Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) by Spider Robinson Page B
Authors: Spider Robinson
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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.
“Jake,” Zoey said, her voice dangerous, “don’t tell me, let me guess. That’s your old flame, Mary, right? The one this place is named after? And that Mickey Finn character she ran off with?” She glared at the Lucky Duck.
“Mickey Finn-Callahan,” I corrected absently. “—and Mary Callahan-Finn. Those are indeed they.”
***
Again I have some explaining to do.
Before I knew Zoey, years before Zoey came into my life and started singing harmony, Mary Callahan—Mike’s daughter—was the only woman I’d been head over heels in love with since the death of my wife fifteen years earlier. One of those “thunderbolt” things. We had a glorious affair, Mary and I—one of the great ones of my life. It lasted just long enough to be measured in minutes, and then Mickey Finn showed up, and Mary went head over heels. She has a thing for tall skinny weird guys—the way I have a thing for large, voluptuous women—and Finn is just plain taller, skinnier and weirder than I’ll ever be on my best day.
He’s not even partly human, and only partly organic. What he is, he’s a cyborg zombie who managed to wake himself up.
He started out as a reasonably humanoid alien, a member of an old and wise race in a star system far from Sol. Then a much nastier race, the Cockroaches, happened onto Finn’s people, and…well, they didn’t destroy them, exactly, quite. They… recorded them: reduced them, one and all, to patterns of frozen data representing their physical and mental descriptions, and filed these patterns away for possible future study in a kind of database of souls. And what was left—the protein—well, they ate that.
Finn alone they kept corporeal—his body “enhanced” with cyborg machinery that made him both mighty enough to rupture a star and loyal enough to be trusted utterly—so that he could serve as a kind of star-scout, going before the Cockroaches (the Masters, he was taught to call them), seeing that their path was kept smooth, by exterminating any local vermin that seemed intelligent enough to be a potential nuisance.
Finn’s own will still existed, somewhere in his brain—but it was quite helpless, just along for the ride. He could not form the wish to disobey his Master’s least whim: he was counterprogrammed. His resulting shame and frustration found their only expression as rage, giving him a capacity for violence that made him an excellent interstellar hatchetman.
He had been practicing that trade for centuries, and had a lot of notches on his belt, when he happened across Earth, back in 1972. He recognized humanity at once as fitting his programmed parameters for “vermin.” But they chanced to be so much like his own lost race in so many physical ways, and so many emotional ways as well, that, despite his iron programming, Finn found himself regretting the necessity of their destruction. To steel himself for the task, he walked into a bar called Callahan’s Place and ordered ten whiskies…
Fortunately for the human race, under their influence he was able to give us just enough hint to figure out how he could be deprogrammed, prevented from automatically alerting his Masters to humanity’s existence. (The solution is implicit in the human name he took.) Because he had been able to disobey that single order, the structure of his conditioning collapsed, and he became a free agent again. Like many a scout before him, he basically faked his own death and deserted, and some years later married a local: Callahan’s
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.
“Jake,” Zoey said, her voice dangerous, “don’t tell me, let me guess. That’s your old flame, Mary, right? The one this place is named after? And that Mickey Finn character she ran off with?” She glared at the Lucky Duck.
“Mickey Finn-Callahan,” I corrected absently. “—and Mary Callahan-Finn. Those are indeed they.”
***
Again I have some explaining to do.
Before I knew Zoey, years before Zoey came into my life and started singing harmony, Mary Callahan—Mike’s daughter—was the only woman I’d been head over heels in love with since the death of my wife fifteen years earlier. One of those “thunderbolt” things. We had a glorious affair, Mary and I—one of the great ones of my life. It lasted just long enough to be measured in minutes, and then Mickey Finn showed up, and Mary went head over heels. She has a thing for tall skinny weird guys—the way I have a thing for large, voluptuous women—and Finn is just plain taller, skinnier and weirder than I’ll ever be on my best day.
He’s not even partly human, and only partly organic. What he is, he’s a cyborg zombie who managed to wake himself up.
He started out as a reasonably humanoid alien, a member of an old and wise race in a star system far from Sol. Then a much nastier race, the Cockroaches, happened onto Finn’s people, and…well, they didn’t destroy them, exactly, quite. They… recorded them: reduced them, one and all, to patterns of frozen data representing their physical and mental descriptions, and filed these patterns away for possible future study in a kind of database of souls. And what was left—the protein—well, they ate that.
Finn alone they kept corporeal—his body “enhanced” with cyborg machinery that made him both mighty enough to rupture a star and loyal enough to be trusted utterly—so that he could serve as a kind of star-scout, going before the Cockroaches (the Masters, he was taught to call them), seeing that their path was kept smooth, by exterminating any local vermin that seemed intelligent enough to be a potential nuisance.
Finn’s own will still existed, somewhere in his brain—but it was quite helpless, just along for the ride. He could not form the wish to disobey his Master’s least whim: he was counterprogrammed. His resulting shame and frustration found their only expression as rage, giving him a capacity for violence that made him an excellent interstellar hatchetman.
He had been practicing that trade for centuries, and had a lot of notches on his belt, when he happened across Earth, back in 1972. He recognized humanity at once as fitting his programmed parameters for “vermin.” But they chanced to be so much like his own lost race in so many physical ways, and so many emotional ways as well, that, despite his iron programming, Finn found himself regretting the necessity of their destruction. To steel himself for the task, he walked into a bar called Callahan’s Place and ordered ten whiskies…
Fortunately for the human race, under their influence he was able to give us just enough hint to figure out how he could be deprogrammed, prevented from automatically alerting his Masters to humanity’s existence. (The solution is implicit in the human name he took.) Because he had been able to disobey that single order, the structure of his conditioning collapsed, and he became a free agent again. Like many a scout before him, he basically faked his own death and deserted, and some years later married a local: Callahan’s
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