by Robin Sloan
I whispered encouragements to the home team. “You’re Alexander the Great. Rising China. Everybody better get out of your way.”
The starters spasmed in slow motion. The tub frothed with gas, emitted gouts of scent new and strange: not only bananas and flour but also orange peel, Earl Grey, gunpowder. Was I detecting signal flares launched above a vast battlefield? Or was it the wreckage of war—the broken remnants of armies cleaved apart? Was I smelling corpses?
It took an hour. By the end of it, the scent of flour was gone, and the Clement Street starter was frothing, victorious. I hadn’t seen it so lively since the early days, before the Marrow Fair, before anything.
I added this rampant culture to a tub with flour and water and salt and I mixed the dough myself. It bucked and surged; it was uncanny. I formed a loaf and nothing stuck to my fingers. Silvery and taut, this was sourdough on a wartime footing.
The finished loaf emerged from the Faustofen perfectly round and buoyant. Its face bore a new expression: an even, distant look, hollow-eyed like a statue from antiquity. It was a face full of grim purpose. When I tapped it on its back, I heard an echoing boom.
LOIS! I haven’t heard from you in a while. How is your robot doing? How’s the starter?
TEND YOUR GARDEN
THE CLEMENT STREET STARTER had changed, perhaps irrevocably. Before, I sustained it with inert flour. Now it would accept only living fuel, and only in large quantities.
Every morning was a new conquest. The starter was jubilant, and I was back on track, production-wise. I had the volume of starter I needed, which meant I could mix the amount of dough I required, which meant I could bake enough bread to supply Chef Kate every day and, with luck, meet the demand that was imminent.
But as the mornings passed, I grew uneasy. The floury scent of the King Arthur starter was so innocent. When I scooped up the little utopia and dropped it into the arena with the Clement Street starter, I felt a twinge of … something. More than a twinge. It was as if trillions of voices suddenly cried out in terror …
Agrippa’s logic had led me to this strategy, and to the survival of the Clement Street starter. But Agrippa’s logic also demanded that I see it this way: not as a simple kitchen operation, but as a clash of civilizations.
It seemed silly to attach such a grandiose label to something so small … but was it really small? There had to be a scale somewhere—the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings—upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.
To them, I was the cosmic super-being, and what did I wreak with my vast and implacable powers? Total war. Utter annihilation.
I oscillated between finding this vision totally ridiculous and finding it deadly serious.
The bread had never been better! The faces in the crust were stoic and satisfied. Some of the scent of domination lingered in the finished loaves. Lily Belasco noticed the difference. “It’s a bit … peaty,” she said. “How do you do that?”
What I thought was: Well, every morning, I sacrifice a teeming civilization to the Clement Street war machine.
What I said was: “Who knows! Ha-ha! Sourdough is complicated!”
Agrippa had solved my problem, and he had created a new one.
I’d known the Clement Street starter wasn’t normal, of course, but I honestly hadn’t realized the depth of its strangeness until now, because the King Arthur starter was very normal. It was happy and dopey like a big brown dog. It had no special high-maintenance desires. It just wanted to grow.
I let it.
Every day, the Clement Street starter required a larger sacrifice. It was absurd: I was brewing the King Arthur starter in garbage bins. Now, instead of adding the King Arthur to the Clement Street, I did the reverse. Only the tiniest trace of the culture of the Mazg was required. I tipped a cup over and deployed a dollop of hunter/killer starter, potent and relentless. In just fifteen minutes it would sweep through the whole bin, destroying/consuming/reproducing, venting plumes of banana and gunpowder. When it was finished, nothing of the happy floury folk remained.
* * *
AS I WAS DOING THIS, I was also reading the book that Charlotte Clingstone had selected from Horace’s library and left for me, Candide—her café’s namesake.
It was, unexpectedly, a screwball action comedy. The hapless main character, whose name was Candide, traveled with a band of companions from Europe to the New World and back. Along the way, characters were flogged, shipwrecked, enslaved, and nearly executed several times. There were earthquakes and tsunamis and missing body parts.
