The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Scrimshaw believes him to be a vagrant. Half an hour ago, Kenna would have agreed. But with Paulius, they will use this kitchen to reforge a lost empire for one meal, the corroded glory of the Inevitable Philosophies restored through lacquered duck and boiled cowpeas—and Kenna is the Prince of the Inevitable Philosophies.

  His spine snaps straight. He realizes how many years he’s kept it bent.

  Five fingers close into one fist. The Philosophies speak. He brandishes his fist at Scrimshaw.

  “Inevitable.” Kenna’s whisper is inexorable, a planet swinging around the sun like a haymaker.

  Scrimshaw’s upper lip twitches. It takes Kenna a moment to recognize the gesture as a smile. Then the smile is tucked away as neatly as a handkerchief shoved into a pocket as she sighs, her nostrils flaring.

  “Must we pretend each of your new love affairs is as earthshaking as the one before, Paulius?”

  Kenna’s veins frost, that Inevitability vanished—which means it wasn’t Inevitable.

  Did Paulius sense that Kenna longed for the company of men?

  The idea of making love to such a grandfatherly man makes Kenna’s skin itch like it was flaking off, but … Kenna’s seen predators lurking on the transport ships. They’re threadbare, wheedling, obvious men who’ll offer to show new boys the ropes, yet in the end there’s only one rope they ever show. Clammy sweat prickles Kenna beneath his clotted robe as he prepares his usual brush-off speech—he’s an Inevitable Prince, his heirs are carefully chosen, Mother and Father would never allow a coupling with no chance of progeny—

  “Love affair?” Paulius’s outraged squawk, loud enough to cut across the kitchen, floods Kenna with reassurance. “When have I ever bedded a customer? Especially not one a third my age—”

  “Not the boy.” Scrimshaw’s words are a guillotine, beheading useless arguments. “The menu. You’re a living avalanche, Paulius, eternally perched to rumble headfirst into love affairs with some new idea. The boy’s not a boy. He’s an excuse for adventure.”

  “You see?” Paulius turns, wide-eyed, to Kenna, then flutters his hands in Scrimshaw’s direction as though presenting criminal evidence in a trial. “Only this calculating clockwork concoction would confuse ‘excuse’ with ‘inspiration’. This callous creature’s heart doesn’t beat—it accrues.”

  Scrimshaw stands impassively, motionless except for a single rotation of her wrist: get on with it. Her tedium at Paulius’s impassioned production crushes Kenna’s lungs in one liver-spotted fist, leaving him breathless.

  Paulius is flamboyant, confident, a born performer. Kenna is certain that Paulius believes what he is saying; the man triggers none of his fine-tuned senses that shield him from con artists. But the problem with performers is sometimes they perform so well they fool themselves. Does Paulius believe in Kenna, or the thrill of the performance?

  How many other sad castoffs has Paulius helped? And, perhaps, abandoned when they turned out not to fit into Paulius’s glorious narrative?

  “And don’t you dare speak of my past inspirations as though they ceased to matter simply because they no longer affect our menu!” Paulius splutters, playing the outraged prosecutor, pacing in tight circles before her as he draws the kitchen’s attention. “Great cuisine changes lives, you fetid fetter. What good is it filling bellies if we never touch a heart? Even you, you, must see the necessity of helping a wayward Philosopher to dream…”

  “The Inevitable Philosophies are clichéd,” she ripostes. “Their food was franchised, commercialized, homogenized. People were tired of it long before you were born.”

  “That’s why it’s perfect,” Paulius retorts. “We will revive the unexpected.”

  “Our patrons expect the best meal of their lifetime.” She angles her hand, a gesture like a fencer parrying. “It would take years to elevate a hoary cuisine to our standards. Merely sourcing the exotic ingredients would take—”

  “A day.”

  Scrimshaw reels. “A day?”

  “I’ll burn connections.”

  “For this?”

  Paulius kisses the top of Kenna’s head, dry and chaste. “The Prince’s future is at stake. I can do no less.”

  “Even if you do burn connections—a life-threatening resource I would urge you not to drain for this paltry exercise—I will not shut down the kitchen again to go chasing some wild dream. We have reservations, some from people who took the relativistics years ago. By the time they return home, their families will have aged to dust, a sacrifice made so they can dine at the finest restaurant in all the stars. I will not see them disappointed.”

