“How can you coninute to fill the galley stocks up with such perverse, disgusting fare?” the statuesque “young” runaway from the Galactic Confederation demanded when she finally cornered Lilliana.
“Nobody’s saying you have to eat it,” Lilliana said. “In fact, so long as you’re abstaining there’s that much more for everyone else.”
“I’m not talking about base matters of personal taste,” Galatea said. “This is a matter of principle. How can you expect the crew to eat that… that… sort of thing?”
“I thought you’d be in favor of more engineered food on the menu,” Lilliana said.
“‘Engineered’ implies some semblance of design and manufacture,” Galatea said. “It calls to mind images of scientific precision and sanitary sterility. Are you aware that products you’ve been purchasing are made from the DNA of common barnyard animals?”
“I can promise you the cultures being used haven’t seen the inside of a cow for centuries by this point,” Lilliana said. “Vat-meat has all the benefits of natural food with none of the drawbacks.”
“What benefits would those be, exactly?” Galatea said. “Nature is so… so… random, so disorderly… so natural. If you put something like that into your body, you might as well just eat something you found growing out of the ground.”
“Oh, yes… can you yust imagine where we’d be today if our ancestors had done something like that?” Lilliana said.
“You may laugh, but that is the sort of atrocious, ill-educated behavior that the Galactic Confederation has evolved past,” Galatea said. “I am accustomed to eating things that are designed to be eaten, not things that only just barely managed to become edible through the vagaries of pure random chance. As long as you’re throwing yourself into the shopping, I would like to see some real food, in designer colors and aesthetically pleasing geometric shapes.”
“Yes, well, you can’t exactly expect the crew to dine on Puce Rectangular Prism Number 8,” Lilliana said.
“I’m not talking about anything as extravagant as all that,” Galatea said. “A nice, respectable gray platonic solid would be sufficient.”
“Nobody on this ship is interested in eating platonic solids except you.”
“Those toroids you acquired went rather quickly,” Galatea countered.
“They’re called doughnuts, and if you hadn’t been so busy turning up your nose at them you might have found out why they were so popular,” Lilliana said. “Look, it’s not that I’m not willing to do you some favors. You are good at what you do. But I already found you a new GC-style utilisuit in your size…”
“In olive drab,” Galatea said scathingly.
“The only thing you said about color was to make sure it wasn’t anything too flashy,” Lilliana said. “I thought olive drab seemed safe enough. It has ‘drab’ in the name.”
“And olive. Did you know what’s a kind of green? I feel like a painted… lady. Of the night,” Galatea said. “One who has sex with strangers for money. Because she is a prostitute. A common whore. Sometimes I stay in my quarters for hours looking at myself in it, trying to imagine what kind of a woman would allow herself to be seen dressed so scandalously, what decent people would think if they saw me in it. Do you know, I’ve already had to alter the front access panel so that I can…”
“You’re welcome,” Lilliana said. “What I was going to say is that GC goods are hard to come by in the fringes. Galactic ships carry their own food supplies, and they prefer trading with other Galactic sources.”
“Well… you can keep your eyes open, can’t you?” Galatea asked. “You can at least do that much.”
“I can,” Lilliana said, biting back the urge to retort I do plenty. The truth was she already knew that she would find Galatea’s precision engineered foodstuffs if she possibly could. Like the utility suit to fit Galatea’s generous curves, it was almost an impossible challenge… which meant it was too good to pass up.
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