One of Candide’s companions, Pangloss, whose name I recognized from the hundred-dollar adjective he inspired—I’d never known the etymology—insisted throughout that all their misfortunes were for the best, for they delivered the companions into situations that seemed, at first, pretty good. Until those situations, too, went to shit.
The story concluded on a small farm outside Istanbul, where Candide plunked a hoe into the dirt and declared his intention to retreat from adventure (and suffering) and simply tend his garden.
The way the author told it—the book was written in 1759—it was clear I was supposed to think Candide had finally discovered something important.
I could see why the book appealed to Charlotte Clingstone. It was a rejection of ambition; a blueprint for her small, perfect, human-scale restaurant—a safe space set apart from the scrum of the world.
* * *
NOW THAT THE CLEMENT STREET STARTER was back on track, even if distressingly, I had to contend with my other limitations. The Vitruvian was working as fast as possible, but not fast enough. I needed another arm, but that wasn’t in the budget. Not yet.
So I joined it.
We stood side by side. I watched it work, every so often adjusting my motions to match its hyperefficiency. The student became the master.
Other vendors, in the days before the market’s public launch, had started to stay overnight. They unrolled sleeping bags in the lemon grove and slept there. I joined them.
The depot sustained me. I wolfed down cricket cookies and tube-fish tacos and Lembas cakes, which had somehow gotten even worse—now both gritty and gluey—but they kept me going. I drank ten coffees a day. When Naz wasn’t around, I operated the espresso machine myself, and my drinks were quadruple shots.
I was working more hours than I ever had at General Dexterity, but here, I was ecstatic. I hardly worried about anything; for days I would enter states of perfect flow, eating/drinking/feeding/folding/baking/sleeping. While I slept, the Vitruvian still worked.
Then, one morning, I overslept beneath the lemon trees. I must have looked mildly postapocalyptic as I sprinted up the concourse: hair wild, eyes dimmed, clothes stale with bits of cricket cookie on them.
When I reached my workstation, I discovered the tub that contained the Clement Street starter tipped onto its side, and a taut, silvery tendril extending outward, reaching for the King Arthur where it waited in its garbage bin. The tendril flexed and flowed. The Vitruvian had retracted and was watching it warily. It wasn’t programmed to handle this.
The sight jolted me out of whatever dream I’d been lost in.
This was not okay.
I had to stop. I had to figure out what I was dealing with.
* * *
I ROSE FROM MY SLEEPING BAG in the middle of the night. The depot was quiet, powered down. The only light came from the grow rooms.
I carried the Clement Street starter in front of me—now transferred back into its ceramic crock, quarantined—and padded in my socks toward Jaina Mitra’s laboratory.
There, I found the hulking sequencer, the ILLUMINA HYPER CENSUS, its plastic carapace gleaming in the darkness, a line of pinprick status lights rippling silently. It seemed to be twiddling its thumbs.
I fumbled around the lab, looking for one of the sample plates. I opened one cabinet, fo
und the Lembas cakes assembling themselves, closed it. Opened another. There.
Jaina Mitra had only needed a tiny bit of Horace’s saliva. I dabbed my finger into the crock and let a dollop of starter ooze onto the plate. I pressed the button to open the machine, and its tray extended, along with a wash of blue light from its glowing heart. I put the sample plate into the tray and pressed the button again. It was simple; there was only one button to press. This machine that could crack the code of life was easier to operate by far than the Faustofen, or even my microwave.
The machine reclaimed the tray and began to hum.
I whispered an apology for the massacre to come. Then I sat on the floor.
Minutes passed. The hum gave way to the pulse of abrasion, then a high-pitched whine. Then silence.
I would take the information I gleaned from this machine and enter it into an expedient internet search engine. There would be something, surely, about this organism. A warning. A remedy.
I was waiting for the machine to chime, but there was no chime.
I wandered through the sleeping depot, carrying the Clement Street starter with me in its crock.
