The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [53]
“What do you want, Aurora?”
“Stay here. Work here. Wait until my mating group leaves Earth.”
“What if they don’t leave?”
“Their berths are aboard Apparent Dischord. They would lose those, as will I. When the next ship arrives, I may try to get a berth. Then again, your Draco Tavern is a convergence of voyagers. Here I would find a life as interesting as theirs.”
The Flutterbies boycotted the Draco Tavern for about four months.
Then, on a day when rumor suggested that Apparent Dischord’s time was running short, all six Flutterbies filed in and split into pairs.
The Tavern was crowded. They found conversations rapidly. Corliss and Jehaneh went to take orders and didn’t come back.
The philosophy grad student, Berda Wilsonn, had returned with a classmate. They’d chosen a big table, inviting company. A Chirp officer joined them, then two Flutterbies. The others all raised their lift chairs two feet off the floor, to match the height of the Chirpsithra.
I eavesdropped a little. At the Wilsonn table it sounded like they were discussing fear. At other tables Corliss and Jehaneh were both bogged down in conversations, over-complex orders, discussions of cuisine....
It looked to me like some kind of setup.
Well, if it turned sticky, there were Chirpsithra present. I could turn to them as authorities. I left Aurora behind the bar and went to Wilsonn’s table to take their orders myself.
The Chirpsithra said, “Please, will you have an Irish coffee with us, Rick?”
“It’s a busy ... yes, of course, glad to.” I dismissed the notion of begging off. The Chirp bore rank markings: she was an officer. If this was a game, I could assume she was a player. I sat down, glanced at Aurora behind the bar.
The Chirp asked, “What are you afraid of, Rick?”
“What, now?”
“I mean in the general sense.”
“Lots of things,” I said. “Pain. Injury. Taxes. Weird new laws. You?”
“Change, death, ignorance,” she said. “You have seen how little we Chirpsithra tolerate change, how assiduously we avoid death. We seek knowledge everywhere.”
“But don’t all living things avoid change and death? And hey, animals generally evolve better senses as they get more complex.”
“These are not universals,” said the Chirp. “Berda, would you repeat—”
“I said I sometimes have nightmares about making social mistakes,” Berda Wilsonn said. “Wouldn’t that be fear of ignorance?”
I asked, “What about pain?”
Aurora arrived.
The Chirp officer already had a sparker. I asked for a cappuccino: I’d better lay off the alcohol. While Aurora took our orders, the Flutterbies and the grads talked. I hate that Never let a waiter escape isn’t slavery; it just means don’t leave the poor waitron standing there while you talk around her. Anyway, the crosstalk was confusing my translator.
Humans, it seemed, were afraid of nearly everything.
Many species were afraid of death. Others feared loss of mind, loss of intelligence. I’ve hunted with the Folk; I said they were afraid of nothing. Damn few space travelers feared pain; they’d all found ways to block it. Gray Mourners, the males, were afraid of unprotected sex. Flutterbies?
A Flutterby told Aurora, “Green glop, temperature fifty-one degrees,” while the other asked the grads, “How would you live your life if you knew exactly when and how you were to die?”
“I remember an old science fiction story like that,” the boy, Willis, said. “Martians could see the future but not the past. Their lives just ran down like a windup toy.”
Berda said, “I could plan a lot better. My grandmother used to say, ‘If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.’ ”
Willis asked, “The menu says you can make guacamole?”
“It’s already made,” Aurora told him.
“Guacamole and Fritos,” he said, and she went away.
“There’d be less to be afraid of,” the girl said. “Even when you got old, you wouldn’t have to worry about falling off a balcony or dodging a bus. The bus either gets you or it doesn’t.”
“I suggest a different hypothesis,” the first Flutterby said. “Presume you know exactly how