Page 69 of Eat My Moon Dust
“Syalithought you’d probably stop by… He’s working hard on, uh, work orders. In the home towers? Lots to catch up on.” Piro winced sheepishly as my spirits dropped.
“Oh, okay,” I said, trying to maintain some of my usual pep.
Piro was a terrible liar. WasIthis bad of a liar?? No wonder Zufi never bought our fake-real coil act. I was tempted to torture the truth out of the lieutenant pilot but decided not to. Whatever Hunar was working on, that ugly bean heart made it obvious he wasn’t avoiding me on purpose. Hehadshirked a lot of his regular work to help me, after all. And who knew what sorts of demands Zufi was making behind the scenes.
“I guess I’ll message him instead.”
“I think he’s on Do Not Disturb, but you should definitely try.”
“Should I?”
Piro chuckled. “Definitely. Any guy would melt over a comm from hispriya.”He made a point of nodding his ovoid eyes at the red tendril marks on my neck. “Oh, and theKrismistree is nearly done!Syalisaid he’d set it up as soon as the components cooled.”
We chatted a bit more about the tree and the ornaments, then Piro invited me to eat lunch with the rest of the guys outside on the tarmac in the shade. Aavar and Bree sat sandwiched together on the ground, her cross-legged and him with his knees out to either side behind her. They tossed me a beer, teased me about my telltale red marks, and taught me a hologame they played most days to bet on chores. It was relaxing, and when they asked if I’d be eating lunch with them on the regular, I decided that yes, I definitely would.
I spent the rest of the day there, hoping desperately that Hunar would stop by at some point to check on the printing bay while I sat at the break table and polished up the final details of a White Elephant gift exchange.
“WhiteElyiphont…” Bajora mumbled with a question in his tone, looking over my shoulder. He raised a brow at me as he slid a levimat beneath one of the shelves with his boot. “What is that?”
“Humans wrap presents for Christmas and put them under the tree,” I explained. “But mostly just within our families. So if there’s an office party or something, each person brings an anonymous present and chooses one at random. I thought it’d be nice for the festival since we don’t all know each other. And that way, we get presents under the big tree.”
“Huh,” Bajora mused, bringing up his holotab. The levimat whirred to life with a magneticwhompand the shelf rose just an inch or two off the grated floor. Bajora ushered it out through the narrow path by the lockers and called back to me. “Should the rest of us participate even if we don’t have human partners?”
“Duh!” I yelled after him.
“Send me the details and I’ll pass them around.” He walked back into the lounge and put his lower hands on his hips with a thoughtful scrunch of his brow. “What if I want my gift to go to someone specific?”
Thatpiqued my interest. I raised both eyebrows, waiting for him to elaborate, but he dropped the levimat to the floor and crossed his upper arms in defiance. “You won’t tell me who?”
“Nope.”
“Fine. You give them a separate gift. The White Elephant exchange is completely random.” As an afterthought, I added, “You can still send it anonymously though. Just put on the tag that it’s from Santa or a secret admirer.”
He grunted, shuffling the mat under the next shelf, and changed the subject. “Heard you figured out how to make flour frombirianuts. How’d you dry them?”
I grimaced, hunching my shoulders like a gremlin. “I might have set my food bay to warm for twelve hours…” It was definitely longer than that, and my food bay didnotfeel the same afterwards. “I’ve managed a yeast culture, but fat amount of good it’s done so far. I can’t make anything consistent, which is frustrating.”
“Oh?”
I shrugged, jetting off a mass comm to exchange participants. Their gifts were due by the afternoon. “Baking on Yaspur is like high altitude on Earth. Add in a new type of flour and who knows what sort of bacterial culture in the yeast, and it’s been slow-going. I can make unleavened bread, sort of, but thebirianuts don’t like that. I tried to make some ancient focaccia a couple nights ago because it can rise on its own sometimes, and it just crumbled like feta.” I sat back with a wistful sigh. “And I want bannock. And cookies, and pastries, and warm-from-the-oven sourdough and just… a lot of things I haven’t figured out how to do yet.”
“I didn’t understand half of those words and I’m a culinary engineer,” Bajora snorted, lifting up the second shelf and escorting it away. “It all just sounds like freaky human chemistry to me.”
“Exactly!” I threw my hands up, slouching in my chair until my chin hit my chest and my heels were outstretched. Blowing a curl from my forehead, I kicked the air with a growl. “It’s different from grilling a hunk of meat, or whatever Imani says they did on Huajile when she was there. I can’t just put fire under some raw ingredients and expect magic. I need bacterial cultures and chemical reactions that rely on the air instead of heat. At least, that’s what I need to start.ThenI need consistent temperature control.”
Bajora searched through his holotab, throwing down the levimat and kicking it under the next shelf. He scrolled through images and tables of complex equations with a human shake of his head. “Shilpakaari breads are all unleavened, so I guess we don’t have that native on Yaspur or Dharatee… It looks like yiwreni breads are, but their planet died a few decades ago and the atmosphere was drastically different than here. Whatever method you’d usually use, looks like it’s only on Earth at this point.”
“Yup. I’ve got the yeast culture started though. It just takes a while to get it right,” I admitted. “It’d be best if I could have something like baking powder though. If I had both,andsome base ingredients like raw eggs, butter, sugar, I’d be absolutely golden. I could make so many new things with the universal ingredients!”
“Baking powder, like your flour? And butter… that’s made from mammalian milk, right?”
“That’s right.” I scrubbed my hair with a grimace. “But it’s not technically cooked. We churn milk to make it clump up, but milk and yogurt and all that stuff?”
Bajora nodded, already knowing what I’d say. “Food bays don’t print raw materials or cultures.”
“Yes! It’s so frustrating.”
Bajora’s mane spiralled thoughtfully as he sent another shelf out of the room.
