This was about an hours work to write and edit
A Night at Darno’s
I was working as a waiter down at Darno’s on the Pike. It was a typical evening crowd, mostly older folks enjoying their Golden Years, plenty of money now that the kids were away from home.
He was wearing a long coat when he entered, a trench coat that had seen better days, but under the coat he had on the tie and coat that was the dress code for Darno’s. I saw the hostess pause before seating him. We were crowded, but there were still a few seats available for a person dining alone. She finally lead him to an available table, not hidden in the corner as I’m sure she would have like to, but not a centered one either. As out of the way as a table for one could be on a crowded evening like tonight was.
He didn’t even look at the menu, and when I came to take his order I was not surprised by what he asked for. He spoke with a heavy accent, “The steak please, rare.”
I said something like “A good choice, sir.” which is my usual comment to diners. They could ask for a shoe with cheese on it and I’d probably still say “Good choice, sir.” but the steak really was a good choice; it was the house specialty, imported ‘at great expense’ from the coastal regions and 'grilled to perfection' with our own house brand of herbs and seasonings.
I could see some of the older diners were getting nervous and upset.
“A dweenian,” one whispered to her companion, “why did they let one of those in here?”
She probably knew, of course. Legally we could not keep them out even if we wanted to, they were full citizens under the law now and no one could deny them equal treatment. Our high prices discouraged most from coming in, but those that could pay were entitled to the same service as everyone else.
I saw the confusion on the faces of a younger couple at one table. They didn’t understand why the older folks were troubled with having a dweenian joining them for dinner. No one really talked about it. These young folks, obviously newcomers, probably thought this is some sort of racial apartheid, like South Africa or North America during the middle of the twentieth century, or even a religious apartheid, like in Arabia and North America during the middle of the twenty-first century. They would be wrong, it wasn’t.
True, dweenians would never attend a church or mosque, but it wasn’t some sort of feeling of superiority due to racial or spiritual upbringing that was making the older diners quickly ask for their checks and leave without finishing their meals. It was a sense of embarrassment; they were ashamed of what they had done, what the dweenian made them remember.
When my grandparents arrived on Telos III, they and the rest of the first colonists were happy to find a world very much like Old Earth was before the environmental collapse. There was air you could breath without a filter, and even the local life was similar enough to feel familiar. Most of the local plants were compatible with human biology and even the local animals could be digested for proteins. Humans took this uncluttered, pristine world and immediately began building towns, like Pleasant Falls where Darno’s was located and Askakanosh near First Landing.
Out on the plains they found this new animal, the Telos Cow they called it. It looked a lot like the old Earth cow, and tasted the same, though it was a lot smaller and had three toed hoofs and would stand on its hind legs to reach the leaves on trees. A lot of first colonists became ranchers in this area, rounding up herds of Telos Cows, which they raised and slaughtered and then sent the meat to the towns and even off world to the mining colonies on Telos IV and VI.
The cows were strange creatures, very imitative and very quiet. By my parent's generation some farmers were trying to use them for things other then just as meat animals. Some country kids would even have one as a house pet. They could be taught to wear clothes and to walk on their hind legs and to not soil the rug. And if your pet got old, well, it was still good to eat.
Maybe eighteen years ago, a retired circus performer famous for his talking dogs decided to try to teach a cow how to talk. It worked slowly, but eventually he could get the animal to say simple sentences and even respond to some verbal cues. Then one day, to the astonishment of the audience watching, the Telos Cow asked very clearly why his family was being eaten.
It turned out the Telos Cow, who eventually called themselves the dweenians, were kind of telepathic. They communicated by some sort of pheromone that carried thoughts through the air around a heard. They had never figured out that the strange barking noises we humans made all the time was actually some sort of communications, and we had never responded to their attempts to talk to us. When one dweenian learned to speak though, it wasn’t long before all the ones down wind of him learned it as well and within a few weeks every dweenian on the planet was asking where their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and mates and children were.
Parliament had an emergency session to discuss the issue and the offworld ambassadors tried to figure out who to negotiate with. There were discussions of options ranging from mass slaughter of the dweenians to all the human colonist being forcibly removed from the planet. In the end, calmer heads prevailed and dweenians were offered either autonomy or the right to join the human nation as full citizens.
The dweenians were a very imitative people; they chose to join society as full and equal partners. And every once in a while one will come into Darno’s at the Pike, and using cutlery not designed for their three toed hands, would eat a rare steak with teeth better evolved for chewing grass. He would sit there with his big brown eyes, a small trickle of blood on his chin, and the other patrons would see this and remember.