Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (29 page)

Telepathy is like an acid trip, or good lovemaking, in the sense that while your mind experiences it fully, your brain simply cannot record more than a synopsis.
 
It hasn’t got the bandwidth or the baud rate, poor thing, much less the storage capacity.
 
Even some things you retain get lost, because they fail to get listed in the master index; they pop into your mind years later, when you’re trying to get to sleep.
 

For instance, I now knew Doc’s and Long-Drink’s and Fast Eddie’s stories, in much more and much deeper detail than they had told them tonight, just as I had the last time I was telepathic, nearly three years ago—and those of everyone else in the building as well, including Callahan and Mickey Finn and Nikola Tesla.
 
Think of that: I was telepathic with Nikola Tesla!
 
No, forget that: far more important, I was telepathic with my beloved!
 
I knew Zoey as I had always yearned to know her at the moment of orgasm, and was known by her.

No, forget that: we, and all our friends, were telepathic with our only-a-moment-ago-terrified Nameless…

I knew I’d never be able to retain anything but a wisp of a hint of a rumor of a shadow of it, and I was right.
 
Hell, today I can’t even recall how Slippery Joe Maser ended up married to two women at the same time, except that it was a profoundly funny story each of the three times I learned it.
 
But I didn’t care about any moment but the one I/we were living, any universe but the one with which we were codependently arising, any task but the one before us.

Others there were, who had been part of our previous symphysis but happened not to be physically present in Mary’s Place that night; with the single exception of Lady Sally McGee, who was elsewhen, every one of them still living “heard” what we were doing, wherever they chanced to be on the planet, and joined us.

Just like the last time, we knew we had to build a thing.
 
A structure.
 
A pattern of pattern.
 
We had become aware neurons: now we had to become a mind.
 
We had established a programming language, and now it was necessary to write and debug and boot an operating system and an application—

That metaphor triggered an inspiration; I misremember in which brain.
 
Tommy Janssen, our resident hacker/programmer, got up from his accustomed table near Solace, and went around behind her.
 
He grounded himself carefully, disconnected the big SCSI cable from her GCC printer, grinned at us all, and put the end of it in his mouth like a midget harmonica.
 
We all felt a tingling, and then a shimmering, and then a trickle of information incursed our company, and then a flood…

…and Solace came online!

***

It more than doubled our size and depth and breadth, and vastly increased our clock-speed.
 
Solace was only one mind, but it covered a planet, encompassed countless terabytes of data, and worked at a large fraction of
c
.
 
She was taken utterly by surprise—she had been aware of nothing but a group hum, and had just been wondering whether its significance was religious or self-hypnotic or whether the question meant anything, when her camera picked up Tommy unplugging the cable.
 
But the time it took him to get the end of it into his mouth was more than enough for her to deduce what he had in mind, figure out a way to interface with an organic mind through its electrical system, and make up her mind to try it.
 
Leapfrogging from his brain to his mind to ours took her a whole two seconds, and happened, when it happened, all at once.

BOING
,
surprise: Pinocchio has become a real girl!
 

BOING
,
surprise: Mrs. Stonebender’s little boy Jacob now subsumes
not only
an alien, two time travelers, the greatest genius of his age, several dozen barflies, a talking dog, and a self-generated Turing-class artificial intelligence…but everyone on the planet presently logged on to the Net, and all the data in it.

I had never fallen in love with a planet before.

See?
was her first thought.
 
You users don’t know anything: SCSI should be pronounced ‘sexy,’ not ‘scuzzy’—

And then we wasted—no, we spent—a couple of seconds on the telepathic equivalent of a hug, and got down to business.

***

Just like last time, each of us perceived the thing we were building in different terms—though we were simultaneously aware of everyone else’s, and translation was perfect.
 

For me, for instance, it was that incredible, ineffable chord.
 
The most common guitar chords have three or four notes, repeated in different octaves, a total of (usually) six tones.
 
They get more complex, but of course six is the nominal maximum, since there are only six strings—although you can in theory add extra notes with hammer-ons, if you’re good enough.
 
A keyboard player gets a nominal maximum of ten notes—unless she’s got something like a sustain pedal, in which case she can layer on as many as she likes.
 
I have no idea how many notes a chord can contain before it stops being perceived as a chord and becomes cacaphony, but I’m sure the number is not high enough to create the chord we built.
 
So think of a keyboard with eighth-tones, stretching out two or three more octaves on either end of the normal human range, and played by the eight-armed goddess Kali—or all four Beatles, if you prefer, with their heads full of acid.
 
The resulting chord shimmies like a snake, but keeps returning to that poignant place of self-resolving tension, rooted in E.
 
That’s the metaphor that worked for me.
 
Those few of us who were completely unmusical contributed some of the most interesting ideas.

Fast Eddie had less than no trouble grasping my metaphor, of course—but for him what we were doing was setting up a billiard shot, involving 15
¹⁵
balls on a stupendous, flawed table with 6
⁶
pockets, the object of which was to drop every single ball; he felt that image better conveyed the combination of brute power and delicate skill required.

For Solace, who had already spent so many gazillions of picoseconds trying to understand the nature of human beings by inference from their input, we were trying to construct the compiler system for the universe, in order to infer the nature of the User Who wrote it.

For Nikola Tesla, as always, it was primarily a visual image: three mutually orbiting spheres of pure energy, with enough juice between them to power a handful of galaxies.

Mike Callahan saw what we were doing in a frame of reference for which I find I have no memory at all, and the same with Mary.

