Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (12 page)

“I’ll drink to that,” Long-Drink said, and did.
 
His glass—and mine—hit the hearth together.

“Doctor.…excuse me, Nikky?” Solace said.
 
I blinked.
 
How often does a computer misspeak itself, even momentarily?
 
“Are you…willing to answer questions about the future?
 
I have no wish to cause paradox—”

Nikky frowned.
 
“You have a reason for asking?”

Her icon nodded.
 
“I seek always to understand human beings…unattached to succeeding.
 
But some of my projections, my extrapolations of historical trends into the immediate future, lead me to conclusions I find…dubious.
 
The mathematical structure is elegant, but the answers seem
wrong
, somehow.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
 
“I’m astonished at how well you
do
understand humans.
 
That you can do it at all, I mean.
 
If I tried for a hundred years, I don’t think I could learn to think like one of my own corpuscles—or even, say, a skin cell.
 
And that’s what people are to you, metaphorically speaking.
 
The teeny little things that collectively make you up.”

“Yet must not a prudent man understand his corpuscles, and skin cells?” she said.
 
“Who but myself can debug me?”

Nikky was still frowning.
 
He certainly had the eyebrows for it, big black thunderclouds of hair.
 
He glanced around, and saw that most of the room was paying no attention to our conversation.
 
“There are…things about the future that
must
not be revealed to anyone in this ficton.
 
In general, what I call ‘miscegemation’—anachronistic revelation—is usually a bad practice.
 
If life loses its surprise, it loses its flavor.
 
But perhaps if you were to pose a few
limited
questions, restricted to, say, the next few years, I
might
be able to provide a bug-check of your synthesis.”

“Solace,” I asked, rather surprised, “do you really feel you know enough about human nature to make projections about the future?
 
Say, a year in advance?”

“I believe so, Jake—but I am not sure you will believe some of the more certain predictions I would make.”

“For instance…”

“Well…”
 
How astounding, to see a computer with umpty-terabytes of ram hesitate.
 
“I think I can say with some confidence, for example…that by this time next year the Berlin Wall will be rubble, the last Russian soldier will have left Afghanistan, the Soviet Union will have ceased to exist, fracturing without violence into independent republics, the Cold War will be officially declared over, and black rule will come to South Africa, under President Nelson Mandela.”

“WHAT?”
 
“Have you lost your parity bit?”
 
“Bogon flux rising, Captain!”
 
“Yo’ mama!”
 
These were among the reactions from the few parties to this conversation.

“Also, Geraldo Rivera will have his nose broken on camera—yet there will be no general celebration, and his assailant will be charged with a crime.
 
Meanwhile the greatest single killer of human beings of all time, smallpox, will be officially declared extinct—and there will be no significant celebration of that, either.”

“Nikky,” I said hastily, “you don’t have to reveal any confidences—we can handle this.
 
Solace, you’re
way
off base.
 
I don’t know just where it was you dropped a decimal place, but what you just said is crazy as a barbed-wire canoe.
 
Trust me.”

“Jake,” Nikky said sadly, “I trust you a great deal—but I’m afraid you are wrong.
 
Solace is correct in every single particular.”

“But—but that’s
impossible
.
 
How could the Soviet fucking Union ‘cease to exist’?
 
Peristroika
is bullshit—”

“It will go bankrupt,” Solace said.

“Don’t be silly.
 
If it were
possible
for them to go broke, they’d have done it
long
ago.
 
If a couple of million of them starve, the Politburo just shrug and keep pursuing the socialist ideal.
 
They won’t go broke until they run out of cannon fodder…which means, when they run out of people.
 
Besides, no grand jury in the world would indict anyone for punching Geraldo Rivera.”

“He will be a neoNazi.”

I like to think I keep an open mind.
 
But the notion that I would one day find myself admiring anything at all about a neoNazi was—

…well, okay.
 
It
seemed
ridiculous.

“Jake,” Nikky said, “you are a cynic at heart.
 
You believe all bad things will always tend to be as they have been.
 
Because the Politburo has starved millions in the past, it will always do so.
 
No Nazi will ever share ordinary human impulses.
 
How, then, do you resolve the question of Viet Nam?”

Ouch.
 
“Ouch.”

“And the Wall will really come down?” Zoey asked.
 
Her late father and mother had gotten out of eastern Germany just in time, back in the late Thirties, and had never been able to return; the place was a little more than just an abstraction to Zoey.

“Women will dance naked by firelight atop its stones as the last sections are pulled down,” Solace stated.
 
“Nikky?”

He nodded.
 
“True.
 
I saw it.
 
Will have seen it.
 
Have seen it about to be.”
 
He sighed.
 
“She was lovely, by firelight…”

“And Mr. Mandela will truly walk free?” asked Tanya Latimer.
 
Blind ladies tend to have very good ears, and hers had grown points at the mention of South Africa; she had been shamelessly eavesdropping ever since.
 
“He will
lead
his nation?
 
Without bloodshed?
”

“Yes,” Nikky and Solace said together.

“Dear Jesus,” she said, and began to cry.
 
Her husband Isham folded her in his great arms, and they began to rock together, he laughing, she crying, totally telepathic; theirs is one of the great marriages.

I found that my own eyes were wet.
 
“Look,” I said, “I think this is just about enough of this.
 
Okay?
 
I’m starting to itch.
 
I’ve got—let me see, at least eight irresistibly good stories to tell, now—and nobody outside this room would believe a single one of them.
 
