“I didn’t say it was disgusting,” I protested weakly. “I’m just not used to, uh, eating snake sandwiches. That’s all. But…” I cleared my throat. “You said you have two home worlds?”
He looked suddenly guarded. “I should not have mentioned that. But yes, I am half Vorn and half Eloim.”
“I, uh, noticed that your sister doesn’t have horns like you do,” I said, busying myself with securing a sticky thought patch to my left temple and hoping I wasn’t overstepping my boundaries. “Is that because she’s a girl and only the men, er, males of your people have them, or…?”
I left the question hanging, wondering if he would get mad again.
“The horns are from my Vorn heritage,” he growled. “Sellah doesn’t have them because she’s pureblooded Eloim. Not that it’s any of your Gods’ damned business.”
“Sorry!” I protested. “I didn’t know it was such a touchy subject.”
“Well it is. You might not know much about the universe—how could you, living on that uninformed ball of rock you call a planet—but the Vorn are hated and feared throughout our galaxy. They are considered violent, dangerous, and most of all, unpredictable.” He glared at me, as though daring me to say something.
Okay, I wasn’t touching that one with a ten foot pole.
“And what are the Eloim known for?” I asked instead, glossing over the whole violent and dangerous thing.
Sarden took another bite of his sandwich and swallowed before answering.
“Eloim are highly civilized with an elaborate set of social customs for every occasion. They value art, beauty, and learning above all else.”
“Wow.” I frowned. “So the Vorn and Eloim are kind of polar opposites, huh?”
“Something like that,” he agreed guardedly.
“So how did your parents meet and fall in love, if they’re from such different cultures?” I asked, genuinely interested.
“They didn’t,” he said briefly.
“But then how—”
“Why are you so interested in my heritage, anyway?” he interrupted, frowning at me.
“I’m just trying to get to know you,” I said. “I’ve never met an alien before. Hell, I didn’t even know there were aliens outside of scifi books and movies until you had Bambi and his minions drag me through that bathroom mirror.”
“Who is Bambi?” he wanted to know.
“Oh—that’s what I was calling the head wormy guy—the main Commercian, I mean. He had a voice like a character from a children’s story back on Earth so I sort of started calling him by that character’s name.”
“That was actually Char’noth and despite his voice and appearance, he’s not a male you want to make angry with you,” Sarden said dryly. “You really seem to enjoy re-naming things and people.”
“Oh, you mean Al?” I asked. The artificial life-form had gone back to the control area, presumably to run the diagnostic test Sarden had talked about so he wasn’t there to hear us talking about him. “I just thought he needed a name. He seems to like it, don’t you think?”
“Yes, he does.” Sarden didn’t sound completely happy about it. “I don’t understand you—I’ve owned The Celesta for ten solar cycles and A.L.—Al—has been nothing but a control system for the ship. Then you’re on board for less than a solar hour and suddenly he wants a name.”
“Maybe it’s because I treated him like a person—not just a thing,” I said pointedly.
Sarden looked grumpy again. “Are you going to sim yourself some food or not?” he asked, pointedly changing the subject.
“Yes, I am.” I still didn’t like the idea of eating something made out of green slime but it seemed like the best offer I was going to get. And besides, it was better to keep the big alien talking—asking for help with the whole food-sim process might take another step towards making him think of me as a person, not just a commodity to be traded. Reverse Stockholm, I reminded myself. I had to keep it up.
I closed my eyes just as I had seen Sarden do and pictured a single piece of sushi. Nothing too fancy or complicated—just a California roll with crab and avocado and cucumber like they make at Origami, my favorite sushi restaurant in Tampa. Leah and Charlotte and I always go there for girl’s night out and then we head up to Ivarones, a little Italian place, and split a piece of their decadent chocolate cherry cheesecake for dessert.
Just thinking of my two best friends made me want to cry. I wonder if they had gone to the police yet. Probably not—I still hadn’t been gone from Earth for a whole day, even though it felt like years. They wouldn’t be allowed to file a missing persons report until at least twenty-four hours had elapsed. And even then it wouldn’t do them any good. I was gone, on my way to a galaxy far, far away…
Suddenly I realized I was dangerously close to tears.
