Robert Silverberg - Thorns

“Something to drink?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, please. You order. I don’t know what to have.”

No waiter, human or robot, was in sight, nor did Lona see any attending at the other tables. Burris gave the order simply by uttering it into a golden grillwork at his left elbow. His cool knowledgeableness awed her, as she half suspected it was meant to do. She said, “Have you eaten here often? You seem to know what to do.”

“I was here once. More than a decade ago. It’s not a place you forget easily.”

“Were you a starman already, then?”

“Oh, yes. I’d made a couple of trips. I was on furlough. There was this girl I wanted to impress—”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t impress her. She married someone else. They were killed when the Wheel collapsed, on their honeymoon.”

Ten years and more ago, Lona thought. She had been less than seven years old. She felt shriveled with her youthfulness beside him. She was glad when the drinks arrived.

They came skimming across the abyss on a small gravitron tray. It seemed amazing to Lona that none of the serving trays, which now she noticed were quite numerous, ever collided as they soared to their tables. But, of course, it was no great task to program non-intersecting orbits.

Her drink came in a bowl of polished black stone, thick to the hand but smooth and gracile to the lip. She scooped up the bowl and automatically took it toward her mouth; then, halting an instant before the sip, she realized her error. Burris waited, smiling, his own glass still before him.

He seems so damned schoolmasterish when he smiles like that, she thought. Scolding me without saying a word. I know what he’s thinking: that I’m an ignorant little tramp who doesn’t know her manners.

She let the anger subside. It was really anger directed at herself, not him, she realized after a moment. Sensing that made it easier to grow calm.

She looked at his drink.

There was something swimming in it.

The glass was translucent quartz. It was three-fifths filled with a richly viscous green fluid. Moving idly back and forth was a tiny animal, teardrop-shaped, whose violet skin left a faint glow behind as it swam.

“Is that supposed to be there?”

Burris laughed. “I have a Deneb martini, so-called. It’s a preposterous name. Specialty of the house.”

“And in it?”

“A tadpole, essentially. Amphibious life-form from one of the Aldebaran worlds.”

“Which you drink?”

“Yes. Live.”

“Live.” Lona shuddered. “Why? Does it taste that good?”

“It has no taste at all, as a matter of fact. It’s pure decoration. Sophistication come full circle, back to barbarism. One gulp, and down it goes.”

“But it’s alive! How can you kill it?”

“Have you ever eaten an oyster, Lona?”

“No. What’s an oyster?”

“A mollusk. Once quite popular, served in its shell. Live. You sprinkle it with lemon juice—citric acid, you know—and it writhes. Then you eat it. It tastes of the sea. I’m sorry, Lona. That’s how it is. Oysters don’t know what’s happening to them. They don’t have hopes and fears and dreams. Neither does this creature here.”

“But to kill—”

“We kill to eat. A true morality of food would allow us to eat only synthetics.” Burris smiled kindly. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have ordered it if I’d known it would offend you. Shall I have them take it away?”

“No. Someone else would drink it, I guess. I didn’t mean to say all that. I was just a little upset, Minner. But it’s your drink. Enjoy it.”

“I’ll send it back.”

“Please.” She touched the left-hand tentacle. “You know why I object? Because it’s like making yourself a god, to swallow a live living thing. I mean, here you are, gigantic, and you just destroy something, and it never knows why. The way—” She stopped.

“The way alien Things can pick up an inferior organism and put it through surgery, without troubling to explain themselves?” he asked. “The way doctors can perform an intricate experiment on a girl’s ovaries, without considering later psychological effects? God, Lona, we’ve got to sidestep those thoughts, not keep coming back to them!”

“What did you order for me?” she asked.

“Gaudax. An aperitif from a Centaurine world. It’s mild and sweet. You’ll like it. Cheers, Lona.”

“Cheers.”

He moved his glass in orbit around her black stone bowl, saluting it and her. Then they drank. The Centaurine aperitif tickled her tongue; it was faintly oily stuff, yet delicate, delightful. She shivered with the pleasure. After three quick sips she put the bowl down.

The small swimming creature was gone from Burris’s glass.

“Would you like to taste mine?” he asked.

“Please. No.”

He nodded. “Let’s order dinner, then. Will you forgive me for my thoughtlessness?”

Two dark green cubes, four inches on each face, sat side by side in the middle of the table. Lona had thought they were purely ornamental, but now, as Burris nudged one toward her, she realized that they were menus. As she handled it, warm light flushed through the depths of the cube and illuminated letters appeared, seemingly an inch below the sleek surface. She turned the cube over and over. Soups, meats, appetizers, sweets…

She recognized nothing on the menu.

“I shouldn’t be in here, Minner. I just eat ordinary things. This is so weird I don’t know where to begin.”

“Shall I order for you?”

“You’d better. Except they won’t have the things I really want. Like a chopped protein steak and a glass of milk.”

“Forget the chopped protein steak. Sample some of the rarer delicacies.”

“It’s so false, though. Me pretending to be a gourmet.”

“Don’t pretend anything. Eat and enjoy. Chopped protein steak isn’t the only food in the universe.”

His calmness reached forth to her, containing but not quite transferring to her. He ordered for both of them. Lona was proud of his skill. It was a small thing, knowing your way around a menu in such a place; yet he knew so much. He was awesome. She found herself thinking, if only I had met him before they … and cut the thought off. No imaginable set of circumstances would have brought her into contact with the premutilated Minner Burris. He would not have noticed her; he must have been busy then with women like that jiggly old Elise. Who still coveted him, but now could not have him. He’s mine, Lona thought fiercely. He’s mine! They tossed me a broken thing, and I’m helping to fix it, and no one will take it from me.

“Would you care for soup as well as an appetizer?” he asked.

“I’m not really terribly hungry.”

“Try a little anyway.”

“I’d only waste it.”

“No one worries about waste here. And we’re not paying for this. Try.”

Dishes began to appear. Each was a specialty of some distant world, either imported authentically or else duplicated here with the greatest of craft. Swiftly the table was filled with strangeness. Plates, bowls, cups of oddities, served in stunning opulence. Burris called off the names to her and tried to explain the foods to her, but she was dizzied now and scarcely able to comprehend. What was this flaky white meat? These golden berries steeped in honey? This soup, pale and sprinkled with aromatic cheese? Earth alone produced so many cuisines; to have a galaxy to choose from was so dazzling a thought that it numbed the appetite.

Lona nibbled. She grew confused. A bite of this, a sip of that. She kept expecting the next goblet to contain some other little living creature. Long before the main course had arrived, she was full. Two kinds of wine had been brought. Burris mixed them and they changed color, turquoise and ruby blending to form an unexpected opal shade. “Catalytic response,” he said. “They calculate the esthetics of sight as well as of taste. Here.” But she could drink only a tiny bit.