  “That’s fine,” Paulius says. “We’ll work double-shifts until we learn the Inevitable Philosophies. Our old menu in the afternoon, our new menu in the morning.”

  “The chefs have already threatened to strike over their current workload, Paulius. They won’t stand for—”

  But Paulius has twirled away to pound his cane upon an aluminum chopping block. “Oh, my slaves to food!” he cries. “We have another cuisine to unearth! It lies in a moribund coma, drowned in a bog of bottled sauces! The Inevitable Philosophies are ripe for our plunder, needing the sweat of your brow and the tip of your tongue to pry its cuisine back from the grave! Who will help me descend into the Underworld to haul back this sweet, sweet Eurydice?”

  “Yes, chef!” The chefs thrust ladles into the air, stab the air above them, roar their approval.

  “You see?” Paulius blows his staff a kiss. “What you have never understood, you old black manacle, is this kitchen is not a business. The Sol Majestic is a temple of transformation. And we will worship our heathen gods.”

  Paulius curls his arm around Kenna’s shoulders, drawing against him protectively, and Kenna feels safer and warmer than he ever has in his whole life. Kenna is certain that this is a personal love, that Paulius would bankrupt himself before he abandons Kenna to languish without this grand, antiquity-exhuming meal—

  Yet Scrimshaw’s gaze is as dead as a blank monitor. “We will not be able to afford paying them overtime for more than two weeks.”

  “I’ll use my cut of the profits to pay them for three months.”

  “You’ve spent your profits. You have enough left to pay them one month.”

  “You’re a boat anchor,” Paulius hisses. “You’re a bureaucratic cancer. You’re peripatetic poison, poured into the porch of my ear…”

  “So a month is acceptable, then?”

  Paulius holds up eight fingers, four on each hand, wriggling them inches from Scrimshaw’s glasses. “Not a month, you dried bean. Two months. I pay a month of overtime, the restaurant pays for four weeks—eight weeks total.”

  “Four weeks, Paulius. You’ll run overbudget. That, I’m afraid, is…” She clucks her thin tongue against porcelain-white teeth. “Inevitable.”

  “I’ll leave.”

  Kenna’s stomach tightens around the broth in his gut; he hadn’t meant to cost Paulius the restaurant. Scrimshaw inhales through her nose, drawing her head back, more draconic than ever. Kenna half believes she might breathe fire. “You won’t.”

  “Don’t test me, you corroded shackle. I’ve made sacrifices for this place. I keep these hoary old standards on the menu at your bequest.”

  “I allow you to change ninety percent of the dishes every season!”

  “What remains is the most tedious stuff! Transglutinated beef-strands and spherified chicken alginate!”

  “I mandate only that two courses out of twenty-three are guaranteed to please. The rest can be sacrificed on the altar of your experimentation. If you find that too tedious, perhaps you should leave.”

  “Perhaps I shall.” Paulius flicks dirt from underneath well-manicured fingernails. “What would you tell the customers who have arrived after two years in hibernation, I wonder? How would you explain the automatic loss of a Firewar Star rating when the head chef leaves?”

  “How would you explain fleeing yet another job?”

  Kenna feel
s the tension vibrating between the two of them. The rest of The Sol Majestic’s kitchen has returned to chopping, emulsifying, foaming—confident in tonight’s service.

  “Eight weeks,” Paulius says. “Or pack my bags.”

  “Six weeks,” Scrimshaw hisses. “Or pack your own.”

  He whirls on one heel, grabbing Kenna’s hand. “So be it.”

  “But at six weeks,” Scrimshaw relents, her fingers rippling like sea anemones, “I’ll authorize the expenditure to put Master Kenna and his parents up as long as this takes.”

  Kenna hadn’t realized she’d known his name.

  Paulius reaches back to pull his braid out across his chest, begins rebraiding it into fussy little knots. “Put the boy up? In a hotel? Why?”

  “I doubt his parents planned to stay for six weeks. Or would you leave them living in the ducts?”

  Paulius’s knife-scarred fingers skitter through his braid, running up and down the cord like agitated spiders.

  “Done,” Paulius says.

