The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “That’s exquisite,” Kenna says, springing off the table to wave the spoon in Benzo’s face.

  “… the broth.”

  “The broth, yes.”

  Benzo smiles, then shakes his head as though waking from a dream. “… no! That’s awful, don’t you see? It’s…” He ladles a cupful of broth into a wineglass, swirls it before Kenna’s eyes with the vigor of a man attempting to summon a genie. “It’s fatty.”

  The surface of the broth is stippled with microscopic glimmering dots of fat.

  “It’s cloudy.”

  If Kenna squints, he can make out a thin vortex of a haze.

  “And—here, try it again. You’ll see.”

  Benzo thrusts the fine-stemmed glass into Kenna’s hands; some slops on Kenna’s fine robe. That would have panicked Kenna in a past life, having the most expensive thing he had ever worn stained—once stained, an Inevitable Robe cannot be cleaned, to demonstrate the permanency of error—but with Benzo, Kenna has a prince’s grace.

  Except he will never be a prince if he continues to consort with Benzo. Inevitable Philosophies are not born in kitchens, or factories, or junkyards.

  Kenna turns to one side so Benzo cannot notice the dark splotch seeping across the breast of his once-in-a-lifetime robe, and sips at the broth contemplatively, feeling rich heat shimmer straight down to his stomach.

  “Tastes fine to me,” Kenna says.

  Benzo’s panic brings apologies bubbling to Kenna’s lips. He wishes he could find honest fault in this broth, for his lack of criticism is driving Benzo mad.

  “No, no, no!” Benzo grabs the snifter from Kenna’s grasp, slugs the broth back, swishes it around his mouth as he squeezes his eyes shut.

  He’s seen the other chefs sampling dishes; when they taste, it is a fluid motion, closing their eyes blissfully as though they are taking in the overture at an opera, marking the rise and swell of the flavors on their tongues.

  Benzo, however, sweats as he samples. He sloshes the broth like mouthwash, exuding the desperation of a man trying to pass a test. His expressions shift as he proceeds through the stages of examination, each as distinct as a forklift shifting gears—ratcheting into the next segment as he tests for spice quotients, tests for mouthfeel, compares it against past flavor profiles, breaks down the oiliness. Kenna cannot help but feel this process is too mechanical, but he has no idea how to guide Benzo to better appraisals.

  Benzo spits the remains into the sink.

  “No.” Benzo’s whispered negation is the sadness of a spouse caught cheating. “That’s—there’s too much salt. The celery is overwhelming. This is supposed to be a neutral stock we can use in any dish, and it’s … it’s imbalanced.”

  Benzo is deranged, Kenna thinks. The Sol Majestic cannot be that exacting. But the other chefs busy themselves in an orchestrated compassion, not letting Benzo see how they’ve noticed he has fallen short once again.

  “I diced onions for nine months before Paulius used one. Then I cooked chickens for a year. One boy made stock for five years and wasn’t good enough.”

  “But he made it, right?”

  “He was just short of six years when Paulius took him aside. Said his palate wasn’t good enough. And then…” Benzo blows into his fist, spreads his fingers, mimics a leaf floating away on the wind.

  “Well, I think your broth is top-notch. Do you know it saved me?”

  “… no.”

  “I assure you it did. I was emaciated when I arrived. I hadn’t eaten a bite in four days. Yet when Paulius carried your broth to me…”

  “He did?”

  Paulius probably just grabbed whatever was close at hand, but there’s no harm in letting Benzo believe he’s special. “When he brought me your broth, it was like … A fire that limned me from top to bottom. An incandescence that showed me what food was.”

  “Really?”

  Benzo’s excitement is a teetering domino that could be knocked over by the slightest criticism. Yet Kenna cannot muster a scrap of complaint. Perhaps these antler-meats and gravitized omelets and carved apple-gardens are delightful, but the broth is plain as Kenna. He understands it.

  “Will you make me something?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. What is it you chefs consume? You can’t eat grand meals ’round the clock, can you?”

  “That’s my job, actually.” Those delicate cheeks darken again. “I cook the line meals. For the kitchen. It’s … simple fare, to keep their bellies full.”

  “Then make me something simple.”

