The Draco Tavern Read online

  She turned to see who had come through the line of airlocks.

  Bazin was an aerodynamic shape. He might have been mistaken for a thousand-pound turtle, but he moved more briskly, even with sixty pounds of life support and sensor gear mounted on his shell. I’d spoken with him when we arranged for CBS to interview him.

  Sarah said, “I’ve seen Bazin on television. Is he, what, a philosopher? Cosmologist?”

  The Bebebebeque were amused. “No!”

  “I thought he was something like a stuntman. Rick?” She turned to me. “Do you know—”

  I said, “Even before Fly By Wire made orbit, my customers all knew he was coming.” I poured out a row of tiny golden seeds in front of the Bebebebeque, and gave Sarah her water. “Out there among the stars, he’s a star. Bazin is a daredevil, a risk taker. Maybe he does some exploring too, but mostly he’s looking for the biggest thrill. He makes, um, entertainments. Wire him up and you can record what he experiences. If he ever gets killed, they’ll record that too.”

  I stepped outside the privacy shield around the big table, so he could hear me, and shouted, “Bazin!”

  Bazin swerved toward us. The turtle-analogue’s own voice was a series of eructations from under his flexible shell. His translator cried, “Rick! What is the topic?”

  I said, “The topic is cosmology.”

  He joined them at the big table. But more customers had come in, so I missed the rest of that conversation.

  Most of Earth has to put up with television sets, but the Chirpsithra had long since set up a huge holo wall in the Draco Tavern. Generally we let it jump randomly between news channels. Bazin was with us a few days later, while we watched the Today interview.

  “I haven’t decided what I’ll do on Earth,” Bazin’s image told Wade Hannofer, Today’s talking head. “I don’t know what Earth has to offer yet, and of course local governments have territorial rights. I welcome suggestions.”

  Hannofer asked, “Have you seen the Grand Canyon?”

  Bazin brushed it off. “I have viewed Valles Marinaris on Mars. When I am done with Earth, I will sail it in a balloon.”

  “Mons Olympus?”

  “Too shallow. A climb would be a mere walk. Maybe I’ll climb Everest.” In close-up I saw the gleam of his shell, polished to a mirror. The Bazin beside me had lost some polish. A webbing of old cracks showed deep in his shell. I remembered an actor, Jackie Chan, who had a scar for every movie he’d made.

  The image of Wade Hannofer waved around at the image of the Draco Tavern. “Some of the visitors here know when they’ll die. Some are immortal. What are you?”

  “I have longevity,” Bazin said. “Nanosurgery has turned off the death wish in my genetics. I may be killed, but I will not die naturally.”

  Afterward Bazin asked me, “Did you enjoy the interview?”

  “They cut too much,” I said.

  “I was only talking. They’ll pay more attention when I test the Earth for its potential.”

  We watched Bazin as he went about the Earth. My customers came less often, though Fly By Wire continued to orbit the Moon.

  In Disneyland Bazin took the “Star Tours” ride three times straight.

  In a movie theater, the only viewer, he watched Nightmare on Elm Street, The Thing, and Die Hard.

  He made news by riding roller coasters: the tallest, the steepest, the fastest. At all three parks they had to alter a car for him.

  The commentators were getting disgusted when Bazin moved into Phase Two. He strung a wire across the Grand Canyon and crawled across it—with a groove stapled to his belly plate, and a small pack added to the gear on his back. We learned later that that was a pop-out hang glider.

  He went hang gliding, using his own aerodynamic shape and modified Swim-Fins on his flattened hands and feet to steer toward a target, popping his parachute at the last possible moment.

  He jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge with a bungee cord, after elaborate testing.

  He went white-water rafting on the Colorado River. The humans wore life vests; he wore artificial gills. When the raft tumbled, his shell bumped rocks until he could recover.

  I began to see elements of Bazin’s style. He did every dangerous thing in the safest possible fashion.

