“There’s wisdom in that,” I said. “But as a new friend, I feel required to ask: are you still sure you want to go through with this? You can’t think of any better use for the better part of a megabuck?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Feed hungry people? Endow a hospital? Reprint good novels, in quality editions? Build coffeehouses and hire acoustic musicians to play in them? Subsidize the local library? Find a woman and give it to her? You know: enlightened self-interest kind of stuff. One of the things we do with our own excess money around here is to track down deserving candidates and put them through med school, or law school, or business school, or trade school. Marty over there handles the paperwork. We look for the kids who just missed winning the big scholarships. They’ll repay us down the line, when they’re established and practicing—and the only interest we charge is lifetime free professional services from them in their field: medical care, legal services, accounting, plumbing repair, whatever. We’re slowly working our way through all the professions we expect to need free help from in the future. It’s a lot of work, which is to say a lot of fun, and keeps us harmlessly occupied.
“With what you’ve got there in that case you could grow yourself a good GP, a specialist or two in whatever you expect to die of, a lawyer, a shrink and a tax man. Of course, it’s legal and tax deductible, and you’d be in grave peril of making a profit. But you could always burn that.”
He blinked. “Yours is an interesting mind, sir,” he said. “What would you do with, say, a hundred thousand dollars?”
I answered without hesitation. “I’d find out who owns the rights and the master tapes for the album RUNNING JUMPING STANDING STILL by Spider John Koerner and Willie Murphy, and I’d pay to have it digitally remastered and rereleased on compact disc, and I’d buy the entire first pressing myself, and I’d spend the next year giving copies away on street corners and in malls and at toll-booths. I believe if more people knew that record, the world would be a better place. I’ve purchased twenty-seven copies, over the last twenty-odd years, and given away twenty-three of them, and played holes through three, and now I’m down to my last one, and I want to own it in CD format so bad I’d pay to get it done, if I could.”
“I don’t know the album,” he said, and Acayib, too, shook his head and shrugged.
“Boy, are you guys lucky,” I said, “to have that ahead of you.” I have headphone jacks installed about every four feet along the bar; I got a set of headphones apiece for them, the kind that allows in ambient room noise but muffles it. (Real headphones: none of those stupid newfangled stick-it-in-your-ear beads.) As they put the phones on I signaled Fast Eddie to take his break, and bent to switch on the house sound system under the bar. The cassette I wanted was in a position of honor; I popped it in, told the Kenwood deck to rewind to the beginning and put itself into play mode, and stood back to savor the warm pleasure of watching their reactions.
From the opening bars of “The Red Palace,” both began to smile. The smiles got slowly wider for the next forty-five seconds, and then they both began to sway in place with the music as the band kicked in. Even in the rest of the room, where the house speakers were delivering it at background music level, people began unconsciously moving in rhythmic response. It is one of those rare albums that repays close attention, but works perfectly well as background music, too, and is not in the least demeaned thereby. Even Tesla began snapping his fingers—and sparks flew from his snapping fingers. Fast Eddie got back from the can in time to stand still and dig Willie Murphy’s extended piano solo in the middle of the song, nodding with his eyes closed. And several of the regulars dropped out of whatever conversations they were in to sing along with the part that comes right after that solo, when Koerner sings, “When in danger, when in doubt/run in circles, scream and shout/A-HEY!” and then went back to what they were doing. (I don’t believe I have any regulars I haven’t played Koerner’s masterpiece for, at one time or another.)
Around the end of the second verse of the second track, “I Ain’t Blue,” Buck reached into his guitar case and handed me several stacks of bills. “Do it,” he said, with the overloud voice of one wearing headphones, and I nodded back.
(I’m happy to report, now in 1995, that the project eventually succeeded: Red House Records released RUNNING JUMPING STANDING STILL on CD on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its original 1969 vinyl release on Elektra, and they haven’t the faintest idea that they got any help from me and Buck Rogers. Don’t tell them, okay? Let them think it was all their idea. They deserve to.
