The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [66]
The beast would mass around a hundred and thirty pounds. It was hairy and musky. It walked as a biped: two short hind legs, four short, powerful-looking arms, and a mouth not quite like any marrunal’s, but not insectoid. I’d looked for teeth last night, but seen none. I couldn’t guess what it might eat.
It moved up against the bar, close enough that I could smell doggy breath, and suddenly reached over. I shied back. It snatched up a loose translator and snarled at it. The translator spoke.
I reached for my stun, and then the sense of the words reached me. “Was I stupid last night?”
I said, “Stupid? You were—” and stopped, feeling very foolish. “Yeah.”
“Did anything bad happen?”
“Two of you came in with one of the spindly aliens, a Joker. He had you both on a leash, a tether. We don’t allow pets in the Draco Tavern, but I wasn’t quite ready to raise the point, because none of the crew were in.” The crews of the interstellar liners are all Chirpsithra, and they’re more or less in charge. “I thought it was their business, not mine, long as you stayed leashed. Also, I wondered which of you was the pet. In here you can’t always tell.”
“I comprehend.”
“The Joker brought you up to the bar and started talking. Talking fast.” It was starting to dawn on me that I’d been played for a fool. “And one of you voided something smelly against the bar.”
“Sorry.”
“The automatics got it. The Joker told me the two of you had been thawed by accident. Pets and children travel frozen, right? That’s if the liners will have them at all. But you were pets and you’d been thawed, and you had to be kept exercised until ... it sounded like legal problems.”
“Jokers are well known as practical jokers,” the beast said.
Given the species name, you wouldn’t think I’d need to be told that. But the Joker was a tall, spindly creature with dead-white skin partly covered with green hair or moss, and a triangular, somewhat manlike face with a jutting jaw and a permanent grin. I’d thought, Batman reference, and my brain stopped working. No alien would have thought to warn me of that.
I’d got to talking to the Joker. He sounded like someone dancing on a bagful of walnuts, a rattling sound, but his translator took care of that. He seemed intelligent, interested. I told him about running the Tavern. He talked freely, it seemed, about his own background and species. A hotter star than Sol, a planet with a longer year, cultivated land losing fertility.... His pets were a little whiny and not quite housebroken—
I asked, “Were you drugged?”
“No, not drugged. We are Pazensh. We grow intelligence when we come into heat.”
“Really?”
“Yes, we need intelligence to seek and find and test a mate. At other times we survive on reflexes and paranoia. You—?”
“With us it’s pretty much the other way around,” I said. I had no mate right now; Jehaneh was visiting family in Iraq. “And you chewed up a stool. The Joker paid for that, but the Bebebebeque on the stool had to leap for its life. I never knew it could do that.” The big yellow bug had jumped about four meters.
The Pazensh said, “I remember not quite enough about last night, but it ended with a whiff of female scent, and a door that closed and locked. It took me some time to gather my wits, and more to solve the lock and get out of the lander. Then I followed her scent here. Here I find my own scent, and scents of many species, and now I must ask how badly I’ve embarrassed myself.”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” I said. “I’ve done this dance before. Let’s see, you didn’t use the restrooms, but that happens with other species too. They can be complicated. The little bug’s okay—” and it wouldn’t matter much if the Bebebebeque had been eaten; they’re a hive species. “All’s clear.”
“Good. Now I must find my mate.” The Pazensh started