  He must have studied Earth’s history of flamboyant stunts. Most of what we had to offer didn’t apply to him. On Earth he needed life support, but where did life support end and protection begin? With his shell and his low center of gravity and an oxygen source, he could plod up Mount Everest with no danger. With sufficient padding he could go over Niagara Falls, and so what? What is skydiving if you have antigravity?

  In his absence the Draco Tavern’s clientele discussed his adventures. They told of his testing new forms of armor, ballooning through a superJovian free floater, skating across a lake of molten sulfur.

  On Earth a chartered aircraft set him down at the South Pole, with equipment piled on a dogsled and more balanced on his shell. He walked out over several weeks, pulling the sled. The huskies he treated as pets.

  He walked through Death Valley, carrying a small version of what they sold in the Sahara and Los Angeles, a device that condenses water out of the air. I wondered why.

  After seven months’ absence, Sarah Winchell came back. The Tavern was empty. She picked the big table. I brought cappuccinos and joined her.

  “I’ve been on a Stephen King binge,” she said.

  I said, “He was good.”

  “I’ve got his whole library on here.” She tapped her bookplate. “When you spend a lot of time traveling, you need a good library. Otherwise you’ll go nuts. But I’ve been wondering, why do we want to be scared?”

  A trio of brown-furred quadrupeds with manipulators around their mouths joined us but didn’t interrupt. I said, “Maybe we just want to forget what we’re really scared of.”

  Sarah asked, “What would that be?”

  I said, “Taxes. Terrorists. Slipping on a rainy sidewalk. Cancer. If we do everything right, we grow old. Well and good. Most star-traveling species know roughly what that means for them. For a Flutterby, it’s rebirth as a brainless mating machine, ecstacy before death. For humans, it’s swollen joints, failing organs, maybe Alzheimer’s. You Horka, you have longevity, don’t you? What do you see in your future?”

  One of the furry quadrupeds answered, “I see what was always my doom. Bones turned brittle, nerves slowed, until a prey takes me as predator. We only postpone. But other species may postpone forever. They can lose all sense of place, of continuity. Like this one,” as a Chirpsithra joined us.

  “We’re all afraid of some things,” Sarah said. “A writer like Ray Bradbury can show you what he’s afraid of. But there must be horrors we don’t even dream about.”

  One Hork said, “Dream?”

  I grinned and left her to explain dreaming. And a shape like an overstreamlined turtle slid through the low-and-wide airlock.

  “Bazin!”

  “Rick! I see you lack for customers. What’s the topic?”

  “Fear. What can I bring you?”

  He wanted an array of consommés. While he joined the big table, I went for soup, a sparker for the Chirp, and dark beer for the Horka.

  When I came back Sarah was saying, “H. P. Lovecraft tried to create the fear of something too big, too powerful, too different, too old. So did Lord Dunsany. Stephen Baxter goes way further. He’s not trying to scare you, he just reaches further than most minds can stand.”

  Bazin asked, “Might you yourself grow too old?”

  “Well, those old writers were mostly talking about the past. Wizards a thousand years old, or ten thousand—” The Chirp was chittering laughter and Bazin’s head had withdrawn into his shell, but she plowed on. “—Races older than humanity. Old enough that they’d know everything; they’d win any fight using techniques forgotten long ago. It’s one way to tell a story.”

  “It’s a sometime truth,” Bazin said, “although one would need greater ag
e than that! But what if you yourself were the old one? Ultimately there would be nothing of interest.”

  She thought about that. “There’d be new things to learn.”

  The Chirpsithra said, “That is not sure at all. It grows more difficult to hold a civilization together as the universe expands. Have you learned yet that the expansion is accelerating? The galaxies fly apart faster and faster.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “The galaxies themselves evaporate, some stars spinning out of the lens, some dropping into the black holes at the center. In ten billion years I see no possible way to connect cultures. The proton is unstable too. In some vast amount of time we’ll have nothing but electrons and positrons all light-years apart, and nothing interesting will happen ever again. Is this not something to inspire fear?”

  Sarah laughed. “Would you call that ‘existential fear’? It takes too long!”

