The alien’s sense cluster snapped down into its fur, then slowly emerged again. “Certainly we do not!”
“Well, think how it would look!”
“But for you it is natural!”
“Not really,” I said. “People have real trouble learning to kill. It’s not built into us. Anyway, we don’t have quite so much to fight over these days. The whole world’s getting rich on the widgetry the chirps and the thtopar have been selling us. Long-lived, too, on glig medicines. We’ve all got more to lose.” I flinched, because the alien’s sense cluster was stretched across the table, staring at us in horror.
“A lot of our restless types are out mining the asteroids,” the woman said.
“And, hey,” I said, “remember when Egypt and Saudi Arabia were talking war in the UN? And all the aliens moved out of both countries, even the glig doctors with their geriatrics consulting office. The sheiks didn’t like that one damn bit. And when the Soviets—”
“Our doing, all our own doing,” the alien mourned. Its sense cluster pulled itself down and disappeared into the fur, leaving just the ruby crest showing. The alien lifted its mug and drank, blind.
The woman took my wrist and pulled me over to the bar. “What do we do now?” she hissed in my ear.
I shrugged. “Sounds like the emergency’s over.”
“But we can’t just let it go, can we? You don’t really think we’ve given up war, do you? But if we knew these damn aliens were waiting to make movies of us, maybe we would! Shouldn’t we call the newspapers, or at least the Secret Service?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Somebody has to know!”
“Think it through,” I said. “One particular qarasht company may be defunct, but those cameras are still there, all over the world, and so are the mobile units. Some alien receiving company is going to own them. What if they offer…say Iran, or the Soviet Union, one-tenth of one percent of the gross profits on a war movie?”
She paled. I pushed my mug into her hands and she gulped hard at it. Shakily she asked, “Why didn’t the qarasht think of that?”
“Maybe they don’t think enough like men. Maybe if we just leave it alone, they never will. But we sure don’t want any human entrepreneurs making suggestions. Let it drop, lady. Let it drop.”
• • •
• • •
LIMITS
I never would have heard them if the sound system hadn’t gone on the fritz. And if it hadn’t been one of those frantically busy nights, maybe I could have done something about it…
But one of the big chirpsithra passenger ships was due to leave Mount Forel Spaceport in two days. The chirpsithra trading empire occupies most of the galaxy, and Sol system is nowhere near its heart. A horde of passengers had come early in fear of being marooned. The Draco Tavern was jammed.
I was fishing under the counter when the noises started. I jumped. Two voices alternated: a monotonal twittering, and a bone-vibrating sound like a tremendous door endlessly opening on rusty hinges.
The Draco Tavern used to make the Tower of Babel sound like a monolog, in the years before I got this sound system worked out. Picture it: thirty or forty creatures of a dozen species including human, all talking at once at every pitch and volume, and all of their translating widgets bellowing too! Some species, like the srivinthish, don’t talk with sound, but they also don’t notice the continual skreeking from their spiracles. Others sing. They call it singing, and they say it’s a religious rite, so how can I stop them?
Selective damping is the key, and a staff of technicians to keep the system in order. I can afford it. I charge high anyway, for the variety of stuff I have to keep for anything that might wander in. But sometimes the damping system fails.
I found what I needed—a double-walled canister I’d never needed before, holding stuff I’d been calling green kryptonite—and delivered glowing green pebbles to four aliens in globular environment tanks. They were at four different tables, sharing conversation with four other species. I’d never seen a rosyfin before. Rippling in the murky fluid within the transparent globe, the dorsal fin was triangular, rose-colored, fragile as gossamer, and ran from nose to tail of a body that looked like a flattened slug.
Out among the tables there was near-silence, except within the bubbles of sound that surrounded each table. It wasn’t a total breakdown, then. But when I went back behind the bar the noise was still there.
I tried to ignore it. I certainly wasn’t going to try to fix the sound system, not with fifty-odd customers and ten distinct species demanding my attention. I set out consommé and vodka for four glig, and thimble-sized flasks of chilled fluid with an ammonia base, for a dozen chrome-yellow bugs each the size of a fifth of Haig Pinch. And the dialog continued: high twittering against grating metallic bass. What got on my nerves was the way the sounds seemed always on the verge of making sense!
Finally I just switched on the translator. It might be less irritating if I heard it in English.
I heard: “—noticed how often they speak of limits?”
“Limits? I don’t understand you.”
“Lightspeed limit. Theoretical strengths of metals, of crystals, of alloys. Smallest and largest masses at which an unseen body may be a neutron star. Maximum time and cost to complete a research project. Surface-to-volume relationship for maximum size of a creature of given design—”
“But every sapient race learns these things!”
“We find limits, of course. But with humans, the limits are what they seek first.”
So they were talking about the natives, about us. Aliens often do. Their insights might be fascinating, but it gets boring fast. I let it buzz in my ear while I fished out another dozen flasks of ammonia mixture and set them on Gail’s tray along with two Stingers. She went off to deliver them to the little yellow bugs, now parked in a horseshoe pattern on the rim of their table, talking animatedly to two human sociologists.
