Ascending - James Alan Gardner [41]
Lajoolie took a bone-knife from a bone-shelf and laid out three bone-bowls on the bone-counter. I could not tell where the food synthesizer was in this small room, but I assumed obtaining dinner was simply a matter of pressing more bumps on the wall. There was an especially noticeable protrusion just beside the water spigot—a greenish-colored bulge the size of a cabbage, budding from Starbiter’s tissues. I thought there might be small indentations in the bulge, buttons that you pushed in order to specify what sort of meal you wished…soitdid not surprise me when Lajoolie reached out to take hold of the protuberance.
It did surprise me when she used the knife to cut the bulge right off the wall. Then she chopped the material into equalsized portions and placed the chunks into the bowls.
“What are you doing?” I asked in horror.
“Making supper.” She sniffed one of the lumps of green. “It smells like choilappa; that’s glazed ort-breast baked with several kinds of Divian vegetables. Of course, this is really just a mixture of simple amino acids and minerals—very basic, digestible by any DNA-based life-form we’ve ever encountered.”
“It is not digestible by me!” I said. “It is a piece of my friend Starbiter!”
“Yes.”
“You cut it right off her body!”
“Yes.”
“It is Zarett meat!”
Lajoolie looked at me, then at the greenish matter in the bowls. “It’s not exactly meat; it’s a specialized skin tissue, purposely produced to be cut off and consumed by a Zarett’s passengers. It grows fast enough to feed eight people three meals a day…which we feed right back to Starbiter if we don’t eat it all. Each meal is artificially scented and flavored to taste like a different dish: it’s Divian cuisine, but humans really enjoy most of our food. There are a few things we eat that make Homo sapiens nauseous—things that hit your taste buds the wrong way—but if you wait half an hour, the artificial flavoring dissipates and the food turns completely bland. Not very appealing, but it’s still got nutritional content.”
With a false smile of encouragement, she handed me one of the bowls. The green mound in it had the color of raw vegetation and the texture of a dead rabbit half-devoured by cougars. “It is a part of my friend,” I said. “It is also opaque.”
I set the bowl back on the counter.
“Oh dear,” Lajoolie murmured. Her gaze shifted guiltily to my belly; I hoped she was imagining what my beautifully clear glass body would look like if I consumed a substance of hideous green. She would see it in my mouth as I chewed and in my throat when I swallowed. It would hang like a weedy blob as it churned in my belly. Then it would proceed quite visibly through the remaining stages of digestion and disposal. This would not be at all nice to witness—neither for Lajoolie nor for me. The food turning in my stomach would turn my stomach.
On Melaquin, we did not have such problems. Our synthesizers only created transparent foods…and the chemical composition of each dish was cunningly designed to remain invisible while the food was in our bodies, from one end of the alimentary canal to the other. Science People have told me the biochemistry of such a process must be most complex; but I do not see why there should be any great difficulty. Avoid opaque meals, and everything else follows.
“I don’t know what to say,” Lajoolie told me. “This is the only food on the ship. It really won’t hurt you…”
“It will just make me look ugly and foolish.”
“You could wear clothes,” she suggested. “To cover what happens inside you.” She took a step toward the door. “I didn’t bring a big wardrobe with me, but there must be something we could make fit. You and I are, uhh, close to the same height.”
“But we are not the same width at all. I am pleasantly slender; you are unnecessarily broad. Fortunately,” I said, “I do not need your cast-off garments. Thanks to admirable foresight and planning, I have an excellent jacket of my own. It is a perfect fit…and I shall wear it when