The nice family people standing before him—so educated, so smart—explain that some days, Paulius does not find anyone at all to let into his restaurant. Paulius has exacting tastes. It is said on days like that, Paulius sinks into a deep depression, though Paulius is more known for his fits of rage.
And the nice family goes in, one at a time.
And the nice family is ejected from the booth, one at a time.
The Gineer hipsters flutter their hands at Kenna, as if loath to touch his ragged clothing. “Get in,” they hiss. “Get it over with.”
Kenna slumps in. White linen curtains close behind him.
Before him is an elegant table, draped in a white tablecloth, standing before a blank white screen. A wooden chair, curved like a cello, rests on the floor, inviting Kenna to take a seat.
Kenna sits down, crossing his hands to prevent himself from fidgeting. He half expects a buzzer to go off before he speaks.
Instead, he stares down at the tablecloth. It has indents where would-be vandals have left outlines of dicks, but the tablecloth is made of some special ink-resistant fabric.
The screen pulses gently, a reminder.
Kenna clears his throat.
“I … I don’t think I love food.”
Nothing happens. Is there some secret signal that nobody’s told him about? Has he failed already, and is too much of a yokel to know?
“I can’t be certain. Mother and Father—they had grand meals. They warm their hands by those memories, savoring banquets they had with Grandfather, reliving those courses one by one …
“I don’t have those recollections. I’ve had canned meat, dried noodles, pickled eggs. If I … if we … ever came back into favor, would I … appreciate anything else? I can’t tell. All this surviving is killing me.
“Mother and Father, they’re—they dream decades in the future. I can barely imagine tomorrow. And I think if I got one meal, one good meal, to show me what life I could dream about, then maybe I could…”
He drifts off, uncertain what he could do. His life is defined by absences. He can’t envision what he could do, because he doesn’t love food, he doesn’t love people, he doesn’t love anything, and how can you become something when all you’ve known is nothing?
“Maybe I could have a Philosophy,” he whispers.
A soft whirr. Kenna jerks his head up at the noise; he’s still in the confessional. He’d started talking and had forgotten about The Sol Majestic, forgotten about Paulius, he’d poured his heart onto the table and why is that screen rising into the ceiling?
The door concealed on the confessional’s far side swings open, revealing a sunlit orchard.
There are no orchards in space, Kenna thinks. He freezes, so he does not hurt himself in his madness.
But through the door are blue skies, knotted tangles of grass, twisted boughs of trees heavy with fruit. Rows of trees, retreating far into the distance. A zephyr of sun-warmed chlorophyll ripples his hair.
The trees’ branches are wrapped around stainless steel water pipes that snake across the landscape. A geodesic dome’s triangular struts slash across the sky. Surely, he would not have imagined that.
He creeps his way toward the exit, expecting some security guard to block the entrance. But no; he steps over the threshold, and his battered shoes sink into soft loam. His fingers close over a tree branch’s knurled hardness, and the sensation of something growing beneath his fingers is like touching miracles. Kenna inhales, and it’s not the stale scent of recycled body odor and plastic offgassing; it’s the clean smell of rain and leaves.
He plucks a hard oval of purplish-green off a branch: a grape? He rolls the fruit’s waxy surface between his fingertips, puzzled at its hard flesh. Weren’t grapes supposed to be squishy, like the jam in the vending machine sandwiches? This smells like the light crude oil coating your skin after you bunk in a cargo ship’s engine room. Is it safe to eat?
He’s never eaten anything that hasn’t come wrapped in plastic.
Kenna drops the fruit and stumbles forward, seeking something simpler. He pushes his way into a curved valley with long rows of curlicued vines lashed to wooden poles.
A tall, potbellied man strides across the vineyard toward Kenna, jabbing a silver cane into the soft soil for balance.
Kenna’s breath catches in his throat. The man is coming for him. The man who owns the vineyard.
The man—Paulius?—ducks under the vines without lifting his blue-eyed gaze away from Kenna, as though he has memorized every limb in his garden. The man’s own limbs are slender—long graceful arms, a dancer’s legs, all connected to one bowling-ball belly. Whenever he ducks, his long, white ponytail swings madly, knotted in silver cords. He steps over the hillocks quickly, as if an emergency calls for his attention but he refuses to give up the dignity of walking.
