The Galactic Gourmet

by James White

  In answer Gurronsevas agreed that the hunters were worthy of the meat they ate, since it was obtained after long periods of travel and hardship and great personal risk. But the growers of vegetation who stayed at home produced more food with fewer risks and none of the respect accorded the brave hunters. It was thus on Wemar now, just as it had been on countless worlds for many centuries.

  Prompted by Prilicla, he told it that meat-eating in the far past had been a matter of availability, convenience and choice rather than a physiological necessity. He reminded it that as a general rule the vegetable-eating young and the very old Wem were healthier and better fed than the meat-eaters, who often starved themselves into unnecessary sickness because of their hunters' pride. The re­sult was an angry silence that lasted for nearly an hour.

  Still Creethar was not fully convinced that meat was unneces­sary for sexual potency, but after a few days of eating Gurronsevas' Wem vegetable dishes its conditioning, he felt sure, was beginning to crumble.

  Food was a fairly safe topic, especially the preparation and presentation of Gurronsevas's most recent Wem dishes, but when he tried to veer off the subject to talk about Creethar's hunter friends, or about Remrath or the good work that the young cook apprentices were doing in the mine, it stopped talking. Once it said angrily that the kitchen was not a suitable place nor was cooking proper work for a young Wem. When Gurronsevas asked why not, Creethar accused him of stupidity and lack of feeling.

  Remrath had accused him of insensitivity, also without giving an explanation, just before Gurronsevas had been sent away from the mine. Feeling puzzled and intensely frustrated, he returned to the subject of food.

  That was the one topic that he was able to discuss with com­plete authority. Gurronsevas could talk about food in all its multi­tudinous forms and flavors, and with it the weird and even more wonderful variety of beings who had been served his culinary cre­ations. Of necessity this led into a discussion about off-worlders, their beliefs and philosophies and social practices, including the in­dividual preferences and eating habits of the sixty-odd different species which together made up the Galactic Federation.

  He was trying very hard to plant the idea in Creethar's mind that Wemar was one inhabited planet of many hundreds, while hoping that among the other intelligent species he was describing there might be one society whose behavior was similar enough to that of the Wem for the other to react, emotionally or verbally, in a manner that would enable Prilicla or himself to put a crack in this wall of Wem silence.

  But Creethar's emotional and verbal responses were un­changed.

  Prilicla said, "I, too, feel and share your disappointment, friend Gurronsevas. Creethar feels a deep interest and curiosity about the things you are telling it, and there is an even stronger feeling of grat­itude towards you because your conversation is taking its mind off some serious personal trouble. But its despair and anger and fear are still present and have been reduced but not changed by anything you have said to it.

  "The patient's strongest feeling at present is of friendship to­wards you," Prilicla went on. "You may not be consciously aware of it, but you have developed the same feeling towards it, just as you did following prolonged contact with its parent, Remrath. But I feel increasing weariness in both the patient and yourself. With rest a new approach to the problem may suggest itself."

  "Creethar is due for discharge in less than seven hours," said Gurronsevas. "I think we have been overcautious in concealing the news of its imminent release. Now is the time to tell it. We have lit­tle to lose."

  In a gentle, reproving voice Prilicla said, "I can feel your frus­tration, Gurronsevas, and I sympathize. But every time you even hinted at the subject of its return to the mine, there was an adverse emotional response followed by a long, angry silence. There is much to lose."

  For a moment Gurronsevas was silent, then he said, "You tell me that Creethar and myself feel friendship for each other. But tell me, are we good enough friends to be able to excuse each other's bad behavior, insults or unintended hurtful words?"

  Without hesitation the empath replied, "I feel your determi­nation. You will tell Creethar the news whatever answer I give. Good luck, friend Gurronsevas."

