“Miscreant” is classic Harriet. We used to play Scrabble together, back in the old days.
“I’m hungry,” I say, and shrug. I don’t make eye contact. I’m ashamed of myself. I only went with Bert because of his connections, but over the years it’s become clear to me that Bert Gold is a piece of work. I’m living in a rental pod up here, because once Bert left and Harriet took over, it wasn’t like I was welcome on Earth. We all used to be neighbors. After the divorce, Bert grew a hedge of Deathbed Regrets between me and him and the rest of the neighborhood, and we played racquetball for three months straight, until, at last, the transport brought us up here. Harriet was on the other side of that hedge. We could hear her. She had a few things to say. She also had a string of lovers who could’ve made God blush. Then she rose in the world. She was always going to. It was a matter of time.
She sits down at the table, twisting sky around one shoulder so that her arms are both bare and ready for dining.
“I’ll have the Dim Sun Ultimate,” she says to the waiter, who is shaking in his boots at the presence of power.
“The Ultimate?” asks Bert, suddenly losing his confidence in our order. “We’ll get the Ultimate, too, then, if that’s what she’s having.”
Harriet smiles sweetly. I take a nervous sip of my drink. The cart is up on one wheel, making its way over to us. The restaurant is freakishly quiet.
It’s not every day you see the Chief Food Critic of Outer Space and the President of the Universe sitting down to a meal together.
“Are you good with the poisonous ones, Bert?” Harriet asks Bert. “When we were together, I remember, you had some allergies.” She’s not wrong. Bert is allergic to raw. She’s not. She swallows raw right alongside cooked, easily, without even thinking about it.
“I’m not going to eat the poisonous ones, Harriet,” says Bert. “Rodney’s going to eat them for me.”
I give him a sharp look. One of his lovely lady dinner companions died of dark matter, not even that long ago. The chef made an error preparing it, and that was it for her. Bert mourned for about five minutes, and then claimed it was a risk of fine dining. He gave the place a second star for being real.
“Well, he’s your only friend,” says Harriet. “But I guess he’s disposable. Sorry, Rodney. Your choice. You could’ve come with me. Would’ve been better than spending eternity hanging out with this cretin, don’t you think?”
The cart is beside us again. I have to wonder if they’ve spiced it up in the kitchen. This won’t be regular Dim Sun fare, not with Harriet here. The President doesn’t frequent regular places. I notice several diners rigid at their tables in salute.
“At ease,” says Harriet. I make note of their faces. Military, and if that’s what they are, I don’t want to be on their wrong side. I used to be military myself. The cart beside us is glowing gently, and the most thrilling smells are coming from it.
“The Ultimate,” says the chef, out of the kitchen now to pay his respects. “We’re honored to be your dining choice this evening, President Gold.”
“You ruin my anonymity,” says Bert, pitifully. “I’m here as a critic. Now they all know who I am.”
“No one even knows you’re here, Bert, not now that I’m in the room,” says Harriet, and that’s about right. “You’re forgotten, too, Rodney. You can slip out, if you like.”
I want to. Dinner with the two of them is always excruciating, but I can’t help myself. The smell of the food is killing me, and whatever they’ve added to the menu, I want it.
“I’m hungry,” I say. My stomach growls. It’s like the old days, the pizza and beer and pot haze. Up here, Bert once let me accompany him to a meal consumed in our sleep, where we sat at a table, covered in a blanket of napkins, and dreamed our dinner, some kind of godlike nectar full of apricots, but that was nothing compared to stoner food back on Earth. The smells in this restaurant? They’re like fried things, cheese and melted tomato sauce. I’m salivating. I’m ready. Under that cloth is heaven. I think for a moment about all the things I miss, the rinds and puffs, the dripping puddles of oil. I think of how the colonies have nothing like the foods of my youth. The food on earth really tasted like something. In the colonies, you’re lucky to get a taste of anything real. Everything up here is organic and heirloom, and if you ask me, that shit tastes like shit. They raided the seed vault, and brought up varieties of tomato cultivated in the 1800s, lemony-fleshed cucumbers, plump oats, cloned a troupe of red and white cows with smiling faces and high cream production, and now all the food is farm to table. I hate it. Give me the fried things. Give me the processed and the packaged. Give me the junk.
