Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (33 page)

***

But not as shaky as the Lizard’s.

It was reeling like a drunk in a high wind.
 
Which, come to think of it, it was, since a strong draft was coming in through the hole in the roof.
 
Mickey Finn stepped forward and carefully offered it the support of his arm.

It accepted it, climbed out of the hole it had made for itself on impact, and looked blearily around at all of us with its three eyes.
 
Our mental communion was gone, now, but fortunately it had downloaded so much from us that it retained the ability to speak English.

“Ffffank…hyooo…awwww,” it said, with a distinct Lizard accent.

“Any time,” I said, for all of us.

It focused two of its eyes on Finn.
 
“Hai wi’w he’p hyoo resssstore yaw pee’po’,” it said, “ifff hyoo wi’w he’p me ressstore mine.”

“Agreed,” Finn said at once.

“Naowww?” it proposed.

“When we sober up.”

It thought that over for a second, and nodded.
 
“G’uuud p’wann…” it said, and sat down suddenly, like a tripod collapsing.

A nine-foot-tall three-legged critter sitting down suddenly is a funny enough sight: legs splayed in three directions, and its butt end hit the floor like a dropped safe, sending sawdust spraying.
 
The three jiggling tits made it even funnier.
 
But then it remembered how humans express good fellowship, and opened its snout in an attempt to grin, and there were no teeth in there, and the overall effect was so ludicrous that the rest of us all fell down, too: laughing.

Did I mention that it was purple?
 
A few years later, when a certain children’s character swept our culture like a fungus, we were probably the only adults on the planet besides its creators who actually liked it a little.

***

Does it seem callous, that we did not spend so much as a second mourning our dead friend Solace, that we could fall down laughing within moments of her death?
 
Do we seem like human chauvinists, relieved that all our victory cost us was a wog ally?

Or do you figure we just knew she’d be back again someday, that it was in the nature of the Internet to produce her, given enough time—and that after all, her death had been painless?

Neither was the case.
 
We missed her just as much as we missed the MacDonald brothers and Tom Flannery and Dave Costigan and Helen McGonnigle and my own first wife and child and all our other dead.
 
And yes, we were pretty damn sure that she’d be back, but that isn’t why we didn’t mourn.
 
It may seem weird, but death is an intolerable insult
even if it is temporary
.
 
Even though all these unfolding seconds she was not living through would be available in memory for Solace to examine at her leisure when she recoalesced, her death was and is a tragedy, a brutal and wrenching sacrifice.
 
We had all been on the very verge of such wonderful discoveries together!
 
Sure, she had died without pain—but Acayib can testify that you don’t need to feel pain to experience loss.
 

No, we didn’t mourn Solace because she had asked us not to.
 
In those last seconds of planning—of realizing we had only one possible plan—before triggering our telepathic bullhorn, Solace had asked us to grant her the status of Honorary Irishman (
please
don’t give me any crap about the gender; Solace didn’t care about that stuff in the least and why should you?), and give her a traditional Irish wake.
 
Mourn later, if you must, she had said, but throw me a hell of a party first!
 
And a first birthday party for the baby…
 
Our agreement had been unanimous, and now it was time to pay up.

So we pitched a ball…

Fast Eddie, helpless with laughter, crawled to his piano stool and climbed aboard, hit an E minor chord, and called out, “Do you feel like an outcast?”
 
I yelled back, “Yes, brother!” and sprinted for my guitar.

The introduction to “The Red Palace,” the opening track of the Koerner and Murphy album running jumping standing still.
 

The day that album was released, back in 1969, I was just moving into a hippie crashpad next to an abandoned railroad station in East Setauket; I picked up a copy on the way.
 
You know what it’s like when you move into a place full of strangers?
 
How you all smile a lot and become elaborately, distancingly polite while you feel each other out and size each other up?
 
The first thing I unpacked was the stereo, of course, and the first thing I put on was that album; naturally I cranked it all the way up so I could make sure I hadn’t wired the speakers out of phase.
 
Two minutes into “The Red Palace,” everyone in the building—thirteen total strangers—had all crowded into my room, torn off all their clothes, and begun to dance.

It had a similar effect now.

Dozens of willing hands took over from Tom Hauptman, who was too weary to lift his arms.
 
The Coffee Machine began to hiss and gurgle and chuff.
 
So many teeth were displayed, even a cow would have had the sense to run for its life.
 
Chairs and tables were cleared to make room, and we began…well, the first line of the song proper says it all: “Drinkin’ and dancin’, all night long…”

The bass line is important in that song, especially when it gets to the extended piano solo in the middle.
 
A verse and a half before that, Mickey Finn used a laser fingertip to enlarge the doorway to the living quarters in back, and Zoey and Erin came floating in on that high-tech bed, bringing a cheer from the crowd.
 
Tesla waved a hand, and Zoey’s bass walked itself over to the bedside; the bed configured itself so that she could hold Erin to her breast with the crook of her right arm while she played; and she came in right on time.
 
I’d have to check with Guinness, but I believe Zoey may have been the first musician in history to play bass nude, while nursing.

The song ends with a flourishing bass riff; the applause would have torn a hole in the roof if there hadn’t been one already.

Erin seemed to enjoy it just as much as anybody—I distinctly hear muffled laughter during the piano solo—but as the applause dopplered down into laughter and conversation, she let go of Zoey’s nipple and burst into tears again.
 
People awed, and Zoey let go of her bass (it remained upright on its spike heel) to see what the problem was.
 
Erin raged, and pointed with her whole body.

Toward the Macintosh.

Just for a moment, the party mood flickered slightly.
 
That Mac II was the closest thing we had to the corpse at the wake.
 
