The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [30]
“If you’re really going to wake Christine Caine tomorrow,” I said, by way of making my first real move in the game, “I think you’d better let me do the talking. I’m the only one who might be able to make her understand — at least to the extent that I can understand.”
“Thank you for the offer,” said the wonderful child. “We’ll certainly consider it.”
It was her manner more than her choice of words that belatedly tipped me off to the fact that the kind of English she was talking wasn’t her first language, even though it might be a variety thereof. I realized that she might well have learned it in order to talk to me — or to the heroic Adam she considered the true creator of her world.
I knew better than to offer to be the first to talk to him, and told myself that he would probably have far less need of my intercession than poor Christine Caine.
I’m less confident of that judgment today than I was then, but I’m less confident of many things now than I was then. That’s one of the effects of growing ever older, if you do it properly.
Five
The Staff of Life
The food was awful. It even looked awful, but I managed to keep my hopes up for a few moments longer by telling myself that appearances could be deceptive. Once I had taken the first mouthful, though, there was no further room for optimism.
Davida Berenike Columella was watching me closely, but she wasn’t partaking herself. I knew that I was still being tested, but I wasn’t sure how to pass this one. I wanted to be polite, but I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, so I lifted a second forkful thoughtfully, hoping that it wouldn’t be quite as bad.
It wasn’t. The stuff was edible, and the first bolus hadn’t set off an emetic reaction in my stomach, so I had to figure that it wouldn’t do me any real harm — but I’d have felt better if I’d known which bit of my tongue was adapting to the taste. I couldn’t take any comfort from the notion that the extra layer of skin that extended into my mouth from my smartsuit might include among its duties the responsibility to conceal the fact that I was eating crap.
While I chewed I made a careful study of the food on the plastic plate. The rice was a peculiar shade of yellow, but practically all genemod rice had been a peculiar shade of yellow in my day, so that wasn’t surprising. Anyway, the worst thing about the rice was that it was bland to the point of tastelessness. It was the sliced vegetables that seemed to be seriously nasty, but I couldn’t work out whether it was the things faintly resembling peppers or the bits with the slightly woody texture that were the worst offenders. The muddy brown sauce was definitely off, but there wasn’t a great deal of that and it was mostly round the edges, so there hadn’t been much of it on either of the forkfuls I’d taken in.
I looked up again at the impossible child, and met her gaze squarely. Other possibilities were occurring to me now.
“You made this especially for me, didn’t you?” I said.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Using a thousand-year-old recipe and ingredients nobody’s grown as food plants for centuries?”
“It was the best approximation we could contrive,” she told me, apologetically. She’d caught on to the fact that I didn’t like it.
“So why didn’t you just give me whatever you eat?” I wanted to know.
“We have different nutritional requirements,” she told me.
I took this guarded observation to mean that she was genetically engineered not to require vitamins and all the other quirky compounds that real humans had to include in their diet. The implication was that everything I thought of as real food had gone out of fashion centuries ago. In my own day, it had been the world’s poor — who were still exceedingly numerous — who had the dubious privilege of existing on whole-diet “mannas” compounded by machines to supply exactly that combination of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, and trace elements that a human body required to keep it going. Now, apparently, such contrivances were the staff of posthuman life. What else, I wondered, had the