Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

 

  IT’S STRANGE TO HEAR the starter might have reached San Francisco once before! Mainly I’m surprised it wasn’t a Mazg who brought it. Actually, I think I might be a little bit scandalized. Who was this Jim Bascule guy?

  Chaiman finished his album. It has seven tracks and he calls it The Mazg Tapes. I don’t think he’s ever touched a tape in his life. Shehrieh is super worried about it—she doesn’t want him to use the word “Mazg”—and that is very good news for me. I told her about my restaurant and she barely blinked. Sorry, Chaiman!

  I’ll attach the album. I like some of the tracks more than others (it gets oonce-y…), but mostly, I’m proud of my brother for making something that’s truly his.

  BOONVILLE

  THE EXPEDIENT SEARCH ENGINE revealed that Jim Bascule had, sometime between the mid-1970s and today, become a winemaker in Mendocino County. On the website for a winery called Tradecraft, I found his picture. He looked to be in his sixties, scruffy at the chin, blond hair gone gray curling down to his shoulders. There might be more than one Jim Bascule in the world, but this image reassured me. He looked like the kind of person who might have taken up residence at a turnip restaurant in Berkeley.

  The drive was long, three hours. I listened to the radio until the signal faded and then switched to Chaiman’s Mazg remix album, which steadily increased in tempo as it proceeded from track to track. When it got to be too much, the sad Mazg voices all warped into the chipmunk register, I stopped the album short and went back to the beginning, where it was slower, with undistorted crooning buoyed by a spare accompaniment, which seemed to fit the landscape better.

  Fog became mist, which accumulated in sheets on my windshield. I drove very, very slowly, occasionally pulling into turnouts to allow pickup trucks to roar past me, sending up high plumes behind them. My car moaned pitifully as I crawled over a steep switchbacking rise, then coasted with palpable relief down a long and lazy slope toward my destination.

  Boonville was a short strip of shops and restaurants huddled along California State Route 128 where it dropped into the golden fold of Anderson Valley. There were wineries on both sides of the road, some with ramshackle tasting rooms. The local brewery maintained a hopyard, pale buds clinging to long wires parallel to the road. I passed a broad-faced hotel that seemed to preside over the tiny town. I thought about stopping. Maybe on the way back.

  My phone had no signal here, but it had already loaded the map I needed and my GPS showed the way. I turned off the highway onto a hard-packed dirt road, now mottled with puddles, and followed it for a mile until I saw a wooden sign for TRADECRAFT.

  The driveway plunged through the scrim of eucalyptus and dipped to cross a wide bridge over a rushing creek. The planks went thump-thump-thump beneath my tires. My car’s engine groaned a little as I pushed it crunching onto a gravel parking lot. There were two other vehicles parked there in the rain.

  The winery was a long building with a log-cabin look. A small sign advertised the tasting room. Inside, I found a middle-aged woman sitting on a stool behind a countertop, absorbed in a Thomas Pynchon novel. She set it aside when she saw me.

  “Welcome to Tradecraft! Not the nicest day for wine tasting, is it? Anyone else, or just you?”

  I told her I was alone, and that I was here to see Jim Bascule.

  “He just went to drop a couple cases off at the hotel. He’ll be back soon. Can I offer you a taste while you wait? I’m Barbara.”

  I acquiesced, peeled off my jacket, and set it down with my tote bag containing a loaf of bread. (I was always carrying bread these days.) I sipped samples of three red wines and two whites as Barbara probed me gently, learning that I lived in San Francisco (“I love the city”) and worked as a programmer (“Is everyone a computer person now? It seems that way”) but also baked bread (“Have you been to the bakery across from the hotel? They make the best scones. The best”), and I had, in fact, brought a loaf for Jim Bascule.

  “How nice! Well, he should be back any minute. Let’s finish with this, the Tradecraft Gewürz. It’s what we’re known for.”

  She uncorked a slender bottle and poured a trickle into a narrow glass. The wine shimmered thickly.

