Callahan's Con by Spider Robinson

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 assistance 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 agreat 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; nobody'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 bass and amp over to the lead singer's 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, 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 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. 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 God'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 God."
"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 booby 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 boobies, 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 pissed 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 ass
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 shit
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 cin
ema," 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 titled, 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--hell, 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 assured 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-class, 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 it's 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 glasses 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 testicles. 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 dickheads!" 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 whorehouse, where the competition 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.
Nobody 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 pass 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 sunglasses 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 pass 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 glass of water to clear her throat--but stopped, because she went on:
"--Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl--and I am from Tallahassee."
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 Monroe County. But Tallahassee 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."
* * *
Pindrop silence.
The thing to do when you're terrified is to take a step forward and smile. I did both, and when I was done, I had pretty much shot my bolt, so I just stood there, smiling and trying to understand what had gone so horribly wrong.
It was my understanding that Zoey and I were cool with the state education people regarding Erin's homeschooling--we certainly had been for the past seven years. And the idea that her education could be deficient in any possible way was ludicrous. To be sure, every single thing we had ever told the state of Florida about her homeschooling had been complete and utter bullshit. But let's be fair: the God's honest truth could only have confused them--at best. Thanks to the intervention of a cybernetic entity named Solace (now deceased) during Erin's gestation, our daughter was born with a higher IQ; a better vocabulary; and a broader, deeper education than either of her parents. Try explaining that to a state functionary with a fill-in-the-blank form sometime.
I wished Zoey were there so badly my stomach hurt. She was our family's designated Speaker-to-Bureaucrats, not me. She spoke fluent Bullshit. I speak only American, some Canadian, and a smattering of English, and I've learned from painful experience how dangerous that is around a civil servant. It would be three more years before Erin would turn sixteen and become immune to the dark powers of school boards; in the meantime she was, in the eyes of the law, just like any other child: a slave.
Zoey wasn't there. We owned no cell phone. I couldn't recall the last name of the lead singer at whose place she was rehearsing, if I'd ever known it, so I had no way to look up his phone number. It was up to me.
I cleared my throat and said, "Listen, Field Inspector Czrjghnczl, I--excuse me a moment."
The brain behaves oddly under stress. A penny finally dropped. I turned away from her for a moment and directed an accusatory glare down the bar at Walter. He grimaced back, probably with shame. "The district attorneys name was Tarara Buhm?" I asked him.
He hung his head.
"Tarara Buhm, DA?"
He nodded.
I took in a long slow breath, let it out even slower. "Right." I turned back to the Antichrist. "Listen, Field Marshal Von...I'm sorry, Field Inspector Czrjghnczl...I'd just like to--"
"The accent is on the right," she interjected.
Another long slow breath. "Right. As I was saying, I'd like to--"
Harry picked then to shriek, "I'd like to cut the mustard with you and then lick the jar clean afterwards, you spicy slut!"
She turned bright red and spun on her heel, ready to do battle. Then she relaxed a little. "Oh, for God's sake. I thought it was a person."
For once, Harry was speechless. He blinked at her for a moment...then rose into the air with a flurry of angry flapping and flew past me. In a place of honor behind the bar sits an old fashioned pull-chain toilet, a little under five inches tall but fully functional. Harry landed, perched on it, put it to its intended use, and flushed it.
"What a disgusting parrot," she said.
"True, but he's not dead."
She didn't get the reference, and I didn't try to pursue it.
"Excuse me, madam," Ralph Von Wau Wau said behind her. "On what basis do you say that my friend Harry is not a person?"
Uh-oh, I thought. You don't often hear Ralph drop that Colonel Klink accent of his...but when he does, it's time to seek cover.
She, of course, had no way of knowing that, and his tone was soft and gentle. She turned around, and whether she intended to debate with him or simply tell him she was too important to do so cannot be known, because when she finished turning, he was not there. Nobody was. She had just heard his voice from two feet behind her, and now nobody was there; she blinked in annoyance.
