The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [71]
I was spending a few weeks with Jehaneh and Walt in Saddam Hussein’s palace in Tikrit. The army had turned some of his old palaces into hotels back in the Twenty Zeros. Amenities were primitive and the fad had wilted, so it wasn’t that expensive, considering. Saddam had had lots of interesting playground equipment ... for adults, of course, but Walt was having a good time too.
Then the liner hove into view near the Moon and I was called back. I left Walt and Jehaneh there. The Draco Tavern was no place for a two-and-a-half-year-old boy.
DAY ONE
I got there ahead of my crew.
Reworking the Draco Tavern to accommodate new species takes preparation. I spent a few hours looking around the Tavern, then called the ship to learn what kind of visitors to expect. I was waiting on the line, chatting with the translator device, when four Chirpsithra filed through the tall-and-narrow airlock.
Chirpsithra stand eleven feet tall. They’re exoskeletal creatures, usually wearing tools and pouches and rank marks attached to their scarlet chitin shells. I’ve learned to recognize some of the marks. Three were ranking officers. The fourth wore a sigil I’d never seen before: a triangle with curved edges. They looked around, chattering to each other with their translators turned off.
I pointed at a sparker. Want this? The triangle-bearer spoke in Lottl, and I heard, “Rejected with thanks. Rick Schumann?”
“That’s right.”
“Proprietor of this?”
“Yes, the Draco Tavern. Welcome.”
“Thank you. I am Queeblishiz, Matriarch of Lifesystem Support. We have a—” The translator hesitated. “—situation.”
Running this world’s only interspecies bar for nearly forty years, I’ve seen more “situations” than I could count. I said, “See if you can describe it.”
“Our cold sleep facilities have failed.”
“Oboy,” I said, before my mind quite caught up. How many extra visitors—? “Just a minute. Don’t most of your passengers come down anyway? The Draco Tavern is popular. So’s Earth.”
“Passengers, yes,” Queeblishiz said.
Still speculating, I said, “You’d have to fix what’s broken before you can leave. You’ll play hell finding tools for spacecraft on Earth.” We’d abandoned the Moon more than forty years before the first interstellar liner showed up. “How long?”
“Perhaps forty days. We carry tools to make tools.
That didn’t sound bad. But the other Chirp officers were still chattering at her, and she turned off her translator and chattered back. Then, “Barman, we must upgrade your facilities, particularly your defenses.”
“Defenses?” Ohmygod. Sooner or later it had to happen. “What is Long View, a prison ship?”
“Close. Unlucky guess. Long View is not unusual, a typical passenger liner with cold sleep facilities for prey animals, pets, and children. These are breaking down. The ship is too small, massively too small. We’ll go insane if we can’t set some of our children free on Earth.”
“And prey animals too? Do you plan to run hunts through my place?”
“Those we may slaughter and clone again later. We may require the owners to care for their pets, or slaughter them too. Our concerns are for the children. We have four varieties awake.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.
“Yes, but we must begin at once. We must childproof the Tavern.”
I phoned Arlan and Genevieve and told them the situation.
Staff at the Draco Tavern are always volunteers; they’re scientists come to interact with unearthly intelligences and alien disciplines. Children were not of interest. They both bowed out.
Children and pets are normally barred from the Tavern. Variety in adult tool users has always caused problems enough.
The Chirps put electronic locks on the airlocks and toilets. I worried: what if a child was locked out? Queeblishiz reassured me. The children would have bar codes tattooed on their hides. Only the appropriate locks, and toilets, would open for them ... and they wouldn’t lock with a child inside.
Hah, that lesson must be universal! Walt hasn’t locked us out of a bathroom yet, but it’s a basic intelligence test for grown-ups.
The first