'But is he an aficionado or a newcomer?'
'I would think ... that he has not been here more than once or twice.'
After waiting a moment and looking askance at Danlo's worn racing kamelaika, his beard, and his wild hair with the feather in it, she said, 'Could you describe him, please?'
'Well, he has a splendid face, perhaps too intense, but sensitive, and his eyes truly– '
'What does he look like?' the hostess snapped out.
Danlo quickly bowed his head in anger and shame, and then he told the hostess what Hanuman looked like.
'You mean the Worthy Hiroshi li Tal of Simoom,' the hostess said. 'He's one of our most discriminating aficionados. If you'll follow me, I'll show you to his table.'
The hostess opened the inner doors, and without pausing to let Danlo go first, she led him into a lavishly decorated and intimate room. The lights were turned down low, so at first Danlo could see little, just the polished jewood walls, forks and knives of gleaming steel, and the dark faces of the aficionados sitting at their tables. As if dazzled by too many sensa, he moved through a wall of little sounds and odours: sizzling meats and conversational tidbits, woodsmoke and scorched oil and icevine burning thick and sweet. Everything about the room nauseated and repelled him, and yet, he felt strangely drawn into its depths, by hunger, by curiosity and by another need for which he had no name.
'We have a nice table for you,' the hostess said. 'May you enjoy your meal.'
They had walked toward the rear wall, then up a couple of steps to a slightly higher level where five private tables overlooked the rest of the room. Hanuman sat in a padded leather chair with his back to the wall, and he said, 'Hello, Danlo, I was wondering when you'd come in.'
Danlo looked at him in amazement and said, 'You knew I was following you?'
'Cetics are supposed to know such things, aren't they?'
'I wanted to see ... where you were going,' Danlo said with a smile.
'Well, here I am,' Hanuman said. 'Here we are. If you'd like, would you please join me?'
Danlo sat beside him and worked the gloves off his hands. In front of him was the strangest table he had ever seen: it was built in the shape of an octagon, and the half of it nearest him was of black shatterwood, while the far half was sunken and surfaced with gold. A shallow gutter ran along the edge of this golden half. He was about to comment on this unique table when a waiter brought them a plate of slivered kona nuts in pepper sauce.
'Have you eaten?' Hanuman asked. 'I've already ordered, mostly meat dishes, but there will be more than enough other food to share. You should know, that's the way here, for everyone seated at the same table, to share.'
Danlo picked up a pair of bone chopsticks and manoeuvred a few nut slivers into his mouth. The dish was very hot, very sweet, very good.
'How did you get the money to eat here?' Danlo asked.
'And look at you – your clothes! And why are you using the name of a Simoom Architect? You despise Architects, yes?'
He waited for Hanuman to illuminate these mysteries, but Hanuman just sat there, sipping from a goblet of red wine, staring at him.
'Perhaps you should leave,' Hanuman finally said.
The words were like drops of hot wax in Danlo's ears; he shook his head slowly back and forth, unable to understand why Hanuman would say such a thing.
'Perhaps it would be best if you go.'
'But, Hanu, is this what you truly want?' Danlo asked. 'Why did you invite me to sit down, then?'
After taking another sip of wine, Hanuman picked up his knife and dragged the sharp edge of it lightly back and forth across his palm. He seemed puzzled, self-absorbed, aggrieved. A scryer might have said he was full of remorse for events that had not yet occurred. Danlo wondered why he would frequent such a hole-in-the-ice restaurant, with its strange little tables and wealthy patrons stealing furtive glances at each other. Close all around was a faint odour of bruised flowers and burning blood, as well as an air of anticipation that sickened Danlo and made him want to flee. He might have said his goodbyes, then, but Hanuman suddenly smiled and told him, 'No, stay; I've decided you should. I'd thought to spare your sensibilities, but that's silly of me. Please stay.'