I wandered through Horace’s library. Up and down the vehicle ramp. Through a loop of corridors I’d never found before, which deposited me back near the door to the tiny pier. Then I followed the corridor toward the cricket farm. I could hear them chirping.
This time, I pressed ahead.
They lived in row houses made from corrugated cardboard and superfine netting. I saw them milling around, climbing on top of one another, jumping and flickering, chittering and chirping.
What were the epic sagas of the cricket kingdom?
From back in the concourse, I heard a low and commanding chime.
HUNGER
LATER THAT MORNING, with the first light of day peeking in through the skylight above the lemon grove, I was forming one set of loaves while the arm mixed a batch of dough when Jaina Mitra appeared, fully suited up in her lab coat again.
I curled my face into the beginning of an apology, but she held up a hand preemptively. “I’m not angry,” she said. “Well, I am. You should have just accepted my offer and let me help you. But it doesn’t matter.”
I stood there with a cold lump of dough in my hands. “Is that all, then?”
Jaina Mitra’s nostrils flared. “Not by a long shot.” The slashes under her eyes seemed darker than usual. She tossed a printout onto the countertop. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I recognized the spiky cascade from the screen attached to the sequencer; it was exactly what I’d seen in the middle of the night, found inscrutable, emailed to myself, and, after reviewing it in the morning, still found inscrutable. This printout was wildly annotated in bright green ink—little blobs and whorls and, above the graph, an exclamation in Jaina Mitra’s blocky handwriting: WOW!
“Listen to what I’m saying,” she said. “Sourdough starter is a community of organisms. You know that, right?”
“Yes. Of course.” Everett Broom taught me that.
“Generally, there are two or three different species living together. That’s what they say at the bread lab.”
“There’s a bread lab?”
“Washington State. They do very good work. Maybe four species can live together in a stable community. But this is the sequencer’s report on your starter. You saw this?” I nodded, and Jaina Mitra snorted lightly. “I almost cried.”
She smoothed the printout flat on the countertop and pulled a green-barreled pen from her lab coat.
“This here”—she indicated the graph’s broadest peak with the pen’s tip—“this is the yeast. And this”—she indicated another peak—“is Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.” She pronounced it carefully. “These—” She danced the tip of her pen along a series of sharper spikes. “These are matches for bacteria in the Global Microbiome Survey. It adds up to a lot more than four, obviously.” Then she traced a wide box around the series of spikes that rippled along the graph’s floor. “And these—there are so many of them—these are novel.” She raised both eyebrows.
Apparently that did not impress me as much as it should have.
“Meaning,” she went on, “there are no matches in the library. That, by itself, isn’t so strange; like I told you, my cabinet is full of novel organisms. What’s strange is finding this many taxa, known and unknown, living together in an apparently stable community.” She paused. Looked at me. Over at my workstation. Back at me. “It is stable, isn’t it?”
It felt like she was asking about me, not the starter. “I’ve been baking with this starter for months. I got it from a baker who had it for—years? Yes, it’s stable.”
She tsked. It was a tsk of awe. “There must be a hundred constituents! The smallest spikes might be noise—it’s hard to tell. But even so, this many! It’s a scale and complexity of commensal behavior beyond anything I’ve ever seen or read about.” Jaina Mitra looked like she wanted to shake me. “It is unreal.”
* * *
WE SAT WITH OUR ESPRESSO CUPS beneath the lemon trees and I told her the starter’s story. Jaina Mitra did not make a good audience; her gaze was hard and hungry, and she scrawled notes as I spoke, page after page of them in green ink. She made me nervous.
I finished by explaining the starter’s decline, my consultation with Stephen Agrippa, its resurgence, and my concern that I’d taken it too far. Because I didn’t understand what I was working with.