  “Have you heard of botrytis?” She said the word carefully, bo-try-tis. “They call it the ‘noble rot.’ These grapes actually get moldy on the vine. On purpose, I mean. It gives the wine a flavor—you’ll see.”

  I took a sip. The wine felt heavy in my mouth. It was very sweet but also tartly acidic, and the taste lingered for a long time. Barbara poured a glass for herself, nearly full-size, and her eyes were closed when she lifted it to her lips.

  We were both quiet, sipping, when I felt a draft of cold, wet air. Barbara’s eyes fluttered open. “There he is!”

  * * *

  JIM BASCULE WAS SHORT AND LEAN, a sixty-year-old man with the bearing of a boy. His chin bristled with blond whiskers and his hair was pulled away from his shoulders into a neat ponytail.

  I introduced myself and he shook my hand, looking plainly puzzled.

  “Are you the Jim Bascule who baked at Café Candide?”

  His eyebrows leapt. “I’m not sure if I am … But I remember him, sure. How do you know about that?”

  As explanation, I hauled my tote bag onto the countertop, drew out the loaf of bread, and thumped it down.

  He looked first at me, then at the bread. He smiled. And, of course, the bread smiled back.

  I followed him out of the tasting room into a cluttered kitchen. Cases of wine were stacked haphazardly. There were also miscellaneous wheels of cheese and thin sausages hanging on strings like torpid bats. A slab of wood supported an array of jams as well as what appeared to be a loaf of bread, its brown bottom peeking out from underneath a towel patterned with blue flowers.

  Bascule swept the towel back. The loaf underneath was round and thick-crusted with a burnish to shame Everett Broom. That crust didn’t show a face, but instead an intricate spiral.

  “Did you do that yourself?” I asked.

  “I think you know I didn’t,” Bascule said.

  Here’s what he told me.

  When he was preparing to reunite with his love in Europe—or so he thought—Jim Bascule left the starter with his parents in Santa Rosa, and he shared with them his suspicion: that it needed music to flourish.

  “Things didn’t work out in Brussels,” he said. “Oh, gosh. She lived in this little apartment overlooking an alley … she had a balcony where she grew herbs. She knew everyone, and she was always helping people. Little favors, and big ones, too. I was smitten. There’s no question I built her up in my mind while I was away. By the time I returned, she’d met someone else. This gorgeous Greek guy. I didn’t stand a chance. So I wandered a bit, got involved in some other things.”

  What kind of things?

  “Oh, things. I didn’t come back to the States until 1985. When I returned, I discovered my dad still had the starter going. That whole time”—Bascule started to laugh—“he’d been playing it the Grateful Dead!”

  So here I was seeing the hippie spiraling crust of a Deadhead starter.

  “I still play it the Dead every night. There’s a lot of bootlegs.”

  But how? Why?

  “Here’s my theory, honed over decades of bullshitting to myself. This starter, it uses music as a kind of … synchronization. It helps the little yeasts and whatever-elses to do the right things at the right times. You’ve gotta be careful, though.”

  Careful how?

  Bascule laughed drily. “I used to play around with other music, just to see. You know that classical tune ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’?” He whistled a bit of the breakneck melody. “I left it alone for fifteen minutes, no more. When I came back inside, it had spilled out of its container. It was everywhere.” He eyed me sharply. “You seen anything like that with yours?”

  I confessed I hadn’t. The Clement Street starter was well behaved.

  “Well, be careful. I think the m
usic matters. After that happened, I thought I’d finally killed it. Stuff barely bubbled for weeks. Now I just play it the Dead. Good vibes.”

  I traced my finger around the maze, an inch above the sourdough’s crust. “Don’t you find this … really exceptionally strange?”

  Bascule shrugged. “I’ve done a bit of reading. The way these things work together … It’s unbelievable. I’m sure you’ve heard all this stuff about the bacteria in our gut, how they’re like a second brain? There’s a lab—this was just published recently—there’s a lab where they’ve got some yeasts hooked up to the internet. You can log in and reprogram their DNA.”

  That sounded like a terrible idea.

  “My point is, there are things in this living world plenty weirder than this. If you want proof, just come back and visit us in the fall. See the grapes.”

