by Larry Niven
The melk veered just short of the woods. I sprinted in pursuit. Beyond, B-beam half-stood, his eyes horrified. He shouted, “Rick! No!”
I didn’t have time for him. The melk raced away, and nothing popping up in its face was going to stop it now. I was gaining ... it was fast ... too damn fast ... I swung the skull at the flashing hoof, and connected. Again. Throwing it off, slowing it just enough. The half-skull and part-horn made a good bludgeon. I smacked a knee, and it wheeled in rage and caught me across the face and chest with its horns.
I dropped on my back. I got in one grazing blow across the neck as it was turning away, and then it was running and I rolled to my feet and chased it again. There was a feathery feel to my run. My lungs and legs thought I was dying. But the melk shook its head as it ran, and I caught up far enough to swing at its hooves.
This time it didn’t turn to attack. Running with something whacking at its feet, it just gradually lost ground. I delivered a two-handed blow to the base of its neck. Swung again and lost my balance and tumbled, caught the roll on my shoulder, had to go back for the skull. Then I ran, floating, recovering lost ground, and suddenly realized that the grass was stirring all around me. I was surrounded by the black shadows of the Folk.
I caught up.
A swing at the head only got the horns. I hammered at the neck, just behind the head. It tumbled, and tried to get to its feet, and I beat it until it fell over. I used the skull like an ax ... murdering it ... and suddenly black bodies flowed out of the fat grass and tore at the melk. B-beam got a good grip on the horns and snapped the neck.
I sat down.
He handed me the line: knife, beamer, canteen. He was almost as winded as I was. He whispered, “Damn fool, you weren’t—”
“Wrong.” I didn’t have breath for more. I drank from my canteen, paused to gasp, drank again. Then I turned the beamer on a meaty thigh. The Folk must have been waiting for me to make my choice. They now attacked the forequarters.
I crouched, panting, holding the beamer on the meat until it sizzled, until it smoked, until the smell of it told my belly it was ready.
The heaving of my chest had eased. I handed the knife to B-beam. “Carve us some of that. Eat as much as you can. Courtesy to our hosts.”
He did. He gave me a chunk that I needed both hands to hold. It was too hot; I had to juggle it. B-beam said, “You used a weapon.”
“I used a club,” I said. I bit into the meat. Ecstasy! The famine was over. I hadn’t cooked it enough, and so what? I choked down enough to clear my mouth and said, “Humans don’t use teeth and claws. The Folk know that. They wanted to see us in action. My evolution includes a club.”
ONE NIGHT AT THE DRACO TAVERN
This was the script used for Kathy Sanders’s group presentation at the WorldCon Masquerade, Los Angeles, 1984. Steven Barnes played “Rick Schumann.” I played “Larry.”
Drew and Kathy Sanders generally win major awards in the Masquerades. In 1984 Drew was running the Masquerade. Kathy was on her own.
She began making costumes more than a year early. By the time she finished she had duplicated a dozen of the most alien characters from my stories.
I wrote the script. Steven and I recorded the sound background.
The kzin and thrint costumes were hot. I had to fan the occupants through their open mouths. The puppeteer must have been worse yet, though it was designed so that Kathy was half out of it until we were called.
I’d seen previous attempts at a Pierson’s puppeteer costume. A puppeteer has three legs and two heads. Kathy in her costume had one leg bound up against her chest; heads empty and propped up (they flopped over the first time she tried it); and her arms for the forelegs, on short stilts because human arms aren’t long enough. Muscle structure was quilted in, following the Bonnie Dalzell illustration for Ballantine Books, and it looked amazingly lifelike.
She wasn’t exactly agile, though.
We won the Master’s Award for “Funniest.”
ONSTAGE:
RICK SCHUMANN behind bar. The bar is vertical to the audience.
YELLOW BUGS around a table.
WUNDERLANDER and GROG at the bar.
QARASHT seated alone, sense cluster retracted.
