The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [18]
“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