Spider Robinson - Callahans Con

This book is dedicated to Larry Janifer, known to some as Oudis: senior colleague, Knave extraordinaire, and extraordinary friend

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

CALLAHANS CON

Copyright 2003 by Spider Robinson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by Patrick LoBrutto

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-765-34165-4 EAN 978-0765-34165-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003040285

First edition: July 2003

First mass market edition: June 2004

Printed in the United States of America 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For assistance and advice in matters of science and technology, this time around, I am deeply indebted to Douglas Beder, Jaymie Matthews, Ray Maxwell, Jef Raskin, Dave Sloan, and Guy Immega; as always, any mistakes or inaccuracies are my fault for trusting them. Assistance of other kinds, just as valuable and appreciated, was provided by Rod Rempel, Lawrence Justrabo, and Colin MacDonald (the wizards behind my Web site), and by Bob Atkinson, Steve Fahnestalk, Daniel Finger, Stephen Gaskin, Paul Krassner, Alex and Mina Morton, Val Ross, Riley Sparks, the late Laurence M. Janifer, every one of the posters to the Usenet newsgroup alt.callahans, and others too numerous or fugitive to mention.

Particular thanks go to one of my favorite writers, Laurence Shames, for his gracious permission to borrow, for the second time, his splendid creations Bert the Shirt and Don Giovanni. If you find them as delightful as I do, look for Mr. Shamess novels Florida Straits, Sunburn, and Mango Sque eze.

None of my thirty-one booksor anything else Ive donewould have been possible without the advice, ideas, research assistance, not-always-credited collaboration, and ongoing love and support of my wife, Jeanne. This time out, however, she deserves more than the usual thanks; this is the first book Ive written since I quit smoking tobacco, and I estimate I was about 15 to 20 percent harder to live with than usual during its creation. (Neither of us is complaining; we both figure its a good trade. But stillthank you, Spice!) For the same reason and others, special thanks go to my longtime friend and agent, Eleanor Wood, and evenlongertime friend and editor, Pat LoBrutto, for believing in me and being patient.

Howe Sound, British Columbia 8 September 2002

Teach us delight in simple things, And mirth that has no bitter springs.
Rudyard Kipling

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
George Bernard Shaw

Give up owning things and being somebody. Quit existing.
J aka ad-Dinar ar-Rumi

When you can laugh at yourself, there is enlightenment.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

The basic condition of human life is happiness.
the Dalai Lama

A little more than ten years after we had all arrived in Key West, saved the universe from annihilation, and settled back to have us some serious fun, bad ugliness and death came into my bar. No place is perfect.

I noticed her as soon as she came through the gate.

I always notice newcomers to The Place, but it was more than that. Before she said a word, even before she was near enough to get a sense of her face, somethingbody language maybetold me she was trouble. My subconscious alarm system is fairly sensitive, even for a bartender.

Unfortunately Im often too stupid to heed it. I did register her arrival, as I said and then I went back to dispensing booze and good cheer to the happy throng. Trouble has walked into my bar more than once over the years, and Im still here. Admittedly, I did require special help the night the nuclear weapon went off in my hand. And Im the first to admit that I could never have succeeded in saving the universe that other time without the assistance of my baby daughter. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that she might not have succeeded without my supervision. All Im trying to say is that in that first glance, even though I recognized the newcomer as Trouble looking for the spot marked X, not a great deal of adrenaline flowed. How was I to know she was my worst nightmare made flesh?

If the Lucky Duck had been aroundanywhere in Key Westthere probably wouldnt have been any trouble atall, atall. Or else ten times as much. But he was away, trying to help keep Ireland intact that winter, in a town with the unlikely name of An Uaimh. My friend Nikola Tesla might have come up with some way to salvage things, but he was off somewhere, doing something or other with his death ray; nobodyd heard from him in years. Even my wife, Zoey, could probably have straightened everything right out with a few well-chosen words. She had a gig up on Duval Street that evening, though, sitting in with a fado group, and had brought her bass and amp over to the lead singers place for a rehearsal she assured me was not optional.

So I just had to improvise. That only works for me on guitar, as a rule.

It was late afternoon on a particularly perfect day, even by the standards of Key West. The humidity was uncommonly low for the Keys, and thanks in part to the protection of the thick flame-red canopy of poinciana that arched over the compound, we were just hot enough that the gentle steady breezes were welcome as much for their coolness as for the cycling symphony of pleasing scents they carried: sea salt, frangipani, fried conch fritters, Erins rose garden, iodine, coral dust, lime, sunblock, five different kinds of coffee, the indescribable but distinctive bouquet of a Cuban sandwich being pressed somewhere upwind, excellent marijuana in a wooden pipe, and just a soupcon of distant moped exhaust. The wind was generally from the south, so even though The Place is only a few blocks from the Duval Street tourist crawl, I couldnt detect the usual trace amounts of vomit or testosterone in the mix.

It was the kind of day on which God unmistakably intended that human beings should kick back with their friends and loved ones in some shady place, chill out, get tilted, and say silly things to one another. Ive gone to some lengths, over the years, to make The Place a spot conducive to just such activity, so I had rather more customers than usual for a weekday. And they were all certainly doing their part to fulfill Gods wishes: I was selling a fair amount of booze, and the general conversation tended to be silly even if it wasnt.

On my left, for instance, Walter was trying to tell Bradley a perfectly ordinary little anecdotebut since they each suffer from unusual neurological disorders, even the mundane became a bit surreal.

I was down walking Whitehead Street when there was suddenly big this boom, and Im on my lying back, Walter was saying. Thanks to severe head trauma a year or two ago, his whack order is often out of word: he can say eloquently things, but not right in the way. After youve been listening to him for about five minutes, you get used to it.

Bradleys peculiarity, on the other hand, is congenital, some sort of subtle anomaly in Brocas area. Ive always thought of it as Typesetters Twitch: Brad tends to vocally anagrammatize, scrambling letters within a word rather than scrambling the order of the words themselves like Walter. Sometimes that can be even more challenging to follow. Right now, for instance, he responded to Walters startling news with, No this!