  Benzo runs to the pantry, so eager to be asked to demonstrate his skills that he never questions what’s right for Kenna. He returns with a crusty loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and three tomatoes in a wire basket. He carves out a hunk of butter, tosses it into a sizzling pan, the air humming as the stovetop’s induction coils burn red.

  He cuts out four ragged slices—the chewy crust flakes open as he sinks the knife tip in, the inside so fluffy that cutting a straight edge would be impossible—and slathers them in more butter, then slices the tomatoes into perfect circles and spreads them across the bread, then crumbles cheese onto the tomatoes.

  “You don’t want to slice the cheese,” he tells Kenna. “You want it nice and gooey. So it’ll spread across.” He hands Kenna a lump, which is so different from the plastic yellow stuff he’s eaten out of vending machines; this is a creamy white, translucent, squeaking between his fingertips. It feels alive.

  He pops it into his mouth and his toes flex happily.

  “There’s other kinds of cheeses, you know,” Benzo says. Kenna did not know. But now he is happy to contemplate what colors cheese might come in.

  A sliver of doubt slides into his contentment: he should be asking about The Sol Majestic’s guests, studying the wisdom of the rich and potent, readying his Inevitable Philosophy.

  Yet Kenna crowds in as Benzo slides a spatula underneath the sandwich to flip it over, needing to see what shade of golden brown the crust is, what Benzo will do when the cheese oozes out the sides and sputters in the pan. He’s so close that he is hip-to-hip with Benzo. Benzo doesn’t step aside to let Kenna gawk; he stays right where he is, a little cryptic smile floating across that angel’s face, letting Kenna push up against him.

  And when he flicks the sandwich onto a plate and bisects it with his knife, Kenna’s swallowing back saliva.

  Benzo holds up the half-a-sandwich playfully by Kenna’s mouth. “You ready?” he asks. “I’m not gonna feed this one to you, though.”

  Kenna takes the sandwich from Benzo as though it were a benediction. It feels like life, so hot his fingers puff up. He crams the grilled cheese into his mouth, the crust crunching beneath his teeth, the gooey cheese oozing between his teeth, the tomato bursting into …

  * * *

  … when Paulius arrives three hours later, he stinks of duck and sports a ragged gray beard.

  Benzo and Kenna have made what they call “Cheese mountain,” a heap of cheeses brought in by the fromager. The fromager has blindfolded them both, placing samples before them, seeing whether either Kenna or Benzo can identify the cheeses they’ve had today by taste alone.

  Kenna and Benzo are laughing. Benzo isn’t doing much better than Kenna is.

  “… have you chosen?” Paulius asks.

  Kenna whips off the blindfold. Paulius’s blue Kevlar is runneled with burn marks, stained dark with grease; the other chefs stumble out of the Escargone woozily, like sailors on a bender.

  Benzo shivers under Paulius’s shadow.

  “Oh! Yes!” Kenna wraps his arm around Benzo’s brawny shoulders, pulls him close. “Him.”

  Paulius has the grizzled stare of a man readjusting to a larger world. He peers blearily over the antlered meat-strands, the threaded agar-cube, the now-stasised omelette, the rows of elaborate dishes waiting forlornly for Kenna’s attention.

  He scratches his beard, disgruntled. “You had … all those fine meals laid out for yo
u.” Then: “… O Prince.” He sniffs at Benzo; not disdainfully, but as though there’s something about the lad he’s not understanding. “You had twenty dishes within arm’s reach, each a repast that would garner a Culinary Star from a Firewar reviewer, certainly the best meal you’d have had in your life, and…” He exhales through his nostrils, rustling his mustache.

  Paulius turns to look at his chefs, as though somehow one might offer a theory. “… and you don’t even try what they offered?”

  Kenna takes the remainder of the grilled cheese sandwich off the plate, now cold and greasy and still so very delicious, and takes a bite. “Ah yes. That. I incorporated your wisdom.”

  “Elucidate?”

  “All that glory your chefs laid out for my repast? That’s Stage Three cuisine.” Kenna offers the sandwich to Paulius, who turns it over in his hands, flexing it enough to watch the oil drip out onto the tile. “This? This is Stage One. The simple dishes. I must walk before I can run.”

