Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  I accepted my beer from the master of microbes and spun the blank bottle. “Home brew?”

  “It’s from Algebra, around the way.” He motioned back toward the brewery. “Quintuple-hopped. Experimental. I help ’em out sometimes.”

  “People say you’re a microbe whisperer.”

  He took a swig from his bottle, looked out across the water. “They do say that. I try to discourage them, but then they ask me what I am, and I can never quite say it right. So then I just shut up.”

  “You make cheese.”

  He made a deep Mm-hmm, jerked a thumb at the bunker behind him. “That’s the cheese cave. Used to hold nukes.” He took another swig of beer. Grinned. “And now it holds some truly advanced technology.”

  A nervous itch spread across my scalp. “Is it safe to be here?”

  “Do you drive here in a car?”

  “I take Carl’s ferry.”

  “Well, it’s safer than that.”

  “I mean, is it radioactive?”

  “Everything’s radioactive. It’s fine. Mutation’s a good thing.”

  I had no idea if he was serious or not. He seemed like the kind of person who cultivated that ambiguity—who reveled in it.

  Generally I don’t enjoy those kinds of people.

  I hefted the Clement Street starter in its crock and held it out to Agrippa for inspection. He eyed it, then me.

  “Oh, I can’t do anything about that.”

  “What?”

  “You think I’m a sourdough mechanic, and you just drop it off? No, ma’am. I will tell you what I know. How you apply that knowledge to your particular technology there is up to you.”

  “You keep calling it technology.”

  “Technology it is. Come on. I want you to see the cave.”

  * * *

  INSIDE THE BUNKER, the air was clammy and dense, heavy with a ripe ammoniac smell. It seemed to crawl up inside my nose and elbow other odors away. The bunker was narrow but deep—deep enough, at least, that the light from the open door did not illuminate the back wall and instead only petered out into darkness.

  Wire shelves ran straight down the long space, like an art school demonstration of perspective and foreshortening. The shelves were laden with huge wheels of cheese that I recognized from Orli’s table at the Marrow Fair. They were veined with bright colors: blue and turquoise, flame orange, hot pink.

  Agrippa carried a basket under his arm as he walked slowly through the bunker, scanning up and down like a value-conscious shopper scouring the shelves at a grocery store.

  “If you sit here in the dark,” he said absently—and it was no stretch to imagine him doing so—“and wait a long time … you see yellow flashes. That’s vitamin B2 fluorescing.”

  “And you are one hundred percent sure it’s not dangerous.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  That was not a satisfying response.

  We passed a shelf where a wheel of cheese had exploded into some kind of fungal overgrowth. Tall, mushroom-like fruiting bodies rose up and swayed slightly in the air disturbed by our passage. I sucked in a sharp breath.

  “Is that … there…” I pointed. “Is that all right?”

  Agrippa nodded. “Oh, it’s fantastic. An empire is rising, lifting up great works.”

  He picked up a wheel on the next shelf, held it close to his nose. Then he fished a tool out of his pocket, some kind of metal syringe, and plunged it into the wheel. He extracted a slender core sample, popped part of it into his mouth. Offered me the other part. I hesitated for a moment, then accepted it. Satisfied, he turned around and headed for the exit.

  “Culture,” he said. “The word meant this—making cheese—before it meant that—art and opera. And before it meant anything, it just meant working the land. That’s a better definition. That’s who we are. Not our music, our books. Psh, books. They’re all dead. We’re alive. We eat, we grow. But, but but but, here’s the thing! We’re amateurs.”

  We emerged back onto the airfield. I was happy to be out of the bunker.

  “Amateurs!” Agrippa repeated. “Compared to what you just saw? This is the key to my cheese, to that beer, to your sourdough, to anything and everything. I’m going to say it, and you’re going to nod like you get it, but you won’t. Not yet. It doesn’t come easy.”

  He took a breath.