ACTION, simultaneously—
RICK finishes preparing the BUGS’ order, circles bar and takes them a tray with enough liqueur glasses.
LARRY: Here you are, gentlemen.
RICK: Here you are, gentlemen.
BUGS: Queepee? [sound done with whistle or some such]
LARRY enters, pulling down zipper or opening buttons and shaking off the cold or the heat (to signal his entry from outside) while he looks around. He heads for the
QARASHT.
MACHINE PEOPLE GIRL enters, goes to QARASHT.
QARASHT extrudes sense cluster as she enters.
RICK moves behind the bar and goes to work, interrupting himself to talk and gesture expansively. He’s showing off, as if he owns the customers too.
Other aliens are entering—
ENTER:
JINXIAN and CRASHLANDER together
BELTER (?)
ENTER MOTIE MEDIATOR
ENTER KZIN and PUPPETEER, together
LARRY doesn’t get the joke.
ENTER THRINT
LARRY turns to look at Thrint.
RICK interrupts himself to circle the bar, rapidly, carrying LARRY’s drink.
RICK gives the drink to THRINT, hastily, and bowing low.
LARRY moves to intercept, too slow.
KZIN is holding a chair for the THRINT. JINXIAN moves a table for him.
FREEZE FRAME
EXEUNT [the hale help the clumsier costumes]
THE HEIGTS
Clickety-ponk came wafting down the magnetic fields above Siberia in the winter of 2041, the fourteenth Chirpsithra liner to visit Earth in twenty-three years. My translator says that Clickety-ponk is a pun that means Weary Light or Weary from Mating. The vast soap bubble of a ship carried forty-one individuals of eight sapient species, five of them unknown to me. All strangers, of course. We’ll not see the same liner twice in the same millennium.
One pair, called Warblers, looked like featherless birds. They spent a Tuesday making an aerie just under my ceiling. Tuesday night they sang for us, a concert attended by all the ship’s wild variety of crew and passengers. We weren’t expected to serve their drinks too, because the Warblers wanted us in the audience, but the seating! The Draco Tavern isn’t designed as a concert hall.
But the birds were good! They held us rapt. They didn’t need microphones, and translators gave us the sense of the lyrics.
Warblers might have been designed by Dick Rutan. A Warbler was the size of a winning jockey, with wings built something like a hawk’s under a slick skin of what looked like natural cellophane. Above a foreshortened beak its head bulged: streamlining sacrificed for a larger brain, porcelain-white eyes that faced straight forward, and stiff canards steered by jaw muscles. They didn’t use breathers. They wouldn’t touch alcohol. They bought their food in the butcher shops in Mount Forel Town, and warmed it in a microwave oven. Their life-support sigils were almost the same as a human’s, tefee tee hatch nex ool, and that was all I needed to keep them happy.
They spent a day on the Internet doing the kind of research a tourist needs. Gail helped with that.
Thursday they were gone.
Monday morning they were back, high overhead in their aerie, not talking to anyone.
Monday evening a man and two children came in.
They had a Midwestern look, lanky and longheaded, with straight black hair. The boy looked about eleven, the girl twelve or thirteen. The children gaped at the aliens. The chirps and some others waved; the children waved back. They were delighted, I judged, but the man was dogged and suspicious. He did not look like a dignitary or anthropologist or university man.
Nobody crosses Siberian tundra to the Draco Tavern in winter just for a drink, and we don’t encoura
ge children. I said, “Door, do these have business here?”
The voice of the door, and of the translators and all our other semi-independent systems, said, “This entity spoke of urgent legal business. He asserts that his boy was attacked.”
I watched the man approach the bar, holding tight to the hands of the children, who would have hared off among the tables. “Who is he?”
“Z. Wayne Bennett, thirty-two, resides in Ketchum, Idaho, with wife Ida, thirty-five, two children—”
“Pause,” I said, because translators at various tables were yammering. “Schumann here.”
“Immature life-forms are dangerous, should not be admitted, not likely to be sapient!”
“Who speaks?”