“It is a way of thinking,” one of the voices said. “They set enormously complex limits on each other. Whole professions, called judge and lawyer, devote their lives to determining which human has violated which limit where. Another profession alters the limits arbitrarily.”
“It does not sound entertaining.”
“But all are forced to play the game. You must have noticed: the limits they find in the universe and the limits they set on each other bear the same name: law.”
I had established that the twitterer was the one doing most of the talking. Fine. Now who were they? Two voices belonging to two radically different species…
“The interstellar community knows all of these limits in different forms.”
“Do we know them all? Gödel’s Principle sets a limit to the perfectability of mathematical systems. What species would have sought such a thing? Mine would not.”
“Nor mine, I suppose. Still—”
“Humans push their limits. It is their first approach to any problem. When they learn where the limits lie, they fill in missing information until the limit breaks. When they break a limit, they look for the limit behind that.”
“I wonder…”
I thought I had them spotted. Only one of the tables for two was occupied, by a chirpsithra and a startled-looking woman. My suspects were a cluster of three: one of the rosyfins, and two compact, squarish customers wearing garish designs on their exoskeletal shells. The shelled creatures had been smoking tobacco cigars under exhaust hoods. One seemed to be asleep. The other waved stubby arms as it talked.
I heard: “I have a thought. My savage ancestors used to die when they reached a certain age. When we could no longer breed, evolution was finished with us. There is a biological self-destruct built into us.”
“It is the same with humans. But my own people never die unless killed. We fission. Our memories go far, far back.”
“Though we differ in this, the result is the same. At some point in the dim past we learned that we could postpone our deaths. We never
developed a civilization until individuals could live long enough to attain wisdom. The fundamental limit was lifted from our shells before we set out to expand into the world, and then the universe. Is this not true with most of the space-traveling peoples? The Pfarth species choose death only when they grow bored. Chirpsithra were long-lived before they reached the stars, and the gligstith(click)optok went even further, with their fascination with heredity-tailoring—”
“Does it surprise you, that intelligent beings strive to extend their lives?”
“Surprise? No. But humans still face a limit on their life-spans. The death limit has immense influence on their poetry. They may think differently from the rest of us in other ways. They may find truths we would not even seek.”
An untranslated metal-on-metal scraping. Laughter? “You speculate irresponsibly. Has their unique approach taught them anything we know not?”
“How can I know? I have only been on this world three local years. Their libraries are large, their retrieval systems poor. But there is Gödel’s Principle; and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a limit to what one can discover at the quantum level.”
Pause. “We must see if another species has duplicated that one. Meanwhile, perhaps I should speak to another visitor.”
“Incomprehension. Query?”
“Do you remember that I spoke of a certain gligstith(click)optok merchant?”
“I remember.”
“You know their skill with water-world biology. This one comes to Earth with a technique for maintaining and restoring the early-maturity state in humans. The treatment is complex, but with enough customers the cost would drop, or so the merchant says. I must persuade it not to make the offer.”
“Affirmative! Removing the death-limit would drastically affect human psychology!”
One of the shelled beings was getting up. The voices chopped off as I rounded the bar and headed for my chosen table, with no clear idea what I would say. I stepped into the bubble of sound around two shelled beings and a rosyfin, and said, “Forgive the interruption, sapients—”
“You have joined a wake,” said the tank’s translator widget.
The shelled being said, “My mate had chosen death. He wanted one last smoke in company.” It bent and lifted its dead companion in its arms and headed for the door.
The rosyfin was leaving too, rolling his spherical fishbowl toward the door. I realized that its own voice hadn’t penetrated the murky fluid around it. No chittering, no bone-shivering bass. I had the wrong table.
I looked around, and there were still no other candidates. Yet somebody here had casually condemned mankind—me!—to age and die.
Now what? I might have been hearing several voices. They all sound alike coming from a new species; and some aliens never interrupt each other.
The little yellow bugs? But they were with humans.
Shells? My voices had mentioned shells…but too many aliens have exoskeletons. Okay, a chirpsithra would have spoken by now; they’re garrulous. Scratch any table that includes a chirp. Or a rosyfin. Or those srivinthish: I’d have heard the skreek of their breathing. Or the huge grey being who seemed to be singing. That left…half a dozen tables, and I couldn’t interrupt that many.
Could they have left while I was distracted?
I hot-footed it back to the bar, and listened, and heard nothing. And my spinning brain could find only limits.
• • •
• • •
THE LOST IDEAS
Near my elbow there are two 8½-inch disks full of attempted stories. Older stories were written or half-written on paper. They take up a good deal more of my office space. One day I’ll nerve myself to throw them out.
The concept of what makes a story came to me bit by bit. (Not a pun. This was before home computers.) It’s nonverbal, impossible to describe, and it doesn’t quite match any other writer’s picture. It can’t be taught. It evolves as a chain of mistakes.
Here are some projects that didn’t quite come out the way I’d hoped. Some are cases of serendipity, wonderfully transformed by chance. Others may at least function as lessons.
