Hayford Peirce - Deep-Fried Black Diamonds

“What’s a truffle?”

“You don’t know what a truffle is?” Ling Wong Guoy looked at me in astonishment, then reached into his shoulderbag. He pulled out a wrinkled, prune-like object the size of a grapefruit. It was the color of an old black boot that has been worn by a nickel-iron miner in the far reaches of the Belt for twenty years or more without ever being polished. He set it gently on my desk, careful not to let it bounce in the nominal .04 gravity of Ceres. “Here, taste.”

Now it was my turn to gape. “You want me to taste that? ”

Ling Wong Guoy gestured at the miserable cubicle that Hartman, Bemis & Choupette laughingly called my office. “Would I come here to poison you? Would my kinswoman Jin Tshei allow me to poison you?”

Looking down at the strange black object on my desk, I actually considered his two ridiculous questions for a fleeting moment. Jin Tshei is my girlfriend’s wife and—I thought—a close friend of mine. Could she finally have decided that she wanted Isabel all for herself, and this was her way of—

No, ridiculous! The very thought was unworthy of an Ethical Broker & Bourseman, particularly Jonathan Welbrook White! I picked up the repulsive looking thing and sniffed it tentatively. It had a pungent yet somehow elusive smell. “What do I do with it?”

“Take a bite, a big bite, just as if you were eating an apple. Let the morsel rest upon your tongue. Then chew it slowly, delicately, lovingly, savoring the flavors, letting the pieces roll around your mouth. Close your eyes. Let your entire being concentrate on nothing more than what is in your mouth.”

I shook my head dubiously, then shrugged and did what he said.

Sometime later, when I regained a semblance of my senses, I opened my eyes to stare in wonder at what I held in my hand. I’m not a poet, so I won’t try to tell you what it tasted like. All I’ll say is that it was the most wonderful, most exotic, most sensual, most overwhelming experience I had ever had in my life. “Are you sure this is legal?” I whispered, then salivated noisily. It was all I could do to keep from stuffing the remainder of the truffle into my mouth as fast as I could push it in.

Ling Wong Guoy smiled knowingly. “Entirely legal, Mr. White. I use them frequently in my restaurant. You may have already tasted them there, in somewhat less overwhelming quantities. I have, I believe, already noted your distinguished presence in my humble establishment at various times.”

Humble establishment —that was a laugh! Ling Wong Guoy was the owner and chef of the most elegant and most expensive restaurant in the entire Belt, La Voûte Céleste, an eating establishment so recherche that it actually employed human beings as waiters. Its name, it had been explained to me, was French for Heavenly Vault or Celestial Canopy. Since the restaurant was one of only seven buildings on the surface of Ceres and had an invisibly domed dining room open to the spectacle of a billion stars, its name was a meaningful one. I had eaten there twice; always, unfortunately, in the company of my unspeakable boss, J. Davis Alexander, as that worthy wined and dined super-important clients on the company expense account. I had never forgotten either meal.

“Truffles are those skinny little black things stuffed under the skin of the chicken?” I ventured, casting my mind and taste buds back to those two extraordinary feasts.

“Yes, truffle slices. And there are somewhat thicker pieces in the foie gras. On Earth the normal truffle weighs about two to three ounces at the very most. That truffle you hold in your hand would weigh about seventeen ounces, the result, I suppose, of growing it on Ceres in what is essentially zero gravity and in half the barometric pressure of Earth’s.”

I nodded slowly and took another voracious bite—after all, he hadn’t asked for it back, had he? “It certainly is delicious,” I said inadequately when I’d finished swallowing, “but why exactly have you brought this to me ?”

“Do you know what a truffle costs per ounce in Paris or Perigord on Earth? Two hundred and seventy Belter buckles per ounce, Mr. White! I myself pay over 500 buckles per ounce for them to be landed on Ceres to use in my restaurant.”

Once again I stared in astonishment at the dapper, black-haired little man on the other side of my desk. “You mean this thing here in my hand is worth over 8,000 buckles? And I’ve been eating it?”

“Yes indeed. Truffles are a form of fungus that grows underground at the roots of certain trees—generally the shrub oak—in only a few places on Earth, mostly certain regions of France and Italy. They are found by dogs or pigs that have been specially trained to sniff for them. They are generated from spores and for centuries now farmers and scientists have tried to find a way of cultivating them. So far no one has succeeded, although there is an experimental station in Spain that claims to have had some success. The entire world’s production is no more than a hundred tons or so annually, which is why, Mr. White, their price is so outrageous.”

I took another look at the halfeaten piece of fungus in my hand and then another look at Mr. Ling Wong Guoy, Restaurateur Extraordinaire.

Ling Wong Guoy was, I knew, an immigrant who’d come from Earth to Clarkeville, the fourth largest city on Ceres and the eighth largest in the Belt, about fifteen years ago. He’d started small, with a fast-food joint, and had worked his way up to La Voûte Céleste. I also knew that he was a kinsman of some sort of Jin Tshei, Isabel’s wife, since Jin Tshei had told me so after I’d lunched at his restaurant for the first time.

Finally, I knew—like almost everyone else in Clarkeville—that Ling Wong Guoy was the owner of his own private asteroid, a tiny hunk of worthless rock that not even the most optimistic virophage miner had thought worthy of trying to extract anything from. Ling Wong Guoy had bubbled the entire asteroid—it was only a couple of hundred meters long—and turned it into a farm to supply his restaurant. Now the asteroid was famous throughout Ceres, and probably the entire Belt, for it was certainly the only one that raised pigs and chickens in order to supply a high-class French restaurant.

“You said that truffles only grow in a few choice places on Earth,” I prompted the restaurateur. “You also said that this particular one—” now a bare smidgen of a memory of its formerly robust seventeen-ounce self “—was grown on Ceres. Does that mean—”

“Yes,” said Ling Wong Guoy, “that means that I have succeeded where four centuries of Terran experts have failed. I have succeeded in growing truffles with no more difficulty than I have in cultivating mushrooms.”

“How—?”

Ling Wong Guoy laid a finger alongside his nose. “Ahhh, that, Mr. White, is what I think I must call a proprietary secret. I will say this, however. A year ago I brought my cousin Hernandez Wong Ling to Ceres from Earth in order to supervise my farm. Purely by happenstance, of course, my cousin just happened to have worked for several years on that experimental truffle farm in Spain I mentioned earlier. It may be—and I stress that this is only a possibility—that he may have inadvertently carried with him some of the spores necessary for their propagation. After that—” Ling Wong Guoy shrugged “—a rare combination of elements unique to that particular asteroid’s soil, plus secret fertilizers and additives of our own, have enabled Hernandez Wong Ling to grow this fabulous truffle which I guarantee you will grow nowhere else in the Belt. Or in the entire Solar System.”