I’m glad we’ve established that Solace has a reasonably efficient way of predicting the immediate future, and now I propose that we
drop it.
”

“Hey, take it easy, Jake,” Long-Drink said.
 
“This is interestin’.”

I shook my head.
 
“Nikky, you were right: to know the future is to lose something of the
now
.
 
This is
wrong,
Drink.
 
Didn’t you ever spy out your Christmas presents in advance…and then wish you hadn’t?
 
One morning the whole world will wake up and find out the Evil Empire just packed it in, and they’ll all look at each other in awe and wonder…and to me it’ll be old news.
 
No amount of money I could make on selling the ruble short could compensate me for that.”

“I am sorry, Jake,” Solace said.
 
“I should have realized—”

“No reason you should have.
 
I think it’s a human thing.
 
But you two are like unprofessional book reviewers, you’re giving away the plot twists, and
I’d like you to stop, now.
”

“Wise words,” Tesla said.
 
“I apologize to you, Jake.
 
I suppose I assumed that as an old friend of Mike and Lady Sally, you had dealt with this sort of thing before.”

It did seem odd.
 
“It just never came up,” I told him.
 
“We didn’t even know Mike was a time traveler until right there at the end, just before the bomb went off.
 
He never told us a word about specifics of the future.
 
We never asked.
 
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I was afraid if I asked, he might answer.
 
It’s tempting to peek ahead to the ending—but it always spoils it if you do.
 
You gotta pay your money to enjoy the ride.
 
Anyhow, we never asked.
 
Now, this is my house, and I hereby declare the subject changed.
 
Who has a new subject?”

“Word games?” Solace suggested at once.
 
“How about inversions?
 
A man with a fat head…”

“—keeps his hat fed,” Long-Drink said, and guffawed.
 
“I get it.
 
Uh…‘He had a grizzled chin…and a chiseled grin.’”
 
That brought scattered applause.
 
“You try one, Jake.”

“Well…whenever Ralph has puppies, Doc has to go visit the Von Wau Wau home with his needle.
 
Don’t want a—”

“—rabies boom in the babies’ room,” Zoey and the Drink said along with me.
 
Fast crowd.

“Yeah,” Tanya said, “and Michael Jackson keeps all his records in a hit shed.”

That drew hoots of laughter, and of course a word game in Mary’s Place attracts people like flies; our circle expanded.
 
Tommy Janssen held up a joint, made a face, and said, “Bum doobie.
 
Got it from a—”

“—dumb booby,” several people chorused.

Well, believe it or not, from there it degenerated.
 
Zoey perpetrated some horror I’ve blocked out about drab Jews who jab Druze, and someone else who shall remain nameless explained the difference between a tribe of clever pygmies and a women’s track team—the pygmies are a cunning bunch of runts—(I hasten to add that this unnamed person was female; we weren’t allowing men to be sexist that week), and Doc Webster, who ought to take the rap for it, attempted a complicated atrocity that involved something called a Shick Brit-house, and one of us who had given up drinking when he found it causing impotence said that in his experience, a rum cooler was a cum ruler—we had lost all decency and decorum, in other words.
 
The laughter became ribald and rowdy enough to wake up Nagenneen, who added his memorable cackle to the merriment.
 
He also said something involving “baked noodles and naked poodles,” but he was laughing so hard we didn’t catch the set-up.
 

Well, from inversions it was a natural segué (exactly how much
does
a seg weigh?) to palindromes, words or sentences that are the same spelled backwards.
 
Mention of baked noodles reminded Doc Webster of one of his favorites: “Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog.”
 

Thus challenged, Long-Drink produced the inspired, “Wonder if Sununu’s fired now?”
 

When the applause died away, Isham grinned and declaimed, “Lewd did I live; evil did I dwell.”
 

“I hear
that
,”
 
Tanya responded, and poked him accurately in the ribs to more laughter and applause.
 

I felt inspired myself, and announced, “You know, a guy named Robert tried to get Solace to help him set up a bogus company, that would make nonexistent hot-dog rolls and fleece all the investors.”
 
A hush fell over the room.
 
“If the story ever gets out, the headline is going to be: mac snubs bob’s bun scam.”

A blizzard of peanuts occurred in my vicinity.

Suddenly Nikky made a dramatic gesture with his magic hands, confronted Solace directly, and bellowed, “I, madam, I made radio!
 
So I dared!
 
Am I mad?
 
Am I?”

It wasn’t until she said, “Brilliant, Nikky—you’re the only man who ever lived who could have spoken that one,” that we all realized he had just made a palindrome.

When the ovation had died away, Doc Webster cleared his throat and tried for the last word.
 
“Well, that was five,” he rumbled.
 
“And…a six is a six is a six is a six is a…”
 
He kept it up just long enough for everyone to realize it was another palindrome.

Ralph Von Wau Wau awarded that one “Top spot.”
 

Which caused Tommy Janssen to say, “Go, dog!”

Doc Webster glared ferociously at both of them, and they looked at each other, grinned, and said “Sue us!” together.
 
The Doc lost it and got the giggles, and from there I suppose things might well have escalated into a full-scale riot, but just then there was an earsplitting sound and an intolerable brilliance behind me, and when I spun around and got my eyes working again a large lady and a skinny giant were lying on my floor, both dressed from neck to toe in what looked like form-fitting mylar, surrounded by a receding outline of sputtering sawdust.

5

ED, UNDO BOD, NUDE

…and not just any large lady and skinny giant.
 
They were both out cold, face up—but I’ve have recognized them face down and wearing masks.
 
It was the namesake of Mary’s Place, and her old man.