I said, “Z. Wayne, it strikes me that a lift belt is no different from a hunter’s gun except that it’s not a weapon. Do you hunt?”
He glared.
“If you were strong enough, you’d hunt without the gun. Tefee tee hatch nex ool means their world has lighter gravity, that’s the tefee, with air enough like ours to breath, that’s the tee.”
“Still cheatin’.” To the female, “And who gave you the right to hunt my boy?”
The female said, “Need.”
I said, “Oh, come on.”
She said, “Doctor Schumann, the hunt triggers our appetite. We need eat only seldom, but we must gorge then. You can testify.”
Bennett said, “What?”
“I ported stocks of their food from the market,” I told him. “I haven’t seen them eat, but I know how much food goes up. At first none, then lots.”
“If we can’t work up hunger during a hunt,” she said, “we become malnourished, or we must take noxious medicine.”
“Don’t we all,” I muttered.
“The effect is temporary. We will be lucky to last twenty days. Then, if we cannot hunt, we must endure cold sleep. We had expected to study Earth and mankind for two years.”
I had given his children the thrill of a lifetime, then let Bennett confront the entity he’d shot. She had shown him the risk he had taken with his son’s life. If Bennett could stay reasonable, couldn’t I? But these idiots were throwing it all away, and I was getting angry.
“You don’t have a problem,” I said. “If you need to hunt, arrange a hunt! I’ve hunted with the Folk myself! They sold the TV rights and videotaped it!”
“Hunt by arrangement?” She couldn’t believe it.
“Live at eleven,” Bennett said grimly.
Better take care of Bennett’s grievance first. I said, “Mr. Bennett threatens exposure, as is his right. The price of raising a child until he’s finished college is around a hundred thousand American dollars, I think.”
“Skeep? Price is stunningly high!”
“You might have got a better price by getting his agreement first!”
Silver Tongue asked, “What would you do, warn the victim?”
“Sure.”
“No,” said Silverback.
“The thing is,” Bennett said doggedly, “my wife talked me into coming here first. She’s walking today because her spine got fixed by some alien technique I can’t spell or pronounce. I’m asking because you might ... might have a rational answer. What gave you the right to attack my son?”
“We must buy that.”
“After stealing it!”
Silverback said, “We hoped for two years on Earth, continue on the next liner. If Earth cannot feed us, we must endure cold sleep beginning tomorrow! Feeding aliens, isn’t that your business, Rick?” She examined me hopefully; gave up and turned to Ham. “But you are harmed, debt must be paid. Skreee?”
Her mate said, “Price is ridiculous in the up direction.”
Ham said, “I’m all right.”
I wanted the price to sting a little. I said to the birds, “Your sense of proportion is way off. What if you did catch an orphan? There wouldn’t be anyone to deal with.”
“An orphan would be the business of local government,” Silver Tongue said.
“Were you ready to ask the French government to name their price?” Sacre bleu, I thought.
“Is France rapacious?”
“No, it’s governments that are rapacious ... and lawyers. You’ve attacked Ham in the United States of America, where lawyers are thicker than anywhere on Earth!” I had my second bright notion. “You try that again, you’ll be lucky not to lose your place aboard Clickety-ponk to some small boy with stars in his eyes and a smart-mouthed lawyer.” That should push some buttons.
Ham stared at me. Then he pulled at his father’s sleeve. “Dad?”
Silver Tongue said, “You exaggerate for effect. I offer two bars silver, two pounds each.”
Ham’s eyes weren’t really glowing, and no alien could read so subtle a signal. But Ham and his father were trying to interrupt each other, and suddenly Z. Wayne bellowed, “You would never see me or your mother again! Nor Lilly either! Lilly, talk to him! Silver Tongue, am I right? These ships go slower than light! Even if he caught a ride back from some other star, it could be a hundred years, or a thousand!”