Get a grip on yourself, Zoe! I took a deep breath and redirected my thoughts back to the piece of sushi. I thought about it as hard as I could until I heard the soft chime from the food-sim.
“All right.” Sarden opened the lid for me and peered inside. “Is that what it’s supposed to look like?”
I peeped in myself and was surprised to see a perfectly delicious-looking piece of sushi sitting on another one of those clear plates.
“Oh, look! Just like I imagined!” I clapped my hands in surprised pleasure.
“So glad we could meet your expectations,” Sarden said dryly, but I thought I saw the ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He lifted the plate out and handed it to me, waiting to see me eat the results.
Picking the piece of sushi up, I sniffed it carefully. Well, it certainly smelled like sushi and there was no green slime anywhere on it or near it. Deciding to give it a chance, I popped it into my mouth and began to chew.
After a moment I was looking for a napkin to spit it into. There wasn’t anything available though, so I had to swallow.
Sarden must have seen the look on my face.
“What happened? Did the food-sim get it wrong?”
“You could say that.” I grimaced. “It looked like sushi but it tasted like something else.”
“Like what?”
I frowned. It was hard to place the wrong taste because the sushi the food-sim had made for me had the right shape and color and texture and smell. But the taste…the taste had been completely off. Finally I had it.
“Chocolate cherry cheesecake!” I exclaimed. “That’s what it tasted like!” Maybe the food-sim had made it taste like that because I was thinking about how I used to share it with Leah and Charlotte after we had sushi.
“What’s that?” Sarden wanted to know.
“It’s this kind of cake only not a cake—it’s made from soft cheese flavored with chocolate—”
“Cheese?” he interrupted me. “Chocolate?”
At that moment I felt truly sorry for him. He might be a big, tough alien with a super fast spaceship but he was living on snake sandwiches and he’d never had cheese or chocolate which are like, two of the holy trinity of foods as far as I’m concerned. (Wine is the third, in case you’re interested.)
“Cheese is an Earth food made from milk, which is this white liquid we get from domesticated animals called cows,” I explained.
“Ah.” He nodded. “We make a similar concoction on Vorn 6 from the bile of the sprag.”
“Remind me never to go out to eat with you on Vorn 6 then,” I said. “Anyway, there are lots of varieties of cheeses—we use a soft, sweet one to make cheese cake.”
“And you said it was flavored by shauckolat?”
“Chocolate,” I corrected him. “It’s made by taking the beans out of these big pods that grow in the jungle and roasting them and grinding them—then mixing them with sugar and more milk—”
“You certainly eat a lot of this ‘milk’ you’re talking about,” Sarden remarked. “If we ate that much sprag bile we’d be sick.”
In my personal opinion, any
amount of bile would be too much, but I didn’t say so. See? I can be tactful.
“There’s no such thing as too much cheese or too much chocolate,” I told Sarden fervently. “Look, I don’t think I’m explaining about the chocolate cherry cheesecake the right way. Let me try to make a piece for you—or let the food-sim try, anyway.”
“Very well.” He nodded and crossed his muscular arms over his still bare chest which made his pecs dance around in a yummy and distracting way. “I’d like to see this Earth delicacy.”
“All right.” Closing my eyes to shut out the sight of his muscles, I took a deep breath and concentrated hard on making cheesecake. I thought about the dense, creamy texture…the rich, chocolately taste…the sweet, slightly tart cherries…
The food-sim dinged again. I opened the lid eagerly to see a perfect piece of cherry chocolate cheesecake sitting there on the clear plate. It looked just like it did when we ordered it from Ivarones.
“Perfect!” I exclaimed, picking it up. I was certain that this time I had gotten it right. It looked amazing and smelled so sweet and creamy and delicious. I couldn’t wait to taste it—but I wanted Sarden to try some too. He, however, was looking at it with an uncertain expression on his face.
“It looks like a triangular wedge of soil with blood clots on top,” he pointed out.
