Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (35 page)

We knew how by now.
 
Most of us were conditioned to associate chanting Om with removing our scalps, melting our skullbones away, and letting our minds out to play together.
 
One by one, in no hurry at all, we began to do so now.

*
 
*
 
*

I was sitting on my chair, beside my pool, with my whole family, watching house lights and poolside Japanese lantern-lights dance on the water.............

...............and then each of us
was
one of those points of light, dancing in a place where there were no chairs or pools or gravity or bodies to be affected by it...............a boundless place where we could touch/join/feel/learn at will, without fear or embarrassment or hindrance...............a peculiar pocket universe where a hundred soundless voices could all speak, be heard and be understood simultaneously ...............where distance between minds did not exist, and misunderstanding was no longer a viable strategy, and defensive armor was not even a concept..............

This is it/here it is/oh I
reMember
now/YES/we’re back/we’re here/it’s still here/it was always here/we made it/it made us/how could we have forgotten?/how could we have remembered?/Ready?/I’ll never be ready/I’ve always been ready—

{Then LET’S GO!}

I am he as you are he as you are we and we are all altogether together in the altogether, so gather ye chestnuts Willie Mays me when you say the word and yule bee free for all good men to come in an aide of the party animal instincts to high heaven help the guy wire the money lenders from the temple to the bridge of the nose candy cane and able to leap from tall bildungsroman empire state of the art for art’s sacrum and coke deal gone sour you doing these dazed and confused into a single elemental patients is a virtual environment to say that if you’re everly brothers’ keeper or toss her backgrounded for a weak signal to the public offering a bell tower above the restroom to move your asterisk everything on one role playing game warden off a cold front tooth and nothing butt the two things I hate the worst case of beer should be enough of this chit for the chatroom service industry standard deviation from the norman mailer-daemon knight Gracie mansion family doctor the book’s a trip and a
half
, isn’t it, man?

{see? everybody can keep up.
 
take a solo, long-drink!}

—Tristram Shandy, Amos & Andy and Mahatma Ghandi were readin’ CANDY, so they all got randy and had a brandy with a girl named Mandy who was fairly handy, and her legs were bandy but her top was glandy; her hair was sandy, like Jessica Tandy—

{dandy, grandee!
 
double bill, blow a chorus for us!}

—He was a straight head.
 
He was straight ahead.
 
His head was straight, and if you was too straight to GET straight, he was the head could STRAIGHTEN you, see what I mean, if you was in dire straits, didn’t matter in the dire front or in the dire rear, he was the straight goods, too first-rate to frustrate, and that’s the straight of it, straight up, we straight on that?
 
Right on—

{okay, round the circle now, everybody take a line:}

Afghanistan banana-stand

A Ceylonese camel with

A Balinese gamelan

Mandalay Brahmin an’ a

Ram-a-lam-a-ding dong

Bing bong Ping Pong

King Kong Donkey Dong

Cheech'n Chong in Hong Kong

Sing along a strong string

single with a dingleberry

jingle got to mingle Kris

Kringle on a shingle as

a polonaise mammal

Colonel Rommel had to pummel

on the pommel for a
 

Simulated summer as a

Ceylonese camel with

A Balinese gamelan

Mandalay Brahmin an’ a

Ram-a-lam-a-dung-dang…

{okay.
 
we’re in.
 
we’re on.
 
we’re networked.
 
good connection.
 
excellent bandwidth.
 
now:}

{enough words.}
 

{enough thoughts.}

{enough selves.}

{no more words.}

{no more thoughts.}

{no more self.}

{close ranks.}
 

{those of you who know about no-thought, teach the rest of us.
 
let us be one, and be still.}

*
 
*
 
*

Sssshhhhhhhhh—

*
 
*
 
*

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm—

*
 
*
 
*

A hundred and twenty-seven minds hugged.
 

A million years passed.
 

Then another.

No problem.
 
In company like this, I could do another billion standing on my head.

Or anybody’s, for that matter.

I (wildly misleading term) was from time (as it were) to (so-called) time briefly aware (without ever thinking about it)
 
that large (but not important) portions of what it amused us to consider Jake Stonebender’s brain were being put to strenuous use by a two-year-old supergenius, processing zeros and ones at such a stupefying rate of speed that they blurred, superimposed, and became spoked wagon wheels spinning faster than hard disks…and every (let’s call it) time I did (metaphorically speaking) come to that (for lack of a better term) awareness, I (also metaphorically speaking) always turned around and went the other way, like a first-class passenger avoiding the engine room.
 
That was someone else’s pidgin.
 
And besides,
all
the brains here were doing that…

Another million years.

And another, marinating in the warm embrace of nearly everyone on earth I cared about—

{jaymie, acayib, merry, check my figures.
 
everyone else hold on please.}

Three or four aspects of myself
 
went somewhere else for a while.
 
The rest of me continued to bask.
 
But only millennia later:

{we’ve got an answer.
 
time to put our selves back on and go use it.
 
thank you all...}

*
 
*
 
*

“—AAOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”

My lungs empty, I drew in another deep breath…and let it out slowly.
 
The Om came to a gently ragged ending.
 
There was silence save for the subsonic rumble of Fantasy Fest a few blocks distant.
 
We were back.
 
I was being me again—so convincingly that within seconds I had even me fooled.

