The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [43]
A Chirpsithra knew me, though I didn’t recognize her. You can’t tell Chirps apart; they’re gene-engineered to identical perfection. I gestured at the Low Jumbos and asked her, “Do they like crowds that much? Or should I be getting bigger tables?”
“You would not see the end of that endeavor! These”—something breathy—“are not the largest of our clients!”
Other Chirps chittered laughter. One said, “There are life-forms that would not fit in any imaginable vehicle!”
The other, “But were they sapient? How could we ever know?”
Chirpsithra obscurities. I moved on. We were frantic for the next hour.
Then the Iraqis all rose and went out—prayer time, I guess—and suddenly most of the bar was getting up and walking, rolling, lurching, slithering through the airlock into a horizontal glare of Siberian tundra. The Low Jumbos followed the rest.
The jellyfish in his aquarium was still there. I wondered if he’d been abandoned. Five Chirpsithra who had watched their alien companions all go away now gathered around the big table with the aquarium in the center. Herman glanced my way for permission. I thumbs-upped him. He pulled up a high chair and joined them. Something hairy came out of the restroom, looked around at the empty bar, then joined Herman and the chirps and jellyfish.
Jehaneh looked tired. I told her to go sack out. Gail went too. Roger Teng-Hui was still at the bar working his Toshiba. The Terminator Beaver was deeply involved with his Macintosh.
I stopped at the Beaver’s table.
What showed of him was largely prosthetic. Under all the goo and wire and silver plating and small glowing icons the Terminator Beaver might have been a solitary Low Jumbo. He was half covered in tiny black platelets, half pink hide bared for prosthetics. Circuitry, lenses, armor covered his body. The material shone like glass and metal and jelly, but it all flexed. There was a narrow indicator strip above his small, neat carnivore’s mouth, where he could read it with goggles like two silver eggs. The widgetry had a functional beauty implying, I thought, centuries of design. It hid most of his face.
Wires ran from a neck ring into the ports of the Macintosh. The screen was dancing, flickering, and his fingers never went near it.
He’d told us his name: a near-supersonic birdsong. He had been in the Draco Tavern since the landings, eating and drinking alone. He had bought the Macintosh laptop computer in Forelgrad, the merchant town that has grown up around the spaceport. Gail had shown him the basics during a dull evening. He’d become skilled very rapidly.
We’d speculated. The Draco Tavern’s elaborate restroom isn’t gender-specific, so we still didn’t know that. Was he, she, it a cyborg by choice, a medical patient, geriatric case, augmented athlete? Was he an injured Low Jumbo avoiding eyes that might find him ugly?
He’d plugged his Mac into the wall, not into one of the universal sockets the Chirpsithra gave us, but into a telephone jack. I looked back toward the bar. Teng-Hui was around the other side, not visible.
The Beaver might well be the mysterious I try not to get myself or the Tavern involved in these dominance games. Sometimes there’s no helping it. And sometimes I can supplement our income by learning something valuable. I once went broke building a supercomputer, but that’s also how I patented the magnetic float. The game the Beaver was playing wasn’t an action game, so I felt free to interrupt. “Terminator Beaver,” I said, and let my translator whistle his name, “how are you doing?” Let him take it either way: progress on the game, or was he thirsty? He whistle-sang. His translator said, “Dead. Notice joke. I begin the game dead.” “Your character can still get hurt.” He was playing Grim Fandango upgraded for 3-D. I watched him trying to deal with the coroner