She sighed, sounding somewhat downhearted. I wish there was something I could do to make her feel better… Kit thought
But then something occurred to him. “Mamvish,” Kit said, “I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It’s back in my puptent.” He got up to walk back. “I’ll go get it. Just wait here—”
“What in the worlds for?” she said, levering herself up again on all those legs, her hide suddenly running blue-hot with Speech-characters.
And between one blink and the next the two of them were standing behind the stone circle. Kit shook his head and laughed. “You are so smooth when you do that,” he said. “Just wait here, I’ll get the thing.”
It only took him a few moments in his puptent to find it. She might as well have it, Kit thought, because at this rate there won’t be enough saltines to use much of it on. And if I’m right about this…
He popped out again and trotted back through the circle to her, holding out a plastic bottle for her to examine. “Here,” Kit said, “I thought maybe you might like this.”
Mamvish rotated that eye at it curiously, then sniffed. And that eye suddenly fixed on the red container with its white label with much, much more interest. “What… Wait. This smells like…” She blinked at him. “Is this made… of tomatoes?”
“Well, yeah. A lot of ketchup is.” Originally he’d thought all of it was, but his Mama had started pulling down cookbooks to set him straight on the concept. Apparently tomato ketchup was a relatively recent development.
“And this is… for me?”
“Well, yeah, Mam, why not?”
She stamped all her feet in sequence in what Kit realized from the sunny yellow of the Speech-characters suddenly roiling under her hide was a gesture of flummoxed delight. “Why are you all so good to me?!”
Kit had to laugh. “Well, why wouldn’t we be?” And then the laugh turned rueful. “You do so much, you work so hard… I have a feeling people don’t say thank you to you enough.”
“The Powers thank me,” Mamvish said. “The work thanks me. That’s as it should be.”
“Yeah,” Kit said, “but other people should do it too. A lot more. So… Here. You want to try some?”
“Do you think I should?” The barely-repressed excitement in her voice made her sound like a kid who’d been invited to open presents early on Christmas.
“Sure,” Kit said. And then, looking at the bottle in his hand and turning it over to look at the back label, he paused. “Then again, it’s not pure tomatoes. Might be smart if you checked the other ingredients. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they put in our food…”
“Well, naturally.”
“Okay, let me talk these out…” Kit pulled out his manual, paged through it to one of the active analysis pages, and laid the ketchup bottle on top of the page. Immediately the various molecules and compounds involved in the ketchup began laying themselves out in structural form just above the ground around them, a bright spill of glowing stick-and-ball structures. “So that complex over there,” Kit said pointing at one of these while he read down the text readout on the page, “that’s the tomatoes. It’s a concentrate—they render them down first. Then this is the vinegar—”
“Is there a generic name?”
“Oh, yeah. Acetic acid. Then the salt—that’s sodium chloride—”
“A fair amount of it in there.”
“Yeah, you should hear my mama about it. The people who make these prepared foods use it as a flavor enhancer. Kind of overuse it, actually. Is that okay for you?”
Mamvish waved her tail around. “It’s all right, I can instruct my metabolism to pay extra attention to it on the way through. It won’t cause any trouble.”
“Okay. And then these—” Kit waved his hand at another series of compounds. “They’ve just said ‘natural flavorings’ here, I think to keep their competition from finding out what they put in this stuff to make it taste the way it does. They’re all vegetable extracts, looks like. “
“Those all look fine,” Mamvish said. “And then this one—”
“Onion powder,” Kit said. “An onion’s a vegetable too, kind of a sharp flavored one. This thing,” and he pointed at another molecule—a couple of benzene rings with various hydrocarbons hanging off them—“this is a sweetener, it replaces one that has more calories.” He squinted at the manual. “One, six-dichloro, one, six-di-deoxy… whatever! The short name’s sucralose. And this last one, ‘spices’, that’s the company who made this getting all secretive again. Looks like there’s paprika in it, that comes from another vegetable—”
“Kit.”
“And this one’s harder to be sure about, but I think it’s—”
“Kit.”
He looked at her, concerned by Mamvish’s tone, which was both alarmed and somehow strangely surprised. “That one,” she said. “The sweetener, you called it—”
Oh no, don’t tell me she’s allergic! “Here,” Kit said, and squinted at the manual for a moment as he worked out how to get it to display the molecule in a higher level of detail.
The molecule spread itself out across the ground around them, and Mamvish turned in a slow circle and stared at the diagram. “Oh my,” she said. “Your world. Your world…!”
“Uh, look, this isn’t the regular kind,” Kit said, turning the squeeze bottle over with some annoyance. “My Mama started getting it because they put this fructose syrup in the regular ketchup. And she’s really annoyed about that stuff, it’s like the food makers in our part of the world put it in everything. I can get you some that doesn’t have the sucralose in it—”
“What? No!!”
Mamvish was shaking all over, and only Kit’s ability to read her skin colors—now swirling with violet and pink—told him that the emotion underneath the shaking was delight: she was aglow with it. “I can’t believe it,” Mamvish murmured. “How could it possibly have gotten any better? Except this way. It’s absolutely true what they say, that what the Powers have made, what they keep on making, is not only more amazing than you imagine but more amazing than you can imagine—”
“Um, okay,” Kit said.
She was turning her head from side to side so she could take turns staring at some parts of the diagram with alternate eyes. “Seriously, you put this in food? Truly yours is a planet of wonders! If it wasn’t for the bloody Idiot Dragons of the South Sea, it would be a perfect place, perfect beyond any possible belief…”
Kit didn’t quite have the heart right now to disillusion her. “Okay,” he said again. “So this molecule is all right with you?”
Mamvish looked at him in astonishment. “Absolutely! Oh, Kit, you are my thelef’ indeed! Can I really take this with me?”
“That’s what it’s for,” Kit said.
“And you’re sure you don’t need it for… other purposes?”
The look she trained on Kit as she said that gave him a whole new meaning for the term “side-eye”.
“Uh,” he said, none too sure of where this was going. “…I put it on crackers.”
The goggliness of the eye on that side got, if anything, more goggly. “Yeah, I know, it’s kind of weird,” Kit said. “I did it accidentally when I was little and I started to like it, and every now and then I get the urge again. It’s a comfort thing for me, kind of.”
“‘Crackers,’” Mamvish said.
“Yeah, I know, it’s not what you’re usually supposed to use it on, but I kind of—”
“And crackers are… a portion of your anatomy?”
Kit stopped dead. “What?”
Mamvish’s underhide started swirling with all kinds of hasty, crowded Speech-text in all kinds of colors, to the point where she started looking like an unnerved mobile fireworks display. “Oh please don’t take offense, I mean, you’ll have to forgive me but I haven’t really had time to look into, you know, these subjects, in enough depth… and the manual functions suggest that Earth humans have this whole range of unusual names for reproduction-associated organs, really so unlikely-sounding, some of them, and I do understand that this gets into the territory of privacy issues, and I…”