Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (14 page)

Tesla bowed.
 
“Greetings, dear lady.
 
Drinking.”

“Huh.
 
Well, I’m glad you’re here.
 
You don’t happen to have your death-ray on you?”

He flickered.
 
It was as if someone spliced film: one instant he was standing there, and the next he was standing there holding an artifact with both hands.
 
You didn’t need to be told it was a death-ray.
 
“At your service, ma’am.”

She blinked.
 
“Cripes, I wish we’d had the sense to bring you along with us.
 
Stick around: we may just need you in a few hours.”

“Let’s get Mick powered up,” Callahan said.

***

Callahan did the same indescribable things to Finn’s head with his…utensil that he had done to Mary’s, and it was just as effective.
 
Finn’s eyes opened, tracked, and scanned his surroundings.
 

“Are you all right?” he asked Mary.

“I’m okay, darling,” she said.
 
“How are you?”
 

His eyes closed momentarily, and reopened.
 
“Offensive system crippled, nineteen percent functional and degrading.
 
Defensive system badly damaged, stable at forty-five percent.
 
Motive and perceptual systems damaged, seventy-two percent each.
 
Life-support system slightly damaged, ninety-four percent and healing.
 
Cognition systems nominal.
 
I am ‘all right,’ but will need extensive repair before I can resume battle.”

“You’ll get it,” she promised him.

“What went wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly.
 
“I don’t know, Mick.
 
Between us, we should have taken him easy.”

He sat up slowly and awkwardly, and met my eyes, and I flinched.
 

I had not seen that expression on his face in over twenty years.
 
He had worn it the night I met him, the night he walked into Callahan’s Place and announced that he was going to destroy the human race and felt just rotten about it.
 
I’ve only seen one human face with that much anguish and despair on it, that I can recall: an old photo I saw once of a Sonderkommando at Birkenau, one of the trustee prisoners who helped expedite the slaughter of their own kind, in return for pitiful privileges, even though they knew for certain that eventually they would be murdered themselves.

“Hello, Jake,” he said, and stood up.
 

“Hi, Mickey—good to see you again,” I said.
 
“Welcome to Mary’s Place.”
 

There was a short cacaphony, as nearly everyone in the joint called out some equivalent greeting.
 
“Hello, my friends,” Finn responded.

“Amenities later, Mick,” Callahan said briskly.
 
“Let’s get this show on the road.
 
Jake, you and Tom start passing out Irish coffee.
 
Mary, Mick, make your report.
 
Start at the beginning, so everyone can catch up—some folks here don’t know about Mick and his situation.”

***

Mick went first.

“My people are called the Filarii,” he said.
 
Over the years, the big cyborg has trained his voice to sound reasonably human, but he wasn’t thinking of details like tone or inflection now, and so he sounded kind of like the “male” version of the Directory Information robot.
 
“We had been civilized for nearly six thousand years, and were spread across five star systems, when we were discovered by another race.
 
Neither you nor I could pronounce their name for themselves; we called them The Ruthless Ones, but most of you here call them the Cockroaches, because of their striking resemblance to an enlarged version of that terrestrial lifeform.

“One of their far-roving slave scouts encountered us, some centuries ago.
 
We detected it, invited it to our homeworld, and began exchanging information.
 
It soon became apparent, from what it revealed and what it withheld, that its Masters, the Cockroaches, were warlike, and would attack us as soon as the scout reported our existence.
 
We considered the problem and evolved two possible solutions.
 
The first was to annihilate them, the second to educate them.
 
In retrospect, perhaps we erred.
 
Loving Life, and loving Sentience, we took the riskier course, and failed, and were removed from the Universe.

“The Ruthless Ones did not destroy us—quite.
 
They were too frugal for that.
 
They…
compressed
us.
 
They destroyed our physical selves, and reduced our minds and bodies to their minimum descriptions, to frozen patterns of data in their databanks, so that they might recreate us for study or slave labor or torture if the desire ever arose.
 
The Filarii became suspended in time, existing only in potential.

“Save for me.
 
I alone was kept corporeal, and extensively modified.
 
My will was taken from me.
 
I was made into a slave scout like the one that had doomed my race, and assigned to perform that function for one of the Cockroaches myself—the one you named The Beast.
 
Mightier than any one of them, yet utterly obedient, I ranged ahead of their mindless expansion, identifying nuisance races—that is, sentients—and destroying them on command.
 
I…excelled at the task.”
 
His voice was flat, machine-like, yet the pain came through clearly.
 
“Then, after centuries of genocide, I was lucky enough to stumble across Sol, and Terra, and Callahan’s Place.”

I had heard this story retold many times, and furthermore was busy passing out Irish coffees—yet all at once, in this
n
th retelling, I heard something I had missed before.
 
Or rather, failed to hear it, for the
n
th time.
 
I opened my mouth…and shut it again.

“Thanks to you and your friends, Michael,” Finn went on, “I was able at last to throw off my programming, and regain my freedom.
 
And when my Master came after me, you—you fragile, mortal creatures—formed a telepathic group mind, and together destroyed The Beast for me, while I lay paralyzed by fear.”

“No, Mick,” Mary said.
 
“By programming.
 
There’s a difference.”

“Agreed.
 
In any event, my Master was destroyed, and I was set completely free.
 
And shortly before that, I had met Mary, and she taught me to love again.
 
I had thought the ability burned out of me forever by my Master’s programming, but she proved me wrong.
 
