by Larry Niven
Of course I could see problems. “Your environmental designation—”
“Tee tee asterisk squiggle ool,” she said, “but my supplement box compensates.” The caterpillar lifted a feeler to tap the flat bag that rode her back. “I can tolerate a tee tee hatch nex ool environment and Earth’s temperature and humidity spectrum. Ultraviolet light would be dangerous; will I need to spend time outside?”
“No. Why do you want to do this?”
“My reasons will not harm you nor your dependents. I will work for food and shelter.”
I asked, “Are you underage?”
Our translators may have botched that. She said, “I am older than you are. Child-labor laws cannot apply. Wish you to know if I am an adult? Of course not I am an incipient female, maturity delayed. Wish you to know if I can bind myself with promises? I can.”
Aurora didn’t have a name until I gave her one.
Aurora worked for scale: there’s a union in Mount Forel Town. Still, scale is cheap. My staff has to face daily crises never described outside of old science fiction magazines. They all have doctorates, and they all work for high salaries.
Food and housing might be a problem. Aurora had said that nourishment was covered. Her backbag included a supplement box that would take care of allergies and dietary deficiencies, and the “ool” designation gave her an herbivorous but flexible diet. As for housing, I had to improvise. The food storage lockers under the Tavern are versatile—have to be—so we reprogrammed one of those.
Some of the human anthropologists who came in were surprised and amused. I don’t believe any of my alien customers were startled to find Aurora serving their drinks and such, barring one, and that was her own species.
They wriggled in through the long-and-low airlock, all six of them, two days after Aurora started work. They ordered as usual: a green glop, rich in fiber, stored cool but not frozen, and they needed lots. I sent Aurora with it. Their eyestalks avoided her, scanned in wide arcs around her and the big bowl of glop, as they slithered toward the long-and-low airlock. One stopped to register a credit to pay for the abandoned order. They didn’t speak to Aurora.
Aurora seemed pleased afterward. When I asked her about it, she claimed it was personal, swore it wouldn’t affect the Draco Tavern’s business, and refused to speak further on the subject.
The Chirpsithra run the interstellar liners. They’re talkative creatures who claim to own the galaxy. They do, if you only count red dwarf stars. The Draco Tavern was built according to their plans, partly financed by them too. They’re generally eager to help when problems arise. But when something annoys them, I’ve known them to play practical jokes.
So I try not to bother the Chirpsithra every time I need data. I have other options.
For instance: the translator devices. They have access to a vast library. It’s hard to believe that something that fits in a large pocket or small purse carries that much storage, but it certainly doesn’t use the computers on the Chirpsithra liners. The liners orbit the Moon. There would be a lightspeed delay, and there isn’t.
I think the pocket translators must be artificial intelligences in their own right.
I tried: {Flutterby [with a “species” suffix] + immature + employment} and got this:
Plant-eater, carbon base, rocky/oxygen/water world, G4 sun. Interplanetary-level industry. Immature Flutterbies above sixty-one point eight kilograms may enter binding contracts to perform service. Servants and machinery take one pronoun; citizens take another.
(Slaves were equivalent to machinery? That sounded like a rigid caste system at work.)
{Flutterby + travel} got me too much material, a long lifetime’s study. {Flutterby + interstellar travel + contractual} told me what hundreds of the Flutterby species had done to themselves in order to ride the Chirpsithra liners. Armed with that I confronted Aurora.
It was a dead morning: just us two and a sessile creature drinking alone. I asked, “How old are you, Aurora?”
“In Earth orbits, near seventy,” she said, “ship time. Longer than that given relativistic effects.” She reared up to polish the big mirror over the bar, avoiding my eyes, catching them anyway in the reflection. “We postpone our maturity by chemical means.”
“I can see wanting to live a long time,” I said. “Why not grow up first?”
“Rick, how can you bear to ask such personal questions of a waitron?”
“Why not?”