The man is dressed in thigh-high black boots and a white ruffled vest, but somehow the rain-slickened vines leave no marks upon him. He is wrinkled and tan—not the fake orange tan of tanning booths, but the light leathery patina one acquires from hard work in fine sunlight.
He holds a brass bowl in his free hand, thrusting it forward. Steam wafts upward.
He deposits the bowl into Kenna’s hands gravely. Kenna looks down; the bowl thrums warm against his palms, rimmed with circuitry, the soup cradled within perfectly still. The bowl has its own artificial gravity generator at the bottom, pulling the soup down so it can never spill.
Kenna trembles. This bowl is worth more than everything his family owns, and yet Paulius—for it is Paulius—has handed it to him as though it were nothing at all.
Paulius bows.
“The first rule of appreciation,” Paulius says, his voice mellifluous, “is that it is impossible to savor a thing you have been starved of. This applies to food, lovers, and company. So I must feed you before I can teach you. Drink deep.”
Except Kenna can savor it. Though his stomach punches the inside of his ribs, desperate for nutrients, Kenna peers into the coppery broth before him. Little globules of fat wobble upon its surface, glimmering like holograms. Glistening dark meat chunks bob at the bottom. He inhales, and the rich chicken scent fills his nostrils, fills his brain, fills his world.
Then he thumbs the gravity release button and sips it. Or tries to. His hands betray him, pouring it into his mouth. Kenna fights his body to sip genteelly instead of gulping. He’s sobbing and coughing, making dumb animal noises in front of Paulius …
Paulius grabs his shoulder, his fingers so strong they root Kenna to the earth. “Your breath stinks of ketone. I know how long a man can starve, and you are at your limits. Please. Eat.”
Freed from restraint, Kenna dumps it down his throat. His belly heats up, radiating warmth like a tiny sun. His muscles twitch as his blood feasts on the broth, ferries it out to his limbs, suffusing him with a rapture greater than any orgasm.
His ass hits the ground. He sprawls in the soft earth, feeling his emaciated body rebuilding itself, feeling the sunlight’s warmth on his brown skin.
Paulius kneels down beside him, nodding as Kenna’s chest hitches. This isn’t just the broth; it’s life, it’s a connection to this land Paulius has created, and—
He loves food.
He loves something.
As Kenna realizes how close he was to dying, dying in all the ways that really counted, he curls up and cries.
3
After Ninety Minutes at Savor Station
“So why didn’t you eat the olives?”
Paulius has draped a robe over Kenna’s shoulders as he leads Kenna across the orchard, headed for a small frosted-glass door set into a polished aluminum wall. Kenna clutches at the white linen lapels, reveling in the feeling of clean cloth; he’s worn his filthy Inevitable Robe for so long he can no longer distinguish between the stained cloth and his squalid skin.
“I thought they were grapes,” Kenna replies, looking back at the gravity bowl. It’s worth more than some spaceships. Paulius
simply left it where Kenna had dropped it.
“Why didn’t you eat the grapes?”
“I—knew not how to eat them.”
“You don’t know how to eat grapes?” Paulius leans in, his thin-lipped mouth pursed with grave concern. Kenna feels the sickness roiling within him, a rotting cancer uncovered by Paulius’s examinations. Kenna’s stomach is a landfill of rubbery microwaved mockmeats and sugared pastries that crumble like plaster dust to the tooth.
“For lack of opportunity only,” Kenna explains. “We’ve fallen from fashion. My parents, they travel the stars in an attempt to bring the Inevitable Philosophies back to the people who once followed them, but … until they succeed, we lack a planet to call our own. And the foods on starships are built to last.”
“So what did your mother make you when you had a bad day?”
“She microwaved a tub of macaroni.”
“And when you could buy any sweet, you bought—”
“Frosted Chocobombs.”
“Why?”
“They had the most calories.”
