The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [60]
“Alien,” I said. “Speedy, I’ve been calling it. It’s almost through the jelly lock.”
“That’s an airlock? Made of jelly?”
“They’re all airlocks, that whole line along the front of the Tavern. For Speedy we’ve got this block of plastic ... not jelly, just memory plastic soft enough to deform. He’ll walk through it, but slowly, and it won’t lose air in either direction.”
“How many aliens have you got in right now?”
“Ten. Six are in Argentina, hunting.”
“But you have to feed the rest?”
“I meant on Earth. There’s nobody actually in the Tavern.”
Taper’s eyes defocused: he was consulting notes. “You got a lot more with the first liner, with Thrill Seeker. Five species, twenty individuals. That first landing must have been a thrill a minute.”
I waved it off. “Oh, you can find anything you want about the first one. Let me tell you about the second landing.
“Weren’t there records of that too?”
“But nobody looks at them....”
That long ago, we didn’t have much telescope coverage of the Moon. What we had was Spaceguard. Spaceguard was an effort by NASA and other political entities to track Near Earth Objects: that is, asteroid threats above one kilometer across. Map those and you might stand a chance of protecting the planet from a giant meteoroid impact. They’d already found 90 percent of the candidates, they said.
An object was found approaching the Moon’s dark limb. It blinked out as it entered the shadow.
Another skywatcher caught the flare of what might have been its drive, but turned out to be riding lights. The skywatching community began talking to each other. Hundreds had it in view when the Chirpsithra liner settled into orbit around the Moon, and they didn’t tell a single disaster control office or newsman for nearly ten hours.
They’d done this once before, with an incoming asteroid that turned out to be a false alarm. Skywatchers talked to each other, and the public remained in blissful ignorance. Lines of communication just hadn’t been established.
But now the world was watching, and everything happened too slowly. The mile-wide soap bubble drifted in orbit around the Moon. A smaller boat budded loose and drifted toward Earth. Eased down through the atmosphere, taking more hours, following force field lines down to Earth’s magnetic pole. It settled at Mount Forel in Siberia, where the first ship’s boat had touched down last year.
Everything we saw came via orbital cameras; it was hours before camera crews could get on site. We saw aliens eleven feet tall and very slender, plated with dull red armor: the same Chirpsithra species who had crewed the first ship. They emerged from the lander and began landscaping.
Taper asked, “Was the Draco Tavern in place yet?”
“No, I had backers and a site, but there was nothing on it but posts and string.”
“Pity. So what do you mean, landscaping?”
“That’s what it looked like, even up close. They sprayed water and dirt and alien fertilizer. I was one of the first on site, and I could smell that chemical reek.
“Cameras showed up, and newspersons, and UN officials. The Chirpsithra went about their business. They planted some weird alien trees in the soil they’d made, and then some structures that they brought out on big float plates. Like Japanese landscaping, we thought.”
“I’ll run those records after I get home.” Taper waved around us. “Is this what you’re talking about? This whole three or four square miles looks like alien gardening.”
“Yeah. Those bigger trees were planted as saplings. Most of this layered mosslike stuff grew up over the next few years. The slow ones were already in place. There was plenty for the herbivores by the time they got hungry.
“The Chirps talked to me about the interspecies tavem I wanted to build. We settled on where to put it, right at the edge of the cultivated stretch. They left me the jelly lock and a lock for themselves, and those were the first pieces of the Draco Tavern. They played diplomat and gave some interviews,