by Larry Niven
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Fictionwise
www.fictionwise.com
Copyright ©1971 by Larry Niven
First published in Quark, ed. Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, 1971
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* * *
The doorbell rang around noon on Wednesday.
I sat up in bed and—it was the oddest of hangovers. My head didn't spin. My sense of balance was quiveringly alert. At the same time my mind was clogged with the things I knew: facts that wouldn't relate, churning in my head.
It was like walking the high wire while simultaneously trying to solve an Agatha Christie mystery. Yet I was doing neither. I was just sitting up in bed, blinking.
I remembered the Monk, and the pills. How many pills?
The bell rang again.
Walking to the door was an eerie sensation. Most people pay no attention to their somesthetic senses. Mine were clamoring for attention, begging to be tested—by a backflip, for instance. I resisted. I don't have the muscles for doing backflips.
I couldn't remember taking any acrobatics pills.
The man outside my door was big and blond and blocky. He was holding an unfamiliar badge up to the lens of my spy-eye, in a wide hand with short, thick fingers. He had candid blue eyes, a square, honest face—a face I recognized. He'd been in the Long Spoon last night, at a single table in a corner.
Last night he had looked morose, introspective, like a man whose girl has left him for Mr. Wrong. A face guaranteed to get him left alone. I'd noticed him only because he wasn't drinking enough to match the face.
Today he looked patient, endlessly patient, with the patience of a dead man.
And he had a badge. I let him in.
“William Morris,” he said, identifying himself. “Secret Service. Are you Edward Harley Frazer, owner of the Long Spoon Bar?”
“Part-owner.”
“Yes, that's right. Sorry to bother you, Mr. Frazer. I see you keep bartender's hours.” He was looking at the wrinkled pair of underpants I had on.
“Sit down,” I said, waving at the chair. I badly needed to sit down myself. Standing, I couldn't think about anything but standing. My balance was all conscious. My heels would not rest solidly on the floor. They barely touched. My weight was all on my toes; my body insisted on standing that way.
So I dropped onto the edge of the bed, but it felt like I was giving a trampoline performance. The poise, the grace, the polished ease! Hell. “What do you want from me, Mr. Morris? Doesn't the Secret Service guard the President?”
His answer sounded like rote-memory. “Among other concerns, such as counterfeiting, we do guard the President and his immediate family and the President-elect, and the Vice President if he asks us to.” He paused. “We used to guard foreign dignitaries too.”
That connected. “You're here about the Monk.”
“Right.” Morris looked down at his hands. He should have had an air of professional self-assurance to go with the badge. It wasn't there. “This is an odd case, Frazer. We took it because it used to be our job to protect foreign visitors, and because nobody else would touch it.”
“So last night you were in the Long Spoon guarding a visitor from outer space.”
“Just so.”
“Where were you night before last?”
“Was that when he first appeared?”
“Yah,” I said, remembering. “Monday night...”
* * * *
He came in an hour after opening time. He seemed to glide, with the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. By his gait he might have been moving on wheels. His shape was wrong, in a way that made your eyes want to twist around to straighten it out.
There is something queer about the garment that gives a Monk his name. The hood is open in front, as if eyes might hide within its shadow, and the front of the robe is open too. But the loose cloth hides more than it ought to. There is too much shadow.
Once I thought the robe parted as he walked toward me. But there seemed to be nothing inside.
In the Long Spoon was utter silence. Every eye was on the Monk as he took a stool at one end of the bar, and ordered.
He looked alien, and was. But he seemed supernatural.
He used the oddest of drinking systems. I keep my house brands on three long shelves, more or less in order of type. The Monk moved down the top row of bottles, right to left, ordering a shot from each bottle. He took his liquor straight, at room temperature. He drank quietly, steadily, and with what seemed to be total concentration.
He spoke only to order.
He showed nothing of himself but one hand. That hand looked like a chicken's foot, but bigger, with lumpy-looking, very flexible joints, and with five toes instead of four.
At closing time the Monk was four bottles from the end of the row. He paid me in one-dollar bills, and left, moving steadily, the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. I testify as an expert: he was sober. The alcohol had not affected him at all.
“Monday night,” I said. “He shocked the hell out of us. Morris, what was a Monk doing in a bar in Hollywood? I thought all the Monks were in New York.”
“So did we.”
“Oh?”
“We didn't know he was on the West Coast until it hit the newspapers yesterday morning. That's why you didn't see more reporters yesterday. We kept them off your back. I came in last night to question you, Frazer. I changed my mind when I saw that the Monk was already here.”
“Question me. Why? All I did was serve him drinks.”
“Okay, let's start there. Weren't you afraid the alcohol might kill a Monk?”
“It occurred to me.”
“Well?”
“I served him what he asked for. It's the Monks’ own doing that nobody knows anything about Monks. We don't even know what shape they are, let alone how they're put together. If liquor does things to a Monk, it's his own look-out. Let him check the chemistry.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Thanks.”