“Oh, Kenna.” Paulius’s silver-braided hair twitches as he shakes his head, like a cat’s tail as it stalks prey. “You can pack yourself into ships to sail the vacuum, work for men who speak no language you understand, sleep beneath a sky that glows in colors you never realized air could be. Yet when you find that ramshackle stand nestled in all that exotic lustre, the one that sells the dumplings you ate when you were a child, then—then no matter how far away you are, your mouth will bring memories flooding back. Food is what anchors us. Food’s how we find our way home.
“And you…” He tenses; his silver cane lifts an inch from the ground. “Your home is a collection of vending machines.”
Paulius’s cold fury is reassuring. Kenna’s body itches with sickness. The broth burbles in his belly, the most organic thing about him; his bones and muscles have been formed from the extruded fats and olfactory compounds sold in plastic packages.
But Kenna is no longer worried. Paulius will protect him. And a man who can tend to an orchard in space’s hard vacuum can work miracles.
Paulius’s gaze lifts away from Kenna, up toward the hexagonal polarized windows looking out into space. He bares china-white teeth at the blank panels above, which glow with dispersed sunlight.
He begins to tap his teeth, slowly, like a metronome.
Paulius squints, searching for something high above him. There’s nothing up there, Kenna thinks. But as Paulius sweeps his cane-tip out across the lambent radiance, outlining imaginary figures across that blank artificial sky, Kenna sees what hangs above them:
A blank canvas.
Paulius giggles, an infectious titter. He frowns, tapping his teeth harder. Then another chuckle, and he mutters “yes.”
Each giggle is a new idea, Kenna realizes. He strains his eyes to look up at the sky, hungry to see what Paulius sees. Paulius is assembling concepts, trying to piece something together—
Paulius raps his cane across Kenna’s shins. “How long has it been since your mother and father have been properly served?”
“They were children. Younger than I.”
Paulius jitters like he’s filled with electricity, making tentative gestures in every direction as though the world is filled with too many possibilities to commit to one movement. “I can’t give you what we serve. Don’t you see? That’s my food. What you need is, is—it’s your food. We don’t make that here.”
That mad spark leaps to Kenna. “But you will.”
“We will! Banquets in the classic style, fit for the finest leaders! Scented osmanthus blossoms! Hami melons, dripping dew! Cold fish cakes! The entire kitchen will have to be refitted! We’ll train our staff to serve each course in purest Inevitable Philosophy etiquette! By the time we’re done, you will know what home is!”
Paulius thrusts his cane into the air, as if leading a parade—then looks back, realizing no one but Kenna is here to see him.
Yet Kenna’s chest heaves. For the first time, he’s excited to see what happens.
Is that what an Inevitable Philosophy feels like?
Paulius drags Kenna toward the glass door. “Come on.”
Kenna passes through the door, and a flashbulb panic sears his nerves as he realizes there are laborers in this kitchen—flush-faced men and women chopping roots. Mother and Father always covered his eyes whenever Kenna tried to watch the transport-ship repair squadrons—as if manual labor was a disease he could pick up through casual contact.
Yet the smells of The Sol Majestic’s kitchen are so intense that Kenna forgets he has eyes.
The yeasty scent of bread dough fills his nose, so pungently alive that Kenna realizes all those crackers he ate were like fossils preserved in plastic packets. Then a moist salty oiliness squirms into his nostrils, a scent Kenna cannot identify until he sees a burly woman sliding a knife into the belly of a great golden fish and realizes this is what the sea must smell like. Everywhere some new delicious scent plucks at his nose, these mysterious aromas opening up channels to his stomach …
Paulius tugs on Kenna’s shoulder: “Come on!” Kenna stumbles into the narrow corridor between an oven’s furnace and three men chopping a great purple branch into perfectly round slices. He’s terrified he’ll bowl someone over, making brute contact—but everyone in The Sol Majestic’s kitchen is aware of their neighbors. They step out of Kenna’s way with military precision.
Kenna’s staggering through the least of The Sol Majestic’s dangers: there’s the scrawny young boy hauling a cauldron of bubbling sun-plasma, the tall androgynous technician speeding time back up on a stasis cage crammed with sharp-pincered crabs, the two men swinging a six-horned animal carcass up onto the butcher block.
