“Why?”
“So it was still hot when you got to it. Pie came last.”
“Why?” she asked again.
“How would I know?”
He vowed to learn by party time. He had two weeks, but the days evaporated surprisingly quickly once he had a deadline to meet. First off he had to find out if people could still eat an entire meal without damaging themselves, so he looked up a doctor and told him what he planned to do. When the doctor finished laughing he said, “Sure, it’s still possible. We haven’t had time to actually evolve away from our ancestral energy source. On the other hand, I’d advise you to reprogram your nanites to assist with the digestive process, just in case your endocrine glands are slow to respond after a lifetime of disuse. I can give you a program for that. You’ll probably want to upload it a few hours before you eat so your body will already be prepared for the influx of food.” Dennis felt a big weight slide off his shoulders until the doctor added, “Let me know how it works.”
That wouldn’t be possible without food, which wasn’t something a person could just find in a storehouse somewhere. Dennis had to convince his apartment complex’s nanofab AI that he had a legitimate need for the stuff, and once it agreed to make what he wanted, he had to decide what he did, in fact, want it to make.
There had to be a turkey, of course. He had a hard time convincing the AI that he wanted it already dead, and preferably without feathers or entrails, but from his research into cooking techniques he learned that very few people started with the whole turkey, and he saw no reason why he should either. Tradition was tradition, after all, and he wanted to do his Thanksmas dinner the same way his great-grandmother had done. That also meant potatoes, which he would boil and mash until they were smooth (never lumpy!), and gravy made with the molten fat from the turkey, and yams with both caramelized sugar and spun sugar melted over them – cooking seemed to involve a lot of melting – and deviled eggs, which involved yet another argument with the AI, who couldn’t decide whether or not it needed to make a chicken first before it could make an egg.
And then there was the stuffing. Cheryl had gotten into the planning by this point, and she had uncovered perhaps the most controversial aspect of the whole holiday meal: what to put inside the turkey carcass while you cooked it. One source said it should be a mixture of spiced bread crumbs, and another source said it should be crackers and the cut-up “giblets” and more eggs (mixed in raw rather than deviled, thank goodness), and another source called for a different type of bread made from ground corn, while another swore that the best thing to put inside the turkey was a can of beer that would boil and steam the meat into perfect flavored tenderness from the inside out.
Of course all of the sources dismissed the other methods as hopelessly inferior, and Dennis couldn’t remember which kind his great-grandmother had liked. “This must have been why the tradition died,” he said to Cheryl when she showed him the results of her research. “Nobody could settle on what kind of stuffing to use.”
She said, “I think we should just go with the easiest one. We’re already making bread for the crescent rolls, so let’s use bread crumbs and be done with it.”
That made a great deal of sense, and the nanofab AI would undoubtedly like the idea, too, so that’s what they decided to do. Then they complicated its job anyway by ordering olives and cranberry sauce and cheese spread and pickled cucumbers and half a dozen other condiments that the history texts swore were necessary for a traditional Thanksmas meal.
“Whoa, check this out,” Cheryl said, pointing to a footnote at the end of the list. “It says here that fruit cake was mostly a ‘Christmas’ thing, and that Thanksgiving and Christmas were two separate holidays until the end of the twentieth century, when people realized that preparing for two big feasts in a row was driving them all crazy.”
“No surprise there,” Dennis said. Even with a nanofab to make the raw ingredients for him, this was turning into a major undertaking. The thought of doing it twice made him seriously doubt the sanity of his own sainted great-grandmother.
But as she had so often said to him before she left for a new life on Neptune’s moon, Triton, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” So Dennis persevered, and he and Cheryl finalized their menu and planned their strategy for preparing it all.
Then he had to figure out gifts for everyone. In a society where nanofabs could build anything a person wanted from its constituent atoms, it was hard to think of anything that his guests would want that they didn’t already have, but Dennis delved into the history texts for that, too, coming up with a BB gun for Joachim, some frilly underwear for Teeliam, a bar of soap on a rope for Frieda, and a box of real paper stationery for Aylette. For Cheryl he directed the nanofabs to craft a pair of silver earrings with onecarat diamonds carved into the shape of little hearts. He nearly sent them back for recycling when the nanofab delivered two perfectly rendered human hearts, complete with aorta and pulmonary veins, but the reflections of light from them were so incredible that he decided to give them to her after all.