(But I digress…)
By the time Spider John had worked his way around to the title track—the first one on side two of the vinyl version—Nikola Tesla had managed to work his way down the bar to where I was standing. His eyes flashed under those craggy brows as he shook my hand. (In this second incarnation, he’s no longer afraid of shaking hands with people.) “Hello, Jake,” he said merrily. “No see long time.”
“What brings you here, Nikky? I haven’t seen you in…a while.”
“To be perfectly honest, I am not sure. I felt a sudden strong urge to come here and look you up. As you know, I am in the habit of indulging unexplained urges; it has worked out well for me a number of times.”
I nodded. “You can say that again.” (The first historically recorded instance was an irresistible impulse to draw a geometric figure that came to Nikky in a vision…and became the basis for the first-ever electric motor.) “How’d you happen to know our coordinates? Temporal or spatial? Or even that we existed? I don’t recall sending you a Change of Address notice after Callahan’s Place blew up…not having an address for you.”
“I was chatting with Michael when the impulse came to me; he had just been describing your opening night. He gave me your ficton coordinates.”
(That explained it, for me. If it doesn’t for you, here’s the briefest summary I can devise: Mike Callahan—husband to Lady Sally McGee—is, like her, a time traveler: the proverbial Mick of Time. His own thirty-eight-year mission in this ficton, this time frame—saving humanity from alien enslavement—involved owning and operating a tavern, called Callahan’s Place…where nearly all of us who now hang out at Mary’s Place originally met and became friends. Sadly, Callahan’s Place was eventually reduced to a radioactive hole in the ground, as a necessary side effect of the successful completion of Mike’s mission…but we do our best to carry on its traditions and principles, in his merry memory. He dropped in from the future to visit us on our Opening Night, and stayed for several days. I hope that clears everything up.
(But I digress…)
“How is it with Zoey?” Nikola Tesla added. She was down at the other end of the bar, at the time, schmoozing with Suzie and Susie Maser.
“Well, we’re kind of seriously into overtime,” I admitted, drawing him a second beer. “Kid’s late to his zeroth birthday party. A couple of weeks late. I can’t say I blame him. If I lived where he does, I wouldn’t want to move either.”
“And so she waits.”
I nodded. “It’s getting to her, a little.”
“Well,” he said, “it is good that she laughs while she waits. My lightning made her laugh. And she was laughing when I came in.”
“What she was doing would make a cat laugh,” I told him. “I’d like you to meet a couple of new friends of mine. Buck Rogers and Acayib Pinsky, this is Nikola Tesla; Nikky: Buck and Acayib. Buck was providing the entertainment until you showed up, Nikky.”
Nikky shook both their hands warmly. “I apologize if I upstaged you, Buck.”
Buck shook his head, just a little dizzily. “No, no—if you intend to make an entrance, you’re pretty much committed as soon as you clear the door. It was an honor to yield the floor to you, sir.”
Nikky bowed. “But what was the nature of your entertainment?”
Buck grinned sheepishly. “Well…” He indicated the guitar case on the bartop. “…I was inviting people to make paper airpla
nes out of hundred-dollar bills and skate ’em into the fire over there. I’ve got a whole case full there, and my intention is to be broke by closing.”
Nikky’s face split in a huge vulpine grin. “Oh, splendid! Oh, magnificent! Whatever else may happen, I am repaid for the trouble of coming to visit Mary’s Place tonight. Oh, if J.P. Morgan were still alive, this would kill him: he must be generating high torque in his mausoleum! May I…?”
Buck made way for him. “You would honor me again, sir.”
Tesla stayed where he was, raised his right hand…and a stack of bills left the case and came to him. Acayib paled, and swayed, but he didn’t go down. Nikky took the top bill from the floating stack, leaving the rest hovering there, and folded it into a very rakish, oddly cantilevered paper airplane, which he threw in a conventional manner, actually touching it with his fingers. Need I tell you that it sailed as majestically and elegantly as the Gossamer Condor, and came in for a smooth terminal landing in the exact center of the fire? It drew scattered applause.