Bert brings out his little rating notebook. Harriet stretches her arms wide to encompass the table, and then she cracks her neck. I sit back, belly out, ready to eat my weight in one-bites. Usually, I get the signature dish first, the Dim Sun itself, but tonight’s special. The chef pulls the cloth off the cart, and we’re on.
“Rings of Saturn,” the chef says. “Deep-fried, flash drenched in Mars water-ice, and then fried again.”
His assistant is standing by with a fire extinguisher, but this is nothing. The rings are small, a bit blurry, and clearly crisp. They glow a little, which might be worrying for some, but Bert Gold and I are invulnerable. We’re connoisseurs of spice. These rings are fried in some kind of astral napalm. I take one, and crunch into it with my front teeth, feeling it beginning to burn the roof of my mouth. It makes me hard, I’m telling you. I miss onion rings. Back in the day, me and Bert were at a bar one night, and I put seven onion rings around my business. Didn’t end the way I thought it might. I was looking at the ladies. They were laughing at me. People, it turned out, didn’t feel the same way I did about rings. There’s a photo somewhere.
“Nice,” Bert mutters, scribbling notes. “Though I could have done without the second fry. The napalm tastes like Cindy’s sweat, back in San Francisco, that sweet, sweet Cindy, our delicate dance of kink and desire—”
That last he says in his patented Bert Gold Indiscrete Voice. The diners around us are dislodged from their attempts to pretend they aren’t already staring at our table.
Harriet has managed to down an entire basket of rings, and is now eating something tiny and wriggling, little motes of light that she grabs with tongs from out of the air.
“Are you sure about that, Bert? I think it tastes like Thomas,” Harriet says, at similar volume. “And when I say sweat, I mean the way Thomas would come in, after a run, drenched, and I’d lick it from his biceps. Remember that, Bert? Remember Thomas? He was lovely. Remember how Thomas used to pick me up and carry me up the stairs? Remember how we used to shut the door so hard you’d hear it slam from all the way behind your stupid hedge of mosquito-harboring Deathbed Regrets?”
Even I remember Thomas. Bert looks at Harriet, unblinking, up for the challenge.
“Cindy was the one who grew fur after the radiation hit. I used to rub her pelt backward to generate electricity for the whole block. Oh, man, I knew some really beautiful women before you, and after you, too,” he says, and then sighs, shaking his head sadly at Harriet as he munches a bite of Saturn.
Harriet isn’t beautiful. What Bert Gold has never realized is that she doesn’t give a damn. Harriet is what you’d call striking, as in a match, to light a cigarette. Bert Gold was a fool to lose her. Beautiful has nothing to do with anything in the long run. Somebody like Harriet keeps a man busy. Harriet even kept me busy as her neighbor. I was regularly trying to parse her philosophies. She talked circles around me, sending me running to the encyclopedia on the regular. Back when we were all in our forties, Harriet blazed so bright she hurt the eyes. She’s not any calmer now. Harriet’s seventy years old and her perfume smells like smoke hitting a thunderstorm. I can see the telltale gleam of a firearm stuffed down her cleavage, and there’s a whip curled around her shoulder, around the silky bit of sky she must have had to hire a team of thieves to tug out of its comfortable spot.
&
nbsp; “Don’t trifle with me, Bert Gold,” Harriet says. “You exaggerate. I met Cindy. You call it a pelt, I call it peach fuzz.”
Harriet’s hair recoils itself into tight knots. She puts an entire dumpling into her mouth and chews it very slowly. The insides of her cheeks flash a lot of different colors, red and purple, electric green, and something about it, the transparency, the expression of rapture on her face, is shockingly sexy. I think for a moment about the unpredictability of lust, about how once, back on Earth, I fucked a snack cake. I made a thousand-layered heap of them, and cut holes in the creamy centers. It was as good as it sounds.
I’m still eating. Their battle means they aren’t paying attention to the cart, and so I’m grabbing my fill. I take a peek into each basket, then have a mouthful of motes, each one bouncing around on my teeth and fizzing as they explode.
“Io’s Moonlight,” the chef whispers proudly. “I give them a little bath of liquid nitrogen.”
I open my mouth for more, but I can see the rest of the dumplings, plump and rosy, and Harriet is reaching out for another. I’m worried she’ll eat them all before I get to try them, but she passes me one.