Then she thought to look down.
She had been opening her mouth to speak as she turned. Now it just kept opening, until she looked like she was using it to pleasure an invisible elephant...but nothing could come out of it because she could not stop inhaling.
It was hard to blame her. It's disturbing enough to look down and discover a full-grown, visibly pissed-off German shepherd at your feet. But if it challenges you to argue semantics with it, and you don't lose your cool...Jack, you dead. I sighed. I could already tell this was probably going to cost me.
"I vill admit," Ralph told her, "his sense of humor leaves virtually everything to be desired. But by zat criterion zere are very few perzonss present here right now." His fake accent was starting to come back, an encouraging sign.
She yanked her eyes away from him with an almost audible sucking sound and looked quickly around her. I could tell she was looking for the ventriloquist who was causing this dog to appear to talk, and she kept trying even though she kept coming up empty. Again, hard to blame her. The night I met Ralph myself, maybe a quarter of a century ago at the original Callahan's Place, he was working a ventriloquist con, in partnership with a mute guy. We only caught on because the guy wasn't very good at lip synching.
But finally she gave up. You could see that she wanted to hit a delete key and make Ralph go away. But she couldn't find one. "Vould you mind telling me just vat your definition of 'perzonhood' entailss?" he repeated.
Since he persisted in speaking, she would have to answer him, but that didn't necessarily mean she had to concede he existed. She stared straight ahead of her and addressed the empty air. "The abortion controversialization has made the legal definition quite complexitized; it would be imprudent to paraphrase it from memory. I can however direct you to--"
"The hell with the legal definition," Alf yelled. "Answer the damn question, lady."
She froze. This new voice was much higher in pitch and reedier in tone than Ralph's, did not sound even vaguely canine, and had no accent at all--Southern Florida Standard English, if that isn't an oxymoron. But it came from roughly the same height as Ralph's voice, so she already sensed she was in trouble.
Again she looked down.
And again performed her Linda Lovelace At The Zoo impression. And once again, I could not find it in my heart to fault her for it. Most people are stunned silent by their first sight of a Key deer.
They look pretty much like any other deer ...only seen through the wrong end of a telescope: perfect little miniature creatures. One taller than knee-high would be considered a basketball player by his tribe. Tourists who take the trouble to get past the safeguards protecting Key deer and see one up close just about always react with awe. Even without hearing one speak.
Much less speak rudely. "Come on, come on, sugar--we
do have all day, but we have better things to waste it on than
you," Alf snapped, twitching his tail.
The Inspector could not seem to shake off her paralysis; every time she started to, her eyes refocused on Alfie and her mainspring popped again. Alf's nose is hard to look away from, so big and red he looks like W. C. Fields's lawn ornament--apparently there's an auxiliary brain in there. The bureaucrat tried looking away from it...and found herself staring at Ralph; no help there. I felt an impulse to intervene somehow, but many years ago I gave up trying to find ways to cushion fellow humans against that first meeting with people like Ralph or Alf. There is no way to cushion it that I've ever found; it's simply a sink-or-swim kind of deal. Best to let the hand play out as dealt.
Long-Drink McGonnigle stood up, frowning.
Shit, where did I put that fifth ace?
He loped over to the chalk line before the fireplace and raised his glass. Silence. "To manners," he said, emptied his drink in a gulp, and flung the glass into the hearth. The smash was loud and musical.
There was a ragged but strong chorus of, "To manners!" and more than a dozen glasses followed Long-Drink's in a ragged barrage.
Newcomers to our company often find our toasting customs almost as startling as Ralph Von Wau Wau: A sudden thunder of bursting glassware can make some people jump a foot in the air.
"Now, Ms. Belch...," Long-Drink said, turning and advancing on Field Inspector Czrjghnczl. This was not going well. "...exactly what the hell makes you think you have the right to saunter in here and make wild insinuations and vile threats about people you've never even met?"