  Bazin poked his head out of his shell. “It certainly frightens me,” he said.

  “Does it?”

  “I cannot even think about it. I certainly do not intend to face it. Can you extrapolate me as the last cluster of protons in the universe? I must have some reassurance that I will not live to see all of this slow to a stop.”

  Is that why ... ? I didn’t ask, because Bazin was pulling into himself. Horn caps on his knees and skull blocked holes, locking his shell against intrusion. This was what he would look like at the end of the universe.

  We next saw Bazin riding a kayak over a succession of waterfalls. Afterward he disappeared into a system of caves in the Mindanao Trench. He hasn’t been seen since. We get occasional transmissions.

  STORM FRONT

  The dome that covers the Draco Tavern can be set to show almost anything. It can be a window. It can show recordings across the whole dome, or break up into dozens of frames. We can get live feeds from anywhere in this world or others. Moving among the tables on a busy night, I’m subjected to a bewildering variety of scenery.

  Tonight’s crew ran to sophisticates: aliens of a wide variety, but they all knew how to use the visuals to tell stories or back up arguments. Worlds danced around me, and obscene medical animations, and fractal geometries. This night had already run more than thirty hours since Spin Constant’s lander came down from the Moon. When I got back to the bar, I set the view to transparent just to give my eyes a rest.

  The sun was trying to rise, not quite making it in Siberian February; just enough to put a golden glow on the horizon. It washed out other stars, but the new star blazed brightly within the glow.

  A Chirpsithra officer folded herself into a chair at the bar. I offered her a sparker. “We came to view that,” she said. “It’s already in its later stages, but we have good recordings. Ssss,” as current flowed through her nervous system. “We saw the neutrino wake and were able to slow down for the best view.”

  “Is that footage available?”

  “Surely, for a price.”

  We get newsfolk in the Draco Tavern. I’d drop the word.

  Beneath the new star, a yellow-white light came rolling across the ice. I waved at it. “Is that one of yours?”

  “Not a passenger,” the Chirp said. “A refugee.”

  The visitor rolled in like a big lamp, a five-foot-tall sphere glowing yellow-white, its intensity turned down now. It bumped along the shock-absorbing floor. It was heavy.

  That glow must be riding lights, I thought, so that passersby don’t get rolled over. If that color had been blackbody temperature, the Draco Tavern would have burned. Nonetheless the sphere was hot As it approached the bar I felt welcome warmth on my face. In Siberia in winter, you never quite get warm enough. Various customers, human and not, turned toward the visitor or expanded their surface areas. Others shied away, of course. The Tavern gets all kinds.

  I asked, “What’ll it be?” Trusting the translator I was sure it carried.

  “Only your company,” the visitor said. “You don’t store hot plasma, I take it. How strange this place is!”

  “Compared to what?”

  “Compared to my home. Let me show you.” A tendril of light sparked on the thing’s surface. In response, a triangular window formed in the dome, shedding blue-white light with whorls in it.

  “Damp that,” the Chirpsithra officer ordered. The light dimmed. Even so, it would put out too much heat if it stayed on. I tried to guess what I was looking at. “One of those star-hugging gas giant planets?”

  “A sun. That sun.” A sparkling tendril waved out at the brilliant pinpoint.

  The pictures in my head turned over. I was looking at a containment for a plasma confined at X-ray temperatures.

  Refugee, the Chirp had said. I said, “Sorry.”

  “There was a plague,” the refugee said. “A self-replicating magnetic effect that damps us from the inside. Before we could control it there were only eleven of us left. Too few, far too few, to regain control of our weather. Spin Constant came in the last breath of time to save nine of us.”

  The Chirp said, “We’ll be able to read out their memories with a few years of study. That won’t sell to just anyone.”

  You can hear, and sometimes you can buy, peculiar nightmares in the Draco Tavern.

  I flinched from increasing the refugee’s pain, but he seemed willing to talk. I asked, “Weather?”

