It is conceivable, in the infinitude of possible cuisines, that the last batch of leicha will be produced in circumstances quite alike that of the first: confusingly, by accident, through the careless tilt of a pot, or a fire that has gone on too long. Curious hands (or desperate hands -- for the old ways were born of necessity too) stir in long beans, nuts, ragged plastic sachets of dried fish. One month's hoarded rations, nothing more, from some forgotten terrestrial farm; or perhaps the gathered surplus of hydroponic farms spinning away in some distant centrifugal station, their pale roots frayed from imitation-G. But the pot will be made of metal, and the ladle will be made of wood, and (regardless of the strange fluorescence of the brewing concoction, or the ragtag provenance of its ingredients) there will be, as there always have been, hungry mouths to feed.

Despite all these differences it will be nice to imagine that our mouths will still be built in certain ways, after all, and that tinge of basil, mint, and salt will go down like a story. "Like your grandparents used to make," the maker of the music might chide, misremembering ready-made dishes from some future-past as distant from us as our own grandparents were from ours. Or they might lie, and invent stories of immigrants on alien shores, much like them, with a story much like this: this is all they had, this is all we have, and this is how tradition is born. The drinkers of the tea might take it all in, let it all seep in as the flavour does, a flavour that might remind them (un)comfortably of some terrestrial, earthy past. They might even begin, after an exchanged glance/smile or two, to like it.

The dish will never be made again. Perhaps the maker and her children move on to greener pastures (figuratively): reaching the next waypoint, they find a cachet of protein substitute that will last them for weeks. Or a seed-ship, with soil and solar lamps, will pick them up, and the children will have no more want of fresh stalks and leaves for the rest of their lives. Or our brave rangers and their craft remain, as they always have been, refugees to the bitter end. The last leicha will be drunk in the spaces between the stars, going down -- as their ears pop from the steaming liquid pressure -- as it had from the first, with a sound of thunder, or the closing notes of a song.