[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
beef?"
"Sure," I said and set about making it. A proper roast presents challenges. I aimed for perfection, from
the red-rare middle of the meat to the crispy charred fat at the edges, with particular care for the Maillard
reactions. They're what give the meat its perfect taste; the big molecules break up into the tiny,
good-tasting ones at about 413 kelvins; a few kelvins too many and there's charcoal mixed in with the fat,
a few too few and you don't bring out all the taste. I did it just right this time. Harry thought so too,
because he grunted approvingly.
Then something happened.
We were across the ocean and coming into the daylight side again. Harry pushed the last forkful of beef
aside and said, with genuine interest, "Markie, do you see what's out there?'
Of course I did, in a literal sense. What I didn't see was why the spectacle of the sun appearing before
us was worth commenting on. "It's asunrise, Markie!" he said. "It's the first one I've seen inforever.
Can't you see how beautiful it is?"
The truth was that I couldn't. I have no systems for the recognition of visual beauty unless it relates to the
presentation of food. I could easily identify all the colors involved, which ranged from the pale pink of
sweetbreads before they are poached to the deep crimson of a boiled lobster shell, but those were
nothing more than the natural frequencies of visible light that has been refracted through water droplets of
the appropriate sizes, in the appropriate position relative to the sun. What was special enough about that
to make Harry ignore his food I could not say.
Then he made a noise I had never heard from him before. He jumped to his feet, knocking his table over
and spilling everything on the floor. He was pointing toward the horizon with the hand that held a fork. He
cried, "Look there! It's where we lived, Markie! Come on, I'm going down to take a look."
I automatically erased the mess he had made as I saw what he was looking at. To be honest, the
prospect did not excite me nearly as much as it did Harry, but as he was projecting himself to the surface
I followed.
I would have identified the place at once, without any help from Harry, because as soon as we were
down I could see the hulk of an old, abandoned lander from a Five resting at the edge of a swamp. The
wreck was almost overgrown by rushes, but it definitely was nothing that had grown there naturally. The
ground rose steeply away from the marshland to a group of rocky hills, and Harry pointed out a ledge
with an opening below it: "That's where we mostly lived! That cave! And look over there that's the
blind we made to catch bugs in the cold weather." He was pointing to what was left of a sort of tepee of
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
rushes, just where the muddy swamp margin began to turn into dark, sludgy open water. "We'd climb
into the blind just before daylight," he was telling me excitedly. "Then when the bugs came out to feed
we'd jump them. Had to have the blind, though. They were pretty antsy. If we tried to come at them from
the shore they'd be gone before we were within five meters of them. And all up along the
hillside see? are the trees with the leaves we could eat. And you can't see them from here, but under
the tree branches there were things like mushrooms, and "
And so on and on.
I am not lacking in friendship for Harry. It is part of my programming to be obliging, when feasible, to
persons, machine-stored or otherwise. So I allow Harry to use up much of my time and even some of my
skills without complaint. But our spacecraft was orbiting more than three degrees of longitude every
minute. True, a minute is a very long time to us, but there was also very much to investigate in an entire
planet. Harry didn't want to leave. "We could land, Markie," he said. "Why not? Hey, be reasonable,
okay? We can check the rest of this Arabella dump out any time, for God's sake!"
I didn't say anything to that. I just didn't do anything, and since I was the one with the override for the
lander I just kept on in orbit, while Harry sulked.
Maybe he would have kept on sulking for all those interminable six thousand seconds that a single orbit
would take, except that then we did see something down in a valley that didn't belong there.
More than anything else, it looked like some crumbling old castle out of Earth's organic history, big
enough for a Caesar, surrounded by gardens grandiose enough for a French king, next to a patch of
greenery, perfectly round, not much more than a kilometer across. And in the middle of it was a perfectly
round pond.
My first thought was that maybe the Kugels hadn't destroyed every trace of that old culture they had
killed off. It only took a moment for me to see that that couldn't have been the way it was.
It was a castle, all right, and it wasn't old at all. It just looked that way. Then it showed us pretty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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beef?"
