Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (11 page)

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—both also present—and five or six former hookers, and two smoke-ring artists, and 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.
 
(Knowing Mike Callahan personally, she took the idea of time travel in stride.)
 
I guess she came as close as a glandless machine can come to awe…which she expressed by hesitating—perceptibly, some times 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—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 love, 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 awhile, 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 to fully and accurately 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 Lyndon Johnson 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.”

I started to interrupt, but Zoey kicked me in the shin.
 
I subsided.
 
Damn it, Solace was right!

“Made uneasy by my difficulty in expressing myself, I have kept my contact with even this company limited in both duration and depth.
 
Essentially I distract them with games, for fear of how they may react when they finally get it through their heads that I am
other
.
 
If they can.
 
Even so, there has been conflict.”

Again I opened my mouth, and closed it again.
 

Now that I thought about it, the closest there had yet been to an fight at Mary’s Place—a very heated argument—had centered around Solace.
 
Had taken place within a day or two of Solace’s revealing her existence to us all.
 
At a time when Solace was not with us, and her host Macintosh was, as far as we knew, shut down…

***

I don’t like recounting argument, but here (with most of the attributions deleted) are some highlights:

“We should get Solace to work out stock projections for us.”

“I’m shocked you could say such a thing.”

“Me too—money market is obviously the way to go.”

“We shouldn’t exploit a fucking miracle!”

“Why not?
 
You’d rather
waste
one?”

“We should get her to sing for us.”
 
(That one was me.)

“Huh?”
 
(That was everybody.)

“When you want to know what someone’s like, words don’t make it.
 
You gotta hear ’em sing, like I did with Zoey.
 
Or see ’em dance.
 
Or, if it has to be words, hear ’em recite a poem.
 
Dig the art that speaks to them.
 
Tell me what music a man listens to for pleasure, and I’ll tell you whether I’ll let him marry my daughter or not.”

“Who says you get a vote?”
 
(That was Zoey.)

“
I
still say we should blow the goddam thing up—and pray that we can.”
 
(That was the Duck.)

“Technoprimitive paranoid!
 
Luddite!”

“Montezuma!”

“We should ask her to work on human immortality.”

“If there is even a
suggestion
that we take this great gift and immediately try to use it to turn a profit, turn First Contact into a cash cow, I for one am leaving.”

“Well, I’m suggesting it.
 
That’s what humans
do
—why deny it?”

“Why
admit
it?”

“Because it’s
true
.
 
Because we can’t have telepathy based on bullshit.”

“Damn it to Hell—”

After half a heated hour of it, I had grasped that consensus was receding like the horizon, and exercised my authority as proprietor.
 
“What we are going to do,” I said very loudly, “is treat Solace as she has asked to be treated: like any other customer.
 
Since she has no way of taking a drink, she doesn’t even owe us the three bucks a beer costs, and she doesn’t use up any more electricity than I was planning to burn anyway, and she shows up for a grand total of about one pleasant hour a night, and I am not going to have it spoiled by a bunch of bickering barflies.
 
Nobody asks Solace for any goddam favors—and anybody who mentions harming her again will be lucky to wake up in Emergency.
 
And there’s an end to it!”
 
It was a phrase Mike Callahan had used to disperse the rare quarrels in his Place, and invoking it worked: the subject was dropped.

***

My ruling had stood, but there was often a little uncomfortable residue of frustration in the air immediately after one of Solace’s nightly visits.
 
And we tended to spend a lot of the time she was there just chewing the breeze with her, playing word- or other games, stepping around the central question of our relationship with her.

“Nikky,” I said now, “you said there were three ways people treat most things: exploit it, trade with it, or worship it.
 
How do you treat the
other
-than-human?
 
What should we be giving Solace, that we aren’t?”

“But you are,” he said, smiling at me.
 
“Imperfectly, perhaps, but Solace’s presence here proves that you have not failed.
 
To the other-than-human, one gives love—and wonder.”

“Huh.”
 
I thought about it.
 
“I have to admit, there isn’t exactly a big shortage of either of those around here.
 
What do
you
say, Solace?”

“I say that I have something in common with my brother Acayib.
 
Like him I cannot feel pain…but can feel sadness.
 
I cannot hurt…but I can suffer.
 
Dealing with you and your friends, Jake, has often brought me sadness and confusion.
 
But that means I must love you, for only those you love can make you sad.
 
I say that you are my friends.
 
My true and only friends,” she said.
 
“More than I ever expected to have.
 
Most humans share the instincts of the Lucky Duck.
 
If we have further to travel together, toward one another, let us be grateful that we at least know that.”