Callahan’s Secret, page 17
None of this was in English. That is, it left Callahan’s mind as English but passed through the minds of Jim and Paul, who knew as much of the Masters’ language as Finn did, and by hearing it through their “ears,” we understood it independent of any grammar or vocabulary. The English of it doesn’t begin to convey the monstrous arrogance of the bluff Mike was running.
“NO MASTER HAS EVER BEEN ‘SUMMONED.’ I GO WHERE I LIST, AND DISTURB ALL WHO PERCEIVE ME. WHAT—”
“Countdown resumes. Twenty-eight—,” Mike interrupted—and a telepathic interruption is ruder than any other kind, I think.
I tried to imagine the situation from the creature’s perspective. Humans were sufficiently advanced as a race to be able to hang out a telepathic No Trespassing sign for it, seemed completely unawed by its own majestic power—yet they restricted themselves to a single planet, of a single star system, and the only technology visible thereon seemed primitive. They were either suicidally brave—or they had something up their sleeves. The Masters were, as Finn had told us, remorselessly logical: its safest move was to play along until such time as it determined positively that we were bluffing, and then implode our planet, leaving no witnesses to its humiliation.
But it hated acknowledging any non-Master life form as an equal, even as a bargaining ploy. Mike got all the way down to twenty-five—and my heart got about three-quarters of the way up my esophagus—when it said:
“IT SUITS ME TO DIVULGE MY PURPOSE HERE. SUBSEQUENTLY, WE MAY DETERMINE TOGETHER WHETHER ITS FULFILLMENT WILL DISTURB LOCAL SENTIENTS, AND THE PROBABLE TIME OF MY DEPARTURE.”
“Speak. And make it snappy.”
“I SEEK A MISSING SLAVE. SENT TO SCOUT THIS SYSTEM, IT FAILED TO REPORT BACK. I SEEK IT, OR ITS REMAINS. ONCE I HAVE IT, I HAVE NO FURTHER INTEREST IN REMAINING OR RETURNING HERE.”
“Goodbye, then. Neither your slave nor its remains are here.”
You might reasonably translate the Master’s reply as “SHARKSHIT.” It had raised its “voice” slightly: it was getting angry.
We kept our tone level. “—Twenty-four—”
When I was a kid in school, I always sat in the back of the classroom. If things got too boring, I’d do a Slow Fade. You move your desk back and to the right imperceptibly slowly, about six inches per minute, toward the back door and out into the hall. If you do it slowly enough, the teacher never notices you leave. In a similar manner, Paul MacDonald began now to withdraw from the thing we had all built in Callahan’s Place, without advertising his departure. It helped that his brother’s telepathic aspect was so nearly identical to his own. I don’t think anyone else noticed—maybe they never played Slow Fade—and I kept my own realization from the common awareness, did my best not to think about it even to myself. While we were talking to the front of the alien’s mind, Paul was sneaking around the back…
“THE SLAVE WAS WELL-DEFENDED,” it was saying. “I CAN BELIEVE YOU OVERCAME IT; BUT IF SO IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A MEMORABLE EVENT.”
“Perhaps for one such as you,” Callahan agreed. “Our automatic defenses are capable, and do not require our attention.”
“THEN WHY YOU SPEAKING TO ME?”
“Amused curiosity. Your mind is singularly ugly.”
Oddly, it did not take offense. Every entity it had ever met in its centuries of existence had feared it; it did not know how to react to a direct insult. But it did get angrier—because we were wasting its time. “EVEN IF YOU HAD ANNIHILATED THE SLAVE, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN A COMPONENT LEFT, INDESTRUCTIBLE BY ANY KNOWN FORCE. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN LOCATED HERE—” It sent a sort of three-dimensional X-ray picture of Finn’s head, and clearly visible beneath and behind his right ear, between skull and brain, was a little nodule that looked like a marble. “IT IS A DATAFILE CONTAINING EVERYTHING PERCEIVED BY THE SLAVE SINCE ITS LAST MILKING. I REQUIRE IT IMMEDIATELY.”
“You grow boring,” Callahan said. “Countdown resumes—”
“I WILL TEAR APART YOUR STAR!”
Callahan made no reply. He made a throat-cutting gesture to us, and we broke the connection.
There was no chatter. Less than half a minute on the countdown, on our bluff.
“What did you get, Paul?” Callahan snapped, and I became aware for the first time that Paul MacDonald was back among us telepathically as well as physically. He tended to “blend in” with Jim’s aspect, like an echo, which was why it had been possible for him to get away with a Slow Fade.
He made a convulsive mental effort, and did something like a file memory dump, sending information in a block rather than bit by bit, to all of us at once. In a matter of a second, we knew everything he had learned. Grasping it took me a few seconds more.
