From: dmar@rp.CSIRO.AU (David Mar)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Post Toast - a story by Spider Robinson.
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 96 12:26:56 EST
Organization: Grapevine's Posting Service

Danger Mouse here. No persona stuff... I am simply relaying the
following story from Spider Robinson.

Background: Spider contacted me after recently seeing for the first
time the alt.callahans Allabout file. His reaction, and motivation
for contacting me are explained in the story.

Spider does not want his e-mail address revealed, for reasons he
explains in the story. Under no circumstances will I tell anybody
what it is, so please don't ask me.

Other than that... enjoy the story. :-)

- Danger Mouse.

####################################################################

Copyright 1996 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved.


                            POST TOAST  
                                by 
                          SPIDER ROBINSON


Jake Stonebender, proprietor of Mary's Place (spiritual successor to
Callahan's Place), has been making music with Zoey and Fast Eddie for
over an hour, and his fingers are shot.  "Tom," he calls out to the
man behind the stick, "Bring me a double!"

Tom Hauptman grins.  "Sure thing, Boss," he says.  Then, oddly, he
turns on his heel and leaves the room, walks through the bead curtain
into the back -- into Jake and Zoey's living quarters.  Jake stares
after him in puzzlement.

A moment later Tom emerges with a companion.  Tall, unreasonably thin,
long of hair and reasonably sanitary of beard, thick glasses, Beatle
boots, otherwise clad in an odd mixture of L.L. Bean and The Gap, with
long fingers,  a splendid guitar around his neck and a vaguely
alarming gleam in his eye.  He is, in short, a reasonable facsimile
of Jake.

"You DID ask for a double," Tom says, straightfaced, and the bar
bursts into thunderous laughter and applause.

"Spider Robinson!" Jake cries.  "By da t'underin' Jesus, it's good to
see you, mate!"

"Right back at you, bro," says Spider.  "Hi Zoey.  Hi, Eddy -- Doc --
Drink -- everybody..."

There is a merry rumble of welcome.  "What brings you back to Long
Island, pal?" Long-Drink McGonnigle calls out.  "If you don't mind my
asking," he adds hastily, as Fast Eddie stirs on his piano stool.

"I came to give you all a speech, and a toast, and a song," Spider
says solemnly, and a respectful silence falls.  Tom Hauptman is
already pouring the Bushmills 1608.  Spider takes it, walks around
the bar and strides up to the chalk line on the floor, faces the
crackling hearth.  He holds up his shot and looks through it at the
fire for a long moment, seems lost in thought.  Then he lowers it,
untasted, and turns to the assembled witnesses.

"As most of you know," he says, "I come from what Admiral Bob calls
a different 'ficton' -- a different dimension, a different reality
-- than this one.  My reality is adjacent to and congruent to and
very similar to yours, but different.  For example, in the 1996 that
I come from, the Beatles just put out two new singles."

(rumbles of astonishment and profound envy from all sides)

"With help from Mike Callahan, I visit this ficton once every few
years, and get Jake there stoned, and transmute what he tells me
about you into stories that I publish as science fiction back in my
own ficton.  I get to support a family without owning a necktie, and
Jake gets the free reefer and someone to listen to him talk: like
breastfeeding, the relationship is mutually satisfactory, so much
that it has endured for two dozen years.

"So in my ficton, there are a lot of people who have the
preposterous idea that I INVENTED all of you, that you are all just
figments and figwoments of my imagination.  To be honest, I haven't
done much to dissuade them -- because anybody who could think up
people like YOU rummies would have to be one hell of a story-teller."

(sounds of raucous agreement from the patrons)

"Well, I recently learned that, to humble me, God created yet
another ficton, which is adjacent and congruent and similar to my
own, yet different -- called USENET -- and in THAT ficton, some
people seem to have the idea that Spider Robinson is a fictional
character THEY invented.  They're apparently engaged in rewriting
me as I speak, patting me into shape.  I only recently got the word:
some of them hipped me, and kept it up 'till I finally heard them.

"I'm not complaining: it serves me right.  Talk about poetic
justice!  And they're not even doing a bad job, so far, if you ask
me: they actually make me sound pretty interesting.  Did you know,
for instance, that Robert Heinlein once saved my life?  I hadn't...

"But I didn't come here to boast.  I came here to tell you all that
the seed you used me to plant in my ficton has metastasized...to
another.

"The denizens of this world called USENET, see, were kind of like
Jubal Harshaw's proverbial editor and his soup.  Having invented a
sci-fi writer named Spider, they decided they liked some of his
stories enough to make them real.  So, 7 or 8 years ago, they did.

