Liberty's Heirs

Chapter 14

The inside of Honest Abe's Inn was dark, cold, and smelled like rancid urine.  A crude caricature of a man with a beard and a tall black hat was on the sign over the entrance way.  It was made of brown brick and concrete and looked like its metallic roofing material, perhaps copper, had been stolen from some other building and attached crudely to the top of this one.  It was three stories tall and had a large atrium in the middle.  While the exterior of the building might well have been three hundred years old, it looked as if the entire interior had been gutted and rebuilt a hundred years ago in a completely different layout by poor craftsmen who could not come close to the sophistication of the Ancients who, in turn, were primitive in comparison to the civilization created by the Aye.

Clearly the establishment was communal, the town being a reasonably equivalent to a Community Center.  Blion had approached it very slowly.  Other people had no apparent compunction about entering and leaving so he felt uninhibited about pushing open the thick wooden doors and going inside.

He stood there just inside the doors looking around, trying to get his bearings.  On his left, two old men in tattered clothing sat playing a game while a third one watched.  Blion recognized the game, Mac Spencer had forced him to play it a few times despite his complete disinterest.  It was called 'chess' in Ancient English.  On his right two women stood talking animatedly to each other dressed in surprisingly colorful and ornate outfits.  Heavy makeup decorated their tired, weather beaten eyes.  Next to them, a middle aged man played a lively song on a long stringed instrument Blion was not familiar with.  His song seemed clumsily played, though it was not one Blion recognized.  He couldn't be sure whether some of the notes were mistakes by the player or written by a composer who didn't understand the rules of optimal music composition.  It occurred to him right then that the people of this place might not be familiar with complex rules that were revealed by the Aye to humanity less than a hundred years ago.

Straight ahead was a long roughly-hewn table, like a counter, with another man, big and burly, behind it and behind him were many glass bottles filled with various fluids, some clear and some dark-colored.  At the long table was a relatively neat looking man with a carefully crafted hair style was eating a plate of food.  Blion a big smile came across Blion's face.  This was, as he had hoped, a restaurant of sorts.  He could finally get something to eat and drink.  At this point, he was hungry enough to eat a rabbit, just like one of these horrifying primitives.

He walked eagerly up to the counter, the top of which was composed of a different material than the rough base.  The top was smooth and hard, almost stone-like.  Perhaps it was another item salvaged from the ruins of the old city and re-purposed.  He sat down on an uncomfortable wooden stool which was so high his feet were left dangling above the floor.  They found rest on a horizontal wooden bar that connected the legs to one another.

"I would like some synthacrab, please." He said to the man behind the counter as he looked longingly at the plate of food half-eaten by the man next to him.  He began salivating.

"Syntha-what?"  The man replied gruffly in a deep voice, his eyebrows raised.

Blion realized that synthacrab might be as easy to for this man to obtain as it would be for the poor girl in the story to spin straw into gold.  Especially considering that inorganic protein synthesis and tissue cloning required immense technical infrastructure and know-how and these people couldn't even make decent furniture.  "I'll take whatever that guy is eating."