There was a hatch, carved from the lignified structural components of a planet-dwelling tree. I braced myself and pushed it open, then bounced slowly into the refectory. There were benches and tables bolted to the walls, floor, and ceiling; seat belts and sticky patches provided for the retention of diner and dinner alike. The wall at the far end of the refectory contained a recessed pulpit (currently unoccupied) and a hatch through which wafted a pungent odor that reminded me of the miasma surrounding Cook, whose door I had inadvisedly opened at the prompting of the talking box. (I say inadvisedly because he certainly didn’t want his cell cleaned; he drove me away with the most disgusting language I’ve heard in a very long time.)
“Hello?” I called. “Is it time for dinner yet?”
“Dinner? Dinner? I’ll give you dinner . . . !” Cook—green-skinned, belligerent—stuck his head through the hatch and glared at me with sullen aggression that slowly gave way to confusion: “Wait, you again! Who are you?”
I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes: Passive-aggressive resentment of my presence seemed widespread among the crew, and it was becoming tiresome. “The deacon hired me—I’ve just spent a day tying down loose items and scrubbing the deck. Can I have some food? Juice, maybe? Anything to eat, before I starve?”
Cook looked at me askance, showing the facets of his compound eyes. “His holiness didn’t tell me he was hiring new bodies!”
I placed a private bet on where Cook’s prejudices lay: “His brotherly holiness seems to be too busy arguing with his imaginary siblings to tell anybody anything useful,” I said. “But you can check with him if you like. I’m sure he’ll remember hiring me for at least another day or two.”
Cook nodded, his initial suspicion fading. “You can never tell,” he grumped defensively, and made as if to withdraw: “We get stowaways . . .”
“Food?” I asked hopefully.
“Can’t you wait? Food! That’s all you people are ever after! Food? Food! You’ve come to the right place, and I’ll sort you out, but you’re going to have to wait until it’s ready to serve up. I don’t know, everyone’s so impatient these days. The others will be here soon enough, so let’s see . . . are you one for the raw diet, or cultured? Do you need radioactives, or are you strictly organic? Salt, sweet, sour, umami, hydrocarbon, or nitriles? And will you be needing the juice bar, too?”
“Do I look as if I glow in the dark? I need juice and organics. Preferably something more entertaining than blue-green algae.”
“I’m on it. Do you have a problem taking your organics in the shape of cooked meat?”
“Meat? It’s not poisonous, is it?”
“It’s not poisonous.” Cook stared right back at me, as if deciding whether to take offense. “Contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and traces of phosphorus, sulfur, and a variety of other elements. It’s not radioactive, either.”
“Just tell me you grew it in a tank—”
“Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?” Cook reached behind his counter and thrust a tube with a mouthpiece at me. I fumbled it—it was disturbingly warm and soft. “Vat-cultured Fragile liver tissue, force-grown. Paté de fois Sapiens. You won’t get it anywhere else in Dojima System. Enjoy!”
“Er—” But I was too late to remonstrate: Cook retreated into his food-preparation module and slammed the hatch. Presently, I heard banging and much swearing from the other side, so I jumped up and attached myself to a vacant bench on the ceiling while I tried to decide whether to risk eating the stuff. At least the seat was adequately juiced: Soon I felt the comforting warmth of eddy currents flowing through the long bones of my thighs.
I was working myself up to the point of risking the tube of meat when the door opened, and Deacon Dennett floated in, followed rapidly by three cleaning worms and Father Gould. I say floated, but that gives rather the wrong impression—the deacon clearly anticipated his repast, but at the chapel’s current acceleration, it was impossible to move fast without bouncing off the walls and ceiling. In his eagerness for traction, he lost ground, until he was reduced to flapping his arms and grabbing at the furniture. Meanwhile, Gould mumbled and gibbered incomprehensibly: The poor fellow was driving eight of the field-expedient drones in parallel, and consequently had barely any cognitive bandwidth to spare for his own bodily needs. He was leashed to the deacon’s belt by a length of tape. Of the new arrivals, only the cleaning worms made good speed, undulating through the air and moaning hungrily, like a pack of feral vacuum cleaners.
“Ah, Ms. Alizond! Finished already?”
I tried not to bristle at his presumption. “I’ve just put in a thirty-hour shift, your holiness. There are limits to my unrefueled endurance.”
“Oh, as you were, then. All flesh must be eaten.” He waved magnanimously as he approached the hatch. “Cook, I say, Cook? Are you in?”
“Gruffum hash intestinal,” Father Gould’s speech center burped.
The hatch opened. “Whaddayou want?”
“What’s on the menu today?” Dennett was unperturbed.
“You gotta choice: gash, or tubespam like her”—he jabbed a thumb at me—“or I can do ya fermented milch curds from the Fragile vat, with added juice an’ fried lice harvested from the waste tank. What’s it gonna be?”
I noted with interest that Cook’s accent roughened considerably when he addressed the minister, and he was nudging him toward options he never offered me—not that they sounded appetizing.
“I’ll have the gash and tubespam, if you please.” The deacon showed no sign of being nudged.
“The vegetable?”
“He’ll have the same.”
“Hey,” I called from the ceiling.
“Yeah?”
“Those curds—where do they come from?”
“Mother’s milk,” Dennett said.
Milk? I’d heard of it, somewhere, once upon a time. “Oh.” Working on the principle that the deacon has been here longer than I and wouldn’t willingly let Cook poison him, I dropped the topic: Instead, I raised my tubespam and ingested a squirt. It tasted spicy, slightly rough, and reminded me of something I ought to know. It contained protein, fat, and mixed carbohydrates in an emulsion of mineral oil and water: I could digest the stuff. It was even piquant although I suspected I could get bored with it really fast. Suicidally bored if I had to eat it for many months.
Dennett collected two portions of what passed for food, then looked up. “Catch,” he said, and tossed me one end of Father Gould’s leash. While I carefully reeled in the father, he joined me on the ceiling bench. “Welcome to our cozy little parish. I suppose you’ve been busy?”
My mouth was full of paste. I swallowed: “Yes. The maintenance book kept me running around like a mad thing. Did our departure go smoothly?”
“As smoothly as can be expected—”
“Grackle turds! Nom!” (Father Gould clumsily plugged a tubespam container into his mouth and began to chew on it, unopened.)
“—Under the circumstances. But we’re making a solid centimeter per second squared, and if everything runs smoothly, you should be able to go into slowtime in another three or four days. Until shortly before our arrival, of course, except for the odd maintenance shift.”
“So we’re due to arrive—when?”
“Four hundred and fifteen standard days, give or take.” The deacon paused to delicately squeeze a blob of paste into the palm of his hand, then transferred it to his lips while I struggled to conceal my dismay.
(Four hundred and fifteen days? I’d told the agent I wanted the fastest available crossing! The run usually took less than a standard year, even on a minimum-energy transfer orbit.)