The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [55]
“Now you’ve lost all seven,” I said. “Aurora? What happened?”
“You heard their arguments. They were sensible,” the remaining Flutterby said, “and I am persuasive. If we—if my mating group were to wait for our return to homeworld, any kind of accident might take us. If we lose even one of seven, our genetic variety might be too sparse. We owe it to our gene line to have our children immediately.”
“We? But not you.”
“One must remain to teach the children. I may still mate among the next generation.”
“Or the one after that. They bought this?”
“Rick, for most of the species I’ve met, mating has consequences, but not for us. It was not difficult to persuade my family that it is time to mate. My time will come too.”
I sighed. I asked, “ ‘Immigrate’?”
The Chirp officer said, “We don’t have convenient room aboard Apparent Dischord. Rick, your planet is wide. A few dozen refugees won’t harm you.”
“What do they eat?”
“Thank you, Rick, an excellent point. We will learn.”
At that point I knew I was stuck. I dropped the word to some news channels before I called any government agencies.
The mating dance swirls above the Draco Tavern, gloriously sharing its colors with the Aurora Borealis. They are all brilliant wings and little torso, more kite than butterfly. They mate while falling. Via movie screens and TV sets it is being seen all over the Earth.
Presently they scatter across the tundra. Chirpsithra researchers have found Siberian plants the immature forms can eat, and scent-marked them so the adults can find them.
I’ll have to talk to Aurora about food supplies for future generations. The Siberian tundra isn’t exactly lush.
THE DEATH ADDICT
The Draco Tavern was nearly empty: just me and the bugs and Sarah. Sarah was complaining about the expanding universe.
She’s an angular woman with solid and elegant bones, not much flesh to cover them. She’d introduced herself to me: Dr. Sarah Winchell, anthropologist, a woman in her forties (a bit younger than myself) who had lived with apes in the wild and had now come to confront aliens. I’d have expected her to be overspecialized. Her knowledge of cosmology surprised me.
I’d brought her two mai tais, with popcorn for the Bebebebeque. Now she was drinking club soda. Her speech stayed lucid and brisk.
“The universe is expanding,” she told the ring of bugs. “Fine, I can live with that, I grew up knowing that. But the expansion is increasing. Getting faster. What could be the purpose in a universe that is forever blowing apart?”
She sat in an arc of chrome yellow bugs each about fourteen inches tall, perched around the rim of the big table. They buzzed. Their translator said, “Purpose you expected? Examine your contract!”
She laughed.
The Bebebebeque were a hive mind. They spoke with one voice. “To isolate cultures may be a way to keep novelty in the universe. Too easy communication is making the human race too uniform, is it not?”
Sarah laughed again. “We’re not uniform!”
“You seem so to us. For purpose, will you have entertainment? The puzzle of how to build civilization changes with time. Tools are invented, then better tools. If this goes on, all problems may be solved, all tools reach their perfect state. It may be that a universal expansion propelled by dark energy is expected to compensate, make communication more difficult, puzzles more interesting. Here enters Bazin; shall we ask him?”
She turned to see who had come through the line of airlocks.
Bazin was an aerodynamic shape. He might have been mistaken for a thousand-pound turtle, but he moved more briskly, even with sixty pounds of life support and sensor gear mounted on his shell. I’d spoken with him when we arranged for CBS to interview him.
Sarah said, “I’ve seen Bazin on television. Is he, what, a philosopher? Cosmologist?”
The Bebebebeque were amused. “No!”
“I thought he was something like a stuntman. Rick?” She turned to me. “Do you know—”
I said, “Even before Fly By Wire made orbit, my customers all knew he was coming.” I poured out a row of tiny golden seeds in front of