“Of course.”
As Paulius holds him, Kenna realizes how correct his parents were:
To be a salesman instead of a Philosopher is to be truly damned.
* * *
He’d thought Paulius would retreat to his quarters to record the blog—but Paulius had started production right in the hotel room.
Kenna hides in the bathroom, clammy with cowardice-sweat, turning on the shower to drown Paulius’s stentorian attempts at narration. It’s not long before Paulius cracks the door open; Kenna is hunched on the toilet like a boy with a bowel dysfunction.
“Don’t you … want to watch me make it for you?” Paulius’s hurt voice floats across the bathroom with a feather’s gentleness.
Kenna remembers a lie he’d told, a long time ago: You can’t just hand me the food, Paulius. I … I have to watch it happen. The creation, it … it inspires me.
“Not this time.”
Paulius nods and retreats.
Kenna shivers, needing the touch of someone who cares. But Paulius’s touch would unlock awful truths.
He keeps the door shut—but the frosted glass barrier doesn’t block Paulius’s shouts as he erupts in symphonies of curses, breaks out in mad-scientist laughs, flings his cane across the room, purrs in satisfaction. The glass lights up with a kaleidoscope of colors as Paulius fast-forwards through The Sol Majestic’s archived videos.
Kenna presses his cheek against the glass, mad to know what Paulius assembles, feeling incomplete without seeing what clips he has selected, how he’s rearranging them, what words he’s choosing …
When did a lie become a truth?
He does need to see the beauty being made. The Sol Majestic has addicted him to the act of creation. All that keeps him pent in this porcelain jail is the knowledge that what’s being created is hollowly rotted—Paulius struggles to create beauty, but the best he’ll manage is a tawdry huckster’s pitch.
Kenna rubs the shower-steam into his skin, pretending it smells like chicken soup.
Hours later, Paulius raps his cane on the glass door, so enthusiastic he threatens to shatter the glass. “Come, Kenna! Let me show you who you are! Or at least as I see you!”
Kenna’s hair drips with moisture, his skin beaded with cold water, as though his whole body was weeping. But Paulius rushes in, grabs him by the hand, leads Kenna out like a man starting a parade.
“I did it, Kenna,” he whispers, placing Kenna down in a chair, getting him a towel to dry himself with. “I have distilled what you do.”
Kenna has seen this manic exhilaration before: when Paulius brought him the lacquered duck. Paulius has once again assembled scattered ingredients into beauty, and his eyes gleam as he queues up the video.
“the highest art is to get someone to give you something that grants them joy,” Rèpondelle said, and he knows this is how she justifies her manipulations: yes, she alters their mindsets through flattery and lies, but it’s all to make them blissful.
Though as Paulius dims the lights, to Kenna he has the drugged look of a cow led off to be butchered.
The screen blurs into motion, and:
A camera poised high in the trees shows Paulius standing in a tangled green garden, lit by golden sunshine, as though the heavens have chosen to illuminate him alone. He reaches back, clasping an emaciated boy in a wretched robe as though some great electricity were being carried between them—and as he sweeps the tip of his cane up, it’s as though he’s demarcating the heavens, his face suffused with joy.
Kenna is shocked to see himself as he was when he first stumbled into The Sol Majestic—but of course Paulius records everything. If a lucky accident happens in the kitchen, Paulius wants to re-create it, celebrate it, market it. But there is no noise except for a howling wind that exists nowhere in the gardens.
“I was inspired the moment I saw Kenna,” the speakers intone.
Cut to a high shot of a cramped waste reprocessing unit, strung with Christmas lights and half-empty beer bottles: Kenna stands tall beneath Captain Lizzie, his robe fluttering dramatically.
He stands so straight. All he remembers from that day is terror, confusion, desperation. Yet there he is, one finger raised politely to contradict her, her anger dissolving into understanding.
“He’s been here for only weeks, and he’s changed the Station. There’s new policies been enacted, things that encourage the flourishing of…”
Montgomery, catapulted into space, a high angle from a low security camera.
“The strangest beauty.”
