Instead, Kenna pads around to the service entrance, stares into the retinal scanner, hoping Scrimshaw has added his biometrics to the authorization list.
The door glides open.
Tears blur his vision. He’s never seen The Sol Majestic’s dining room. But for him, this long kitchen, cut into a maze by flat chopping surfaces and ovens, is The Sol Majestic.
He is gratified to see signs of life as he creeps past the pantry of humming stasis cubes. Two chefs spin a great sticky candy floss ball off a pan of caramelized sugar, delicately coordinating an antigravity device so as to not shoot burning sucrose in each other’s face. A gaggle of waiters, sleeves rolled up, slam shots of lion’s milk and place drunken bets on a combat hologame. Montgomery, spidery in her brass goggles and mold-eaten chef’s outfit, crouches over velvet-black curtains and squeezes a glimmering blue fluid out of an eyedropper into something Kenna cannot see.
And as always, the Escargone’s flickering light, that celluloid shadowplay of Paulius working at hummingbird speeds.
The motley crew stop their games as Kenna stumbles forward, drunk with relief, headed for the stool in front of the Escargone. The shot glasses are lowered to the table, agreeing Kenna is a problem to be solved but unsure who is fit to handle him.
A smarter man would sidle up to these chefs, get to know their names, start casual conversations that he would ultimately steer onto the topic of old kitchen gossip. But he can’t think of a way of asking them about Paulius’s past protégés that wouldn’t degenerate into him begging for knowledge.
Instead, Kenna strides ahead, stiff-legged, focusing on the Escargone’s porthole-light, refusing to blink until water fills his eyes.
He can identify Paulius’s movements, even speeded up. There are no other cooks left to assist Paulius; they refuse to cram themselves into that gastronomic oubliette for weeks of their time, so he works in isolation, perfecting Kenna’s next dish.
Kenna needs Paulius. It is shameful to need a man so badly, to be in such need of benediction that you will be his dog, waiting outside his doorway until he deigns to acknowledge you, but that is who Kenna is. If he must reveal his tender belly to The Sol Majestic’s workers, then he will, because even if Paulius’s benevolence is an illusion then Kenna needs this illusion …
“Hey!” a stern voice says. “Clear out.”
The shock of being spoken to makes Kenna blink. Montgomery has pushed her goggles back across her forehead; her light bronze skin is flecked with violet mold, her hair dotted with spores, and so the area around her eyes where her goggles had been is the only place that shows unblemished skin. Somehow, that clarity makes her honey-colored eyes dangerous.
She flicks knifelike fingernails in Kenna’s direction, once, twice, a peremptory shooing motion.
Kenna grabs the stool, fingers tightening—she will have to carry him out. But he’ll fight her …
Chairs scrape across the floor behind him. Muttered apologies: “Sorry, Montgomery.” They file out of the kitchen, keeping their distance from Kenna; an apology for pointing unwanted attention in his direction.
Montgomery drapes a heavy dishcloth around his shoulders, the towel’s weight a terry cloth hug. “You cold?”
Kenna is cold. He hadn’t noticed.
“Paulius might be a while.” Montgomery worms long fingers through a hole in her red-and-gold striped chef’s outfit to scratch her armpit. “You want a treat to pass the time? I have one of the oddest repasts in the universe, should it suffice.”
Kenna’s stomach is a stone. But Montgomery’s gruff kindness is more filling than any banquet, so he clambers down from the stool.
Standing up feels like he’s broken a spell. This solemn vigil would have been ridiculous. Solitude is supposed to help gestate Inevitable Philosophies, but Kenna is broken; isolation makes him orbit around the same discomfiting thoughts over and over again until they swell to occlude his vision, destroy his memories of anything good in life, reduce him to an embarrassingly adolescent eternity.
If the Majestic has taught him nothing else, it’s that he needs a friend to take him aside before he loses all perspective.
“Come,” Montgomery says. “The Bitch is generous today. I can spare a mouthful.”