"That's right, jadies and lentilmen: they whipped up their own
Callahan's Place, out of thin air!  It's called alt.callahans..."

(a ROAR of astonishment and confusion and glee and outrage and
disbelief...which finally morphs into a long rolling wave of
laughter...followed by another...and another)

"Now, I know what many of you want to hear about.  You want me to
tell you all the countless little ways their Callahan's Place is
different from the one you lot used to drink in, and from Mary's
Place here.  And there are a lot of differences, and maybe we can
talk about them another time.  But the things I want to tell you
first -- the most important things -- are the ways their
Callahan's Place is LIKE yours."

"Do they make rotten puns there?" Doc Webster calls.

"Do dey make music dere?" Fast Eddie asks.

"Do they drink there?" Long-Drink bellows.

"Do they smash their glasses in the fireplace?" Tommy Janssen asks,
and the rumble of the crowd indicates that he has come closest so
far to a good question.

"None of that is really important," Jake Stonebender says, meeting
Spider's eye.  "What about the IMPORTANT stuff, Spider?  Did they
get THAT right?"  

The room falls silent.

Slowly, enjoying the suspense, Spider lets his poker face relax
into a crooked smile.

"As far as I can tell, they DID, Jake.  At alt.callahans they
believe that shared pain is diminished, and that shared joy is
increased, just like here.  They believe that a snoopy question
merits a mild concussion.  They help the ones that hurt and make
merry with the ones that don't."

(stunned silence in Mary's Place)  

"They care about one another, there, 24-7.  They don't make any
magical claims, but they seem to have compassion by the carload,
and they value kindness over hipness.  And they use a system of
communication that's startlingly like the telepathy you folks are
shooting for here.  Oh, there's a social disease rampant in their
world with a horrid symptom called 'flaming' -- but they suffer far
less from it than just about anywhere else in their ficton.
First-time visitors are not called the 'n-word' there, for instance,
as is customary elsewhere.  Just like here, alt.callahans seems to
be a place where it's All Right To Be Bright, where it's All Right
To Be Dull, where it's all right to be any damn thing at all except
a pain in the ass.  You know the Invisible Protective Shield around
this place?  The magic force field that keeps out the bikers and
dealers and predators and drinking alcoholics and kids looking to
raise hell?  Well, they've got one too, called a Sysop.

"And yes, they make exceedingly rotten puns there.  And some
splendid music.  And they tell toxic jokes.  Don't tell anybody,
but I've already pinched a couple."

Doc Webster clears his throat.  "Uh...how big a joint are we
talking about, Spiderman?"

Spider grins.  "Nobody knows.  This USENET ficton is a truly weird
universe, a snake's orgy of nodes and channels and webs and
threads, and as far as I know there is no truly accurate census,
and alt.callahans runs all through it like kudzu...and branches off
from there to ANOTHER ficton called -- you won't believe this one!
-- The Web.  But the best guess I heard was, well in excess of
61,000 people are regular patrons.  It's said to be in the top one
percent of bars there, by size, and furthermore to be damn near the
only one in the top two percent that doesn't have topless
bottomless waitresses and a live donkey show.  THIS Callahan's
Place probably couldn't be destroyed by FIFTY nukes, all going off
at once."

(a vast collective intake of breath nearly extinguishes the fire
in the hearth)

"Put it this way," Spider says.  "In January of 1995 -- their 1995
-- these people exchanged more words than I have written about you
bozos in two dozen years of doing so for my living.  Six and a
half MEGABYTES."

"What kind of words?" Jake asks.

Spider nods.  "Good question.  I reached into a pile of their
traffic at random and pulled out a message.  Someone I didn't know
was talking to someone else I didn't know, who was in the end stage
of leukemia.  He said, 'You are about to go on a wonderful journey
through space and time with Mike Callahan and the gang.'  He said,
'I envy you the trip.'  He said, 'Save me a seat by the hearth, my
friend...'  He...I...it was..."  Spider falls silent.  His jaw
muscles ripple, and he pokes around behind his glasses with a
knuckle.  "Five deaths, so far," he manages.  "And some births...
and God knows how many weddings..."  He shakes his head.  "And some
of the WORST goddam jokes I ever..."

"Hully fuckin Jesus Christ, WE DONE IT!" Fast Eddie cries.

"We broke the membrane," Suzy Maser murmurs, thunderstruck.  

"Through the Looking Glass..." her co-wife Suzi breathes.

"Spider's right," Doc Webster rumbles.  "We've metastasized."

"We're loose among the fictons," Long-Drink McGonnigle says with
most uncharacteristic sobriety.  "We're fucking literally out of
this world!"

