If you ever need to hide a billiard ball in a hurry, Howard, you know who to talk to.

She looks at the flower and gives what can only be described as a smile of despair. "It's called a ploom. The plant grows for fifty years, then produces this one flower, seeds and dies. If you let it grow with its roots saturated in certain organic solutions for its last year, it slowly transforms the flower's pigments into various flavored sugars. It's supposed to represent every possible variation of sweetness in its petals.

"People guard these plants, in the wild - they don't grow well in hothouses. They fight and steal and lie, because the sale of one flower can feed a family for a year. And on the tables of Fle they pile the plooms up by the thousands at their parties, and discard them on a whim. Devour them without tasting, enjoying the thought of the shorn plant and the wasted years spent watching it, more than the taste. They're a whole culture of wasters, and if you want to spit in their metaphorical eye, eat your ploom slowly."

She gazes up at the water-rippling ceiling fora moment. "It's not a culture I'm going to be proud or bringing back from the dead, actually."