The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [81]
“I’m not sure.”
“Fsst! I give Mars to the Europan colonists.”
Cheri gulped. She said, “We will protest the decision.”
“You have that right. Submit your protest to the ship, to Safe Orbits, before our departure sixty-one days from today. Rick, bring us sparkers.”
The rest stayed at the table, but Cheri Kaylor followed me to the bar. I asked, “Another drink?”
She spoke in a suppressed wail. “I’ve lost Mars!”
“Irish coffee?”
“What do I tell Hermes Padat? They’ll never react in time. The UN can’t decide to order dinner in sixty-one days! I’ve lost Mars! Yes, Irish coffee.”
I talked while I worked. “Not by yourself. You didn’t lose Mars without help. Mars has been there all along. For hundreds of years we’ve known we could get there. For fifty years we’ve even known how. It just wasn’t important enough to enough people. We never had Mars in the first place.”
“They aren’t even Martians. I wouldn’t mind being kicked off by Martians.”
“They didn’t seem to mind the probes. Maybe they’ll want visitors.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Cheri, how much territory is a millionth of Mars?”
“Why?”
“It’s my commission. It might be enough for an embassy.”
It turns out to be around a hundred and forty square kilometers.
PLAYGROUND EARTH
It was wonderfully peaceful in the dark beneath Europa’s ice. The VR setup saw in infrared. The little scooter tootled among schools of alien swimmers lit by their own heat. Most of them looked like translucent squid or ambulatory jet engines. One variety had carved the underside of the ice into channels and buildings, a whole inverted city.
I had put my life on hold while recovering from a chain of misfortunes.
A Chirpsithra, Diplomat-by-Choice Ktashisnif, had died of allergies while in custody of human kidnappers. The perps had been turned over to the crew of Transstar Code, and the Chirps had executed them in the same way Ktashisnif had died, by slow suffocation. In a flurry of bad publicity, Transstar Code had departed Earth and Sol system and left me holding the bag.
I’d closed the Draco Tavern. I had little choice.
Wandering Signal took up orbit around the Moon a month later. Various diplomats inside and outside the UN attempted to stop the ship from sending landers. They may have been too subtle, and nobody fired any weapons at visiting aliens, though we’d worried about that.
The landers the Chirpsithra use are nowhere near the size of their interstellar liners, but they’re big and conspicuous. It may be a good thing that Mount Forel is so inaccessible; the ship got its share of news cameras anyway. And someone mailed a package to the Draco Tavern that turned out to be a bomb.
Some of us were inside doing maintenance. The bomb killed another Chirpsithra, Engineer Hrashantree, and left me with internal injuries. It would have hurt a lot more of us if the Tavern hadn’t been closed.
In the weeks that followed I sat or lay around being entertained by little sensor packages that various aliens have been sending out among the planets. The proxies crawl or swim across most of the interesting places in the solar system. Departing Chirpsithra liners don’t bother to collect them; the next starship just links up, and Earth’s satellite network have access too.
Mars was fun for a while, but there weren’t any life-forms to make the place interesting. Pluto and Charon hosted actual tourists wearing video cameras and other sensors, entities who could never visit Earth. Jupiter was just confusing. Europa—
My virtuals went black and jerked me from under the Europan ice, back into my bedroom. I blinked and tried to sit up. “Beth?”
“You have friends,” Beth Marble said.
“I’ve got lots of friends.” I sat up, lifting mostly with my arms; but my belly muscles were growing back together. Soon, leg lifts.
Beth said, “Your friends in lobster shells that are too tall for the ceilings. Can they come in?”
“Chirpsithra. Sure, bring ’em in.”
Beth Marble had gotten a raw deal. She’d been a psychiatric technician taking care of developmentally disabled patients