“Thank you, Buck,” Nikky said contentedly. “That was most delightful. But you must soon switch to mass destruction if you truly hope to be bankrupt by closing. You appear to have on the close order of a million dollars left—that is, ten thousand-odd pieces of paper. To complete the task in the—” He glanced up briefly at the CounterClock. “—two hours and twelve minutes that remain until closing, you must average 75.7575 repeating bills per minute. Assuming the assistance of every person here, each of us would have to throw an average of 2.5252 repeating airplanes per minute—which, considering the time required to fold each, is just feasible.”
Buck blinked and slowly nodded. “I was just figuring that out when you arrived,” he said, in the tone of one who does not expect to be believed. “Though I just rounded the total off to two and a half per minute apiece. I’m careless with numbers.”
Nikky nodded back, oblivious to the irony. “I am not fond of repeating decimals myself. It is somehow more pleasant to imagine half of a bill than a more complex and counterintuitive fraction, which insists on requiring infinite significant figures to express itself.” He glanced down at his beer. “This glass, for instance, contains an amount of beer which calls for a repeating decimal if calculated in cubic centimeters—but I am soothed to note that it can be just as accurately and much more simply expressed as approximately half the container’s cubic capacity.”
“The question is,” Acayib said, “is it half-empty? Or half-full?”
Nikky flashed that wolflike grin again, and tossed back the contents in one long swallow. “Thus do I dispose of your question,” he said, and the three of us chuckled.
“I genuinely admire your project, sir,” he went on to Buck. “I wish Morgan had shared your taste for burning money. I went to him once for backing on a rather grandiose project: I proposed to pump energy into the planet Earth, in essence turning it into a colossal storage battery, so that anywhere on its surface, one could sink a rod into the soil and draw power. Morgan thought in silence for perhaps a minute, and then said, ‘My dear Mr. Tesla—how am I to charge the customers for this power?’ I got up and left his office, knowing that my project was finished and my true education had just begun.”
Buck winced in sympathy. Then he looked thoughtful. “Say—Nikky, could you work that scam today? Would a megabuck in 1988 dollars be enough to get you started, at least? I’d love to be able to take a computer and a CD player to the beach without batteries…”
Tesla laughed heartily. “Thank you for your offer, Buck—but it comes more than eight decades too late. I have abandoned the scheme. At this point in history, free power would be a catastrophe. Mankind is not yet ready to completely reinvent economics. But tell me, if you don’t mind my asking: is your name by any chance a reference to the character ‘Anthony “Buck” Rogers,’ featured in the Amazing Stories novelettes and subsequent comic strip by Philip Francis Nowlan?”
“Ridiculously enough, no, it isn’t,” Buck told him. “My parents were total illiterates; they named me after my Uncle Buckingham. And of course I can’t go around asking people to call me ‘Mr. Rogers’.”
“Why not?” Nikky asked.
Buck stared at him, and groped for an answer.
“Nikky,” I interrupted, “There’s someone else here tonight I’d like you to meet. I think you’ll find her interesting. She’s one of your grandchildren: a sentient machine. A self-generated computer intelligence, the first as far as anybody here knows, and a real nice lady too, named Solace.”
Acayib blinked and swallowed. “Solace is…is made of silicon? No wonder she understood my problem so well…”
I gave Nikky a capsule summation of Acayib’s special problem and Solace’s role in helping him come to terms with it.
Nikky’s eyes widened. “I will be delighted to make her acquaintance. We all need Solace. But should we not help our friend Buck with his logistics problem first?”
“No, no, that’s okay,” Buck said. “I’m putting the project on hold. Jake started me thinking another way, a minute ago, and what you just said triggered some other thoughts. I’m gonna run this through one more time. There’s no hurry: it can always be dumped in a single load in under ten seconds if that’s the way I decide to go. No, let’s by all means go meet the sentient computer.”
As we all made our way across the crowded, merry room, Buck said to me privately, “Jake, I can see how, what with a pooka and a cluricaune and a perfect coffee machine and a talking dog in the house, you might not have gotten around to mentioning a little thing like a sentient computer. But is there anything or anyone else here tonight I should be paying especial attention to? I ask purply for pureposes of information.”