Jaina Mitra stared down at her notes. “Everyone in my field is obsessed with identifying new organisms,” she murmured. “It’s like a treasure hunt. But I already have the organisms I need. I just can’t put them together.” She looked up, staring into space. “How do their communities work? I try…” She sighed raggedly. “When I move one piece, the others don’t fit anymore. When I turn one knob, the other knobs eat it for dinner. My new batch is worse than ever. Do you know what makes it so sticky? It’s not the enzymes. It’s what the enzymes produce. Dead cells. Lysed bacteria. Corpses!”
The gluey taste of death. Great.
Jaina Mitra was showing me something real, and it ran a little ragged, and it made me like her a little more. Like, two percent more.
She laid her hands flat on her notebook. “I’d like to study your starter.”
“I don’t think it’s going to solve your problem.” I said it as lightly as I could.
Her face was a mask of control. “It might. Please. We could work together.” She was suddenly sweet and solicitous, and it was very strange. She should have stayed sharp and brusque. She should have commanded: Let me work with that muck of yours! I would have complied in a moment.
THE SLURRY FACTORY
IT WAS THE DAY BEFORE the Marrow Fair’s grand opening, and I was relaxing at my workstation, satisfied with my ability to produce enough sourdough, wasting time on the internet, and still thinking about Jaina Mitra’s offer when she appeared again to announce she wanted to show me something that could, or should, influence my decision. It involved a car trip, and could I take the afternoon off? I accepted. I had the feeling, suddenly, that I’d been down in the darkness of the depot for too long.
A year in California and I’d rarely been south of Daly City, never stepped foot in San Jose, and barely contemplated the existence of the San Joaquin Valley.
Driving down California State Route 99 in the passenger seat of Jaina Mitra’s blue Tesla, the rightmost lane was taken up completely by semis hauling trailers, and beyond them endless orchards, silvery olive trees alternating with spiky almond trees, solid green to the horizon. The San Joaquin Valley’s existence was confirmed.
We watched a pickup truck with a portable toilet in its bed crawling along an access road, keeping pace with the pickers who were sweeping across the field in a loose line.
There were structures that poked out in places: immense, featureless white warehouses, like big-box stores before any branding had been applied. We saw grain elevators, smelled feedlots.
>
Jaina Mitra eased onto an exit ramp and turned onto a long, straight road called Avenue 16. We passed a neon-green tractor lumbering on the shoulder and I waved to its driver, who waved back. Farther up, we watched a small plane fly in low arcs over a vast field of pistachio trees, leaving a trail of pink vapor. I fumbled with the Tesla’s control panel and set the AC to recirculate.
We turned off Avenue 16 onto Road 23. There were too many long, straight roads out here to bother with names.
A semi was rattling up the road, coming in the opposite direction. The trailer it hauled was painted bright green, and as it passed, I saw a familiar logotype rendered in crisp white. That semi was hauling nutritive gel.
This was Slurry country.
The facility was ahead. It was enormous, one mile square, a tangle of towering vats with pipes and valves embroidering their surfaces, all of it bounded by loading docks where more bright green trailers were waiting. Train tracks ran straight through the facility; Slurry could be lowered in containers directly onto freight cars and hauled away to Chicago or New York or the Port of Oakland and points beyond.
Olive trees lined the long driveway that led from Road 23 into the facility. Beneath the trees, fruit rotted in dark piles.
* * *
“THIS FACILITY USED TO BELONG TO GALLO,” Jaina Mitra said. “They made like ten percent of the country’s wine here.”
A man was crossing the parking lot to meet us. He was tall and bald and frighteningly gaunt, waving energetically, his lips pressed flat in an enthusiastic smile.
“Dr. Mitra! Yes! And our guest of honor!”
“This is Dr. Klamath,” Jaina Mitra said. Her face was cheery but her eyes betrayed a sense of duty. “Founder and CEO of Slurry.”
“I prefer Chief Nutrition Officer!” He gave Jaina Mitra a feather-light hug, then offered his hand to me. Taking it, I encountered a palm of extraordinary dryness.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “See the sights. Dr. Mitra told me you’re a Slurry subscriber—well, it all comes from here.”