“But we are not of similar caste and rank!”
“I’m your boss,” I said. “I’d be handicapped if I didn’t know something about you.”
Her eyestalks telescoped forward and back, studying me. “Very well. Our mature form is little more than a sex organ with wings. We have no digestive organs and little brains. We live ten or eleven days after we emerge from chrysalis form,” Aurora said. “I surmise that biotamperers among the Gligstith(click)optok or Chirpsithra might contrive to make an adult Flutterby immortal, and even find some way to keep her from starving. But she would be decoration, not companion. Companions, citizens, minds are found only in children. When an elder becomes a chrysalis, she has younger sibs and children of sibs to protect her until she emerges to fly. Over hundreds of thousands of orbits our line has evolved to live longer, to postpone the mating flight so that we may become more capable of defending our genetic line.”
“These other Flutterbies, are they your sibs?”
“They are my mating group—wives and husbands,” the translator said.
“Why did they leave when they saw you?”
“I have changed caste/rank. They don’t know what to do,” she said smugly. “They can order service of me, but only in context of our positions. Else they cannot speak to me, cannot persuade me to ... persuade me of anything.”
“What would they want from you?”
“To go home.”
“Then what? Set your metabolism running again? Become an adult?” She avoided my eyes. I asked, “Mate?”
“Mate and breed and die,” she affirmed.
“What do you want, Aurora?”
“Stay here. Work here. Wait until my mating group leaves Earth.”
“What if they don’t leave?”
“Their berths are aboard Apparent Dischord. They would lose those, as will I. When the next ship arrives, I may try to get a berth. Then again, your Draco Tavern is a convergence of voyagers. Here I would find a life as interesting as theirs.”
The Flutterbies boycotted the Draco Tavern for about four months.
Then, on a day when rumor suggested that Apparent Dischord’s time was running short, all six Flutterbies filed in and split into pairs.
The Tavern was crowded. They found conversations rapidly. Corliss and Jehaneh went to take orders and didn’t come back.
The philosophy grad student, Berda Wilsonn, had returned with a classmate. They’d chosen a big table, inviting company. A Chirp officer joined them, then two Flutterbies. The others all raised their lift chairs two feet off the floor, to match the height of the Chirpsithra.
I eavesdropped a little. At the Wilsonn table it sounded like they were discussing fear. At other tables Corliss and Jehaneh were both bogged down in conversations, over-complex orders, discussions of cuisine....
It looked to me like some kind of setup.
Well, if it turned sticky, there were Chirpsithra present. I could turn to them as authorities. I left Aurora behind the bar and went to Wilsonn’s table to take their orders myself.
The Chirpsithra said, “Please, will you have an Irish coffee with us, Rick?”
“It’s a busy ... yes, of course, glad to.” I dismissed the notion of begging off. The Chirp bore rank markings: she was an officer. If this was a game, I could assume she was a player. I sat down, glanced at Aurora behind the bar.
The Chirp asked, “What are you afraid of, Rick?”
“What, now?”
“I mean in the general sense.”
“Lots of things,” I said. “
Pain. Injury. Taxes. Weird new laws. You?”
“Change, death, ignorance,” she said. “You have seen how little we Chirpsithra tolerate change, how assiduously we avoid death. We seek knowledge everywhere.”
“But don’t all living things avoid change and death? And hey, animals generally evolve better senses as they get more complex.”
“These are not universals,” said the Chirp. “Berda, would you repeat—”
“I said I sometimes have nightmares about making social mistakes,” Berda Wilsonn said. “Wouldn’t that be fear of ignorance?”
I asked, “What about pain?”
Aurora arrived.
The Chirp officer already had a sparker. I asked for a cappuccino: I’d better lay off the alcohol. While Aurora took our orders, the Flutterbies and the grads talked. I hate that Never let a waiter escape isn’t slavery; it just means don’t leave the poor waitron standing there while you talk around her. Anyway, the crosstalk was confusing my translator.
