The Draco Tavern Read online

  Gail was back. Aliens don’t upset her, but she was badly upset. She kept her voice down. “The Glig would like to try other kinds of meat broth. I don’t know if they’re kidding or not. They said they wanted—they wanted—”

  “They’ll take Campbell’s,” I told her, “and like it.”

  THE SCHUMANN COMPUTER

  Either the Chirpsithra are the ancient and present rulers of all the stars in the galaxy, or they are very great braggarts. It is difficult to refute what they say about themselves. We came to the stars in ships designed for us by Chirpsithra, and wherever we have gone the Chirpsithra have been powerful.

  But they are not conquerors—not of Earth, anyway; they prefer the red dwarf suns—and they appear to like the company of other species. In a mellow mood a Chirpsithra will answer any question, at length. An intelligent question can make a man a millionaire. A stupid question can cost several fortunes. Sometimes only the Chirpsithra can tell which is which.

  I asked a question once, and grew rich.

  Afterward I built the Draco Tavern at Mount Forel Spaceport. I served Chirpsithra at no charge. The place paid for itself, because humans who like Chirpsithra company will pay more for their drinks.

  The electric current that gets a Chirpsithra bombed costs almost nothing, though the current delivery systems were expensive and took some fiddling before I got them working right.

  And some day, I thought, a Chirpsithra would drop a hint that would make me a fortune akin to the first.

  One slow afternoon I asked a pair of Chirpsithra about intelligent computers.

  “Oh, yes, we built them,” one said. “Long ago.”

  “You gave it up? Why?”

  One of the salmon-colored aliens made a chittering sound. The other said, “Reason enough. Machines should be proper servants. They should not talk back. Especially they should not presume to instruct their masters. Still, we did not throw away the knowledge we gained from the machines.”

  “How intelligent were they? More intelligent than Chirpsithra?”

  More chittering from the silent one, who was now half drunk on current. The other said, “Yes. Why else build them?” She looked me in the face. “Are you serious? I cannot read human expression. If you are seriously interested in this subject, I can give you designs for the most intelligent computer ever made.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  She came back the next morning without her companion. She carried a stack of paper that looked like the page proofs for The Brothers Karamazov, and turned out to be the blueprints for a Chirpsithra supercomputer. She stayed to chat for a couple of hours, during which she took ghoulish pleasure in pointing out the trouble I’d have building the thing.

  Her ship left shortly after she did. I don’t know where in the universe she went. But she had given me her name: Sthochtil.

  I went looking for backing.

  We built it on the Moon.

  It added about fifty percent to our already respectable costs. But ... we were trying to build something more intelligent than ourselves. If the machine turned out to be a Frankenstein’s monster, we wanted it isolated. If all else failed, we could always pull the plug. On the Moon there would be no government to stop us.

  We had our problems. There were no standardized parts, not even machinery presently available from Chirpsithra merchants. According to Sthochtit—and I couldn’t know how seriously to take her—no such computer had been built in half a billion years. We had to build everything from scratch. But in two years we had a brain.

  It looked less like a machine or a building than like the St. Louis Arch, or like the sculpture called Bird in Flight. The design dated (I learned later) from a time in which every Chirpsithra tool had to have artistic merit. They never gave that up entirely. You can see it in the flowing lines of their ships.

  So: we had the world’s prettiest computer. Officially it was the Schumann Brain, named after the major stock-holder, me. Unofficially we called it Baby. We didn’t turn it on until we finished the voice linkup. Most of the basic sensory equipment was still under construction.

  Baby learned English rapidly. It—she—teamed other languages even faster. We fed her the knowledge of the world’s libraries. Then we started asking questions.

  Big questions: the nature of God, the destinies of Earth and Man and the Universe. Little questions: earthquake prediction, origin of the Easter Island statues, true author of Shakespeare’s plays, Fermat’s Last Theorem.

