“They could be sent to other conservation preserves,” Heyman rumbled, “not slaughtered for their meat! My God, what will history say of us? We who live in the last century when wild animals are found on the earth, killing and eating the priceless few survivors of a time when—”
“You want the verdict of history?” Kolff asked. “There sits history, Heyman! Ask its opinion!” He waved a beefy hand at Vornan-19, in whose authenticity he was not a believer, and guffawed until the table shook.
Serenely Vornan said, “I find it quite delightful that you should be eating these animals. I await my chance to share in the pleasure of doing so.”
“But it isn’t right!” Heyman spluttered. “These creatures — do any of them exist in your time? Or are they all gone — all eaten?”
“I am not certain. The names are unfamiliar. This buffalo, for example: What is it?”
“A large bovine mammal covered with shaggy brown fur,” said Aster Mikkelsen. “Related to the cow. Formerly found in herds of many thousands on the western prairies.”
“Extinct,” said Vornan. “We have some cows, but no relatives of cows. And moose?”
“A large-horned animal of the northern forests. That’s a moose head mounted on the wall, the one with the huge antlers and the long, drooping snout,” said Aster.
“Absolutely extinct. Bear? Grouse? Partridge?”
Aster described each. Vornan replied gleefully that no such animals were known to exist in his era. Heyman’s face turned a mottled purple. I had not known he harbored conservationist leanings. He delivered a choppy sermon on the extinction of wildlife as a symbol of a decadent civilization, pointing out that it is not barbarians who eliminate species but rather the fastidious and cultured, who seek the amusements of the hunt and of the table, or who thrust the outposts of civilization into the nesting grounds of strange and obscure creatures. He spoke with passion and even some wisdom; it was the first time I had heard the obstreperous historian say anything of the faintest value to an intelligent person. Vornan watched him with keen interest as he spoke. Gradually a look of pleasure spread across our visitor’s face, and I thought I knew why: Heyman was arguing that extinction of species comes with the spread of civilization, and Vornan, who privately regarded us as little more than savages, doubtless thought that line of reasoning extremely funny.
When Heyman finished, we were eyeing one another and our menu cubes in shamefaced fashion, but Vornan broke the spell. “Surely,” he said, “you will not deny me the pleasure of cooperating in the great extinction that makes my own time so barren of wildlife? After all, the animals we are about to eat tonight are already dead, are they not? Let me take back to my era the sensation of having dined on buffalo and grouse and moose, please.”
Of course there was no question of dining somewhere else that night. We would eat here feeling guilty or we would eat here without guilt. As Kralick had observed, the restaurant used only licensed meat obtained through Government channels, and so was not directly causing the disappearance of any endangered species. The meat it served came from rare animals, and the prices showed it, but it was idle to blame a place like this for the hardships of twentieth-century wildlife. Still, Heyman had a point: the animals were going. I had seen somewhere a prediction that in another century there would be no wild animals at all except those in protected preserves. If we could credit Vornan as a genuine ambassador from posterity, that prediction had come to pass.
We ordered. Heyman chose roast chicken; the rest of us dipped into the rarities. Vornan requested and succeeded in getting a kind of smorgasbord of house specialties: a miniature filet of buffalo, a strip of moose steak, breast of pheasant, and one or two of the other unusual items.
Kolff said, “What animals do you have in your — ah — epoch?”
“Dogs. Cats. Cows. Mice.” Vornan hesitated. “And several others.”
“Nothing but domestic creatures?” asked Heyman, aghast.
“No,” said Vornan, and propelled a juicy slab of meat to his mouth. He smiled pleasantly. “Delicious! What a loss we have suffered!”
“You see?” Heyman cried. “If only people had—”
“Of course,” said Vornan sweetly, “we have many interesting foods of our own. I must admit there’s a pleasure in putting a bit of meat from a living creature into one’s mouth, but it’s a pleasure that only the very few might enjoy. Most of us are rather fastidious. It takes a strong stomach to be a time traveler.”
“Because we are filthy, depraved, hideous barbarians?” Heyman asked loudly. “Is that your opinion of us?”
Not at all discomfited, Vornan replied, “Your way of life is quite different from my own. Obviously. Why else would I have taken the trouble to come here?”
“Yet one way of life is not inherently superior or inferior to the other,” Helen McIlwain put in, looking up fiercely from a huge slab of what I recall as elk steak. “Life may be more comfortable in one era than in another, it may be healthier, it may be more tranquil, but we may not use the terms superior or inferior. From the viewpoint of cultural relativism—”
“Do you know,” said Vornan, “that in my time such a thing as a restaurant is unknown? To eat food in public, among strangers — we find it inelegant. In the Centrality, you know, one comes in contact with strangers quite often. This is not true in the outlying regions. One is never hostile to a stranger, but one would not eat in his presence, unless one is planning to establish sexual intimacy. Customarily we reserve eating for intimate companions alone.” He chuckled. “It’s quite wicked of me to want to visit a restaurant. I regard you all as intimate companions, you must realize—” His hand swept the whole table, as though he would be willing to go to bed even with Lloyd Kolff if Kolff were available. “But I hope that you will grant me the pleasure of dining in public one of these days. Perhaps you were trying to spare my sensibilities by arranging for us to eat in this private room. But I ask you to let me indulge my shamelessness a bit the next time.”
“Wonderful,” Helen McIlwain said, mainly to herself. “A taboo on public eating! Vornan, if you’d only give us more insight into your own era. We’re so eager to know anything you tell us!”
“Yes,” Heyman said. “This period known as the Time of Sweeping, for instance—”
“—some information on biological research in—”
“—problems of mental therapy. The major psychoses, for example, are of great concern to—”
“—a chance to confer with you on linguistic evolution in—”
“—time-reversal phenomena. And also some information on the energy systems that—” It was my own voice, weaving through the thickened texture of our table talk. Naturally Vornan replied to none of us, since we were all babbling at once. When we realized what we were doing, we fell into embarrassed silence, awkwardly letting bits of words tumble over the brink of our discomfort to shatter in the abyss of self-consciousness. For an instant, there, our frustrations had broken through. In our days and nights of merry-go-round with Vornan-19, he had been infuriatingly elliptical about his own alleged era, dropping a hint here, a clue there, never delivering anything approaching a formal discourse on the shape of that future society from which he claimed to be an emissary. Each of us overflowed with unanswered questions.
They were not answered that night. That night we dined on the delicacies of a waning era, breast of phoenix and entrecфte of unicorn, and listened closely as Vornan, more conversationally inclined than usual, dropped occasional nuggets about the feeding habits of the thirtieth century. We were grateful for what we could learn. Even Heyman grew so involved in the situation that he ceased to bewail the fate of the rarities that had graced our plates.