  “In that cave, empires are rising and falling. There are battles under way. Wars. More soldiers on both sides than in all the wars of human history combined. And they are struggling. They are taking territory, making it safe. Building fortresses.” He lifted the wheel he’d chosen out of his basket and hefted it. “There is a saga in here to put our whole history to shame.”

  His eyes were a little defocused now, lost in the grandeur of his rant.

  “In every wheel of cheese, there’s revolution, alliance, betrayal … Can you feel it?”

  I told him the truth: I could not.

  “Nope. You’re honest, I appreciate that. Of course you can’t. I couldn’t, not at first. We’re blind to it. But this is their world, not ours, and their stories are greater.”

  I frowned. “They’re just bacteria. They don’t think or plan. They just … exist.”

  “Just exist? They do things we only dream of. They are fecund and potent, they can speak to one another with chemicals and light, they can form teams—oh, the teams they can form. Millions strong, all working together perfectly. If we could cooperate like that—if we could even get close—we would have all of our problems solved. They can live at the bottom of the ocean. They can live in volcanoes. They can live forever.”

  Well: my comrades below had sent me to the right person. This was a man who loved microbes.

  He looked at me, eyes blazing. “This is all I have to offer you. If you can understand this—if you can not only hear what I’m saying but believe it—then you’ll know what to do with your starter.”

  We were both silent a moment. Then I ventured: “Can you at least give me a hint?”

  He laughed. “Sure. What I’m saying is, first you have to respect it.”

  He spun his wheel of cheese around and sniffed it, sucking in a great deep breath. Then he held it out, turned it a degree either way, inspecting, and the look on his face showed more than respect. It showed awe.

 

  ON THE GREAT ROCKY ISLAND, M. built a kingdom! His friends and family feasted on the fruits of the cave and they were well nourished. They built a long jetty, a place where ships could pause on their journeys across the sea. To feed the sailors, the Mazg brewed beer and baked bread. The fluttering, wobbling culture of the cave, they kept secret.

  This is a pretty good story so far, but maybe you’re wondering, Why haven’t I heard of M.’s great rocky island? Why is it not a wealthy maritime state? Why are Beo and his cousins hidden away in all the second-story apartments of Europe?

  Because, of course, there was a problem.

  Their port was very successful, and the population of the Mazg (we can call them that now) grew rapidly in just a few generations. They became beer-drinkers and bread-eaters themselves, because the culture of the cave thrived nowhere else, not even in other caves on the island. For a long time, they wondered why. Most shrugged. Then a girl of the Mazg, a genius, simply opened her ears. The whistling song across the narrow crevice was linked somehow to the life of the culture. Through experimentation, she determined the crucial tones and sequences. This is the origin of the songs that the Mazg sing today—the songs on your CD.

  This girl became the governor of the great rocky island, and she transformed it, bringing the culture out of the cave. Now the Mazg had beer and bread and something else, too. Sailors who tied up their ships and walked ashore to rest and trade were well fed and well treated, but they were not allowed behind the walls of the fortresses in which the culture of the Mazg was propagated and the songs of the Mazg were sung.

  Behind those walls, the language of the Mazg grew in upon itself and lost it
s kinship with other languages.

  AGRIPPA (CONTINUED)

  I RETURNED TO THE AIRFIELD the next day because the others had spoken the truth: Agrippa was a genius. Maybe also an asshole. But I believed he had something to teach me; I believed he understood the starter in a way I didn’t, or couldn’t.

  The cheese is not the thing, he told me. The cheese is just the territory, the battleground. The bacteria are the thing. They are the actors on a milky stage.

  Most plants have at least one bacterial symbiote, he told me. He pronounced it carefully: sym-bi-ote. He looked out across the airfield, at the scrubby red and green plants. All those? Infected. But that’s not the right word, he said. Infected means there’s something wrong. This is all right; it’s partnership. Some plants are infected by bacteria that are themselves infected by a virus. Wheels within wheels. Clockwork.

  You have four pounds of bacteria in your body, he said. You don’t feel it. He bounced on his heels. I think I’m starting to feel it. I think I can talk to them.

  Talk to them?

