The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [57]
On Earth a chartered aircraft set him down at the South Pole, with equipment piled on a dogsled and more balanced on his shell. He walked out over several weeks, pulling the sled. The huskies he treated as pets.
He walked through Death Valley, carrying a small version of what they sold in the Sahara and Los Angeles, a device that condenses water out of the air. I wondered why.
After seven months’ absence, Sarah Winchell came back. The Tavern was empty. She picked the big table. I brought cappuccinos and joined her.
“I’ve been on a Stephen King binge,” she said.
I said, “He was good.”
“I’ve got his whole library on here.” She tapped her bookplate. “When you spend a lot of time traveling, you need a good library. Otherwise you’ll go nuts. But I’ve been wondering, why do we want to be scared?”
A trio of brown-furred quadrupeds with manipulators around their mouths joined us but didn’t interrupt. I said, “Maybe we just want to forget what we’re really scared of.”
Sarah asked, “What would that be?”
I said, “Taxes. Terrorists. Slipping on a rainy sidewalk. Cancer. If we do everything right, we grow old. Well and good. Most star-traveling species know roughly what that means for them. For a Flutterby, it’s rebirth as a brainless mating machine, ecstacy before death. For humans, it’s swollen joints, failing organs, maybe Alzheimer’s. You Horka, you have longevity, don’t you? What do you see in your future?”
One of the furry quadrupeds answered, “I see what was always my doom. Bones turned brittle, nerves slowed, until a prey takes me as predator. We only postpone. But other species may postpone forever. They can lose all sense of place, of continuity. Like this one,” as a Chirpsithra joined us.
“We’re all afraid of some things,” Sarah said. “A writer like Ray Bradbury can show you what he’s afraid of. But there must be horrors we don’t even dream about.”
One Hork said, “Dream?”
I grinned and left her to explain dreaming. And a shape like an overstreamlined turtle slid through the low-and-wide airlock.
“Bazin!”
“Rick! I see you lack for customers. What’s the topic?”
“Fear. What can I bring you?”
He wanted an array of consommés. While he joined the big table, I went for soup, a sparker for the Chirp, and dark beer for the Horka.
When I came back Sarah was saying, “H. P. Lovecraft tried to create the fear of something too big, too powerful, too different, too old. So did Lord Dunsany. Stephen Baxter goes way further. He’s not trying to scare you, he just reaches further than most minds can stand.”
Bazin asked, “Might you yourself grow too old?”
“Well, those old writers were mostly talking about the past. Wizards a thousand years old, or ten thousand—” The Chirp was chittering laughter and Bazin’s head had withdrawn into his shell, but she plowed on. “—Races older than humanity. Old enough that they’d know everything; they’d win any fight using techniques forgotten long ago. It’s one way to tell a story.”
“It’s a sometime truth,” Bazin said, “although one would need greater age than that! But what if you yourself were the old one? Ultimately there would be nothing of interest.”
She thought about that. “There’d be new things to learn.”
The Chirpsithra said, “That is not sure at all. It grows more difficult to hold a civilization together as the universe expands. Have you learned yet that the expansion is accelerating? The galaxies fly apart faster and faster.”
“Yes,” she said.
“The galaxies themselves evaporate, some stars spinning out of the lens, some dropping into the black holes at the center. In ten billion years I see no possible way to connect cultures. The proton is unstable too. In some vast amount of time we’ll have nothing but electrons and positrons all light-years apart, and nothing interesting will happen ever again. Is this not something to inspire fear?”
Sarah laughed. “Would you call that ‘existential fear’? It takes too long!”
Bazin poked his head out of his shell. “It certainly frightens me,” he said.
“Does it?”
“I cannot even think about it. I certainly do not intend to face it. Can