A David Zindell Thanksgiving treat: While awaiting the decision of the Transcendent Ones of Alumit Bridge, Danlo was given a small apartment on the city's seventeenth level, overlooking a huge and busy street called Elidi Boulevard. As he would soon discover, of course, it was actually no smaller than any other apartment in Iviunir; like Scutari nymphs in their feeding boxes, the Narain required little living space. His five rooms were tiny, separated from one another by thin walls of white plastic: there was a bathing room where he might cleanse his body, a multrum barely large enough to allow squatting and voiding oneself of wastes, a facing cell almost the same size, a sleeping chamber, and---barbarically---a kitchen. **Danlo had always regarded the private consumption of food to be a shameful and barbaric thing, but the Narain lived according to different sensibilities. They preferred convenience to company; it was their way to voice their immediate hungers to their ministrant robots, to wait silently a few seconds while these semisentient machines lit the ovens in the kitchen, and then to recline on soft white carpets of spun plastic in their chambers, there to swallow their meals of tasteless factory foods in solitude. It was a bad way to live, but then, as Isas Lel had warned Danlo, the Narain preferred to let their robots live for them.-from The Field, chapter 13 of The Wild If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. Lyall Watson <i></i>
|