She lopes off, leading him to a recessed corner. Velvet-black curtains surround a stainless-steel sink, flecked with white flour. Mounted behind the curtains is a planetarium projector, beaming a hemispherical black hologram projection of outer space so it floats above the sink, cold stars shining down.
As she approaches the shadowy stage, she whirls upon Kenna, crouching. She makes fluttering calming motions with both hands, shushing him as though he might wake a sleeping infant.
“There.” Her drum-tight face loosens in ecstasy as she peers into the sink, the blissful relief of a junkie pushing heroin into the vein. “There’s my sweet Bitch.”
Something within burbles, a soft slow exhalation.
“Go on.” Montgomery nudges him. “Look.”
Kenna jerks forward a step, stops. For the first time, he understands Montgomery’s Sensate nature; in a way, this delicious tension is better than any revelation. He’s honored she has entrusted him with her secret, so he pulls aside the curtain with the painstaking deliberation of a poor boy opening up his only Christmas present.
Resting in the sink is a small oaken cask; the one she brandished at all the chefs when she was making her way through to the robes.
Resting in the cask is a pulsing, baby-sized wad of dough.
The brown dough undulates, it bubbles, having swollen out the cask’s rim to extend slim tendrils. It grasps for the curtains at clumsy plant speeds, yet something’s mesmerizing in its motions. The dough’s color ripples through spectrums of delectable browns, from the rich dark brown of a freshly baked pretzel to the wheat-colored swell of dinner rolls, puckering into the crackled texture of a biscuit-top.
Kenna feels an ache in his chest, which swells to a distracting annoyance.
He realizes he has forgotten to breathe.
Tiny bubbles stipple the dough’s surface, blossoming like flowers across a field. They burst in elaborate geometric patterns—an encoded communication?—releasing puffs of electric blue fungus that drift down to coat the sink. The dough ripples again, an unconscious shrug, flopping yet another questing tendril out, its skin swelling into—
Montgomery whisks the curtain shut with a showman’s grace, scattering yeast granules across Kenna’s robe. “She’s got a hypnotic quality to her, I think. Comes with the way she interfaces with your brain.”
“What…” Kenna leans back on the chopping block behind him, gripping the hard wood, using it as an anchor to remind himself of the existence of something other than that beautiful Bitch. “What is that?”
“Oh, that’s not the question.” She draws her goggles back down over her eyes, then peers into the sink, cocking her head to and fro like a pecking bird. Then she eases her hand in, twisting her arm back and forth with the careful air of a man attempting to crack a safe. “Question is, what can she do?”
She emerges with an ice-cube-sized palpitating chunk of unearthly dough.
“What is that?” Kenna repeats.
“Do you trust me?”
“No.”
A rolling eye-twitch. “Trust me.”
She grabs his head, her long nails catching on his braids; as he opens his mouth to protest, the dough-globule sticking to her fingertips reacts to his breath’s carbon-dioxide warmth, shivers in orgasmic rhapsody before sending sticky shoots spasming down the back of his mouth.
Kenna swallows, stringy tentacles hauled halfway down to his stomach by unthinking peristaltic motion. They swell at the moisture, turning spongy, trapping the retching boiling up from his belly. He bites down; the dough flows through the gaps in his teeth, taking root in his throat.
He claws at his mouth. Montgomery grips his wrists, digging her fingernails in until Kenna’s hands pop open, then flattens his palms again
st her collarbones. Kenna yanks away, but Montgomery is immovable as a titanium beam. The smoked lenses of her brass goggles whirl and click as she focuses upon him, and there is something comforting in her insectile confidence.
Montgomery has a flinty love; he feels it in the way she holds him against her.
“Breathe through your nose.”
Gagging, Kenna surrenders to her orders. Octopoid strings hammocked across his throat vibrate at the rush of incoming air, peel away as they reposition themselves to allow Kenna wavering breaths. Montgomery thumps his hands against her chest once, twice, as if in approval. Kenna coughs as doughy strands peel away from his uvula to creep down his tongue …
“Almost there,” Montgomery reassures him.
The dough seeps into his tongue’s papilliar bumps, digging deep—
Warm bread dough fills his world.
