Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  “Damn!” Kris breathed after the camouflaged lift had dropped them four stories into a space that reminded her of Ali Baba’s cave, if it had been taken over by kobolds. Her father, before his retreat into failed marriages and the wastelands of alcoholism, was given to telling her bedtime stories, and she retained a three-year-old’s confused impression of a few of these fairytales. As a mining engineer, he would’ve had a considerable acquaintance with caves, but (being a colonial who would hardly have had an opportunity to set foot on Earth), she was sure he’d never encountered anything like this.

  This place was enormous, with a vaulted ceiling so high above it was lost in gloom. The whole interior was lit with drift-lamps, some as dim as candles, a few like tiny suns, and others just multicolored swarms of pixy lights. These lights wandered among the heaps and stacks and baskets and cases of every kind of comestible and foodstuff that a gustatorily obsessed mind could conceive of, rather like (or so Kris thought) lost souls searching for the exit.

  Completing a slow pirouette, she shook her head. “What is all this?”

  “Just Foods.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s just food. I can see that”—assuming he was teasing her.

  “I mean that’s the name. Just Foods. It’s kind of play on words—everything’s organic.”

  “Organic? What else would it be? It’s food.”

  Huron chuckled. “Well, yes. But in this case, it means that it’s farmed. No vat meat. No cultured veggies. Nothing synthesized.”

  “Farmed. As in dirt?”

  “Yep. Hand cultivated. Sort of a gimmick, and a lot of people make fun of it, but it does taste better.”

  “And you pay extra for this?” Growing up on Parson’s Acre, Kris had lived on a farm—only the very poorest people there did not farm—and everything was grown in dirt. Special dirt, that had the heavy metals and some strange local chemical compounds removed, but still dirt, and when the crops failed—which they often did—you ate ration packs. Those were more expensive, because they had to be imported. Making a fetish out of growing food in dirt made just as much sense as anything else on this planet.

  “Think of it as keeping an art form alive.”

  Grubbing in dirt as an art form? Yeah. Totally nuts.

  “I was thinking of fish”—redirecting her thoughts to the subject at hand.

  Right. Dinner. “Sure. Fish is good.”

  “Halibut or swordfish?”

  Now she was getting interested. “That thing you do with the nuts?”

  “The swordfish with a pesto and pistachio crust?”

  “That!”

  “Okay”—with a smile. “Grilled asparagus with shaved asiago and truffles, or a salad?”

  “Both?”

  “Okay. Both. Goat cheese in the salad?”

  “Yeah—that really good kind.”

  “Chevre de Bellay?”

  “Uh huh. And those red oranges.”

  “Sure you don’t wanna add toasted macadamias to that?”

  “Can we?”

  “Sure. Swordfish, Chevre de Bellay, toasted macadamias, asparagus and blood oranges. Good.” His smile spread to one side and they shared a quick kiss. “Objectives assigned. Move out.”

  “How d’ya know where you’re going?” Kris asked after almost a dozen apparently random turns. Huron seemed to be navigating like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Which was fine for him, but what did ordinary mortals do? “There’s not even a directory”—holding up her xel in bewilderment.

  “Actually there is,” he replied, threading his nonchalant way through a wilderness of flowers. “But you gotta ask for it.”

  “Ask who?” Kris figured that if this place had a staff, they were probably hiding under something.

  “That’s the tricky part.”

  “Here.” Huron handed her a large bunch of fresh basil. Arms busy with the fish, nuts, two kinds of cheese, three heads of garlic and a couple of oranges, she snaked out a hand for the basil. Huron was holding the asparagus and the salad greens. “I think that’s it?”

  “Are we gonna carry all this?” Kris asked, juggling the load.

  “Why not?” he replied, with perfect unreason. “They deliver—that’s what most people do—but they charge quite a bit. I don’t like paying for it.”

  Right. The guy who owns worlds doesn’t wanna spring for delivery. Now that makes sense.

  “We’ll grab a bag on the way out.”

  “Uh huh.” Should she be thankful they were planning a light dinner? But Huron looked like he still might be foraging. Was he thinking of breakfast too? That pale greenish thing he was holding did look kinda like an egg. A big scaly egg.

