THE REAL THING
If the IRS could see me now! Flying a light-sail craft, single-handed, two million miles out from a bluish-white dwarf star. Fiddling frantically with the shrouds, guided less by the instruments than by the thrust against my web hammock and the ripples in the tremendous, near-weightless mirror sail. Glancing into the sun without blinking, then at the stars without being night-blind, dipping near the sun without being fried; all due to the quick-adjusting goggles and temp-controlled skintight pressure suit the Chirpsithra had given me.
This entire trip was deductible, of course. The Draco Tavern had made me a good deal of money over the years, but I never could have paid for an interstellar voyage otherwise. As the owner of the Draco Tavern, Earth’s only multispecies bar, I was quite legitimately touring the stars to find new products for my alien customers.
Would Internal Revenue object to my actually enjoying myself?
I couldn’t make myself care. The trip out on the Chirpsithra liner: that alone was something I’d remember the rest of my life. This too, if I lived. Best not to distract myself with memories.
Hroyd System was clustered tightly around its small, hot sun. Space was thick with asteroids and planets and other sailing ships. Every so often some massive piece of space junk bombed the sun, or a storm would bubble up from beneath the photosphere, and my boat would surge under the pressure of the flare. I had to fiddle constantly with the shrouds.
The pointer was aimed at black space. Where was that damned spaceport? Huge and massive it had seemed, too big to lose, when I spun out my frail silver sail and launched ... how long ago? The clock told me: twenty hours, though it didn’t feel that long.
The spaceport was coin-shaped, spun for varying gravities. Maybe I was trying to see it edge-on? I tilted the sail to lose some velocity. The fat sun expanded. My mind felt the heat. If my suit failed, it would fail all at once, and I wouldn’t have long to curse my recklessness. Or—Even Chirpsithra-supplied equipment wouldn’t help me if I fell into the sun.
I looked outward in time to see a silver coin pass over me. Good enough. Tilt the sail forward, pick up some speed ... pull my orbit outward, slow down, don’t move the sail too fast or it’ll fold up! Wait a bit, then tilt the sail to spill the light; drop a bit, wait again ... watch a black coin slide across the sun. Tilt to slow, tilt again to catch up. It was another two hours before I could pull into the spaceport’s shadow, fold the sail, and let a tractor beam pull me in.
My legs were shaky as I descended the escalator to Level 6.
There was Earth gravity on 6, minus a few kilos, and also a multispecies restaurant bar. I was too tired to wonder about the domed boxes I saw on some of the tables. I wobbled over to a table, turned on the privacy bubble, and tapped tee tee hatch nex ool, carefully. That code was my life. A wrong character could broil me, freeze me, flatten me, or have me drinking liquid methane or breathing prussic acid.
An Earthlike environment formed around me. I peeled off my equipment and sank into a web, sighing with relief. I still ached everywhere. What I really needed was sleep. But it had been glorious!
A warbling whistle caused me to look up. My translator said, “Sir or madam, what can I bring you?”
The bartender was a small, spindly Hroydan, and his environment suit glowed at dull-red heat.
I said, “Something alcoholic.”
“Alcohol? What is your physiological type?”
“Tee tee hatch nex ool.”
“Ah. May I recommend something? A liqueur, Opal Fire.”
Considering the probable distance to the nearest gin and tonic ...” Fine. What proof is it?” I heard his translator skip a word, and amplified: “What percent ethyl alcohol?”
“Thirty-four, with no other metabolic poisons.”
About seventy proof? “Over water ice, please.”
He brought a clear glass bottle. The fluid within did indeed glitter like an opal. Its beauty was the first thing I noticed. Then, the taste, slightly tart, with an overtone that can’t be described in any human language. A crackling aftertaste, and a fire spreading through my nervous system.
I said, “That’s wonderful! What about side effects?”
“There are additives to compensate: thiamin and the like. You will feel no ugly aftereffects,” the Hroydan assured me.
“They’d love it on Earth. Mmm ... what’s it cost?”
“Quite cheap. Twenty-nine Chirp notes per flagon. Transport costs would be up to the Chirpsithra. But I’ m sure Chignthil Interstellar would sell specs for manufacture.”
“This could pay for my whole trip.” I jotted the names: Chirp characters for Opal Fire and Chignthil Interstellar. The stuff was still dancing through my nervous system. I drank again, so it could dance on my taste buds too.
To hell with sleep; I was ready for another new experience. “These boxes—I see them on all the tables. What are they?”
