The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [14]
The bartender signaled negative.
“The device acts on your central nervous system; I assume you have one? There at the top? Ah, good. It feeds you a story skeleton, but your own imagination puts you in context and fills in the background details. You live a programmed story, but largely in terms familiar to you. Mental damage is almost unheard of.”
“Will I know it’s only an entertainment?”
“You might know from the advertisements. Shall I show you?” The Hroydan raised the metal dome on a many-jointed arm and poised it over my head. I felt the heat emanating from him. “Perhaps you would like to walk through an active volcano?” He tapped two buttons with a black metal claw, and everything changed.
The Vollek merchant pulled the helmet away from my head. He had small, delicate-looking arms, and a stance like a tyrannosaur: torso horizontal, swung from the hips. A feathery down covered him, signaling his origin as a flightless bird.
“How did you like it?”
“Give me a minute.” I looked about me. Afternoon sunlight spilled across the tables, illuminating alien shapes. The Draco Tavern was filling up. It was time I got back to tending bar. It had been nearly empty (I remembered) when I agreed to try this stunt.
I said, “That business at the end—?”
“We end all of the programs that way when we sell to Level Four civilizations. It prevents disorientation.”
“Good idea.” Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel at all confused. Still, it was a hell of an experience. “I couldn’t tell it from the real thing.”
“The advertisement would have alerted an experienced user.”
“You’re actually manufacturing these things on Earth?”
“Guatemala has agreed to license us. The climate is so nice there. And so I can lower the price per unit to three thousand dollars each.”
“Sell me two,” I said. It’d be a few years before they paid for themselves. Maybe someday I really would have enough money to ride the Chirpsithra liners ... if I didn’t get hooked myself on these full-sensory machines. “Now, about Opal Fire. I can’t believe it’s really that good—”
“I travel for Chignthil Interstellar too. I have sample bottles.”
“Let’s try it.”
WAR MOVIE
Ten, twenty years ago my first thought would have been, Great-looking woman! Tough-looking, too. If I make a pass, it had better be polite. She was in her late twenties, tall, blond, healthy-looking, with a squarish jaw. She didn’t look like the type to be fazed by anything; but she had stopped, stunned, just inside the door. Her first time here, I thought. Anyway, I’d have remembered her.
But after eighteen years tending bar in the Draco Tavern, my first thought is generally, Human. Great! I won’t have to dig out any of the exotic stuff. While she was still reacting to the sight of half a dozen oddly shaped sapients indulging each its own peculiar vice, I moved down the bar to the far right, where I keep the alcoholic beverages. I thought she’d take one of the bar stools.
Nope. She looked about her, considering her choices—which didn’t include empty tables; there was a fair crowd in tonight—then moved to join the lone Qarasht. And I was already starting to worry as I left the bar to take her order.
In the Draco it’s considered normal to strike up conversations with other customers. But the Qarasht wasn’t acting like it wanted company. That bulk of thick fur, pale blue striped with black in narrow curves, had waddled in three hours ago. It was on its third quart-sized mug of Demerara Sours, and its sense cluster had been retracted for all of that time, leaving it deaf and blind, lost in its own thoughts.
It must have felt the vibration when the woman sat down. Its sense cluster and stalk rose out of the fur like a python rising from a bed of moss. A snake with no mouth: just two big wide-set black bubbles for eyes and an ear like a pink blossom set between them, and a tuft of fine hairs along the stalk to