Limits (39 page)

Selective damping is the key, and a staff of technicians to keep the sy
s
tem in order. I can afford it. I charge high anyway, for the variety of stuff I have to keep for anything that might wander in. But sometimes the damping system fails.

I found what I needed—a double-walled canister I’d never needed b
e
fore, holding stuff I’d been calling
green kryptonite
—and delivered glowing green pebbles to four aliens in globular environment tanks. They were at four different tables, sharing conversation with four other species. I’d never seen a rosyfin before. Rippling in the murky fluid within the transparent globe, the dorsal tin was triangular, rose-colored, fragile as gossamer, and ran from nose to tail of a body that looked like a flattened slug.

Out among the tables there was near-silence, except within the bubbles of sound that surrounded each table. It wasn’t a total breakdown, then. But when I went back behind the bar the noise was still there.

I tried to ignore it. I certainly wasn’t going to try to fix the sound system, not with fifty-odd customers and ten distinct species demanding my atte
n
tion. I set out consomme and vodka for four glig, and thimble-sized flasks of chilled fluid with an ammonia base, for a dozen chrome yellow bugs each the size of a fifth of Haig Pinch. And the dialog continued: high twittering against grating metallic bass. What got on my nerves was the way the sounds seemed always on the verge of making sense!

Finally I just switched on the translator. It might be less irritating if I heard it in English.

I heard: “—noticed how often they speak of limits?”

“Limits?
I don’t understand you.”

“Lightspeed limit.
Theoretical strengths of metals, of crystals, of alloys.
Smallest and largest masses at which an unseen body may be a neutron star.
Maximum time and cost to complete a research project.
Surface-to-volume relationship for maximum size of a creature of given design—”

“But every sapient race learns these things!”

“We find limits, of course. But with humans, the limits are what they seek first.”

So they were talking about the natives, about us. Aliens often do. Their insights might be fascinating, but it gets boring fast. I let it buzz in my ear while I fished out another dozen flasks of ammonia mixture and set them on Gail’s tray along with two Stingers. She went off to deliver them to the little yellow bugs, now parked in a horseshoe pattern on the rim of their table, talking animatedly to two human sociologists.

“It is a way of thinking,” one of the voices said. “They set enormously complex limits on each other. Whole professions, called
judge
and
lawyer
, devote their lives to determining which human has violated which limit where. Another profession alters the limits arbitrarily.”

“It does not sound entertaining.”

“But all are forced to play the game. You must have noticed: the limits they find in the universe and the limits they set on each other bear the same name: law.”

I had established that the twitterer was the one doing most of the talking.
Fine.
Now who were they? Two voices belonging to two radically different species…

“The interstellar community knows all of these limits in different forms.”

“Do we know them all? Goedel’s Principle sets a limit to the perfect
i
bility of mathematical systems. What species would have sought such a
thing? Mine would not.”

“Nor mine, I suppose. Still—”

“Humans push their limits. It is their first approach to any problem. When they learn where the limits lie, they fill in missing information until the limit breaks. When they break a limit, they look for the limit behind that.”

“I wonder…”

I thought I had
them
spotted. Only one of the tables for two was occ
u
pied, by a chirpsithra and a startled-looking woman. My suspects were a cluster of three: one of the rosyfins, and two compact, squarish customers wearing garish designs on their exoskeletal shells. The shelled creatures had been smoking tobacco cigars under exhaust hoods. One seemed to be asleep. The other waved stubby arms as it talked.

I heard: “I have a thought. My savage ancestors used to die when they reached a certain age. When we could no longer breed, evolution was fi
n
ished with us. There is a biological self-destruct built into us.”

“It is the same with humans. But my own people never die unless killed.
We fission.
Out memories go far, far back.”

“Though we differ in this, the result is the same. At some point in the dim past we learned that we could postpone our deaths. We never developed a civilization until individuals could live long enough to attain wisdom. The fundamental limit was lifted from our shells before we set out to expand into the world, and then the universe. Is this not true with most of the space-traveling peoples? The Pfarth species choose death only when they grow bored. Chirpsithra were long-lived before they reached the stars, and the
gligstith(
click)optok went even further, with their fascination with h
e
redity-tailoring—”

“Does it surprise
you, that
intelligent beings strive to extend their lives?”

“Surprise?
No. But humans still face a limit on their lifespans. The death limit has immense influence on their poetry. They may think differently from the rest of us in other ways. They may find truths we would not even seek.”

An untranslated metal-on-metal scraping.
Laughter?
“You speculate i
r
responsibly. Has their unique approach taught them anything we know not?”

“How can I know? I have only been on this world three local years. Their libraries are large, their retrieval systems poor. But there is Goedel’s Pri
n
ciple; and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a limit to what one can discover at the quantum level.”

Pause. “We must see if another species has duplicated that one. Mea
n
while, perhaps I should speak to another visitor.”

“Incomprehension.
Query?”

“Do you remember that I spoke of a certain gligstith-(click
)optok
me
r
chant?”

“I remember.”

“You know their skill with water-world biology. This one comes to Earth with a technique for maintaining and restoring the early-maturity state in humans. The treatment is complex, but with enough customers the cost would drop, or so the merchant says. I must persuade it not to make the o
f
fer.”

“Affirmative!
Removing the death-limit would drastically affect human psychology!”

One of the shelled beings was getting up. The voices chopped off as I rounded the bar and headed for my chosen table, with no clear idea what I would say. I stepped into the bubble of sound around two shelled beings and a rosyfin, and said, “Forgive the interruption, sapients—”

“You have joined a wake,” said the tank’s translator widget.

The shelled being said, “My mate had chosen death. He wanted one last smoke in company.” It bent and lifted its dead companion in its arms and headed for the door.

The rosyfin was leaving too, rolling his spherical fishbowl toward the door. I realized that its own voice hadn’t penetrated the murky fluid around it. No cluttering, no bone-shivering bass. I had the wrong table.

I looked around, and there were still no other candidates. Yet
somebody
here had casually condemned mankind—me!—to age and die.

Now what? I might have been hearing several voices. They all sound alike coming from a new species; and some aliens never
interrupt
each other.

The little yellow bugs?
But they were with humans.

Shells?
My voices had mentioned shells…but too many aliens have e
x
oskeletons. Okay, a chirpsithra would have spoken by now; they’re garr
u
lous. Scratch any table that includes a chirp.
Or a rosyfin.
Or those srivinthish: I’d have heard the
skreek
of their breathing.
Or the huge grey being who seemed to be singing.
That left…half a dozen tables, and I couldn’t interrupt that many.

Could they have left while I was distracted?

I hot-footed it back to the bar, and listened, and heard nothing. And my spinning brain could find only limits.

******