Damon Knight - Orbit 19

The characteristic fare of Blushing depressed Kalkas less than the food of Trojan Port or Vega; the Ganyfolk, dependent upon a supply line and more interested in Jupiter than in colonization, had no automatic chicken, no nowcow, no vat for beef, no accelerated rice. Fruits and vegetables they had in plenty, of course, but most of their protein was, more or less unabashedly, seaweed, yeast, and algae. With the aid of his spices Kalkas found it easier to swallow the honestly insipid pastes of the canteen than the artificially flavored foods of the cafeteria or the common room. Unfortunately, Blushing did boast a turkeypot which was harvested for special occasions. The first Earthman to visit Ganymede was a special occasion, and at dinner turkey was regularly set before him. He drew heavily upon his diminishing reserves of spice without being able to generate the illusion that the textureless white discs were anything but edible plastic.

Cris Troyant was slightly offended by the spices, not, it seemed, because their use implied a comment about Blushing’s premier food but because they were an Earthborn taste that no Spaceborn had ever acquired. Her nose was sensitive; she wrinkled it immediately when Kalkas opened his little box of paprika, and asked him if that was one of the flavorings he had used in the famous Agency dinners.

“Ferenc told you about those? I experimented with paprika once, very lightly, on cabbage. It wasn’t such a disaster as garlic, but it convinced me not to go on to cayenne.”

“These things change the flavor of the food.”

It wasn’t a question, but Kalkas replied as if it were. “In a sense they do. They have their own flavors, and they can also be used to emphasize the flavors of the foods to which they’re added. They help us pay attention to what we eat.”

Looking blank, Cris turned back to her plastic turkey. By the time the meal ended, Kalkas had begun uneasily to wonder if there were any possible approach to the girl. She seemed to be unresponsive, not because she was shy or preoccupied, but because she had no interest that Kalkas could touch. Her eyes, opaque rather than dull, received but did not send, and her lips were compressed. He imagined her exercising to relax, preferring water to coffee, and studying thoughtful books in her spare time. He understood why he had not recognized her when he saw her earlier, in the Instruction Center. Her hair had lost its flame; she was nearly chubby. She dressed in the stylized utilitarianism of Mars, but her clothes lacked the usual clashing bright colors; her pullover was light grey, her shorts were pale blue, and her only accessory was a narrow peltex belt that held a brooch in place over her navel. The brooch was a disc of polished olympistone, orange rather than crimson, lightly carved with a Greek cross. Kalkas thought she might talk about it, but she said only that it had been a gift. She didn’t stop for coffee, and Kalkas was left with no choice but to prospect among the other Ganyfolk.

“She doesn’t seem much like her parents.”

“Never met ‘em,” said the Executive Engineer. “Mother died. Cris doesn’t communi much. Ever beep bids with Ferenc?”

“Often, but more often with Macky. Ferenc didn’t sit on the Communications Subcommittee until shortly before the Retirement. He was never voluble, but he was never so locktaped as his daughter seems to be.”

“Voluble?” The Executive Engineer didn’t know the word.

The Head Beep Programmer said, “Long-interval polytalker,” and went on to tell Kalkas that Cris connected better through readouts than through speech. “She’s a booster on the procomps. I’ve been gramming for thirty years, and I’m not many diblets quicker than she is now.”

Two days later Kalkas found an excuse to adjourn the session early and relaxed from the negotiations by strolling through the Tunnels. Using the creddy his hosts had provided him for such casual occasions, he sampled the flavored alcohol served by a tiny step-in, rented a few music settes for the player in his room, and bought a charming little crystal pendant that held within it a complex three-dimensional pattern traced with europium oxide. Presently his wanderings brought Kalkas to the procomp section. No one objected to the Earthborn guest looking in on some of the daily labors of the colony, so he stayed for a while and grew interested in Cris Troyant’s work. When, once, she paused and leaned back from her console, he asked her a question, which she answered shortly but clearly, and then he asked if she would spend a few minutes over coffee telling him about her work.

She would, although she hadn’t much time to waste and she didn’t —as she said when they reached the canteen—like coffee, preferring instead a bubbly concoction called Greenwhistle.

“What do you want me to tell you?”

Kalkas wanted to know what his genes could possibly have contributed to her, but he began talking with her about the extent to which Blushing relied on the procomps. His own quite informal acquaintance with the devices had come chiefly in Libya Dome, where every office, every kitchen, every lab had a terminal, and most drudgery was performed by slaved specialty robots. Afforded such sybaritism, Kalkas had promptly shed the housekeeping habits in which Earthborn children are trained, but he had never grown easy with the quasi-cyborgs that made his domestic laziness possible. Both the energy-extensive policies of the Conservancy and the naturistic element of the global village culture inhibited the use of procomps on Earth; even the Clerks and Ministers who relied most heavily on them felt some distaste for the things. But the Ganyfolk used them even when metallic circuitry or human labor might be more efficient: some of the research teams, Cris said, were composed solely of procomps whose handlers only checked program obedience and methodology patterns.

“I handle quasi-phoenix study a lot,” she said by way of illustration.

“And you don’t know precisely what your procomps are doing, but you know they’re doing it?”

“Pos.”

The certainty of her knowledge perplexed Kalkas just as the mode and content of it disturbed him. He was familiar with readout globes as auxiliaries to screens and printers; to the procomp handlers of Blushing, screens were useless and printers only supplemented holographs recorded directly from the globes. Cris read the shifting patterns as easily as Kalkas read Kuoyü. The analogy was imprecise, of course, because the procomps employed a language that could not be spoken, whose tagmemes were points, lines, colors, and motions. It was not a tongue, it was a face, and Kalkas doubted that any Earthborn had ever made it.

For a short time Kalkas supposed that facility with the procomps was to Cris what talent was to some painters and sculptors and composers, either cause or symptom of a radical inarticulateness. But as he tried to improve his acquaintance with his daughter, he realized that she was simply impatient with the linearities and cadences of ordinary language. She preferred the meaning mandalas; she disdained what she thought a poor substitute. Kalkas was at the worst disadvantage of his career.

Weeks later, as Vega decelerated past the orbit of Earth in vector to Mercury, Kalkas concluded that it had been, after all, the inhuman symbography of the procomps that had led finally to his success. His reflection was prompted by the image of Earth displayed on the big screen of the common room; the planet happened to be only a few million kilometers from the longrunner’s course, and the astrogating scope had been fixed on it for several hours. Examining his responses to the display, Kalkas found among them, as he had expected, no hint of any feeling that the image was making a statement to him, that the planet as shown meant anything—anything, at least, but itself. Yet Cris, certainly, would endue it with some recondite signification; her inability to make clear what she meant when she spoke of the physicality and the inevitability and the connectingness of the signs in the globes had been what provoked her to lead Kalkas up to the surface dome.