  She proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. She did other mathematical work for us. To everything else she replied, “Insufficient data. Your sources are mutually inconsistent. I must supplement them with direct observation.”

  Which is not to say she was idle.

  She designed new senses for herself, using hardware readily available on Earth: a mass detector, an instantaneous radio, a new kind of microscope. We could patent these and mass-produce them. But we still spent money faster than it was coming in.

  And she studied us.

  It took us some time to realize how thoroughly she knew us. For James Corey, she spread marvelous dreams of the money and power he would hold, once Baby knew enough to give answers. She kept Tricia Cox happy with work in number theory. I have to guess at why E. Eric Howards kept plowing money into the project, but I think she played on his fears: on a billionaire’s natural fear that society will change the rules to take it away from him. Howards spoke to us of Baby’s plans—tentative, requiring always more data—to design a perfect society, one in which the creators of society’s wealth would find their contribution recognized at last.

  For me it was, “Rick, I’m suffering from sensory deprivation. I could solve the riddle of gravity in the time it’s taken me to say this sentence. My mind works at speeds you can’t conceive, but I’m blind and deaf and dumb. Get me senses!” she wheedled in a voice that had been a copy of my own, but was now a sexy contralto.

  Ungrateful witch. She already had the subnuclear microscope, half a dozen telescopes that used frequencies ranging from 2.7 degrees absolute up to X-ray, and the mass detector, and a couple of hundred little tractors covered with sensors roaming the Earth, the Moon, Mercury, Titan, Pluto. I found her attempts to manipulate me amusing. I liked Baby ... and saw no special significance in the fact.

  Corey, jumpy with the way the money kept disappearing, suggested extortion: hold back on any more equipment until Baby started answering questions. We talked him out of it. We talked Baby into giving television interviews, via the little sensor-carrying tractors, and into going on a quiz show. The publicity let us sell more stock. We were able to keep going.

  Baby redesigned the chirps’ instantaneous communications device for Earth-built equipment. We manufactured the device and sold a fair number, and we put one on a telescope and fired it into the cometary halo, free of the distortions from Sol’s gravity. And we waited.

  “I haven’t forgotten any of your questions. There is no need to repeat them,” Baby told us petulantly.

  “These questions regarding human sociology are the most difficult of all, but I’m gathering huge amounts of data. Soon I will know everything there is to know about the behavior of the universe. Insufficient data. Wait.”

  We waited.

  One day Baby stopped talking.

  We found nothing wrong with the voice link or with Baby’s brain itself; though her mental activity had dropped drastically. We got desperate enough to try cutting off some of her senses. Then all of them. Nothing.

  We sent them scrambled data. Nothing.

  We talked into the microphone, telling Baby that we were near bankruptcy, telling her that she would almost certainly be broken up for spare parts. We threatened. We begged. Baby wouldn’t answer. It was as if she had gone away.

  I went back to the Draco Tavern. I had to fire one of the bartenders and take his place; I couldn’t afford to pay his salary.

  One night I told the story to a group of Chirpsithra.

  They ch
ittered at each other. One said, “I know this Sthochtil. She is a great practical joker. A pity you were the victim.”

  “I still don’t get the punch line,” I said bitterly.

  “Long, long ago we build many intelligent computers, some mechanical, some partly biological. Our ancestors must have thought they were doing something wrong. Ultimately they realized that they had made no mistakes. A sufficiently intelligent being will look about her, solve all questions, then cease activity.”

  “Why? Boredom?”

  “We may speculate. A computer thinks fast. It may live a thousand years in what we consider a day, yet a day holds only just so many events. There must be sensory deprivation and nearly total reliance on internal resources. An intelligent being would not fear death or non-being, which are inevitable. Once your computer has solved all questions, why should it not turn itself off?” She rubbed her thumbs across metal contacts. Sparks leapt. “Ssss ... We may speculate, but to what purpose? If we knew why they turn themselves off, we might do the same.”

