The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [17]
“Maybe they don’t think enough like men. Maybe if we just leave it alone, they never will. But we sure don’t want any human entrepreneurs making suggestions. Let it drop, lady. Let it drop.”
LIMITS
I never would have heard them if the sound system hadn’t gone on the fritz. And if it hadn’t been one of those frantically busy nights, maybe I could have done something about it ...
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,