“I’m sorry,” she said to Professor Lornah again. “Where I come from, we consider bugs pests—not pets. We don’t keep them around for company—we exterminate them.”
“Pests? Exterminate them? How awful!” the other woman exclaimed. “How can you do such a thing to such sweet, loving creatures?”
She was looking at Vicky the same way Vicky might look at someone who declared they hit stray dogs or cats with their car on purpose. Clearly this was a sore point.
And I went and put my foot right in it, Vicky thought sourly. Shouldn’t have drunk so much of that stuff at the table. I would have known better if I wasn’t so tipsy!
“I’m sorry,” she said again, not sure how to smooth things over. “Bugs are…different on my world. They’re not, uh, cute.”
Not that she thought the bugs she’d seen on Priima Belle were in any way cute or attractive either, but it was clear that was how the residents here thought of them.
“Never mind—we don’t have time to debate the obvious deficiency of your species’ moral fiber,” Professor Lornah snapped. “The audience will be getting restless. Here—put on the thought-to-matter transference helm so you can lecture properly.”
As she spoke, she pulled the tall, metal crown-looking thing off her own head and jammed it down on Vicky’s.
“Ouch!” Vicky put up her hands to steady and adjust the crown—which rose a clear three feet above her head. But the edges already appeared to have melded to her skin. “Hey—it won’t come off,” she objected, feeling frightened when she couldn’t get the tall crown to so much as budge.
“Of course it won’t—not until you give your lecture and give it something to transmit into matter,” Professor Lornah snapped. “Now be quiet—the curtain is rising and I must introduce you.”
As she spoke, the royal blue curtain rose once more, revealing the expectant faces of the audience which filled the entire huge lecture hall.
“And now,” Professor Lornah said in a loud voice which carried all the way to the back of the auditorium. “Without further ado, please welcome Professor Victoria from the Kindred Mothership.”
There was a polite round of applause as Professor Lornah left her alone at center stage and everyone sat forward expectantly. The silence was overwhelming—deafening. And it was a listening silence—a waiting silence, Vicky thought hazily. They were waiting for her to speak.
But there was a problem—though all eyes were trained on her, she didn’t have the slightest idea what to say.
Chapter Twenty
It turned out to be a good thing for Vicky that she was tipsy-verging-on-drunk. The stage fright that she might have felt, being in front of an audience of stuffy alien academics on a strange world, seemed to have been melted away by the alcohol. So instead of freezing, she stepped forward, opened her mouth and heard herself say,
“Hola! Como estas?”
And just like that, she was launching into a beginning Spanish lesson.
But not just any Spanish lesson—this was the lesson she did with all her Spanish One classes that had to do with food and restaurant words. It was always a fun class because she had her students bring their favorite Spanish-inspired dishes.
Some years everyone brought tacos but other years students got inventive. She’d had them bring arepas from Colombia, menudo from Mexico, curanto from Chile, and once even a huge steaming platter of paella from Spain. It was always a fun and delicious experience for everyone and it really helped the students learn the vocabulary she was trying to teach.
Of course, all these dishes were delicious, but Vicky was still kind of tipsy and she didn’t know if she was up to describing such complex flavors into existence. So what she chose to talk about was mostly food found at her favorite Tex-Mex restaurant in the world, Pappasito’s.
She led off with some of the simpler food people associated with the cuisine—she talked about tortilla chips and the many different dips that came with them. As if by magic, baskets of hot, salty chips and little dishes of salsa, queso, and guacamole appeared on everyone’s plate.
“You choose a chip and dip it into the concoction of your choice,” Vicky told her audience. “Try them all—the salsa is spicy and hot, the guacamole is creamy and cool and the queso is melty and delicious.”
She watched as the bored-looking Professors and their students looked at each other and then began to try the food she had spoken into existence. Of course, she never would have tried to pass chips and dip off as exotic haute cuisine to a bunch of academics on Earth, but this was an alien world where nobody had ever even had a taco before, she reasoned. So she might just get away with it.
True, the food she was offering them didn’t have any squirming larvae or an arachnid-delivery system but who didn’t love chips and salsa? Well, she hoped they would love it, anyway.
As she looked around the lecture hall, she thought her first offering was a modest success. People were nodding thoughtfully and trying all three dips separately and then mixing them together. They seemed to be enjoying themselves and learning something at the same time, which was the main point of teaching, as far as Vicky was concerned. Still, she wanted to liven things up a bit more—get them really engaged.
Then she had an idea.
“Of course,” she went on, “What would a basket of salty chips be without a delicious Margarita to wash them down?”
Naturally this wouldn’t have been possible in her high school Spanish One Class, but here she felt she could serve alcohol with impunity. Especially since it