I have to put it in figurative terms. A lot of this stuff doesn’t go into words; worse, the memories turn insubstantial as I try to translate them. Paul had sneaked in an unguarded back window of the creature’s mind, while we occupied it at the front door. He had strolled around in some of the mustier back files of an immense storehouse of memories for a matter of whole seconds, teaching himself how to understand the operating language, the file-finder system, the retrieval commands—reconnoitering while keeping a low profile. He didn’t get all he’d hoped for, he ran out of seconds, but Paul was a seasoned professional at tiptoeing through human minds, and he came away with more from this alien mind than I would have believed possible.
The majority of what he learned was incomprehensible or irrelevant or otherwise useless. The creature’s name, to pick a basic example, was utterly untranslatable. We could no longer think of it as a Cockroach, and like Mary we refused to call it a Master. We reached an instant group consensus on what to call it: The Beast. (And hoped that we had its number.)
The Beast was a pervert. Don’t ask me to describe what kind of pervert it was, or what constituted “normal” for its race. I don’t want to think about either one. Please just take my word for it that it was, by its own lights, disgusting. It was not ashamed of itself. Shame is a kind of self-hatred, and no Master is capable of hating—or loving—itself. But it did wish strongly that it could be other than it was, and that is as close as such a being can come to shame. (Not close enough, in my opinion.)
Its perversion had recently become known to its kind. Social faux pas on a cosmic scale: it was now and forever an outcast, a renegade, to be slain on sight. Its slaves had been reprogrammed to others. It was alone. To one of its race this fate was simply intolerable. Masters cannot live in Coventry. This is weird, since they are not a gregarious race under the best of circumstances. They don’t need each other’s attention, the way humans do, but they positively require each other’s respect. The Beast had exactly two psychologically feasible alternatives; to suicide, or declare war on its entire race.
In the billion or so years of Master-recorded history, only a very few of the very few outcasts had ever chosen the latter alternative, and their names were metaphoric symbols for evil itself. But The Beast was a real pervert.
It was also a logical pervert. No force or combination of forces it knew could seriously threaten its race. But it wasn’t (The Beast was prepared, being a pervert, to admit to itself) strictly true that everything was known to the Masters. For instance, once in a very long time (even by Master standards), a scout slave failed to report back. Scouts were so heavily armed and defended that it was difficult to imagine anything capable of destroying one before it could get off a report. (No Master in the Universe was permitted to be as heavily armed as a typical scout, since a Master, unlike a slave, could bring himself to turn a weapon on another Master. (I know that doesn’t make sense in human terms. Very little about the Masters does.) An AWOL scout meant either that someone had destroyed it, someone who could perhaps be used, or that the scout had—incredibly—malfunctioned in some way, in which case its own weaponry might be salvageable.
The risk was horrible. A Master is not defended as well as a scout either.
It was a mad gamble, and The Beast knew it, but it was a pervert and doomed. Desperate and raging, it had followed the trail of Txffu Mpwfs across the big empty spaces to the place where he was known as Mickey Finn, hoping to find some terrorweapon it could use to avenge itself, and found…a bunch of barflies, a few time traveling Micks, two telepathic psychiatrists and a talking dog. Callahan’s Bar on New Year’s Eve.
“All right,” Callahan said in our heads as we finished assimilating the burst of largely useless data that included this, “we’ve got it right where we want it. At T minus ten seconds, we tell it we’ve changed our minds: we’re not going to kill it after all. It’s too disgusting to kill. We’re going to ignore it—and call the other Masters and demand that they come remove their garbage from our system at once. That should—”
He screamed then, with his mind and with his throat. I don’t suppose I’d ever thought to hear Mike Callahan scream. I didn’t hear the physical scream, of course, because sounds drown each other out and I and everyone else in the room were screaming, too, but mental screams don’t drown each other out, each one registered with individual clarity. Amazing that I had time to register such trivia, with The Beast loose in my brain…
“ENTROPY!”
The beast was very angry; that was the strongest curse it knew.
“JUST AS I FEARED! IT WAS NOT A WEAPON WHICH DISABLED TXFFU MPWFS, BUT A DISEASE. THAT ‘LOVE’ FUNGUS. USELESS TO ME!”
Paul hadn’t been as careful as he thought. We should have remembered: Finn thought faster than a human being; so would his Masters. Probably they thought even faster than him.
In the instant of opening communication we had told The Beast the rate at which we processed information—by establishing a second as a significant interval for us—and it had been outthinking us ever since. It had had plenty of time to spot Paul stumbling around in the back of its brain, without alerting him. It had learned a great deal about telepathy from him, and then had hidden in his pocket, as it were, and been brought back home by him. His data-broadcast had opened us all up, allowed The Beast to access our files and study us. Our cover was blown sky-high. Jim and Paul MacDonald were effectively dead, their minds torn out, their personalities annihilated, their bodies and brains kept alive to serve The Beast as a telepathic transceiver.
