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 machines, 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 atmosphere 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 diplomatic 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 becoming better, more destructive! We thanked our luck that you had not destroyed 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.”
“We waited and waited. We have waited for thirty years…for twenty-four of your own years, and we have nothing to show for it
