Limits

treatment is complex, but with enough customers the cost would drop, or so the merchant says. I must persuade it not to make the offer.”
“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 exoskeletons. Okay, a chirpsithra would have spoken by now; they’re garrulous. 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.
******