The boy said, “But an interstellar—”
Silverback noticed what was going on. “Major decision, give up the past, adjust to far-away unknown future, as we have. Circle the galaxy or stop off at own risk. Up to a hundred thousand years before return. Wait until older, Hammett. Mister Bennett, we accept price to teach Ham through college as determined through the Internet, pay in United States dollars, twenty percent finder fee for rapacious bartender—”
“Hold up,” said Z. Wayne.
“—Escrow account for you and Hammett until Hammett attains age of presumed wisdom, if you will sign now.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the price,” Z. Wayne said. “No, dammit, Ham, we will not sue to get you a ticket on an interstellar liner! Silverback, I want some assurance that there will be no further hunting of children.”
“We would have to leave Earth early,” she said.
“You can’t prey on children. No matter what you pay, who you pay, you still can’t do that.”
The birds were silent. Z. Wayne looked at me.
“I have a notion,” I said.
Five months later I took my niece and her children to the Park.
They’d raised the price of tickets by 60 percent. The crowding was fierce. Marilyn was shocked.
“Relax,” I told her. “This is Draco Tavern’s treat, every dollar of it.”
“But why do they pay that much? Most children aren’t even wearing the hats! Those that are ... four a day? Out of hundreds!”
“Under two hundred.” We’d picked a Wednesday.
The young man wouldn’t give Wayne and Becky hats unless Marilyn and I signed contracts as their guardians. Despite four children tugging at us, I took a couple of minutes to examine the contract. I wanted to be sure no sneaky little weasel clauses had crept in since we wrote it.
A lot of parents were changing their minds after they read it. I signed.
“Ricky, is this safe?”
“Sure. Jael? Alvin? Han?” Had they changed their minds?
They made their intent clear, and Marilyn signed, and the kids put on the hats. Han asked, “Can I keep it?”
“It’s a loaner,” Marilyn said.
I said, “You can buy it when you leave.”
Scattered through a crowd of a thousand were less than a hundred hats, all on children between five and ten, all flame orange with a wide brim for protection against the sun and against looking up. Children with and children without orange hats all looked up anyway as they entered the Park. We found cloudless blue sky, and the new tower.
“Where are they?” Denise demanded.
I shook my head. “The tower’s theirs. They come when they want. Only the top, of course.” Most of the tower was the Beanstalk Fall, with much too long a waiting line. “Hey, Dolphin Ride!”
A prey who welcomes us is not acceptable!” Silverback kept repeating herself. She was sure I didn’t understand.
“First remember what you’re avoiding,” I told her. “Two years in cold sleep, then off into the starscape. Even doing it my way, you’ll lose time while the lawyers argue.”
“No!”
“Bet on six months, plus or minus. You can’t have everything. What you can have,” I said, “is prey that don’t know you’re coming.”
“Nonsense! They sign contracts!”
“Look again. The Park gets seven hundred people on a weekday, three times that on weekends. Half of those are kids,” exaggerating a little. “You pick two in a day. Four if you can stand it. It’s less than a hundred to one that any kid gets picked.
“A lot of them, kids and parents
, will spend the whole time looking up.” Memo: Be damn sure the Park makes dark glasses available! “You don’t pick those. Ignore them. Others will forget you’re there. You’re not on a schedule. It’s an amusement park. They’ll be distracted.”
Z. Wayne had been working with a Palm Pilot. “Can you really get away with this? You’re selling very little. Pot odds are of any kid being carried one and a half feet by two-point-two pounds of bird.”
“Most of them won’t wear the hats! Z. Wayne, they’ll pay extra to see some other kid carried off. Most of the kids with hats won’t get more than that.”
“They’ll never buy it,” said Bennett.
“Shall I put out offers?”
“Try it,” said Bennett, and “One may ask,” said Silverback, and “Scraww!” said Silver Tongue. So I put in calls to Disney, Knott’s, Six Flags....
Music from the sky.
We all looked up. The birds were there, black against the sun, singing their hearts out. They wheeled and sang for at least ten minutes above the endless line for the Beanstalk Fall, then glided behind the tower in a roar of applause.
I faced forward again. The kids were tired of waiting.
Screams. I looked around.
