The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [52]
Aurora seemed pleased afterward. When I asked her about it, she claimed it was personal, swore it wouldn’t affect the Draco Tavern’s business, and refused to speak further on the subject.
The Chirpsithra run the interstellar liners. They’re talkative creatures who claim to own the galaxy. They do, if you only count red dwarf stars. The Draco Tavern was built according to their plans, partly financed by them too. They’re generally eager to help when problems arise. But when something annoys them, I’ve known them to play practical jokes.
So I try not to bother the Chirpsithra every time I need data. I have other options.
For instance: the translator devices. They have access to a vast library. It’s hard to believe that something that fits in a large pocket or small purse carries that much storage, but it certainly doesn’t use the computers on the Chirpsithra liners. The liners orbit the Moon. There would be a lightspeed delay, and there isn’t.
I think the pocket translators must be artificial intelligences in their own right.
I tried: {Flutterby [with a “species” suffix] + immature + employment} and got this:
Plant-eater, carbon base, rocky/oxygen/water world, G4 sun. Interplanetary-level industry. Immature Flutterbies above sixty-one point eight kilograms may enter binding contracts to perform service. Servants and machinery take one pronoun; citizens take another.
(Slaves were equivalent to machinery? That sounded like a rigid caste system at work.)
{Flutterby + travel} got me too much material, a long lifetime’s study. {Flutterby + interstellar travel + contractual} told me what hundreds of the Flutterby species had done to themselves in order to ride the Chirpsithra liners. Armed with that I confronted Aurora.
It was a dead morning: just us two and a sessile creature drinking alone. I asked, “How old are you, Aurora?”
“In Earth orbits, near seventy,” she said, “ship time. Longer than that given relativistic effects.” She reared up to polish the big mirror over the bar, avoiding my eyes, catching them anyway in the reflection. “We postpone our maturity by chemical means.”
“I can see wanting to live a long time,” I said. “Why not grow up first?”
“Rick, how can you bear to ask such personal questions of a waitron?”
“Why not?”
“But we are not of similar caste and rank!”
“I’m your boss,” I said. “I’d be handicapped if I didn’t know something about you.”
Her eyestalks telescoped forward and back, studying me. “Very well. Our mature form is little more than a sex organ with wings. We have no digestive organs and little brains. We live ten or eleven days after we emerge from chrysalis form,” Aurora said. “I surmise that biotamperers among the Gligstith(click)optok or Chirpsithra might contrive to make an adult Flutterby immortal, and even find some way to keep her from starving. But she would be decoration, not companion. Companions, citizens, minds are found only in children. When an elder becomes a chrysalis, she has younger sibs and children of sibs to protect her until she emerges to fly. Over hundreds of thousands of orbits our line has evolved to live longer, to postpone the mating flight so that we may become more capable of defending our genetic line.”
“These other Flutterbies, are they your sibs?”
“They are my mating group—wives and husbands,” the translator said.
“Why did they leave when they saw you?”
“I have changed caste/rank. They don’t know what to do,” she said smugly. “They can order service of me, but only in context of our positions. Else they cannot speak to me, cannot persuade me to ... persuade me of anything.”
“What would they want from you?”
“To go home.”
“Then what? Set your metabolism running again? Become an adult?” She avoided my eyes. I asked, “Mate?”
“Mate and