Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  “We’ll miss you on Control,” he said, “and I know the guys at the Slurry table will miss you, too. Have you tried the latest formulation? Revision G mark … five, I guess? The glycemic index is unreal.”

  I ducked into the cafeteria to reassure Chef Kate that I would keep her supplied with sourdough even though I was leaving the company. In the kitchen, I found her robot arm wheeled out of the corner, reactivated, cracking eggs merrily alongside her sous chefs.

  “I heard we have you to thank for this,” Kate said drily. Her expression was complicated.

  “I can’t tell if you’re happy about it or not,” I said.

  She sighed. “Neither can I.”

  As I was shepherded around the office, enduring various last-day-of-work rituals, I was accosted first by Arjun and then by Garrett.

  “There’s something you need to know,” Arjun hissed as I was walking out of the HR debrief.

  “There’s something you need to know,” Garrett whispered as I was preparing for the Proprioception handoff.

  “Garrett’s in love with you.”

  “Arjun’s in love with you.”

  I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

  Across Townsend Street, I walked the length of the Task Acquisition Center, headed for the desk of Deborah Palmer-Grill, where I would make my arrangements to purchase the refurbished arm. I peered across the rows and tried to spot the bearded chef, but of course, he was gone. I’d made him obsolete. Confidence.

  DPG rose to meet me. “You did it.” She reached for my hand, giving it not a mere shake but a hearty rattle. She was grinning. “I think I’m going to get a raise because of you. Andrei was obsessed with the eggs!”

  I bent across her desk to reach her keyboard and tap my payment information into a digital form.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” DPG said. The purchase order floated on her monitor. “You could join me over on this side of Townsend Street. We would make a good team!”

  I looked back at the arms and their trainers. There were fewer than before. It wasn’t just the bearded chef who was gone. General Dexterity was making progress.

  I shook my head. “I think I want to get a little labor in while there’s still a chance.”

  I walked out of the robot factory into bright sunlight with my belongings in a small box. My tablet and stylus; my picture of my parents; Kubrick the cactus. It was the middle of the day and I’d deployed no office chaff. Odd parts of me, my chin and my heels and the soft backs of my arms, felt tingling and buoyant. I was light.

  THE NOVICE’S GRACE

  ANOTHER WEDNESDAY CAME, and with it the final market preview. Soon, our secret kingdom would open to the world. Every customer whom I’d ever seen was here this morning, snapping photos to post on the expedient image-based social network. This was their last chance to prove to the world they had been one of the elect.

  I had forwarded Chaiman’s album along to Naz, and this morning he played it through the concourse. Stretched out by echoes, the songs of the Mazg were sweetly sad. Valedictory. They were perfect.

  There was at least one new customer on this, the last of the Wednesdays. I recognized her. Charlotte Clingstone.

  “So, here you are,” she said.

  A trio of acolytes clustered behind her, eyes roving the concourse warily. I recognized them, too, from the kitchen at Café Candide. They all noticed the Vitruvian at once. It was mixing placidly. They stared.

  “That’s quite a contraption,” Clingstone said. “Is it really necessary?”

  “It’s helpful,” I said.

  She lifted a loaf from the ping-pong table, faced the smiling crust squarely through her glasses. “It looks different than I remember it.”

  I offered her a taste. Her contingent, too.

  The acolytes chewed dutifully. Clingstone sniffed the bread, raised her eyebrows, and took a nibble. “It’s very competent,” she said. “Do you bake anything else? Croissants? Pizza dough?”

  I did not.

  “You do remind me of Jim with his mystery starter. He had the novice’s grace, perpetually. It was maddening.” She nibbled her sourdough sample and continued, sounding very casual. “I have a proposal for you. Leave the robot behind. Come join us at Café Candide.” It took her acolytes a moment to process what they’d just heard. When they did, their eyes went wide, and they looked at me with bewilderment and horror.