"All that pain diminishing," Zoey says softly.

"All dat joy increasin," Fast Eddie adds just as softly.

Jake, with the air of someone quoting scripture, says, "'God,' he
cries, dying on Mars, 'we made it!'..." and everyone in the room
(recognizing the tagline of a Theodore Sturgeon story famous in
nearly every ficton) nods.

Suddenly a spontaneous ovation occurs, a consensual roar of joy and
glee and hope and pride that rocks the rafters, shakes the walls,
rattles the glasses behind the bar and makes a cloud of sawdust
rise from the floor.  People fall on each other and hug and laugh
and sob and pound each other's back and pour beer over one another.
Jake and Tom were off the mark the instant it began, from sheer
instinct, and barely in time: as the blizzard of empty glasses
begins to fall on the fireplace, they are busy passing out full ones.

Which reminds everybody that Spider said he has a toast to make.
Which reminds them that maybe Spider has more on his mind than just
making them feel good.  Slowly, hesitantly, the noise dwindles,
until the room is more or less silent again.

"So," Zoey says, "how do YOU feel about all this, Spider?  If you
don't mind my asking?"

"Well," Spider says slowly, "I came here tonight because I didn't
know the answer to that myself.  I figured one of you would probably
ask me sooner or later, and I know I can't lie to one of you, so I
expected to get my answer here...and I have.  The answer is, it
beats the living shit out of me."

"What do you THINK of the joint?" Long-Drink asks.

"Dunno, Drink.  I've never been there in my life."

"Jump back!" the Drink says.  "Why not?"

"Well, basically, you need a good Ficton-Twister to get there.  A
Ficton-Twister is a highly evolved descendant of the typewriter,
and the one I own after twenty-three years of writing science
fiction for a living just isn't powerful enough to pierce the
membrane, as the Doc puts it.  I couldn't get to USENET if I walked
all day.  The data I was given about alt.callahans amount to a
time-lapse film of a couple of years that takes half an hour to
watch: you can't evaluate a place on evidence like that."

"But what's your first impression?" Zoey prods.  "How does it make
you FEEL?"

Spider is slow to answer.  Slowly it dawns on those present that
for the first time in memory, Spider Robinson is having difficulty
finding the right words. 

"I feel," he says finally, "like a man who's just learned that he
has a grown son he never knew existed, by a lady long-forgotten...no,
a whole HERD of grown children, with grown grandchildren with kids
of their own.  He can't claim the privileges of paternity, because
he only meant to entertain the lady, and he wasn't there when the
diapers were full, or the tuition was due -- but nonetheless he
feels warm and proud, whether he has any real right to or not."
Jake and Zoey exchange a glance.  "I...put it this way: I feel less
useless than usual, lately."

"Does it bother you that some of them don't seem to know you from
Adam's off ox -- or care?" Merry Moore asks.

Spider grins.  "That part fucking DELIGHTS me.  The only kind of
church I'd be willing to duck into to get out of a driving rain
would be one where some of the congregation are a little vague on
the Prophet's actual name, and it's all right to call him an
asshole out loud, but the goddam DOCTRINE itself somehow got
preserved.  I would rather those people remember 'Shared pain is
lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy' than
remember the name of the first idiot to say it.  My interest in
being worshipped approaches zero...from BENEATH."  He looks
thoughtful, and sights through his untouched drink at the dancing
flames again.  "I admit I do feel just a tad like Moses, camped
outside a suburb of the Promised Land, watching his name get
misspelled in the history books."  Suddenly he giggles and lowers
his glass, rescued as always by his sense of humour.  "Then again,
that happens in my OWN books, sometimes."

"Hell, Spider," Jake says, "I got an idea.  You say somebody there
hipped you to the place.  So you can send them a letter, right?"

"Yeah, sort of.  I can e-mail folks who can pass the file through
the membrane."

"So why don't you write and tell them all about your next Tor
Books hardcover about us, CALLAHAN'S LEGACY?  You know, the one
about the night Buck Rogers walked in and started setting hundred
dollar bills on fire.  Or tell 'em about the hardcover omnibus of
your first three Callahan books that Tor will bring out shortly
after that.  Hell, tell them about the complete list of your books
posted in the Compuserve SFLit Forum.  If that many people bought
a book or two apiece, you could afford a better Ficton-Twister,
right?"