Its screen still glowed blue-white, but it was hung, displaying only the Mac bomb-icon, labeled “Error: ID ∞”
 

“She’ll be back, honey,” Zoey said, but Erin refused to be comforted.
 
When a baby wants something, she hates to wait even a second.
 
“Mary?” Zoey called out, and her bed began to move again, closer to the Mac.
 
Erin stopped crying—well, slacked off—and reached out toward it.
 
Mary must have used her body language to steer by: she ended up not in front of the monitor where I’d have expected, but at the right side of the case.
 
Struggling to control muscles whose hardware and software she was still in the process of building, she hit the
restart
half of the programmer’s switch.

We figured we had to let her try it, but we knew it was hopeless.
 
I was even surprised to hear the little G major chime as the screen went blank; it seemed incredible that Solace had not burned out any of her local hardware or operating system during the firefight.
 
And sure enough, the Mac took more than thirty seconds to boot, rather than springing to life at once the way it would have if Solace had still been on board.

But when it did boot, it was not the Finder that came up, but a startup application.
 
A face appeared onscreen; one I had seen only once before, on the night Zoey and I met.
 
The one Solace had created in a desperate attempt to make sure that Zoey and I fell in love.
 
A simulacrum of her dead father…

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said to Erin.
 
“I’m your grandfather Murray.
 
Your Aunt Solace wrote me, to be your friend.
 
What’s your name?”

Zoey and I gaped at each other, then glanced at Erin.
 
She had that idiot smile again.
 
“Erin,” Zoey said.
 
“Her name is Erin.”

“Thank you, Zoey.
 
Hello, Erin.
 
Would you like to put headphones on, so the grownups won’t disturb us?”

Erin glared up at both of us.
 
Well, what are you waiting for?

A wave of laughter and applause swept round the room as I scurried to get headphones.

“So that’s what Solace’s last name was!” Long-Drink McGonnigle whooped.

We all stared at him in mute inquiry.

“Finnegan,” he explained.
 
“By God, she
was
Irish.”

And the party was off and running again.

***

Some of the memories get a little vague, after that, but I retain a few of the highlights.

—Finn and the Lizard determining (after some consultation) that caffeine would get a lizard drunk, and proceeding to get it ripped on Jamaica Blue Mountain—

—Callahan and his daughter dancing a jig on the bartop together—

—Maureen Hooker showing us a dance she’d learned from Snaker Ray, that once got her thirty days—

—Tesla wandering by with a pigeon on his head and his pants on fire—

—Finn, Callahan and Mary all arm-wrestling the Lizard at the same time; all losing—

—the Lucky Duck, feeling his luck come strong upon him, attempting and pulling off the coup of a lifetime: he flipped on the TV and began channel-surfing.
 
Though it was around dawn, we had a satellite dish out back—thank God I hadn’t put it on the roof—so there were plenty of channels active.

 
But in three complete rotations,
he couldn’t find a single commercial
—

—Erin trying to eat the mouse—

—a horrid pun contest that began when someone referred to the before-mentioned Yoda Leahy-Hu, and Doc Webster started talking about the success of the merchandising campaign for the second
Star Wars
movie.
 
“Once you get your hands on a toy Yoda—” he began.

“You’ll end up Honda the table,” Long-Drink finished.

“Sounds like a science fiction short-short,” the Doc said imperturbably.
 
“Maybe it’ll win the Yugo.”

“Don’t mind him,” Long-Drink told the rest of us.
 
“He’s been drinking a Lada Thunderbird.”

“Puns on cars, eh?” the Doc said thoughtfully.
 
“Hey, you can’t exhaust that one: there are manifold puns on a topic like that.
 
Wheel never use it up.
 
It’s universal: you just put your mind in gear, and as long as you don’t clutch up, the transmission of standard puns becomes automatic.”

“Yeah,” said Callahan, “but lay off the sci-fi angle.
 
You can’t a Ford to let a fan belt you.”

“I’ll just use my enginuity and try to Dodge,” the Doc said.

“Give us a brake, Doc,” said the Drink.
 
“I think you’re running out of gas.”

“You could have fueled me.
 
Hood ever have believed I could pun like this, dead trunk?
 
Oil tell you, this is really sedan accelerating, it’s a gas!”

Long-Drink flinched slightly under the barrage, and then came up with an evil grin.
 
“Thank God no one will ever clone you, Doc.
 
God help us if ever VW.”

That brought a growing chorus of groans to the howling point.
 
“Well, BM double, you!” the Doc riposted, but he was clearly staggered.

“Yeah,” the Drink went on, “we’d end up having to toss the spare over a cliff somewhere…and then we’d be arrested for making an obscene clone fall…”

From there, as it usually does, it got worse—

—floating up through the hole in the ceiling in that magic bed of Zoey’s, with her and Erin, watching the sunrise from the rooftop with a dozen friends, all of us warm and comfy despite the chill winds, thanks to Finn-magic—

—Mike and Mary and Finn and Tesla and the Lizard all leaving for who knows where together at about eight AM, amid a chorus of drunken cheers and sobbing farewells and oaths of eternal friendship—

—saying to Fast Eddie, “You wish you had a third hand, like the Lizard?
 
Hell, Eddie, you can have
four
, any time you want.
 
Just double your fists.”—

—Putting steak on my eye—

***

All right, I’m stalling.

That’s because I’ve finally come to the end of this story, and as I promised you from the start, it ends with a disaster.

***

By nine AM, we were beginning to slow down just a trifle.
 
Actually, more than half of us were passed out, and the rest, though still jolly, were showing distinct signs of motor impairment.
 

At the stroke of nine, a stranger walked in the front door, and conversation and merriment came to a halt.