“God damn it,” Long-Drink murmured blissfully, “
one
of these days we have got to try that when we have time to
stay
there for a while.
 
Maybe just a week or so to start, and then build up—”

“
Did it work
, princess?”

Everyone fell silent for the answer.

“I think so, Daddy.
 
I’ve got a solution in which we have a high degree of confidence.
 
If I’ve made the correct assumptions, and Pixel observed the time accurately, I think I know where Mom was when she rematerialized, close enough to exactly that with a little luck, I should be able to rescue her.”

A ragged cheer went up.
 
I was glad I was sitting down; nobody knew how close I came to passing out.

“How far away are we talking about?” I asked, when I could speak again.
 
“Orbit of Mars?
 
Oort Cloud?”

“Oh God, no!” she said.
 
“Sorry, I thought you knew.
 
I could have given you an approximate answer hours ago: it had to be roughly 68,400 miles from where she started.
 
Nineteen miles per second times sixty times sixty.
 
That’s, like, a quarter of the distance from here to the moon.”

“Ah.”
 
And Erin had
been
to the moon.
 
Well, once, anyway.
 
I felt a little bit better.

“Of course, that was seven hours ago—so from
here
, I’ve got to Transit roughly seven times that far.
 
A little over half a million miles.”

I felt a little bit less better.
 
“Ah.
 
And you’re confident?”

She smiled.
 
“Hit a target half a million miles away, with an error no bigger than a few hundred yards?
 
NASA was doing that back in the Seventies, Daddy.
 
Are you saying I’m not smarter than NASA?”

“As long as you’re luckier,” I said, and then wished I’d bitten my tongue off instead.
 
At that point in history NASA was having some of its worst luck since the
Challenger
Tragedy: a run of maddening disasters like that Mars lander that went silent only seconds before touchdown.

Our luck had generally been notoriously good, in the past.
 
But then in the past we’d often had considerable help in that direction, from the paranormal powers of our friend The Lucky Duck, who is the mutant offspring of a Fir Darrig and a pooka.
 
Unfortunately the Duck had dropped out of sight without warning a few years back, leaving us a brief note in which he explained that right now Ireland needed him more than we did.
 
I can’t say I disagree.
 
But
damn
I missed him that night.

“Okay,” Herb said.
 
“We have a good target.
 
Now did I hallucinate it, or did we all formulate an actual plan together while we were in rapport?
 
For what you’re going to do to find and rescue Zoey once you find finish the jump, I mean.”

“We’d better have,” Omar said.
 
“She’s only going to get the one chance.
 
With a window twenty seconds wide.”

“I think so,” Erin agreed.
 
“I’ll be right back.”

Pop.
 
She was gone.

“She’s just gone up to Titusville to do a little shopping,” Acayib assured me.

There’s a guy just off Route One up in Titusville, whom you could call a fanatic collector in the same sense that the Great Rift is an interesting geological feature; he specializes in esoteric radio and aerospace stuff, and his collection covers over a dozen acres along the side of the highway.
 
Double Bill calls it The Surplus Store of the Gods: there you can find everything from 8-foot dishes on tracking mounts, to a complete 3-story optical tracking station blockhouse, to—I swear, he took me there and showed me once—an honest to God Titan booster.
 
We’ve had occasion to shop there in the past, and Erin has always maintained a good relationship with Gordon.

Pip.
 
A piece of gear appeared on the poolside concrete next to Erin’s empty chair.
 
Pop.
 
She was back too.
 
“This is the best I could find,” she said, and Acayib, Doug and Herb began inspecting the device together.
 
It looked to me like an unpainted Magic Eightball with an antenna and a few
 
other bits sticking out of it, with its own remote control.

“That’s a Zoey-detector?” I asked.

“Close enough,” Acayib said.
 
“It’s a programmable IR scanner with telemetry.”
 
He shut up and started working on it.

“Zoey is small, dark, soft and non-metallic,” Doug said, watching over his shoulder.
 
“For purposes of detection in free space,
 
the only good thing she is now is
warm
.
 
Erin is going to teleport this ahead of her, to a point a few feet from her own arrival point, programmed to look for warm things.
 
Once she gets there she’ll have the scanner zig-zag via teleportation jumps every second or so along a search trajectory.
 
In twenty seconds…Merry, you were in my head watching as I did the math; do you check my figures?”

“Yes,” she said.
 
“If Zoey is anywhere within a cubic mile of Erin, the device should locate her within twenty seconds.”

“Once it does, I’m there,” Erin said.
 
“Then I use this.”
 

“Jesus!”
 
She was holding up a theatrically large pair of scissors.
 
“What for?”

“Well, I thought of bringing along some kind of pressure bubble and stuffing Mom into it—NASA has developed some prototypes I could borrow.
 
But neither Mom or I has had any experience with them at all, and I’m really dubious about my chances of getting her into one and sealing it within twenty seconds.
 
She’s likely to be in a state of panic when I get to her.
 
So I think the best way to go is, once I locate Mom I Transit to her side and just teleport her back home ahead of me…well, to some location above earth but within atmosphere, after which I can take her the rest of the way back down to the ground in safe easy hops.
 
But to teleport her ahead of me,
she has to be naked
.
 
So the scissors are to get her that way in as few seconds as possible.”