Yon

It was towards the beginning of my first intra-Sol reading tour, a period that I now look back on with much sadness and regret but which at the time I considered an unmitigated success. I had just returned from a sold-out reading at the Sea of Tranquility Literary Society on Luna, and my most recent reading on Earth, at the University of Lisbon's Sociedade de Poesia, had been packed to the rafters. Filled with elation as the wind of fame caught my sails, I dined that evening with a friend—the novelist João Lundgård Cunha—at a small neo-Futurist restaurant in Bairro Alto. Having eaten hardly a thing all day, I took to my meal ravenously, with the type of appetite a pair of new lovers have for each other, making short work of an entire chickenFiat before spitting its stuffing of ball bearings into the provided bowl with a series of satisfied clinks. João, however, barely touched his food, merely prodding a kumquat with one hand and running a restless index finger over the adjacent swatch of sandpaper with the other. Seeing that he finally had my attention, he said that the cause of his lack of appetite was thus: he had just that morning received a letter, from Yon.

He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and, after I had wiped my fingers clean, handed it to me. It was a postcard, rather than a letter. On one side was an image showing the inside of the Grand Bazaar in Tyr, Yon's capital: stall after stall of steaming food, rows of hanging meats, cauldrons overflowing with the delicate Yonnian molluscs that the planet is famous for. I turned the card over and noted the interplanetary postmark before reading the message:

Dear J, it read. I miss you. Perhaps, I was wrong about us . . . ?

There was no signature, but from João's troubled look I knew that he had no doubt about the identity of the sender, and whoever it was had clearly once made a deep impression on him. I handed back the card.

It had been more than a decade since he had visited the planet, he said. I myself have never been there. Though today Yon is a popular destination for food tourists, before the invention of the Mirrorbooths, barely anyone bothered to make the trip and few starliners even made the journey. Indeed, Yon's lack of appeal was the very reason João had decided to go there in the first place. He had a manuscript to finish, and the distractions of being in Lisbon as an up-and-coming novelist in the 2350s—with its seemingly endless procession of lunches, dinners, and soirees—made doing so almost impossible. It is an old writer's trick: you go somewhere completely unexciting, where the food is bland, the wine unpleasant, the company nonexistent; you book a hotel room and write until you've put the final full stop on whatever it is that your publisher has been begging you for months to complete. Yon was, at that time, such a destination. He knew no one there, could not speak the language, and, one must remember, could not consume any of the local food or drink—Yon being one of only two planets in the Commonwealth where the chemical building blocks of life have evolved with the opposite chirality to our own. The most noticeable effect of this was of course, before the invention of the Mirrorbooths, to render all Yonian food not only tasteless but also completely indigestible to an organism whose biochemistry had evolved on Earth.

And so, his suitcase filled with enough glucose tablets and vitamin supplements to ensure he would not die of malnutrition before his manuscript was done, he dutifully boarded a starliner to Yon.

He paused for a moment as our chrome-clad waiter replaced the swatch of sandpaper with one of velvet, then continued:

"I spent the first few days in my hotel, working on my novel intensely, barely leaving my room. On the fifth day, however, I was in such need of diversion that even the rainy, gray streets of Tyr were enough to tempt me outside.

"It was nearing dusk, and stalls were already set up in the arcades ready for dinner. There were crowds everywhere, clusters of Yonians, silver-tinted faces glistening like wet slate in the humidity, eating, drinking, joyfully effusing with each gulp and swallow. I felt a sadness, then, a profound loneliness. Great billows of steam rose from the cooking pots, strange meats and vegetables sizzled vociferously in their pans; but I could smell nothing, none of it. To the receptors in my nose, those scent molecules, so evidently fragrant to the locals, were all back to front! I knew, too, that if any of those glorious foods were to pass my lips, they would be like plastic on my tongue, would simply pass through me inertly, giving me no nourishment whatsoever.

"Forlorn, I returned to my hotel, and to the bottle of glucose tablets that were awaiting me. That night, instead of working on my manuscript until far into the night, all I could think of was the food that I had seen, none of which was available to me.

"The next morning, I woke with a keen resolve. I descended in the elevator and asked at reception if they could book me a guide for the day. I would like to see some of the city. An hour later, she arrived."

Here João closed his eyes for a moment, and the corners of his mouth turned upwards as if he were savoring a caramel, such was the sweetness of the memory.

"Her name was Tallia," he said. "Like the other Yonians I'd seen, her skin was tinted silver and, as was the fashion, she wore her hair in a kind of slick crest which, along with the intricate folds and pleats of her Yonian robes, made her appear as of a bird of paradise.

"After exchanging pleasantries for a minute or two and learning that I was a writer, she asked what I would like to see—the University, perhaps? The Library?

"'I want to visit the markets,' I said, 'and some restaurants, any ones you like—whichever are your favourite.'