The birds had circled behind the tower, already diving, picking up serious speed. They fell straight toward us. Silverback pulled up and rolled, showing her silver-and-scarlet design, but Silver Tongue swerved and swooped and dropped on an eight-year-old girl.
For an instant I wished fiercely that Disney World had bid. All that empty land for the birds! And they could have been wearing yellow Mickey Mouse hands! But Disney hadn’t even got in a bid; their lawyers were too timid. Silver Tongue’s claw tips were sheathed in blue, the color of his belly, and the girl never saw them until they closed on her. We heard her scree-hee-hee-heeming, fear and laughter as she rose.
THE WISDOM OF DEMONS
With the midnight sun behind him, he entered the Draco Tavern as a fire-edged black silhouette. Even so, I knew him.
I watched him approach the bar. His walk was wobbly and he was being careful of his balance, like a karate master just out of the hospital. He’d been drinking last night... wait, now, it wasn’t him at all.
Then he wrestled himself onto a stool and adjusted the height, and I knew him again. “Webber, wasn’t it? Last night.”
A goofy, twisted grin. It wasn’t Webber. “Yes! Alan Webber, anthropologist. Give me water. Flavored water.”
“I’ve got some carbonated fruit Savors—”
“Good!”
I ducked back into storage.
The Draco Tavern serves every species that travels with the Chirpsithra interstellar liners. Our storage space has to be huge, but stuff for human consumption is stacked along one short wall. I picked him a cranberry soda, then took a moment to get my nerve back.
Last night he’d called himself a xenosociologist. His speech, his walk, his look were all different. There weren’t many aliens in the bar last night, and two or three times as many humans. Webber had started talking to a Gligstith(click)optok.
What I know about the Glig is privileged. I’d given Webber no more warning than what we tell everybody. Nobody gets near Mount Forel, Siberia, without hearing it a dozen times: These are ETIs, interstellar travelers. Gangrene is your ferst cousin compared to these entities. They don’t think like you do....
They’d gone to a table and turned on a privacy shield.
The Glig showed him wonders. I’ve seen their toys, technology beyond anything we’ve been able to borrow or copy, and weird little plants and animals. They talked half the night. At two in the morning, with the low July sun coming around from behind Mount Forel, Webber and the Glig went off toward the lander.
And here he was again, but changed.
I’ve run the Draco Tavern for years. From time to time I see the usual strangeness edging over into horror or madness. I deal with it Whatever was wrong here, if I complained to any Chirpsithra she would relay it to the captain. And I had the stun.
So what was I afraid of?
I showed him the bottle. “This is cranberry. Ice?”
“Good idea!”
“Splash of dark nun on top?”
“Try it.”
He’d ordered scotch and soda last night. Maybe he’d get loquacious. I served him and watched him taste. He twitched, startled at the bite of the rum.
“You were with a Glig last night. With,” I remembered, “Preez Thporshkil.”
“Yes. Thporshkil offered ... Ow.”
“Ow?”
“I bit my lip,” he said. Some customers wear a slack and gaping grin the whole time they’re in here, like everything they see is new and different. He wore that grin as if sketched in by a drunken artist with a shaky hand. “Offered me a wish.”
I asked, “A wish? Like a genie or a devil?”
His face went slack. Then, “Yes, like a genie, but there must be many wishes.... you say Glig? Many wishes a Glig can’t grant. Thporshkil is studying the human kind. It wanted to see what I would ask and what I would do with it. What would you wish for, Rick?”
Alan Webber had asked me that question last night. I should have guessed what was going on.
I said, “Make me healthy.”
He laughed oddly. “Not a good choice!”
“Glig are masters of biology.”
“We, they, Glig love the life sciences. They wish to learn more of human chemistry ... plumbing... interior interactions ... array of nerve interactions. The corpus callosum that connects the two halves of your brain, why is it so narrow?”
“Beats me. I think it’s why some of us talk to ourselves. We have to get signals from one side of the brain to the other.”
“Yes, of course! But Thporshkil would use the opportunity to learn. to exneriment. Once he began work on you, you would be left in too terrible a state ever to say, ‘Stop!’ until Thporshkil had repaired all of its mistakes.