This was something she knew how to deal with: Her blank face congealed. "And you are f..."
The Drink nodded. "Magnificent. I know."
"Well, in point of fact, Mr. Nificent, I happen to be fully authorized to-"
"Author-ized?" Doc Webster interjected. "Nonsense. Where's your elbow patches? Your coffeemaker? The beads of blood on your forehead? The line of creditors hounding your footsteps? No offense, Ralph."
"I doubt she's authored a thing in her life," Long-Drink agreed. "She looks like more of an editor to me."
She rebooted. "In point of fact, I am fully authorized by the state to investigate and make recommendatory suggestions for disposition vis-à-vis the educational slash residentiary status of minor children deemed to be in a state of potentialized risk."
"Wow," Marty Pignatelli said. "You carry a piece?"
She gave him a withering glare.
"Not even a throwdown?" Marty's an ex-cop.
It had been over a decade since I had last heard someone use the word "slash" in a sentence that did not also have the word "prices" in it. I couldn't help wondering who was responsible for major children. And of course, "state of potentialized risk" was one for the archives. But I wasn't thinking about any of those things just then. I was beginning to understand how much trouble I was in.
This was no mere garden-variety bureaucrat. This was the hydroponic monoculture logic-resistant kudzu-gene Franken-food kind. She didn't need a damn gun. Sweat ran down my back into my shorts.
It was time to start proffering olive branches. "Field Inspector Czrjghnczl," I said, carefully placing the accent on the rjgh, this time, "I don't think anyone here would question your authority, your responsibility, or your probity. Would we, folks?" I put just enough spin on the last three words that the response was a strained silence. I went on, "There's really no need at all to approach this in an adversarial spirit. I'm sure that with open, honest communication we can arrive at a mutually--"
It was working; I could see it in her eyes. My submissive display was pulling her back from the very edge of a snit. There was still hope for negotiation. I was trying to recall everything I knew about stalling, when without warning the situation went completely to hell.
* * *
It happened too fast to really grasp, but as I reconstruct things, what started it was Pixel the cat, materializing on the countertop behind me...less than a foot from where Harry the parrot still sat on his little porcelain throne. Yes, he's that Pixel: the Cat Who Walks Through Walls, former master of Robert A. Heinlein; he wandered into our company and took us captive shortly after Mr. Heinlein's death in 1988. You'd think Harry would be used to his sudden appearances by now, after more than a decade of mutual ballbreaking, but it still gets the little guy every time. He screamed "Jesus Christ," erupted from his commode like a Nike from its launch rack, and made a beeline for whatever he happened to be looking at at the moment. Which was Field Inspector Czrjghnczl, of course.
From her point of view, she was suddenly under scuz missile attack, albeit a missile trailing feathers and profanity. Her reaction must have been just as automatic as his: She tried to bat Harry out of the air with her deadly briefcase. She had excellent reflexes, too; the only thing that saved Harry a nasty concussion was the twenty-five pounds or so of cat that seemed to be attached to her arm all of a sudden. Painfully attached: I've seen Pixel dice melons with those claws. He doesn't like it when anyone but him gives Harry a hard time.
Still operating on hardwired programming, she let go of the briefcase and tried to fling him from her arm. But just as she got to the point where she planned to "snap the whip" and use centrifugal force to unseat him...he was just gone. She ended up in a spinning, off-balance stagger. Alf just had time to bray, "Hey, I'm walkin' here--I'm walkin' here--" before Ludnyola tripped over him. Her brain was lagging three or four crises behind, and her reflexes had done all they could; she would have gone down and landed heavily on that infinitely fragile little animal. But Ralph von Wau Wau roared and reared up on his hind legs, and suddenly all the frenzied high-speed activity congealed into a static tableau.
Ralph and Field Inspector Czrjghnczl appeared to be dancing. A new dance, one I felt definitely had possibilities. Her arms hung limp at her sides, and Ralph was holding her up by the tits.
