“And you went?”
“Well, I didn’t just—” Of course I’d been an idiot. “—didn’t just jump up and run out to the ship. I asked, ‘Can you bring me back here before the evening crowd?’ And Vanayn said, ‘Not a problem.’ ”
She looked behind her at Vanayn, a great gray-striped mass of muscle, big eyes and iron teeth under a bubble helmet. “Vanayn, now. He’s a new species, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. Predator, likes lots of room and not much company. Slow metabolism. Oxygen is a poison to him. He has his own ship. He came in behind the liner, Quark Mapping, following the neutrino trail.
“We were all at the big table, seven or eight species, when he came in. He steered a floating cargo bin around to the bar. I store foodstuffs for my alien customers, but the supplies have to get to me somehow. I stowed the tank and ran him up a drink. A bunch of the other aliens gathered around his table. I served them, and then we sat around talking for a while.”
“About what?”
Familiar food was clearing my head. I still had to concentrate to remember. It was so long ago.
“Me,” I said. “And the Tavern. My customers ... the aliens, they’re all temporary. Most of them are gone when the landers lift. A few stick around for a year or two. The humans who come in here, they’re usually collecting data for a doctorate or a newsburst. So are my staff, all doctors and grad students, all here to learn something and then go write it up. The only permanent feature of the Draco Tavern is me.”
She waited.
“Which makes sense,” I said. “I’m at the heart of the information flow. I was asked to go flying once before, and I turned that down.” She started to interrupt, but I pushed on. “It was light-years away. Whatever they learn, it’ll come back to the Draco Tavern. And I still couldn’t make them see why I ... don’t ... go anywhere.”
“Drink,” she said, and poured tea. “Shall I order something stronger?”
“Maybe an aquavit. Thank you.”
“Does it satisfy you, this answer? The reason you don’t travel?”
“Sure. Usually. I’d had a couple of Irish coffees, though. Then Vanayn said, ‘Let me take you for a ride!’ and I said, ‘Can you get me back before the evening crowd?’ And he said ... damn.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘This is not a problem. I’ll put us in a loop.’ And all I had to do was ask him why.”
“But you went.”
“The way I saw it—well. Look around you.”
We had tall and slender exoskeletal Chirpsithra. We had Gligstith(click)optok built like little gray tanks draped in green fur pelts. Bebebebeque arrayed around the rim of the table like big golden bugs. Finny entities drifted within a fishbowl on wheels. Funny featherless birds, Warblers, nested overhead.
Cheri Kaylor grinned. “I can identify most of these species.”
I said, “Whatever they look like, whatever their shape, whatever they breath or drink or need for life support, I knew I was surrounded by folk who want me to continue in existence. If I was making a hideous mistake, one or another would point it out. If I had an accident, one or another would come rescue me.”
“So you went.”
“And they were all watching me. All these travelers who never turned down a dare. I took a moment to think it through, but how could I back down? Yeah, I went.”
“Was it that same ship?” Kaylor asked. She was almost bouncing in her chair. “The one you landed in? It’s not your standard lander.”
“Looks something like a Taurus station wagon, doesn’t it?”
“But big. How far can it go?”
“It’s just a lander, Doctor. Lifeboat, Captain’s gig, not the main ship.”
“So it goes as far as the Moon?”
“At least. We were there in three hours. The gig kind of molded itself against the hull and Vanayn took me aboard.”
Kaylor was starting to look puzzled.
“I watched him extrude a transparent bubble onto the hull,” I said, “from the back of the control room. Now I was walled off, my life-support conditions and his, and a curved transparent wall between. He stripped out of his life-support gear. He’s odd under that. And we took off,” I said, “and everything turned weird.”
“You didn’t have much time for much weirdness,” Kaylor said. “You were gone only seven hours.”
“It was longer than that,” I said. “Ship’s time.”
“You took off ...”
“Earth and Moon shrank all in an instant, but so did the Sun. I don’t know what kind of effect that was. ‘What would you like to see?’ Vanayn asked me.