But ... no, wait ... Rick, in the end you would be healthy to the limit of Thporshkil’s skill. Ow.” He pronounced the Glig’s name better than I did, but it had him biting his lip over and over. ”You would want the chaotic damage of many years repaired? Your life extended? Nose and brow and ears reshaped?”
“Hey!”
“In time Thporshkil could learn to do all that. Rick, I can arrange it.”
Webber hadn’t called me Rick. Last night he’d called me Dr Schumann. But the Gligstith(click)optok couldn’t say Schumann.
“Webber,” I said, though I had become sure that this wasn’t Webber, “what did you ask for?” I was examining him for seams and flaps, not trying to hide it much. I thought he might be a copy, some kind of android, and he’d need access hatches.
He said, “I wished for Thporshkil’s wisdom.”
“Just that?”
“Yes. If you ask a ... demon? for health, it must make you healthy to its own limit of skill, if you don’t add lim-. its by using modifiers. Adjectives. But that is your wish. I wanted the wisdom of an interstellar traveler.”
Again I felt my bloodstream icing up. I said, “That was a bad wish. Your brain might not be big enough. Or you could end up knowing things meant for Glig, not for humans. They wouldn’t go to a toilet the same way, or reproduce—”
“No!” That wild laugh again.
I said, “Glig eat human meat, did you know that?”
“I didn’t know it last night. Rick, they don’t kill to get it! They’re only curious. They clone human organs for the markets. As for brains, Glig and human nervous systems are vastly capacious. The limit is not the number of brain cells, but the number of possible connections. Only a storage algorithm is needed. Thporshkil downloaded my mind, copied itself, wrote a merge program, merged us and wrote it all back into my brain. Here I am. When I come back here in two hundred days, Thporshkil too will have its wish. It will learn what I can learn of what it is to be a man.”
“Wisdom,” I said. “Suppose you’d wished for knowledge
?”
“Thporshkil might have given me knowledge. Light-threads from his library and a viewer to string them.” Webber’s strange pronunciation was improving. “But wisdom is knowledge and the skill to use what you know. I wanted both.”
“Did you get what you wanted?”
“Yes!”
“This change, is it permanent?”
“You mean to ask if my new knowledge can be taken away from me.”
“Filtered out,” I suggested, “leaving what you were.” Was there a way to rescue last night’s Alan Webber?
He asked, “Rick, can you make a machine to separate the components of a milkshake?”
“I might.”
“But it would be elaborate and expensive and hard to market,” he said, “and too massive to ride aboard a chirps liner.”
“But are you Alan Webber? Or did he die last night? It’s pretty clear that you’re also Thporshkil the Gligstith(click)optok.”
I had my hand near the stun, but he hadn’t even lost the goofy grin. “I’m here. I may answer for either of us, Thporshkil or Alan. Do you think I was cheated?” Webber laughed. “I have wisdom now!”
“You sure as hell didn’t last night. Did you ever make a sillier wish in your life?”
“Rick, most animals seek homeostasis, but interstellar travelers are different. We are not like those who stay home. We seek change. The man I was last night wanted to change himself. He has his wish. I do not have a complaint. Do you? You know who to speak to.”
He walked out, perfectly in balance and almost strutting. I thought it over, and in the end I did nothing.
SMUT TALK
The Draco Tavern isn’t just a pub. It’s how humanity interacts with at least twenty-eight sapient species throughout the galaxy. Somewhere among these trillions of alien minds are the answers to all of the universal questions.
So it’s worth the expense, but costs are high. Keeping supplies in hand grows more difficult every time a new species appears. Siberian weather tears the Draco Tavern down as fast as we can rebuild it.
When a year passed without a Chirpsithra ship, we were glad of the respite. The Tavern got some repairs. I got several months of vacation in Wyoming and Tahiti. Then that tremendous Chirpsithra soap bubble drifted inward from near the Moon, and landers flowed down along the Earth’s magnetic lines to Mount Forel in Siberia.