CALLAHAN'S CON.

by Spider Robinson.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

For a.s.sistance 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. a.s.sistance 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 Kra.s.sner, 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. Shames's novels Florida Straits, Sunburn, and Mango Squeeze.

None of my thirty-one books-or anything else I've done-would have been possible without the advice, ideas, research a.s.sistance, 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 I've 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 it's a good trade. But still-thank 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.

-Jaka ad-Dinar ar-Rumi.

When you can laugh at yourself, there is enlightenment.

-Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.

1.

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, something-body language maybe-told me she was trouble. My subconscious alarm system is fairly sensitive, even for a bartender.

Unfortunately I'm 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 I'm still here. Admittedly, I did require special help the night the nuclear weapon went off in my hand. And I'm the first to admit that I could never have succeeded in saving the universe that other time without the a.s.sistance of my baby daughter. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that she might not have succeeded without my supervision. All I'm 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 around-anywhere in Key West-there probably wouldn't 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; n.o.body'd 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 ba.s.s and amp over to the lead singer's place for a rehearsal she a.s.sured 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, Erin's 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 couldn't detect the usual trace amounts of vomit or testosterone in the mix.

It was the kind of day on which G.o.d 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. I've 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 G.o.d's wishes: I was selling a fair amount of booze, and the general conversation tended to be silly even if it wasn't.

On my left, for instance, Walter was trying to tell Bradley a perfectly ordinary little anecdote-but 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 I'm 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 you've been listening to him for about five minutes, you get used to it.

Bradley's peculiarity, on the other hand, is congenital, some sort of subtle anomaly in Broca's area. I've always thought of it as Typesetter's 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 Walter's startling news with, "No this!"

Walter nodded. "I to swear G.o.d."

"What went grown?"

"What went wrong some was criminal trying to district the scare attorney who sent jail to him," Walter explained. "A DA? Which neo?" Brad is a court recorder.

"The new one, Tarara Buhm. He trapped her b.o.o.by car with a bomb smoke."

Our resident cross to bear, Harry, cackled and yelled one of his usual birdbrained comments: "You're welcome to smoke these b.o.o.bies, bubbelah!" No one ever reacts to Harry anymore, but it doesn't seem to stop him.

"Wow," said Bradley. "I bet she was sacred."

"Her scared? I p.i.s.sed about my just pants!"

"How did it?"

"Some named fool Seven and a Quarter."

"Seven and a Quarter?" Bradley said. "Pretty wired name." "His apparently mother picked it out of a hat. But if you think that's name a screwy-"

Listen to too much of that sort of conversation without a break and the wiring can start to smoke in your own brain. I let my attention drift over to the piano, where Fast Eddie Costigan was accompanying Maureen and Willard as they improvised a song parody.

A nit is a tiny little pain in the a.s.s The size of a molecule of gas The average nit's about as smart as you, Which means that you may be a nitwit too.

... and if you don't ever really give a s.h.i.t You may grow up to be a nit.

"Knit this!" Harry screamed at the top of his lungs, and was roundly ignored as always.

Or would you like to swing on your dates Carry on at ruinous rates And be better off than Bill Gates Or would you rather be a jerk

A jerk is an animal whose brain tends to fail And by definition he is male... .

Maureen and her husband both started pelting each other with peanuts at that point, so Fast Eddie went instrumental while they regained control and thought up some more lyrics.

From over on the other side of the bar, Long-Drink McGonnigle's buzz-saw voice cut through the Gordian knot of conversation. Apparently he'd been inspired by a couple of words in the song's chorus. "Coming soon to your local cinema," he declaimed, trying to imitate the plummy tones of a BBC announcer, "the latest entry in the longest-running comedy series in British film history: a romp about air rage t.i.tled, Carry-On Baggage." There was general laughter.

Doc Webster jumped in, with a considerably better fake British accent. "Joan Sims will play the baggage-fully packed indeed-Charles Hawtrey will handle 'er, and they'll spend the movie squeezed together, either under the seat or in the overhead compartment, while flight attendant Sidney James offers everyone his nuts." Louder laughter.

Doc has been topping Long-Drink-h.e.l.l, all of us, except for his wife, Mei-Ling-for decades, now. But the McGonnigle likes to make him work for it a little. "Rest a.s.sured that once they get their belts unfastened and locate each other's seat, they'll soon be flying united," he riposted.

"-in the full, upright position, of course," the Doc said at once, "and setting off the smoke detectors. The Hollies will provide the baggage theme song, 'On a Carousel,' performed by Wings in an airy, plain fashion while eight miles high. As the actress told the gym teacher, 'It's first-cla.s.s, Coach.

Long-Drink raised two fingers to his brow to acknowledge a successful hijacking and joined in the round of applause. As it faded, Willard and Maureen tried another take, together this time:

A jerk is an animal who's here on spring break He sure can be difficult to take (raucous laughter) He has no manners when he swills his ale He'd sell one kidney for a piece of tail So if its years till you have to go to work, Then don't grow up: just be a jerk

"Jerk this!" Harry shrieked inevitably. After a brief pause for thought, Maureen launched the next chorus:

Hey, would you like to swing on a bed Try to moon some frat boy named Fred And be better off when you're dead Or would you rather get a life?

