The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [33]
His face went slack. Then, “Yes, like a genie, but there must be many wishes.... you say Glig? Many wishes a Glig can’t grant. Thporshkil is studying the human kind. It wanted to see what I would ask and what I would do with it. What would you wish for, Rick?”
Alan Webber had asked me that question last night. I should have guessed what was going on.
I said, “Make me healthy.”
He laughed oddly. “Not a good choice!”
“Glig are masters of biology.”
“We, they, Glig love the life sciences. They wish to learn more of human chemistry ... plumbing... interior interactions ... array of nerve interactions. The corpus callosum that connects the two halves of your brain, why is it so narrow?”
“Beats me. I think it’s why some of us talk to ourselves. We have to get signals from one side of the brain to the other.”
“Yes, of course! But Thporshkil would use the opportunity to learn. to exneriment. Once he began work on you, you would be left in too terrible a state ever to say, ‘Stop!’ until Thporshkil had repaired all of its mistakes.
But ... no, wait ... Rick, in the end you would be healthy to the limit of Thporshkil’s skill. Ow.” He pronounced the Glig’s name better than I did, but it had him biting his lip over and over. ”You would want the chaotic damage of many years repaired? Your life extended? Nose and brow and ears reshaped?”
“Hey!”
“In time Thporshkil could learn to do all that. Rick, I can arrange it.”
Webber hadn’t called me Rick. Last night he’d called me Dr Schumann. But the Gligstith(click)optok couldn’t say Schumann.
“Webber,” I said, though I had become sure that this wasn’t Webber, “what did you ask for?” I was examining him for seams and flaps, not trying to hide it much. I thought he might be a copy, some kind of android, and he’d need access hatches.
He said, “I wished for Thporshkil’s wisdom.”
“Just that?”
“Yes. If you ask a ... demon? for health, it must make you healthy to its own limit of skill, if you don’t add lim-. its by using modifiers. Adjectives. But that is your wish. I wanted the wisdom of an interstellar traveler.”
Again I felt my bloodstream icing up. I said, “That was a bad wish. Your brain might not be big enough. Or you could end up knowing things meant for Glig, not for humans. They wouldn’t go to a toilet the same way, or reproduce—”
“No!” That wild laugh again.
I said, “Glig eat human meat, did you know that?”
“I didn’t know it last night. Rick, they don’t kill to get it! They’re only curious. They clone human organs for the markets. As for brains, Glig and human nervous systems are vastly capacious. The limit is not the number of brain cells, but the number of possible connections. Only a storage algorithm is needed. Thporshkil downloaded my mind, copied itself, wrote a merge program, merged us and wrote it all back into my brain. Here I am. When I come back here in two hundred days, Thporshkil too will have its wish. It will learn what I can learn of what it is to be a man.”
“Wisdom,” I said. “Suppose you’d wished for knowledge?”
“Thporshkil might have given me knowledge. Light-threads from his library and a viewer to string them.” Webber’s strange pronunciation was improving. “But wisdom is knowledge and the skill to use what you know. I wanted both.”
“Did you get what you wanted?”
“Yes!”
“This change, is it permanent?”
“You mean to ask if my new knowledge can be taken away from me.”
“Filtered out,” I suggested, “leaving what you were.” Was there a way to rescue last night’s Alan Webber?
He asked, “Rick, can you make a machine to separate the components of a milkshake?”
“I might.”
“But it would be elaborate and expensive and hard to market,” he said, “and too massive to ride aboard a chirps liner.”
“But are you Alan Webber? Or did he die last night? It’s pretty clear that you’re also Thporshkil the Gligstith(click)optok.”
I had my hand near the stun, but he hadn’t even lost the goofy grin. “I’m here. I may answer for either of us, Thporshkil or Alan. Do you think I was cheated?” Webber laughed. “I have wisdom now!”
“You sure as hell didn’t last night.