Yet the whole look of the house was very simple and spare—appliances and storage were mostly hidden away against the walls, or in them, by woven screens or cupboard doors. There was a great deal of artwork, paintings and sculpture done by both of Quelt’s parents. Her father’s art looked more like what Nita thought of as modern or abstract art: splashes of bright color against the pale, plain stuccoed walls. Quelt’s mother’s art was mostly portraiture, pictures of her husband and daughter, and very beautiful landscapes—all of these featuring the sea or the hill behind the house. There were also some still-life studies of flowers in the dining room, the work of someone who had sat in front of one of the blue jijis flowers up on the hill for a very long time, studying every petal of it, every hair.
“Young cousins,” Quelt’s mother said when they’d seen everything, “what about latemeal? Did you eat anything on the journey?”
“Uh—” Kit said.
“Everything,” Nita said. “But we’re ready for more. And so is Ponch. Huh, Ponch?”
Ponch looked at Quelt’s mother and wagged his tail. Food is always nice, he said.
Quelt’s mother smiled. “The perfect houseguest,” she said. “Things will be ready in a few moments…Do you change clothes for latemeal?”
“Is it required?” Nita said. She knew places where it was.
Quelt’s mother tilted her head sideways. “The careful guest,” she said, “perhaps wants to show the other diners honor.”
Nita and Kit looked at each other. “Change for dinner,” they said in unison.
They unlimbered their pup tents, slipped into them, and changed into clean things. Nita, feeling the heat, got into one of her beach wraps and put a light jacket over it, then went out to see about dinner. Everybody sat down in the great room, on cushions around the long, low table, which groaned with the feast Quelt had threatened. Nita began to understand, with some amusement, that Quelt’s mother and father were as much in love with food and its treatment as her own mom had been. It was strange for her, too, to look down the table at the vast array of bowls and plates and platters, rilled with dishes hot or cold that sported unfamiliar shapes and colors, greens and blues very much in evidence. She laughed to herself
as she saw Kit go straight for the blue foods, so that Quelt’s mother laughed and passed him more of them. For her own part, Nita sat there dealing with her first really leisurely contact with alien foods—smells and textures that she’d never encountered before, but that were nonetheless instantly appetizing.
“We’re lucky this way,” Quelt said, passing Nita a bowl of some bright orange sauce to dribble over a plateful of something that smelled most deliciously of fried chicken but tasted like sweet-and-sour pork. “Our body chemistries are a lot alike; we’re both using iron as the heart of the molecule that carries oxygen around in our blood. So that means there’ll be certain similarities in—” And then Quelt stopped and laughed. Nita looked up at her with her mouth full, chewing. Quelt said, “As if it matters! Do you want to know what these things are, or would you prefer just to point, and I’ll pass them to you?”
“Pointing’ll do fine for the moment,” Nita said, and she pointed and had many things passed to her. She was grateful that table manners on Alaalu, or at least this part of it, were very similar to those on Earth, right down to the short but elegant grace said before the meaclass="underline" “Here we are,” said Kuwilin, “and here’s all this fine food. May it do us good, so we can thank the Powers for it!”
When they were halfway through the meal, the sun was easing down toward the water outside the dining room window—not a window as such, but just an opening with windbreak shutters folded back out of the way of the view. Quelt’s mother stretched. “This is a good time to take a rest from the food,” she said, “and it won’t run away…or not far.” There was some laughter at that, since everyone was feeling a little overstretched: Dinner had featured at least six different kinds of shesh. Nita had started out thinking of this as a sort of alien cheese, but then she realized that such an appraisal fell very far short of the mark. There were too many ways to treat the shesh, as she found when she made the mistake of getting Kuwilin talking about it.
Demair rolled her eyes and started talking to Kit about what life on Earth was like, while Kuwilin held forth on shesh—the storage, processing, pressing, coloring, and texturization of the foodstuff; the handling of its seasonal variations; and its preparation for dining, using at least a hundred technical terms that Nita hadn’t realized even occurred in the Speech. Hearing them now, she found herself wondering whether there were some wizards who practiced their art exclusively in the culinary mode, forsaking all other usages. Or more likely, she thought, it’s true what we’ve always read in the manual.. that wizardry is only another kind of science—just one with its roots sunk deeper into the universe than most.
For the moment, it didn’t matter. After a while, they all got up and left the table, went outside, and strolled down the beach, watching the sun go down in a great blaze of fire—peach and orange and gold against that sky, which, despite a touch of green, or perhaps because of it, seemed more intensely blue than any Nita had ever seen on Earth. That color ran chills down Nita’s neck, once or twice, when she looked up at it. What is it? she wondered. What is it about this place that reminds me of something else? Whatever else it reminds me of, it’s good…
Ponch gamboled up and down in the water, running at the slight waves, biting them, chasing them out to sea again. Nita, walking with the others, gazed up and down those miles and miles of empty beach, and was astounded. “Can anyone live
in a place like this?” she said.
Quelt’s mother looked at her in some surprise. “Anyone who likes,” she said. “It’s a little isolated here, but some of us like that. People in other islands, maybe they don’t—but then they have hundreds and thousands of stad to sail before they see another human face. This is the biggest island, so we have the Cities here.” She shook her head. “I’ve lived in the Cities—they’re nice if you want to see a thousand faces that you don’t know every day, and maybe there’s a kind of freedom in that. But for my part, perhaps I’m too much of a homebody. Maybe I prefer seeing just two other faces that I know, most days, and hearing the same three flocks of flying sheep come in every day and go again…the water coming up and down, and nothing else.” She smiled, a long, lazy, untroubled look.
“For the rest,” Kuwilin said, “this is no crowded world. Granted, there’s much more sea than land. The sea is openhanded with us, and gives us more than enough food for everyone. People who have more than they need give to those who have less, if they need it, or if they ask for it. Why? How is it in your world?”
Nita started to answer, then stopped herself. She was disinclined to break the perfect spell of quiet that was coming down over her so quickly in this place. She glanced at Kit, who was walking on the far side of Kuwilin, but he was looking out to sea, not paying attention. “It’s different,” she said. “It’s very different. People don’t give that readily in my world.”
“But what’s the matter with them?” Quelt’s mother said. “Don’t they have enough?”
“Of many things,” Nita said, “maybe not. There are so many of us. And while there’s a lot more land on my planet than there is on Alaalu, our world is much smaller.” She pulled out her manual. “See,” she said, paging to the map of Alaalu, which showed Earth beside it for comparison’s sake.