Humans, it seemed, were afraid of nearly everything.
Many species were afraid of death. Others feared loss of mind, loss of intelligence. I’ve hunted with the Folk; I said they were afraid of nothing. Damn few space travelers feared pain; they’d all found ways to block it. Gray Mourners, the males, were afraid of unprotected sex. Flutterbies?
A Flutterby told Aurora, “Green glop, temperature fifty-one degrees,” while the other asked the grads, “How would you live your life if you knew exactly when and how you were to die?”
“I remember an old science fiction story like that,” the boy, Willis, said. “Martians could see the future but not the past. Their lives just ran down like a windup toy.”
Berda said, “I could plan a lot better. My grandmother used to say, ‘If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.’ ”
Willis asked, “The menu says you can make guacamole?”
“It’s already made,” Aurora told him.
“Guacamole and Fritos,” he said, and she went away.
“There’d be less to be afraid of,” the girl said. “Even when you got old, you wouldn’t have to worry about falling off a balcony or dodging a bus. The bus either gets you or it doesn’t.”
“I suggest a different hypothesis,” the first Flutterby said. “Presume you know exactly how and when you will die, if you can survive all natural dangers. Your mind will fade first. You will die in ecstasy, and you will be too stupid to know that it’s the end for you.”
The second said, “The chrysalis form is a deep torpor. What wakes is near mindless. Digestive organs have faded too. There’s no motive except survival and mating, and then even those nerves shut down.”
The first: “Also you may pause your fate indefinitely. The danger is that all other ways to suffer or die will have more time to find you.”
The boy asked, “You’re not being hypothetical now, are you?”
“No. This is our fate, but we must still fear all other mischance. Predators, a fall, a misalignment in Apparent Dischord’s antimatter containment could rob us of our destiny. We took this risk gladly in order to see more of the universe.”
Aurora returned pushing a floating tray.
Willis dipped up some guacamole. I hid my grin with a cappuccino mug; but I’d looked first to see he hadn’t found the wrong bowl of green glop. He said, “We do the same.”
The Flutterbies seemed startled. “What? Do you really?”
“I mean we try to live as long as possible. Whatever’s currently killing our old people, we go through a lot of effort to cure it. That always means the next thing in line gets us. It was cancer and Alzheimer’s when I was growing up, because we’d cured some other diseases. Elders usually die miserably, and it sometimes takes a long time—”
“There isn’t any good way to die,” the girl snapped. She looked at the Chirpsithra. “Is there?”
The Chirp said, “You already know our answer. Some of us are many millions of Earth-orbits old. All sapient beings evade what evolution shaped us for. All meddle with their destiny, even Flutterbies. A Flutterby who succeeds at longevity will not breed. That seems very strange.”
“Death comes to all of your kinds, and always unwelcome,” the second Flutterby said. “Our death is welcome if we hang on long enough. We’ve arrested our development, but we took our risk with senses wide open.”
The Flutterbies left during a lull in the ongoing ice storm. Afterward Aurora came to me. “I must resign my post,” she said.
“You were listening to them, weren’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“Does it strike you that they were talking for you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Aurora. “They could not speak to me, but they could convey arguments in my hearing. Also they brought pheromones from adult Flutterbies. I felt protective and protected, and I heard their arguments. I know what they did to me. I know, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Pheromones. Doesn’t that strike you as unfair?” In fact the whole jape seemed monstrously unfair.
Aurora said, “We must have adults about us, to protect. Proper pheromones are released into our cabins during flight. If I remain on Earth I will not have that. I will only have the knowledge that I die without children. But, Rick, their argument cuts both ways. I go to see if they can follow their own logic.”
I paid her salary to date, and she went.
Two days later, the Draco Tavern was empty. Corliss went to visit her family in Canada. Jehaneh stayed, of course. With her two passengers—one a visiting sapient bacterium, the other our unborn child—she’s grown a bit heavy for travel. And we waited for Apparent Dischord to leave the Moon.
