Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (31 page)

The Lucky Duck was human, but a mutant strain—not only Irish, but half pooka and half Fir Darrig—with paranormal powers and an extremely odd upbringing; brief interludes of normality were the only freaky things that ever happened to him.
 

Nor was Ralph Von Wau Wau truly a human being, though he could imitate one well enough to be a successful writer.
 
He had, for instance, never felt anything more than brief lust or lasting fondness for a female, nor any emotional interest in any of his many offspring; it just wasn’t in him.
 
He had dietary and other habits I will not describe.
 
In fact, his most completely human attributes were a conviction that humans are hilarious, and an abiding dislike of behavioral scientists.

He was a merry son of a bitch; we love him and he loved us.

Through all this loving, we came to fully understand something we would have said we already knew, if asked an hour before: that the crucial thing that conveys personhood is not anything so parochial as humanity, but sentience itself.
 
We began, for the first time, to truly understand the decision the Filarii had made so long ago.
 
They had believed that sentience has a duty to avoid causing pain, and when it came to the crunch they had opted to preserve the ethical structure they had built, rather than the flesh they had inherited.
 
If a principle isn’t worth dying for, it isn’t a principle, it’s an attitude.

Tom Hauptman, former minister, had been studying other religions in the years since he defrocked himself.
 
As we all worked together at the thing we were building, he shared an extended quote with us (Tom has near-eidetic memory) from a Zen abbot named Tenshin Reb Anderson:

Look at the blue sky.
 
It’s nice to look at, but it’s so hard to understand.
 
It’s so big and it goes on forever.
 
How are you going to get it?
 
It’s hard to understand all sentient beings, too, but it’s not difficult to sit upright and be aware of them…

This is like trusting what.
 
What—trust it.
 
Put aside your doubts and trust it.
 
Trust what.
 
Don’t trust it, a thing you can think of.
 
Trust what you can’t think of.
 
Trust the vastness of space.
 
Trust every single living being.
 
Trust cause and effect: vast, inconceivably complex and wondrous cause and effect.
 
This faith has unlimited possibilities.
 
Think about not moving.
 
Think about giving up all action.
 
And remember, giving up all action does not mean stopping action.
 
That would be another action.
 
“Giving up” means giving up the attempt to do things by yourself, and embracing the way of doing things with everyone.

Trust Buddha’s mind.
 
Trusting Buddha’s mind means trusting all sentient beings.
 
This is fearless love.
 
You can give it all up and then you can love every single thing…

Yes—all beings!
 
All beings are sharing the way at this moment.
 
Never graspable, totally available.
 
There is no other thing outside of this.
 
My question is, do we trust it?
 
Looking at myself, the only thing I can find that holds me back from completely trusting the practice in which all sentient beings are now engaged is lack of courage; lack of courage to affirm all of life, which is the same as the lack of courage to affirm death.
 
Without being able to affirm death, I cannot affirm life.
 
This is the courage that comes with insight, so I could say that what holds me back is lack of insight.

I’m not a Buddhist myself—Irish whiskey works just fine for me—but those words resonated.
 
Perhaps we had all been suffering, just a touch, from carpal tunnel vision.

***

As we reached that insight, the thing we were building among us came to completion.

***

It was the same thing we had built the last time: a telepathic amplifier, that would allow mind-to-mind communication with a nontelepath.
 

Describe it?
 
Don’t be silly.
 
About the only meaningful things I can say about it are that its range was about a trillion miles, and that
everything
material was transparent to it.

We could have reawakened George Bush’s dormant belief in God, if we’d been practical jokers; we could have read all the mail in the world, if we’d been nosey; we could have given Ray Charles sight if we’d had the time; we could have satisfied the baffled curiosity of every cat alive, or apologized to the dolphins, or told all those mosquitos to knock it the hell off.
 
We were busy…

I was at Zoey’s side, had drifted back there without noticing the moment we’d all gone telepathic.
 
You’d think telepathy would make it less necessary to physically touch, but it’s just the other way around: makes it
more
necessary.
 
Several of us, for instance, were making love, and there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t touching someone.
 
We grew together, reached consensus, made our plans, said goodbye to our lives, Solace warned that we were out of time, Zoey finished a contraction and caught her breath, and we employed our new tool.

***

Solace aimed it.

Tesla tuned it.

Mary cranked the gain wide open.

Finn focused it, with great care.

Tom Hauptman composed the message.

Nameless put it into wordlessness.

I, to my shock, was selected as spokesbeing.

Callahan triggered it.

Everybody
powered it.

***

The last time we had done this, the message we had used our telepathic bullhorn to transmit was a threat.
 
We had given The Beast ten seconds to state his business or die.
 
The threat had been a bluff…and it had not worked.
 
Only brute force had saved the day, and that option was closed to us this time.

So we changed strategy.

The message I/we sent was, as I’ve said, wordless, an emotional gestalt on a level so basic that we hoped it would be intelligible to any sentient life-form.
 
As Theodore Sturgeon said, if it isn’t simple, it isn’t basic, and we had no time or room for anything but the basics.
 
At the same time it was layered with so many nuances that several verbal constructs convey different aspects of it.
 
Here are some of them:

TIME OUT!

EASY…

TRUCE!

PARLEY…

KING’S X!