I was caught. Swallowed by The Beast. Damn it, it was just like being swallowed by a Beast, the size of the one that got Pinocchio. My surroundings went away, my telepathic companions went away, my eyes and my mind found black nothingness in all directions—I tried to cast around with my arms and discovered that I could not find my body anymore. The audible screams, including my own, were now inaudible; so were the mental ones. There was just the Master and me. All my strings were cut.
“OR PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY USELESS AFTER ALL,” it went on thoughtfully. “I SEE POSSIBILITIES…”
I snapped, shrieked at him: “Motherfucker!” It seemed to echo.
“IT IS A MINOR COMPONENT OF MY PERVERSION THAT I AM NOT. YOU OUGHT TO TRY TO ENJOY YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS. THE ONE YOU CALL FINN WILL WAKE, AND THEN I WILL OWN IT AGAIN, AND THEN YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS WILL CEASE. SOON, AS YOU RECKON TIME: YOU HAVE NO TIME TO WASTE.”
“When Mick wakes up you’re gonna be the first Shark that ever got killed by his own Finn!” I only half-believed it, but I badly needed that half. My sanity hung from it.
“I CONCEDE THAT IT HAS DISOBEYED PROGRAMMING AN UNPRECEDENTED NUMBER OF TIMES—ONCE, FOR AN INTERVAL MEASURABLE IN YOUR GREAT LONG SECONDS.” Dimly I knew somehow that the Beast was not talking only to me, but talking privately to each of us, by time-sharing at a horrendous rate, the way a TV tube redraws each line of pixels so quickly that you never see them disappear. “IT WILL NOT DO SO AGAIN.”
“Finn loves us!” I cried, while thinking, Finn loves one of us. “Even if he didn’t, he’d fight you—because you’re evil!”
“HOW AM I EVIL?”
“You’re a murderer!”
“INCORRECT. I HAVE NEVER KILLED ANY SENTIENT ENTITY.”
“You and your kind killed Finn’s entire race!”
“INCORRECT. WE HAVE NEVER KILLED ANY RACE.”
“Fuck you. Mick told us the truth.”
“CORRECT. YOU MISUNDERSTOOD IT. ITS RACE IS NOT DEAD, MERELY IN STORAGE. IT TOLD YOU THAT EACH OF ITS PEOPLE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON A MOLECULE OF ITS OWN, DOWN TO THE LAST MEMORY. ALL WE KILLED WERE CELLS, AS YOU DO WHEN YOU PARE YOUR OWN FINGERNAILS. THE ESSENCE OF FINN’S PEOPLE, THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS AND MEMORIES AND GENETIC PATTERNS, ARE NOT ENDED. THEY COULD BE RECREATED AT ANY INSTANT, A TRIVIAL MATTER OF SYNTHESIZING ENOUGH PROTEIN. THEY ARE NOT DEAD, MERELY DISPLACED IN TIME. LIKE MICHAEL CALLAHAN.”
Oof.
“IT IS A SHAME THAT THE METHOD HE USES TO TRAVEL IN TIME IS UNSUITABLE FOR MASTERS—THAT WOULD BE A MIGHTY WEAPON INDEED. I MUST GIVE THOUGHT TO ADAPTING IT—”
“You’re worse than a murderer,” I yelled. “You’re a slaver, and an arrogant pervert!” Dimly it occurred to me that a videotape recording of the interior of Callahan’s Place at this moment must look pretty strange: a roomful of people apparently hollering abuse at each other. Or was I actually yelling, with my throat? I tried to figure out how to regain control of my senses, groping around in the dark for the controls.
“DOES YOUR RACE NOT ENSLAVE CHIMPANZEES AND DOLPHINS, THOUGH THEY ARE CLEARLY SENTIENT? AND WORSE, DO NOT MEMBERS OF YOUR SPECIES ROUTINELY ENSLAVE EACH OTHER? THIS IS PERVERTED ENOUGH TO REVOLT EVEN ME: IN ALL OF TIME, NO MASTER HAS EVER DONE SUCH A THING.”
Damn him, he was getting to me, he kept poking little holes in all my postulates, undermining my moral position and turning my righteous anger into nothing more than the helpless rage of the victim. I tried to ignore him as I struggled to invest my body again.
“CAN YOU, INCIPIENT ALCOHOLIC WHO ARE ATTRACTED ONLY TO FAT WOMEN AND ARE COMFORTABLE ONLY HERE IN THIS ROOM WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL CRIPPLES LIKE YOURSELF, CALL ME A PERVERT? AS FOR ARROGANCE, CAN YOU, WHO KILLED YOUR FAMILY TO SAVE A FEW DOLLARS AND SHOW OFF IMAGINARY MECHANICAL COMPETENCE, CALL ME ARROGANT?”
