The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [11]
“I thought they all looked alike,” he said.
I said, “I’ve had Chirpsithra in here for close to thirty years, but I can’t tell them apart. They’re all perfect physical specimens, after all, by their own standards. I never saw one like that.”
I gave him his espresso, then put three sparkers on a tray and went to the Chirpsithra table.
Two were exactly like any other Chirpsithra: eleven feet tall, dressed in pouched belts and their own salmon-colored exoskeletons, and very much at their ease. The chirps claim to have settled the entire galaxy long ago—meaning the useful planets, the tidally locked oxygen worlds that happen to circle close around cool red-dwarf suns—and they act like the reigning queens of wherever they happen to be. But the two seemed to defer to the third. She was a foot shorter than they were. Her exoskeleton was as clearly artificial as dentures: alloplastic bone worn on the outside. Tubes ran under the edges from the equipment in her floating couch. Her skin between the plates was more gray than red. Her head turned slowly as I came up. She studied me, bright-eyed with interest.
I asked, “Sparkers?” as if Chirpsithra ever ordered anything else.
One of the others said, “Yes. Serve the ethanol mix of your choice to yourself and the other native. Will you join us?”
I waved Noyes over, and he came at the jump. He pulled up one of the high chairs I keep around to put a human face on a level with a Chirpsithra’s. I went for another espresso and a scotch and soda and (catching a soft imperative hoot from the farsilshree) a jar of yellow paste. When I returned they were deep in conversation.
“Rick Schumann,” Noyes cried, “meet Ftaxanthir and Hrofilliss and Chorrikst. Chorrikst tells me she’s nearly two billion years old!”
I heard the doubt beneath his delight. The Chirpsithra could be the greatest liars in the universe, and how would we ever know? Earth didn’t even have interstellar probes when the chirps came.
Chorrikst spoke slowly, in a throaty whisper, but her translator box was standard: voice a little flat, pronunciation perfect. “I have circled the galaxy numberless times, and taped the tales of my travels for funds to feed my wanderlust. Much of my life has been spent at the edge of lightspeed, under relativistic time-compression. So you see, I am not nearly so old as all that.”
I pulled up another high chair. “You must have seen wonders beyond counting,” I said. Thinking: My God, a short Chirpsithra! Maybe it’s true. She’s a different color, too, and her fingers are shorter. Maybe the species has actually changed since she was born!
She nodded slowly. “Life never bores. Always there is change. In the time I have been gone, Saturn’s ring has been pulled into separate rings, making it even more magnificent. What can have done that? Tides from the moons? And Earth has changed beyond recognition.”
Noyes spilled a little of his coffee. “You were here? When?”
“Earth’s air was methane and ammonia and oxides of nitrogen and carbon. The natives had sent messages across interstellar space ... directing them toward yellow suns, of course, but one of our ships passed through a beam, and so we established contact. We had to wear life support,” she rattled on, while Noyes and I sat with our jaws hanging, “and the gear was less comfortable then. Our spaceport was a floating platform, because quakes were frequent and violent. But it was worth it. Their cities—”
Noyes said, “Just a minute. Cities? We’ve never dug up any trace of, of nonhuman cities!”
Chorrikst looked at him. “After seven hundred and eighty million years, I should think not. Besides, they lived in the offshore shallows in an ocean that was already mildly salty. If the quakes spared them, their tools and their cities still deteriorated rapidly. Their lives were short too, but their memories were inherited. Death and change were accepted facts for them, more than for most intelligent species. Their works of philosophy gained great currency among my people, and spread to other species too.”
Noyes wrestled with his instinct for tact and good