  Clingstone continued. “Bring the starter back to the café. You’ll apprentice under Mona Rahut. You met her. There’s no better teacher.”

  I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestler, or an all-expenses-paid trip to Gary, Indiana.

  “That’s very kind of you,” I said, “but I have a business here. They’re about to open the market. It’s going to get a lot bigger.”

  My reply pinged off Clingstone’s calm countenance without leaving a mark. She chewed the last of her sample and swallowed. “Many young people wait years to be offered an apprenticeship at Café Candide.” The smoldering hatred in the acolytes’ gazes indicated they had recently been those people.

  “I just don’t see myself working in a restaurant,” I said.

  Clingstone’s gaze was even. “It’s really quite a bit more than a restaurant.”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.” Firmly. “I’ve learned a lot on my own.”

  She hmmed, and it was almost musical. She looked from me to the Vitruvian to the starter in its crock, and back to me again. “I wonder if that’s true? Some days, that bread of Jim’s … it seemed almost to bake itself.”

  I was going to protest, but Clingstone turned and shepherded her acolytes back onto the yellow-tape road. “Thank you for the taste,” she said. “Though I do think you should try pizza dough. A killer sourdough crust. Can your robot do that?”

  More customers passed by. I was reaching into the Faustofen when I heard a voice I recognized: “Lois! Proprioception!”

  It was Andrei, linked arm in arm with an older man.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited,” he said. He started to laugh. “I didn’t expect to see a Vitruvian! This is the one you bought.”

  “She’s one of your employees?” the older man asked. He was very handsome, with an old sea captain look to him.

  “Was. Gregor, this is Lois Clary. Originally from Michigan. She worked with us on the Control team for … fourteen months?”

  Those flash cards were good.

  Andrei looked down the concourse. “You quit … to work here?”

  “This is where I solved the egg problem,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it at the office. I bake bread now, and I’m going to put some things up for sale in the ArmOS marketplace.”

  Andrei smiled at that, but still seemed perplexed. He and his companion said farewell and continued along the yellow-tape road. I told them to sample the Lembas cakes with an open mind.

  Watching them walk away, it occurred to me again: Could Andrei be Mr. Marrow? They were both so deeply impatient with the world as it was …

  Later, Charlotte Clingstone and her acolytes passed by on their way out. The acolytes looked exhausted; worn down by novelty. Clingstone spoke to them, and while they proceeded up onto the airfield, she returned to my workstation. I was afraid she was going to try again to recruit me, but she only thwapped a book down on the ping-pong table.

  “From Portacio’s collection,” she said.

  It was Candide.

  “I read it when I was a little younger than you, and it was a formative experience. Thus, the name of the café.”

  I inspected the book. It was very slender.

  “I think you might enjoy it,” Clingstone said.

  I wondered if this market was all silly gimmicks to her, or if she’d found anything at all that
she actually liked.

  “Yes. The mushroom grotto is interesting, isn’t it? We’re going to try those hen-of-the-woods.”

  “Did you see the Lembas cakes?”

  Charlotte Clingstone smiled and winced at the same time. “It’s a very impressive project, but I fear it’s a bit too far ahead of the curve for Café Candide. That woman still has things to prove. But one day? Who knows. Maybe we’ll start a dinner with her little cathedrals.”

 

  HERE’S A STORY about how the starter came to us.

  The first of the Mazg, before we were the Mazg, was a man named M., who was pressed into service as a slave. He rowed aboard a ship crossing the sea. (Which sea? The story does not specify, of course!) There was a storm; the ship capsized; and this man M. washed ashore onto a great rocky island that, even though it stood along many trade routes, was uninhabited because there was no place to grow anything, and so anyone who settled there would be dependent on others for their food, and that was a losing proposition in those times, on that sea.

  M. cursed his luck. His refuge was barren. There were pools of condensation in the rock, and he sipped from these while little crabs snatched at his nose.

