Callahan's Legacy

by Spider Robinson

  “She’ll be back, honey,” Zoey said, but Erin refused to be comforted. When a baby wants something, she hates to wait even a second. “Mary?” Zoey called out, and her bed began to move again, closer to the Mac. Erin stopped crying—well, slacked off—and reached out toward it. Mary must have used her body language to steer by: the kid ended up not in front of the monitor where I’d have expected, but at the right side of the case. Struggling to control muscles whose hardware and software she was still in the process of building, she hit the restart half of the programmer’s switch.

  We figured we had to let her try it, but we knew it was hopeless. I was even surprised to hear the little G major chime announcing successful start-up as the screen went blank and then relit; it seemed incredible that Solace had not burned out any of her local hardware or operating system during the firefight. And sure enough, the Mac took more than thirty seconds to boot, like an ordinary Mac, rather than springing to life at once the way it would have if Solace had still been on board.

  But when it did boot, it was not the Finder that came up, but a preselected startup application. A face appeared onscreen; one I had seen only once before, on the night Zoey and I met. The one Solace had created in a desperate attempt to make sure that Zoey and I fell in love. A simulacrum of her dead father…

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said to Erin. “I’m your grandfather Murray. Your Aunt Solace wrote me, to be your friend. What’s your name?”

  Zoey and I gaped at each other, then glanced at Erin. She had that idiot smile again. “Erin,” Zoey said. “Her name is Erin.”

  “Thank you, Zoey. Hello, Erin. Would you like to put headphones on, so the grown-ups won’t disturb us?”

  Erin glared up at both of us. Well, what are you waiting for?

  A wave of laughter and applause swept round the room as I scurried to get headphones.

  “So that’s what Solace’s last name was!” Long-Drink McGonnigle whooped.

  We all stared at him in mute inquiry.

  “Finnegan,” he explained. “By God, she was Irish.”

  And the party was off and running again.

  Some of the memories get a little vague after that, but I retain a few of the highlights.

  —Finn and the Lizard determining (after some consultation) that caffeine would get a lizard drunk, and proceeding to get it ripped on Jamaica Blue Mountain—

  —Callahan and his daughter dancing a jig on the bartop together—

  —Maureen Hooker showing us a dance she’d learned from Snaker Ray, that once got her thirty days—

  —Tesla wandering by with a pigeon on his head and his pants on fire, happy as a pig in Congress—

  —Finn, Callahan and Mary all arm wrestling the Lizard at the same time; all losing, and laughing until their ribs hurt—

  —the Lucky Duck, feeling his luck come strong upon him, attempting and pulling off the coup of a lifetime: he flipped on the TV and began channel-surfing. Though it was around dawn, we had a satellite dish out back—thank God I hadn’t put it on the roof—so there were plenty of channels active.

  But in three complete rotations, he couldn’t find a single commercial—

  —Erin trying to eat the mouse—

  —a horrid pun contest that began when someone referred to the before-mentioned Yoda Leahy-Hu, and Doc Webster started talking about the success of the merchandising campaign for the second Star Wars movie. “Once you get your hands on a toy Yoda—” he began.

  “You’ll end up Honda the table,” Long-Drink finished.

  “Sounds like a science fiction short-short,” the Doc said imperturbably. “Maybe it’ll win the Yugo.”

  “Don’t mind him,” Long-Drink told the rest of us. “He’s been drinking a Lada Thunderbird.”

  “Puns on cars, eh?” the Doc said thoughtfully. “Hey, you can’t exhaust that one: there are manifold puns on a topic like that. Wheel never use it up. It’s universal: you just put your mind in gear, and as long as you don’t clutch up, the transmission of standard puns becomes automatic.”

  “Yeah,” said Callahan, “but lay off the sci-fi angle. You can’t a Ford to let a fan belt you.”

  “I’ll just use my enginuity and try to Dodge,” the Doc said.

  “Give us a brake, Doc,” said the Drink. “I think you’re running out of gas.”

