after you got the brush-off from the government, but you didn’t do it. Where were your press conferences then?” Gordon said nothing, so Sykes continued. “No, you didn’t go forward with telling everyone because you knew that the standard for convincing people about aliens is higher than it is for other things. It’s higher than some weird kinematics off a bunch of telescope sightings, and you know that it’s higher than some doctored photo of a bunch of red and blue blobs that look nothing like our concept of a spaceship. You stayed underground and let the evidence exist as some internet rumor because that’s as far as you could go until you had more to show. We’re the same way. We can’t go forward on the basis of this photo.”
Then Lydia smiled. “But maybe we can stop holding you back.”
Gordon looked at them both sharply, but they said nothing. The servers returned with food and fresh drinks, whisking away their half-eaten cups of gumbo and replacing them with steaming, sizzling dinner plates. Sykes was served some sort of squash risotto alongside an immense blackened porterhouse, a dollop of butter melting on top. Both Lydia and Gordon were each served shrimp.
In this case, shrimp was an oxymoron. These were prawns, three grilled, butterflied tails apiece, each one four inches long, spiced with flakes of red pepper and herbs, lying atop a bed of sticky white rice, drizzled and surrounded by a rich crawfish étouffée, and topped off with a sprinkling of lump crab meat. Gordon looked down at it and smiled. He glanced back up at Lydia. “For this, I forgive you of nearly half of the crap you’ve pulled.”
“My, my. That much? And we haven’t even gotten to coffee or the desserts yet. I just might be back in your good graces by the end of the night.”
“Don’t push your luck.” Gordon sliced off a forkful, making sure he got a piece of everything. He tasted it cautiously, but as the myriad spices, sauces, and meats inundated his senses, he began to chew with gusto. No one flavor or spice stood out. It was an exercise in exquisite balance, with the resulting mélange of flavors nothing less than arthropodic bliss.
In so far as it is possible to define a person in simple terms, Gordon Lee was a man of great drive but little philosophy. One of the few beliefs he held, aside from an almost religious devotion to preparing for the Deltans, was that there was a definite moral equivalency to being part carnivore. If an animal had to die for his dinner plate, he felt that it should have an honorable death, and that its passing should result in something greater than just the filling of his belly.
Fast food, for the most part, was simply wrong and the vast majority could be replaced surreptitiously with Vegan fare without anyone noticing a thing except for the drastically improved health of the nation. On the other hand, a really good burger could represent a sublime ascendancy, placing a simple cow in the bovine equivalent of Valhalla. For a bacon cheeseburger, the moral cost was correspondingly higher, the dish then involving the lives of two farm animals, including one that was arguably more intelligent than a dog. For Gordon to feel good about it, it had to be really good bacon and on a really good burger. If one of them failed to measure up, the whole thing was in a moral deficit.
Gordon had had more than one ethical crisis over club sandwiches.
Though crustaceans were pretty far down the sentience/morality ladder, having three different varieties on the same plate was still more than enough to raise the equivalence bar pretty high. That Gordon dug in with relish and without any sort of soul searching or sense of existential guilt was testament to just how good Lydia’s choice had been.
They passed more than a few minutes without saying a thing other than to comment upon the food. Sykes, who did not share any of Gordon’s philosophies
Then Lydia smiled. “But maybe we can stop holding you back.”
Gordon looked at them both sharply, but they said nothing. The servers returned with food and fresh drinks, whisking away their half-eaten cups of gumbo and replacing them with steaming, sizzling dinner plates. Sykes was served some sort of squash risotto alongside an immense blackened porterhouse, a dollop of butter melting on top. Both Lydia and Gordon were each served shrimp.
In this case, shrimp was an oxymoron. These were prawns, three grilled, butterflied tails apiece, each one four inches long, spiced with flakes of red pepper and herbs, lying atop a bed of sticky white rice, drizzled and surrounded by a rich crawfish étouffée, and topped off with a sprinkling of lump crab meat. Gordon looked down at it and smiled. He glanced back up at Lydia. “For this, I forgive you of nearly half of the crap you’ve pulled.”
“My, my. That much? And we haven’t even gotten to coffee or the desserts yet. I just might be back in your good graces by the end of the night.”
“Don’t push your luck.” Gordon sliced off a forkful, making sure he got a piece of everything. He tasted it cautiously, but as the myriad spices, sauces, and meats inundated his senses, he began to chew with gusto. No one flavor or spice stood out. It was an exercise in exquisite balance, with the resulting mélange of flavors nothing less than arthropodic bliss.
In so far as it is possible to define a person in simple terms, Gordon Lee was a man of great drive but little philosophy. One of the few beliefs he held, aside from an almost religious devotion to preparing for the Deltans, was that there was a definite moral equivalency to being part carnivore. If an animal had to die for his dinner plate, he felt that it should have an honorable death, and that its passing should result in something greater than just the filling of his belly.
Fast food, for the most part, was simply wrong and the vast majority could be replaced surreptitiously with Vegan fare without anyone noticing a thing except for the drastically improved health of the nation. On the other hand, a really good burger could represent a sublime ascendancy, placing a simple cow in the bovine equivalent of Valhalla. For a bacon cheeseburger, the moral cost was correspondingly higher, the dish then involving the lives of two farm animals, including one that was arguably more intelligent than a dog. For Gordon to feel good about it, it had to be really good bacon and on a really good burger. If one of them failed to measure up, the whole thing was in a moral deficit.
Gordon had had more than one ethical crisis over club sandwiches.
Though crustaceans were pretty far down the sentience/morality ladder, having three different varieties on the same plate was still more than enough to raise the equivalence bar pretty high. That Gordon dug in with relish and without any sort of soul searching or sense of existential guilt was testament to just how good Lydia’s choice had been.
They passed more than a few minutes without saying a thing other than to comment upon the food. Sykes, who did not share any of Gordon’s philosophies
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