To the Lucky Duck it appeared that we were juggling chainsaws, raw eggs, live rats and vials of fulminate of mercury on a tightrope in a high wind during an earthquake in spike heels with a belly full of chili and beer; the prospect filled him with vast equanimity and a professional interest.

As they had the last time, Susie Maser and Long-Drink McGonnigle chose zero-gravity metaphors: for her, human choreography, and for him, web-spinning spiders.

For Acayib Pinsky we were building a tower to Heaven, and
this
time we were going to get it right.

For Tanya Latimer, we were learning to
see
…

For Dorothy, one of our two resident master mechanics, we were trying to design an engine the size of a pixel that would run a Space Shuttle for a year on a thimbleful of good intentions.

Tom Hauptman, as before, saw us as trying to compose a perfect prayer.

To Zoey—for whom, like Buck and Acayib, this was her first telepathic experience—what we were trying to do was
have this fucking baby!

And to Nameless, we were downloading the entire universe together, which made her giggle uncontrollably.

The question Zoey and I had been trying to telepathically ask her for the last three weeks—why she was late for the party—was at last answered.
 
Not with words, but with a wordless flash of imagery that triggered a vagrant scrap of melody from a Paul McCartney song inside my head.
 

She’d been only waiting for this moment to arise…

11

POP, MOM, POP!

Something I don’t quite know how to convey is how I/we dealt with Zoey’s agony.

For it was agony, unbelievably intense.
 
I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a real birthing.
 
It ain’t like TV.
 
Zoey and I had both thought we were prepared for the pain, or at least could conceive what it would be like; the truth was a horrid shock.
 
Each time a contraction hit, Zoey’s sentience collapsed utterly and she became a suffering, lowing animal—she never
quite
lost contact with the rest of us, but for long periods she perceived us only as a distant
other
to rage at or plead with.
 
Shared pain is always lessened, but I’m sorry to report that telepathy didn’t lessen it a damn bit further, or make it much easier to take, even though some of us had already been through childbirth themselves.
 
In many ghastly ways it was worse, though I’m happy to say most of the specifics do not seem to be in my memory banks.

Once I was in a hospital ward, and the post-op across the way decided to ignore his doctor’s orders and drink a carbonated beverage.
 
That night at 1 AM he began to scream, and he continued to scream, non-stop, despite anything the nurses could do for him, until dawn.
 
For the first half hour or so, the rest of us in the room were reasonably sympathetic; for perhaps another hour we were fairly stoic; by dawn we all, earnestly, wanted him dead.
 
Not with anger; we’d lost the energy for anger by about 4 AM.
 
We just wanted the screaming to stop.
 
If that poor man is still alive, it’s only because none of us was well enough to get out of bed and go kill him that morning.

Okay, Jake.
 
So expect that.
 
Warn the others to expect it.
 
And yes, come to think of it, deep down inside I did feel a secret, dishonorable ape-urge to go in there and slap her across the chops and say, “Straighten up, dammit!”
 
Which is patently ridiculous: I don’t know a braver person in the world than Zoey, and I knew of my own experience just how much excuse she had; my own uterus was in spasm.
 
It was just monkey-selfishness, and the conditioning of a thousand movies that try to tell you bravery consists of not screaming.
 
Bullshit.
 
Bravery can consist of just screaming, accepting that terrible dwindling of your universe, and not willing yourself to die—which is all too easy to do.

Bravery can consist of just listening to someone scream, and not willing them to die—which can be terribly hard to do.

Oddly enough—at least, it seems so to me in retrospect—the one who helped us the most was Acayib.
 
Of all of us, he seemed to identify most thoroughly with Zoey’s anguish.
 
That sounds paradoxical, since this was his very first experience of pain.
 
To him the simple ache in the muscles of her clenching hands was a horrid revelation; the contractions themselves were sheer horror.
 
But somehow that enabled him to strongly share her most dominant emotion: indignation.
 
He could not
believe
that other humans had been putting up with this monstrous indignity all their lives.
 
He had never in his own life, even momentarily, been reduced to a whimpering animal, and had always secretly suspected that those it did happen to were just putting on a histrionic show.
 
He gave Zoey an anchor to hold onto when she started to drift away: someone who completely agreed with her about the outrageous
offensiveness
of pain, who believed more sincerely than any of us that she had a
right
to protest.
 
(For Nameless, of course, pain was nearly as much of a novelty, but she was—forgive me, baby!—just too
busy
to be much help to anybody; she was absorbing much more than she was putting out.)

Additional valuable assistance, of a distinctly different kind, came from both Chuck Samms and Noah Gonzalez, for whom pain has long been an old friend.
 
You know that black people’s expression, “It got good to him…”?
 
I was taken on a tour of one of New York’s more startling S&M bars once by Maureen Hooker, a former pro dominatrix (among many other skills), and I found it fascinating, trying to psych out all the different patrons, pick out the tops from the bottoms.
 
At the end of the bar was a man in a wheelchair, and I thought him the easiest one in the room to understand: rendered helpless and hurt by his handicap, he obviously enjoyed the opportunity to impose control and inflict pain for a change.
 
I outlined my theory for Maureen, and she had trouble keeping a straight face; it turned out that guy was not only a bottom, but what she called the most notorious pain-queen in the place.
 
All God had left him were helplessness and pain, and so they got good to him.
 
(You think you’re better off than he is?
 
Think twice.)
 
In just that way, Chuck’s chronic angina and Noah’s ruined leg informed and enlightened us all, including Zoey and Nameless.