Callahan's Secret by Spider Robinson Read Free Book Online

Steinitz asked.
    “They would put me back to work, unpunished. They are not like humans, who sometimes kick a machine that is not working. They would simply restore the machine to service. And, as an afterthought, they would exterminate the organisms which caused the machine to malfunction.”
    “Us, you mean,” Callahan said.
    “Yes.”
    Mary and Callahan exchanged a look I didn’t understand.
    “There’s no chance you could sneak back to your home planet without these Master clowns catching on?” she asked Finn.
    “None whatsoever,” Finn said expressionlessly. “To begin with, my home planet no longer exists. It has not existed
    for several centuries, and I am the last of my people.” Mary winced. “What happened?”
    “The Masters found us.”
    “Jesus-and killed everybody but you.”
    “They killed everybody including me. But the Masters are a prudent and tidy race; they always keep file copies of what they destroy, each etched on a molecule of its own. Like all..of my people, I was slain, and reduced to a single encoded molecule. Some time after my death they felt need of a new scout, fashioned this body, and caused to be decanted into it a large fraction of my former awareness-withholding the parts that did not suit them, of course.”
    Mary gasped; she was horrified. “God, you must hate them.”
    Finn’s voice was bleak. “I wish greatly that I had the ability. That is one of the parts that did not suit them.”
    I was as horrified as Mary. As a rule, Finn is disinclined to talk about his past, and of course none of us had ever tried to pry. I’d always wondered how he’d gotten into his former profession. Now I was sorry I knew.
    (Still, I was tempted to ask him the other thing that had always puzzled me: why the body he wore looked human. Was human stock ubiquitous through the Galaxy? Had his Masters designed him specifically to come here? Or did he somehow reform his body for each new planet, each new culture? I knew that at least half his body was organic-but did that half have anything in -common-with the body he had been born into?
    Perhaps the answer was equally horrifying. In any case, my Mend Finn was in pain: This was no time to be snoopy.)
    “Mickey,” Mary said softly, “if you are unable to hate your Masters… then you are unable to love them. Yes? That’s why you were able to betray them.”
    “Yes. They do not wish to be loved. They would find the idea disgusting. Love baffles and repels them, they stamp it out wherever they find it in the Galaxy. The Masters are motivated by selfinterest.”
    “So are most humans,” Mary said.
    Finn actually laughed. “Excuse me, Mary my new freind, but what you said is funny. All humans-without exception-want to love. No organic or emotional or psychological damage can remove that need. Humans can survive, albeit in pain, without being loved-but lock a man in a dungeon and he will find an ant to love, or try. The sociopath, who feels no emotions, wishes he could, and is driven mad by his inability. Love is the condition in which the happiness and welfare of another are essential to your own.
    To any rational selfish mind, this is insanity. To a Master it would be obscenity: perhaps the corresponding horror for a human being would be ego-death.”
    “Love is ego-death,” Mary whispered.
    “The Masters have run across love from time to time in their expansion through the Galaxy. They’re not at all afraid that it might infect them, nor do I believe that to be a possibility, but they always exterminate it with a special pleasure, afrisson of horror, a small thrill of disgust.” Finn closed his eyes briefly. “It was the flaw for which my race
    died.”
    The Place was silent. Mary’s fingers were digging painfully into my arm, and I couldn’t protest because I was gripping her ann just as hard. Why was she glaring at Callahan?
    “When first we encountered the Masters, we considered the problem they represented and evolved two