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“You can get diseases from eating nearly anything,” Bethany said. “I don’t eat brains or
spinal tissue, so I’m safe from nasty things like Creutzfeld-Jacob.”
“Where do you get the meat?” Marla said.
“Ah. This is what your approval depends on, yes?”
“I frown on murdering people and eating their parts, yeah,” Marla said. “It’s a subject
I’m extra-sensitive about lately, since Mutex wants a return to the bad old days of
theocrats getting fat off the meat of unwilling sacrifices. So, what, do you have people
in morgues and hospitals, harvesting for you?”
“No, I do the butchering myself,” Bethany said, sitting back down. “With the help of a
couple of apprentices.”
“Shit,” Marla said. “I’m as morally flexible as the next guy, but there are some things I
have trouble bending my judgment around. You kill ordinaries? People from your own
city? For food?”
“Yes,” Bethany said. “But before you try—and I stress the word ‘try’—to execute me
for crimes against humanity, let me assure you that I only eat the willing. I have no
shortage of volunteers. Sometimes they even stay alive while I amputate a limb or two,
and dine with me on their own flesh.”
“You expect us to believe that?” B said. The whole situation clearly outraged him.
“There’s no reason you shouldn’t,” Bethany said.
Marla nodded to Rondeau, and he flipped his knife closed. “It’s true,” Rondeau told B.
“There are people who want to be eaten. With all the billions of people on this planet,
there’s no shortage of people who are into weird shit. And Bethany probably offers
incentives to the suicidal and the terminally ill—pleasure in their last moments, shit like
that.”
“Occasionally, yes,” Bethany said. “More so in the old days. Now it’s mostly people
who just want to be prey. It’s a kink for some people, a fetish, though an almost
invariably terminal one. They come from all over the world. I pay their travel expenses.
The Internet has helped immensely. There are whole online communities,
anthropophage newsgroups and mailing lists, everything. It’s made my life a lot
simpler.”
“I’m pretty grossed-out right now,” Rondeau said. “I’m going to go away and think
about unicorns and fluffy bunnies and other noncannibalistic things for a while.”
“Go with him, B,” Marla said.
“I’m still confused,” B said. “Is she one of the good guys?”
“Oh, B,” Marla said. “We’re so far past questions of good and bad that I can’t begin to
answer that. But if we can define ‘good’ as ‘willing to stop Mutex from bringing