Free Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake

meal before him as few of his fellows would have been able to do.
    Not that the food was exotic in any normal sense. There was roast meat, vegetables both raw and cooked—nothing Slade recognized, and nothing particularly striking except a dish that looked like cole slaw and tasted like napalm—and bread, which was almost certainly baked from Terran wheat. The wine was probably better than Slade had a palate to enjoy. He had grown up on Tethys with stim cones, not alcohol. His introduction to the latter as a low-ranking trooper had been regimental stash, valued for reasons apart from its piquant subtleties of flavor.
    “You know,” he said around a bite of roast—from the end, where it was cooked gray, not pink—“I sort of thought you might be vegetarians. It, well, I thought you might.”
    “Some of us are,” Onander said as he forked more meat from the tray between the two men. “Down at the far end,” he noted, with a gesture toward one of the side tables, brief enough to be unobtrusive. “We haven’t a large population on Elysium, but neither is it a monolithic one. You wouldn’t prefer, ah, vegetable protein, would you? Really, I should have checked.”
    Slade had not been conscious of being the center of attention. The other people in the hall had been eating and chatting in normal fashion. Now, however, the big wood-paneled room had noticeably stilled. “Oh, not at all,” the castaway said in embarrassment. “It’s mostly seafood of one sort or another . . . a lot of it compressed and textured plankton, but animals to start out even if they were little ones.”
    He grinned and looked around the room. “Tell the truth, a lot of what I was raised to eat was about as bland as regimental food.” He raised a bite of roast on his fork. “Nothing as good as this,” he closed, putting an obvious period to the explanation by eating the morsel.
    Slade had not done any physical labor since his last bout of exercise on the lifeboat. The tension of the landing, however, had itself kept his metabolism cooking at a high rate. He plowed on through repeated servings, vaguely conscious without focusing on it that those around him continued to eat though at a much lower rate. When Slade finished, covering a belch withhis hand, there was almost simultaneous movement among his hosts to push their plates away and lean back.
    Nan stood. “I think,” she said, “that if we’ve all eaten, we can adjourn to the Assembly Room to listen to our visitor. If he wouldn’t mind?” she added, looking down at Slade. The question was real and hopeful, not a rhetorical exercise.
    “Ah, I’d be delighted,” said the big man. When he got up, he found that his muscles were wobbly with exhaustion and the pleasant burden of food being digested. Natural courtesy aside, Slade owed these friendly people a duty for their hospitality. It did not occur to him to shirk his duties simply because he was tired.
    “Of course everyone couldn’t gather to meet you directly tonight,” said Onander as he opened the door behind his own chair. A two-meter long hallway, open at the further end, lay beyond. “But from the Assembly Room, we can broadcast and share your talk with the whole community.”
    Slade had noticed that the dining room into which he had first been ushered was only half the exterior size of the building. The Assembly Room filled the remainder, save for the length of the hall between them. Too narrow for a kitchen, he would have thought . . . and none of his business; Slade wasn’t searching this city for contraband.
    The Assembly Room took his breath away with its abruptness.
    They had dined beneath bare rafters, seated on wood and eating from hand-thrown pottery. The Assembly Room was by contrast as technically advanced as anything Slade had seen. It was of a style that was wholly new to him as well.
    Elysians who passed as Slade stepped aside were reclining on what seemed to be a bare floor. The surface rose and mounded,