She stared, from Ralph down to her chest and back up to Ralph, whose muzzle panted and drooled slightly a few inches from her face. Her brain caught up, or perhaps only her reflexes. She screamed, pushed Ralph violently away, and sprang backwards.
Most of us started yelling, but of course the more we yelled, the more determined she became to keep on backpedaling. And she had only been about twelve steps from the pool to start with.
It will be very bad, I thought, if she falls in the pool.
She stopped on the eleventh step and planted her feet firmly, oblivious of the water just behind her. By now her brain had definitely caught up, and overruled the reflexes. A civil servant never retreats, no matter what. Not even if it is the only sane thing to do. The hounds of Hell can always be slapped with a subpoena or threatened with a seven-year audit. I could see her using fire-extinguisher blasts of anger to smother her fear. She took a deep breath, raised her voice, as if she didn't already have anyone's attention, and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I require your cooperation. Are either of the parents of Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz here present?"
Gee, this was not going well.
I was out of wiggle room. Outright lying would only make things worse. Time to cop. "I'm Jake Stonebender."
Her target radar locked on to me. "I see. Is your wife present?"
"Uh, no, she's at a rehearsal."
Somewhere on her console a red light came on. "She is an actress?"
I hastened to deny the slander. "A musician."
I could tell from her expression I had added another amber light and a warning buzzer. "I see."
I was wishing I'd thought to lie. Now she was going to ask what instrument, and I was going to have to say bass. Bureaucrats are not likely to be impressed by bass players. Perhaps you've heard the one about the difference between a bass player and a large pepperoni pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four. I wondered if I could phrase it so as to imply that Zoey bowed a bass, for a symphony orchestra. Would Field Inspector Czrjghnczl know Key West has no symphony? Maybe I should--
"And where is Erin herself now?"
Cerebral meltdown.
"," I said, not very loudly. How could I have not anticipated this question?
"She is nearby, I presume?"
"Ye-e-es," I agreed cautiously, crossing my fingers hard enough to raise bruises. In a certain sense, Erin is always nearby. And it would not be good to admit that I had no clear idea where--or even when--she was, and that she could easily be thousands of miles away...or for that matter, thousands of years. This woman believed, as an article of faith, that anyone Erin's age was by definition a PINS, a person in need of supervision, and that it was my responsibility to keep tabs on the kid every second.
"Pursuing some sort of educational project at this time of day, no doubt?" she said skeptically.
Here I was on less shaky ground. "Absolutely. Anthropological research."
"Fetch her, please."
"Look," I said desperately, "I don't see any need to--"
"Kindly produce her at once," the Field Inspector said. "If in fact you can."
A couple of people went woooo. She had issued fighting words. I considered feigning offense, as a stalling tactic. But stalling until what?
Damn it, I might as well bite the bullet.
I sighed deeply and brought my watch up. I pressed the mode button on the lower left and the display changed to a dormant stopwatch labeled CHRONO. I pressed it again and the watch became an, alarm clock awaiting instructions. Another press, and the watch offered to tell me the time in some other time zone, arbitrarily designated "T-2." On most watches, the fourth press would have reverted it to default, the current-time readout. On mine, the fourth press caused it to display a crude but recognizable picture of a ladybug.
I hesitated for several more seconds, trying to think of a good way out of this. Then I pressed the button on the upper right, once. The ladybug began flashing--
 Erin materialized, immediately between me and Field Inspector Czrjghnczl. "Hi, Papa!" she said cheerily. "What's up?" Her pitch dropped several notes. "Why are you holding your face in your hands like that?"
Behind her, there was a large, loud splash.
Part of it, of course, was that Erin was hovering about a foot and a half over the bar, with no more visible means of support than a bass player. Another part of the problem was probably that she had just Transited--traveled home from some other ficton, some other place-and-time. For technical reasons I don't understand, living and dead matter can't Transit in the same load...so those who travel that way necessarily arrive stark naked.
