Page 39 of Eat My Moon Dust
“Piro pulled Zufi out to see themilibolhives. He’ll be gone for a couple hours.”
I blinked, surprised. The hives were huge and undisturbed, probably centuries old. Bajora had found them following those sensitive tendrils within weeks of us moving in. He had a small operation out there, knowing the sweetmadhuwas a comfort to the humans. It reminded them of something calledhunni.
No,honey…Shit. Tinsley had used the same word as an endearment.
“Chudthi,”I hissed, heat climbing my tendrils like flames.
“What?”
“Nothing, just–you’re okay with that?”
Bajora shrugged, but there was a bitter set to his jaw. “Zufi won’t say anything if I send him a care package once in a while. Our little secret.”
“Thanks.”
He glanced at the locker behind me. “Tinsley’s right. You deserve to stay. I’m just doing what I can.”
“You agree with her a lot for a woman that hates your life’s work. How unexpectedly humble.”
When he turned, grabbed our plates, and tossed them in the cleaner, my shoulders eased. I glanced at the locker, half-tempted to burn the package that was making me defensive but grabbed the prototype of the tree needles instead. A tree with needles? Fucking wild.
“I like Tinsley. A lot. She’s a handful, and you know me.” Bajora gave me a roguish grin and a wink as he walked to his workbench. “That’s my favorite kind of person. Besides, she’s right about that too. The food bays, I mean.”
“Right.” I shuffled all her plans together and tossed them on the shelf with my name on it.
“Come here, I’ll show you.”
Bajora programmed something into the food bay out of muscle memory. The machine, already warmed up, spit out a pastry similar to theamilpocket I’d yet to eat. Bajora held each one up in his upper hands, catching the light.
“This is something called asamosa.It’s from the part of Earth that Naitee and Rambir Patel came from. They’re really similar, but the Earth version is stuffed with vegetables instead of fish.”
“Okay,” I said, following impatiently. I had a tree to design and twinkle lights to pull off the printing bay.
“What differences do you see?”
I squinted. “I don’t. They’re both pastries and shaped like pyramids.”
Bajora shook his head and tapped on their corners with the index fingers of his lower hands. “Thesamosais perfectly even. Every corner is the same amount of pointy, the same golden brown. The flaky bits are even the same shape. You see that?”
Now that he’d pointed it out, I did see it. “Huh.”
“Right now, there’s one variant to each human recipe except for the ones my data says are the most popular in the colony. Tea,kauphee,tost,so on, so forth. So thissamosa?If we print a hundred of them, they’ll all be exactly the same.”
He set it down, cut it open, and steam wafted out, exposing complex spices and rich chunks of vegetables in a minced paste. But the two halves of thesamosawere identical. Three green chunks, two red specks…
Bajora repeated theamilpocket print twice more and set them all on a plate. “Our food has hundreds of variants that are selected at random for each recipe. It feels natural to eat because culinary engineers have had two centuries to figure out how to engineer our food that way.”
“Well, shit,” I said, impressed. Bajora smiled, handing me one of theamilpockets while he ate the other. “Guess I never paid attention, eating the same three meals on a ship for so many years.”
Bajora hummed in the affirmative. “Most people think that it’s a one-generation problem. The next generation grows up without the variety or more realistic printing ingredients, therefore doesn’t miss the taste. But a lack of culinary variants in yiwreni food was linked to higher rates of depression and dissociation when they lost their planet. Same with universal syn-cuis on ISU vessels. Our bodies are hardwired for certain vitamins and minerals, and it’s really hard to replicate that without ingredients from the source. That’s why getting a culinary engineer into the human colony was top priority instead of, I don’t know–”
“A trauma therapist?”
We both huffed with bitter laughter. Every time I’d requested one be stationed with us, Zufi said he was still looking.
Bajora shook his head. “And there are some foods we justcan’tprint. Likeyoaghurt,for example.”
“Why not? It’s a food, that doesn’t make sense.”