“Red Dwarf,” she says to me. “Reminds me of some other things.” She looks meaningfully at Bert’s crotch. Bert doesn’t flinch. He stuffs a Red Dwarf into his mouth like he’s a goat gnawing a tire. He’s not even taking notes, just making rambling fake-writing scribbles on his notepad.
The dumpling is soup-filled, and explodes in my mouth. When I dab at my lips, a blood-colored liquid stains the napkin. It’s reminiscent of the crème soda that got outlawed for filtering through pee and messing up the pH of the oceans. Over the years, the FDA took everything delicious on Earth away.
“This is excellent,” I tell Harriet.
“Isn’t it, though, Rodney?” she says. Her voice is sweet and polite. You’d think Bert Gold was a thousand light years away. “This is one of my favorite places. Has been for ages. But it upsets my digestion to see Bert Gold here.”
Bert sits up very straight, his belly pushing out of his shirt. “You know this is my restaurant,” he says. “I discovered it way back when. I’ve been coming here for a decade. This is mine, Harriet.”
I know what he’s thinking. Harriet’s about to claim custody of yet another place. What is there to say, when your ex-wife becomes the President of the Universe? She got ninety-nine percent of the vote. Bert Gold’s got nothing but belly. He made the bad call of pissing her off. This divorce could have been friendly, but Bert Gold posted photos all over the place of himself with a bevy of beauties. Bert Gold sent lewd messages to Harriet’s friends and enemies. Bert Gold roved like a NASA vehicle. Also, and worst of all, Bert Gold underestimated Harriet Gold’s intellect. He’d never paid any attention to the designs she’d been drafting in her spare time. The whole portal system is Harriet’s invention. She made climbing through the space-time continuum as easy as climbing through a bathroom window. Now space travel is like buying a bus ticket.
“You’re being an idiot, Bert,” I say, and then I reach into a little basket and grab a handful of something black, covered in a soft mosaic of sweet crumbs. It’s light in my fingers, and I nearly lose it to floating.
“You might not want to eat that one, Rodney,” says Harriet.
“Why not?” says Bert.
“I had it when I was here last,” says Harriet. “It’s not really for human consumption. I mean, not for normal humans, anyway. It’s pretty gourmet. Not everyone can handle it.”
She moves the basket a little out of Bert’s way, and Bert’s hand jolts out like a cottonmouth from a creek bottom. He grabs the basket from Harriet and tugs. Bert’s nothing if not predictable.
“What is it?” Bert Gold asks the chef, pouring the little black objects onto his plate like he’s a starving man.
I notice Harriet giving the chef a look, and the chef shrugs and says “Odds and ends. Noble gases, couple of rogue elements in a crispity crust of interstellar dust.”
Bert pops one into his mouth. He smacks his lips.
“Tastes like donut,” he says, and so I take one, too, disregarding the look I saw the chef and the President of the Universe exchange. I roll it around on my tongue, feeling the stardust rub off. I’ve eaten stardust before. It’s cinnamony, and a little rough, a hint of filth in it, like eating cheese puffs squashed up out of a dirty hand. It’s pretty good. Maybe not double star level, but pretty good.
All is well, until I bite down and find nothing in the center.
“Donut hole,” I say to Bert. “Not the same as donut.”
I feel obscurely emotional, disappointed at the loss of the chewy center. I look at the chef. “This is just the hole, right? Is that what we’re eating?”
Harriet looks at Bert and grins.
Bert gets a very unhappy look on his face. That’s when I feel it. The nothing makes its way down my throat and into my belly. The nothing swells to fill my stomach. It’s a black bleakness, a twisting unfurling into itself, like something being wrung and simultaneously growing.
“Black Hole,” says Harriet, and shrugs. “What can I tell you, Bert? House specialty. I think I warned you.”
Bert’s belly is bigger than it was. He looks pregnant. I look down at mine. Same. The chef twitches his bandana nervously. Surely being President of the Universe doesn’t mean you can murder your ex-husband and his best and only friend in the middle of a crowded restaurant? Surely it can’t mean that. Harriet smiles at me.
“Antidote?” Bert sputters.
“Who says there’s an antidote? Maybe this is your last supper.”