LET’S TALK…

WHITE FLAG!

DO NOT FEAR…

HOLD YOUR FIRE!

BE COOL…

HEAR US OUT!

WE CAN HELP YOU…

WHAT’S ALL THIS BROUHAHA?

YOU CAN BE FREE IF YOU CHOOSE…

EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY ALRIGHT!

The message itself conveyed the message,
Here we are
, of course…and more important and more stressed than any of the above semantic content, there was a pervasive, enfolding subtext I can only verbalize as
SHHHHHHHHHHH!
or possibly
PSSSSSSSSTTTT!
which we hoped would, in combination with the precision of our aim, be self-explanatory.
 
This multilayered statement went out in a single stupendous burst that lasted only a fraction of a second and then chopped off.

We waited.

With bated breath, and baited brains, and beta software.

We had pinned all our hopes on a gamble.
 
We had bet the farm that the similarities between Mickey Finn and the Lizard were greater than the differences.
 
With all reality in the pot, we were counting on nothing more substantial than our guesses about the psychology and wiring specs of an unknown alien being, cyborged by another, different alien.
 
Serenely happy, living life to the fullest, we waited to see if we’d guessed right.

After five endless seconds, the first response came back—

It had no ordered semantic content as such, at first.
 
The Lizard was not so much allowing itself to “think out loud” as to
be
out loud.
 
In the instant it had perceived our probe, it had figured out how to construct a wall against it, and had erected that wall the instant we broke off contact.
 
Now it…well, didn’t lower the wall, but held a mirror up and peeked cautiously over the top.
 
Which allowed us to “glimpse” it in return.
 
What came through was:

old/cold/grim/merciless/bitter/

angry/frustrated/ashamed/vicious/

weary/dutiful/despairing/terrified/

resigned/helpless/determined/wary

all of them with a flavor so
alien
that I’d have felt more kinship with a terrestrial lizard.
 

We could not conceal our joy and relief.
 

We would have liked to conceal it, for fear of spooking the Lizard, but at the level of truth we were maintaining, diplomacy was impossible.
 
What we were receiving might not seem terribly encouraging—but the crucial thing was that it was unmistakably and unquestionably
coming from an organic brain
.

Like its former colleague, Mickey Finn, the Lizard had been cyborged by The Beast, zombified and enslaved by inorganic installations from its head to all three feet.
 
Like Finn’s, about a quarter of its brain was now made of silicon or gallium arsenide.
 
Like Finn’s, that part of the Lizard’s brain—call it the Fink Brain—had total overriding control of its body and will.
 
And—thank God—just like Finn’s, the organic part of the Lizard was allowed to think whatever the hell it pleased…whenever the inorganic Fink part didn’t have a more pressing use for its neurons.

We had succeeded in making contact only with the organic part.

And while it was clearly wary, it had so far opted not to pass the news on to its mechanical master.
 
Our gamble was working—

—so far—

It waited, and thought, for another eternal five seconds, and then sent a reply.
 
Like ours, it was simple yet layered.
 
The parts of it that can be shoe-horned into human English words went something like this:

OH YEAH?

BACK OFF…

SAYS WHO?

WATCH IT…

HELP HOW?

I DOUBT IT!

HOW DO I KNOW I CAN TRUST YOU?

but again, quite a lot of the meaning was in the subtext.

It was whispering…

***

In retrospect, I think we might just have failed right there, if the Lizard had been more like us.
 
Part of what saved us was its peculiar triadic nature.

First, because Nikola Tesla had such a profound lifelong attachment to the number three, such a humanly counterintuitive understanding of threeness.
 
And second because, as Mary had pointed out, the three-eyed Lizard
did not have a blind-spot
, had in its experience no analogs for such biped binocular concepts as “sneak up on,” “behind your back,” “blindside,” or “backstab”—and hence was just a little less paranoid than a human would have been.
 

Only a little—it was, after all, an assassin: zombie slave of a pervert monster—but enough to bring us a surly reply instead of a reflex attack we could not have survived.

Even better, it kept all this hidden from its Fink Brain, perhaps intuitively accepting, for the moment, the (us/it/that) triad we had offered.

Best of all, its reply contained direct questions.

***

In response, we gave it
everything
.

There was no other way to do it.
 
We risked scaring it, or overwhelming it—but we
had
to persuade it that we spoke the truth, and the only way to do that was to offer total disclosure: to present more, and more internally consistent, data than any lie could possibly contain.

We did not
send
it any information, did not upload a single bit except the message:

 
See for yourself…
 

And then we simply gave it total access, unlimited privilege, and allowed it to download anything we had, without hindrance.
 
In human metaphorical terms, we pulled down our pants and spread our legs and invited it to explore.
 
We opened our minds and hearts and brains absolutely to it, and waited…

Imagine a lizard crawling around in your shorts.
 
Now raise that to the millionth power, and you’ve got a glimmer of what it’s like to have a Lizard crawling around in your head.

Ah, but think how horrible it must be for the Lizard!
 
And try to be a gracious host…

It sampled everything, from Chuck Samms’ infantile memories of breast-feeding to Nikola Tesla’s beta version of the Unified Field Theory to Nameless’s still-forming first impressions of reality.
 
It learned everything we knew: