Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (8 page)

“What what is?”

“The one thing we may have going for us that you’re afraid to trust.”

“Oh yeah, sorry.
 
It sounds paradoxical, but the only edge we may have is that Ludnyola is a real bureaucrat.”

Zoey and I were beginning to be tired of exchanging glances, so we stopped.
 
“This is good?”

“In a twisted way.
 
It could have been much worse: she could have been like half the other people in civil service.”

“…who are…?”

“Who are chair-warming buck-passing trough-slurping fakes,
pretending
to be bureaucrats because that’s an acceptable excuse for not being a human being.
 
As far as I can tell from study of her record and interrogation of her computer, Ludnyola is the genuine article: a machine with a pulse.”

“Yeah, so?”
 
I grasped the distinction, and from my limited acquaintance with the Field Inspector, agreed with Erin’s analysis…but I still didn’t see how this helped our cause.
 
I suspected caffeine deficiency, and signaled Long-Drink to send a St. Bernard.

Zoey seemed to get it, though.
 
“Is that true, Jake?” she asked.

“Yeah, she’s Mr. Spock without the charm, all right.
 
So what.
 
Why is this good for the Jews?”

“Don’t you grok, Daddy?
 
From everything I’ve been able to learn about her, she’s a cyborg.
 
And cyborgs
always
follow their programming.
 
They
have
to.”

“Sure.
 
And she’s programmed like a Saberhagen Berserker…or an Ebola virus molecule.”

“She’s not an assassin, Daddy, she’s a bureaucrat.
 
They live and die by rules.
 
By
the
rules.
 
If we are very lucky, if she’s as genuine and as hardcore as we think she is, it just won’t be
possible
for her to break the rules, any more than an Asimov robot could punch somebody.”

Alf arrived with the drinks cart; I thanked him, gave him a quick scratch around the base of the horns (who doesn’t enjoy that, eh?), and traded Zoey’s empty for the new coffee.
 
It was Tanzanian Peaberry, roasted by Bean Around The World up in British Columbia, the mere scent of which always kickstarts my cortex.
 
Sure enough, after only one sip—okay, gulp—I saw with crystal clarity that I was still confused.

Zoey saw it too.
 
“Jake, take it from the top.”

“Okay.
 
Ludnyola wants to take our kid away and put her in hell.
 
Using
the goddam rules.”
 
More coffee.
 
It was literally priceless then.
 
No Tanzanian coffee was sold anywhere in the world that year, because all the Tanzanians who were supposed to harvest the coffee either were butchered, or starved to death.
 
The only way to get any was to have a teleport who loved you in your family.

“What is her thesis?” Zoey prompted.

“We’re shitty parents.”
 

“And her proof of this is that we…”

Light finally dawned.
 
“
Ah
.”

“…that you did a shitty job of educating me,” Erin supplied.
 
“And you
didn’t
.”

“We didn’t do a damn thing!” I felt obliged to point out, though I was already beginning to see what she meant.

“Exactly.
 
You stayed out of my way.
 
How may
universities
have that much sense?
 
It was a terrific education.”

“—
and we can prove it
,” Zoey said.
 

“Exactly,” Erin agreed.
 
“If she has any doubts after ten minutes of conversation, let her give me the Mensa test!
 
Or any other test she’s capable of comprehending herself—I’ve got more IQ points on her than she
weighs
, Daddy.”

I wanted to agree with them and cheer up, I just couldn’t seem to work it up.
 
“And you think if we just prove to her that she’s wrong, she’ll go away?”

She sighed.
 
“Well, like I said, I’m afraid to trust it.
 
But if she’s a
genuine
bureaucrat—”

“I don’t know,” I said, finishing my coffee.
 
“I think you may be underestimating the ability of even the most robotic bureaucrat to
interpret
the rules.
 
Remember, she’s related by blood to Beelzebub.”

“That’s the question,” Erin agreed.
 
“How important is family to a robot?
 
Cousin Jorjhk, back on Long Island, was as corrupt, venal and nepotistic as any other public official on Long Island: one glance at his record will tell you that.
 
But Ludnyola here comes across as…well, as a laser beam.
 
Straighter
than any straight arrow.
 
I think she got into this because she believed what her relatives told her, and what she saw yesterday didn’t help: she thinks we’re all some kind of cult of anarchists and hippies.”

“We’re not?” I said, and Zoey pinched me.
 
Never mind where.
 
By the poolside, okay?

“She’ll never understand us much better than that; she’s not equipped.
 
But we don’t need her to.
 
If I’m reading her right, the only thing she cares about is whether my education has been neglected.
 
We can demonstrate that it has not, no matter how she may stack the deck.
 
That may be enough to deactivate her—whatever she may privately
wish
she could do to us.”

“I follow the logic,” I agreed, and looked for words to explain my doubt.
 
“Back in the late 60s, I lived in Boston for awhile.
 
There was a drug cop there like you’re talking about, Sgt. Holtz.
 
Like Inspector Teal in the Saint stories: he lived by the rules, and as long as he didn’t catch you violating any laws you were safe from him.
 
This made him unique among drug cops, then or ever.
 
Well, this one pot wholesaler who thought he was as slick as the Saint—come to think of it, his name was Simon—used to yank Holtz’s chain all the time.
 
Simon was slick enough to get away with it, too, was never on the same
block
as probable cause.
 
But he was unwise enough to rent a third-floor walkup…and one night Sgt. Holtz arrested him for coming home.
 

“He’d turned up the fact that Simon was one-eighth Mohawk—it probably wasn’t hard, the guy used to brag about it—and then he’d done a little research.
 