  Paulius takes a big bold bite that stuffs half the sandwich into his mouth. He bobs his head as he chews it messily, Benzo chewing his fingernails as he waits for judgment.

  After Paulius swallows, he grins.

  “Brilliant,” he says, pulling up a stool to cut himself a slice of cheese.

  7

  The Third Day at Savor Station

  Every sixth day, The Sol Majestic rests. Benzo does not.

  Kenna hears Benzo rise well before the station’s dimmer-lights switch to daycycle, even though there is no service today. He pads after Benzo into the kitchen, where Benzo starts the broth routine again: cycling down a stasis cube to fetch a chicken, the feathers still on. Meandering through the orchard’s garden to pull some fresh carrots from the ground, brushing off the dirt, smelling them before tossing the unworthy ones into the composter. Getting out the pots and setting up his station.

  He’s not alone. At least half the chefs are up, yawning as they thrust their knives into the electron-sharpeners’ crackling slots.

  “Do you ever take a day off?” Kenna asks.

  Benzo lowers the feathered chicken into the scalding water, swirls it around the pot. He frowns down at the chicken, parsing the question.

  “Paulius said I was close.”

  Actually, what Paulius said after sipping yesterday’s broth was You used too much salt, too much rosemary, too few onions. It’s cloudy because you overcooked the carrots. And I can tell you skimmed off the fat. If you get the balance right, you shouldn’t have to skim.

  For all Benzo knows, Paulius won’t even taste his broth today. The glass porthole to the Escargone gleams with compacted photons, a paper sign reading LACQUERED DUCK OR BUST taped across the inside. Kenna’s heard Paulius will try to pack four months into today, though his chefs may hamper that effort; they stagger hunch-shouldered out of the Escargone to run weeping through the station’s rings, hugging surprised strangers and exclaiming at Savor Station roominess.

  But Benzo isn’t doing this to best Paulius. He’s making broth to best himself. Benzo is hell-bent on making not just one perfect broth, but a sequence.

  That seems oddly ambitious for a line chef. Yet the kitchen bustles with grand experiments.

  This must be Paulius’s influence. Ordinary people could not aspire to such greatness. Kenna has seen the layabouts on the transport ships inhaling weed and exhaling shattered dreams; none could have mustered such ambition without a superior intellect to goad them.

  Though as Benzo hoists out the sopping chicken to pluck feathers off the still-steaming wings, Kenna wonders whether Benzo can achieve his goal. The kid was just short of six years before Paulius took him aside, Benzo had said. Said his palate wasn’t good enough. Kenna remembers tasting blue-veined cheese crumbles and doing almost as well as Benzo in the fromager’s guessing game …

  “She wants to speak with you,” a rumpled yellow-striper says.

  Kenna feels proud, as though he has passed a test. There is only one She in The Sol Majestic worth discussing, and the yellow-striper assumed correctly that Kenna understood. He nods, heading toward Scrimshaw’s red door at the kitchen’s rear …

  The yellow-striper yanks him back hard enough Kenna has to steady himself on a wooden chopping block. “You never go to the red door!” Her nostrils flare. “Nobody emerges from the red door as an employee. I wouldn’t even send one of Paulius’s favorites in there without a warning…”

  “Then where is she?”

  The yellow-striper waves two fingers next to her eyes, lunging at Kenna repeatedly in a strangely ostrich-like movement before flipping her palm open to him in a capisce? movement.

  Kenna does not capisce.

  “Oh right,” she says, embarrassed. “You’re not keyed into our social network. She’s in the loading dock.”

  Kenna shouldn’t be surprised that everyone here has biomatrixes installed, but then again surgery is a small price to pay for working at The Sol Majestic. Though it is a large price for Scrimshaw to pay, as biomatrix implants are top of the line even by Intraconnected standards.

  He squeezes Benzo’s shoulders to apologize for leaving, but Benzo has gotten out pliers to pluck the pinfeathers. Benzo’s existence has shrunk to a chicken, and Kenna finds something comforting in that.

  Scrimshaw sits in a perfect siddhasana position in the center of the loading dock, a clipboard in her lap. Towers of folded robes surround her, as though she were a goddess holding court in a fabric temple. Judging from the angles of the stacks, all faced inward toward her, Scrimshaw has personally sorted every robe on the pallet.