Hanuman picked up a crystal bottle and asked Danlo if he would be taking alcohol that evening. Danlo nodded. As he watched a stream of ruby wine flow into his goblet, he became aware of a subtle change in the room. The buzz of voices had died to a few scattered whispers. Just below them, off to the side, was a wood and gold table at which sat two pairs of men and women. One of the men was a sullen-looking wormrunner; he was accompanied by an elegantly dressed common whore, who, except for her tattooed lips and red-rimmed eyes, might have passed as an ambassador's wife. The other man and woman each had brilliant green eyes too large for their delicate faces. They were obviously engineered farsiders from some non-civilized world, and it was hard to understand how they should be sharing a table with a criminal and a whore. All the patrons in the room were now looking at this table, or rather, their stares were fixed on a small efficient man standing at the edge of the table's golden half. This was one of the restaurant's chefs. He was swaddled completely in white cottons; he wore a white turban and white slippers and white cotton gloves; each article of clothing was spattered with dark red stains. From a steel cart next to the table he removed a bowl of oil. He quickly dribbled out this oil in zig-zag lines over the table's golden surface. He then used a broad brush to spread the oil evenly.
'Gold heats the most perfectly of all the metals,' Hanuman explained. 'Which is why the tables are wrought of a gold alloy.'
It was now obvious that the chef was about to cook a meal for the aficionados. Danlo could not tell how the tabletop was heated – probably by plasma or jets of burning hydrogen – but in very little time the sheet of oil began to blister and smoke. The chef reached his hand into a basket on one of the cart's lower shelves. He grasped a fat, struggling female sleekit by the neck. The sleekit's body, from snout to tail, was a quivering pink and white mass which everywhere oozed blood; moments earlier, in the kitchen, the chef's assistants had flayed the skin off it. The chef held it up so that everyone could appreciate its size and sex. In his other hand he held a metallic device that looked like a nutcracker. He used it to quickly break each of the sleekit's legs. These four wrenching motions were accomplished so suddenly that Danlo scarcely could believe it. He sat frozen to his chair, holding his breath, watching. The sleekit had remained curiously silent at the breaking of its legs, but when the chef heaved it onto the table, it let out a terrible whistling cry, the way sleekits do when they are mortally wounded. The sleekit tried to spring off the hot tabletop, and then tried to run, but its legs were quite useless and could get no purchase on the popping oil. All it could do was to flop about in panic as it sizzled and whistled and cried.
'No!' Danlo whispered. 'No, no, no.'
'This method causes the animal to release great amounts of adrenalin before it's killed,' Hanuman explained. He sipped his wine and then smiled sadly. 'Some say this makes the meat more pungent. Certainly it's fresher, this way. Now let's see if the sleekit is pregnant, or not.'
The chef had his knives out, now, and he touched them to the sleekit, whose sad, black eyes still burned with life. Then, with startling efficiency, the chef plied his knives, slashing and sawing and slicing, and the sleekit suddenly lay in pieces that cooked in the hot oil and in its own blood. There was much blood, most of which ran over the golden cooking surface and into the gutters before draining down a dark hole at the table's corner. Some of the blood, though, the chef used to baste the liver and sweetbreads and the other cuts of meat. He stirred in a decoction of the juice of snow dahlia and other flowers, and in this way he made a delicious sauce. While the meat simmered, he discarded the bones and intestines and other offal. Danlo was glad to see that no baby sleekits spilled out of the severed uterus, though clearly, some of the aficionados were disappointed. When the chef's dish was finally finished, he served it up on delicate white plates. He garnished the steaming sleekit pieces with sliced oranges and fresh mint. Then he bowed to the aficionados and began wiping his knives with a soft white cloth.
'An elegant dish,' Hanuman said. 'Though I should tell you, I've never really liked the way sleekit tastes.'
Danlo heard Hanuman's voice hissing out of the darkness, but he could not look at him. He was sweating now, struggling to breathe, and both his palms were pressed to his forehead. He sat utterly still, fascinated and stunned by what he had just seen.
'You ... were right,' he said when he finally caught his breath. 'I should not have stayed.'
'But then you'd never have experienced the art of odori,' Hanuman said. 'Didn't you tell me once that a human being can never have enough experience?'
'But the killing of a sleekit this way ... this is shaida.' He stared at the candle lights hanging from the ceiling, and he remembered: shaida is he who cuts meat from a living animal.
'I should have thought that you'd be gratified that some civilized people spurn cultured meats in favour of the real thing.'
Danlo watched the aficionados eating their dinner, and then for the first time in years, he said a prayer for the spirit of a slain animal: 'Pela Churiyanima,' he whispered, 'mi alasharia la shantih, o shantih l'Ali.'