Benzo is collapsed by the porthole, naked and weeping and bleeding, clutching Kenna like a drowning man clinging to a rock. Kenna, whispering something unknowable in his ear, his back arched as if he intends to lift Benzo up.
“He unlocks potentials in people,” Paulius whispers. “He takes who they are, and magnifies the best parts of them. I don’t think he understands how powerful he’s going to be. But…”
Chefs standing around a lacquered duck, engaging in inspired debates over meals, an entire restaurant dedicated to turning Kenna’s vague philosophies into food.
“We have wrapped ourselves deep in the Inevitable Philosophy the Prince will manifest in two weeks. And he’s asked us to make available the opportunity for you to be a part of it in advance—a special Inevitable Robe, made to mark the Prince’s ascendence. If you cannot attend, let this limited-edition robe guide you to the destiny you deserve…”
Kenna squirms in the seat as the sales pitch heats up. Paulius chuckles. “You see it now, don’t you, Kenna?”
He wants to be in the kitchen. He wants to be in places where people speak in practical languages, of temperatures and tastes instead of gossamer philosophies. He’d rather cut root vegetables than cut commercials.
But what he will get will be more cavernous hotel rooms. Meals he’s never seen prepared. More time alone in rooms with people who, under different circumstances, he might be friends with, tricking strangers into doing him favors.
Yet The Sol Majestic will exist, he tells himself. There will still be a kitchen, there will still be meals made, there will still be Paulius’s mad vision.
He will never be a part of them again. But they’ll exist.
That will have to be enough.
31
Two Hours Until the Wisdom Ceremony
It is the night of the Wisdom Ceremony—and though a sumptuous feast awaits him, Kenna feels as though he has been prepared for the meal. His brain has become a thrashing database, so stuffed full of Rèpondelle’s lessons that whenever he gets nervous, preloaded conversations of engrams and narrative transportation and subliminal stimuli shuffle to the fore.
After eighteen-hour days in Rèpondelle’s simulations, he won’t actually talk to people at the Wisdom Ceremony: he will regurgitate snippets of dialogue that Rèpondelle has poured into him, and they will repeat their lines back to him.
Rèpondelle fusses with the straps underneath his clothing, pulls tight until the thumbtacks she has wedged against his skin threaten to bleed. His body language has been a challenge—standing proud inside the cramped transport ships led to banged foreheads and bullies—so she’s resorted to an old Allface trick of torturing him into a confident posture.
She circles him three times, hands clasped behind her back. “perfect,” she sighs.
Kenna is unsure if the pleasure she radiates is accidental, or a tactic to boost his confidence.
“ready?” she asks.
He isn’t. Yet he knows no amount of training could prepare him. He remembers Rakesh leaning over Montgomery as she’d hugged herself, one lever-pull away from being dropped into icy vacuum. She’d worked for months to arrange this lunatic’s dream, and yet come the day even iron-willed Montgomery had hoped someone would haul her out and tell her she didn’t have to do this.
But Rakesh hadn’t.
“Nobody cares about your needs,” he’d told her. “They’re satisfying their own.”
She hadn’t
been ready.
She’d done it anyway.
“Yes,” Kenna says, and when the words come out a whisper Rèpondelle pokes his thumbtacks to remind him an Inevitable Prince should speak clearly.
“then proceed, o Prince!” She sucks air into her lungs until the nondescript Rèpondelle becomes the acolyte Mother and Father entrusted their son to.
She thumbs open the door. Mother and Father loom like statues.
Father nods, once. “It’s good to see you, Kenna.”
Kenna can tell that Father has rehearsed those words.
Yet as Mother hugs him, Kenna reads a stiff reluctance on their bodies: not quite the open fondness they had for the brief period he was in their favor, but they do not clasp their bellies as if looking for excuses not to touch him. He will be neither favored nor shunned until he reveals his Inevitable Philosophy.
His Philosophy is, of course, stinking bullshit.