“Full-sensory entertainment devices. Cost is six Chirp notes for use.” He tapped keys and a list appeared: titles, I assumed, in alien script. “If you can’t read this, there is voice translation.”
I dithered. Tempting; dangerous. But a couple of these might be worth taking back. Some of my customers can’t use anything I stock; they pay only cover charges. “How versatile is it? Your customers seem to have a lot of different sense organs. Hey, would this thing actually give me alien senses?”
The bartender signaled negative.
“The device acts on your central nervous system; I assume you have one? There at the top? Ah, good. It feeds you a story skeleton, but your own imagination puts you in context and fills in the background details. You live a programmed story, but largely in terms familiar to you. Mental damage is almost unheard of.”
“Will I know it’s only an entertainment?”
“You might know from the advertisements. Shall I show you?” The Hroydan raised the metal dome on a many-jointed arm and poised it over my head. I felt the heat emanating from him. “Perhaps you would like to walk through an active volcano?” He tapped two buttons with a black metal claw, and everything changed.
The Vollek merchant pulled the helmet away from my head. He had small, delicate-looking arms, and a stance like a tyrannosaur: torso horizontal, swung from the hips. A feathery down covered him, signaling his origin as a flightless bird.
“How did you like it?”
“Give me a minute.” I looked about me. Afternoon sunlight spilled across the tables, illuminating alien shapes. The Draco Tavern was filling up. It was time I got back to tending bar. It had been nearly empty (I remembered) when I agreed to try this stunt.
I said, “That business at the end—?”
“We end all of the programs that way when we sell to Level Four civilizations. It prevents disorientation.”
“Good idea.” Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel at all confused. Still, it was a hell of an experience. “I couldn’t tell it from the real thing.”
“The advertisement would have alerted an experienced user.”
“You’re actually manufacturing these things on Earth?”
“Guatemala has agreed to license us. The climate is so nice there. And so I can lower the price per unit to three thousand dollars each.”
“Sell me two,” I said. It’d be a few years before they paid for themselves. Maybe someday I really would have enough money to ride the Chirpsithra liners ... if I didn’t get hooked myself on these full-sensory machines. “Now, about Opal Fire. I can’t believe it’s really that good—”
“I travel for Chignthil Interstellar too. I have sample bottles.”
“Let’s try it.”
WAR MOVIE
Ten, twenty years ago my first thought would have been, Great-looking woman! Tough-looking, too. If I make a pass, it had better be polite. She was in her late twenties, tall, blond, healthy-looking, with a squarish jaw. She didn’t look like the type to be fazed by anything; but she had stopped, stunned, just inside the door. Her first time here, I th
ought. Anyway, I’d have remembered her.
But after eighteen years tending bar in the Draco Tavern, my first thought is generally, Human. Great! I won’t have to dig out any of the exotic stuff. While she was still reacting to the sight of half a dozen oddly shaped sapients indulging each its own peculiar vice, I moved down the bar to the far right, where I keep the alcoholic beverages. I thought she’d take one of the bar stools.
Nope. She looked about her, considering her choices—which didn’t include empty tables; there was a fair crowd in tonight—then moved to join the lone Qarasht. And I was already starting to worry as I left the bar to take her order.
In the Draco it’s considered normal to strike up conversations with other customers. But the Qarasht wasn’t acting like it wanted company. That bulk of thick fur, pale blue striped with black in narrow curves, had waddled in three hours ago. It was on its third quart-sized mug of Demerara Sours, and its sense cluster had been retracted for all of that time, leaving it deaf and blind, lost in its own thoughts.
It must have felt the vibration when the woman sat down. Its sense cluster and stalk rose out of the fur like a python rising from a bed of moss. A snake with no mouth: just two big wide-set black bubbles for eyes and an ear like a pink blossom set between them, and a tuft of fine hairs along the stalk to serve for smell and taste, and a brilliant ruby crest on top. Its translator box said, quite clearly, “Drink, not talk. My last day.”
She didn’t take the hint. “You’re going home? Where?”
“Home to the organ banks. I am shishishorupf—” A word the box didn’t translate.
“What’s it mean?”
“Your kind has bankruptcy laws that let you start over. My kind lets me start over as a dozen others. Organ banks.” The alien picked up its mug; the fur parted below its sense cluster stalk, to receive half a pint of Demerara Sour.
She looked around a little queasily, and found me at her shoulder. With some relief she said, “Never mind, I’ll come to the bar,” and started to stand up.
The Qarasht put a hand on her wrist. The eight skeletal fingers looked like two chicken feet wired together, but a Qarasht’s hand is stronger than it looks. “Sit,” said the alien. “Barmonitor, get her one of these. Human, why do you not fight wars?”
