The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [27]
QARASHT.
MACHINE PEOPLE GIRL enters, goes to QARASHT.
QARASHT extrudes sense cluster as she enters.
RICK moves behind the bar and goes to work, interrupting himself to talk and gesture expansively. He’s showing off, as if he owns the customers too.
Other aliens are entering—
ENTER:
JINXIAN and CRASHLANDER together
BELTER (?)
ENTER MOTIE MEDIATOR
ENTER KZIN and PUPPETEER, together
LARRY doesn’t get the joke.
ENTER THRINT
LARRY turns to look at Thrint.
RICK interrupts himself to circle the bar, rapidly, carrying LARRY’s drink.
RICK gives the drink to THRINT, hastily, and bowing low.
LARRY moves to intercept, too slow.
KZIN is holding a chair for the THRINT. JINXIAN moves a table for him.
FREEZE FRAME
EXEUNT [the hale help the clumsier costumes]
THE HEIGTS
Clickety-ponk came wafting down the magnetic fields above Siberia in the winter of 2041, the fourteenth Chirpsithra liner to visit Earth in twenty-three years. My translator says that Clickety-ponk is a pun that means Weary Light or Weary from Mating. The vast soap bubble of a ship carried forty-one individuals of eight sapient species, five of them unknown to me. All strangers, of course. We’ll not see the same liner twice in the same millennium.
One pair, called Warblers, looked like featherless birds. They spent a Tuesday making an aerie just under my ceiling. Tuesday night they sang for us, a concert attended by all the ship’s wild variety of crew and passengers. We weren’t expected to serve their drinks too, because the Warblers wanted us in the audience, but the seating! The Draco Tavern isn’t designed as a concert hall.
But the birds were good! They held us rapt. They didn’t need microphones, and translators gave us the sense of the lyrics.
Warblers might have been designed by Dick Rutan. A Warbler was the size of a winning jockey, with wings built something like a hawk’s under a slick skin of what looked like natural cellophane. Above a foreshortened beak its head bulged: streamlining sacrificed for a larger brain, porcelain-white eyes that faced straight forward, and stiff canards steered by jaw muscles. They didn’t use breathers. They wouldn’t touch alcohol. They bought their food in the butcher shops in Mount Forel Town, and warmed it in a microwave oven. Their life-support sigils were almost the same as a human’s, tefee tee hatch nex ool, and that was all I needed to keep them happy.
They spent a day on the Internet doing the kind of research a tourist needs. Gail helped with that.
Thursday they were gone.
Monday morning they were back, high overhead in their aerie, not talking to anyone.
Monday evening a man and two children came in.
They had a Midwestern look, lanky and longheaded, with straight black hair. The boy looked about eleven, the girl twelve or thirteen. The children gaped at the aliens. The chirps and some others waved; the children waved back. They were delighted, I judged, but the man was dogged and suspicious. He did not look like a dignitary or anthropologist or university man.
Nobody crosses Siberian tundra to the Draco Tavern in winter just for a drink, and we don’t encourage children. I said, “Door, do these have business here?”
The voice of the door, and of the translators and all our other semi-independent systems, said, “This entity spoke of urgent legal business. He asserts that his boy was attacked.”
I watched the man approach the bar, holding tight to the hands of the children, who would have hared off among the tables. “Who is he?”
“Z. Wayne Bennett, thirty-two, resides in Ketchum, Idaho, with wife Ida, thirty-five, two children—”
“Pause,” I said, because translators at various tables were yammering. “Schumann here.”
“Immature life-forms are dangerous, should not be admitted, not likely to be sapient!”
“Who speaks?”
“I am Ambassador-Regent Ven! We am not to be endangered !” The system drew blinking green halos around four Lungfish in an over-illuminated vat of water on tractor treads.
All of them? Make that thirty-eight individuals.