  On the third day, starving, he considered his options, which were (1) attempt to swim elsewhere, or (2) throw himself off the great rocky island’s tallest outcropping. Two kinds of suicide.

  Then he discovered a cave. Its opening was the narrowest crevice, invisible from any but the closest angle. He would not have discovered it if there had not been a smell emanating from inside—very faint, but in his starved state it drew him like a lure.

  Lois, you know this smell.

  I will write more later.

  DEFLATION

  AS THE MARROW FAIR ACCELERATED toward its launch, a crisis unfolded, first slow, then fast.

  To ensure I could make enough loaves to sell five or six days a week, I was testing myself, with the Vitruvian slinging dough double time and the Faustofen’s burners roaring nonstop. I ordered the fancy flour in bags larger than I’d known existed. To match all that flour, to mix dough in the volume I required: I needed more starter.

  It felt like a kind of surrender, but I transferred the Clement Street starter from its ceramic crock into a wide plastic tub. When I began to bake, I prepared a prodigious amount of floury paste for fuel. But in its new tub, the Clement Street starter grew slowly, almost reluctantly. I put the music of the Mazg on repeat and turned up the volume; it didn’t have any effect.

  Worse: the loaves that resulted were deflated. Upon reflection, it had been happening for some time, just too gradually to notice. Now there was no denying it: the loaves were not as round as before, and when I tapped them on their backs, I heard unappetizing thuds. Inside, the crumb was different: heavy and dense. The smell was off, too: less banana, more acetone. And the faces that peered up from the crust were flat masks of resignation.

  I was asking a lot of the starter, I realized. But I was treating it well; I was offering it a daily feast of the finest wheat sugars! This was a partnership, a symbiotic relationship, and the starter had a job to do. The Vitruvian and I were doing ours.

  I tried to negotiate with it. “What’s the matter? What do you need?”

  No gurgles. No puffs. No phenomena at all. The Clement Street starter seemed … depressed.

  Each day, the starter took twice as long to double in volume. I was accustomed to the mathematics of exponentiation working in my favor; now I worried that it had turned against me. If this trend continued, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to get what I needed for the day’s loaves. The Marrow Fair’s opening was approaching.

  I began to quietly freak out.

  It was possible I was overthinking it. The problem might be mundane. A search of Global Gluten revealed that, yes, starters sometimes lost their mojo. The customary recommendation was to throw it out and start over, but I couldn’t do that. I wanted to bang on the keyboard: WHAT IF YOUR STARTER WAS GIVEN TO YOU BY MYSTERIOUS SIBLINGS FROM AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY AND WHAT IF IT’S IRREPLACEABLE??

  Naz at the coffee bar noticed my mood. “This might be more than a cappuccino can fix,” he said. I ordered one anyway, and while he was preparing it, I explained that my sourdough starter was exhibiting a pathology I couldn’t diagnose.

  Naz nodded sagely. “This thing”—he clonked his espresso machine on the head—“is fantastic, but it’s totally temperamental. I always struggle with it. You know who turned out to be the Marzocco whisperer? Anita, with the crickets. She rebuilds old motorcycles.” He clacked a cup down into its saucer and slid it across the countertop. “This place is a magnet for weirdo geniuses. Somebody at the Marrow Fair can help you. Just put a note in the newsletter.”

  I composed my query, stared at it on my laptop’s screen for ten minutes, then sent it to Horace for inclusion in the next day’s dispatch.

  In the morning, Jaina Mitra found me at my workstation. I was sitting in the folding chair, waiting for a batch of dough to very slowly rise.

  For once, her hair was down. It was impossibly thick—definitively a different substance than what was attached to my scalp. She was wearing a T-shirt, not her usual lab coat, and she seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen her before. Maybe things were going well with Lembas.

  “I saw your note in the newsletter,” Jaina Mitra said lightly, “and … I have an idea. I could run your starter through the sequencer. Find out what’s in there.”