Kenna has lived side-by-side with soldiers, hitchhiking back home on the cargo ships with him; these cooks are tougher. Their hands are criss-crossed with half-healed knife cuts and puffy burn scars. They reach fearlessly into flames. When Paulius slides in between two women dicing braided liquorice cords into perfect cubes, their knife-blades unconsciously turn toward him, like solar panels rotating toward the sun, trying to lure Paulius into judging their work.
Who knew creating something corporeal required such courage?
Paulius pushes by, batting people out of the way with his cane. The chefs notice Kenna trailing behind. They squint, wondering what chef is in trouble—and then, when they note Kenna’s cheap robe and see Paulius’s hand clutching Kenna’s wrist, they make a pained noise.
“Scrimshaw! SCRIMSHAW!” Paulius yells, headed for a bright red door at the kitchen’s far end. The plain door makes Kenna realize how beautiful this kitchen is. The chefs wear stylish snapped-collar outfits bridging a rainbow of colors, from a commander’s red to a dishwater blue. Their silver knives draw showers of sparks when they pull them from the auto-sharpening stations. They work on brushed-copper ovens, scrubbed spotless, bathed in light from the stacks of stasis cages that freeze time and dispense a cold blue glow of Cherenkov radiation—
But that battered red door is painted aluminum. It’s the one thing in The Sol Majestic’s kitchen that doesn’t need to impress, which means it contains the most impressive thing of all.
“Scrimshaw!” Paulius yells, a doctor calling across a crowded emergency room.
The door bangs open.
A tall, dour woman plants one steel-toed boot onto the kitchen floor, as if she is an explorer claiming this planet for the first time—
Everything stops.
Kenna wonders, for a moment, if the stasis cages have malfunctioned. Knives hover in mid-air. Women hauling boiling stockpots wrestle sloshing fluid to a halt. Gineer chefs with their hands beneath a broiler pause, looking anxiously over their shoulders.
This is the woman who signs the paychecks, Kenna thinks.
She lowers her thick-rimmed black glasses, peering down at Kenna through crystal lenses. Kenna should have popped a scrubba-freshener before he got here, burnished the oil resi
due off his dark skin. But how could he have known?
The queen of the kitchen is as cold as a coat hanger, a plain woolen black coat draped over a form even more emaciated than Kenna’s. She’s tall as a parapet, peering down at everyone through old-style glasses, crouched like the legends of old dragons; a terrible intelligence radiates from her. She’s a black hole of information, drinking in every detail, revealing nothing.
Yet her bristling irritation broadcasts her desires to Kenna. She demands one thing: perfection, at the lowest possible price. And no one has yet given it to her. Her hair is an unflattering bowl cut, dyed a deep and artificial jet-black for a woman her age. Kenna is certain that the unstylish hair is a trap, designed to lure out those unwise enough to comment upon it.
“Scrimshaw!” Paulius all but hurls Kenna at her feet. The kitchen, seeing Scrimshaw’s attention flicker down to someone else, resumes operations.
“Yes?” Her voice is a bemused whisper, yet it cuts through the clatter of plates.
“New plan.”
“New plans incur new expenses. I’m against.”
“The old menu? Deleted.” Paulius flicks his hand across the air like a man erasing a chalkboard. “Our new cuisine will be a fresh take on the Inevitable Philosophies!”
He thrusts his hands down at Kenna, a boy demonstrating this new puppy’s lovableness to a skeptical parent. Under Scrimshaw’s chill black eyes, the half-headed bruises on Kenna’s cheekbones throb back to life, fresh breezes blow through his shabby Inevitable robe, his unwashed armpit-stink wrinkling his nose.
Scrimshaw clears her throat, a hiss like a dying air scrubber, preparing to dismiss him—
Kenna clambers back to his feet, never breaking eye contact with her.
You are a prince, his mother had reassured him as she dabbed sealing fluid on his cuts after the bullies had beaten him. Find your Philosophy, and the universe will pour your cups full of pride.
The Sol Majestic Page 2
