Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [210]
"I lived on it for three months straight!" Enrique put in proudly. Mark shot him a slight frown, and he subsided.
Mark seized one of the silver knives on the tray, cut the cube into four parts, and popped a portion into his mouth. "Try it!" he said around his chewing. He stopped short of a dramatic mumble of yum, yum! or other convincing sound effects. Enrique too reached for a piece. More cautiously, so did Miles. He hesitated, with the fragment at his lips, to find both his watchers hanging on his gesture. His brows twitched up; he chewed. A breathless silence fell. He swallowed.
Enrique, scarcely able to contain himself, said, "How d'you like it?"
Miles shrugged. "It's . . . all right. Bland, but you said it was unflavored. Tastes better than a lot of military rations I've eaten."
"Oh, military rations," said Enrique. "Now, there's an application I hadn't thought of—"
"We'll get to that phase later," said Mark.
"So what makes it so potentially profitable?" asked Miles curiously.
"Because, through the miracle of modern bioengineering, it can be made practically for free. Once the customer has purchased, or perhaps licensed, his initial supply of butter bugs, that is."
A slight but noticeable silence. "His what?"
Mark pulled out the little box from his jacket pocket, and carefully lifted the lid. Enrique sat up expectantly. "This," said Mark, and held the box out toward his brother, "is a butter bug."
Miles glanced down into the box, and recoiled. "Yuk! That is the most disgusting thing I've seen in my life!"
Inside the box, the thumb-sized worker butter bug scrabbled about on its six stubby legs, waved its antennae frantically, and tried to escape. Mark gently pushed its tiny claws back from the edges. It chittered its dull brown vestigial wing carapaces, and crouched to drag its white, soft, squishy-looking abdomen to the safety of one corner.
Miles leaned forward again, to peer in revolted fascination. "It looks like a cross between a cockroach, a termite, and a . . . and a . . . and a pustule."
"We have to admit, its physical appearance is not its main selling point."
Enrique looked indignant, but refrained from denying this last statement out loud.
"Its great value lies in its efficiency," Mark went on. It was a good thing they hadn't started out by showing Miles a whole colony of butter bugs. Or worse, a queen butter bug. They could work up to the queen butter bugs much later, once they'd dragged their prospective patron over the first few psychological humps. "These things eat almost any kind of low-grade organic feedstocks. Corn stalks, grass clippings, seaweed, you name it. Then, inside their gut, the organic matter is processed by a carefully-orchestrated array of symbiotic bacteria into . . . bug butter curds. Which the butter bugs regur—return through their mouths and pack into special cells, in their hive, all ready for humans to harvest. The raw butter curds—"
Enrique, unnecessarily, pointed to the last fragment still sitting on the foil.
"Are perfectly edible at this point," Mark went on more loudly, "though they can be flavored or processed further. We're considering more sophisticated product development by adding bacteria to provide desirable flavors to the curds right in the bug's guts, so even that processing step won't be necessary."
"Bug vomit," said Miles, working through the implications. "You fed me bug vomit." He touched his hand to his lips, and hastily poured himself some wine. He looked at the butter bug, looked at the remaining fragment of curd, and drank deeply. "You're insane," he said with conviction. He drank once more, carefully swishing the wine around in his mouth for a long time