  At that moment, Huron abandoned his examinations of the ripe cherimoyas. “Time to declare victory?”

  “Sure.” No scaly eggs for breakfast, then. At least they looked more edible than some of things she was seeing. Like those plants over in the next bin but one. “So what are those?”

  “What?” he asked, missing her pointed look.

  “Those things in that bin. They look like big spiky weeds. The round things”—when he still didn’t follow her.

  “Oh. Artichokes.”

  “What do you do with them?” They were awful homely for decorations—nothing like the enormous array of fresh flowers they’d walked through on the way here.

  “Eat them.”

  “Eat them?” Kris thrust her burden unceremoniously into his arms and walked over. Picking up a stalk, she snapped off a thick, gray-green, fibrous leaf. Inspecting it for a moment, she looked back at him. “This?”

  He nodded. A few other patrons were covertly pausing to take in the show.

  “How?”

  “It’s a bit . . . inobvious.”

  “I guess,” she muttered.

  “Grab a couple. I’ll show you.”

  Kris flicked the mauled leaf back into the bin and looked at the others, still dubious. “Alright.”

  * * *

  “You hungry?” With their purchases wrapped and sealed in a pair of insulated sacks, and having made it to the exit without incident, Huron nodded towards the escalators that led to the main arcade.

  “Hockey give you an appetite?” Kris asked with an indulgent smile. She never felt like eating much for an hour or two after exercising, but Huron got ravenous. But then, he had a metabolism like a furnace, as she’d learned from sleeping next to him.

  “How’d you guess? I know a nice little place.”

  With Huron, that could mean anything. His tastes ran from sushi in Osaka to foie gras in Vienna to Delhi kebabs or Rangoon curries, and once they’d flown to Tasmania for oysters, which Kris had found briny and unpleasant. Though less unpleasant than a spectacularly bad experience she’d had at the Academy with these things they told her were “prairie oysters”—and the deep-fried catfish he got her made up for it.

  “What kinda place?”

  “Medium-greasy cheeseburgers. Right here.”

  “Here?” She pointed at the ground beneath her feet for clarification.

  “Yeah. Just a few entrances down.”

  “Oh.” Kris had yet to have a cheeseburger, medium greasy or otherwise. Other than Huron’s globe-spanning perambulations, her introduction to cuisine had been mostly aboard ship, and Trafalgar’s mess was overseen by a mess president under the watchful eye (and thumb) of Commander t’Laren. Isabeau t’Laren was an excellent executive officer in most respects, but her notions of a proper diet were both traditional and rigid. She even maintained the outdated practice of having banyan days, when no meat was served, twice a week. (This was mainly a concession to Trafalgar’s Nedaeman officers—Nedaema being a vegetarian society—for the CEF did not officially tolerate culturally specific practices.) Cheeseburgers were a Terran habit, and t’Laren would no more have countenanced them on her menu than she would have allowed shoptalk, smoking in the mess, or passing the port the wrong way (a sin which Kris had had the misfortune to commit twice).

  �
�I’ll go for a cheeseburger.”

  “Excellent. You won’t be disappointed.”

  Not disappointed, but more than a little mystified. Cheeseburgers, it turned out, came in a multiplicity of forms that took up three columns on the handwritten board over the counter of the small shop Huron led them to. Someone who supposed they possessed a degree of literary flair had named them, resulting in choices like: Ol’ Hickory, Minnesota Fats, El Gordo Loco (utterly obscure), and Moby Dick (she didn’t even want to think about that).

  After a half minute of minor anguish, Huron interceded with a suggestion. “Just get the bacon burger with sharp cheddar.”

  “Okay.” She repeated the order to the skinny kid with a pale shock of kinetic hair behind the counter.

  “Everything?” he asked in a lazy adenoidal voice.

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  The kid made a scrawl on a slip of plaspaper.

  “Pickles?” Huron remarked quietly from behind her shoulder.

  “Oh—yeah. No pickles.”

  The kid scratched across his scrawl. Then he looked up. “Want fries?”

  “Fries?” Was he asking how she wanted it cooked? The sign outside read: Gott’s Cheeseburgers. Grilled Fresh To Order! Grilled, not fried. “I, um . . .”