Not just any bread dough; the crackling bread fresh from Benzo’s pan, but amplified. The crust crispier, the yeast richer, the browned bits perfectly toasted, and that heady scent of Benzo curled up close to him—
All intertwined with the silky taste of chicken broth, the two melded together like somehow you could make a crispy sandwich out of wet soup, and those overlaid with the crumbly salt of the fromager’s goat cheese, woven with how good that first sugar-shock of Frosted Chocobombs felt on an empty stomach on those rare occasions Mother let him choose from the vending machine, melded with …
It’s love. Food is love. All the memories of food, plucked from his brain and mixed into one heart-stilling emotion-swell, the thin threads of Kenna’s happinesses melded into one great moment …
When Kenna swallows, the dough slips bonelessly off his tongue and into his stomach.
“No worries, you poop it out,” Montgomery says. “I think if you had a different biology, you’d have just taken part in some alien reproductive cycle. But if the Bitch has a home planet, I’ve yet to find it.”
He’s panting, and it’s not just the lack of air. Montgomery’s presence makes him coltish, embarrassed; he’s never had sex, but he’s pretty sure it’s that intense.
“What is that?” he asks for the third time.
The dough in the sink makes a thin keening noise, like helium squeaking out of a balloon.
Montgomery kneels down to slide a black leather valise out from under the sink. “The lady who asked me to tend to it called it ‘Sirusian Sourdough.’” She roots through a clatter of glass bottles, holding them up to her goggles, tossing them aside. “In truth, she made up the name, and was most likely hoping to ditch a shipment of forbidden contraband before she was arrested. She needn’t have bothered; the Bitch would have liquefied in a few hours, without assistance.”
She settles upon a curlicued bottle with ash-pale grains within, dumps out a palmful, weighs it experimentally. She sprinkles it in a dash at a time; the keening noise dwindles.
“I have carried this fine Bitch on my back across star systems, asking endlessly what she is or where she is from; no one knows the answer. Alas, the Bitch is old, and wants to die. She must be constantly cajoled with nostrums to prod her back to a viable existence. I’ve determined through trial and error what she likes, mostly, but it’s hard going. I wish I had a better sense of what makes her happy, but…”
She leans down into the sink, poking the bulbous surface fondly. It makes a squeaking noise.
“… Maybe one day I’ll bring her home.”
Kenna massages his throat, that warm chicken-and-bread flavor still resonating like a tuning fork. “I see why Paulius retains your services.”
Montgomery rolls her shoulders, deflecting the compliment with an irritated shrug. “I’d do it gratis, but I’m not stupid enough to turn down free money. Besides, the Bitch is filled with endless challenges. Perfect companion for a Sensate, really.”
“I admit I’m unfamiliar with labor, but … is tending to a blob of alien genetics a full-time job?”
She shoves the valise back under the sink hard enough that bottles rattle. “I don’t work here, kid. This is one stop in a grand journey. Once the tarnish dulls the hull, I’ll move on.”
“Okay, but … how much time do you spend tending her?”
She palpates the Bitch as though expecting to find some new malady. “My moldy darling needs maintenance every—well, call it thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds.”
“You feed her every half an hour? Without fail? When do you—”
“I’ve had dreams.” Montgomery’s pupils are constricted pinholes. “I refuse to succumb to temporary comas when I’ve seen so damned little of the universe.”
She is an addict, Kenna reminds himself. Needing something new every day. Then he remembers that spider-scrabbling twitch of the Bitch in his gullet—and instead of revulsion, the thought fills his mouth with drool. One taste, and already he’s primed to associate that crawling sensation with purest love.
The urge to beg for another sample is humbling. And he only has the memory of three good meals.
“This must be … intense … for someone with a history of fine dining,” Kenna says.
“Another reason I don’t sleep.” Montgomery slides down the sink, elbows hooked across the ridge, letting her legs sprawl loose-limbed across the floor. “The customers have a hard enough time of it. I know of three old men who’ve taken up permanent residence at the Station, working as janitors, putting together their meager savings for a single, annual, shared taste. I don’t dare let anyone who works here try her; they’d beat me to death and tug her corpse to shreds.”