Instead, a floating cart parked itself outside the array of airlocks. A Chirpsithra came in and got me, the same officer who’d sat at the Wilsonn table.
I looked into the cart at six fat fluffy white bags each about my size, lightly dusted with fluffy white snow, and one growth-arrested Flutterby.
The Chirp said, “We must ask for judgment. May these immigrate?”
“I don’t make policy for the UN,” I said. “What happened?”
“It may have caught your attention—”
I lost patience. “Half my clientele that day were conspiring to get Aurora back to her berth in Apparent Dischord. Why?”
The Chirp officer said, “When clients board as a group, we prefer that they remain a group. We do not like to explain how we lost one here, one there. Others of my passengers found it amusing to help rebuild a lapsed ... family.”
“Now you’ve lost all seven,” I said. “Aurora? What happened?”
“You heard their arguments. They were sensible,” the remaining Flutterby said, “and I am persuasive. If we—if my mating group were to wait for our return to homeworld, any kind of accident might take us. If we lose even one of seven, our genetic variety might be too sparse. We owe it to our gene line to have our children immediately.”
“We? But not you.”
“One must remain to teach the children. I may still mate among the next generation.”
“Or the one after that. They bought this?”
“Rick, for most of the species I’ve met, mating has consequences, but not for us. It was not difficult to persuade my family that it is time to mate. My time will come too.”
I sighed. I asked, “ ‘Immigrate’?”
The Chirp officer said, “We don’t have convenient room aboard Apparent Dischord. Rick, your planet is wide. A few dozen refugees won’t harm you.”
“What do they eat?”
“Thank you, Rick, an excellent point. We will learn.”
At that point I knew I was stuck. I dropped the word to some news channels before I called any government agencies.
The mating dance swirls above the Draco Tavern, gloriously sharing its colors with the Aurora Borealis. They are all brilliant wings and little torso, more kite than butterfly. They mate while falling. Via movie screens and TV sets it is be
ing seen all over the Earth.
Presently they scatter across the tundra. Chirpsithra researchers have found Siberian plants the immature forms can eat, and scent-marked them so the adults can find them.
I’ll have to talk to Aurora about food supplies for future generations. The Siberian tundra isn’t exactly lush.
THE DEATH ADDICT
The Draco Tavern was nearly empty: just me and the bugs and Sarah. Sarah was complaining about the expanding universe.
She’s an angular woman with solid and elegant bones, not much flesh to cover them. She’d introduced herself to me: Dr. Sarah Winchell, anthropologist, a woman in her forties (a bit younger than myself) who had lived with apes in the wild and had now come to confront aliens. I’d have expected her to be overspecialized. Her knowledge of cosmology surprised me.
I’d brought her two mai tais, with popcorn for the Bebebebeque. Now she was drinking club soda. Her speech stayed lucid and brisk.
“The universe is expanding,” she told the ring of bugs. “Fine, I can live with that, I grew up knowing that. But the expansion is increasing. Getting faster. What could be the purpose in a universe that is forever blowing apart?”
She sat in an arc of chrome yellow bugs each about fourteen inches tall, perched around the rim of the big table. They buzzed. Their translator said, “Purpose you expected? Examine your contract!”
She laughed.
The Bebebebeque were a hive mind. They spoke with one voice. “To isolate cultures may be a way to keep novelty in the universe. Too easy communication is making the human race too uniform, is it not?”
Sarah laughed again. “We’re not uniform!”
“You seem so to us. For purpose, will you have entertainment? The puzzle of how to build civilization changes with time. Tools are invented, then better tools. If this goes on, all problems may be solved, all tools reach their perfect state. It may be that a universal expansion propelled by dark energy is expected to compensate, make communication more difficult, puzzles more interesting. Here enters Bazin; shall we ask him?”