  For a moment Gurronsevas said nothing as he tried to choose words that were right and at the same time would excuse him in advance for any hurt they might cause this strange being who had become his friend, then he said, "There is much I want to say to you, Creethar the First Hunter, and many questions I would like to ask. I have not asked them before now because, whenever I tried to do so, you grew angry and would not speak to me. Remrath will not speak to me either and, for reasons we do not understand, has for­bidden the off-worlders to return to the mine. But now we have only a few hours left to talk together, and exchange questions and answers..."

  "Be careful," said Prilicla. "Creethar's emotional radiation is changing, and not for the better."

  "...Your wounds and infections are healed and clean," he went on carefully, "and your physical condition is as good as we can make it. You will be returned to the mine before noon."

  Creethar's body jerked suddenly against its restraints, some­thing it had not done for many days, then became still. Its face turned suddenly towards Gurronsevas, but the eyes were tightly closed. What stupid piece of xenophobia or cultural conditioning, he wondered angrily, could cause such a severe reaction in a mind that he knew to be intelligent, civilized and in many ways ad­mirable? He was not an empath, but Prilicla's next words told him only what he already knew.

  "The patient is becoming seriously disturbed," said Prilicla ur­gently. "The feelings of friendship towards you are being negated by an upsurge of the background fear-anger-despair emotions that troubled it earlier. But it is fighting very hard to subdue those ad­verse feelings towards you. Can you say something that will help? Its distress is increasing."

  Gurronsevas sub-vocalized a word that he had been forbidden to speak as a child and had only rarely used as an adult. The patient's reaction to what should have been good news was all wrong, and suddenly he felt both unsure of himself and angry that he was caus­ing anguish to a friend without knowing how or why. In all other respects Creethar's thought processes and conversation were nor­mal, but in this one respect the Wem was totally alien. Or was it the medical team, or even Gurronsevas himself who in this single re­spect were alien, and if so how?

  He was missing something, Gurronsevas felt sure, some es­sential difference that was both simple and vitally important. An idea was beginning to stir in the depths of his mind, but trying to coax it out into the light seemed only to drive it deeper. He wanted to ask Prilicla for advice, but he knew that if he bypassed the trans­lator to do so, Creethar would think that he was keeping secrets from it, and that would not be the right thing to do just now.

  He did not know what to say, so he said what he felt.

  "Creethar," he went on, "I feel confused, and guilty, and very, very sorry for the mental pain I am causing you. Somehow I have failed to understand you. But please believe me, it is not now and has never been my intention or that of the others on the ship to hurt you. Nevertheless we, and especially I through ignorance and insensitivity, have caused you past and present mental anguish. Is there any apology I can make, or anything else that I can say or do that will ease it?"

  Creethar's body grew tense but it was not fighting the re­straints. It said, "For such a fearsome creature you can be sensitive at times and grossly insensitive at others. There is something that you might do for me, Gurronsevas, but I am ashamed to speak the words. It is not the kind of favor that one ever asks of a relative or a close friend, or even a new, off-worlder friend like yourself, be­cause it would be distressing for them."

  "Ask it, friend Creethar," said Gurronsevas firmly, "and I shall do it, whatever it is."

  "When, when my time comes," said Creethar in a voice that was barely audible, "will you go on talking to me about the won­ders you have seen on other wor
lds, and stay close to me until the end?"

  The brief silence that followed was broken by Prilicla, who said, "Gurronsevas, why are you feeling so happy?"

  "Give me a few minutes to talk to it," he replied, "and Creethar and the rest of you will feel happy, too."

  Chapter 32

  The litter bearing Creethar had its sun canopy fully deployed so that the patient was hidden from sight. When Prilicla had said that it was only fitting that Gurronsevas and no one else should ac­company it to the mine entrance, the only objection had come from Naydrad who was worried by the thought of an inexperi­enced driver being in charge of an anti-gravity vehicle.

  Tawsar, the returned hunters, and all of the teachers with the exception of Remrath had been joined by the young working par­ties, so that the slope outside the mine entrance was covered by tightly-packed Wem bodies, except for a small area at the front of the crowd that contained three small handcarts. Slowly and silently Gurronsevas guided the litter to within a few yards of the carts, then reduced power to the anti-gravity grids. While the litter was settling to the ground he opened the canopy to reveal Creethar.

