"Welcome, tiny customers. What'll it be?"

Graa and Fling cocked eyes and aimed teeth toward Koen, respectively.

"What's seasonal?" he asked.

"Snails and crabs. And…" The Greaves rotated and held a gauntlet over a pile of little bags under a hanging bundle of wide, brown strips. "We've got a new shipment of selling insect-killing flower-meal and smoked snakemeat."

"Snakemeat?" said Graa, as an association tickled Koen's memory. He had studied up on Cantonese cuisine when he first went to work for Ambassador Li, a native of Guandong.

"The flowers," he said. "Can you show me an intact one?"

"Have at you!" boomed the armored figured, and brandished a little yellow flower.

"Uh huh," said Koen. "I think this is a chrysanthemum. I can make se gang."

"Snake soup?" Graa stropped his beak on Koen's shoulder. "I have a Tensor friend who would be very distressed at the thought. He keeps a snake as a pet."

"I'd love to see that dinner," said Fling.

Koen was still thinking about Canontese food, and the evolutionary histories of the relevant spices. Chives were allium leaves, ginger was another kind of monocot…coriander, anise, and pepper he didn't know. He'd have to trust the translators.

The translators were up to the task. After only a little confusion, the Greaves gave Koen a bundle of culantro1 leaves, which at least sounded like cilantro, which was the plant that made coriander seeds. Good enough.

"Anise?" asked Koen.

There was scuffling and squeaking inside the armor. "Never heard of it."

There were many other plants with that same flavor, though.2 Star anise? Fennel? Licorice? They finally settled on a substitute, not a seed, but an alarmingly green tincture that the Greaves called "sweet wormwood."

Koen tried some. It neither killed him nor drove him insane, and it did taste a bit like anise.

"Good enough."

Pepper, ginger, and onion leaves were easy to name, but none of the various cultivars the Greaves offered tasted like pepper, ginger, or onion leaves. They tasted like something, though, and Koen chose a number of samples. Cantonese food was a good cuisine to shop for in a nonhuman market. The emphasis was on the natural flavors of the main ingredients, so the number of spices was limited. Koen would wait to try something like curry until after he'd made better contacts in the Zogreion's food business.

Oh right, he wouldn't. He'd flee with Mr. Grumbles back to the human Earth.

Trying not to let his spirits sink, Koen watched the suit of armor as it filled his order, rotating at the hips, arms reaching and pulling ingredients together. It reminded him of industrial automation.

"Couldn't this job be done by a robot?" he wondered out loud. "That's where things seem to be headed on Earth."

"Yeah, that happened on our earth too. And here. So what?"

"Well, why do you do this job? Is it like the Quotidians, where buying and selling are…" he tried to explain Live Action Role playing, "… traditional performance arts?"

"No they aren't," said General Graa. "They're religion."

" Virtuous conditioning," said Fling.

Koen leaned closer to the Greaves in their armor. The pumpkin head swiveled toward him. Fur and iris flashed behind an eye-hole.

"What I'm curious about is why you do it," said Koen.

Shutters snapped shut over the eye holes. The joints at neck and waist pulled in with a double clack. The gauntlets came up, as if ready to punch. "Curiosity? An attack!"

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"I'm not attacking you — "

"That's what an attacker would say!"

"Press your attack," commanded Graa, unhelpfully.

"— I just want to know why you sell in person like this," Koen said.

"Why? Why do you think? For personal connection!"

Koen blinked at the looming figure. "Oh. Um. It's been a pleasure to have met you again." He held out his hand.

A zz-zz noise from inside of the armor, like chattering teeth. "Beat it, Tiny, before we beat you."

Koen's companions showed their teeth and puffed out their feathers, respectively.

"Yes! Let's fight!"

"How dare you? I am intimidating."

Koen felt like he was back on the rope between the trees. Should he fight? Run away? No. He wanted to get somewhere. He was sick of feeling either afraid or angry. He wanted to make a personal connection, damn it.

The Greaves said they did, too, even though they were holed up in their armor, shivering. "We are each of us alone," he said. "Trapped in the armor of our skulls."

Fling flicked her ears at him. Koen decided he'd interpret that as a wink.

Koen tried to think like a kinkajoo in a wooden box. When that didn't work, he tried to think like himself. What did he feel like doing? Luring the furry creatures out.

"I'm thinking," Koen said, "about the value of food."

A shutter rose behind an eye hole. "We sell. You buy. Got it?"

Graa jabbed his beak forward. "A rhetorical opening! Tell them you'll sell to them!"

Koen hadn't thought of that. A glorious future of interspecies spice-trade loomed in his thoughts. A distraction. That wasn't what he was curious about.

"What do you like to eat?" he asked instead.

"We're omnivores."

"No, I mean like comfort food. What did your mother feed to you?"

"How dare you?" But that was only one voice. "Coconut grubs," said the other at the same time. "They were steamed with breadfruit in banana leaves. We ate together inside her cuirass. You never told me that. I didn't want to make you jealous. Jealous?" The armor rocked as its inhabitants chased each other around inside it. "Not in front of the outsiders. Comrade, let there be no barriers between us!"

The rocking stopped. The armor was still.

Fling hopped in place. "My teeth itch to gnaw a big hole in that armor. Then our eyes can see inside."

"Don't do that," said Koen.

Graa pecked his toes. "I am bored. Mammals, stop being boring!"

"This is why I came to you in the first place," said one Greave. "You know how to be in a family. But you know how to be ourself!"

General Graa rose on Koen's shoulder. "I am — "

Koen put his hand in front of the bird's beak. Graa pecked Koen's palm, indicating that he was being very polite and not drawing blood.

A soft chattering rose inside the torso of the armor, rising to a yip. A scuffle, the scurrying of little clawed feet, and the armor reanimated. The shoulders spread and the arms dropped back to the counter-top. The head shook and the eye holes opened.

"What're you looking at, Tiny?" the double-voice boomed.

"Um," said Koen, blushing. "Nothing."

"You think you got food that's better than coconut grubs? Let us have it, then!"

"Well," said Koen, who'd been thinking about a street vendor he'd known in Brasília, "how about abará? That's bean paste and dried shrimp and palm oil, steamed in banana leaves."

The look on Laura's face when she'd squeezed the paste into her mouth. Koen's heart panged and his mouth filled with saliva.

"Too messy!"

Koen imagined eating abará inside wooden armor. Yes, the Greaves would want something that held together.

"Steamed buns!" he said. "Baozi. Meat and vegetables and fish sauce in a ball of steamed bread."

The Greaves' translator clicked and their gauntlets twitched. "A ball of what?"

"Bread." Koen's breath came fast. "Ground wheat and yeast mostly, formed into a paste."

The translator clicked twice.

"Confirm you have permission to give away your species's culinary secrets," said Graa. "I'm acting in good faith."

"No caution!" said Fling. "Reveal the secret of bread!"

"Next time we're going out without her, and you will offer up cultural treasures to me alone. I am dominant."

Koen ignored both of them, as well as, for the moment, his worries about Mr. Grumbles. "Come to the UN Embassy," he told the Greaves. "I'll make bread for you."

1Eryngium foetidum, also called Mexican coriander

2Called anethole, although Koen didn't remember that at the time.