The good feelings seep out of Kenna, leaving chill wariness behind. “Yet you bequeathed me a sample.”
She cracks her neck lackadaisically, then locks gazes with Kenna.
“Well, I figured if Scrimshaw thought you could take one hundred percent honesty, you could handle a ride with the Bitch.”
Kenna’s surprised exhalation turns into a reluctant grin. This entire feeding session has been an elaborate setup for a talk; he admires the subtlety with which she cleared out the kitchen, then ushered him into her trust.
“So…” His stained robe feels like lies skeined across his body. “So you are aware. Of my, uh…”
It’s amazing, how the incline of her head can convey such compassion. “Your fake Philosophy, yeah.” She whistles, low and long. “Don’t envy you that.”
“But how did you…”
“So many secrets.” She makes a plucking, pincer-like gesture with stiff fingers, which Kenna eventually recognizes is a mockery of knitting. “Everyone lies, here. What’ll happen to them once I leave? I swear, I’m the only one who sews everything together.”
Kenna’s relieved sigh feels so bottomless he deflates, sliding onto the tiled floor facing Montgomery. He wanted someone else to know of his sacrifice; here she is.
“… have you got a Philosophy?” she asks. “I mean, not a real one. One that’ll satisfy the punters.”
“Don’t call them punters.” Kenna remembers the bhelpuri merchant, all those sad emails tossed onto Father’s desk, everyday people straining under such desire they creaked under their weight. “They deserve something. They deserve a real Prince. A nobleman who—who can light the way for them again.”
“You realize your religion’s only six generations old, right?”
Kenna’s cheek feels as numb as if she’d slapped him in the face.
“You Philosophers only got thirty years of real power.” Montgomery scratches the back of her neck, a doctor reluctantly diagnosing an embarrassing disease. “Your great-grandparents got lucky enough to catch some potent people’s ears, sold a lotta self-help vids in their day, but … you were a fad, not a religion.”
Kenna turns to Paulius, as though Paulius would emerge from the Escargone to argue of course the Inevitable Philosophies are meaningful, Paulius has his own Inevitable Philosophy, it’s why he’s spending months locked in a tiny jail cell even though his body burns with disease.
The porthole flashes
brighter, as if sensing Kenna’s distress.
“You don’t even have your own ceremonies!” Montgomery cries. “Your cuisine’s ripped off from ancient cultures, your robes are modified dashikis with splashes of old pop art. The people who made the Inevitable Philosophies ransacked whatever looked cool from old civilizations other people ignored! And the Philosophies your parents have, they’re not philosophies—there are no insights behind them. Their Philosophies are more like a glorified to-do list…”
“Even allowing for your high-handed notion that what we do is a fad,” Kenna says, pressing his back against the chopping block, “you still need me to comport myself improperly to sell your robes.” His throat convulses as he pronounces the word “sell”; that’s the first time he’s admitted what he’s doing out loud. “Sell enough robes to—”
“To keep the Majestic solvent, yes, yes.” She lights a cigarillo, stabs the air with it. “Paulius will help. He’s good at bringing fads back to life. But … have you considered letting the Inevitable Philosophies die when this is done?”
Kenna gets up to leave.
She leans over to press him back against the cutting block, a gentle pressure that brooks no interruption.
Montgomery takes a long fearful drag on the cigarillo, sucking in bravery with the carcinogens, then pitches it aside.
“The universe,” she tells him, her eyes a bright burning gold, “is a big place. So big we don’t even know where she comes from.” She glances over her shoulder toward the burbling mass in the sink. “I’m not saying to stop the Wisdom Ceremony. But your position isn’t hereditary, despite how much of a show your parents put on. Back in the glory days, all a Philosopher needed was an incandescent willpower and a willingness to toe the party line. If Paulius works his culinary spell, then acolytes of every shade and state will come forward to plant their lips ’pon your parents’ parts. Which means you don’t have to spend your life shackled to this lie. You could disappear afterwards. I’d give you some money.”
The Sol Majestic Page 11