  “Master Kenna.” She sweeps her hand across the robe-free space she has left for him to sit. “I must discuss The Sol Majestic’s future with you.”

  He pulls his heels underneath him. Mother has taught him to meditate for years, grabbing his neck to correct his slouching. Yet when even Mother gets into siddhasana position, she is tight as a cord; Scrimshaw’s relaxed, yet her lean thighs are pressed flat against the floor.

  Kenna wants to ask Scrimshaw if she has studied yoga. From her bowl haircut and her unflattering thick plastic glasses, he’s pretty sure Scrimshaw views her body only as a carrying case for her head.

  “What level of honesty do you require?” Scrimshaw asks. “Choose carefully. Most people melt under levels of total truth.”

  Kenna suppresses a shiver. You’re not behind the red door, he thinks. You’re not being cast out. Yet. But from the way Scrimshaw’s fingers impatiently tap the clipboard, something dreadful lurks within these stacks of robes.

  “I’m poor,” Kenna says. Admitting that to her is like scourging himself with whips: a necessary pain to prove worthiness. “I cannot afford the luxury of lies.”

  Scrimshaw’s approving smile is as quick as a single frame in an animation, vanishing before Kenna can prove it wasn’t an illusion. She purses dry lips, weighing her approach.

  “These robes will bankrupt us before your meal arrives.”

  She’s as calm as a coroner taking a dead man’s pulse. Her gray eyes smother Kenna’s initial laughter: this is no joke.

  “Paulius isn’t entirely awful at negotiating, when he cares to be.” She rubs Kenna’s hem between thumb and forefinger, drawing his attention to the quality. “He got quite a good price for them. The problem is, each robe is worth three months’ salary to the average man. Bargaining the tailor down to the equivalent of a month’s salary per robe is useless when he has purchased…” She runs a finger down her clipboard, tapping her fingernail upon the total. “One thousand, two hundred and three robes.”

  Sitting down, Kenna feels dwarfed by the stacks of robes, as though they might topple over and bury him. Though he has been here two days, The Sol Majestic feels as eternal as a culinary church—a place where bills never came due. Except as Scrimshaw flips over the clipboard to present it to Kenna for his verification, he sees the Majestic as she does. The beauty disappears, replaced by business—a mass of expenses sagging into a deep bankrupt void, a ponder
ous weight threatening to snap and drag the owners into poverty.

  How does anyone ever develop a Philosophy when they’re weighted by such petty concerns?

  Yet Kenna himself is a weight. In his attempt to help, Paulius has dropped such a load onto that strained web that it will now snap.

  “What can I do?” Kenna is glad he hasn’t eaten. Every bite shrinks the Majestic’s profit margin. Gods, Benzo spilled chicken broth on this expensive robe and Kenna didn’t even try to blot it off …

  “This invoice will come due in thirty days. Another sign of Paulius’s sad inexperience; net 30 would be excellent terms for perishables, which frequently go bad before the week is up. But for intersolar apparel sales, net 120 is more standard—assuming that we have one hundred and twenty days to transport the robes to our store, sell them, and have the cash from the customers to pay the bill. Purchased in bulk, like this? He would have done better to have doubled the price per robe, but given us a hundred and eighty days to sell them before the bill came due.”

  “It’s easy enough to follow.” Though Kenna squirms, wishing these tawdry financial concerns weren’t so simple; he’s halfway toward learning a trade. “Plus, we’re not a clothing emporium.”

  Scrimshaw adjusts her glasses as though they pain her. “As you say. And even were we renowned for our suits instead of our soups, it’s not like a discredited religious sect’s formal wear is in high demand. This is doubtlessly why the tailor was so eager to sell them.”

  “Can’t we … refuse to pay?”

  “No matter how far humanity travels, all merchants remain a whisper apart. Fail to pay this invoice on time, and word will get out. Other merchants will sense our blood laced in the water and tighten their terms—or worse, demand cash up front. The Sol Majestic rests on a foundation of top-flight ingredients sourced from across the universe. If the merchants believe they might not get paid for their investment, they’ll offer us different selections. Customers would notice the degradation. Firewar reviewers would swarm in to recalculate our rating. It would be a slower death—cancer instead of the guillotine—but just as certain.”