She laughed, then smiled a beautiful, kind smile, and said, via the translatomat, “Well, you have to tell me that. We eat cledif, or fruit with cledif.”

“Fruit with cledif, please,” I said, and presently she brought me a plate of delicious-looking fruits and a large bowl of pale yellow gruel, smooth, about as thick as very heavy cream, luke warm. It sounds ghastly, but it was delicious—mild but subtle, lightly filling and slightly stimulating, like cafe au lait. She waited to see if I liked it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think to ask if you were a carnivore,” she said. “Carnivores have raw cullis for breakfast, or cledif with offal.”

“This is fine,” I said.

Nobody else was in the place, and she had taken a liking to me, as I had to her. “May I ask where you come from?” she asked, and so we got to talking. Her name was Ai Li A Le. I soon realised she was not only an intelligent person but a highly educated one. She had a degree in plant pathology—but was lucky, she said, to have a job as a waitress. “Since the Ban,” she said, shrugging. When she saw that I didn’t know what the Ban was, she was about to tell me; but several customers were sitting down now, a great bull of a man at one table, two mousy girls at another, and she had to go wait on them.

“I wish we could go on talking,” I said, and she said, with her kind smile, “Well, if you come back at sixteen, I can sit and talk with you.”

“I will,” I said, and I did. After wandering around the park and the city I went back to the hotel for lunch and a nap, then took the monorail back downtown.