Chapter 4 islak polenta (3)

There was no one else in the cafe, and she and I developed a mutual affection. "Can I ask where you're from?" she asked, and we started talking.Her name is Ai Li Ai Lei.I quickly realized that she was not only very smart, but also highly educated.She has a degree in phytopathology - but, she says, was lucky enough to get a job as a waitress. "Since the ban," she said with a shrug.After realizing that I didn't know what the so-called ban was, she was going to tell me, but then some other guests came, a man as strong as a bull occupied a table, and two girls as timid as mice sat at another table, and she had to go and greet them.

"Hope we can keep talking," I said, and she told me, smiling kindly, "well, if you come over at sixteen I can sit down and talk to you." "I will," I said and did.I walked around the park before heading back to the hotel for lunch and a nap before boarding the monorail in the afternoon to head downtown again.I have never seen a group of people concentrated in a car with such a wide variety--all different shapes, heights, colors, and some have hair, others have fur and even feathers (I am at this time Only then did I realize that the tail of the street sweeper was really a tail).I saw a tall, thin, green-skinned young man.Isn't that thing above his ear a leaf?He murmured in the warm wind that blew in through the open window.

Unfortunately, the only thing all Islakhs have in common is poverty.The city apparently was thriving not so long ago.The monorail is a sleek industrial design, but the facilities now look pretty old.There are also some old houses in the city built to a scale I am familiar with. Although they are grand and beautiful, they have been in disrepair for a long time.There are not many such old houses, and the city is full of newer buildings: houses as big as giants, houses as small as toys, and structures that look a lot like stables, cowsheds, and rabbit cages—a scary place. A hodgepodge of buildings, all of which look cheap, crumbling, and low-quality.As for the Islakhs themselves, they were in rags, if not outright.Some with fur or feathers don't even wear clothes anymore.The green lad wore a modest apron, but his gnarled trunk and limbs were naked.This is a country in dire economic crisis.

A. R. A. R. sat at a table outside a café next to the one where she worked as a waitress (Crediff's).She smiled at me and motioned for me to come over, so I sat next to her.She was eating a bowl of cold kladiff with sweeteners and I asked for the same. "Please tell me about the ban," I said to her. "We used to be the same as you," she said. "What happened?" "Uh," she hesitated. "We like science. We like engineering. We're really good engineers. But maybe we're not very good scientists." Briefly tell her story: Islaks are very strong in Applied Physics, Agriculture, Architecture, Urban Development, Engineering, etc. and can invent all kinds of things, but their weakness is in Life Sciences , history, and cannot effectively organize knowledge into a system.They have characters like Edison and Ford, but not Darwin or Mendel.By the time they have airfields like ours, they've learned to travel between the planes too.About a hundred years ago, one of their scientists discovered applied genetic technology on a certain plane.He brought this technology back to Islak.This brand new technology fascinated everyone.They quickly grasped the fundamentals of it.Or maybe they didn't fully grasp the fundamentals of genetic technology before they started applying it to all life forms they knew.

"Initially," she said, "genetic technology was applied to plants. To make various food crops more productive, or to make them resistant to bacteria, viruses, and pests, and so on."