But I think the icing on the cake must have been that whatever ficton Erin had just been visiting, they had a war going on there--well, that doesn't rule out many, does it?--and she was soaked with blood, apparently so recently spilled that it still qualified as living matter. Even I found the sight unnerving, and I knew for sure that none of the blood was hers.
Small wonder Field Inspector Czrjghnczl suffered system crash and fell over backwards into the pool.
Other people hurried to pull her out. I was way too busy. I had five or ten seconds max to bring Erin up to speed. This was going to get ugly, now, and fast.
Fortunately my little girl has always had a tendency to hit the ground running. "Tell it, Papa."
"That splashing behind you is a government employee--"
"Which agency? NSA?"
"No, no, state educa--Why would you expect the NSA?"
"Later, Pop, later. She's here about homeschooling, then?" She got the hose, adjusted the sprinkler head to hold still, and began sluicing blood off herself. "But why? We're current with the state."
I shrugged. "Beats me. You know I don't speak Bureaucrat."
In another year or two, long hair would become very important to her, but at thirteen she was keeping hers cut short enough that rinsing it took no time at all, and afterward all she needed to do was shake her head and let the sun do the rest. Clothes appeared next to her, Transited from her nearby bedroom; she began dressing. "How bad is it?"
"She started out by talking about maybe removing you from our custody. From there, the situation deteriorated."
Erin grinned, visualizing it. "She demanded that you produce me forthwith, and then when she suddenly found my bare bum in her face, she went for a swim."
I nodded. "You have the thing in a nutshell. Be careful: surprises frighten her."
"You said she's a bureaucrat. What's her name?"
I told her.
Erin frowned. "Accent on the rjgh?" she asked, and I nodded. "Aha," she said.
I heard her, but it didn't register right away; I was distracted.
God damn it.
I really don't want anyone but friends in my pool.
No, I mean I really really don't want anyone but friends in my pool-and certainly not enemies.
* * *
"There's a corpse down there," she screamed as she broached.
"A dead bod--" and by then she had fallen back below the surface of the water again.
See what I mean?
No friend would leap to a conclusion like that. Not even a fair-minded stranger. The only corpselike thing about Lex at all is his custom of taking naps at the bottom of the pool. And why shouldn't he? Perfectly normal thing for a merman to do, especially at that time of the day.
All right, he doesn't look much like someone raised on a diet of movies and cartoons would expect a merman to look. Specifically, he has no tail. Unlike Daryl Hannah in Splash, even when he's immersed in water, Lex has two legs, just like thee and me--they're just a lot scalier, that's all. Well...and they bend in a few directions ours don't. And the toes are webbed. Other details of his lower anatomy I leave to you to imagine for yourself, except to say that while he may not have a tail himself, my understanding is that he gets plenty of it.
Also unlike Daryl Hannah, he is not amphibian. If you kept him out of the water long enough to dry off, he would not metamorphose into a smooth pink human being; he would die. And would probably soon smell like dead fish.
Lex has lived in the waters around Key West for most of his life. Most of the old-time Conchs know him, especially the fishermen, guides, charter boat skippers, divers, the Houseboat Row gang, and other water people. Nobody actually discusses his at any length, you understand; the word just went around a long time ago that if you got into trouble out there on the briney, and you weren't an asshole, help might just come to you if you were to lean over the side and slap the water in a certain manner. And that if that did happen, the next time you went out, it would be a good idea to toss a large sack of saltwater taffy overboard at the same spot. Then there was the fishing boat skipper who accidentally dropped a waterproof Walkman with a cassette of Rubber Soul in it over the side, and from that day forward could not go out without catching large, sought-after fish in great quantity. For years afterwards the word was that leaving a cassette tape on a buoy on your way to sea was good luck. Word of another kind also went around about Lex from time to time, but only in the scuba community, and only among the ladies.