“Harriet,” I say. “Harriet, that’s not fair.” My words sound weirdly slurred to me, and I reach up my hand to touch my mouth. My lips are curling backward.
“What did I ever do to you?” I ask Harriet. My belly is huge now, bigger than the table. It’s full of nothing and everything at once. I can tell it’s only a matter of time before I flip into an inside out exploded man-sock. I’ve always been hungry, but now the hunger is a bulging starvation.
Bert and I have always thought well as a team, but I’m pissed with him. I think of those months of racquetball. He owes me. He shouldn’t put me in situations like this. I look around at all the young lovelies, all the tentacled, pointy-chinned pretty things who are stargazing their idol, Harriet, and the vengeance she’s wrought.
Bert, across from me, is in similarly dire straits. He’s holding his burgeoning belly with both hands, but I see him look toward the cart, and the glow on it. There are a couple of dishes still left, one in a covered metal basket. I look at Bert. I nod.
A bit of black hole leaks out the corner of Bert’s mouth, and he moans. I watch it take over a piece of his cheek, look through it, and see a whole lot of nowhere I want to live.
I tilt like a gömböc (some of the old Scrabble-words still stay with me), roly-polying my way at the cart. My extruded belly button serves as a pivot point.
“What are you doing?” says Harriet. “Rodney, don’t think you’re getting him out of this. This is Bert’s own fault.”
I grab the basket with the Dim Sun in it and tilt back to center. I grab it like I’m a warrior, because I’m sitting opposite a real warrior and I know she’ll have me if I don’t eat fast.
The Dim Sun is a big disc, covered in golden red melt, with spots of darkness from the oven. It’s what I’ve been smelling this whole time. The cheesy tomato goodness. The crackle and the heat. You can only get that level of boiling ignition by using a cosmic microwave. I salute the chef with a quick fist pump, and then I break the Dim Sun in half and shove it at Bert. I can feel my finger bones freezing where the dark spots are. The bright spots are scalding my skin off.
“Take that, Harriet!” I shout, and then I fold my part of the Dim Sun in half and shove it in my maw, chomping down on it with the dentures I had specially made. They can withstand anything I’d want to eat. It’s hot and cold and delicious. It’s junk in the most divine sense,
celestial debris, a miniature of the fail of Earth’s sun, and all over the universe these are a coveted item. They fill you up no matter what. They’re known for it.
Bert’s gobbling his down, and so am I, though I’m tempted to savor it more slowly. I can feel it quieting the Black Hole, stopping its progress. My belly shrinks. The dark is retreating. The melting goodness covers over the nothing, and my shirt, now tattered, relaxes.
Harriet sighs and stands up. She has her own whole Dim Sun, already nibbled around the edges. She eats it in three bites, showing incredible tolerance for the burn.
“You’re always entertaining, Harriet,” Bert Gold says, wiping his mouth. “I’d wish you better luck next time, but you’d miss me if you caused me to be absorbed into the dark. You should try and get over me.”
The chef passes Harriet a small dessert cone. She licks at it like a pleased cat. Bert looks at it enviously. I know his mouth, like mine, is blistered.
“Comet ice,” she says, and shrugs. She offers the cone to me, and gives me a single lick, which instantly ruins me. It’s not normal comet ice. It’s the kind of thing that delivers seas to a dry planet. Faintly strawberry, faintly coconut. A little rum, a little gasoline. It’s a cocktail of perfection and it soothes my burns. Harriet’s not bad. She never was. In fact, I always liked Harriet. Why I’m the guy Bert got in the divorce, I don’t know. He chose me, but I should never have chosen him back.
“That was completely your fault, Rodney,” Bert says petulantly. “You’re supposed to be the taster. I won’t take you places if you don’t do your job. I shouldn’t have even had any of that black hole in my mouth. I’m unstarring this place and reporting it to Health & Safety,” says Bert. “I am.”
I look at Bert, waiting for him to apologize. He doesn’t.
“Have one of these,” I say, and I pass Bert the last basket on the cart. After all these years, I’m finally sick of Bert. He’s criminally ungrateful. I just saved him from a Black Hole, and will he ever he say thank you? No. He’s never been nice, not really. I’m only here because a lady canceled on him, and she was right to do it. Bert will never learn.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 16
