The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [16]
The lady drank. I remembered that there had been qarashteel everywhere the Chirpsithra envoys went, twenty-four years ago when the big interstellar ships arrived; and I took a long pull from my Sour.
“It all looked so easy,” the Qarasht mourned. “We had left instruments on your Moon. The recordings couldn’t be sold, of course, because your world’s rotation permits only fragmentary glimpses. But your machines were becoming better, more destructive! We thanked our luck that you had not destroyed yourselves before we could return. We studied the recordings, to guess where the next war would occur, but there was no discernible pattern. The largest land mass, we thought—”
True enough, the chirps and their qarashteel entourage had been very visible all over Asia and Europe. Those cameras on the Moon must have picked up activity in Poland and Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iran and Israel and Cuba and, and ... bastards. “So you set up your cameras in a tearing hurry,” I guessed, “and then you waited.”
“We waited and waited. We have waited for thirty years ... for twenty-four of your own years, and we have nothing to show for it but a riot here, a parade there, an attack on a children’s vehicle ... robbery of a bank ... a thousand people smashing automobiles or an embassy building ... rumors of war, of peace, some shouting in your councils ... how can we sell any of this? On Earth my people need life support to the tune of six thousand dollars a day. I and my associates are shishishorupf now, and I must return home to tell them.”
The lady looked ready to start her own war. I said, to calm her down, “We make war movies too. We’ve been doing it for over a hundred years. They sell fine.”
Her answer was an intense whisper. “I never liked war movies. And that was us!”
“Sure, who else—”
The Qarasht slammed its mug down. “Why have you not fought a war?”
She broke the brief pause. “We would have been ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“In front of you. Aliens. We’ve seen twenty alien species on Earth since that first Chirp expedition, and none of them seem to fight wars. The, uh, Qarasht don’t fight wars, do they?”
The alien’s sense cluster snapped down into its fur, then slowly emerged again. “Certainly we do not!”
“Well, think how it would look!”
“But for you it is natural!”
“Not really,” I said. “People have real trouble learning to kill. It’s not built into us. Anyway, we don’t have quite so much to fight over these days. The whole world’s getting rich on the widgetry the chirps and the Thtopar have been selling us. Long-lived, too, on Glig medicines. We’ve all got more to lose.” I flinched, because the alien’s sense cluster was stretched across the table, staring at us in horror.
“A lot of our restless types are out mining the asteroids,” the woman said.
“And, hey,” I said, “remember when Egypt and Saudi Arabia were talking war in the UN? And all the aliens moved out of both countries, even the Glig doctors with their geriatrics consulting office. The sheiks didn’t like that one damn bit. And when the Soviets—”
“Our doing, all our own doing,” the alien mourned. Its sense cluster pulled itself down and disappeared into the fur, leaving just the ruby crest showing. The alien lifted its mug and drank, blind.
The woman took my wrist and pulled me over to the bar. “What do we do now?” she hissed in my ear.
I shrugged. “Sounds like the emergency’s over.”
“But we can’t just let it go, can we? You don’t really think we’ve given up war, do you? But if we knew these damn aliens were waiting to make movies of us, maybe we would! Shouldn’t we call the newspapers, or at least the Secret Service?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Somebody has to know!”
“Think it through,” I said. “One particular Qarasht company may be defunct, but those cameras are still there, all over the world, and su are the mobile units. Some alien receiving company is going to own them. What if they offer ... say Iran, or the Soviet Union, one-tenth of one percent of the gross profits on a war movie?”
She paled. I pushed my mug into her hands and she gulped