Rèpondelle and he have chosen “I will be a light to disperse the darkness”—a Philosophy so vague it can be applied profitably to any situation. He has memorized a platitude-filled speech designed to give people nebulous placeholder hope until he can talk to them in person and cold-read their fears.
Yet his distaste is only because he knows the tricks behind the speech. Rèpondelle has recorded his rehearsals for analysis, coaching him which words to emphasize, when to slow down—and the playback of his final reading brought him to tears, even though he’d been the one who gave it.
For the first time, Mother and Father’s presence reassures him. He needs to look like the Inevitable Prince, and Mother and Father have spent their entire lives expecting to be treated as royalty. They fall into place behind him as he walks down the hotel’s hallway, their presence a beacon that he is Inevitable, he is this religion’s righteous owner, and even if it’s hokum they’re telling him it’s right to be hokum.
Rèpondelle bolts down the hall, hands raised high like a sprinter crossing the finish line, her robe streaming behind her, and she slams open the exit doors.
The roar thumps him in the chest, a cheer so loud it ripples his robe, and the crowd is packed so tight the onlookers clamber over each other to get a glimpse of him, pushing their heads beneath other people’s armpits, wriggling forward with the clumsiness of newborn kittens …
Yet though they’re stuffed tight enough to cause transport ship riots, they’re all grinning, eyes wide with hope. Kenna’s too used to sedentary people waiting in line for paperwork, women smoking joints to pass the crushed hours packed inside the public spaces—this animated rush is a spark. He breathes in their excitement and when he breathes out he shouts greetings at them—
“Salutations!” he cries; they rush forward in praise. Rèpondelle produces a baton to push the crowds back, shouting “make way for the Prince!” and they clear a bubble for him to step through …
This can’t be real, he thinks. Scrimshaw must have purchased these crowds for me. But Kenna recognizes some of the faces, janitors and merchants and mechanics, and realizes somehow his triumph has become their triumph, that when he becomes the Inevitable Prince they will have become enmeshed in his greater story. This is why they grab his shoulders, ask Kenna if he remembers them, their faces taut with the hope they were essential to this new and glorious movement he will unleash.
“Of course I know you!” he tells them, Rèpondelle’s reflexes coming to the fore—never dampen someone’s enthusiasm when you can reflect it back at them—and he watches them relax as he lies to them, each worried they had offended him by overlooking him when he was nobody, but he sweeps them up in happy Rèpondelle-shaped embraces designed to fill them with forgiveness, and his generosity confirms his reputation that the Prince loves everyone.
They walk away stronger for his lie.
And Kenna sees a Colpuran man with brightly braided hair skulking at the back of the crowd—
“I know you most of all, sir!” Kenna cries, carried along by some great wave of kindness, as if everything he sees today will help him heal someone, for of course it’s the bhelpuri merchant he left behind.
He’s been so selfish. Of course the bhelpuri merchant doesn’t know Kenna’s pondered his plight ever since. All he knows is that he offered a free sample to the Inevitable Prince, who ran away.
Kenna commands the crowd to bring the bhelpuri merchant here, whose eyes iris wide in wonder, and Kenna falls to his knees.
“You fashioned me a gift, once,” Kenna says. “I was unworthy.”
That is truth.
Yet there’s no harm in using Rèpondelle’s techniques to magnify the truth.
The bhelpuri merchant stammers apologies, and Kenna cries that this brave man followed his dreams to Savor Station to make the best bhelpuri in the galaxy, and the merchant demurs that Kenna never tried his bhelpuri and Kenna says, “Then we’ll have to try it, shall we?” and promises to sit down with the merchant before he leaves and by the time Rèpondelle escorts Kenna away the merchant is overwhelmed with people demanding he get back to his cart and sell them his wares, the Prince’s wares, and Rèpondelle winks in approval.
They make their way to the Majestic’s obsidian cave entryway, which has been cleared by Savor Station’s security personnel. The space has been lit bright for vloggers to record.
Scrimshaw, pulled tight in her vulturish black cloak, stands alone to greet him.
She steps forward, wreathed in hisses of random noise to confound the vloggers’ recording devices, and produces a single blood-red index card, which she holds between two fingers. Scrimshaw bows, offering the card to him.
