I CHECKED TO SEE if my baggage was properly tagged with the little green disks that would conduct it through the interlevels and on, then loped off the rickety old rollerwalk, crossed the broken blue bricks of Water-Alley, and sauntered between the heavy columns flanking the entrance to the local outlet of the Butcher’s Union. Inside, high on the shelves, behind copper webbing, racks of cloned flesh thrust pink and red through the hooking rings. Longpig over there, shortpig—our term for the native flesh—in front of me and on the far wall, a host of more exotic insect, lizard, and worm meats. Prime cultures, says Si’id, who supervises1 the kids working2 this shop as well as the next outlet down; she’d go on for hours about the various pedigrees and provenances if you let her.
I never go into a butcher outlet anywhere on Velm, or anywhere else for that matter, no matter the geosector, without recalling the first time, during my fifth trip oflworld, that I was dining with my employe1 and her spouses for my third job1. (The feathers on everything; the very un-subtle music.) I was charmed when they served the meal on narrow plates, about three inches wide, curved around in a circle. You worked your way along from portion to portion—cunning I thought—eating with your fingers; though getting the tastes and smells so confused with one another would never go at home. There was the meat; and I began to tell them about the butcher outlets on Velm, and just what the cloned longpig I’d been raised on was, realizing as I spoke they were a little shocked. I picked up my own bit of roast, bit down—something hard was in it …
Then I realized: Bone!
This meat had once been walking around with a skeleton inside. Although I didn’t, many times when I’ve told the story, I’ve said I left the table.
Inside, the stained-glass skylight lay reds and greens over the chipped stone flooring. Three other women waited with their director disks ready in claw (or hand), while the little human redhead who’d been working2 here as an apprentice for a standard year now, swung and slashed with her broad bright knife; and the two other apprentices behind the glass wall were preparing outgoing orders: one kid, another human, with long tanned arms, the other, evelm, with gold claws on tufted greenscaled ones, tossed the packages into a clinking chain net that carried them out through the sphincter flange.
Minutes later, I’d sent a kilo and a half of flesh, tagged with a green disk, on ahead of me. (Shoshana had said: “Marq, if you’re going to come home unexpectedly, couldn’t you at least see about your own food?” So I was going to see about several of the folks’ today.) I was out the door again, through the gate, and onto the roller walkway—clink, clank, clunk, halt, bounce, go again. Blue noon-sky between the platforms of the two above-ground park-levels, like the scraps of dark blue cloth we cut up as kids to make patchwork maps of imaginary counties, clear and smokeless.
Then overhead platforms pulled away.
From the rollerwalk rail I watched pale cactuses drifting on my right, and the high boulders nearer and nearing on my left; we came around the cliff edge, to see the falls broiling on the rocks, and there beside it, its three freestanding multichrome walls rising two hundred meters each behind it, the black and silver pile: Dyethshome.