  “French fries.” The kid, realizing Kris was not from these parts, poked at the menu with his stylus.

  French, Kris knew, was a dead language, once spoken in France, which had been a major polity in Western Europe before the Troubles. The Paris Conurban was the surviving remnant of it—she and Huron had been there a few times. But how this might to relate to frying—

  “They’re potatoes,” Huron murmured. “Deep-fried potatoes.”

  “Oh!” Kris brightened amazingly. “Yeah! Fries.”

  With a sigh, the kid amended his note, turned and clipped it to a rotating apparatus on a ledge behind him that separated them from the kitchen. A gnarled hand immediately snatched it off.

  “And for you, sir?” he addressed Huron expectantly.

  Sir, huh? Glancing at Huron sidelong, as she moved to one side.

  “Moby Dick, no mayo. Extra onions, with fries.”

  Bearing their laden plates—Huron’s requiring two hands to support the monstrosity he’d ordered—they went to claim a table. Hers was by no means small and she’d be lucky to get through half of it, especially with that mound of thickly julienned potatoes, deep fried to a fine tawny color and emitting an absolutely divine aroma. Squeezing into a corner booth with a small rickety table ahead of Huron, she incautiously bit into several before even putting her plate down and yelped.

  “Yeah, they do stay hot longer than you’d think,” he said as he slid into his seat.

  Kris felt her upper lip tenderly. It probably wasn’t gonna blister. “What’s up with writing stuff down?” she asked as she waited for them to assume a safe temperature. “And that sign and everything.”

  He leaned to one side, observing his burger as if setting up his angle of attack. The damn thing must’ve been twenty centimeters high. “Just kinda set in their ways. How are they?”—nodding at her plate.

  She tested another one. “Awesome!”

  “Glad to hear it.” Inspecting his burger’s top bun, Huron gave his head a slight shake with that cockeyed smile.

  “What?” Kris asked, looking up from her French fries. The burger could wait.

  “Mayonnaise.” He scraped the bun on the edge of his plate, leaving a drift of white goo.

  “I thought you told ’em not to.”

  “I did. Sometimes they remember. Other times not.”

  “Ya gonna say something?”

  “Nope”—reassembling the towering stack and tucking the slab of red onion back in place.

  “Why not?”

  He gently compacted the mass, and nodded towards the counter. “Y’see that gray-haired guy back there?”

  Kris glanced over her shoulder. “Yeah.”

  “That’s Dittmer. He owns this place—it’s been in his family for three generations. He’s about a hundred and ten. He knew my grandfather. I’ve been eating here since I was six.”

  “So?”

  “So Dittmer likes mayo. He slathers it on damn near everything out of habit. Always has.”

  “So?”

  “So a guy who’s been feeding me burgers since I was six is gonna put mayo on them no matter what I say. Yes, I can take it back and he’ll laugh and make it again, but what’s the point? Dittmer isn’t gonna change and I don’t want him to. I like him the way he is. So when he forgets, I just scrape off the mayo and call it good.”

  Kris looked again at her plate. “I don’t get this sometimes. Off-world, you’re like almighty fuckin’ god. They bow down and you rearrange their whole economy and everything to suit—whatever—and here you can’t get them to not put white goo on what you’re eating?”

  Inwardly, he sighed. “It’s all about . . . context. That’s business. This is where I grew up. Around here, people—like Dittmer—sometimes put mayonnaise on your burger whether you want them to or not. That’s how it is. That why I like it here. Godhead’s a tiresome gig.”

  She picked up a fry and inspected it before biting it in half. “Yeah. Okay. I guess I get that.”

  “Yeah, I can see how it might take some getting used to.”

  Yeah. Some.

  Huron lifted the gargantuan burger adroitly.

  How’s he gonna eat that thing? Then: Jeezus Christ! She knew he’d picked the call-sign Viper for their wing, but not that he could unhinge his jaw like one. Chewing peacefully, he nodded at the wire rack containing some cutlery in the middle of the table.

  “No shame in cutting that thing in half, if you want. Might make it easier.”