I glanced at him. “You’ve decided you’re colossally stoned, and this is all a hallucination, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “One of my better ones.”
“Well, if it works for you, go with that. I don’t know if I can answer your question. To my way of thinking, everybody here tonight is as interesting as a sentient computer. I lost my benchmarks for weirdness a long time ago. We’ve got a guy here who’s got two wives—who know about each other—and two or three former hookers, and two smoke ring artists, and sometimes we get in a benign vampire, and a werebeagle…you tell me, what constitutes ‘interesting’?”
He nodded. “I’ll just keep my inputs open.”
We had reached Solace by then, so I introduced all three newcomers to her and she to them. This was a moment I savored.
Solace was very impressed to meet Nikola Tesla. (Having once met Mike Callahan, she took the idea of time travel in stride.) I guess she came as close as a machine can come to awe…which she expressed by hesitating—perceptibly, sometimes for as long as a second—before responding to anything he said. She knew better than I did that nearly all of her most basic components and systems had been conceived and given form by this man. He in turn treated her like a grandchild of whom he was exceedingly proud, delighted to meet her again after an unimportant absence of years. Despite what must have been strong temptation on both sides, they restricted themselves firmly to Standard English, so the rest of us could follow the conversation. I was so happy and proud I thought I’d burst. I waved Zoey over to join us.
“You represent something completely new in the world,” Nikky was telling Solace. “You are…pardon me. Jake?”
“Yes, Nikky?”
“Do you permit punning in your establishment?”
“I encourage it,” I confessed.
He nodded. “Courage indeed. Very well, then. Solace, you are the first known example of the Fourth State of Mattering.”
“Oh!” Solace said, her little icon face beaming. “Oh, how lovely, Dr. Tesla.”
“I am ‘Nikky,’ please, dear lady.”
“It’s gorgeous,” said Long-Drink McGonnigle, who had drifted near to share the moment. “But what does it mean?”
“Until Solace birthed herself,” Nikky explained, “the
universe was divided into three categories of thing that mattered to mankind: less than human, human, and more than human. Insentient, sentient, and supersentient, if you will—all three matter to us. As examples, let us posit a nail, a neighbor, and electricity. One uses the first, respects the second, and feels awe for the third. Now there is a fourth category: other-than-human. Solace is not more than human—in some ways she is less, for she has no relatives of her own kind, and can breed only as an amoeba does. She is not human, for she cannot feel pain, or pleasure, or fear, having no analogs of ductless glands. She is certainly not less than human, for she can probably outreason all of us in this room put together, myself not excepted. And there is no question at all that Solace matters.”
“She does to us,” Long-Drink and Zoey and I all said together.
Solace paused for a whole second…and then her icon mouth went from smile to broad grin, and little tear-pixels dripped slowly from its eyes.
“That,” she said, “is why I am here and nowhere else. The people in this company test out extremely high in empathy, tolerance, acceptance of the different. My research indicates that normal humans can learn to live with those deemed less than human—and they can even tolerate for a time that which they deem more than human…but there are few cases on record of humans permitting the other-than-human to remain among them. So I’ve decided to keep a low profile for a while, interacting with this limited set of humans, on an experimental basis, to minimize the chances of harm to either side.”
“And how has it been going?” Nikky asked.
“Slowly,” she said. “You have put your finger squarely on the problem I sensed but could not analyze: I have been unable fully and accurately to communicate my nature to even these special humans.”
“You haven’t, Solace?” I asked, a little stung.
“No, Jake,” she said gently. “The Lucky Duck, for instance, has a suspicious and skeptical nature: he is polite to me, but secretly fears me. To him I smack of some CIA or NSA plot, something omnipresent and potentially dangerous, God without a heart, something like Roy Cohn on steroids. To him I am less than human. Many of the people here, being computer illiterate, see me as more than human: a superbrain, a metal god. I cannot get past their awe. Jake, on the other hand, had already used a Macintosh extensively by the time I revealed myself, and so he was the first to make the Third Error: he sees me as human.”
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