“What? Eww! Don’t say that about my cheesecake!” I protested. “Look, just try it and you’ll see how delicious it is. Just try.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t see why I should try your cuisine when you refused a bite of my perfectly good churn wrap, but all right. I’ll try.”
“You need something to eat it with—do you have any forks or spoons—any kind of utensils?” I asked when he raised his eyebrows at me in confusion.
“Oh. Of course.” He tapped the long bar the food-sim was located on twice with his fingertips. A portion of it flipped over, revealing a tray which held the most bewildering array of cutlery I’d ever seen, all made of some shiny black metal.
There were several knives of varying lengths, some things that looked like really sharp chopsticks only they had curly ends like corkscrews, a ladle-like spoon that would have held almost an entire bowl of soup—if his people ate soup—and some things that looked like weird 3-D forks with tines sticking out in all directions.
“What in the world?” I said, staring down at the bizarre instruments.
“Sorry.” Sarden looked slightly embarrassed. “It’s inherited from my mother. Eloim have elaborate customs for everything, including dining.”
“And they use all this for every meal?” Carefully, I chose a spork-looking thing with a very long handle—it looked like the best bet for eating the cheesecake the food-sim had made.
“Mmm-hmm.” Sarden nodded. “I don’t usually use it myself. Or at least, only when Sellah comes on board. She—” He stopped abruptly and for a moment I thought I saw his features twist into an expression of deep pain and regret. Then his face went blank and he shrugged. “Anyway, do you want to try this cakecheese first or should I?”
“Cheesecake,” I corrected him. “And you try it.”
“Very well.” He took the long handled spork from me. “And this is the correct utensil to use?”
“Uh, sure. It’s fine.”
“All right.” He dug gamely into the chocolate cherry cheesecake despite his earlier opinion that it looked like dirt and blood. He popped the bite in his mouth and I watched anxiously, wondering if this taste of Earth cuisine would make him think differently about me.
“Well?” I asked anxious after he had chewed and swallowed.
Sarden frowned. “It tastes good enough. Only…did you say it was supposed to be sweet?”
“Yes—so sweet it makes your teeth ache. Why—isn’t it?” I asked anxiously. “Here, let me try it.” I reached for the spork-thing but he held it out of arm’s length.
“Don’t you want me to wash it first?”
“Why?” I asked impatiently. “Do you have a cold? I mean, are you sick?” I asked, seeing the look of incomprehension on his face.
“Well, no. But…I am Vorn. Half Vorn anyway,” he said, as though that was supposed to make a difference.
“So? I’m human. Now let me try the cheesecake.” I held out my hand for the spork and he reluctantly surrendered it. (For those of you who are squeamish about eating after someone else, I’m sorry—it just doesn’t bother me.) Besides, I really wanted to try that cheesecake. I hadn’t even been gone from Earth a whole day yet and already I was having chocolate withdrawal.
I took a big bite of the chocolate cherry cheesecake, making sure to get one of the plump, gooey cherries too. I popped it in my mouth and chewed…then nearly spit it out.
“Wrong again? Is it not supposed to taste like that?” Sarden guessed, apparently reading the expression on my face.
“No,” I said swallowing with some difficulty. “Not at all.”
In fact, it tasted exactly like sushi. Not the mild California roll I’d tried to make earlier, either. The cheesecake tasted like the time I’d tried a piece of really strong salmon skin roll that Charlotte had ordered once. She’d gotten me to take a bite by telling me I wasn’t adventurous enough—I wondered what she would think if she could see me now.
Now, I know what you’re thinking—so what if they look wrong, you have something that tastes like cheesecake and something that tastes like sushi. Why not just close your eyes and eat them and enjoy?
Well, because it wasn’t just the taste I was dealing with. It was the texture and the smell. The smooth, creamy mouth-feel of the cheesecake and its rich, dark chocolate smell did not go well with the flavor of raw fish.
In fact, it was disgusting. So I was surprised when Sarden plucked the spork from my hand and ate another bite himself.