  “The weather in a star can become chaotic, out of balance. Like that.” Again the refugee gestured at the nova in Earth’s sky. The sunset light had died, and it had become more brilliant yet, with shock-wave patterns traced around it.

  To the Chirpsithra, I said, “That’s too close for comfort, isn’t it? Close enough to hurt us.”

  “We can sell you some shielding,” she said.

  “Good.” Of course someone would have to explain this matter of cosmic rays and a ruined ozone shield to professional politicians in the United Nations. It would be like talking to handicapped children, but otherwise the funds wouldn’t emerge.

  I decided that wasn’t my problem. I asked the refugee, “What will you do now?”

  “We hope to settle in Sol, if the locals make us welcome.”

  “Sol?” Our sun. “Locals?”

  The Chirp was amused. She asked me, “Did you think the steady weather in your star was an accident? Most stars on the main sequence have a population that knows at least rudiments of weather control. Any telescope can tell you whether they do it well or badly. In Sol they’re a little clumsy. Bigger stars are harder to control. In their twilight years an intelligent species can lose the balance. Then there are novas and other disturbances.”

  I nodded as if I’d known that all along. “Would they, the locals, be interested in talking to us?” It seemed unlikely that they would visit the Draco Tavern, or come to this cold rock at all. But they’d have knowledge to contribute, and who knows? Human mathematicians and computers might contribute something their Weather Department could use.

  The Chirp said, “I’ll speak to them when we negotiate for Fireball,” indicating the refugee, “and his people. That won’t be soon. We should quarantine them for a bit to be sure they’re not contagious.”

  An anthropologist was signaling for a refill—gin and tonic, she being human—and I turned away to make it. But the word sat in my head like a time bomb. Contagious. Contagious?

  ... Beings deep within the sun, all dead of Fireball’s magnetic contagion. How would we know? We’d never detected them when they were alive. The sun a vast graveyard, sunspots boiling uncontrolled across the photosphere, X-ray-temperature storms forming deep within. Masses sinking toward the center, temperatures rising ... the sun rings like a great gong ...

  I asked, “How long a quarantine?” and turned around.

  But the Chirpsithra officer and his fiery refugee had gone off to another table.

  THE SLOW ONES

  He landed a small plane at the Mount Forel Spaceport, with a lot more runway than he needed. He’d phoned ahead. I watched him for a while, making his way o
n foot along the three-kilometer path that leads down to the Draco Tavern. He took his sweet time, stopping to pan across the alien foliage with the video-camera bump on his forehead.

  When he stopped to rest, I went out to meet him. What the heck, the Tavern was clean and in good repair and life was turning dull.

  This strip of land between the airlocks and the foothills is covered with strange plants, purple ground cover too dry to be moss, and big odd shapes that you might take for wind-shaped rocks. He was looking about him, delighted and a little awed, as he perched on one of the slow ones. This one looks like a rock wind-smoothed into the shape of an inverted boat. I was amused.

  “Thank you for letting me come, Mr. Schumann,” he said. He was a black-haired white American, medium height, with a smile that might have been ingratiating. The vid camera was a glittering dot on his forehead. “Matthew Taper. I’m with CDC Network. I hope I won’t keep you long.”

  “No problem. There aren’t any ships in and I’ve got lots of free time.”

  “Ah. Good.” He slid over to make room for me on the Type Two Slowlife. I sat. He hadn’t noticed a second inverted-boat-shaped rock, this one’s mate, fifty meters further back.

  He pointed at a cube of clear yellow plastic set in the Draco Tavern’s wall. There was a shadow inside it: a dark aerodynamic shape like a large turtle with big clawed feet and a head partly retracted. Taper asked, “Is that an alien or a sculpture? Or a hologram?”

  “Alien,” I said. “Speedy, I’ve been calling it. It’s almost through the jelly lock.”

  “That’s an airlock? Made of jelly?”

  “They’re all airlocks, that whole line along the front of the Tavern. For Speedy we’ve got this block of plastic ... not jelly, just memory plastic soft enough to deform. He’ll walk through it, but slowly, and it won’t lose air in either direction.”