“ ‘Saturn,’ I said. I was remembering a starwatching party back in college, the first time I ever used a telescope. Mars was only a pink blotch, but Saturn never disappointed anyone. Vanayn didn’t know the name, so I sketched the solar system to show him what I meant.
“Beyond the curved outer wall, the starscape turned to something stranger. ‘Navigating through cf-furk-kup space isn’t straightforward,’ Vanayn said. My translator was having trouble with that word. ‘The trick is to define the loop. Here, is that Saturn?’
“ ‘No,’ ” I said.
Kaylor jumped. “Not Saturn?”
“No, it was a big, bloated gas giant planet. The ring was narrow, barely visible.
“Vanayn said, ‘Okay, I can fix it.’ His tentacles writhed, and the outside view changed. Graphs and letters in at least three dimensions. Probability curves, the infrared and X-ray universe, I had no idea what we were seeing. Later I learned to read some of those symbols—”
“Just a minute,” Kaylor said. “Could this ship of yours have been traveling in time?”
“Oh, it was,” I said. Aquavit had arrived, and I drank half of it and let it trickle down my throat. “Ah. Yeah, that’s what Vanayn meant by ‘put us in a loop.’ The trick seems to be that you have to bring the ship back to the same point you left. Otherwise you’ve violated some important parity laws.”
“You didn’t learn that right away, though.”
“Not for a couple of months. Mind, I didn’t keep time very well. My watch racked up almost a year before the battery ran out.”
“God, what an opportunity. But Saturn’s rings aren’t a permanent feature, Mr. Schumann. A moon bashes another moon or something, and for a few hundred thousand years we have big gaudy rings. Most of the time Saturn’s rings must look a lot like Jupiter’s or Neptune’s.”
I said, “Oh. But Vanayn thought he’d gotten lost.”
“What happened then?”
“He started searching. He was trying to find the neutrino trail from Quark Mapping. First we went to a view of nothing but galaxies. Flat space, he said. That didn’t do it. He took us to other domains, black holes, peculiar galaxies, always getting more and more lost.
“God, it was all wonderful! But it took weeks or months to get anywhere. The displays didn’t usually show normal space, normal suns and planets, or starscapes at all. Vanayn spent some time fiddling with my life support until I could get food—tee tee hatch nex ool means it won’t kill me, whatever it tastes like, but I had to explain about vitamins and fiber. He showed me how to use his library. I did some research. Eventually I could read some of his displays.
“He was looking for the point in spacetime from which we’d left. It was the only way we could get back into the universe.”
“Were you worried?”
“Scared out of my mind, at first. I was watching my life disappear. Vanayn never did consider himself lost. He was ‘having an adventure.’ I got on his nerves. Eventually Vanayn stopped talking to me.
“Then I kind of settled into the routine. I learned a lot from Vanayn’s library. It was my only friend. It’s sapient, near as I can tell. It taught me how to fiddle with the paste dispenser so I could get some variety into my diet. I made some changes in the medical system too. I invented two or three chemicals that would have a decent street value if I could manufacture them. After a wh
ile the library cut me off and made me sober up.
“I don’t know how Vanayn worked out how to get us back. If that first planet really was Saturn a million years ago, or a million from now, or fifty, and if he figured that out ... anyway, he still wasn’t talking to me. He got us back to the Moon, and then he just pulled me into the gig and took us home.”
“Wonderful,” Cheri Kaylor said.
“Lettuce,” I said. “David? When you get a minute, get me any kind of salad. I haven’t eaten anything normal since ... I still can’t tell.”
Magliocco hadn’t said anything this whole time, but now he was looking at me like some sort of strange bug. He said, “It should have been me.”
Cheri gave him a look: Idiot! He ignored her. “I’ve got credentials in cosmology and astronomy. He showed you sights the rest of the human race might never know. I might even have figured out what he was doing! Why a bartender?”
“I was the wrong man,” I admitted. “You, Dr. Kaylor, any human being in here would have been a better choice. I just hate being lost.”