  Yes, he said. Send them messages. Chemicals. Hormones. What I want to do next is learn how to listen and hear their reply.

  He held one of the wheels of cheese under my nose and instructed me to breathe deeply. I did. The smell was dense and close, but there was also the suggestion of citrus—a far-off orange.

  What would it be like, he asked, to smell our whole world at once? Our whole history? If this wheel were us, what would it smell like? Agrippa thought it would smell like engine exhaust.

  He seemed barely to eat, and the things he did eat were strange: extremely funky yogurt, strained and thickened, along with tiny wild radishes foraged in the far corners of the airfield.

  Once, I asked him: Do you … shower? He shrugged and said: The last time I showered was before I arrived here. Almost a year ago.

  A year without a shower! The idea of it made my skin crawl. And he did have a ripeness to him, but like the cheese he created, it wasn’t unpleasant. Agrippa had achieved equilibrium. He had won the inhabitants of his underarms to his cause.

  One day, Agrippa said: I dream of a great council of fermentation. Beer. Sauerkraut. Kimchi! Have you had kimchi? I love kimchi.

  My phone reception was terrible on the airfield. It was an uncanny spot: really truly in the center of everything—with San Francisco’s skyline visible across the water, the great bustle of the Port of Oakland across the channel, Oakland’s own downtown rising in the other direction, the Marrow Fair beneath us—yet it felt utterly desolate and disconnected. It was amazing to see the goats grazing here in the calm eye of a storm of trade and transit.

  I came to visit again the next day, and the next. Mainly, I listened to Agrippa talk. When he didn’t talk, I followed him around, enjoying the silence. I followed him into the bunker, tried to see what he saw in the developing wheels of cheese. Mostly, I failed. I tried to be helpful. He would show me how to do something, and I would do it.

  I milked a goat.

  I learned how he made his cheese. He painted it. Literally: He painted bacteria and fungi onto the wheel. Dipped a brush into a scummy pool of some culture, dragged long wet strokes across the curd’s pale surface. In the cave, after weeks of development, these strokes took on texture and color, became deep blue or hot pink or flame orange, or even exhibited a ghostly bioluminescence.

  I had my first tiny breakthrough when I looked at one of his painted wheels and saw not a lump of milk by-product inoculated with bacteria, but a map, color-coded just like an atlas. For a moment, I saw the battle lines. There were mighty armies on the march, billions strong or more, deploying biochemical matériel, fighting a war that was going to take, on their timescale, millennia or more, maybe millions of years, because it was for them an evolutionary timescale. They could change. The organisms that won the war might not be the organisms that began it. For a moment, I saw it. Blue and pink and orange.

  I found Agrippa farther back in the bunker.

  “I saw it,” I told him. That’s all.

  He looked at me—his face changed, eyes narrowed, then opened again—and he nodded once. “Good. Now you know what to do with your starter.”

  Did I?

  I sat with the ceramic crock in the deck chair next to the Airstream. It was nighttime, past ten. The sun was down, but the Port of Oakland lit the airfield with a purgatorial glow. I wondered how the goats handled the strange light. They must have adapted.

  Agrippa and I were sipping experimental beers. I was a little bit drunk.

  “I think … my starter needs a warrior spirit,” I said.

  “It has a warrior spirit,” he said. “It was born with it.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “You need to give it something to fight.”

  “Like what?”

  “A rival. Another culture. Something from Big Sourdough.” He paused. “Is there such a thing as Big Sourdough?”

  I considered the question. The answer came to me.

  “I can use King Arthur,” I declared.

  “That’s flour, right?”

  “Yes, but, but but but”—I was getting excited—“they also sell a starter, they say it’s a hundred years old … They ship it to you. It’s really popular. They must make it by the barrel.”

  “Ohhhh,” he said. “Perfect. Get some of that. Put them in the arena together.”

  “What if the King Arthur wins?”

  “Hey now! You gotta believe in your starter,” he said. “It can hear you. It’s right there. You need to have a warrior spirit, too! Lead the way!”