She showed me that the ability to love
cannot
be destroyed—can, at worst, be buried deeply, and that which is buried can be dug up again.
 
She taught me that I had the
right
to love, by loving me.
 
She healed me of much of the pain that comes from centuries of mass murder.

“And so, with my mind back and my heart back, and my former Master dead, my duty was clear.
 
It fell to me to restore my people to the Universe, to pour them back into the stream of Time, that they might live again.”

***

“But—” Acayib began, shaking his head dizzily.
 
“But how the hell could you do that?”

“By reversing the procedure used to remove them,” Finn said.
 
“Phase One, steal the data that represent the Filarii, from the databanks of The Beast, along with the software necessary to decompress that data.
 
Phase Two, pick out a suitable planet, grow a sufficient number of bodies of the right descriptions from DNA records, and ‘play back’ their personalities from RNA records.
 
I grant you Phase Two is a nontrivial problem, but—”

“But how—” Buck burst out, and then caught himself.
 
“Excuse me,” he went on dizzily, “For just a moment there I started pretending that all this is really happening, and I wondered how you could revive your people without the rest of the Cockroaches stopping you.”

“My Master was a rogue,” Finn explained.
 
“A pervert, by the standards of his race, forever ostracized from Cockroach society.
 
And my home star system lay within his fief.
 
The Filarii are contained within his personal databanks, and no other Cockroach would think of taking or even examining those—as the property of a pervert, they are contaminated, taboo.”

Buck nodded agreeably.
 
“Sure.
 
Fine.
 
By all means.
 
Carry on.”

“What kind of pervert?” Acayib asked.

Finn shrugged.
 
“I simply cannot convey it.
 
There is no analog within human experience.
 
Nothing a human can do would make it as intrinsically disgusting as was my Master to his fellows.”

“To us, too,” I said.
 
“We called it The Beast, and it reminded us a lot of a shark, but in a way that makes me want to apologize to the next shark I meet.
 
I don’t know what other, normal Cockroaches are like, but I know that one was
wrong
.”

“Okay, Mr. Finn, so your people were just sitting there in storage, and the other Cockroaches weren’t going to interfere.
 
What went wrong?” Buck asked.

Mary looked at Finn, and Finn looked at Mary.

“I was not The Beast’s only slave,” he said.
 
“There is another.”

Rooba rooba rooba: everyone spoke at once.
 
Then, with comical suddenness, everyone shut the hell up again.

Another Finn out there?
 
An
unfriendly
Finn?

Finn
 
was capable of causing suns to go nova…

An unfriendly Finn who was tougher than Finn and Mary put together?

We were all thinking the same thought.
 
What if it tracked them here?
 
Finn must have read our expressions, for he held up both his hands and said quickly, “Do not be afraid.
 
It cannot have tracked us.”

The outside door
banged
open, letting in enough breeze into the foyer to start the swinging doors swinging.

***

No one screamed.
 
No one even jumped a foot in the air, as far as I can recall.
 
Most of us had been drinking with the Lucky Duck for several months, and had been pretty hard to faze even before we met him.
 
But I think it’s safe to say that everyone’s attention focused on that doorway.

And we certainly didn’t freeze in terror, either.
 
Nearly everybody seemed to be in motion—calm, unhurried but purposeful motion.
 
Fast Eddie, for instance, scratched his ankle and the back of his neck in the same flowing motion, and ended up with his blackjack in one hand and a knife in the other, both ready for throwing.
 
Ralph Von Wau Wau circled around and took a position beside the doorway, ears flattened, grinning (and this time he
was
drooling).
 
Long-Drink McGonnigle was taking a Glock 9mm from his night watchman’s uniform jacket.
 
Buck Rogers produced a handgun of his own, looked to me like a Dan Wesson.
 
Several people were experimentally tapping their palms with beer bottles, mugs, sugar shakers and other blunt instruments; others were taking up chairs.
 
I found that I was standing between Zoey and the door, and had my shotgun in hand, was easing the safety off.
 
All these preparations were of course ludicrous, but we were doing our best.
 
Aborigines defiantly waving our spears at the Terminator.

Only four of us that I could see were absolutely still.
 
Mike Callahan and his daughter stood motionless, facing the doorway.
 
Finn had lifted his arms, and the forearms were starting to glow faintly.
 
And over by the fireplace, Nikola Tesla, glowering ferociously, clutched his death ray.

And the swinging doors opened, and our visitor entered, and the barometric pressure in the room dropped suddenly, as everyone gasped at once.
 
Including the newcomer.

A fireplug with a pit-bull’s head…

It was the homuncula that had visited me and Zoey that morning at dawn.

***

And I had a pretty good idea of what she had been doing with her time since then.
 
She had been scouring the earth for a dress even uglier than the one she’d had on.
 
Somehow she had succeeded.

Along the way she had acquired a camcorder; a glowing red LED at its snout said it was recording.

Believe me, you don’t want to think about what we were seeing.
 
Think instead of what
she
must have been seeing.
 
And taping.

A room full of disreputable looking thugs and molls, brandishing assorted lethal weapons including a shotgun and a death-ray.
 
An open guitar-case full of money, sloppy stacks of bills beside it on the bar.
 
A seven-foot-tall man with glowing forearms and a very large lady, both dressed in mylar.
 
And a big naked Irishman.

We gaped at each other in silence, for what seemed like a long time.
 
And then Ralph von Wau Wau spoke.