I looked around at the evening crowd, a dozen assorted sizes and shapes, a whispering background of alien buzzes and clicks and screeching, seven or eight species from hundreds of light-years around. “I’m glad to be home.”
LOSING MARS
The latest crop of visitors to Earth came rolling across the tundra: four shapeless bean bags glowing like psychedelic rainbows. They formed a queue and rolled through one of the low-and-wide airlocks, into the Draco Tavern. Two Chirpsithra turned from the bar and watched them approach.
It had been a quiet afternoon.
I spoke to the first bag to reach the bar. “Welcome to the Draco Tavern. What can I do for you?”
An insert on the bag spoke in the soft accents of a standard Chirpsithra translator system. “We seek to speak to any representative of the United Nations.”
“There aren’t any in tonight,” I said. There rarely were, though it’s not unheard of. “Is this urgent?”
“Of huge import, but our timeline is flexible,” said another of the bags. “Rick Schumann the barkeep, can you contact the United Nations for us?”
“I can find somebody.” I still had phone and e-mail codes for Cheri Kaylor and Carlos Magliocco.
“That is well. The Chirpsithra have demanded too high a fee as mediators. Would you accept two-to-the-twentieth part of what we deal for?”
Less than a millionth? “I have no idea. What are we dealing for?”
“Mars.”
I tapped out what Dr. Kaylor had scrawled on her card, and got her voice mail. “Cheri Kaylor. Leave your name, number, and vital statistics. An Arab slavemaster will contact you shortly.”
That could hardly be her business office, I thought. “Rick Schumann, Draco Tavern. Some of my visitors have a strong interest in talking United Nations business—”
“Worth a trip to Siberia?” Dr. Kaylor had picked up.
“Worth more than that, I gather. I don’t have the full details yet. Shall I call Mr. Magliocco too?”
“No, hold up, Rick. I’m actually in Siberia, in a bathtub at the Mount Forel Hotel. We can get Carlos involved if this looks interesting. Who’s talking? What do they look like? Where are they from?” She sounded cheerful and intrigued.
“They haven’t said. They’re in full pressure gear. I think they’re fish.”
“Give me half an hour. I’ll have an Irish coffee.”
I hung up, wondering why she didn’t want Magliocco. A bit of work-related rivalry?
Until the first alien lander came down thirty-six years ago, the United Nations had spent most of its time in internal bickering and grand theft. These days they presented more of a united front. Cheri Kaylor and Carlos Magliocco dealt with people like me, people who dealt directly with aliens.
The life-support bags were arrayed at a big table with two Chirpsithra and a bearlike creature who had walked down from the lander with not even an extra coat. Wen Goldsmith took their orders. The bags wanted water, any interesting flavor.
Okay, I’d guessed they were water dwellers. I poured them pitchers of tap water and glacier water to get them started, and I joined the circle. “Mars,” I said.
“We are not involved,” one of the Chirpsithra said. The other said, “We may be asked to judge.”
One of the bags said, “We should wait for an official, should we not?”
“Dr. Kaylor will be here shortly,” I said.
Another bag said, “We have no secrets. What would you have of us? We look like this.” A picture formed on the bag’s side: a deep sea eel with long, elaborated fins manipulating a keyboard, goggle eyes and prominent pink gills. “We dare not make this envelope transparent. There’s too much light.”
“You tell too much,” the first bag said.
“They have not hidden themselves.”
“I concede.” The first bag showed a picture too, another deep sea eel, but with blue gills.
Dr. Kaylor came in. I’d never been sure of her rank, so I didn’t give it. She sat at one of the floating chairs, flustered but not showing it much. “Welcome to the local neighborhood,” she said.
“We are local indeed,” Blue Gills said. “Neighbors. We are from Mars.”
“Evolved on Europa,” said Pink Gills.
“Colony established some thirty thousand years ago,” said a third bag: Bronze Gills. The fourth still hadn’t shown itself.
“Jupiter orbits, not Earth orbits.”