  The assembled Wem were hushed and respectful as befitted the occasion, their feelings towards the off-worlders remaining hid­den. Even the youngest of the children were silent as the crowd stared at the still figure of their former First Hunter whose body was clean and undamaged except for its right hind-limb, which was en­cased in a transparent cast. But when Creethar raised its head suddenly and stepped onto the ground the reaction, the sudden out­burst of shouting and screaming, and the milling about of Wem bodies, was beyond anything in Gurronsevas' experience. He won­dered how this storm of emotional radiation was affecting Prilicla on Rhabwar.

  But the empath had been gently insistent that, following their lengthy pre-discharge conversation with Creethar, there would be no risk. The expected emotional storm, it felt, would be comprised of shock, surprise and uncertainty, with minimum hostility. After all, it had been Creethar's own idea to hide the facts from its own people until the last possible moment so that its homecoming would have the maximum effect.

  Limping only slightly, Creethar moved close to the hand-carts and stopped to look down at them. The noise from the crowd made it difficult to think, but rather than inarticulate screaming and shouting, the sound was changing to that of many conversations that were being shouted only because everyone else was shouting. And the movements within the crowd had almost ceased, but one eye showed him a young adult who looked like Druuth disappear­ing into the mine entrance, hopefully on the way to fetch Remrath. The others brought him the picture of Creethar looking up from the carts and raising its arms for silence.

  "My family, friends and fellow hunters," it said slowly and clearly when silence finally came, "you have made a serious mis­take regarding the intentions and the abilities of the off-worlders on the ship. It is the same mistake that I was making until a few hours ago. But now you can see for yourselves that I am not a dis­membered collection of dead meat ready to be loaded onto these carts and taken to the kitchen. I am alive, and strong, and healthy. This is because our off-world friends are not and have never been preservers of meat.

  "They are preservers of life."

  Creethar paused. From the crowd there came a sighing sound, like a wind blowing gently over grass, as they all seemed to inhale as one in surprise and wonder. But silence returned as it resumed talking, describing all the things that had been said and done to it by the off-worlders. Only once did it stop, when its parent and its mate appeared suddenly in the mine entrance and began pushing their way to the front of the crowd. But Remrath gestured for Creethar to go on speaking and walked past it to stand beside Gurronsevas.

  In a voice that carried only to him, it said, "We grievously mis­judged your friends on the ship and, after all that you have done for us, you most of all. I was thinking too much like an ignorant and backward Wem, and I am sorry. You, and your preserver friends, are again welcome in our home."

  "Thank you," said Gurronsevas in matching voice. "I, too, am deeply sorry, for being so stupid and insensitive, and for not lis­tening with more care to the words you were saying to me. It was a misunderstanding."

  A misunderstanding...

  Gurronsevas cringed inwardly with shame and embarrass­ment at the memory of some of the things he had said to Remrath. At the time he had thought it strange and rather charming, but not important, that the arts of cooking and healing were practiced by the same person, and that among the Wem these individuals were also known as preservers. If he had been thinking properly he would have realized that in a society that had come to regard the eating of their increasingly scarce food animals as their only long-term hope of survival, meat from any source would not have been wasted. The clues had been plain for him to see. And when he had used the word "preservers" while referring to the medical team, believing that "healer" and "preserver" were synonymous so far as the Wem language was concerned, he had not been thinking at all.

  If their positions had been reversed and Remrath had offered to tell Gurronsevas in detail what the off-world preservers—the be­ings who were thought to be responsible for cleaning and cutting away infected tissues and sectioning-up and preparing the edible body parts for the kitchen as would technicians in a slaughter­house—were doing to his beloved offspring, physical violence rather than an angry silence and expulsion from the mine might have been the result.