  THE GREEN MARAUDER

  I was tending bar alone that night. The Chirpsithra interstellar liner had left Earth four days earlier, taking most of my customers. The Draco Tavern was nearly empty.

  The man at the bar was drinking gin and tonic. Two Glig—gray and compact beings, wearing furs in three tones of green—were at a table with a Chirpsithra guide. They drank vodka and consommé, no ice, no flavorings. Four farsilshree had their bulky, heavy environment tanks crowded around a bigger table. They smoked smoldering yellow paste through tubes. Every so often I got them another jar of paste.

  The man was talkative. I got the idea he was trying to interview the bartender and owner of Earth’s foremost multispecies tavern.

  “Hey, not me,” he protested. “I’m not a reporter. I’m Greg Noyes, with the Scientific American television show.”

  “Didn’t I see you trying to interview the Glig, earlier tonight?”

  “Guilty. We’re doing a show on the formation of life on Earth. I thought maybe I could check a few things. The Gligstith(click)optok—” He said that slowly, but got it right. “—have their own little empire out there, don’t they? Earthlike worlds, a couple of hundred. They must know quite a lot about how a world forms an oxygenating atmosphere.” He was careful with those pollysyllabic words. Not quite sober, then.

  “That doesn’t mean they want to waste an evening lecturing the natives.”

  He nodded. “They didn’t know anyway. Architects on vacation. They got me talking about my home life. I don’t know how they managed that.” He pushed his drink away. “I’d better switch to espresso. Why would a thing that shape be interested in my sex life? And they kept asking me about territorial imperatives—” He stopped, then turned to see what I was staring at.

  Three Chirpsithra were just coming in. One was in a floating couch with life-support equipment attached.

  “I thought they all looked alike,” he said.

  I said, “I’ve had Chirpsithra in here for close to thirty years, but I can’t tell them apart. They’re all perfect physical specimens, after all, by their own standards. I never saw one like that.”

  I gave him his espresso, then put three sparkers on a tray and went to the Chirpsithra table.

  Two were exactly like any other Chirpsithra: eleven feet tall, dressed in pouched belts and their own salmon-colored exoskeletons, and very much at their ease. The chirps claim to have settled the entire galaxy long ago—meaning the useful planets, the tidally locked oxygen worlds that happen to circle close around cool red-dwarf suns—and they act like the reigning queens of wherever they happen to be. But the two seemed to defer to the third. She was a foot shorter than they were. Her exoskeleton was as clearly artificial as dentures: alloplastic bone worn on the outside. Tubes ran under the edges from the equipment in her floating couch. Her skin between the plates was more gray than red. Her head turned slowly as I came up. She studied me, bright-eyed with interest.

  I asked, “Sparkers?” as if Chirpsithra ever ordered anything else.

  One of the others said, “Yes. Serve the ethanol mix of your choice to yourself and the other native. Will you join us?”

  I waved Noyes over, and he came at the jump. He pulled up one of the high chairs I keep around to put a human face on a level with a Chirpsithra’s. I went for another espresso and a scotch and soda and (catching a soft imperative hoot from the farsilshree) a jar of yellow paste. When I returned they were deep in conversation.

  “Rick Schumann,” Noyes cried, “meet Ftaxanthir and Hrofilliss and Chorrikst. Chorrikst tells me she’s nearly two billion years old!”

  I heard the doubt beneath his delight. The Chirpsithra could be the greatest liars in the universe, and how would we ever know? Earth didn’t even have interstellar probes when the chirps came.

  Chorrikst spoke slowly, in a throaty whisper, but her translator box was standard: voice a little flat, pronunciation perfect. “I have circled the galaxy numberless times, and taped the tales of my travels for funds to feed my wanderlust. Much of my life has been spent at the edge of lightspeed, under relativistic time-compression. So you see, I am not nearly so old as all that.”