  “The ones with the fungus?”

  “You ever heard of a suitcase clone? No? Well, okay. Come back in the fall.”

  Before I left the winery, I asked one last question.

  “Who was she? The woman in Belgium who gave you the starter?”

  Bascule shook his head. “She had the strangest name.”

  * * *

  ON THE WAY OUT OF TOWN, I stopped at the Boonville Hotel. Inside, I walked down a shadowed hall to claim a stool at the short bar—I was the only one there—and when the bartender appeared, who was also the hotel’s manager, I ordered a glass of the Tradecraft Gewürtztraminer.

  Through an open doorway, I watched a small kitchen staff working quietly, preparing that evening’s meal. I wondered how one of General Dexterity’s robot arms—with kitchen skills!—would fit in here on the side of California State Route 128. Would it ruin that kitchen, or improve it? I genuinely didn’t know.

  I sipped my wine slowly.

  I pondered the egg problem.

  I wondered what other music I could play for the Clement Street starter. Was there any album, any composition, that would encourage a crust that looked simply … normal?

  The bartender/manager came back out and asked me if I’d be joining them for dinner. I asked him what they were serving, and he reported: roasted chicken, accompanied by a panzanella salad with tomatoes from the garden and croutons from homemade sourdough.

  I told him I had to get back to the office.

 

  YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN my mother’s face when Chaiman and I asked her about Jim Bascule. She told us she hadn’t thought of that name in thirty-some years.

  Apparently, when he appeared again in Brussels, Shehrieh was shocked. She refused him, and she told us she felt bad about it, but he was too short, and he couldn’t cook anything. Well, he could bake bread, but she’d taught him that. And there was another man, he was Greek … this was before Leopold. (My father wasn’t home when we were talking about all this, and I think that was probably for the best.)

  But I understand what she means about the cooking. It’s crucial in Mazg relationships, especially in the beginning. How do you even get started if you can’t woo the other person with your spicy soup?

 

  THAT WASN’T A EUPHEMISM!

  THE EGG PROBLEM

  DURING MY SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE, at the urging of a professor who specialized in the history of the assembly line, I had embarked on a self-directed project to identify the first use of a computer program in a manufacturing process. After a semester of digging through libraries in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, I had scrounged a few early examples, but I failed to convince either Evelyn Simmons or myself that I had succeeded in my task. Nevertheless, she gave me a 4.0 and told me I’d learned a useful skill.

  I used it now.

  I was going to be the one to solve the egg problem.

  I read up on anatomy and physiology. I acquired textbooks for students of physical therapy and DVDs for students of dance. I tracked down software from a company called Anatomix that could accurately simulate the flex of skin and muscle, and I inspected every menu, every command. Horace became my research assistant: he scoured the internet and brought me three new kinesiology papers every day; dropped them on the countertop still warm from the laser printer.

  Sometimes, when I was sitting at the long picnic table reading and rereading the papers, sipping endless cappuccinos provided by Naz, I paused to wonder: Who paid for all this?

  The master of the market, the figure known universally as Mr. Marrow, was an enigma. Horace hypothesized that our patron was the scion of an old San Francisco family that had earned its fortune feeding the Barbary Coast. Naz was more paranoid, and said Mr. Marrow walked among us. “He could be Horace, for all we know.” I heard from others that Mr. Marrow was obviously Anthony Bourdain; definitely Ferran Adrià; indisputably Sergey Brin.

  Every day, I carried a carton from the open pantry and placed it before the Vitruvian. One by one, it lifted the eggs, and one by one, it ruined them.

  I imagined Mr. Marrow looking at a rapidly growing outlay for pasture-raised eggs and wondering, What the—?

  I had watched the Vitruvian make a hundred attempts without any apparent improvement. At the Task Acquisition Center, identical arms had ruined probably thousands of eggs. (What happened to those eggs? Did we, the Dextrous, eat them as breakfast scrambles? I hoped we did.) The problem wasn’t the training. There was something about this task that eluded ArmOS, even when it had mastered so many others. It could assemble a phone, but it couldn’t open an egg.