“Are you aware of a near-frozen sea lying beneath the soil of Mars?”
“It covers near a hundred thousand square kilometers.”
They waited. Dr. Kaylor said, “Yes, in Elysium, near the equator. We think the dust keeps it from evaporating.”
Blue Gills said, “Dust and rubble, then dust compressed to cement, then pack ice, then solid ice. The Elysium Sea is well protected from loss of water vapor. Liquid water beneath. Conditions are very like those beneath the ice of Europa—”
“The increase in gravity is hard to notice.” Pink Gills.
“Pressure increases faster with depth.” Bronze Gills.
“But that’s as well, as the Elysium Sea is more shallow.”
Bronze Gills said, “Of course the taste of the water is quite different. A bit of planet-shaping was needed, and still the taste—”
“We prefer it.” Blue Gills.
“Barkeep, these are interesting flavors,” Pink Gills said. “What else have you?”
“Want to try something carbonated? Cheri, I’ll get your Irish coffee.”
When I came back one of the bags was saying, “Years ago. Here a probe, there a probe, descended on Mars with no clear method or pattern. Some stayed in orbit, some landed, some struck hard. Half of them destroyed themselves or failed to send a signal. We saw a similarity in design and guessed that they were from the inner world.”
“Yes, those were ours,” Dr. Kaylor said.
“Then they stopped,” said Blue Gills. “Nothing since three years ago. What happened?”
Cheri didn’t speak, so I said, “The Chirpsithra ships started coming. We’ve learned more about the universe since then than throughout our whole history.”
“But you ceased to explore Mars. Or did you cease entirely to explore?”
An uncomfortable silence. Cheri asked, “Did you come here in your own ship?”
Blue Gills said, “No! We feared you would take such as an invasion or violation of territory. When a Chirpsithra lander approached us, we concluded that we would be accepted as their guests. We come regarding a matter of territory, after all.”
“Who owns Mars?” Pink Gills demanded.
“Well,” said Cheri, “I don’t speak for the United Nations. I can bring this to Hermes Padat, I think.” The Secretary General.
Bronze Gills asked, “Can we settle this quickly? I myself dwell on Europa. Life support is a problem here. Too much gravity, too little pressure.”
“Oh, no, a case like
this could take years,” Cheri said. “I should try to call the Secretary General.”
In a stunned silence we watched Cheri dial.
One of the Chirpsithra said, “No. I think we can decide more quickly than that. We hold authority in this part of space. Dr. Kaylor, do you claim Mars?”
“Of course. It’s our next-door neighbor, the nearest planet, much closer to us than Jupiter is.”
“Do you currently build ships capable of reaching Mars?”
She swallowed. “Ah ... no.”
“Has any human being ever set foot on this neighbor planet?”
“No. We would have, but you came. You already own most of space, most of the galaxy. You’ve said so yourselves.”
“Rick? Would you have gone to Mars if we had left you alone?”
When I was a boy, we had gone to the Moon, and come home, and stopped. Mars had changed whenever someone looked again, and always there was talk of putting a man there some day.
“I’m not sure.”
“Fsst! I give Mars to the Europan colonists.”
Cheri gulped. She said, “We will protest the decision.”
“You have that right. Submit your protest to the ship, to Safe Orbits, before our departure sixty-one days from today. Rick, bring us sparkers.”
The rest stayed at the table, but Cheri Kaylor followed me to the bar. I asked, “Another drink?”
She spoke in a suppressed wail. “I’ve lost Mars!”
“Irish coffee?”
“What do I tell Hermes Padat? They’ll never react in time. The UN can’t decide to order dinner in sixty-one days! I’ve lost Mars! Yes, Irish coffee.”
I talked while I worked. “Not by yourself. You didn’t lose Mars without help. Mars has been there all along. For hundreds of years we’ve known we could get there. For fifty years we’ve even known how. It just wasn’t important enough to enough people. We never had Mars in the first place.”
“They aren’t even Martians. I wouldn’t mind being kicked off by Martians.”