"Excuse me," a stranger's voice said, when the cheering had faded enough.

It had taken that long for the newcomer to make it as far as the bar. I'd vaguely noticed her doing a larger-than-usual amount of gawking around at The Place on her way, examining it intently enough to have been grading it by some unknown criteria. I turned to see her now, and a vagrant shaft of sunlight pierced the crimson leaves overhead, forcing me to hold up a hand to block it, with the net effect that I probably looked as though I were saluting.

It seemed appropriate. The short pale Caucasian woman who stood there was-in that Key West winter heat-so crisp and straight and stiff and in all details inhumanly perfect that I might well have taken her for a member of the military, temporarily out of uniform, an officer perhaps, or an MP. But she wore her severe business suit and gla.s.ses as if they were a uniform, and in place of a sidearm she carried something much deadlier. From a distance I had taken it for a purse. The moment I recognized it for what it really was, I started to hear a high distant buzzing in my ears.

A briefcase.

With an elaborate crest on it that was unmistakably some sort of official seal.

I felt a cold, clammy sweat spring out on my forehead and t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. Suddenly I was deep-down terrified, for the first time in over a decade. My ancient enemy was in my house.

The others were oblivious; most of them could not have seen the briefcase from their angle. "No, excuse me, ma'am," Long-Drink said politely. "I didn't see you there. Have a seat."

"There's no excuse for either of you d.i.c.kheads!" Harry said, and shrieked with laughter at his own wit. The stranger ignored him, which impressed me: Harry isn't easy to ignore when you first meet him. He spent a few too many of his formative years in a wh.o.r.ehouse, where the compet.i.tion for attention must have required strong measures.

"Welcome to The Place, dear," Mei-Ling said. "What are you drinking?"

"Nothing, thank you," the stranger said. She had ignored Long-Drink's invitation to sit, too. Her voice sounded eerily like synthesized speech on a computer, the audio equivalent of Courier font. "I am looking for the parents of the minor child Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz. Would any of you know where they might be found at this point in time?"

My friends are pretty quick on the uptake. By the time she was done speaking, everyone present had grasped the awful truth.

A bureaucrat was among us.

n.o.body flinched, or even blinked, but I knew they, too, were all on red alert now, ready to back my play. The small comfort was welcome: I was so terrified, it was hard to get my breath.

She was short, not much over five feet, and fashionably anorexic. I guessed her at fifty-five years old, but could have been low: her greying brown hair was yanked back into a ballerina bun so tightly that there might have been some incidental face-lift effect. Her skin was paler than average for a Floridian, and I could tell by the incipient sunburn on her left arm and the left side of her face that she had just driven down the Keys that morning. But no part of her that I could see was shiny with perspiration . . . even though a business suit is at least two layers of clothing more than is desirable in Key West.

The best way to lie is to tell part of the truth, in such a way that your listener fills in the blanks, incorrectly, for herself. That way if you get caught, you can always play dumb. "Her mother's not here right now," I said. "Is there a message I can pa.s.s on when I see her?"

"No. Do you know exactly where she presently domiciles?"

About fifty yards away, in the nearest of the five houses within the compound. "Have you tried the phone book?"

"What about her father?" I wasn't the only one who could answer a question with another question.

"Never met the guy," I said, still miniskirting the truth.

I was very glad I still had all my hair, at age fifty-mumble, and still wore it Beatle-style: those greying bangs concealed the icy sweat dripping down behind my sungla.s.ses now. So far, I was still speaking the strict truth-my wife, Zoey, was a few weeks pregnant with Erin when I met her-but I was beginning to pa.s.s beyond the area where I could later claim to have innocently misunderstood what this woman was asking. And I already didn't like the direction this was going.

She looked around at the others, one by one. This was a little more complex than it sounds, because she did it like a poorly designed robot: instead of moving her eyes from face to face, she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead and moved her entire body slightly each time. You had the idea she was taking a mental snapshot of each face. "Do any of you know where I might find either of the parents of Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz at this point in time?"

Maybe Mei-Ling guessed my problem. "No offense," she said, "but who are you, and why do you want to know?" "My name is Czrjghnczl-"

I hastily began drawing her a gla.s.s of water to clear her throat-but stopped, because she went on: "-Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl-and I am from Tallaha.s.see."

My heart was already hammering. Now it started flailing away with a maul, putting its shoulder into it. I had taken her for a town-level bureaucrat, or at worst someone from Mon-roe County. But Tallaha.s.see is the capital of Florida. Ms. Czrjghnczl was state-level trouble.

"I am a senior field inspector for the Florida Department of Education," she said, confirming my worst fear, "and I have been tasked with determinating whether Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz is being properly and adequately homeschooled, or is in fact in need of immediational custodial intervention and/or removal from her parents' custody."