by Larry Niven
But one of the big Chirpsithra passenger ships was due to leave Mount Forel Spaceport in two days. The Chirpsithra trading empire occupies most of the galaxy, and Sol system is nowhere near its heart. A horde of passengers had come early in fear of being marooned. The Draco Tavern was jammed.
I was fishing under the counter when the noises started. I jumped. Two voices alternated: a monotonal twittering, and a bone-vibrating sound like a tremendous door endlessly opening on rusty hinges.
The Draco Tavern used to make the Tower of Babel sound like a monologue, in the years before I got this sound system worked out. Picture it: thirty or forty creatures of a dozen species including human, all talking at once at every pitch and volume, and all of their translating widgets bellowing too! Some species, like the Srivinthish, don’t talk with sound, but they also don’t notice the continual skreeking from their spiracles. Others sing. They call it singing, and they say it’s a religious rite, so how can I stop them?
Selective damping is the key, and a staff of technicians to keep the system in order. I can afford it. I charge high anyway, for the variety of stuff I have to keep for anything that might wander in. But sometimes the damping system fails.
I found what I needed—a double-walled canister I’d never needed before, holding stuff I’d been calling green kryptonite—and delivered glowing green pebbles to four aliens in globular environment tanks. They were at four different tables, sharing conversation with four other species. I’d never seen a Rosyfin before. Rippling in the murky fluid within the transparent globe, the dorsal fin was triangular, rose-colored, fragile as gossamer, and ran from nose to tail of a body that looked like a flattened slug.
Out among the tables there was near-silence, except within the bubbles of sound that surrounded each table. It wasn’t a total breakdown, then. But when I went back behind the bar the noise was still there.
I tried to ignore it. I certainly wasn’t going to try to fix the sound system, not with fifty-odd customers and ten distinct species demanding my attention. I set out consommé and vodka for four Glig, and thimble-sized flasks of chilled fluid with an ammonia base for a dozen chrome-yellow bugs each the size of a fifth of Haig Pinch. And the dialogue continued: high twittering against grating metallic bass. What got on my nerves was the way the sounds seemed always on the verge of making sense!
Finally I just switched on the translator. It might be less irritating if I heard it in English.
I heard: “—noticed how often they speak of limits?”
“Limits? I don’t understand you.”
“Lightspeed limit. Theoretical strengths of metals, of crystals, of alloys. Smallest and largest masses at which an unseen body may be a neutron star. Maximum time and cost to complete a research project. Surface-to-volume relationship for maximum size of a creature of given design—”
“But every sapient race learns these things!”
“We find limits, of course. But with humans, the limits are what they seek first.”
So they were talking about the natives, about us. Aliens often do. Their insights might be fascinating, but it gets boring fast. I let it buzz in my ear while I fished out another dozen flasks of ammonia mixture and set them on Gail’s tray along with two Stingers. She went off to deliver them to the little yellow bugs, now parked in a horseshoe pattern on the rim of their table, talking animatedly to two human sociologists.
“It is a way of thinking,” one of the voices said. “They set enormously complex limits on each other. Whole professions, called judge and lawyer, devote their lives to determining which human has violated which limit where. Another profession alters the limits arbitrarily.”
“It does not sound entertaining.”
“But all are forced to play the game. You must have noticed: the limits they find in the universe and the limits they set on each other bear the same name: law.”
I had established that the twitterer was the one doing most of the talking. Fine. Now who were they? Two voices belonging to two radically different species ...
“The interstellar community knows all of these limits in different forms.”
“Do we know them all? Goedel’s Principle sets a limit to the perfectibility of mathematical systems. What species would have sought such a thing? Mine would not.”
“Nor mine, I suppose. Still—”
“Humans push their limits. It is their first approach to any problem. When they learn where the limits lie, they fill in missing information until the limit breaks. When they break a limit, they look for the limit behind that.”
“I wonder ...”
I thought I had them spotted. Only one of the tables for two was occupied, by a Chirpsithra and a startled-looking woman. My suspects were a cluster of three: one of the rosyfins, and two compact, squarish customers wearing garish designs on their exoskeletal shells. The shelled creatures had been smoking tobacco cigars under exhaust hoods. Now one seemed to be asleep. The other waved stubby arms as it talked.
I heard: “I have a thought. My savage ancestors used to die when they reached a certain age. When we could no longer breed, evolution was finished with us. There is a biological self-destruct built into us.”
“It is the same with humans. But my own people never die unless killed. We fission. Our memories go far, far back.”
“Though we differ in this, the result is the same. At some point in the dim past we learned that we could postpone our deaths. We never developed a civilization until individuals could live long enough to attain wisdom. The fundamental limit was lifted from our shells before we set out to expand into the world, and then the universe. Is this not true with most of the space-traveling peoples? The Pfarth species choose death only when they grow bored. Chirpsithra were long-lived before they reached the stars, and the Gligstith(click)optok went even further, with their fascination with heredity-tailoring—”
“Does it surprise you, that intelligent beings strive to extend their lives?”
“Surprise? No. But humans still face a limit on their lifespans. The death limit has immense influence on their poetry. They may think differently from the rest of us in other ways. They may find truths we would not even seek.”