“It's also the reason I'm here,” said Morris. “We know too little about the Monks. We didn't even know they existed until something over two years ago.”
“Oh?” I'd only started reading about them a month ago.
“It wouldn't be that long, except that all the astronomers were looking in that direction already, studying a recent nova in Sagittarius. So they caught the Monk starship a little sooner; but it was already inside Pluto's orbit.
“They've been communicating with us for over a year. Two weeks ago they took up orbit around the Moon. There's only one Monk starship, and only one ground-to-orbit craft, as far as we know. The ground-to-orbit craft has been sitting in the ocean off Manhattan Island, convenient to the United Nations Building, for those same two weeks. Its crew are supposed to be all the Monks there are in the world.
“Mr. Frazer, we don't even know how your Monk got out here to the West Coast! Almost anything you could tell us would help. Did you notice anything odd about him, these last two nights?”
“Odd?” I grinned. “About a Monk?”
It took him a moment to get it, and then his answering smile was wan. “Odd for a Monk.”
“Yah,” I said, and tried to concentrate. It was the wrong move. Bits of fact buzzed about my skull, trying to fit themselves together.
Morris was saying, “Just talk, if you will. The Monk came back Tues
day night. About what time?”
“About four thirty. He had a case of—pills—RNA...”
It was no use. I knew too many things, all at once, all unrelated. I knew the name of the Garment to Wear Among Strangers, its principle and its purpose. I knew about Monks and alcohol. I knew the names of the five primary colors, so that for a moment I was blind with the memory of the colors themselves, colors no man would ever see.
Morris was standing over me, looking worried. “What is it? What's wrong?”
“Ask me anything.” My voice was high and strange and breathless with giddy laughter. “Monks have four limbs, all hands, each with a callus heel behind the fingers. I know their names, Morris. Each hand, each finger. I know how many eyes a Monk has. One. And the whole skull is an ear. There's no word for ear, but medical terms for each of the—resonating cavities—between the lobes of the brain...”
“You look dizzy. You don't sample your own wares, do you, Frazer?”
“I'm the opposite of dizzy. There's a compass in my head. I've got absolute direction. Morris, it must have been the pills.”
“Pills?” Morris had small, squarish ears that couldn't possibly have come to point. But I got that impression.
“He had a sample case full of—education pills...”
“Easy now.” He put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy. Just start at the beginning, and talk. I'll make some coffee.”
“Good.” Coffee sounded wonderful, suddenly. “Pot's ready. Just plug it in. I fix it before I go to sleep.”
Morris disappeared around the partition that marks off the kitchen alcove from the bedroom/living room in my small apartment. His voice floated back. “Start at the beginning. He came back Tuesday night.”
“He came back Tuesday night,” I repeated.
“Hey, your coffee's already perked. You must have plugged it in in your sleep. Keep talking.”
“He started his drinking where he'd left off, four bottles from the end of the top row. I'd have sworn he was cold sober. His voice didn't give him away...”
* * * *
His voice didn't give him away because it was only a whisper, too low to make out. His translator spoke like a computer, putting single words together from a man's recorded voice. It spoke slowly and with care. Why not? It was speaking an alien tongue.
The Monk had had five tonight. That put him through the ryes and the bourbons and the Irish whiskeys, and several of the liqueurs. Now he was tasting the vodkas.
At that point I worked up the courage to ask him what he was doing.
He explained at length. The Monk starship was a commercial venture, a trading mission following a daisy chain of stars. He was a sampler for the group. He was mightily pleased with some of the wares he had sampled here. Probably he would order great quantities of them, to be freeze-dried for easy storage. Add alcohol and water to reconstitute.
“Then you won't be wanting to test all the vodkas,” I told him. “Vodka isn't much more than water and alcohol.”
He thanked me.
“The same goes for most gins, except for flavorings.” I lined up four gins in front of him. One was Tanqueray. One was a Dutch gin you have to keep chilled like some liqueurs. The others were fairly ordinary products. I left him with these while I served customers.
I had expected a mob tonight. Word should have spread. Have a drink in the Long Spoon, you'll see a Thing from Outer Space. But the place was half empty. Louise was handling them nicely.
I was proud of Louise. As with last night, tonight she behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The mood was contagious. I could almost hear the customers thinking: We like our privacy when we drink. A Thing from Outer Space is entitled to the same consideration.
It was strange to compare her present insouciance with the way her eyes had bugged at her first sight of a Monk.
The Monk finished tasting the gins. “I am concerned for the volatile fractions,” he said. “Some of your liquors will lose taste from condensation.”
I told him he was probably right. And I asked, “How do you pay for your cargos?”
“With knowledge.”
“That's fair. What kind of knowledge?”
