She raised one finger as the maitre d' intercepted her, a signal she had minimized to a mere shadow of a gesture. It meant: alone. He seated her, as often happened, in a corner.
Mira wore a garment that looked formal and expensive, but was without a designer's imprint. Indeed, it had been costly only in the way of combat hardware. It generally appeared to be dark gray, but it contained a few terabytes of borrowed military code that gave it a subtle sort of camouflage ability. When she sat for a long time in one place, it gradually blended into the background, the ultimate wallflower's petals.
The restaurant was three-quarters full. She let her mind flutter among the various languages of the customers, identifying and enumerating them without lingering for meaning. A cabal of pale humans power-gabbling in High Anglo Expanded; an overcrowded table, waiters weaving elegantly around its jutting extra chairs, full of Xian soldiers boasting in Pan-Semitic; a mixed-species party charmingly murdering Diplomatique. No tongues within hearing that she didn't know. She often wished that her forgotten upbringing had left more holes in her liguistic skills. Concentrating, she tried to escape comprehension of the sounds, hoping to elevate them to some kind of alien music.
In the attempt, her focus shifted to the other lone diner in the restaurant. Not only silent, he was still as well, his head tipped up toward the overhanging trees as if to let the false stars in under his heavy brow. He was huge (especially for an artificial), human-shaped and coherent, without the floating peripherals and distributed core fashionable throughout the last decade. And his skin surface accentuated his solidness and stillness; it had a mineral sheen, igneous and rugged, that made her wonder if he weren't simply a statue. She watched him carefully, trying to catch any movement. The menu arrived before she had seen even a hint of motion.
As overwrought as everything on this vessel, the menu started by describing its own elaborate construction: paper composed of roughage from the passenger's own collected and sterilized shit (how witty), ink distilled from plant dyes (how rustic), the cover made from the skin of a real dead animal (how macabre). No, the old arts weren't lost here on Queen Favor; you could visit the colony of religious technophobes who tilled the bucolic upper decks, complete with false seasons and infant mortality, and could buy their crude wares while their children gawked. At long last, a race of happily accurate flat-worlders.
The food, however, lacked any measure of the common touch. Exotic animals, specially hybrid plants, pure synthetics; handmade, machine-processed, wave-bombarded. The voyage had assaulted her with endless culinary flourishes, and they'd lost all distinction through their magnificent, consistent complexity. She craved bread and water.
She fingered her selections (the crude fibers of the paper were interlaced with touch-sensitive intelligence) and dutifully answered when pressed for endless specifics: degrees of cooking, spicing, psychoactivity.
When the ordeal was over, Mira rested her head in her hands, closing her eyes in the cave darkness behind her palms. She was growing tired earlier every night.
Judging from her coloring, Mira's ancestors had lived in the Mediterranean basin. In the odd moments she spent searching for her past, she'd read that many of these cultures observed something called siesta, a day-breaking ritual of rest. In this pre-industrial sleep pattern, one rose early and went to bed late, making up for the long day with a nap in the afternoon. Lately, she had experienced a strange inversion of this custom welling up from her genes; perhaps mutated by new worlds and the empty spaces between the stars. She had begun to wake up later and later, and was sleepy by the time evening began. The inverted siesta came in the wee hours, an anti-nap in which she lay awake in darkness. But she refrained from drugging herself; instead, she remained carefully motionless through the growing hours of insomnia, reluctant to break the surface tension of night as if hoping to learn something in that dark, empty expanse.
She opened her eyes to discover the maitre d' awaiting her attention with obvious embarrassment.
"Excuse me," he began uncomfortably, "but there seems to have been a mistake."
These were shocking words aboard the Queen Favor, as unthinkable as, "Pardon, but our drive is down, would you mind grabbing an oar?"
With fascination she waited for an explanation.
"When the young lady was seated, I had forgotten that all tables were reserved." He made a hopeless sort of gesture toward a large party of uniformed young men. A sports team. Or perhaps soldiers. Aspirants to some new cult? "You may join them if you wish. Or perhaps join another table."
She smiled. What a royal fuckup for the Queen Favor. She could imagine the reparations that would come later, hosts of supplicant avatars bearing gifts, deliciously detailed apologies. Mira rose, gathering her cloak around her. (It had already taken on the dappled pattern of leafy shadows.) She would simply take her meal in her cabin. It was only the ship's wheedling that had gotten her out tonight, after all.
The evening was ending in the best possible way.
But then she caught sight of the statue-man again. He had moved, his head now cocked toward the rowdy new arrivals. The other clientele were looking toward them as well. Mira imagined the many stares that would follow her if she left now in the celebrity of this brief disturbance, and she shivered a little. "Perhaps I could join the artificial, the big one eating alone," she said.
"Of course," the maitre d' answered, bowing a little as he turned toward the statue.
The artificial looked at them and, without hesitation, nodded. He must have received the query through direct interface—the Queen personally handling this minor disaster. Mira smiled with reignited satisfaction as she walked toward his table. Now two passengers had been embarrassed and inconvenienced by the Favor's screwup.
They were seated together for a few moments before he spoke; she had wondered for a second if he would.
"I should introduce myself. My name is Darling." His Diplomatique was quite good, perhaps a little archaic, as if it had been formed before the new Contacts: the NaPrin and Chiat Dai influences were missing.
"Mira Santiarre Hidalgo," she responded. He nodded and smiled as if the three names utterly satisfied, and lofted his gaze toward the sky again.
His lack of discomfort disappointed her a little. She'd been hoping to find him brittle, rude, only acquiescing to her request out of extreme embarrassment. But at least he wasn't as terribly charming and resolutely civilized as all the other entities she'd met on the Favor.
As her moment on the moral high ground of inconvenience elapsed, Mira found silence reasserting itself, eased by the diffident habits of eating alone so many nights. She wanted to shake off the feeling, and her frustration made her aggressive. At last, she actually wanted to talk to someone on this ship, and he was being as laconic as a serving drone.
When his food arrived, and he began to consume it in the old-fashioned way (old-fashioned for an artificial, that is), she decided to play dumb.
"What are you up to, if I may ask?"
His hands were held stiffly at either side of the dish. The sensory strands that extended from his wrists criss-crossed over the plate, a cage of antennae imprisoning all but the tendrils of steam that rose from the dish. Even the mechanism was out-of-date: most artificials now used invisibly small filaments in their sensory arrays, or energy fields erected on the fly.
"I am appreciating this dish," Darling responded politely. "Imaging its density in the millimeter band; cross-bombarding it with X- and UHF; reading the content of stray particulate mass; observing the cooling patterns of its constituent parts." A few of the strands left their positions in the web to plunge through the crust that encased the pie, little geysers of steam erupting from their entry holes, and Darling sighed a bit to himself, his eyelids fluttering. "It's a pleasingly complex dish: fruit, meat, and sugars at high temperature; extremely difficult to reverse-engineer. I may have to consult the menu."