Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 by John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

of Venus picked it up and ran one finger over it, delicately, barely brushing the surface, feeling the corrugations and relief of the surface.
     
    He held it for a moment, as if not quite sure what he should do with it, and then his hand darted over and put the egg on the plate in front of Leah. She looked up, puzzled.
     
    “This is for you,” he said.
     
    The faintest hint of surprise passed through the other diners, almost subvocal, too soft to be heard.
     
    A moment later the servers set an egg in front of each of us. Our eggs, although decorated with an intricate filigree of finely painted lines of gold and pale verdigris, were ordinary eggs—goose eggs, perhaps.
     
    Carlos Fernando was fidgeting in his chair, half grinning, half biting his lip, looking down, looking around, looking everywhere except at the egg or at Leah.
     
    “What am I to do with this?” Leah asked.
     
    “Why,” he said, “perhaps you should open it up and eat it.”
     
    Leah picked up the diamond-laced egg and examined it, turned it over and rubbed one finger across the surface. Then, having found what she was looking for, she held it in two fingers and twisted. The diamond eggshell opened, and inside it was a second egg, an ordinary one.
     
    The kid smiled again and looked down at the egg in front of him. He picked up his spoon and cracked the shell, then spooned out the interior.
     
    At this signal, the others cracked their own eggs and began to eat. After a moment, Leah laid the decorative shell to one side and did the same. I watched her for a moment, and then cracked my own egg.
     
    It was, of course, excellent.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Later, when I was back with the Singh family, I was still puzzled. There had been some secret significance there that everybody else had seen, but I had missed. Mr. Singh was sitting with his older wife, Triolet, talking about accounts.
     
    “I must ask a question,” I said.
     
    Truman Singh turned to me. “Ask,” he said, “and I shall answer.”
     
    “Is there any particular significance,” I said, “to an egg?”
     
    “An egg?” Singh seemed puzzled. “Much significance, I would say. In the old days, the days of the asteroid miners, an egg was a symbol of luxury. Ducks were brought into the bigger habitats, and their eggs were, for some miners, the only food they would ever eat that was not a form of algae or soybean.”
     
    “A symbol of luxury,” I said, musing. “I see. But I still don’t understand it.” I thought for a moment, and then asked, “Is there any significance to a gift of an egg?”
     
    “Well, no,” he said, slowly, “not exactly. An egg? Nothing, in and of itself.”
     
    His wife Triolet asked, “You are sure it’s just an egg? Nothing else?”
     
    “A very elaborate egg.”
     
    “Hmmm,” she said, with a speculative look in her eye. “Not, maybe, an egg, a book, and a rock?”
     
    That startled me a little. “A book and a rock?” The Bruno book—the very first thing Carlos Fernando had done on meeting Leah was to give her a book. But a rock? I hadn’t see anything like that. “Why that?”
     
    “Ah,” she said. “I suppose you wouldn’t know. I don’t believe that our customs here in the sky cities are well known out there in the outer reaches.”
     
    Her mention of the outer reaches—Saturn and the Beyond—confused me for a moment, until I realized that, viewed from Venus, perhaps even Earth and the built worlds of the orbital clouds would be considered “outer.”
     
    “Here,” she continued, “as in most of the ten thousand cities, an egg, a book, and a rock is a special gift. The egg is symbolic of life, you see; a book symbolic of knowledge; and a rock is the basis of all wealth, the minerals from the asteroid belt that built our society and bought our freedom.”
     
    “Yes? And all three together?”
     
    “They are the traditional gesture of the beginning of courtship,” she said.
     
    “I still don’t