"Sure," I said and set about making it. A proper roast presents challenges. I aimed for perfection, from
the red-rare middle of the meat to the crispy charred fat at the edges, with particular care for the Maillard
reactions. They're what give the meat its perfect taste; the big molecules break up into the tiny,
good-tasting ones at about 413 kelvins; a few kelvins too many and there's charcoal mixed in with the fat,
a few too few and you don't bring out all the taste. I did it just right this time. Harry thought so too,
because he grunted approvingly.
Then something happened.
We were across the ocean and coming into the daylight side again. Harry pushed the last forkful of beef
aside and said, with genuine interest, "Markie, do you see what's out there?'
Of course I did, in a literal sense. What I didn't see was why the spectacle of the sun appearing before
us was worth commenting on. "It's asunrise, Markie!" he said. "It's the first one I've seen inforever.
Can't you see how beautiful it is?"
The truth was that I couldn't. I have no systems for the recognition of visual beauty unless it relates to the
presentation of food. I could easily identify all the colors involved, which ranged from the pale pink of
sweetbreads before they are poached to the deep crimson of a boiled lobster shell, but those were
nothing more than the natural frequencies of visible light that has been refracted through water droplets of
the appropriate sizes, in the appropriate position relative to the sun. What was special enough about that
to make Harry ignore his food I could not say.
Then he made a noise I had never heard from him before. He jumped to his feet, knocking his table over
and spilling everything on the floor. He was pointing toward the horizon with the hand that held a fork. He
cried, "Look there! It's where we lived, Markie! Come on, I'm going down to take a look."
I automatically erased the mess he had made as I saw what he was looking at. To be honest, the
prospect did not excite me nearly as much as it did Harry, but as he was projecting himself to the surface
I followed.
I would have identified the place at once, without any help from Harry, because as soon as we were
down I could see the hulk of an old, abandoned lander from a Five resting at the edge of a swamp. The
wreck was almost overgrown by rushes, but it definitely was nothing that had grown there naturally. The
ground rose steeply away from the marshland to a group of rocky hills, and Harry pointed out a ledge
with an opening below it: "That's where we mostly lived! That cave! And look over there that's the
blind we made to catch bugs in the cold weather." He was pointing to what was left of a sort of tepee of
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
rushes, just where the muddy swamp margin began to turn into dark, sludgy open water. "We'd climb
into the blind just before daylight," he was telling me excitedly. "Then when the bugs came out to feed
we'd jump them. Had to have the blind, though. They were pretty antsy. If we tried to come at them from
the shore they'd be gone before we were within five meters of them. And all up along the
hillside see? are the trees with the leaves we could eat. And you can't see them from here, but under
the tree branches there were things like mushrooms, and "
And so on and on.
I am not lacking in friendship for Harry. It is part of my programming to be obliging, when feasible, to
persons, machine-stored or otherwise. So I allow Harry to use up much of my time and even some of my
skills without complaint. But our spacecraft was orbiting more than three degrees of longitude every
minute. True, a minute is a very long time to us, but there was also very much to investigate in an entire
planet. Harry didn't want to leave. "We could land, Markie," he said. "Why not? Hey, be reasonable,
okay? We can check the rest of this Arabella dump out any time, for God's sake!"
I didn't say anything to that. I just didn't do anything, and since I was the one with the override for the
lander I just kept on in orbit, while Harry sulked.
Maybe he would have kept on sulking for all those interminable six thousand seconds that a single orbit
would take, except that then we did see something down in a valley that didn't belong there.
More than anything else, it looked like some crumbling old castle out of Earth's organic history, big
enough for a Caesar, surrounded by gardens grandiose enough for a French king, next to a patch of
greenery, perfectly round, not much more than a kilometer across. And in the middle of it was a perfectly
round pond.
My first thought was that maybe the Kugels hadn't destroyed every trace of that old culture they had
killed off. It only took a moment for me to see that that couldn't have been the way it was.
It was a castle, all right, and it wasn't old at all. It just looked that way. Then it showed us pretty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]