The Monk reached under his robe and produced a flat sample case. He opened it. It was full of pills. There was a large glass bottle full of a couple of hundred identical pills; and these were small and pink and triangular. But most of the sample case was given over to big, round pills of all colors, individually wrapped and individually labelled in the wandering Monk script.
No two labels were alike. Some of the notations looked hellishly complex.
“These are knowledge,” said the Monk.
“Ah,” I said, and wondered if I was being put on. An alien can have a sense of humor, can't he? And there's no way to tell if he's lying.
“A certain complex organic molecule has much to do with memory,” said the Monk. “Ribonucleic acid. It is present and active in the nervous systems of most organic beings. Wish you to learn my language?”
I nodded.
He pulled a pill loose and stripped it of its wrapping, which fluttered to the bar like a shred of cellophane. The Monk put the pill in my hand and said, “You must swallow it now, before the air ruins it, now that it is out of its wrapping.”
The pill was marked like a target in red and green circles. It was big and bulky going down.
* * * *
“You must be crazy,” Bill Morris said wonderingly.
“It looks that way to me, too, now. But think about it. This was a Monk, an alien, an ambassador to the whole human race. He wouldn't have fed me anything dangerous, not without carefully considering all the possible consequences.”
“He wouldn't, would he?”
“That's the way it seemed.” I remembered about Monks and alcohol. It was a pill memory, surfacing as if I had known it all my life. It came too late...
“A language says things about the person who speaks it, about the way he thinks and the way he lives. Morris, the Monk language says a lot about Monks.”
“Call me Bill,” he said irritably.
“Okay. Take Monks and alcohol. Alcohol works on a Monk the way it works on a man, by starving his brain cells a little. But in a Monk it gets absorbed more slowly. A Monk can stay high for a week on a night's dedicated drinking.
“I knew he was sober when he left Monday night. By Tuesday night he must have been pretty high.”
I sipped my coffee. Today it tasted different, and better, as if memories of some Monk staple foods had worked their way as overtones into my taste buds.
Morris said, “And you didn't know it.”
“Know it? I was counting on his sense of responsibility!”
Morris shook his head in pity, except that he seemed to be grinning inside.
“We talked some more after that—and I took some more pills.”
“Why?”
“I was high on the first one.”
“It made you drunk?”
“Not drunk, but I couldn't think straight. My head was full of Monk words all trying to fit themselves to meanings. I was dizzy with nonhuman images and words I couldn't pronounce.”
“Just how many pills did you take?”
“I don't remember.”
“Swell.”
An image surfaced. “I do remember saying, ‘But how about something unusual? Really unusual.'”
Morris was no longer amused. “You're lucky you can still talk. The chances you took, you should be a drooling idiot this morning!”
“It seemed reasonable at the time.”
“You don't remember how many pills you took?”
I shook my head. Maybe the motion jarred something loose. “That bottle of little triangular pills. I know what they were. Memory erasers.”
“Good God! You didn't...”
“No, no, Morris. They don't erase your whole memory. They erase pill memories. The RNA in a Monk memory pill is tagged somehow, so that the e
raser pill can pick it out and break it down.”
Morris gaped. Presently he said, “That's incredible. The education pills are wild enough, but that ... You see what they must do, don't you? They hang a radical on each and every RNA molecule in each and every education pill. The active principle in the eraser pill is an enzyme for just that radical.”
He saw my expression and said, “Never mind, just take my word for it. They must have had the education pills for a hundred years before they worked out the eraser principle.”
“Probably. The pills must be very old.”
He pounced. “How do you know that?”
“The name for the pill has only one syllable, like fork. There are dozens of words for kinds of pill reflexes, for swallowing the wrong pill, for side effects depending on what species is taking the pill. There's a special word for an animal training pill, and another one for a slave training pill. Morris, I think my memory is beginning to settle down.”
“Good!”
“Anyway, the Monks must have been peddling pills to aliens for thousands of years. I'd guess tens of thousands.”
“Just how many kinds of pill were in that case?”
I tried to remember. My head felt congested...
“I don't know if there was more than one of each kind of pill. There were four stiff flaps like the leaves of a book, and each flap had rows of little pouches with a pill in each one. The flaps were maybe sixteen pouches long by eight across. Maybe. Morris, we ought to call Louise. She probably remembers better than I do, even if she noticed less at the time.”
“You mean Louise Schu the barmaid? She might at that. Or she might jar something loose in your memory.”
“Right.”
“Call her. Tell her we'll meet her. Where's she live, Santa Monica?”
He'd done his homework, all right.
Her phone was still ringing when Morris said, “Wait a minute. Tell her we'll meet her at the Long Spoon. And tell her we'll pay her amply for her trouble.”
Then Louise answered and told me I'd jarred her out of a sound sleep, and I told her she'd be paid amply for her trouble, and she said what the hell kind of a crack was that?
After I hung up I asked, “Why the Long Spoon?”