At last the day arrived. Dennis uploaded the modified metabolism program into his body’s nanites and reminded his guests to do the same, then he and Cheryl swung into action, starting with the turkey, which they washed and stuffed and buttered and put in their specially created roaster in their specially created oven, covering it with a tent of aluminum foil despite several sources’ admonition that that was cheating. That may have been true, but it was also true that the turkey’s skin wouldn’t dry out that way, and that’s why practically everybody from the twentieth century all the way to the death of the whole concept of eating did it.
The smell of the raw bird and the dry bread inside it wasn’t necessarily appealing, nor was its texture, but once it began to cook they were amazed at the aroma that wafted out of the oven. Dennis’s abdomen gurgled loudly, and Cheryl laughingly accused him of doing it as a joke until her own did the same thing a few minutes later.
“It must be the nanites getting our bodies ready,” she said.
They peeled the potatoes while the turkey cooked, arguing over whether to use a knife or the special slotted potato peeler that came with the kitchen utensil kit, and then they set the potatoes aside while they boiled the yams and the eggs in separate pots, then candied the yams and deviled the eggs.
Hour after hour they cooked the meal, and the smells permeating the apartment grew more and more complex all the while. Dennis’s stomach was growling like a wild animal now, and there was a peculiar knotted sensation in it that became more and more insistent, until he could finally stand it no longer. When Cheryl poured a fan of olives out into a serving dish, he snatched one up, popped it into his mouth, bit down on it three or four times – sending a wild mix of salty, bitter, acidic and fruity flavors over his tongue with each bite – then swallowed the pieces. He felt them slide all the way down his throat, and when they hit bottom he knew he had done the right thing.
Cheryl stood there, her mouth wide open, waiting to see if he would fall over. He reached for another olive to feed his ravenous stomach, but at the last moment he popped it in Cheryl’s mouth instead. He watched her roll it around with her tongue, then bite down on it, her eyes growing wider all the while; then she swallowed and he could actually see the lump pass down her throat.
“Oh my god,” she whispered. “Why did they ever give this up?”
Dennis shook his head. “I have no idea.”
They both looked at the dish of olives, then banged their knuckles together in their haste to grab another and another and another. Each one was as delightful as the first, assuaging one tiny step at a time the immense, burning, ravenous hunger in their stomachs.
“Stop,” Cheryl said when the olives were half gone, pulling the dish away from Dennis’s reach. “We’ve got to save some of these for our guests.” She was breathing hard, her nostrils flaring wide with each inhalation, and at that moment Dennis would have devoured her if there hadn’t been a whole
room full of food waiting to be prepared and four friends coming over to share it.
He forced himself to calm down and roll out the dough for the rolls – which was probably why they were called “rolls”, he supposed. His stomach growled again at the yeasty aroma of the raw bread, but he pushed his fist against his belly until it stopped.
“It’s taking all my will power just to resist this stuff, and I’m a grown man who’s never seen any of it before,” he said. “How could children back then live with the anticipation?”
Cheryl was concentrating on the pie crust. A smear of white flour dusted the dark photosynthetic skin just above her navel, and Dennis couldn’t resist the urge to lean down and lick it off.
“Hey!” she squealed, backing away and slapping him playfully on the head. “Don’t you start that, or we’ll never get this meal ready.”
He took a deep breath. “Right. Wow. This is . . . when are those guys going to get here?”
“Soon. Why don’t you start boiling the potatoes.”
“Okay.”
Each task required more and more focus, but he forced himself to follow the checklist until suddenly there came a banging at the front door.
“That’s got to be Joachim and Teeliam,” Dennis said, fleeing the makeshift kitchen to let his friends in.
It was indeed Joachim and Teeliam, panting heavily as if they had run the whole way from their apartment on the other side of the park. Joachim had leaves in his hair, and they both had orange stains around their mouths. Dennis had been prepared to apologize for his own appearance, but the moment he saw them he said, “What happened to you?”
“Our stomachs . . .” Joachim began, just as Teeliam said, “We’ve been getting these cravings. When we got to the park and smelled the fruit on the orange trees, we—”
“Oh no. You ate one?”
“More than one,” Joachim said. “You wouldn’t believe how good they are.”
“Just the inside part,” Teeliam added. Then she caught a whiff of the aroma coming from the apartment, and she pushed past Dennis. “Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow. Excuse me, I’m just going to go check on this turkey of yours . . .”
“Oh yeah, let’s see this thing,” Joachim said, hot on her heels.
“Incoming!” Dennis called out to Cheryl. He would have followed to help her, but he saw Frieda and Aylette running out of the park, so he stayed to greet them at the door.
