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hard work, but certainly not boring!
The food was too strange to eat much; she could not have gotten it down at all had she not been ravenous after her breakfastless morning. The textures were too smooth, the tastes too sweet or too salty, with one fiery bitterness that made her splutter. At least Bethany was trying to be friendly.
Searching her mind, she realized she was still angry about the moment when she had walked naked between the rows of machines. None of the men had been offensive, they had not noticed that she was female. But they should have noticed. Noticed; not looked at her offensively, but noticed that she was in fact female and would have feelings about displaying herself before strange men. Possibly they should have had the machines entirely staffed by women, just to indicate that they understood her natural feelings. She hated the idea that they considered her just a nothing, another machine that happened to be living and breathing, a machine no one would have noticed except that it was not wearing the proper uniform! A lot of bones and organs , Bethany had said. She felt depersonalized, as if by treating her like a machine they had made her into one.
“Don’t try to eat that stuff if you don’t like it,” Bethany said, noticing her struggle with the food. “Sooner or later, you’ll find out which things you like and which ones you don’t, and you can get native food - oh, I’m sorry, I mean naturally cooked food, things more like what you’re accustomed to eating - in quarters. Some people prefer synthetics, that’s all - the Alphans, for instance, have religious objections to eating anything that’s ever been alive or growing, so we have to provide complete synthetic diets for them, and it’s cheaper and easier to package them for the staff up here. They’re not so bad when you’re used to them,” she rattled on, while Jaelle blinked, thinking of a world where everybody ate this kind of thing, not for convenience or cheapness but because they had religious scruples about eating anything which had once contained life. She supposed it showed, after all, a very elevated ethical sense. Anyway, there was nothing she could do about it.
By now she was numb to shocks and flung her half-emptied plate into the ubiquitous disposal bins, watching it flow away into slime and swirl away down the drain. Small loss, she thought. Upstairs again, in one of the large windowless offices, she felt the unease of incipient claustrophobia - it was unsettling not to be sure whether she was on the fourth floor or the twenty-fourth. She told herself that she could not expect to have everything familiar, among Terrans, and that at least it was a new kind of experience. But the strange sounds and background machine noises scraped away at her nerves. Bethany located a desk for her.
“This is Lorne’s place; even when she’s here she doesn’t use it much, she worked mostly in Montray’s office upstairs, but when I heard you were coming in, I had it cleaned out and set up for you. You wouldn’t want to work under Montray, he’s a - ” She used an idiom Jaelle did not understand, comparing him with some unfamiliar animal, but the disapproving tone conveyed her meaning perfectly well. She remembered what she had heard in the Medic office, too… Montray, then, was the one who could not be trusted to treat Darkovans with ordinary courtesy. How, she wondered, had this man come to be in a position of authority if his character faults were so extreme that even his own staff felt free to comment on them? She resolved to ask Peter; she literally did not know how to frame the question for Bethany’s ears without implying all kinds of insulting things about Terrans in general.
Bethany was explaining, in rapid-fire, how to use the voice-scriber, the throat-mike, the clearing key for erasure, the way in which the words would print on the screen before her. “You don’t have to speak out loud, just subvocalize.” She struck