He takes it, turns it over: it’s blank on both sides. Rèpondelle’s spine stiffens, which he knows is her default behavior whenever something unexpected happens: clearly, this isn’t part of the ceremony.
Scrimshaw’s thin lips curl up into a cryptic grin.
He stares down at it, hunting for hidden technology. But it’s an ordinary piece of paper.
Then he remembers where he last saw it.
He flicks the card against his chin, remembering how high this card had seemed when it was tucked into a stack of robes. This is her hidden signal: those robes had been sold, pouring enough money into The Sol Majestic’s coffers to pay the robe-maker.
He tucks the card into his robe, glad of the keepsake—and realizes that as the Inevitable Prince he will no longer have to worry about bullies stealing his memorabilia.
“Did we turn a profit?” he asks. “They were triple-price. I hope that seals the breach in our financial interests…”
Her eyes flutter shut as she shakes her head in a tiny dream; Kenna can almost watch her savor a world where she’d be allowed to keep money. “There were profits. But then Montgomery and Paulius decided at the last minute the Ceremony they had wouldn’t be right for you, and nearly bankrupted me with the architectural changes…”
Kenna frowns. “What did they do?”
She clucks her tongue. “They’d kill me if I spoiled the surprise. But they’re awaiting you, O Prince. Everyone has arrived but you.”
She bends down, her dry lips brushing his ear.
“Everyone but Benzo,” she says. “Your parents refused to allow his presence.”
Kenna slumps, the thumbtacks pushing deep into his skin. But Scrimshaw does something she has never done before:
She takes his hands in hers.
Her fingers are bony, her skin worn thin by age, but her grip is prepared to haul him away if Kenna whispers a single protest.
“Are you ready to claim your … Inevitable Philosophy?”
What a wonderful world, Kenna thinks, where even Scrimshaw has a conscience.
Of course he’s not ready.
But Rèpondelle has taught him to lie well. He ponders the empty words he must speak until his dying days: I will be a light to disperse the darkness.
Such bullshit.
Such beautifully crafted bullshit.
He nods. Scrimshaw opens the doors.
&nbs
p; 32
Ninety Minutes Until the Wisdom Ceremony
Kenna has never entered The Sol Majestic through its front doors before.
For a moment, he thinks he has died.
Then he realizes: sophisticated audio countermodulators have dampened the noise around him, leaving him in such perfect silence he can hear his pulse quicken. Slow-light fields have absorbed every photon, plunging him into a velvety darkness so cool it wicks the sweat from his skin. The carpet is soft and springy, so each step loosens the bonds of gravity, propels him forward through the void. Mother and Father are behind him, but they could be a galaxy away.
Kenna treads forward; the sudden quiet has robbed him of the crowd’s boisterous energy. He is, once again, reduced to a boy pretending to be a Philosopher.
There are supposed to be drinks before the meal. Kenna tries not to hold out his hands and stumble forward as though this were some haunted house; he clasps his arms by his side, retaining a prince’s dignity. Rèpondelle prepared me for the salad course, the snail course, the rusted egg course …
Normally, he’d freeze before he crashed blindly into a waiter. But he trusts Paulius. He trusts Montgomery. If they ask him to walk through darkness, he will follow …
A laser inscribes a smoking inscription on the floor before him.
Welcome to the Inevitable Prince’s Wisdo
Kenna stumbles to a halt. The laser stops writing. He chuckles, feeling silencing countervibrations penning his laughter in his chest, then clasps his hands to hug himself as he realizes: this is the first of the wonders they have planned for me.
He steps forward, following the laser’s trail, and it continues writing for him in robe-vibrant letters, moving like a ballerina gliding ahead, an elaborate curlicue he recognizes as Paulius’s handwriting:
m Ceremony! A glorious dinner awaits—but before you eat, you will travel the path the Inevitable Prince took to get here, reliving life as He knew it. But I warn you! Where He has journeyed, there is very little food …
The Sol Majestic Page 31