  That made sense—especially if she didn’t want most of it to end up in her lap. She reached out for a knife, and proceeded to saw the thing in half. The first bite made her smile. The second made her smile wider. “Okay, you scored. I’m a convert.”

  “Just as I had foreseen.” He had to fit the smug comment around more burger. They munched together awhile in contented silence. Kris put hers down to deal with the few remaining fries, and the start of a new program on the several consoles set about the walls abruptly caught her eye. At first, a quizzical frown puckered her brow. Then she sat back, lips pale. Huron turned to look.

  The consoles were all showing a retrospective on Mariwen Rathor. Kris blinked rapidly several times and slid her gaze away.

  “I didn’t know it was her birthday.” Her voice was a dense, barely audible whisper.

  “Yeah . . .” He hadn’t remembered himself. If he had, he may have reconsidered his choice of lunch venue. Not that he could have readily found one without consoles—or even should have tried. “Loralynn, are you okay?”

  She gave her head a shake: the abrupt tremor of someone shocked awake. “Yeah. Fine.”

  He leaned back in his chair. He’d seen that look before. You were wise to walk soft around it. “Would you like to know how she’s doing?”

  “Why?”

  “I got a message from Marc a couple of days ago. He told me he’s been talking to Antoine. They have some ideas about a new therapy—”

  “Rafe?” Looking up, her hazel eyes were wet and bleached to a dull gray-green. “Can we just go?”

  “Sure. Go ahead. I’ll wrap this up.”

  ~ ~ ~

  198 Days Earlier

  Bungalally Heights;

  The Grampians, Republic of Victoria, Terra, Sol

  “What do you think?” Marcus Huron asked, leaning forward, an intent look in his blue eyes. He had never developed the knack of disguising his feelings, quite unlike his celebrated older half-brother. That, Antoine Rathor thought, probably accounted for Marc being the most reclusive of the three siblings. His position as a senior staff physicist at Forbes-Dyson Gravitic System in Melbourne did not require him to be in the public eye, and this immense ranch just north of the Grampians not only provided a rare d
egree of solitude but plenty of scope for pursuing his enthusiasms, chief of which was horse breeding. Many thousands roamed the ranch, including some quite ancient breeds, where they mingled a few species of formerly endangered antelope and a herd of camels.

  “Quite intriguing,” Antoine commented, leafing through the thick folio on the table between them. They were sitting alone in a pleasant room of indeterminate character, where Marc had been explaining his ideas over sparkling iced chimarrão. Unlike his ranch, the dwelling was a modest affair, and its décor rambled amiably from Art Deco to Chinoiserie to a dining room out of the Arabian Nights, with a surprising amount of grace. This room managed to combine the openness of a solarium with the intimacy of a parlor, and reflected Nedaeman tastes: unfinished woods, undyed raw silk, and no metal anywhere. The only vibrant color came from the many orchids, set strategically in niches—a poignant touch for Antoine, for Mariwen loved them so.

  “I wished I’d had time to be more thorough.” Marc fidgeted with the tall frosted glass to one side of the document. “The primary sources are nearly prehistoric, which makes them difficult to validate.”

  “No need to temporize.” Antoine returned to the summary page. He evaluated analytic reports for a living and this one was far above the common run. “So equine therapy was used mainly to treat these particular neurological disorders and autism?”

  “Those are the uses I could get good data on. New therapies for all those disorders became available only a few decades after equine therapy became recognized, so the baseline is not extensive and it never seems to have been widespread. Some of the claims do seem overblown, but there is a solid core of evidence. Not that I’d expect the medical establishment to agree. They’ll just think it’s Xanthus koi all over again.”

  Antoine acknowledged the comment with a polite nod. Xanthus koi were a genetically modified subspecies that have been developed on Iona. They were claimed to be effective in treating cases of chronic depression that did not yield to conventional therapies. You petted them, which was said to impart a sense of well-being, though exactly how was unclear. They’d been the fad-du-jour on Earth a decade or so back. However, the specimens being sold then were not the genuine article: Xanthus koi frequently succumbed to translation shock when traveling hyperlight, making it impractical to import them in any quantity. His office had become briefly involved as smuggling was initially suspected, but when it turned out to be just a run-of-the-mill fraud, they’d withdrawn from the case.