Spider shrugs.  "I'd like to, Jake.  For one thing, I hear there's
some confusion over there about the NON-Callahanian book that just
came out, the Baen paperback called DEATHKILLER; I'd like to tell
them it's a combined reissue of 2 related out-of-print novels
called MINDKILLER and TIME PRESSURE, slightly revised and updated;
and I'd love to explain to them how the story "God Is An Iron"
originally grew to become the former of those, and why both books
BELONG together; and I'd like to let them know that I'm presently
working on a third novel in that ficton called LIFEHOUSE.  I could
mention the computer- game version of Callahan's Place coming soon
for PC and Mac from Legend Entertainment.  I might even remind
them that anyone in the world who wants to bother can, for less than
the cost of a single hardcover, become a nonattending member of the
World SF Convention, and nominate and vote for the annual Hugo
Award, thereby strongly influencing the course of modern sf and the
income of the winning writers...and that even a man with three
Hugos could always use a few more.  (Ask my friend Harlan.)  But
there are two problems...  

"First, they might take all that for an attempt to 'post a
commercial message on USENET.'  This violates a stringent
ficton-wide taboo, roughly equivalent to defecating in public
after ingesting a prune stew, and punishable by 'public flaming'
(which I will not describe, but I hear it's worse than public
phlegming) and 'spamming' (enough said). 

"And second of all, even if they WANT to hear about that stuff...
suppose I DID clear enough to buy myself a Ficton-Twister that'll
run System 7, and a whole new whack of compatible software...pardon
me, I mean, 'enough magic'...why, if that happened, I'd feel
obliged to visit alt.callahans with my new rig and say thanks, and
then they'd all know my interworld address.  Have you ever tried
to answer mail from 61,000 people?"

(a rumble of apprehension as the magnitude of Spider's problem
begins to dawn)

"Even if one percent of 'em were interested enough to bother," he
goes on, "that's enough man-hours to eat up all the profit 61,000
sales would bring in, right there.  Say I only hear from one TENTH
of one percent, and not one of those is a chump: 61 interesting
letters a day.  The nicest form-response I could design would
disappoint or offend many of them -- and that's not even the problem.

"The problem is that I would LOVE to answer each one personally and
at length, spend every waking minute of every working day chatting
with friendly strangers who believe that shared pain is lessened
and shared joy is increased, who like to swap compassion and
villainous puns, who tolerate the weird, who help each other
through real life and real death...and who in many cases happen to
be familiar with and/or friendly toward my lifework.  I had a friend
once named Milligram Mulligan -- surely dead, by now -- who said
that the first time he heard the TERM 'speed freak,' before he had
any idea what that lifestyle entailed, he knew It Was Him.  Well,
the drug alt.callahans was designed to mate perfectly with my own
endorphin receptors.  I can easily see myself disappearing up my
own anus, (virtually) partying away the hours...

"...and never publishing another fucking word.  Not the
Callahan/Lady Sally/Mary's Place stuff, and not the other fifty
percent of what I write, alone and with Jeanne, which is just as
good and just as important to me -- and hopefully to some
percentage of the literate public.

"Even worse, the problem is not limited to USENET.  My
sister-in-law Dolly tells me ANOTHER Callahan's Place, smaller but
just as cool, recently coalesced in a ficton called AOL...

"I hear the Siren call, and my heart aches to heed it...but I have
a family to feed, and rent to pay, and debt to service, and a deep
primordial completely eco-irresponsible compulsion not to rest
until the last tree on my earth has been hacked down, sliced into
strips, and stained with graffitti of my composition.  Gaea
forgive me..."

"I'm a vegetarian, myself," Long-Drink remarks.  "I don't give a
damn about animals."  He grins sadistically.  "But I HATE plants..."

Ignoring him magnificently, Jake says, "Then there's only one thing
to do, Spider."

Spider looks alert.  (One of his better impressions.)

Zoey says it for her old man.  "You gotta write them one long
letter, with no return address.  You gotta tell 'em that you love
'em and that you're grateful to 'em and that you wish 'em all well.
Tell 'em they make you feel proud and humble and awed and gratified
all at the same time, and make sure they know they're never gonna
be far from your thoughts as long as you live...and maybe ask 'em
while they're busy rewriting you to remember that you always tried
to be kind to your characters."

(sustained rumble of agreement, at which Spider blushes)

"And you gotta tell them," Tanya Latimer says, "that WE love them,
too, and that we thank them for making us all feel just a little
bit less superfluous...for making us feel that all our struggles
and trials have been WORTH something, have MEANT something...even
if it's only to people in another world.  I don't know about
anybody else here, but I -- "  She catches herself.  "No, I DO know
about everybody else here.  We're all gonna sleep GOOD tonight..." 