My universe of blackness began spinning around me. Don’t ask me how blackness can spin. I had to make it stop or I would go yammering insane, and the only way to do that was to get my eyes open. Damn it, I had lived in this goddam skull all my life, navigated my way around it blind drunk, done a cold-restart of all systems after thousands of interludes of natural or unnatural unconsciousness—why the hell couldn’t I tell where anything was?
Let’s see. The ears should be the simplest; fewer bits of data to integrate than eyes. First get hearing back, then go for the big stuff. Sound off, ears, I can’t see you.
“I HAVE NEARLY REACHED YOU NOW. SOON I WILL BE PHYSICALLY PRESENT, AND ABLE TO RESTART THE SLAVE FINN.”
“He’ll find a way to beat you. He won’t let his wife down!”
There was a sort of far-off rumbling. Miles away up its alimentary canal, The Beast was grinning. “I WILL PROMISE HIM THAT IF HE HELPS ME TO…RECORD YOU ALL, AND FIGHTS MY WAR FOR ME, I WILL REVIVE HIS PEOPLE, AND GIVE THEM A PLANET TO USE AS THEY WISH. THIS ONE WILL DO ADMIRABLY. HE WILL COOPERATE.”
No, damn it, it was not a faraway, metaphorical rumbling. It was close by, and real. My hearing was coming back—
—and The Beast was burning his way through the roof of Callahan’s Place.
“I WILL GIVE YOU A RIDDLE,” it went on conversationally. “THERE IS A RACE OF CREATURES ON THIS PLANET WHICH IS CLOSELY RELATED TO MY OWN, THOUGH MUCH DEGENERATED FROM THE PURE STOCK. A SMALL GROUP OF THESE CREATURES COULD EASILY KILL ONE OF YOU, YET NONE HAVE EVER DONE SO: THEIR WORST ‘CRIME’ IS THAT, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN YOUR ECOSYSTEM, THEY COMPETE WITH YOU FOR FOOD—AND LOSE IN THE COMPETITION, EVERY TIME. THESE CREATURES ARE CLEARLY AND UNMISTAKABLY SENTIENT. YET YOU SLAUGHTER THEM EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER THEM, BY THE VILEST MEANS KNOWN TO YOU. CAN YOU NAME THESE ENTITIES? AND CAN YOU, IN LIGHT OF THIS INFORMATION, STILL CONSIDER ME EVIL?”
I heard scattered crashes, felt distant pain, understood that one of my friends had been hurt by a falling piece of burning ceiling.
“I AM HERE,” The Beast said. “AH—YOU ARE EVEN UGLIER IN PERSON THAN YOU ARE IN YOUR MINDS. STRANGE THAT ONES SO AWKWARDLY AND PRECARIOUSLY CONSTRUCTED COULD BE SO COURAGEOUS. YOUR ATTEMPTED BLUFF WAS SPLENDID; IT MIGHT HAVE WORKED AGAINST ONE AS SLOW-WITTED AS YOURSELVES. I SHALL TREASURE YOUR RECORDINGS.”
Dear God—how many minutes or seconds could there be left before the mickey finn wore off Mickey Finn and it was all over? Before the whole human race was stopped, recorded, frozen like six billion flies in amber for whatever portion of eternity pleased The Beast? Would we ever be revived? If so, would Terra still hold the resources to support technology, the food to support life? Would Sol still burn?
“NOW THAT I AM HERE, THERE IS NO NEED TO WAIT FOR THE SLAVE FINN TO REVIVE NATURALLY. I SHALL DO A SYSTEM FLUSH AND REBOOT IT MANUALLY…”
Dimly I heard several voices whimpering, realized that one of them was my own and therefore that my voice was working again.
“Mike!” I screamed. “Mary! Sally! Help me!”
And things happened very suddenly then.
Or rather, things had been happening very suddenly, and came to fruition all at once.
The Beast thought very fast, much faster than any of us could hope to, and it had that time-sharing thing down cold. But no one present in the room, including The Beast, knew as much about time as Mike Callahan. Callahan, who carried himself and his wife and daughter through time, without the support of any external hardware…
The Beast was carrying on over a hundred conversations at once, like a chess Master playing a hundred opponents at once. Every few dozen picoseconds it got back to Mike’s “table,” and the big Irishman was always there. But in between, he was elsewhen, in a quiet, safe space-and-time where he could think things over and plan at his leisure. Leisure enough to work a lot of things out, and to come up with the swiftest and most elegant solution.
He restored our vision.