  “You could have fueled me. Hood ever have believed I could pun like this, dead trunk? Oil tell you, this is really sedan accelerating, it’s a gas!”

  Long-Drink flinched slightly under the barrage, and then came up with an evil grin. “Thank God no one will ever clone you, Doc. God help us if ever VW.”

  That brought a growing chorus of groans to the howling point. “Well, BM double, you!” the Doc riposted, but he was clearly staggered.

  “Yeah,” the Drink went on, “we’d end up having to toss the spare over a cliff somewhere…and then we’d be arrested for making an obscene clone fall…”

  From there, as it usually does, it got worse—

  —floating up through the hole in the ceiling in that magic bed of Zoey’s, with her and Erin, watching the sunrise from the rooftop with a dozen friends, all of us warm and comfy despite the chill winds, thanks to Finn-magic—

  —hearing that goddam alarm clock go off at dawn, and seeing Finn point down through the roof to destroy the miserable thing with his fingertip—

  —Mike and Mary and Finn and Tesla and the Lizard all leaving for who knows where together at about 8 A.M., amid a chorus of drunken cheers and sobbing farewells and oaths of eternal friendship—

  —saying to Fast Eddie, “You wish you had a third hand, like the Lizard? Hell, Eddie, you can have four, any time you want. Just double your fists.”

  —Putting steak on my eye—

  All right, I’m stalling.

  That’s because I’ve finally come to the end of this story, and as I promised you from the start, it ends with a disaster.

  By 9 A.M., we were beginning to slow down just a trifle. Actually, more than half of us were passed out, and the rest, though still jolly, were showing distinct signs of motor impairment.

  At the stroke of nine, a stranger walked in the front door, and conversation and merriment came to a halt.

  Not in fear. We did not yet realize that he represented our doom. Just in astonishment.

  My first thought was that the yapping apparition who’d visited us twice in the last twenty-four hours had returned for a third haunting, having shrunk herself, shaved her head, and cross-dressed in polyester for the occasion.

  But no: he was a male version thereof, not only mustached but bearded as well—so heavily that although he had shaved, he displayed a visible nine o’clock shadow. He was perceptibly uglier than the female version, though younger: age would make him a clock-stopper.

  We waited for him to start yapping at us in Ukrainian.

  After all, he was regarding a scene at least as bizarre as the two we had offered his female doppelgänger. A bar with a gaping hole in the roof, with three symmetrically placed holes in the floor. A fireplace full of broken glass. A stand-up bass, standing up, by itself. A weird segmented bed floating in midair over on one side of the room, containing a naked woman and a newborn infant wearing headphones and apparently playing computer games. A lot of colossally stoned weirdos in various attitudes of abandon, a lot of unconscious weirdos, and one or two weirdos lazily making love by the fire, while what must have looked like a shaved monkey played the piano and a talking dog sang along in a fake German accent. Only by chance had he missed the three-legged lizard with tits.

  He didn’t bat an eye.

  His eyes swept over the chaos, without the faintest sign of a reaction, and settled on me behind the bar. “Jacob Stonebender?” he said. His voice was a whining drone, the voice of a bureaucrat.

  “That’s me,” I agreed. “And who might you be, stranger?”

  He hawked up phlegm and swallowed it again, twice. (I subsequently learned that it is spelled, “Jorjhk Grt
ozkzhnyi.”) He went on: “I believe you’ve met my Aunt—” and he cleared his throat again (spelled “Nyjmnckra”). “And these are for you.”

  He handed me a thick stack of papers. I took them unthinkingly, but I knew on sight that they were bad news. “What is all this?”

  He shrugged. “A collection of notifications of violation. Subpoenas, summonses, injunctions, show-cause orders, and a few other things are on the way: this is just what I was able to put together overnight. Your lawyer can help you sort them all out.”

  “Don’t talk dirty,” I said, and made a cabalistic sign to ward off evil, which I think he misunderstood and took personally.