  I got the sense she was just looking for reasons to use her amazing machine. I thought about the sequencing process as she had described it—the pulverization of the cells, the divination of their entrails. What good would it do me to know about the starter’s dead DNA? It was its living behavior I needed to understand.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “It’s nice of you to offer. Thanks.”

  “Of course. Tell me what you decide. And you should come over and try the new batch sometime. It’s better! I think it’s better. I’m almost there.”

  Nothing was happening at my workstation. The dough was going to take a very, very, very long time.

  I rose from the folding chair. “Can I try it now?”

  Over at Jaina Mitra’s lab, I bit into one of the new Lembas cakes. The gluiness had improved, but there was a new flavor—deeply metallic. It tasted uncomfortably like blood. I winced, and I could see the disappointment in her eyes. She took a bite herself, and cursed. “Something changed. It wasn’t like this last night…”

  “It’s really hard, what you’re trying to do,” I said. “You’re inventing something totally new. Everyone else here, we’re taking things that are established and … putting a twist on them. Even then, it’s impossible. Trust me.”

  Jaina Mitra nodded absently. “I think maybe the problem is the molybdoenzymes…”

  I walked to Naz’s coffee bar and requested a glass of water to wash the coppery flavor out of my mouth, then sat at the long picnic table to check my email. Replies to my query in the newsletter were accumulating, and in their recommendations they were unanimous. Unequivocal.

  Talk to Stephen Agrippa, they said.

  Ask Agrippa.

  Agrippa the cheese maker.

  Agrippa knows more about microbes than anyone.

  Agrippa, up on the airfield.

  Agrippa, with the goats.

 

  SO, WHAT NEXT? M. wormed his way through the narrow crevice and found a scene from a dream. Inside, the cave was forested with fungus, their stalks as thick around as trees, with fluttering ribs and wobbling tendrils. The wind across the crevice played a whistling song. (Remember this.)

  M. knew that mushrooms could be deadly, but what choice did he have? He feasted. And guess what? They were great! The fruits of the cave sustained him.

  Weeks later, a sharp-nosed ship ventured close enough to the great rocky island for him to signal, waving his arms atop the precipice from which he might before have jumped. When the ship approached,
he climbed aboard and … was immediately pressed into service, a slave once more. He told no one of the cave and its hidden sustenance.

  Five years later, he had earned his freedom, and five years after that, he had acquired a ship of his own, slow and leaky, but large enough to carry not only his own small family but also the families of the men beside whom he had rowed and suffered.

  This part of the story feels true to me.

  AGRIPPA

  BEYOND THE OLD HANGARS there was the expanse of abandoned airfield, cracked and overtaken by tall grasses. A line of low, rounded bunkers rose at the asphalt’s edge, and beyond them it was just dark water.

  I carried a sample of the Clement Street starter in its original ceramic crock across the broken landscape, the Marrow Fair beneath my feet.

  The man and his alpaca were out there guarding their herd.

  I approached slowly, both of them watching me as I crossed the concrete.

  “Stephen Agrippa?” I called when I was close enough. “We met before … never mind. I work in the market.” I pointed dumbly into the ground. “Everyone said I should talk to you.”

  The man nodded slowly at this.

  “I have something strange,” I said. “It’s a sourdough starter, but it’s not— Hey!”

  A goat was gnawing on my pant leg. I danced away. Agrippa laughed; a high, echoing bark.

  “Come on,” he said. “Bring your something strange. Don’t worry about Hercules. He’s cool.” His voice was wry and reedy. He turned and ambled away. I followed, circling wide around the hungry goat and the watchful alpaca, whose name was apparently Hercules.

  Agrippa led me toward one of the bunkers, set deep into the ground, its rounded top thick with vegetation, inky green and rusty red. The bunker’s face was a half-moon of white. There was a ramshackle Airstream set up next to it with an awning that extended to one side.

  In the shade of the awning, Agrippa reached into a plastic cooler and retrieved two bottles, both unlabeled. He cracked their caps with his molars. “Want one?”