'Of course, it's cruel,' Hanuman said, 'but all killing is cruel.'
Danlo looked at him and said, 'It is wrong to kill.'
'But your Alaloi kill animals don't they? I should have thought you'd be used to the sight of killing.'
'A hunter never kills ... just for the pleasure of it,' Danlo said. 'An Alaloi man kills to live, only because there is no other way.'
'Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse?' Hanuman asked.
'I have never seen a mouse, but I know about the snow tigers,' Danlo admitted.
Hanuman glanced over at the kitchen doors for a moment, then said, 'You're sworn to ahimsa, Danlo, and I admire your devotion. I honour it, even though I think it's slightly silly. But you yourself admit that killing is a necessary part of life. If that's so, why shouldn't we enjoy it? Why shouldn't we praise the act and savour everything about it?'
Danlo was about to answer him when another chef, a big woman with meaty hands and a tight, grim face, emerged from the kitchen. She pushed a steel-drawered cart right up to their table. Danlo wanted to rise up and flee, then, but everyone in the restaurant seemed to be watching him. While the chef grunted and panted and bent low to ignite the burners beneath the table, Danlo told himself that this art of frying live animals was just another of civilization's decadences. The right side of him called out for him to run away as fast as he could, but his left side whispered that he should stay and learn from this decadence. Like a seabird caught in the ocean's ice, he was frozen into inaction. He watched the chef smear an orange-coloured oil across the golden fry table. He realized that civilized people, in their comfortable cafes and effortless getting of clothing, warmth, and luxury, in the isolation of their professions, in their acquisition of knowledge or money, in their easy entertainments, were so benumbed and cut off from life that they could see neither the world's horror nor its beauty. The various drugs and art forms so common in the City were ways toward a forced and artificial appreciation of beauty; the abomination occurring before his eyes was an attempt of a jaded people to experience – safely – sheer horror. Danlo hated people for needing such stimulations. He was horrified to discover that after seven years in Neverness, a part of himself had grown too used to accepting their ways. In truth, at that moment, the right side of him despised the left, even as his belly churned and tightened at the smell of burning oil. He watched the chef open a steel drawer packed with fresh snow. When she removed a snowworm as long as his forearm and held it up for him to see, he pressed his fist into the centre of his belly. For the first time, he glimpsed a part of Hanuman's vision of their world: that all people crave suffering as instinctively and fiercely as they do joy.
'This is shaida,' Danlo said. He leaned his head closer to Hanuman's, and he whispered, 'Tell her we have changed our minds.'
'Have we?' Hanuman said.
'Please tell her to stop.'
The table surface was now quite hot, and the chef held the snowworm over it. The worm kept trying to coil onto itself; it was only with difficulty that the chef managed to pull it straight.
'No, do not!' Danlo suddenly shouted. 'Don't you know that aulii... has a rare sensitivity to heat?'
But the chef did not listen to Danlo. He wasn't the first newcomer to fall squeamish and lose his taste for his meal. The restaurant's chefs had instructions to heed only the aficionado's commands, and since Hanuman said nothing, the chef dropped the worm onto the table.
'No!'
There was a sudden sizzling sound, and in front of Danlo, the worm bounced about and writhed in the hot grease. It tried to coil, but the proteins in its segments were shortening-up, congealing, cooking. Using the dull edge of her knife, the chef rolled it back and forth across the frying surface. And it never stopped writhing, and inside Danlo, his intestines and stomach and oesophagus writhed and burned with bitter acids. His eyes burned with tears, and his throat burned, and he coughed and he said, 'Do not let it die this way! aulii's nerves are buried ... so deep.'
He was too choked-up with hatred to say more about the snowworm's anatomy. He wanted to tell the chef that most animals, when they burn to death, suffer pain only a short while because the nerves most sensitive to heat are concentrated in the skin and are quickly destroyed. He wanted to tell Hanuman, and every aficionado in the restaurant, that the snowworm's consciousness was different from that of other animals. A snowworm's awareness of cold and heat – of everything – was spread throughout every tissue and cell of its body. A snowworm was fantastically sensitive to heat. It would take a long time to die, writhing on the griddle, and each moment of burning would last forever.