“I am Ambassador-Regent Ven! We am not to be endangered !” The system drew blinking green halos around four Lungfish in an over-illuminated vat of water on tractor treads.
All of them? Make that thirty-eight individuals.
I said, “Translator, I’m on it. Tell them that they’ll be protected.”
“Tell all species?”
“Tell the most timid. Tell Ambassador-Regent Ven and whoever else is complaining. Can you handle it?”
“Yes.” I heard hoots and whistles and a low rumble and a skittery rattlesnake sound, alien voices all jabbering at once: the Draco Tavern’s translators momentarily linked to perform one service.
Bennett had nearly reached the bar when he suddenly pulled the children against him, pointed straight up, and screamed, “That’s them!”
The Lungfish all burrowed straight down into mud. The rest of us all looked up.
The Tavern is built to Chirpsithra design, though humans were the builders and the place is human-friendly. Chirpsithra stand eleven feet tall, and they like head room. Bennett was looking forty feet up to the aerie the birds had built under the ceiling.
Two Warbler faces stared back for a moment, and then one bird launched and tilted into a tight spiral. It wore a thick silver plate with a small rocket pod sticking up on a fin, the base held in place by webbing across its puffer-pigeon chest.
Damage control needed I eeled around from behind the bar, big smile, hand extended. “I’m Rick Schumann,” I said. “You’d be Z. Wayne Bennett?”
He didn’t look down, but his hand reached out. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor Schumann. This is Lilly, this is Hammett. Ham was the one attacked. What are you doing about these undead birds?”
“Hi Ham, hi Lilly.” I shook their hands. “Attacked?”
The boy grinned. In a sudden motion he peeled off his T-shirt. There were small red marks on both sides of both shoulders, nine marks and a Band-Aid.
Aw shit.
The Warbler dropped lower. He was giving Bennett the creeps. For an instant I saw the Warbler as he did: a cross between a plucked chicken and a bluebellied demon, vicious beak, huge claws built for ripping, the head too human or not human enough. He landed halfway across the main room, on an empty table, and waited.
A child-stealing alien was about the worst publicity I could think of. “I don’t see police,” I said. “Or reporters.”
“You will,” Bennett said, “if we don’t get this settled. Do I have to worry that my boy got infected with something weird?”
“No, trust me on that” No visitor carries parasites. It’s damn few alien bacteria that have an interest ... though I’m hosting one myself. That one got through by outwitting the medics.
“Here.” I fixed a translator to his shirt collar. “Let me talk.” He nodded once, jaw clenched. I led him and the children to the bird’s table.
We had an audience. Even the Lungfish had come out to watch.
The bird watched with unruffled dignity as I settled the Bennetts in chairs. I told it, “I’m Rick Schumann, speaking for—”
“I know you. That one shot my mate.”
Bennett glared. I spoke before he could. “Your mate is accused of stealing a child.”
“Stealing was not her intent, nor mine. We pick up chosen prey, fly in a circle of designated circumference, and set it down. No harm—”
“Her claws pierced his skin.”
“We must acquire gloves. Hammett Bennett, we are sorry for your hurt. Doctor Schumann, this worked out well enough in France when I took prey.”
Bennett didn’t like that, though he held his tongue. I said, “What are your names?”
The bird shrieked musically, twice, then said, “I have been called Langue d’Argent.” My translator said, “Silver Tongue.”
The United Nations Free Sky (or “Free Spy”) Treaty allows satellites to pass over any country at ninety kilometers or above, and any observer may watch it if he can. The Warblers took a lens lander, the smallest of Clickety-ponk’s boats, a quarter around the planet and down in Alsace. The boat’s stealthing was minimal and the sky, as Silver Tongue described it, was full of hot air balloons that day, but the Warblers would be gone before anyone could react.
What kind of idiots had the Chirps wished upon us this time? “In front of a sky full of witnesses, did you attack a creature that wore clothing?”