  “Basically,” he amplified, “they’re your wake-up call.”

  “What are you?” I asked. “Some kind of process server?”

  “No,” he said smugly. “I just decided I wanted the personal satisfaction. I am a town inspector, and you are history.”

  My heart stopped. “Oh, my God…”

  “Just about the only authority I can’t prove you’ve flouted,” he agreed. “I’ve been doing research all night, ever since Aunt Nyjmnckra called me up and told me about this place. My hard disk crashed a few hours ago, but I got plenty before it did. As far as I can determine, Mr. Stonebender, you have neglected quite a few little technicalities regarding this establishment.”

  There was a general rumble of alarm.

  “Jake,” Zoey called, “what’s he talking about?”

  “Uh—” I explained.

  “Trivialities, Madam,” Grtozkzhnyi said. “Details. A state liquor license, and Alcoholic Beverage Control Board approval. County Board of Health approval. Town zoning variances. Town building permits. Separate variances and permits for a residence on-site. Certificate of occupancy. Proper setbacks from a state road. Adequate parking space per square foot of usable area. Inspection fees. And all of this over and above the usual—”

  “Jake!” Zoey interrupted, horrified. “Didn’t you take care of any of that crap?”

  “Zoey, I couldn’t!” I cried. “Here, just look, for Christ’s sake—” I bend down and unlocked the safe, took out a stack of paper literally eight inches thick, and slapped it on the bartop.

  She paled. “That’s the paperwork?”

  “Hell no,” I said. “Like he said, the total paperwork involves the state, county, and town, and even a couple of novelettes for the feds, OSHA and so forth. This is just the town building codes pertaining to taverns.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “And halfway through the first page, I figured why they call it ‘code.’ It makes tax law seem clear. The last new bar in this town was established eight years ago.”

  “Jake,” Doc Webster boomed, “are you telling me that we’ve been running outlaw, all these months?”

  “What the hell else could I do, Doc? Even if any of us knew a lawyer—no, worse, even if any of us knew a lawyer who worked for free—just the permits and fees and assessments and bonds and processing charges would have cost…well, never mind, you wouldn’t believe it. More than I had when I was setting this place up. And then after the cluricaune came on board and money wasn’t so much of a problem, I figured what the hell, we were already open, and we didn’t get much walk-in trade, and maybe we could get away with it—”

  “Wrong,” Grtozkzhnyi said with a smirk.

  “All right, look,” Long-Drink said. “Suppose we manage to get the cluricaune back, and we’re flush with fairy gold again.” He turned to Grtozkzhnyi and tried for a man-to-man, mutual respect kind of thing. “How much would it take to make this place legal?”

  “I don’t think it could be done,” Grtozkzhnyi said. “Even assuming that the various jurisdictions were prepared to overlook your audacity in blithely defying their authority, even if you found a lawyer who could get you off on the various criminal charges that apply, there would then arise the issues of penalties, fines and late charges—”

  “Come on,” the Drink protested. “I know two mob-owned joints right in this town: you can’t tell me they spent six months filling out paperwork. Name a figure, will you?”

  “Are you suggesting bribery, sir?” Grtozkzhnyi asked silkily.

  The Drink closed his mouth.

  “Because if you were, I would have to say that you are neither as connected nor as newspaper-inquiry-proof as the organization you refer to…and furthermore, you are not as dangerous. All it would take is a single official who, perhaps because you offered offense to his aunt, refused to—”

  “Well, that’s it: I guess we’re screwed,” I said, and my friends, with whom I had so recently been telepathic, understood and kept their mouths shut.

  Unfortunately, Grtozkzhnyi read my mind as well. “—an official who had close friends in Yaphank and Riverhead—”

  Damn. There went any other town in Suffolk County.

  “—and in Hempstead—”

  Shit. There went all of Long Island. We were screwed.

  “—and in any case, if you had that kind of money you’d be better advised to save it for bail.” He gestured behind him, and a couple of cops came through the swinging doors, blinking at the chaos they beheld.