“You’ll never believe what we just figured out!” Frieda said, shoving a soft white cylinder about an inch across into his mouth. “Can you believe it? It’s a banana!”
The flavor was amazing. Smooth and sweet and exotic and oh, oh yeah.
Aylette said, “Who knew they were food? I always thought they were just genetically engineered sex toys.”
“What have we been missing all our lives?” Frieda said. “And more to the point, why?”
“I’ve been asking that same question all afternoon,” Dennis said. “Come on in and let’s start eating!”
He didn’t have to offer twice. With six people helping, the rest of the preparation went like a meteor strike, and within minutes the pies were in the oven and they were all sitting at the table, drooling at all the food while Dennis sliced slab after slab of flaky white meat from the turkey’s breast. Only the presence of the knife kept everyone from snatching each piece as soon as it came free.
When he had carved six big slices, he held up the knife and said, “There’s a traditional speech that the host makes before the meal,” but he got no further before he was pelted with olives and pickles from all sides, so he lowered the knife and said:
“Dearlordwethankyouforthebountyplacedherebeforeusamen. Okay, let’s eat!”
They didn’t bother learning how to use forks and spoons, nor plates either for the first few minutes. They just grabbed what they could reach and stuffed it in their mouths. Nobody spoke; they just grunted and pointed and handed food back and forth until their stomachs stopped craving more.
Then they loaded up their plates and ate simply because it tasted so wonderful, and then they ate some more because they didn’t want to stop. Finally, when the turkey was picked to the bone and every scrap of every other dish was gone as well, they pushed back from the table and staggered, groaning, into the living room where they could stretch out on the couches and let their meals digest.
“I expected more energy out of it,” Joachim said, rubbing his distended belly.
“Me too,” said Frieda. “But I feel like I just ran the length of the colony.”
“I thought it was just me because I spent all day preparing it,” Dennis said.
“It was all that eating,” said Teeliam. “It really takes it out of you to shovel all that stuff into you.”
“Mmm,” said Cheryl. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slowing down.
Dennis wanted nothing more than to close his own eyes and drift off for a long afternoon nap, but the suddenness of their torpor alarmed him enough that he forced himself to stand up and go into his study, where he searched the historical archives for symptoms of overeating. He found several articles on weight gain and dieting, which he bookmarked just in case, but he found what he was looking for in an article on metabolism. Tryptophan, it said, was an essential amino acid formed from proteins during the digestive process, and it also had a pronounced soporific effect. Nothing to worry about, as long as you didn’t try to operate heavy machinery after eating a big meal.
He went back into the living room to tell everyone, but they were already asleep, so he snuggled in next to Cheryl and did the same.
They awoke several hours later and exchanged their gifts, oohing and aahing over each of them, even the lame ones. Cheryl loved her earrings, and Joachim happily fired BBs at the turkey carcass until one of them bounced back and hit him in the eye. Cheryl gave Dennis a pair of warm socks, “Because I noticed that your feet sometimes get cold in the middle of the night.”
Then it was time for pie. They weren’t quite as excited about it as they were the rest of the meal, but the first bite changed that. They wound up dividing the whole thing into six pieces and cleaning the plate.
When they were done, they sat at the table and looked at the wreck of Dennis’s apartment. The room they had cooked everything in was piled with dirty pots and pans, and the dining table was covered with dirty dishes and the platter with the turkey carcass on it, and the living room floor was scattered with the paper they had concealed the presents with until they had exchanged them, and even the guests were covered with smudges of grease and egg yolk and gravy.
“We are gloriously stuffed,” Dennis said. “And I loved every minute of it. I still can’t figure out why people gave this up.”
Cheryl had an odd expression on her face. She looked down at her lap, then twisted around to look at her butt.
“What’s the matter?” Dennis asked.
“Something feels funny down there,” she said.
“Funny how?”
“Funny like really full. Like something wants to come out.”
Now that she mentioned it, Dennis had been feeling the same thing for a while himself. He hadn’t paid it much attention, since his stomach felt so much more distended, but the focus of pressure was definitely moving lower.
He felt a little bubble of gas escape, and the pressure eased a bit, but then the smell rose up to nose level and everyone scattered, gagging and waving their hands in front of their noses.
“I think we just figured out why people quit doing this,” Cheryl said as she opened the window.
But it wasn’t for another half hour, when they could no longer hold back the pressure, that they knew for sure.
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The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 66