  Could I criticize it, really? My own egg-cracking experience was extremely limited—a cookie-baking spree during my senior year of college; everything but the egg and a little butter was already in the box—and in that time I had certainly never attempted to do it one-handed, which was what was required of the Vitruvian. Even with the benefit of two hands, my egg-cracking had been fumbling, borderline disastrous—a gentle rain of eggshell into the cookie mix, shards removed carefully one by one.

  If I was going to have any hope of teaching the Vitruvian, I would have to master this skill myself.

  I opened the expedient video-sharing website on my laptop, searched for “how to crack an egg,” and was rewarded with thousands of results. I selected the first and watched a disembodied hand crack an egg against the rim of a clear glass bowl and pull its halves apart, two fingers forward, two fingers back. The gesture was almost obscenely elegant. I tried to copy what I saw on the screen, and was rewarded with a smear of yolk across my palm.

  I felt a surge of kinship with the Vitruvian. We were starting at the same level.

  But there was a difference between us: I learned fast.

  Thwack, crack, pull—after only a few attempts, I could do it as neatly as my faceless tutor. Thwack, crack, pull. There’s a technical term for this: “one-shot learning.” You see something once; you can do it. Programmers who work on artificial intelligence and robot locomotion regard it with nearly mystical awe.

  Having mastered the elegant, one-handed egg-crack in if not one, then maybe three shots, I set myself to the deeper task of understanding it. I pushed all my awareness into my hands—muscles, tendons, finger pads. Thwack, crack, pull. Thwack, crack … another smear. As quickly as I had learned it, I unlearned it. Thwack … The egg didn’t even crack. My fingers trembled.

  I repeated this cycle every afternoon for a week. Every session contained, at its peak, a few perfect, satisfying cracks, with the broken shell levered apart by the subtlest workings of my fingers and palm. But the sessions all ended the same way, with me so lost in amped-up self-awareness—proprioception!—that I was dinging the eggs harmlessly off the bowl, or demolishing them entirely, just like the Vitruvian. Our performance converged. I had nothing to teach it.

  After this happened, I would angrily dispose of the broken eggs, feeling stupid and wasteful, then stomp up and down the concourse in frustration.

  And I would watch other people work.

  When Naz used his espresso machine, it was musical: clack of portafilter, hiss of steam, gurgle of
milk, clink of saucer. When Anita worked her cricket flour into dough, she stared into space, thinking with her hands. That’s what I wanted to achieve. Even Jaina Mitra: when she shuttled samples between her great microbial menagerie and the DNA sequencer, her fingers and feet moved of their own accord. She was elsewhere, gaze clouded, brain churning. She could have done it with her eyes closed.

  That, of course, was it.

  I ran back to my workstation, opened my laptop, and made sure I was synchronized with the latest changes to ArmOS. It was going to be so simple. It was going to be so huge.

  To date, my contributions to the codebase had all been tiny refinements—painstaking embroideries in the tight tapestry of Proprioception. I had also written a related debugging panel for Interface, but I would never admit to that.

  Now I created a module from whole cloth. It was concise, not even a hundred lines of code, built in perfect symmetry around a single action. One by one, in exactly the right order, I suspended the arm’s motor control loops. Then I loaded the action directly into the PKD 2891 Stepper Motors, which most people didn’t realize you could do; they all had their own MCUs, with just enough memory for what came next. Then, one by one, I brought the motor control loops back online.

  I finished my new module, named it, tried to compile, was informed of several embarrassing syntax errors, corrected them, compiled again. I flashed the Vitruvian with the new code and said aloud, “Try again.”

  It plucked up an egg, moved it lightly into position, paused, and thwacked the egg against the rim of the bowl. Just after the thwack, my new module took over. The motor control loops went dark. The arm wasn’t running blind; it was more like … a blink. Not even a hundred milliseconds, during which my new module said: Just go for it.

  In the ArmOS codebase, as part of the Control package, I had created something new—a tiny space without feedback or self-awareness—and I had named it Confidence.