“Not bad,” he remarked thoughtfully. “At any rate, I’ve had worse. But I take it you want to try again?”
I sighed. “I’ll try something different this time—I think the food-sim thingy has sushi and cheesecake completely mixed up.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Go ahead. I have an entire drum of Nutrient Slime in the cargo hold—you can make as much shauckolat cakecheese as you want.”
This time I didn’t even try to correct him. Instead, I closed my eyes and pictured a cheeseburger. The biggest, juiciest cheeseburger ever, with pickles and onions, a deep red slice of tomato and a crispy piece of lettuce, all served on a big, fluffy sesame seed bun.
The food-sim dinged and out it came—exactly as I had pictured it. It smelled amazing.
Sarden eyed my creation with interest. “You Earthlings certainly have strange looking food.”
“Says the man who just ate a snake sandwich right in front of me,” I said, lifting the plate out of the food-sim’s big gold pot.
“Do you need a utensil to eat that?” he wanted to know. “What is it called, anyway?”
“A cheeseburger. And no utensils—this is finger food.”
“Finger food?” He frowned. “Is it made from the ground up digits of some animal?”
“Ugh, no!” I exclaimed. “Finger food just means it’s meant to be eaten with your fingers—with your hands. Don’t your people have any food like that? Aside from snake sandwiches, I mean.”
“The Eloim do not,” he said. “Even the churn wrap I ate was supposed to be carved into pieces with a vunnel knife and then consumed with the trillers.” He nodded at the cork-screw chopstick looking things. “The Vorn, however, are very fond of chabeth knuckles. We cover them in a type of sweet blood sauce and gnaw the meat from the bones. It’s a very messy affair.”
“It sounds like it,” I muttered. Actually, neither one of his cultures sounded like much fun. The Eloim sounded like overly fancy prigs and the Vorn appeared to be the galaxy’s equivalent of thuggish ex-cons with the table manners of a hillbilly. I wondered again how in the world his parents had gotten together. Maybe his mom had
a thing for bad boys.
“Well? Are you going to try it?” Sarden asked, nodding at my plate.
“Absolutely.” I eyed my creation reverently. This time I was completely certain the food-sim had gotten it right. It looked so perfect—like a cheeseburger out of a commercial. I mean, it really was a thing of beauty. Closing my eyes, I took a big bite and tasted…
Chocolate éclair.
“Oh, no,” I moaned, putting the cheeseburger down.
“Wrong again?” Sarden picked it up, sniffed it, and took a bite. He frowned, putting it down. “That is much too sweet.”
“It’s not supposed to be sweet at all,” I said sadly. “It’s supposed to be salty and crunchy and chewy and delicious.” Not that chocolate éclairs aren’t delicious—but that taste just doesn’t go with the smell and texture of a cheeseburger.
“Possibly A.L.—Al—did something wrong when adding the new Earth cuisine to the food-sim’s program,” Sarden remarked. “Maybe you should wait and let him tinker with it some before you try again.”
“No.” I frowned. “I’m not giving up.”
He gave me a surprised look. “For such a small female, you certainly have a lot of determination.”
“I’m not a quitter,” I said grimly. “And I’m not that small—it’s just that you’re so freaking huge. Does that come from the Eloim side or the Vorn side?”
“Vorn,” he said. “The Eloim are only a little larger than you Earthlings.” He sighed. “I was much feared growing up for my size. Only Sellah—” He frowned and stopped himself abruptly. “Keep trying if you want to. I have to see if A.L. has finished the diagnostic on the Hydrogen scoop’s panels yet.”
He started to leave but just then Al came gliding into the room.
“Master Sarden, diagnostics complete,” he said in that proper voice of his. “But I’m afraid you will not like the results.”
“What?” Sarden growled. “All I want to hear is that we can get to Giedi Prime.”
“Not immediately, I’m afraid,” Al said apologetically. “One of the panels is fatally flawed and must be replaced. The repairs you made will only hold for a little while—long enough to get us to the nearest spaceport—Gallana—which orbits Proxima Centauri.”