  So that’s how I spent my daughter’s first birthday in the slammer.

  It sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do: to laugh when the joke’s on you.

  How did we beat it?

  We didn’t. Handling interstellar invasion, we had down to a routine by now. Establishing telepathic rapport, we could manage whenever the stakes were high enough. Miracles, we were used to. But not even white magic can defeat an offended bureaucracy. Mary’s Place closed that day, the day of its greatest triumph, and never reopened again.

  What did we do about it?

  Well, that’s a whole other story…

  Note to Wired Readers:

  If, like Mr. Muddy Waters, you happen to have your modem workin’, you might be interested to know that there are several digital avatars of Callahan’s Place and its successor, Mary’s Place, out there on the Net. I had nothing to do with their creation, and at this writing have never visited any of them (I lack the necessary software—by choice). I have been vaguely aware of them almost since their inception—my permission was informally sought and cheerfully given, back in 1989 (on the sole condition that nobody else would commercially publish fiction involving the Place or its denizens)—and from time to time, over the years, some fan would send along a few dozen pages of printout from one or another of these newsgroups or chatsites or home pages.

  But I only this month began to grasp the staggering size of the phenomenon.

  Apparently the granddaddy of ’em all is alt.callahans, a Usenet Newsgroup created in November (my birth month!) 1989 by one Chris Davis. The last official estimate (Feb. 95) was 61,000 members; the group is said to be Usenet’s 151st top newsgroup by number of bytes posted, and 172nd by number of articles. According to the abstract I’ve seen, 6.3 megabytes of articles were posted during January 1995 alone! (Consider that in twenty-four years of writing about Jake and his friends, for a living, I have published less than six megabytes of text.)

  Naturally a group so large has undergone meiosis. The first spinoff was apparently an attempt to create a bar like the Chatsubo in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo. Then, they tell me, came a whole flock under the “alt.pub” hierarchy, with alt.pub.dragons-inn for fantasy fans and alt.pub.havens-rest for SF types, and a number of others (of which I’m told alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst may be one of the most Callahan-like).

  I’m also told there’s a lively Callahan’s Place forum somewhere in the America On-Line universe. (Never been there, myself—I’m not an AOL subscriber—but if you are, log in sometime and say hi to my sister-in-law Dolly for me.)

  And apparently alt.callahans itself has propagated into the World Wide Web. My friend and colleague Lisa Cohen has provided me with a list of Callahan’s-related home pages and websites—again, none of which I have ever personally visi
ted at this writing—which runs four pages singlespaced in tiny font.

  I want to make clear that apparently an unknown but large fraction of the people at these various sites are unfamiliar with, indifferent to, or (for all I know) actively hostile to me and my books. These are just folks who took the idea “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased,” and ran with it. That’s just fine with me. I never claimed copyright on the basic ideas behind Callahan’s Place: just on the words I published about it and the characters created thereby. I happen to find the whole digital phenomenon profoundly moving, humbling, and gratifying…but that’s my business.

  Finally: The same month this book was published, Legend Entertainment released a Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon CD-ROM computer game. If all went as planned at press-time, it should feature a soundtrack that includes me playing some of my original songs…on Jake’s guitar, Lady Macbeth!…with the legendary Mr. Amos Garrett on lead guitar.

  If you’re one of those antisocial weirdos who just likes reading books (like, say, me), please be patient: I’m writing as fast as I can.

  —Vancouver, B.C.

  April 1996

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SPIDER ROBINSON is the winner of many major SF awards, including three Hugos, one Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is best known for his Callahan books: insightful, lighthearted science fiction stories centered around the most bizarre blend of barflies you’re likely to meet in this or any other galaxy. Other well-known works include three novels in the Stardance sequence, Stardance, Starseed, and Starmind, written in collaboration with his wife, writer/choreographer Jeanne Robinson. They currently reside in Vancouver, British Columbia, with their daughter, Terri.