  Kenna waits for them to shake hands. Instead, they breathe in and out three times, their gazes locked like swordsmen in a battle, each refusing to be the one who slinks away from this confrontation. Come the third breath, they both turn away.

  Scrimshaw shuts the red door. Paulius collars a passing chef.

  “Pack the Escargone with basic supplies. Two—no, three weeks’ worth. I’ll burn connections as soon as I determine what other supplies we have to get in, oh, and tell Rèpondelle to round up the boy’s parents.” He makes a tiny hop, stamping both his feet on the floor, half a jig. “Oh, I have so much research to do!”

  Then he crouches down, ducking below the kitchen’s sightline, leaning heavily on his cane. He slides his fingers around the back of Kenna’s head; his grip is so weak, the pressure on Kenna’s neck is a mere request to come closer.

  Kenna acquiesces. Paulius presses his sweat-fevered forehead to Kenna’s.

  “Thank you,” he whispers. In The Sol Majestic’s maelstrom, touching heads creates a tiny chapel for Paulius to reveal his secret exhaustion. “Thank you for gifting me something new.”

  As Paulius’s skull trembles against his, Kenna senses the sickness ravaging Paulius’s body. Paulius feels like a bird, frail bones and thin muscle; something devours him from the inside.

  It is an intimacy Kenna has never felt before: an acknowledgment of weakness, shared through touch.

  This restaurant, Kenna realizes, is no hobby. It is a survival mechanism. Paulius must endlessly stoke himself with grand visions, or his failing body will collapse and never rise again.

  As if to confirm this, Paulius inhales one ragged breath, then leverages himself back to his feet with his cane. When he stands, he is once again Paulius: indomitable. Unstoppable.

  “I’m afraid we must part for now, my friend. But never fear—you and I will smuggle a meal worthy of igniting your passions past Scrimshaw’s starvation budget. Stay close: I shall return.”

  You and I. Kenna adores the way Paulius effortlessly credits him. And though it may be foolish, risking affection on a man who may only see him as an opportunity to perform, Kenna chooses to drink deep of this newfound camaraderie.

  The danger, of course, is that instead of friendship, Paulius will give Kenna a meal and a sales pitch before ejecting him back into the void, where Kenna will spend his life wincing as he recalls the time someone purloined his lineage to fashion a show. A smarter man would tuck in his napkin and wait for nothing more than a free meal.

  Yet he remembers how he felt in the confessional booth: a blank husk wheezing dead words. He’d starved on a diet of pure cynicism. Believing in Paulius, in this meal, nourishes him in a way he can’t explain. He must risk his heart. He must.

  Paulius taps chefs on the shoulder, commanding them to come with him. Kenna follows, but does not know the kitchen’s rhythms. The chefs move to their own time, and Kenna realizes Paulius had fed him the beat. Within moments, Paulius has disappeared out a side door.

  Kenna cruises to a stop next to a freshly peeled pile of fluted potatoes. The remaining chefs pay him no attention; they have to decompress airsquid from their pressurized containers, sew pieces of meat through a canopy of crisped turnips, sizzle pans of nuts. A chef scoops the golden nuts high in the air, like a comet soaring, then whisks the pan underneath to catch every last one as it falls, as beautiful as any dance.

  Kenna hears the wooden thok-thok-thok as a chef juliennes an iridescent root into precise ivory matchsticks. He cranes in, pushing dangerously close, marking the way her fingers curl protectively to hold the vegetable, her knife chopping so fast that Kenna wonders if she is gene-enhanced.

  Kenna’s right hand slips around an imaginary knife, rocking it back and forth. The fingers of his left hand curl over an imaginary root. His admiration is a sad weakness—Mother would twist his arm until his tendons strained, haul him to Father for a lecture on the necessity of intellectual purity.

  The chef slows her pace, angling her blade toward him, stepping aside to display the way she pinches the blade with her forefinger and thumb, the way she juts her knuckles forward to protect the fingers of her guiding hand. She exaggerates her body motion, rolling her shoulders, bobbing her head as she rocks the blade through the root. Kenna bobs along with her, an uncertain grin creeping across his face as he catalogues her technique …

  Then she hip-checks Kenna to one side, her chopping speeding up to a blurred machine-gun rat-a-tat. She fixates on the roots with the urgency of a pilot making a rough docking.