Turned out there was a very old law still on the books in Boston, then—might still be, for all I know—that made it illegal for an Indian to go above the first floor in any public dwelling.
 
Sgt. Holtz explained matters to a judge who was just as much of a stickler for rules as he was, and Simon would have done time if he hadn’t jumped bail..”

“Okay, I get your point,” Erin said.
 
“But Simon really was a drug-dealer, Pop.
 
I’m really not an uneducated kid.”

“Agreed.
 
The trick will be to overcome Ludnyola’s presumption that you are one.
 
Whether we can depends on how thick her blinders are.
 
And I’d have to say in the short time I shared with the Field Inspector, her mind seemed as made up as a bed the second week of Boot Camp.”

“Oh, big deal,” Erin said.
 
“I don’t see what everybody’s worried about anyway.
 
No matter what, she’s not taking me away from you guys.”

I didn’t say anything.
 
Neither did Zoey.
 
When neither of us had said anything for several seconds, Erin repeated, “She’s
not
,” with rising pitch and volume.

“Of course not,” her mother said gently.
 
“But think it through, honey.
 
If she comes after us, she has the whole machinery of the state behind her.”

“So?
 
We can whip ‘em all!”

“Sure,” I said.
 
“But not without causing talk.”

“Oh.
 
Shit.”

“If a state cop whips me upside the head with a baton, and I don’t seem to mind, he and all the other policeman will become very curious to know why not.
 
Sooner or later they’ll learn me and my family are bulletproof, too, and then we’ll be talking to a lot of humorless people from Langley, and life will be
much
less fun.
 
Those guys would have uses for bulletproof people—ugly ones.
 
One way or another it’d be the end of The Place; I doubt they’d leave us alone to drink in the sun.”
 
I reached for an empty mug and started to pour myself a beer.

“I’m not going underground at my age,” Zoey said.
 
“I took that class.”

“Wait a minute!” Erin said.
 
“So are you saying if we can’t head her off, I’m supposed to
go
with that nimrod?
 
To some foster home?”
 
The pitch of her voice began rising on the second word, and by the last it was close to supersonic.
 
I opened my mouth to reply, genuinely curious to hear what I would say, but I never got to, because just then the man monster walked in.

*
 
*
 
*

It was as though he had been constructed specifically to refute my belief that a bureaucrat is the scariest thing there is.
 
He was good at it, too.

First of all, he was big as a mastodon.
 
I saw him right away, before he even entered the compound, and I spilled the beer I was pouring myself.
 
I take great care not to spill beer.
 
He had to turn sideways to come through the open gateway, which is not small.
 
I remembered big Jim Omar carrying that gate away in one hand, an hour or two earlier, and estimated that this guy could have carried Omar
and
the gate in the same effortless way.

It wasn’t until you got past the sheer mountain-out-for-a-stroll size of him, and got a close look at his face, that you
really
started to get scared.

Look, he wasn’t quite as big as the late great André the Giant, okay?
 
And if André was ever defeated in the ring, I never heard about it.
 
But the moment I saw this guy’s eyes, I knew he could take on an armed squad of angry combat trained Andrés, barehanded, with a high degree of confidence.
 
And probably would have, given the opportunity, for no other reason than to prove he was alpha male.
 
I stared at those eyes of his for several long seconds, and the first human emotion I was able to identify there was a very mild disappointment that none of us men present was enough of a challenge to be any fun to kill.
 
I felt keen relief.
 
He ignored all the women present.
 
I sensed that to him women were interchangeable; when he was ready, he would simply take the nearest one.

Then his eyes went toward the spot where my thirteen-year-old daughter was sitting.

3

Big Stones

It’s funny.
 
I knew, for a fact, that there was no way he could form a real danger to Erin.
 
Try to bear hug her, he’d end up holding her empty clothes.
 
Try to shoot her, he’d be in serious jeopardy from the ricochet.
 
Try to outsmart her, and gods who’d been dead a thousand years would come back to life just to laugh at him.
 
I knew all that.
 
Do you think it made the slightest difference in how I reacted?
 
If so you must be childless.
 
Some of the basic human wiring is buried so deep it simply
cannot
be dug up and replaced with fiber optic cable.
 
I wanted him dead, wanted to do it myself, and knew I would die trying.
 
Every gland in my body went into full production.

But Erin was not where she had been sitting a moment ago.
 

She was
behind
the man monster now, looking at
me
.
 
Her face was expressionless, but her eyes seemed slightly brighter than anything else in my visual field, twin tractor beams locked on my own eyes.
 
Far away, someone said something.
 
I found myself remembering what Erin had said yesterday about the fight-or-flight response.
 
Were those really the only two alternatives?
 
I hoped not.
 
He didn’t look like a fight I wanted any part of, and I was not going to flee my home.
 
I’d done that more than once in the past, and I was sick of it.

I perceived that Erin was breathing in and out in long, slow, measured breaths.
 
I could almost hear her voice saying,
we can’t afford to give up any IQ points, Pop
, and I knew it was true.
 
I struggled to follow her example, for the ten or twenty seconds it took the man monster to reach the bar area, and by the time he was close enough to throw peanuts at, I was getting a pretty good supply of oxygen to the cerebral cortex, and beginning to feel fairly confident of bladder control.

Unfortunately, by then he was close enough to smell.
 
Something about his smell went straight to some atavistic part of my brain that lay even deeper than the basic human wiring.
 
Externally it was as though my friend Nikola Tesla were playing one of his benign practical jokes with electricity on me: every single hair on my body tried to stand on end at once.
 
The silhouette of my head must have expanded by ten percent.