Limits (37 page)

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 i
m
perative
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 ra
t
tled 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 co
m
posure. “Life began on Earth one and a half billion years ago. There were organic chemicals in abundance, from passage of lightning through the r
e
ducing atmosphere. Intelligence evolved, and presently built an impressive civilization. They lived slowly, of course. Their biochemistry was less e
n
ergetic. 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 tran
s
plant 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 enth
u
siasm for it. The anaerobic life that survived the advent of photosynthesis includes gangrene and botulism and not much else. I wondered what Cho
r
rikst would find when next she came, and whether she would have reason to toast our memory.

Ten, twenty years ago my first thought would have been,
Great-looking woman!
Tough-looking, too.
If I make a pass, it had better be polite.
She was
in her late twenties, tall, blond, healthy-looking, with a squarish jaw. She didn’t look like the type to be fazed by anything; but she had stopped, stunned, just inside the door. Her first time here, I thought. Anyway, I’d have remembered her.

But after eighteen years tending bar in the Draco Tavern, my first thought is generally,
Human. Great! I won’t have to dig out any of the exotic stuff.
While she was still reacting to the sight of half a dozen oddly-shaped sapients indulging each its own peculiar vice, I moved down the bar to the far right, where I keep the alcoholic beverages. I thought she’d take one of the bar stools.

Nope. She looked about her, considering her choices—which didn’t i
n
clude empty tables; there was a fair crowd in tonight—then moved to join the lone qarasht. And I was already starting to worry as I left the bar to take her order.

In the Draco it’s considered normal to strike up conversations with other customers. But the qarasht wasn’t acting like it wanted company. The bulk of thick fur, pale blue striped with black in narrow curves, had waddled in three hours ago. It was on its third quart-sized mug of Demerara Sours, and its sense cluster had been retracted for all of that time, leaving it deaf and blind, lost in its own thoughts.

It must have felt the vibration when the woman sat down. Its sense cluster and stalk rose out of the fur like a python rising from a bed of moss. A snake with no mouth: just two big wide-set black bubbles for eyes and an ear like a pink blossom set between
them,
and a tuft of fine hairs along the stalk to serve for smell and taste, and a brilliant ruby crest on top. Its translator box said, quite clearly, “Drink, not talk.
My last day.”

She didn’t take the hint. “You’re going home?
Where?”

“Home to the organ banks.
I am
shishishorupf
—” A word the box didn’t translate.

“What’s it mean?”

“Your kind has bankruptcy laws that let you start over. My kind lets me start over as a dozen others.
Organ banks.”
The alien picked up its mug; the fur parted below its sense cluster stalk, to receive half a pint of Demerara Sour.

She looked around a little queasily, and found me at her shoulder. With some relief she said, “Never mind, I’ll come to the bar,” and started to stand
up.

The qarasht put a hand on her wrist. The eight skeletal fingers looked like two chicken feet wired together; but a qarasht’s hand is stronger than it looks. “Sit,” said the alien. “Barmonitor, get her one of these.
Human, why do you not fight wars?”

“What?”

“You used to fight wars.”

“Well,” she said, “sure.”

“We could have been fourth-level wealthy,” the qarasht said, and slammed its mug to the table. “You would still be a single isolated species had we not come. In what fashion have you repaid our generosity?”

The woman was speechless; I wasn’t. “Excuse me, but it wasn’t the qarashteel who made first contact with Earth. It was the chirpsithra.”

“We paid them.”

“What? Why?”

“Our ship
Far-Stretching Sense Cluster
passed through Sol system while making a documentary. It confuses some species that we can make very long entertainments, and sell them to billions of customers who will spend years watching them, and reap profits that allow us to travel hundreds of light-years and spend decades working on such a project. But we are very long-lived, you know. Partly because we are able to keep the organ banks full,” the qarasht said with some savagery, and it drank again. Its sense-cluster was weaving a little.

“We found dramatic activity on your world,” it said. “All over your world, it seemed. Machines hurled against each other.
Explosives.
Machines built to fly, other machines to hurl them from the sky.
Humans in the m
a
chines, dying.
Machines blowing great holes in populated cities.
It fuddles the mind, to think what such a spectacle would have cost to make ourselves! We went into orbit, and we recorded it all as best we could. Three years of it. When we were sure it was over, we returned home and sold it.”

The woman swallowed. She said to me, “I think I need that drink. Join us?”

I made two of the giant Demerara Sours and took them back. As I pulled up a chair the qarasht was saying, “If we had stopped then we would still be moderately wealthy. Our recording instruments were not the best, of course. Worse, we could not get close enough to the surface for real detail. Our a
t
mosphere probes shivered and shook and so did the pictures. Ours was a low-budget operation. But the ending was superb! Two cities half-destroyed by thermonuclear explosions! Our recordings sold well enough, but we would have been mad not to try for more.

“We invested all of our profits in equipment. We borrowed all we could. Do you understand that the nearest full-service spaceport to Sol system is sixteen-squared light years distant? We had to finance a chirpsithra dipl
o
matic expedition in order to get Local Group approval and transport for what we needed…and because we needed intermediaries. Chirps are very good at negotiating, and we are not. We did not tell them what we really wanted, of course.”

The woman’s words sounded like curses. “Why negotiate? You were doing fine as Peeping Toms. Even when people saw your ships, nobody believed them. I expect they’re saucer-shaped?”

Foo fighters
, I thought, while the alien said, “We needed more than the small atmospheric probes. We needed to mount hologram cameras. For that we had to travel all over the Earth, especially the cities. Such instruments are nearly invisible. We spray them across a flat surface, high up on your glass-slab-style towers, for instance. And we needed access to your libraries, to get some insight into
why
you do these things.”

The lady drank. I remembered that there had been qarashteel everywhere the chirpsithra envoys went, twenty-four years ago when the big interstellar ships arrived; and I took a long pull from my Sour.

“It all looked so easy,” the qarasht mourned. “We had left instruments on your moon. The recordings couldn’t be sold, of course, because your world’s rotation permits only fragmentary glimpses. But your machines were b
e
coming better,
more
destructive! We thanked our luck that you had not d
e
stroyed yourselves before we could return. We studied the recordings, to guess where the next war would occur, but there was no discernable pattern. The largest land mass, we thought—”

True enough, the chirps and their qarashteel entourage had been very visible all over Asia and Europe. Those cameras on the Moon must have picked up activity in Poland and Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iran and Israel and Cuba and, and…bastards. “So you set up your cameras in a tearing hurry,” I guessed, “and then you waited.”