(louder rumble of agreement)

"You have to tell them everything you just told us," Doc Webster
said, "and make them a quick toast or two...and then tap-dance out
the door and go back to work."

(rumble graduates to table-thumping)

"He's right," Jake calls.  "Hell, you don't visit US more than
every other year or so, and you're always gone as soon as you fill
up a floppy.  And God knows you're always welcome when you do show.
You're the kind of pal, it's okay if a few years slip by."

(thumping becomes cheer)

Spider stands a little straighter, and for a moment looks both older
and younger than 47.  "Thank you, Jake.  Thank you all.  As it
happens, your advice is exactly my plan."  He produces a tape
recorder from thin air.  "All this is going to be transcribed and
sent to alt.callahans, along with a sample chapter from CALLAHAN'S
LEGACY.  I just felt like it was time I connected you both, this
ficton and that one, directly -- if only by proxy.  It's a pity
Solace is gone, or she could have put you in realtime contact.  She
was a ficton very much like USENET herself...well, anyway, the job
is done, so the only thing left to do is make my toast, and then
-- by way of thanking you and them for letting me pull on your
coat-tail so long -- to play you all out with a song."

For the first time, he lifts his glass of Bushmill's, and every
glass, mug, flask and jelly jar in the room rises in unison with it.
The silence is total.

"To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be,"
Spider Robinson says, "whatever they may be called -- and to all
the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to
stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!"  And he drains
his 1608 in a single draught, and hurls his glass into the precise
center of the hearth, where it explodes with a sound rather like a
Macintosh booting up.

"TO ALL THE CALLAHAN'S PLACES!" everyone in the room choruses, and
the fireplace begins to feel like Jupiter did when Shoemaker-Levy
came to visit...

"Wait, one more," Spider calls.  "To the guy who found a manuscript
called 'The Guy With The Eyes' in the Analog slushpile back in
1972, and decided to buy it, and mentor its author -- to one of the
best sf writers working today: Ben Bova, without whom all of this
would not have been necessary..."

And another roar goes up from the throng.  "TO BEN BOVA!"

And Spider, his hands both free now, slings his guitar back up into
combat configuration.  "Now I'll just sing you this quick one and go.
Jeanne was out of town for a few weeks, and I missed her, so I
wanted to write her a love song.  The problem was, we've been
married twenty years now: there just ISN'T any way to say 'I love
you' that I haven't used already, often.  So I produced a song
called 'Belaboring The Obvious.'

He hits a bluesy A6 chord, and begins to sing...and one can't help
but sense the words are more than a little apropos to Spider's
situation in all THREE fictons: 


                     BELABORING THE OBVIOUS
                               by
                         Spider Robinson
 ((C) 1996 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved in all fictons:)


I want to tell you how I feel, love
But it ain't exactly news
Got no secrets to reveal love
But I'm gonna say it anyway,
   'cause I'm alone and you're away
      I haven't got a blessed thing to lose...

(so here goes:)

Water ain't dry, the sky goes up high, 
And a booger makes pretty poor glue
You can't herd cats, bacteria don't wear hats
-- and I love you

Sugar ain't sour, bread's good with flour
And murder's a mean thing to do
Trees got wood, and fuckin' is pretty good
-- and I love you

Yeah, I'm belaboring the obvious:
You will have noticed all the good times
This is as practical an exercise
As taping twenty cents to my transmission
   so that any time I want to
      I can shift my pair o' dimes...

(but God knows:)

Goats don't vote, and iron don't float
And a hippy don't turn down boo
Dog bites man, the teacher don't understand
-- and I love you

Sickness sucks, it's nice to have bucks
And the player on first base is Who
Kids grow up, most fellows pee standing up
-- and I love you

Guess I didn't need to say it
Just a message that my heart sent
And I kinda like the way it's
More redundant than is absolutely
   necessary thanks to the Department
      of Redundancy Department...
          (Division of Unnecessary Repetition and Pointless Redundancy 	  	 	   Division)

(I must lose:)

Fun is nice, you can't fry ice,
And the money will always be due
Bullshit stinks, and noone outsits the Sphinx
-- and I love you

Livin' ain't bad, and dyin' is sad
And little we know is true
But that's our karma-- baby, you can bet the farm
On this: I DO love you.
  


And with that, weeping with joy and giggling with sorrow, Spider
vanishes back to what he calls reality (what a kidder, that guy),
and to his best friend and co-author and oh yes, wife, Jeanne,
and their sweet daughter Terri, and life goes on at Mary's Place.

And at alt.callahans, may their shadows be always bent at the elbow...

And in

 -- Vancouver, B.C.
  24 March 1996