When I still thought I was going to be a writer, but had no way to prove it, my stepsister gave me an idea. A friend hers, a real writer, had tried it and given up. From that alone I should have known better.
Consider a freeway off-ramp that only exists between midnight and dawn. Nobody who takes it ever comes back.
I ran my phantom off-ramp through the dimensions to a world where stranded aliens were collecting metal and other necessities to rebuild their vehicle. Automobiles taking the phantom ramp found that gravity had rotated ninety degrees: they were going down.
Like the ramp, my attempted story led nowhere. Ultimately I retrieved the alien for another story and called it a Pierson’s puppeteer. If you like the off-ramp idea, take it. I advise against.
On ancient yellowing paper I find an escape story built around a spacecraft of peculiar design: a circular flying wing. I drew pictures of the craft with colored pencils. If a meteor hits the ship at just the right angle…Let’s just say there wasn’t a lot of point to this story, and I never finished it. The spacecraft became the Lazy Eight series of interstellar slowboats.
On disk I have five or six thousand words of a character study for a terrorist in hiding. As with a lot of these notes, I was just fiddling around when I typed it up. That was six or seven years ago. Since then I’ve repeatedly tried to get a story out of Terrorist. I was fascinated, for a time. Why am I not fascinated now? Because no story ever emerged.
I get more ideas than I can use. It helps if someone will write a story for me…like The Sins of the Fathers by Stanley Schmidt. I’d been planning to write about refugees from the galactic core explosion. It had not occurred to me that they’d caused the epidemic of supernovae. That would have rounded off Known Space very nicely…but now I don’t have to write it.
The thing is, some of what I try doesn’t work. And some of what doesn’t work, can be saved many years later, or rifled for its best ideas. But some good stuff inevitably gets lost. And I hate that.
So I’ve saved some lost ideas for you.
Twenty years ago my mother’s house was robbed.
The thief was a middle-aged man just out of jail. What he wanted was to go back to his friends…that is, back to jail. He knew how to do that. He had a quarter in his pocket, so he took a bus to Beverly Hills. He’d heard there were rich people there.
He walked north from Sunset for a block and a half. He climbed a gate and kept moving.
About now the dogs must have started raising hell. Mom had five in the pen near the house. The Keeshond breed began life as guard dogs on Dutch houseboats. They’re too friendly, maybe, but they’re loud. Mom and Porter (my stepfather) were out, but there were servants on the premises. Trouble was, they’d learned to ignore the barking dogs. Keeshonds don’t just bark at burglars; they bark at any stimulus, like Australians go on strike.
The thief found a window, got it open and started to climb through. It must have been hellishly awkward. There were shelves on the insides of the library window, and the shelves were crammed with trophies: half a ton of silver and ribbons indicating thirty-odd years of my mother’s victories at competition dog shows.
He got halfway. Then the window came down on his waist.
Though he was trying to be quiet, he still had to get the trophies and shelves out of the way. He must have raised a hell of a racket. Why didn’t someone come to investigate? Because the clatter of falling silver and glass was drowned out by the barking of the dogs, which the servants were already ignoring. So the thief thrashed in the window for half an hour (he so testified) until he pulled himself free.
He began to search the house. Two pillowcases must have been his first and second thefts. He stripped my sister of every bit of jewelry she owned, and considerably more from my Mom. He got away with between $100,000 and $200,000, mostly in jewelry, stuffed into two pillowcases.
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He also took some bizarre stuff. He was still wearing Porter’s shoes when he was picked up. Heavy ashtrays. Trophies. One of a pair of walkie-talkies. He must have thought it was a radio…or else he was planning to call his victims.
Maybe he got tired, maybe he felt conspicuous. He pushed one pillowcaseful of loot into a trash can a block from the house. It was presently found. He sold some of the rest of it to a bartender, who was presently located, and who never considered that it might be stolen, nope, never crossed his mind.
The police found him in San Francisco. He explained that he’d escaped with some costume jewelry. When they told him the money value of what he’d gotten away with, and failed to keep, he reacted like he’d been robbed.
Mom and Porter ended by feeling sorry for the guy. My sister never did. It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it?
Everyone involved thought I should write it.
“Just like science fiction—” Do you get that too? From relatives and friends of your family who can’t tell science fiction from Zardoz and third season Star Trek? Mundanes consider this a valid excuse to interrupt everyone else to tell a story.
But this time I agreed with them: it’s a hell of a story, and I swore I’d write it up and sell it. I took notes, which I’ve lost. I never did turn it into text, until now. I’m at a loss to understand why…unless it’s because I’ve never had patience with fools, not even when the fool is a friend, not even when it’s me. INFERNO is as close as I’ve come to living in a fool’s head for any great stretch. This burglar was a fool.
Some bad stories can be reworked, or rifled for their components.
“The Locusts” moldered in my files for a decade before I turned it over to Steven Barnes. All it took was a different set of skills and the right attitude.
I quit halfway through “The Crosshatchers” for lack of an ending. That was in the late sixties. I’ve learned. These days I almost never begin writing a story until I know the ending.