  Did she realize I’m debasing myself by watching? Kenna doesn’t know the kitchen etiquette; perhaps he has embarrassed her. He opens his mouth to fumble out an apology—

  Scrimshaw’s black shadow falls over him.

  “There you are.” Scrimshaw’s voice is like steam, hot and ephemeral, making sweat prickle across the chefs’ cheeks. “I’ve arranged for comfortable lodgings for you and your parents. The hotel has just upgraded their virtual reality hoods at the hotel, so you can play any game you please. If you’ll come with me, Master Kenna…”

  Scrimshaw reaches down to guide him to his new home.

  Kenna hugs his hand against his chest, as though it might fly away to meet her grasp. He knows Mother and Father would disapprove, but—

  He needs to learn the kitchen’s secrets. Even though labor is the exact opposite of Inevitable Philosophies.

  “I cry your pardon, Madame Scrimshaw. But … if it were okay by you … I fear I would be far more comfortable ensconced in the bustle of your kitchen than pent in any kind cage of a hotel. If that were to be okay. By you.”

  Scrimshaw’s face is old, and unreadable. Kenna freezes, a rabbit trembling under a hawk’s shadow.

  Then a smile uncurls like a flag across Scrimshaw’s face.

  She nods—no.

  She bows. The chefs around her mirror the motion.

  “Welcome to the kitchen, Master Kenna,” she says, then adds: “For now.”

  4

  The First Night at Savor Station

  Kenna is used to the sleepy travelers’ rhythms on spaceships: the yawn-and-roll of people in the bunks, the shuffle of duffel bags, the erratic ploddings around the corrugated steel walkways to kill time. Nobody hurries on spaceships, except perhaps in that mad rush before touchdown; the space between stars is large.

  Whereas every chop of Sol Majestic’s knives propels them toward the evening’s service. They bang open oven doors, pour hissing clouds of liquid nitrogen into steel bowls, stuff cuts of meat into the long ceramic gravitizer tubes before flipping the switch to cook the protein beneath the heat of planetary pressures.

  The guests are coming.

  The dishes must be assembled.

  Kenna’s main goal is to get out of the way. The chefs tolerate nothing that obstructs the upcoming service, and should Kenna accidentally bump a line cook he would be ejected as an enemy of the kitchen. The air thickens with shouted orders, leaving no room for Ken
na’s questions.

  Yet if Kenna perches near an assembly station, anticipating the chefs’ motions so he darts aside before they mutter protests, the chefs offer him rewards for good behavior. They tilt the saucepans and run spoons down the middle, so Kenna can see the demiglaces’ consistency. They slip him scraps, pausing to register Kenna’s blissful reactions with such pleasure they might as well be watching a theater show. They make flourishing gestures as they wave sensors across the dishes, demonstrating the rows of complex readouts that ensure the scent-profiles contain no unwanted surprises. They even allow Kenna to push a finalized dish underneath the scanners that verify the portions are the correct size and shape.

  Most important, when Mother and Father burst into the kitchen, desperate to see their son, the staff closes ranks around Kenna, obscuring him until a woman in a sharp red tuxedo can be summoned. The woman greets them with a smooth politeness, mirroring their concern for their son’s whereabouts before deflecting the conversation into the necessity for an interview to fathom the mysteries of Inevitable cuisines.

  Kenna cannot hear the conversation over the kitchen’s clatter; his view is blocked by pot-washers ferrying stacks of plates. But the flashes of the red-tuxedoed woman’s body language are like watching a conductor sweeping her baton across an orchestra. She is her own stage, first moving in syncopation with Mother and Father to reflect and catch their movements, then shifting to take the lead so her gestures inspire emotion from Mother and Father.

  Kenna knows how Mother and Father long to be listened to. They have spent their lives in poverty, crouching on the doorsteps of powerful men who have discarded them like last year’s fashion. Yet the woman in the red tuxedo leans in close to hear them; Kenna feels if she missed a single syllable from Mother or Father, she would scoop down and pluck it off the ground to present it to them as though it were a gold coin dropped from a wealthy man’s purse.

  By the time she suggests perhaps a private interview to consult them about their Inevitability might not be amiss—a proposal Kenna catches via a dove-like flutter of white-gloved hands—her veneration has captured them wholly. They follow, straightening their robes.