An untranslated metal-on-metal scraping. Laughter? “You speculate irresponsibly. Has their unique approach taught them anything we know not?”
“How can I know? I have only been on this world three local years. Their libraries are large, their retrieval systems poor. But there is Goedel’s Principle; and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a limit to what one can discover at the quantum level.”
Pause. “We must see if another species has duplicated that one. Meanwhile, perhaps I should speak to another visitor.”
“Incomprehension. Query?”
“Do you remember that I spoke of a certain Gligstith(click)optok merchant?”
“I remember.”
“You know their skill with water-world biology. This one comes to Earth with a technique for maintaining and restoring the early-maturity state in humans. The treatment is complex, but with enough customers the cost would drop, or so the merchant says. I must persuade it not to make the offer.”
“Affirmative! Removing the death-limit would drastically affect human psychology!”
One of the shelled beings was getting up. The voices chopped off as I rounded the bar and headed for my chosen table, with no clear idea what I would say. I stepped into the bubble of sound around two shelled beings and a Rosyfin, and said, “Forgive the interruption, sapients—”
“You have joined a wake,” said the tank’s translator widget.
The shelled being said, “My mate had chosen death. He wanted one last smoke in company.” It bent and lifted its dead companion in its arms and headed for the door.
The Rosyfin was leaving too, rolling its spherical fishbowl toward the door. I realized that its own voice hadn’t penetrated the murky fluid around it. No chittering, no bone-shivering bass. I had the wrong table.
I loo
ked around, and there were still no other candidates. Yet somebody here had casually condemned mankind—me!—to age and die.
Now what? I might have been hearing several voices. They all sound alike coming from a new species; and some aliens never interrupt each other.
The little yellow bugs? But they were with humans.
Shells? My voices had mentioned shells ... but too many aliens have exoskeletons. Okay, a Chirpsithra would have spoken by now; they’re garrulous. Scratch any table that includes a Chirp. Or a Rosyfin. Or those Srivinthish: I’d have heard the skreek of their breathing. Or the huge gray being who seemed to be singing. That left ... half a dozen tables, and I couldn’t interrupt that many.
Could they have left while I was distracted?
I hot-footed it back to the bar, and listened, and heard nothing. And my spinning brain could find only limits.
TABLE MANNERS*
A lot of what comes out of Xenobiology these days is classified, and it doesn’t come out. The Graduate Studies Complex is in the Mojave Desert. It makes security easier.
Sireen Burke’s smile and honest blue retina prints and the microcircuitry in her badge got her past the gate. I was ordered out of the car. A soldier offered me coffee and a bench in the shade of the guard post. Another searched my luggage.
He found a canteen, a sizable hunting knife in a locking sheath, and a microwave beamer. He became coldly polite. He didn’t thaw much when I said that he could hold them for a while.
I waited.
Presently Sireen came back for me. “I got you an interview with Dr. McPhee,” she told me on the way up the drive. “Now it’s your baby. He’ll listen as long as you can keep his interest.”
Graduate Studies looked like soap bubbles: foamcrete sprayed over inflation frames. There was little of military flavor inside. More like a museum. The reception room was gigantic, with a variety of chairs and couches and swings and resting pits for aliens and humans: designs borrowed from the Draco Tavern without my permission.
The corridors were roomy too. Three Chirpsithra passed us, eleven feet tall and walking comfortably upright. One may have known me, because she nodded. A dark glass sphere rolled through, nearly filling the corridor, and we had to step into what looked like a classroom to let it pass.
McPhee’s office was closet-sized. He certainly didn’t interview aliens here, at least not large aliens. Yet he was a mountainous man, six feet four and barrel-shaped and covered with black hair: shaggy brows, full beard, a black mat showing through the V of his blouse. He extended a huge hand across the small desk and said, “Rick Schumann? You’re a long way from Siberia.”
“I came for advice,” I said, and then I recognized him. “B-beam McPhee?”
“Walter, but yes.”
the Beta Beam satellite had never been used in war; but when I was seven years old, the Pentagon had arranged a demonstration. They’d turned it loose on a Perseid meteor shower. Lines of light had filled the sky one summer night, a glorious display, the first time I’d ever been allowed up past midnight. The Beta Beam had shot down over a thousand rocks.
Newscasters had named Walter McPhee for the Beta Beam when he played offensive guard for Washburn University.
B-beam was twenty-two years older, and bigger than life, since I’d last seen him on a television set. There were scars around his right eye, and scarring distorted the lay of his beard. “I was at Washburn on an athletic scholarship,” he told me. “I switched to Xeno when the first Chirpsithra ships landed. Got my doctorate six years ago. And I’ve never been in the Draco Tavern because it would have felt too much like goofing off, but I’ve started to wonder if that isn’t a mistake. You get everything in there, don’t you?”
I said it proudly. “Everything that lands on Earth visits the Draco Tavern.”
“Folk too?”
“Yes. Not often. Four times in fifteen years. The first time, I thought they’d want to talk. After all, they came a long way—”
He shook his head vigorously. “They’d rather associate with other carnivores. I’ve talked with them, but it’s damn clear they’re not here to have fun. Talking to local study groups is a guest-host obligation. What do you know about them?”
