The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [3]
“Oh, one of them asked me about the, uh, uniform. It just came up naturally.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Most religious elders seem to be just ignoring the Chirpsithra. And the other intelligent beings too. I want to know. Do they have souls?”
“Do they?”
“He didn’t say.”
“She,” I told him. “All Chirpsithra are female.”
He nodded, not as if he cared much. “I started to tell her about my order. But when I started talking about Jesus, and about salvation, she told me rather firmly that the Chirpsithra know all they want to know on the subject of life after death.”
“So then you asked—”
“No, sir, I did not. I came over here to decide whether I’m afraid to ask.”
I gave him points for that. “And are you?” When he didn’t answer I said, “It’s like this. I can stop her at any time you like. I know how to apologize gracefully.”
Only one of the three spoke English, though the others listened as if they understood it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
That was clearly the answer Hopkins wanted. “I must have misunderstood,” he said, and he started to slip down from his high chair.
“I told you that we know as much as we want to know on the subject,” said the alien. “Once there were those who knew more. They tried to teach us. Now we try to discourage religious experiments.”
Hopkins slid back into his chair. “What were they? Chirpsithra saints?”
“No. The Sheegupt were carbon-water-oxygen life, like you and me, but they developed around the hot F-type suns in the galactic core. When our own empire had expanded near enough to the core, they came to us as missionaries. We rejected their pantheistic religion. They went away angry. It was some thousands of years before we met again.
“By then our settled regions were in contact, and had even interpenetrated to some extent. Why not? We could not use the same planets. We learned that their erstwhile religion had broken into variant sects and was now stagnant, giving way to what you would call agnosticism. I believe the implication is that the agnostic does not know the nature of God, and does not believe you do either?”
I looked at Hopkins, who said, “Close enough.”
“We established a trade in knowledge and in other things. Their skill at educational toys exceeded ours. Some of our foods were dietetic to them; they had taste but could not be metabolized. We mixed well. If my tale seems sketchy or superficial, it is because I never learned it in great detail. Some details were deliberately lost.
“Over a thousand years of contact, the Sheegupt took the next step beyond agnosticism. They experimented. Some of their research was no different from your own psychological research, though of course they reached different conclusions. Some involved advanced philosophies: attempts to extrapolate God from Her artwork, so to speak. There were attempts to extrapolate other universes from altered laws of physics, and to contact the extrapolated universes. There were attempts to contact the dead. The Sheegupt kept us informed of the progress of their work. They were born missionaries, even when their religion was temporarily in abeyance.”
Hopkins was fascinated. He would hardly be shocked at attempts to investigate God. After all, it’s an old game.
“We heard, from the Sheegupt outpost worlds, that the scientifically advanced worlds in the galactic core had made some kind of breakthrough. Then we started losing contact with the Sheegupt,” said the Chirpsithra.
“Trade ships found no shuttles to meet them. We sent investigating teams. They found Sheegupt worlds entirely depopulated. The inhabitants had made machinery for the purpose of suicide, generally a combination of electrocution terminals and conveyor belts. Some Sheegupt had used knives on themselves, or walked off buildings, but most had queued up at the suicide machines, as if in no particular hurry.”
I said, “Sounds like they learned something, all right. But what?”
“Their latest approach, according to our records, was to extrapolate rational