"She looked at me puzzled and said, in her peculiar Yonian way of phrasing things: 'But to you, eating our food is not able, is this not truth?'

"I told her to leave that worry to me.

"We went to the Great Bazaar first. It was still early for lunch, so we strolled easily among the hall's thick cast-iron pillars. I told her to buy whatever she liked, whatever she loved most, whatever made her mouth water.

"She was shy at first, but as soon as her eyes caught a glimpse of what appeared to me to be a mountain of gastropods, simmering in a braising dish of crimson soup, her eyes sparkled and her silvery skin flushed indigo.

"'These,' she said, 'these are gop lill,' gesturing to the seller that she wanted a bowl of them. I saw her long nostrils flare as he handed her the bowl. 'I could eat a hundred of them!'

"'Describe them to me,' I said as she plunged in her spoon. 'What do they taste like?' She tried, between mouthfuls, to describe the flavour: 'They are sweet,' she said. 'like gop khull, but much richer, and the broth is full fragrant; made with toi blossoms.'

"She must have seen my confusion and, doubtless too, the frustration in my eyes, because she stopped eating at once and said: 'I'm sorry. I know not how to describe it in a way clear to you. I have never eaten Terran food.'

"'Let's try something different,' I said. 'You take a bite, and tell me the first thing that comes into your head, the first image, or memory—whatever it is, even if it seems foolish or strange.'

"She nodded, and took another spoonful, this time with her eyes closed: 'It's like, a thunderstorm,' she said, 'after a morning of heat; the rain and the lightning comes, and in bright flashes, makes everything cool again.'

"And there it was, in that instant, blooming on my tongue, the flashes of sweetness and the floral zing of the soup, washing over my palate, a thunderstorm after a morning of heat. That's what gop lill taste like."

***

The waiter returned and I ordered us both dessert: two sonic booms with freeze-dried strawberries and cream. "I'll be back in a moment with your headphones," he said. I smiled and nodded, and when I looked back again to João, he had placed his fingers gently to his lips; then his eyes regained focus and he returned them to the table. He continued:

"After the Bazaar, she whisked me from food stall to food stall, restaurant to bakery, and dish after dish, I wolfed down her words like a starving dog: a skewer of sand-colored meat that oozed black treacle with every bite, a type of mushroom, eaten raw, straight from the bark, an intricate filigree of silken strands that dissolved instantly on her tongue: 'like swimming in the ocean, the weeds caressing your feet,' 'like falling asleep, wrapped in my grandmother's old shawl,' 'like a kiss with a stranger, unexpected, but oh so desired.' I opened my eyes to see her lick the last of the dessert from her fingers, and there it was, between us, unmistakably. Love, clear as day. Her lips pressed into mine, and I could taste it, like caldo verde laced with piri-piri, burning my tongue and throat.

"The next few weeks went by in a blissful blur. We ate out every day, she eating the foods she loved most, I glutting myself on the metaphors she created for me. But soon, the demands from Earth began to clamour ever louder, and with them, the realization that I could not stay on Yon forever.

"'It's like a sad parting,' Tallia said, licking violet-coloured honey off my fingers—our last meal together. There were tears in her eyes, and I said, suddenly defiant, that I would stay, that I would live off glucose pills forever if I had to; for her, I would do it. Her words alone were enough to nourish me. But she, though no less in love, was wiser.

"'Everything spoils,' she said, kissing me with her violet-covered lips, which tasted, though I hated to admit, like nothing to me. 'Go back before it happens to us.'"

***

After removing our headphones, we sat in silence for a while, waiting for our ears to stop ringing. Some years after João returned from Yon, the Mirrorbooths were invented and rolled out large-scale in the spaceport at Tyr. All a visitor to Yon has to do now is step inside and, via some clever D-manipulation technology, their bodies are rotated through the fourth dimension so that, when they emerge a few moments later, they are mirror images of themselves. Their biochemistry thus inverted, they can enjoy the famed culinary fruits of Yon to the fullest. Another friend of mine, a famous food writer, newly returned from a recent trip to the planet, once gave me a box of Yonian jellies as a gift—properly inverted, she said, so that I would be able to taste them.

I remember popping one on my tongue, and, despite my excitement as it dissolved, Yon's reputation for such delicacies having reached stellar heights, I nonetheless found it bitter and somewhat bland.

Perhaps, having become overrun by food tourists, the quality of food on Yon has diminished, their once hand-crafted masterpieces become mass-produced, lifeless. Or perhaps it had never been as good as I'd imagined it.

***

I asked João what he was going to do about the message, whether he would rekindle his old romance. He looked at the postcard for a while, chewing a clot of freeze-dried cream. Then he pocketed it.

It has been several years since that dinner, and to my knowledge, João has never returned to Yon.