“Just what I see. They come in groups, four to six. They’ll talk to Glig, and of course they get along with Chirpsithra. Everything does. This latest group was thin as opposed to skeletal, though I’ve seen both—”
“They’re skeletal just before they eat. They don’t associate with aliens then, because it turns them mean. They only eat every six days or so, and of course they’re hungry when they hunt.”
“You’ve seen hunts?”
“I’ll show you films. Go on.”
Better than I’d hoped. “I need to see those films. I’ve been invited on a hunt.”
“Sireen told me.”
I said, “This is my slack season. Two of the big interstellar ships took off Wednesday, and we don’t expect another for a couple of weeks. Last night there were no aliens at all until—”
“This all happened last night?”
“Yeah. Maybe twenty hours ago. I told Sireen and Gail to go home, but they stayed anyway. The girls are grad students in Xeno, of course. Working in a bar that caters to alien species isn’t a job for your average waitress. They stayed and talked with some other Xenos.”
“We didn’t hear what happened, but we saw it,” Sireen said. “Five Folk came in.”
“Anything special about them?”
She said, “They came in on all fours, with their heads tilted up to see. One alpha-male, three females, and a beta-male, I think. The beta had a wound along its left side, growing back. They were wearing the usual: translators built into earmuffs, and socks, with slits for the fingers on the forefeet. Their ears were closed tight against the background noise. They didn’t try to talk till they’d reached a table and turned on the sound baffle.”
I can’t tell the Folk apart. They look a little like Siberian elkhounds, if you don’t mind the head. The head is big. The eyes are below the jawline, and face forward. There’s a nostril on top that closes tight or opens like a trumpet. They weigh about a hundred pounds. Their fingers are above the callus, and they curl up out of the way. Their fur is black, sleek, with white markings in curly lines. We can’t say their word for themselves; their voices are too high and too soft. We call them the Folk because their translators do.
I said, “They stood up and pulled themselves onto ottomans. I went to take their orders. They were talking in nearly ultrasonic squeaks, with their translators turned off. You had to strain to hear anything. One turned on his translator and ordered five glasses of milk, and a drink for myself if I would join them.”
“Any idea why?”
“I was the closest thing to a meat-eater?”
“Maybe. And maybe the local alpha-male thought they should get to know something about humans as opposed to grad students. Or—” McPhee grinned. “Had you eaten recently?”
“Yeah. Someone finally built a sushi place near the spaceport. I can’t do my own cooking, I’d go nuts if I had to run an alien restaurant too—”
“Raw flesh. They smelled it on your breath.”
Oh. “I poured their milk and a double scotch and soda. I don’t usually drink on the premises, but I figured Sireen or Gail could handle anything that came up.
“It was the usual,” I said. “What’s it like to be human. What’s it like to be Folk. Trade items, what are they missing that could improve their life styles. Eating habits. The big one did most of the talking. I remember saying that we have an ancestor who’s supposed to have fed itself by running alongside an antelope while beating it on the head with a club till it fell over. And he told me that his ancestors traveled in clusters—he didn’t say packs—and followed herds of plant-eaters to pull down the slow and the sick. Early biological engineering, he said.”
McPhee looked worried. “Do the Folk expect you to outrun an antelope?”
“O
boy!” That was a terrible thought. “No, we talked about that too, how brains and civilization cost you other abilities. Smell, for humans. I got a feeling ... he wanted to think we’re carnivores unless we run out of live meat. I tried not to disillusion him, but I had to tell him about cooking, that we like the taste, that it kills parasites and softens vegetables and meat—”
“Why?”
“He asked. Jesus, B-beam, you don’t lie to aliens, do you?”
He grinned. “I never have. I’m never sure what they want to hear.”
“Well, I never lie to customers.—And he talked about the hunts, how little they test the Folk’s animal abilities, how the whole species is getting soft.... I guess he saw how curious I was. He invited me on a hunt. Five days from now.”
“You’ve got a problem anyone in this building would kill for.”
“Ri-ight. But what the hell do they expect of me?”
“Where does it take place? The Folk have an embassy not fifty miles from here.”
“Yeah, and it’s a hunting ground too, and I’ll be out there next Wednesday, getting my own meal. I may have been a little drunk. I did have the wit to ask if I could bring a companion.”
“And?” B-beam looked like he was about to spring across the desk into my lap.
“He said yes.”
“That’s my Nobel Prize calling,” said B-beam. “Rick Schumann, will you accept me as your, ah, second?”
“Sure.” I didn’t have to think hard. Not only did he have the knowledge; he looked like he could strangle a grizzly bear, which might be what they expected of us.
The Folk had arrived aboard a Chirpsithra liner, five years after the first Chirp landing.
They’d leased a stretch of the Mojave. They’d rearranged the local weather and terrain, over strenuous objections from the Sierra Club, and seeded it with a hundred varieties of plants and a score of animals. Meanwhile they toured the world’s national parks in a 727 with a redesigned interior. The media had been fascinated by the sleek black killing machines. They’d have given them even more coverage if the Folk had been more loquacious.