“What?”
“You used to fight wars.”
“Well,” she said, “sure.”
“We could have been fourth-level wealthy,” the Qarasht said, and slammed its mug to the table. “You would still be a single isolated species had we not come. In what fashion have you repaid our generosity?”
The woman was speechless; I wasn’t. “Excuse me, but it wasn’t the qarashteel who made first contact with Earth. It was the Chirpsithra.”
“We paid them.”
“What? Why?”
“Our ship Far-Stretching Sense Cluster passed through Sol system while making a documentary. It confuses some species that we can make very long entertainments, and sell them to billions of customers who will spend years watching them, and reap profits that allow us to travel hundreds of light-years and spend decades working on such a project. But we are very long-lived, you know. Partly because we are able to keep the organ banks full,” the Qarasht said with some savagery, and it drank again. Its sense-cluster was weaving a little.
“We found dramatic activity on your world,” it said. “All over your world, it seemed. Machines hurled against each other. Explosives. Machines built to fly, other machines to hurl them from the sky. Humans in the machines, dying. Machines blowing great holes in populated cities. It fuddles the mind, to think what such a spectacle would have cost to make ourselves! We went into orbit, and we recorded it all as best we could. Three years of it. When we were sure it was over, we returned home and sold it.”
The woman swallowed. She said to me, “I think I need that drink. Join us?”
I made two of the giant Demerara Sours and took them back. As I pulled up a chair the Qarasht was saying, “If we had stopped then we would still be moderately wealthy. Our recording instruments were not the best, of course. Worse, we could not get close enough to the surface for real detail. Our atmosphere probes shivered and shook and so did the pictures. Ours was a low-budget operation. But the ending was superb! Two cities half-destroyed by nuclear explosions! Our recordings sold well enough, but we would have been mad not to try for more.
“We invested all of our profits in equipment. We borrowed all we could. Do you understand that the nearest full-service spaceport to Sol system is sixteen-squared light-years distant? We had to finance a Chirpsithra diplomatic expedition in order to get Local Group approval and transport for what we needed... and because we needed intermediaries. Chirps are very good at negotiating, and we are not We did not tell them what we really wanted, of course.”
The woman’s words sounded like curses. “Why negotiate? You were doing fine as Peeping Toms. Even when people saw your ships, nobody believed them. I expect they’re saucer-shaped?”
Foo fighters, I thought, while the alien said, “We needed more than the small atmospheric probes. We needed to mount hologram cameras. For that we had to travel all over the Earth, especially the cities. Such instruments are nearly invisible. We spray them across a flat surface, high up on your glass-slab-style towers, for instance. And we needed access to your libraries, to get some insight into why you do these things.”
The lady drank. I remembered that there had been qarashteel everywhere the Chirpsithra envoys went, twenty-four years ago when the big interstellar ships arrived; and I took a long pull from my Sour.
“It all looked so easy,” the Qarasht mourned. “We had left instruments on your Moon. The recordings couldn’t be sold, of course, because your world’s rotation permits only fragmentary glimpses. But your machines were becoming better, more destructive! We thanked our luck that you had not destroyed yourselves before we could return. We studied the recordings, to guess where the next war would occur, but there was no discernible pattern. The largest land mass, we thought—”
True enough, the chirps and their qarashteel entourage had been very visible all over Asia and Europe. Those cameras on the Moon must have picked up activity in Poland and Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iran and Israel and Cuba and, and ... bastards. “So you set up your cameras in a tearing hurry,” I guessed, “and then you waited.”
“We waited and waited. We have waited for thirty years ... for twenty-four of your own years, and we have nothing to show for it but a riot here, a parade there, an attack on a children’s vehicle ... robbery of a bank ... a thousand people smashing automobiles or an embassy building ... rumors of war, of peace, some shouting in your councils ... how can we sell any of this? On Earth my people need life support to the tune of six thousand dollars a day. I and my associates are shishishorupf now, and I must return home to tell them.”
The lady looked ready to start her own war. I said, to calm her down, “We make war movies too. We’ve been doing it for over a hundred years. They sell fine.”
Her answer was an intense whisper. “I never liked war movies. And that was us!”
“Sure, who else—”
The Qarasht slammed its mug down. “Why have you not fought a war?”
She broke the brief pause. “We would have been ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“In front of you. Aliens. We’ve seen twenty alien species on Earth since that first Chirp expedition, and none of them seem to fight wars. The, uh, Qarasht don’t fight wars, do they?”
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 su 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 ...