I'd been hearing about him since I moved to the Rock, and wanted to meet him, but I'm not any land of a boat guy, and my wife is crazy about me, and anyway hates to scuba, so there was no occasion for our paths to cross. Then a few weeks ago my friends William Williams and Doc Webster (you'd expect a doctor and a guy called Double Bill to get along, wouldn't you?) came to me and asked if it would be all right if Lex moved into The Places pool for a while, while the Doc experimented with a couple of possible treatments. It seems that in recent years, the water around Key West has finally become so befouled by the crap we dump into it that Lex had developed a really serious rash on his upper half, and some sort of scale infection on his lower half. If The Place is about anything, it's Welcoming the Weird, so I agreed at once to help. I had the pool filled with salt water and raised a volunteer crew to help transport him, and one dark Tuesday night we did it.
Double Bill lined the back of his pickup truck with plastic, filled it with seawater, and we transported Lex in that. At one point Bill stopped a little short at a traffic light on Truman Street, and I guess Lex bonked his head back there, because he let out a bubbly shout loud enough to be heard in the cab. A couple of tourist college boys standing nearby came over and looked in the back of the truck, and the last I saw of them they were still standing there, solemnly assuring each other in hushed voices that the stuff definitely was worth three hundred an ounce.
Anyway, I'd had Lex as a houseguest (well, poolguest) for a few weeks now, and he'd been no trouble at all. He spent a lot of his time at the bottom of the deep end, listening to his Walkman, and unfortunately, while engaged in that harmless pursuit he bore a slight but persuasive resemblance to a waterlogged corpse.
Which is why Field Inspector Czrjghnczl left the pool very much like a Trident nuclear missile leaving an atomic sub: straight up, and with a great deal of foam, fuss, and noise.
* * *
Folks hauled her out of the pool--fun new game: Bobbing for Bureaucrats--and set her on her feet, and passed her a few towels, earning not a particle of gratitude from her. Her mouth opened and she gestured with her hands, but she was so terrified and enraged, words failed her.
"God, I love it when she's wet!" Harry the Parrot shrieked, flying in a circle around her head.
She swiveled her head to glare at him, raised a hand--
Suddenly there was a cat on her head.
She removed Pixel's tail from her mouth, spit a fine spray of orange cat hair, and tried very hard to hit him, very hard. Slow learner. She very nearly knocked herself back into the pool when he vanished just before her fist arrived.
"What a knockout," Harry squawked.
When it comes to mollifying monumentally pissed-off women, any man alive can use some advice. "What should I do?" I asked Erin.
She shrugged. "Survive."
It wasn't what I wanted to hear, but she was right. Nothing I could possibly have said or done would have been of the slightest possible use.
The soaked civil servant did say things, a number of them-and I'm pretty sure they were in English-but since her voice had gone hypersonic by that point, I'm not sure what they were. It doesn't matter, because she said them over her shoulder on her way to the gate, and she probably      summarized them effectively with the violent slam that cracked the gate itself down the center and knocked it off its hinges.
Not one of my best days, so far. Zoey wasn't going to think so, anyway.
The sudden departure left a silence.
It seemed a shame to break it. But Long-Drink McGonnigle managed to find the right words.
"I'm not going in that pool again until it's been drained and scrubbed."
He brought the house down.
"Oughta get Nikky to oil it with his breath day," Doc Webster said.
"Huh?"
"I say, we ought to get Nikola Tesla to boil it with his death ray."
I blinked at him, wondering if he was pulling my leg or my ears were starting to go--then got distracted by the sudden recollection of what Erin had said to me just as the Field Inspector had emerged from the water.
"You said 'aha!'" I said to her.
"Yes, Papa."
I like to think I'd have thought of it myself, in time. Erin has often told Zoey and me that she isn't really any smarter than we are, just quicker at it. I've never been sure if the distinction means anything. "Aha what, honey?"
"Well, I can't be sure, of course," she said. "But how much do you want to bet that she's a relative of either Nyjmnckra or Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi?"
Thunderbolt.
 
Copyright 2003 by Spider Robinson