  The Wem had been forced to regress in many areas, but they still retained their intelligence and a civilized culture. That was why Prilicla had felt that it would be better for the contact to be renewed by their ex-patient and, as usual, the empath's feeling had been ac­curate and Creethar was doing fine.

  "...The off-worlders came here to tell us how we can live bet­ter lives on our sick but recovering world," Creethar was saying, "but it is only knowledge and advice they bring us. They have ex­plained how and why the sickness came to Wemar many centuries ago, and how we can cure that sickness and keep it from return­ing..."

  Knowing that the Wem had long since lost the precise lan­guage of science, Gurronsevas and Prilicla had described the eco­logical catastrophe that had befallen Wemar in simple words, and Creethar was doing the same. In words that they and it under­stood, Creethar described Wemar's centuries-past Time of Plenty and the terrible, continuous poisoning of the land, sea and air and the creatures who lived on or in them, and on which that short-lived Golden Age depended. It told of the vast quantities of noxious va­pors that had been released into the air, to find their way high into the sky where they attacked and destroyed the vast shield that pro­tected all of Wemar from the harmful parts of their sun's light.

  Gradually the smallest and most delicate sea-dwellers, those on which the larger fish and in turn the Wem depended for food, perished from the polar and temperate oceans. On land the un­shielded sunlight blighted or killed the vegetation that fed the small and large grazers who fed the predators and the Wem themselves. Under the two-pronged attack of starvation and the sickness of a daylight that blinded the eyes and caused uncovered parts of the body to dry and rot away, all forms of animal life were dying in their millions. Their planet was withering and its depleted population shrinking with every weak and sickly generation that was born.

  But the Wem who had brought down this catastrophe upon themselves were tough and adaptable, and so, although they had no way of knowing it at the time, was their world. The entire plane­tary population sickened and the technology that had housed them and harvested their food and processed their meat collapsed in ruins all around them. But a tiny proportion of them did not die, because they learned to protect themselves and their children from the deadly, invisible part of their once friendly and health-giving sunlight, and the few that remained relearned how to live in caves like their earliest ancestors. They grew crops in tiny areas of shel­tered valleys, and traveled, hunted, and fished by night. The grow­ing of vegetables and edible grains out of the dir
ect sunlight was not a popular activity because, until the coming of the off-worlder mas­ter of cooks, Gurronsevas, it was believed implicitly that the diet of a healthy and virile adult Wem had to consist predominantly of fish or meat.

  Holding stubbornly to the belief in meat-eating had been caus­ing the remaining Wem to die, either from starvation or unneces­sarily in the hunt. For the docile food animals were long gone and the few species that had adapted to become nocturnal, cave-dwelling predators had lost their docility. A similar adaptation had occurred in the sea depths where large fish attacked and ate each other or Wem fish hunters.

  "...But the monstrous reduction of population," Creethar was saying in a declamatory voice, "and the death of all transport and manufacturing technology had one beneficial effect: it enabled the ailing Wemar to begin its recovery. Over the centuries the great living creature that is our home world has dispersed and dispelled the poisons from the land and sea and partially renewed the invis­ible shield above us, which allows only heat and light to reach the surface. As a result, the plants are beginning to grow again and the animals and sea creatures forsake their caves and burrows and ocean depths and thrive; but for many generations we must hus­band our food resources by breeding animals, not hunting and eat­ing them to extinction because of our unnecessary hunger for meat, until we have completed the work of replenishing our planet.

  "But the off-worlders advise caution," Creethar continued. "Prolonged exposure to sunlight will still harm us, but not to the extent that it did in the past, and our children's children it will not harm at all. Other problems face the Wem when the surviving fam­ilies and tribes join together again; we must persuade the Fat Ones at the equator to give up their simple but very dirty technology. We must do this peacefully, the off-worlders say, by using our minds rather than our spears, because there are too few Wem remaining on Wemar for violent solutions. And when we begin to redevelop our technology, they will advise us on methods of keeping it clean so that we will not poison our world again..."