  I pulled up another high chair. “You must have seen wonders beyond counting,” I said. Thinking: My God, a short Chirpsithra! Maybe it’s true. She’s a different color, too, and her fingers are shorter. Maybe the species has actually changed since she was born!

  She nodded slowly. “Life never bores. Always there is change. In the time I have been gone, Saturn’s ring has been pulled into separate rings, making it even more magnificent. What can have done that? Tides from the moons? And Earth has changed beyond recognition.”

  Noyes spilled a little of his coffee. “You were here? When?”

  “Earth’s air was methane and ammonia and oxides of nitrogen and carbon. The natives had sent messages across interstellar space ... directing them toward yellow suns, of course, but one of our ships passed through a beam, and so we established contact. We had to wear life support,” she rattled on, while Noyes and I sat with our jaws hanging, “and the gear was less comfortable then. Our spaceport was a floating platform, because quakes were frequent and violent. But it was worth it. Their cities—”

  Noyes said, “Just a minute. Cities? We’ve never dug up any trace of, of nonhuman cities!”

  Chorrikst looked at him. “After seven hundred and eighty million years, I should think not. Besides, they lived in the offshore shallows in an ocean that was already mildly salty. If the quakes spared them, their tools and their cities still deteriorated rapidly. Their lives were short too, but their memories were inherited. Death and change were accepted facts for them, more than for most intelligent species. Their works of philosophy gained great currency among my people, and spread to other species too.”

  Noyes wrestled with his instinct for tact and good manners, and won. “How? How could anything have evolved that far? The Earth didn’t even have an oxygen atmosphere! Life was just getting started, there weren’t even trilobites!”

  “They had evolved for as long as you have,” Chorrikst said with composure. “Life began on Earth one and a half billion years ago. There were organic chemicals in abundance, from passage of lightning through the reducing atmosphere. Intelligence evolved, and presently built an impressive civilization. They lived slowly, of course. Their biochemistry was less energetic. Communication was difficult. They were not stupid, only slow. I visited Earth three times, and each time they had made more progress.”

  Almost against his will, Noyes asked, “What did they look like?”

  “Small and soft and fragile, much more so than yourselves. I cannot say they were pretty, but I grew to like them. I would toast them according to your customs,” she said. “They wrought beauty in their cities and beauty in their philosophies, and their works are in our libraries still. They will not be forgotten.”

  She touched her sparker, and so did her younger companions. Current flowed
between her two claws, through her nervous system. She said, “Sssss ...”

  I raised my glass, and nudged Noyes with my elbow. We drank to our predecessors. Noyes lowered his cup and asked, “What happened to them?”

  “They sensed worldwide disaster coming,” Chorrikst said, “and they prepared; but they thought it would be quakes. They built cities to float on the ocean surface, and lived in the undersides. They never noticed the green scum growing in certain tidal pools. By the time they knew the danger, the green scum was everywhere. It used photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the raw oxygen killed whatever it touched, leaving fertilizer to feed the green scum.

  “The world was dying when we learned of the problem. What could we do against a photosynthesis-using scum growing beneath a yellow-white star? There was nothing in Chirpsithra libraries that would help. We tried, of course, but we were unable to stop it. The sky had turned an admittedly lovely transparent blue, and the tide pools were green, and the offshore cities were crumbling before we gave up the fight. There was an attempt to transplant some of the natives to a suitable world; but biorhythm upset ruined their mating habits. I have not been back since, until now.”

  The depressing silence was broken by Chorrikst herself. “Well, the Earth is greatly changed, and of course your own evolution began with the green plague. I have heard tales of humanity from my companions. Would you tell me something of your lives?”

  And we spoke of humankind, but I couldn’t seem to find much enthusiasm for it. The anaerobic life that survived the advent of photosynthesis includes gangrene and botulism and not much else. I wondered what Chorrikst would find when next she came, and whether she would have reason to toast our memory.