The Draco Tavern Part 21

DAY THIRTY-ONE.

Her brood surrounded her in a ring. Harharharish was reading to them, in English. Walt was among them, listening quietly.

The Wayward Child was inside, hovering near the top of the dome. She wasn't happy. I couldn't help that. A blizzard was raging beyond the dome.

Queeblis.h.i.+z spoke, and I jumped, because she wasn't in the Tavern. "Rick, the lander is down. We will take the children aboard as soon as your climate is habitable again. How long will that be?"

"I never know how long a blizzard will last," I said.

Pause. "We'll send a tank."

Oh, yeah? "You carry a tank big enough for the Wayward Child?"

Pause. h.e.l.l, she must be in orbit around the Moon, not on the lander. "We'll generate it. One hour. Rick, this affair must have cut deep into your profits. We will pay recompense."

"That's fine."

Two-point-four seconds pa.s.sed. "I would have come to bid you good-bye, but I cannot tolerate your environment."

"Are you all right?"

"We're all pregnant."

The impulse to laugh disappeared in an instant. "What are Chirpsithra children like?"

"Voracious," Queeblis.h.i.+z said. "Good-bye."

Jehaneh handed me an Irish coffee, half strength. "I'm going to miss them," she said.

"Which?"

"Well ... the mother bear. The rest I can do without, except that Walt loved the snakes. Djil, where do you go from here?"

Djil said, "Colorado. The Folk are planning a Grand Canyon run, puppies and all. They'll go home on the next s.h.i.+p. Where do you go?"

Jehaneh looked the question at me. I said, "From this point on the Tavern is for adults, unless it's adults and Walt. You've played barmaid here. You think Walt is safe?"

She thought it over. She said, "Yeah."

LOST.

Two United Nations personnel were waiting for me when I wobbled off Vanayn's dinghy. Vanayn looked at them, then brushed past. They stepped out of his path. He ma.s.sed around three hundred kilos, and within the bubble helmet his mouth was a horrorshow of blades.

The tall one, a nordik-looking woman, forced a handful of papers on me. "You're Rick Schumann? Proprietor of the Draco Tavern?"

"Lucky guess." I took the papers without looking.

"I'm Dr. Cheri Kaylor. This is Carlos Magliocco," a dumpy Mediterranean-looking guy. "We need to interview you, debrief you, before you forget anything. May we-?"

My mind was one long fog bank. I said, "The Tavern."

She looked at me doubtfully. Then she took my arm before I fell over.

The dumpy man drove us down in an SUV. He didn't say much. We entered the Tavern through one of the big airlocks.

The Tavern was unchanged. Intellectually I'd expected that. Emotionally, I was just starting to resume my life. Nothing was broken, nothing added, nothing vanished. The customers were the same I'd left behind, a few missing, a few added. Vanayn was chattering with some Chirpsithra at the big table.

David Cho, whom I'd left waiting tables, came to greet me. "How was the ride?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Feed me."

"What do you want?"

"Doesn't matter."

Dr. Kaylor said, "Mr. Schumann-"

"We can talk while we eat," I said. "You want anything?"

"All right." She looked at her companion and asked, "Nachos?" Looked at me, took my arm again, and got me settled in a booth. "You could use a drink, Mr. Schumann."

"Yeah. David? Tea." My hands trembled.

Kaylor said, "That must have been quite a ride."

I smiled. I hadn't smiled in some time. "You might say so."

"You've only been gone seven hours."

"Really? When did they send for you, Dr. Kaylor?"

"Mr. Cho phoned us before you reached the airlock, he says. We've been waiting in the Tavern. This place is a wild experience, Mr. Schumann."

"The Tavern? I've gotten used to it over the years," I said. Thirty-two years now since I founded the Draco Tavern. Thirty-four since the first of the Chirpsithra interstellar liners took up orbit around the Moon, and the bubble shapes of the landers floated down the Earth's magnetic lines to Mount Forel in Siberia.

Spaghetti arrived. I began to eat, but slowly. It was a good choice, but I wasn't used to it.

She asked, "How did it happen? n.o.body else has ever been offered this privilege."

I shrugged. I'm the proprietor of Earth's only interspecies bar. Odd opportunities do come my way. "Vanayn said, 'Let's go for a ride.' "

"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 s.h.i.+p. 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 ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p. He came in behind the liner, Quark Mapping, Quark Mapping, following the neutrino trail. 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 ... d.a.m.n."

"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 Gligst.i.th(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 ent.i.ties 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 s.h.i.+p?" 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 s.h.i.+p."

"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. "s.h.i.+p'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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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."

"G.o.d, 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."