The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [58]
Is that why ... ? I didn’t ask, because Bazin was pulling into himself. Horn caps on his knees and skull blocked holes, locking his shell against intrusion. This was what he would look like at the end of the universe.
We next saw Bazin riding a kayak over a succession of waterfalls. Afterward he disappeared into a system of caves in the Mindanao Trench. He hasn’t been seen since. We get occasional transmissions.
STORM FRONT
The dome that covers the Draco Tavern can be set to show almost anything. It can be a window. It can show recordings across the whole dome, or break up into dozens of frames. We can get live feeds from anywhere in this world or others. Moving among the tables on a busy night, I’m subjected to a bewildering variety of scenery.
Tonight’s crew ran to sophisticates: aliens of a wide variety, but they all knew how to use the visuals to tell stories or back up arguments. Worlds danced around me, and obscene medical animations, and fractal geometries. This night had already run more than thirty hours since Spin Constant’s lander came down from the Moon. When I got back to the bar, I set the view to transparent just to give my eyes a rest.
The sun was trying to rise, not quite making it in Siberian February; just enough to put a golden glow on the horizon. It washed out other stars, but the new star blazed brightly within the glow.
A Chirpsithra officer folded herself into a chair at the bar. I offered her a sparker. “We came to view that,” she said. “It’s already in its later stages, but we have good recordings. Ssss,” as current flowed through her nervous system. “We saw the neutrino wake and were able to slow down for the best view.”
“Is that footage available?”
“Surely, for a price.”
We get newsfolk in the Draco Tavern. I’d drop the word.
Beneath the new star, a yellow-white light came rolling across the ice. I waved at it. “Is that one of yours?”
“Not a passenger,” the Chirp said. “A refugee.”
The visitor rolled in like a big lamp, a five-foot-tall sphere glowing yellow-white, its intensity turned down now. It bumped along the shock-absorbing floor. It was heavy.
That glow must be riding lights, I thought, so that passersby don’t get rolled over. If that color had been blackbody temperature, the Draco Tavern would have burned. Nonetheless the sphere was hot As it approached the bar I felt welcome warmth on my face. In Siberia in winter, you never quite get warm enough. Various customers, human and not, turned toward the visitor or expanded their surface areas. Others shied away, of course. The Tavern gets all kinds.
I asked, “What’ll it be?” Trusting the translator I was sure it carried.
“Only your company,” the visitor said. “You don’t store hot plasma, I take it. How strange this place is!”
“Compared to what?”
“Compared to my home. Let me show you.” A tendril of light sparked on the thing’s surface. In response, a triangular window formed in the dome, shedding blue-white light with whorls in it.
“Damp that,” the Chirpsithra officer ordered. The light dimmed. Even so, it would put out too much heat if it stayed on. I tried to guess what I was looking at. “One of those star-hugging gas giant planets?”
“A sun. That sun.” A sparkling tendril waved out at the brilliant pinpoint.
The pictures in my head turned over. I was looking at a containment for a plasma confined at X-ray temperatures.
Refugee, the Chirp had said. I said, “Sorry.”
“There was a plague,” the refugee said. “A self-replicating magnetic effect that damps us from the inside. Before we could control it there were only eleven of us left. Too few, far too few, to regain control of our weather. Spin Constant came in the last breath of time to save nine of us.”
The Chirp said, “We’ll be able to read out their memories with a few years of study. That won’t sell to just anyone.”
You can hear, and sometimes you can buy, peculiar nightmares in the Draco Tavern.
I flinched