Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

but a riot here, a parade there, an attack on a children’s vehicle…robbery of a bank…a thousand people smashing automobiles or an embassy building…rumors of war, of peace, some shouting in your councils…how can we sell any of this? On Earth my people need life support to the tune of six thousand dollars a day. I and my associates are shishishorupf now, and I must return home to tell them.”

The lady looked ready to start her own war. I said, to calm her down, “We make war movies too. We’ve been doing it for over a hundred years. They sell fine.”

Her answer was an intense whisper. “I never liked war movies. And that was us!”

“Sure, who else—”

The qarasht slammed its mug down. “Why have you not fought a war?”

She broke the brief pause. “We would have been ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“In front of you. Aliens. We’ve seen twenty alien species on Earth since that first chirp expedition, and none of them seem to fight wars. The, uh, qarasht don’t fight wars, do they?”

The alien’s sense cluster snapped down into its fur, then slowly emerged again. “Certainly we do not!”

“Well, think how it would look!”

“But for you it is natural!”

“Not really,” I said. “People have real trouble learning to kill. It’s not built into us. Anyway, we don’t have quite so much to fight over these days. The whole world’s getting rich on the widgetry the chirps and the thtopar have been selling us. Long-lived, too, on glig medicines. We’ve all got more to lose.” I flinched, because the alien’s sense cluster was stretched across the table, staring at us in horror.

“A lot of our restless types are out mining the asteroids,” the woman said.

“And, hey,” I said, “remember when Egypt and Saudi Arabia were talking war in the UN? And all the aliens moved out of both countries, even the glig doctors with their geriatrics consulting office. The sheiks didn’t like that one damn bit. And when the Soviets—”

“Our doing, all our own doing,” the alien mourned. Its sense cluster pulled itself down and disappeared into the fur, leaving just the ruby crest showing. The alien lifted its mug and drank, blind.

The woman took my wrist and pulled me over to the bar. “What do we do now?” she hissed in my ear.

I shrugged. “Sounds like the emergency’s over.”

“But we can’t just let it go, can we? You don’t really think we’ve given up war, do you? But if we knew these damn aliens were waiting to make movies of us, maybe we would! Shouldn’t we call the newspapers, or at least the Secret Service?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Somebody has to know!”

“Think it through,” I said. “One particular qarasht company may be defunct, but those cameras are still there, all over the world, and so are the mobile units. Some alien receiving company is going to own them. What if they offer…say Iran, or the Soviet Union, one-tenth of one percent of the gross profits on a war movie?”

She paled. I pushed my mug into her hands and she gulped hard at it. Shakily she asked, “Why didn’t the qarasht think of that?”

“Maybe they don’t think enough like men. Maybe if we just leave it alone, they never will. But we sure don’t want any human entrepreneurs making suggestions. Let it drop, lady. Let it drop.”

THE REAL THING

If the IRS could see me now! Flying a light-sail craft, single-handed, two million miles out from a bluish-white dwarf star. Fiddling frantically with the shrouds, guided less by the instruments than by the thrust against my web hammock and the ripples in the tremendous, near-weightless mirror sail. Glancing into the sun without blinking, then at the stars without being night-blind, dipping near the sun without being fried; all due to the quick-adjusting goggles and temp-controlled skin-tight pressure suit the chirpsithra had given me.

This entire trip was deductible, of course. The Draco Tavern had made me a good deal of money over the years, but I never could have paid for an interstellar voyage otherwise. As the owner of the Draco Tavern, Earth’s only multi-species bar, I was quite legitimately touring the stars to find new products for my alien customers.

Would Internal Revenue object to my actually enjoying myself?

I couldn’t make myself care. The trip out on the chirpsithra liner: that alone was something I’d remember the rest of my life. This too, if I lived. Best not to distract myself with memories.

Hroyd System was clustered tightly around its small, hot sun. Space was thick with asteroids and planets and other sailing ships. Every so often some massive piece of space junk bombed the sun, or a storm would bubble up from beneath the photosphere, and my boat would surge under the pressure of the flare. I had to fiddle constantly with the shrouds.

The pointer was aimed at black space. Where was that damned spaceport? Huge and massive it had seemed, too big to lose, when I spun out my frail silver sail and launched…how long ago? The clock told me: twenty hours, though it didn’t feel that long.

The spaceport was coin-shaped, spun for varying gravities. Maybe I was trying to see it edge-on? I tilted the sail to lose some velocity. The fat sun expanded. My mind felt the heat. If my suit failed, it would fail all at once, and I wouldn’t have long to curse my recklessness. Or—Even chirpsithra-supplied equipment wouldn’t help me if I fell into the sun.

I looked outward in time to see a silver coin pass over me. Good enough. Tilt the sail forward, pick up some speed…pull my orbit outward, slow down, don’t move the sail too fast or it’ll fold up! Wait a bit, then tilt the sail to spill the light; drop a bit, wait again…watch a black coin slide across the sun. Tilt to slow, tilt again to catch up. It was another two hours before I could pull into the spaceport’s shadow, fold the sail and let a tractor beam pull me in.

My legs were