“I lifted and carried away a local sapient, a human child whom I had observed with family. These are not mere customs, but lessons hard learned. A creature not sapient can die of the shock or kill itself trying to break free, and herders or conservationists blame us. With a sapient creature we can reason, we can deal.
“The boy Andre Palanque-Delabrouille will verify that we agreed. I told him I had given him a ride; he accepted that. His female guardian screamed that I was an evil genie. When I offered a silver bar, she called me a silver-tongued genie, but she took it.”
I said, “Now, I’m still playing catch-up, so give me a sanity check here—”
“We’re sane.”
“I’ll decide that. You saw a child with an adult woman? You swooped out of the sky and picked him up in your claws ... hands. Carried him how far?”
“Skreek!” (The translator whispered, “Two hundred twenty-three meters.”) “In a loop, then back. The game requires we go against the wind. Land, then talk to woman Rosanne Palanque-Delabrouille.”
“Have you given thought to everything that might have gone wrong?”
“Much thought.”
“She was an older adult. In good health? She might have died of shock. The boy will be afraid of plucked chickens for the rest of his life. You offered her silver to say she is the boy’s guardian? What if she lied?”
“Surname was the same.”
“Did she show you identification?” He shrugged; feathers would have ruffled if he had evolved them. “Dammit. You’d have no contract. The news might be breaking on CNN right now. A child attacked by aliens ... twice now. The Chirpsithra ships could be asked to leave Earth.”
“We harm nobody, and the hunt is fair,” Silver Tongue said.
Z. Wayne Bennett spoke for the first time. “Don’t give me that! Do you think I can’t see you’re wearing a flying belt?”
Bennett might be more sophisticated than he looked. Then again, Silver Tongue’s gear looked very like a Buck Rogers flying belt. Thrashing for an answer to Bennett’s accusation, I noticed how many optical organs were pointed our way, and had my first bright idea.
“Z. Wayne, we’re being stared at. I don’t like it. Do you? Silver Tongue, is there room in your aerie?”
“There is room—”
“We can’t fly,” Z. Wayne said belligerently.
But I had the kids’ interest. I said, “There’s an elevator.”
We’d used it to lift amazing quantities of meat. It was just a flat plate, wide enough for all of us. Z. Wayne’s kids pulled him onto it against some resistance. We went up like a dream, with nothing between us and the drop, and unearthly varieties of sapience spread out below us. I was ready to snatch at a child, but Z. Wayne never let go of them.
Silver Tongue’s mate awaited our arrival, then backed away to give us room. We stepped out onto spongy wickerwork woven from Siberian
vegetation.
Her right side was swollen way out of proportion, a foam plastic pillow outlining a wing bound tight along her torso. The skin of her face was ravaged and smeared with gel, with two pocks in her beak and a patch over one eye.
Her belly was the same sky blue as her mate’s. Where his back was a muddle of earth colors, hers was an elaborate scarlet design outlined in silver. I think the silver was tattooed onto a pattern evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic. I’ve never been sure. I picture him riding the wind high up, camouflaged against predators higher yet while he looked down for the bright flash and pattern of a possible mate. Mated, he would hunt for them both.
Bennett said, forcing himself, “Ma’am, how are you?”
She said, “Healing, thank you, Mr. Bennett. My eye is already replaced. Wing bones are growing in a template. My name is Sshreekeetht. How are you, Hammett?”
“Healing too.” She had him awed. “Silverback,” he said.
“Show her,” his father ordered.
The boy took off his shirt. Silverback looked him over, but came no closer. She said, “Z. Wayne Bennett, you must be wonderfully accurate with a shotgun.”
“I didn’t have the right load. If you’d been closer, you’d be dead.”
“You shot me when I was carrying Ham, yet the boy took no harm.” She paused to let us all realize how seriously the man had risked his son’s life, then said, “No harm except that my hands convulsed when the blast hit me. Of course we must pay extra for his hurt.”
“I thought it was more dangerous to leave him in a predator’s grip.”
She didn’t answer. Bennett turned red. He said, “You hunted him wearing a flying belt.”
