Bridgebuilder

Cultural Exchange Night

Mercifically, Alex's arm had been released by the mediboard before Carbon returned for dinner. It even sat him up at an incline without any sort of prompting, which was nice as well. While he appreciated that watching the ceiling for nearly a week was the alternative to being dead, it was not a particularly interesting pastime..

The arm - his arm, he had to keep reminding himself which was an unsettling activity in its own right - was strange to him now. The muscle felt weak, which wasn't a surprise, nor was the unusual sensitivity of the regenerated skin... That same skin unnaturally pale up past his elbow.

Just how bad had the burns been?

His eyes kept returning to the line where his real skin met the freshly grown, almost translucent replacement. Veins and muscles were a little too well defined under it, everything too thin and pulled too tight. Which is why he was staring at his forearm, carefully testing the flexors that ran his fingers one after the other, watching them push and pull as he went down the line, when Carbon came back. The door opened and she floated there in the hallway with one of the chairs from the mess in her hand, looking at him like he was doing something really weird.

"Oh hey. Arm's back!" he showed it off, as though she hadn't seen it just now. "Works great."

"I am glad." The way she said it made him think that she wasn't too sure about that statement. She pulled herself into the sickbay and pressed the chair to the floor, magnets clicking it to the deck plate. Carbon pulled the tablet from its charger and poked around on it for a moment, the mediboard extending a table across his lap in response. "That will make things substantially easier."

"No kidding."

"I am not." She retrieved a covered tray and a squeeze tube with a deep golden brown liquid from the hall and set them down in front of Alex, tiny magnets clicking them both to the table. She had excused herself to get her meal as she pushed off and glided into the hall, humming some tune he did not recognize. It was disconcerting to see her happy. That worried him a little. Shouldn't he be glad to see her happy? Maybe he just wasn't used to it.

Gravity was still off, and wouldn't be coming back on until they were nowhere near the Eohm, so the tray was a necessity. It kept the food from floating away. In this case, it kept a brick red sauce with unidentifiable white disks in place. It looked like someone had roughed it up a bit, too. Some green stuff that looked like it might have had lentils in it - he knew enough to not assume they were - and a yellow-orange cake-like thing rounded it out. It didn't smell bad, just different. The squeeze tube was a mystery, though.

He turned it over, the markings on the bottom in the flowing Tslao script and a tiny magnetic node. Couldn't tell it apart from what his beverage dispenser would have turned out. The cold liquid inside sloshed in the translucent plastic. Alex twisted the top and smelled it. A little lemongrass, maybe a hint of cinnamon.

His right shoulder lifted in a shrug that stopped half-way across his chest and he sampled it. The scent carried over into the flavor. Earthy, a little bit spicy and gritty, maybe the consistency of an aqua fresca. It wasn't bad. He sucked some more out of the tube.

Carbon stopped in the doorway, tray in one hand, two more beverage tubes in the other. Several emotions played over her face and he distinctly made out confusion and a flicker of revulsion before she settled on something that seemed to ask, what the hell are you doing?

He stopped drinking, twisted the cap closed and set it down where it had been. She glided over to the chair next to the board and floated him a second tube, this one with a gentle concave twist and filled with a faintly pink clear liquid. She pointed to the tube with the lemongrass-cinnamon stuff.

"That is a condiment. It goes on the green one." She said it slowly, each word carefully pronounced and very amused.

"Ah. I see." Good job on drinking the ketchup. "So what is this?"

"Try it first. I checked into what had been served to human diplomats, and was pleased to see one of my favorite dishes was common. That would be the red one."

Alex didn't argue with that, applying some of the condiment to the green stuff before offering the tube to Carbon. She just shook her head.

That was fine. More for him. He closed it and set it back down.

He started eating before he gave himself a chance to think about it. The flavors largely didn't make sense to him. The red sauce was chalky and savory at the same time, all at once kind of good and kind of bad. The white things may have been noodles... They didn't have much flavor.

Alex looked at her food and cocked his head to the side. Her noodles were larger and cylindrical, about the size of the first joint on a finger. They might have been crunchy as well. "Did you cut my food up for me? I can eat perfectly well, I don't need that."

"I did. Not for that reason." She continued to pick her way through the main dish.

"Why would you do that, then?" He actually felt a little perturbed but kept eating as well. He hadn't been a child in a long time, and it felt rather denigrating to have his food cut up for him. The irony of that, having just been fed lunch because he couldn't operate any of his limbs, did not escape him and tempered his reaction.

"Do you really wish to know?"

"Well, yeah. I wouldn't ask if I didn't."

Her shoulders raised in concession and she fished one of the white things out of her tray with her chopsticks and held it up for him to see. Golden compound eyes shined out of the deep red sauce, surprisingly vicious looking mouth parts beneath them. She popped it into her mouth and he figured out where that faint crunching noise had been coming from.

The primer had said they eat a lot of insects.

"They are better fresh, but are not safe to cultivate on a ship." So very amused. "The dispenser took all afternoon to produce them, and did make a fair replication."

He gritted his teeth briefly and kept eating, formulating various reasons he should not feel weird eating bugs. Lots of societies on Earth eat insects. They'll eat you if given the chance. Higher energy density. It worked, if only just enough for him to power through it. The green stuff was spicy and sweet, reminding him of Thai food. The cake and drink were both sweet with flavors he couldn't quite place.

"So. What do you think?" She took his tray and slid it into the recycler, the slot just large enough to accept the chunk of synthetic.

"It's different, but I didn't mind it. I'm not used to the flavors, I guess I have no idea if it was good or not."

"Thank you for your honesty. I am glad you did not dislike it outright."

"You're welcome." He relaxed as much as he could as she finished clearing his table. Carbon was only gone a few moments before she returned and settled into the chair next to the mediboard again.

"Is there anything else you would like to know about us?"

"There is, but I still don't know where to start." He stopped and gesticulated, spinning a finger in the air as he tried to figure out something to ask her. The idea that one could just ask a couple of questions to unlock understanding of a culture was plainly foolish. It didn't help that nearly everything he had thought to ask almost instantly lead him to other, better questions. "No, actually, I do have one question that I keep coming back to."

"What is it?"

"What does szhaan mean? It wasn't in the primer, I don't think I've heard it before. You left it behind when, you know, you poked around in there." He gestured to his head as he spoke. Alex had managed to recall several words from when she had verified if he was still properly alive. That one was the most insistent. "Something about it has been bothering me. All of the other things I remember were related to what you'd seen, this was just like an intense feeling of dread."

"It is-" Carbon just stopped, wide-eyed and utterly unprepared for that question. She glanced away and coughed, what little skin he could see in her ears darkened as she studied the door. "The- the translation is imprecise. It is something like using someone else to fulfill your own needs."