It did surprise me when she used the knife to cut the bulge right off the wall. Then she chopped the material into equal-sized portions and placed the chunks into the bowls.
"What are you doing?" I asked in horror.
"Making supper." She sniffed one of the lumps of green. "It smells like choilappa; that’s glazed ort-breast baked with several kinds of Divian vegetables. Of course, this is really just a mixture of simple amino acids and minerals — very basic, digestible by any DNA-based life-form we’ve ever encountered."
"It is not digestible by me!" I said. "It is a piece of my friend Starbiter!"
"Yes."
"You cut it right off her body!"
"Yes."
"It is Zarett meat!"
Lajoolie looked at me, then at the greenish matter in the bowls. "It’s not exactly meat; it’s a specialized skin tissue, purposely produced to be cut off and consumed by a Zarett’s passengers. It grows fast enough to feed eight people three meals a day… which we feed right back to Starbiter if we don’t eat it all. Each meal is artificially scented and flavored to taste like a different dish: it’s Divian cuisine, but humans really enjoy most of our food. There are a few things we eat that make Homo sapiens nauseous — things that hit your taste buds the wrong way — but if you wait half an hour, the artificial flavoring dissipates and the food turns completely bland. Not very appealing, but it’s still got nutritional content."
With a false smile of encouragement, she handed me one of the bowls. The green mound in it had the color of raw vegetation and the texture of a dead rabbit half-devoured by cougars. "It is a part of my friend," I said. "It is also opaque."
I set the bowl back on the counter.
"Oh dear," Lajoolie murmured. Her gaze shifted guiltily to my belly; I hoped she was imagining what my beautifully clear glass body would look like if I consumed a substance of hideous green. She would see it in my mouth as I chewed and in my throat when I swallowed. It would hang like a weedy blob as it churned in my belly. Then it would proceed quite visibly through the remaining stages of digestion and disposal. This would not be at all nice to witness — neither for Lajoolie nor for me. The food turning in my stomach would turn my stomach.
On Melaquin, we did not have such problems. Our synthesizers only created transparent foods… and the chemical composition of each dish was cunningly designed to remain invisible while the food was in our bodies, from one end of the alimentary canal to the other. Science People have told me the biochemistry of such a process must be most complex; but I do not see why there should be any great difficulty. Avoid opaque meals, and everything else follows.
"I don’t know what to say," Lajoolie told me. "This is the only food on the ship, It really won’t hurt you…" "It will just make me look ugly and foolish."
"You could wear clothes," she suggested. "To cover what happens inside you." She took a step toward the door. "I didn’t bring a big wardrobe with me, but there must be something we could make fit. You and I are, uhh, close to the same height."
"But we are not the same width at all. I am pleasantly slender; you are unnecessarily broad. Fortunately," I said, "I do not need your cast-off garments. Thanks to admirable foresight and planning, I have an excellent jacket of my own. It is a perfect fit… and I shall wear it when I deem necessary. But for now I have no appetite."
This was not strictly true. For one thing, I had not yet tried on the jacket; and I was not precisely certain what it meant for clothes to be a perfect fit, since I had never worn clothes before. Nevertheless, I was closer in size to human Explorers than to the muscle-bound woman before me. The jacket back on the bridge would fit better than any of Lajoolie’s apparel.
As for what I said about having no appetite — I was not yet so ravenous as to consume a part of Starbiter (especially not a green part of Starbiter), but I could feel hunger gnawing with growing insistence. During my four years of basking in the Ancestral Tower, I had built up a modest energy reserve… but that reserve would drain quickly now that I was up and moving. I certainly could not sustain myself with the dim phosphorescent glow from Starbiter’s wall fungus; therefore, I would need solid food soon or I would drop into a coma of starvation.
But I refused to eat immediately. Not until I relieved my jacket and covered my digestive tract.
Lajoolie waited another moment to see if I would tuck into the food. Then she shrugged, picked up the green wad from her bowl and took a bite. "It’s quite good," she said. "Really."
"I am not interested in eating," I lied. "I am more interested in understanding recent occurrences. Who are the stick-people? The ones you call Shaddill. Why did they treat us as enemies?"
The big woman chewed for an irritatingly placid period of time before she swallowed. "Until today, I would have said the Shaddill were the most benevolent race in the universe. Now…"
She sighed. Then, with many an annoying pause to eat, she told me what she knew.
The Divians Divided
Lajoolie’s race (the Tye-Tyes) and Uclod’s race (the Freeps) were both offshoots of a species called the Divians. Some one thousand years ago — I do not know if those are Earth years, Divian years, or years of the solar butterflies, because I did not care to ask — the Divians were a single species occupying a single star system. Back then, they did not have Zaretts with FTL fields; they only had primitive rocket-beasts that puttered between their birthworld and a handful of crude colonies on nearby planets and moons. The Divians were totally ignorant of the universe at large… until the Shaddill showed up.
No Divian saw a Shaddill in person; all communication was conducted through robotic go-betweens who looked exactly like the Divians themselves. No one even saw the Shaddills’ spaceship except three people from an outpost on a remote moon. By sheer chance, this outpost suffered an accident involving a poorly designed something that was supposed to keep a second thing properly fueled, so that the second thing could prevent a third thing from catching fire, but then the third thing did catch fire and even though the fire was put out, the smoke suffocated a beetle-like creature that served as some sort of safeguard for the outpost’s life support systems… and in short, disastrous events transpired, threatening death to all concerned. Since no poky Divian vessel could reach the outpost in time, the Shaddill were prevailed upon to sail to the rescue. Their ship swooped in, picked tip the Divian personnel, and sent them back to safety inside the first Zarett ever — but not before the people from the outpost had seen that the Shaddill drove a ship made of sticks.
Such a chivalrous rescue put the Shaddill in an excellent light… and the Divians were already inclined to regard the Shaddill as visitors of wondrous philanthropy. The Shaddill had introduced themselves as emissaries from the League of Peoples, ready to induct "acceptable" Divians into the League. In order to be acceptable, persons had to agree to the League’s only rule: never to slay another sentient being, either by deliberate deed or willful negligence. Creatures who obeyed this law were considered sentient themselves and were guaranteed protection; everyone else was considered non-sentient, possibly a dangerous threat to the universe. The League did not actively seek to destroy dangerous non-sentient beings, but they never ever allowed dangerous non-sentients to move from one star system to another.
The Shaddill offered Lajoolie’s ancestors a choice: to abide by the League’s law (in which case the Divians would be granted the means to venture into the galaxy at large) or to reject the law (in which case they would be killed if they tried to leave home).