The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [54]
The second said, “The chrysalis form is a deep torpor. What wakes is near mindless. Digestive organs have faded too. There’s no motive except survival and mating, and then even those nerves shut down.”
The first: “Also you may pause your fate indefinitely. The danger is that all other ways to suffer or die will have more time to find you.”
The boy asked, “You’re not being hypothetical now, are you?”
“No. This is our fate, but we must still fear all other mischance. Predators, a fall, a misalignment in Apparent Dischord’s antimatter containment could rob us of our destiny. We took this risk gladly in order to see more of the universe.”
Aurora returned pushing a floating tray.
Willis dipped up some guacamole. I hid my grin with a cappuccino mug; but I’d looked first to see he hadn’t found the wrong bowl of green glop. He said, “We do the same.”
The Flutterbies seemed startled. “What? Do you really?”
“I mean we try to live as long as possible. Whatever’s currently killing our old people, we go through a lot of effort to cure it. That always means the next thing in line gets us. It was cancer and Alzheimer’s when I was growing up, because we’d cured some other diseases. Elders usually die miserably, and it sometimes takes a long time—”
“There isn’t any good way to die,” the girl snapped. She looked at the Chirpsithra. “Is there?”
The Chirp said, “You already know our answer. Some of us are many millions of Earth-orbits old. All sapient beings evade what evolution shaped us for. All meddle with their destiny, even Flutterbies. A Flutterby who succeeds at longevity will not breed. That seems very strange.”
“Death comes to all of your kinds, and always unwelcome,” the second Flutterby said. “Our death is welcome if we hang on long enough. We’ve arrested our development, but we took our risk with senses wide open.”
The Flutterbies left during a lull in the ongoing ice storm. Afterward Aurora came to me. “I must resign my post,” she said.
“You were listening to them, weren’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“Does it strike you that they were talking for you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Aurora. “They could not speak to me, but they could convey arguments in my hearing. Also they brought pheromones from adult Flutterbies. I felt protective and protected, and I heard their arguments. I know what they did to me. I know, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Pheromones. Doesn’t that strike you as unfair?” In fact the whole jape seemed monstrously unfair.
Aurora said, “We must have adults about us, to protect. Proper pheromones are released into our cabins during flight. If I remain on Earth I will not have that. I will only have the knowledge that I die without children. But, Rick, their argument cuts both ways. I go to see if they can follow their own logic.”
I paid her salary to date, and she went.
Two days later, the Draco Tavern was empty. Corliss went to visit her family in Canada. Jehaneh stayed, of course. With her two passengers—one a visiting sapient bacterium, the other our unborn child—she’s grown a bit heavy for travel. And we waited for Apparent Dischord to leave the Moon.
Instead, a floating cart parked itself outside the array of airlocks. A Chirpsithra came in and got me, the same officer who’d sat at the Wilsonn table.
I looked into the cart at six fat fluffy white bags each about my size, lightly dusted with fluffy white snow, and one growth-arrested Flutterby.
The Chirp said, “We must ask for judgment. May these immigrate?”
“I don’t make policy for the UN,” I said. “What happened?”
“It may have caught your attention—”
I lost patience. “Half my clientele that day were conspiring to get Aurora back to her berth in Apparent Dischord. Why?”
The Chirp officer said, “When clients board as a group, we prefer that they remain a group. We do not like to explain how we lost one here, one there. Others of my passengers found it amusing to help rebuild a lapsed