Loups-Garous by Natsuhiko Kyôgoku Page A

casserole around and uncovered something else.
    â€œLooks like some kind of clam.”
    â€œClam? You mean like seafood?”
    â€œWell, yeah. Tsuzuki, you’ve never seen it before?”
    â€œI don’t know. I’ve seen turtles, but I have no interest in nature.”
    Mio pierced the bit of food with her fork and inspected it up close. She wondered aloud how it was cultivated, then popped the whole thing into her mouth.
    â€œIt’s pretty good. Even though I don’t know what it is.”
    â€œYou’re weird.”
    â€œYou think so? I think that’s pretty normal,” Mio said and placed her fork back down on the table. It looked like she’d just played with the food.
    It wasn’t like she’d simply tasted the food, nor was it like she savored the whole meal. Plus she said it was delicious like someone much older might have.
    â€œFood is important.”
    â€œWell, sure.”
    â€œI think our ancestors must have been really weak,” Mio said conversationally.
    â€œWeak?”
    â€œSure. They were the ones being eaten. I’m sure of it. That’s why they took such pains to get out of the food chain. We’ve all collectively stopped killing animals, right? No one in this country eats animal meat anymore.”
    â€œYou mean it’s wrong to kill.”
    â€œBut we used to kill. We’d kill animals and then eat them.”
    â€œYou can make food without killing it.”
    â€œOf course you can.”
    â€œYou can even make vegetables,” Hazuki said. “People have been making vegetables since a long time ago.”
    â€œMake. You mean grow them. Grass is a living thing too. It’s different from being made. Making things from scratch is only a recent thing.”
    Oh…
    â€œBut since we started replacing everything from grass to beasts, humans have extracted themselves from the food chain. It took us millions of years, but we’ve done it. We’ve been able to improvise edible food out of nonliving things. Not so long ago, synthetic food was talked about like it was a bad thing, but it’s no different from what we use to make food now. People lacked the proper technology in the past, making the first synthetic foods toxic, but that was stupidity on their part. Still…”
    â€œStill?”
    â€œIf you don’t eat or aren’t eaten, you are not an animal.”
    â€œAnimal…”
    â€œBeast. Even in the sanctuaries, beasts eat beasts. They survive this way. Humans are the only ones that don’t do this.”
    Is that a bad thing?
    â€œThere are animals that have gone extinct because of humans’ killing them.”
    â€œYou’re talking about tigers and stuff, right? But humans stopped killing whales, and now they’re rampant. They eat every living thing in the ocean.”
    â€œWhales don’t eat every single thing.”
    â€œDon’t they eat clams?” Mio said. Despite being a genius, Mio seemed to be lacking much knowledge of animal biology. Hazuki liked animals for some reason. She’d hardly seen any in her life, but she liked looking at old pictures and had even filed some of them.
    Like wolves.
    One night ago, she’d been researching a file on extinct animals and came across one that from the picture looked like a dog. Like a dog she’d seen as a very small child.
    A dog…
    Where was that?
    She couldn’t remember.
    â€œAnimals. That’s derived from anima , which means life, breath. To be animated.” Mio wiped her mouth with the thick fabric of the sleeve of her maintenance uniform. “We aren’t very animated, are we? I think we’re trying to stop moving altogether.”
    The chair squeaked as Mio got up and went back to the monitor.
    â€œWe sit here for hours on end. And yet we continue to live. Anything else would die.”
    The sound of keys being punched.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œI’m