  I stood up. Stared down into the crock. The pale gray scum was no less pale, gray, or scummy than ever before. “Are you ready to fight?” I asked it.

  “There you go,” Agrippa said.

  “Are you ready to fight?” I cried.

  “There you go!”

  “Are you ready to fight?!”

  I held the crock over my head and stomped my feet. A starburst of shadows spun around me, cast by the lights of the bridge and the port and the city and the brewery, all the lights of civilization.

  Agrippa got up, too, and started howling and dancing along. The goats stayed on the far side of the airfield—wisely—but Hercules the alpaca wandered closer, curious.

 

  WHAT NEXT? Beyond the great rocky island, the world was shifting, and now the richest trade routes crossed other seas. Fewer ships stopped at the jetty; fewer sailors bought beer and bread. But the Mazg were still full of ambition! They had hardly begun their story. They used their accumulated wealth to acquire ships of their own, and armed themselves, and became pirates.

  For a while, this was extremely successful. When Mazg pirates stormed a ship, they had the advantage, always, for while the other crew was sick from moldy rations, the pirates were strong from rations made of mold. The great rocky island was now a single enormous fortress-pantry, teeming with the fluttering, wobbling culture that sustained the Mazg. They sang their songs louder. They sang them faster. They were hungry. They were unstoppable!

  They didn’t realize the danger they were in. Something important had been lost. In case it’s not obvious—it’s easier to communicate this when you tell the story out loud, like my uncle does—this story wants you to think that maybe that something was humility.

  After a long season of piracy, one of the roving ships of the Mazg returned to the great rocky island only to find that the great rocky island was gone. In its place there was a floating forest of fungus with fluttering ribs and wobbling tendrils, many times larger than the great rocky island had ever been. While they watched in horror, it fluttered and wobbled and … burped.

  Lost was the kingdom of the Mazg—eaten, in the end, by its own food.

  That last ship fled to land. The Mazg aboard carried in their crocks the culture of the cave, and in their memories the songs. Everything else was lost.

  It’s just a story. There’s another one, about a girl named Mazga
who steals the culture from the queen of the dead. In that story, the songs are the memories of sad souls, and they are needed to trick the culture into believing it’s still in the underworld. Shehrieh likes that one better.

  Me, I like the pirates.

  THE FALL OF CAMELOT

  THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COMPANY began as a Boston-based importer in 1790 and introduced its own American-grown wheat flour in 1896. Since 2004, it’s been one hundred percent employee-owned, which is pretty cool. The company’s headquarters, now located in Vermont, is an enormous twelve-sided building called Camelot.

  From Camelot’s website, I ordered the King Arthur sourdough starter (a single ounce) and paid extra for expedited shipping. The UPS driver delivered it to Cabrillo Street in a plain brown box. Inside, there was a very small plastic tub with a white screw-on lid.

  I carried the King Arthur starter to Alameda, transferred it into a larger container, and began to feed it on the same schedule as the Clement Street starter. It grew eagerly, bubbling and expanding. Where the Clement Street starter smelled faintly of bananas, the King Arthur smelled strongly of flour, with maybe a touch of vinegar. I got the sense that’s how sourdough starter was supposed to smell. Its surface was wet and gloppy; there was no suggestion of the silvery tautness that was the signature of the Clement Street starter’s occasional sentience.

  I tried to see it through Agrippa’s eyes—imagined the King Arthur starter a civilization on the rise. Was it bland, a bit boring? Maybe, but so was my own human civilization. I imagined myself as a cell down there among the teeming trillions. Maybe I was happy. Maybe I was excited for the future.

  Then I carried the King Arthur starter across my workstation to meet its neighbor. It was time for an apocalypse.

  I portioned off a section of the Clement Street starter, noting its despondence, and dropped it into a fresh tub—a great arena—then added the King Arthur and swirled them together. The mixture turned an even gray. For just a moment, I wondered if I had made a miscalculation, and if the King Arthur, with its Protestant work ethic, might be the stronger substance.