The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “And that’s why we pay Rèpondelle the big bucks,” a chef mutters—then, as if embarrassed to acknowledge she has broken the silence they have wrapped Kenna in, darts off to poke her finger into a tub of jellied larks’ tongues.

  And Paulius is woven through the night’s service, tasting, measuring, interrogating. The guests have sat down for their first drinks, and now is the critical time where The Sol Majestic’s perfection must be hammered into place. Paulius is everywhere, consulting on the look of this dish, searing a caul of cheese beneath the broiling flametongue of the salamander, debugging the bioprinter as it catches on a spool of carpaccio. Occasionally he stops to ruffle Kenna’s hair.

  But Kenna catches the signs of Paulius’s fatigue. The way he leans on his cane when no one’s looking. The delirious way he closes his eyes between tasks.

  He looks tireless, but Kenna sees the cost.

  The service draws closer. Kenna scurries through the bustle of hips and knife-tips to watch as the ingredients are combined into dishes. They are not food as he understands it. These are tiny blobs of taste positioned on a plate’s canvas, so beautiful Kenna would cringe to eat them; he imagines clumsy fingers sinking into the clean geometrical lines of a cut of fish that floats atop a shimmering river of degravitized salt water, smudging the clean ribbon of dark sauce artfully curved across the platter, and Kenna shivers in revulsion. Eating this art would be like peeing his name across a mural.

  Yet his stomach, his traitorous stomach, rumbles as the chefs spritz the trout with atomized air scented with the leafy scent of riverbanks, preserved from the planet the fish was caught in, tiny clouds caught and shaped by microgravity controllers to keep the fish moist as the moment it was caught—and to give diners the illusion that they are perched high in a tree, staring down through a dusky mist.

  The rhythm reaches a crescendo as Kenna counts each course brought out to the diners, savory dishes sweetening as they approach the dessert course. Twenty-three dishes. Twenty-four. He jerks awake, sitting on top of the humming ultrasound dishwasher. Is that twenty-five? Did he miss one? Despite the broth in his belly and the chunks of meat the chefs have passed him, Kenna feels his body extracting the last of the nutrients from everything he has eaten today, then trying to weave all that natural healthiness into bones made from expiration-date pastries. The effort sucks the sugar from his brain, his body falling into deep slumber as it closes down for repairs. Twenty-six dishes. He thinks. Twenty-seven.

  Darkness.

  A cheer hauls him out of paper-thin sleep. The night’s service is over. Kenna clambers down, furious he missed the excitement; the fumellier offers him a hit from the Majestic’s prodigious marijuana supplies. And why shouldn’t he? All the other chefs are taking tokes, popping open bottles of beer, celebrating another successful night. Kenna sucks the smoke in deep, chokes; everyone claps him on the back, offers him a glass of wine.

  Who knew the camaraderie that work brought? Mother and Father gestated their Inevitable Philosophies through scrupulous self-reflection, abandoning earthly bonds to generate certainty, but …

  The staff here is so joyous at having survived another night’s service that their celebratory good will overflows to anyone nearby.

  They joke that if they give him the best wine, Kenna will choose them. A boastful mock-scuffle breaks out, each chef claiming the dish they will make for the Inevitable Prince tomorrow. They interrogate Kenna as to his preferences; their sentences waft into the air like the marijuana smoke, skirling into nothingness, and Kenna stares at the fans overhead.

  Soon he is leaning against the ultrasound dishwasher, but the chefs push him aside; they clean pots, sing songs, discuss what repasts a transport ship hobo would find appetizing. Kenna tries to speak, but his tongue flops in his mouth like a fish the chefs have released from stasis. His words bubble in his skull like the bubbles in this champagne flute, fizzing out the top of his head and popping into nothingness …

  Someone carries him. Paulius. His gait is uncertain. Kenna tries to tell him to get his cane. But Paulius crouches over, tucks Kenna into a cot. There are a few other chefs in cots around him already, some snoring deeply, some reading, some blowing plumes of marijuana smoke into the vents.

  He’s not tired. There are still things to watch in The Sol Majestic. Kenna is no child. He is

  He is

  He is asleep. And for once, his dreams are not Inevitable, but fiercely, gloriously mundane.

  5

  The First Morning at Savor Station

  The one thing Kenna knows about beds is that you must fight for every minute you stay in them. Beds are a prized luxury on the transport ships. He has slept in one only seven times in his life. Four of those times have been in medi-clinics.

  A bed is a tiny vacation. Nobody’s feet are jabbing into your back, no stranger is stepping on your face. Your body heat suffuses the blankets, enfolding you in a warm hug from yourself.

  Yet the moment you exit the bed, the vacation is over. Beds are rented by the hour.

  So Kenna sleeps in the cot the same way he has slept in every bed: his fists knotted in the blankets, eyes squeezed shut, pretending to be asleep until an attendant ejects him from this soft kingdom.

  Except the chefs are getting up around him. They awake with a jolt, craning their necks around to see what got them up. Then they get up furtively, snatching their shoes from the floor, tapping a dozing friend on the way out and jerking their chins toward the door. Their friends mouth silent thanks before pulling on their shirts.

  It was like this on the ships, Kenna thinks. Ride long enough on any transport ship and you come to know the hum of the engines. There were merchants who lurked along the shipping lanes, offering to cut the transport captains in on their profits. If you heard the ship’s thrum shift from the steady pulse of long-distance haulage into the pitch of sublight speeds, you could position yourself by the docking bay to get first pick of the salesmen’s merchandise.

  Mother and Father had lectured Kenna over the way he’d sleep through anything: Once you have hauled your Inevitable Philosophy up to your conscious mind, Father had said, it will be as though words are written on every wall. You will not sleep; your dreams will prod you to action.

  Your childish dreams are anesthesia, Mother had said, disappointment inscribed on her face. They muffle your actions. How do you expect to acquire an Inevitable Philosophy, Kenna, staring at the insides of your eyelids?

  Except the insides of every transport ship held the same corroded walls, the same bullies waiting to mock the fallen Prince, the same reminders he couldn’t afford the upper decks’ sumptuous entertainments.

  Yet in The Sol Majestic, Kenna’s waking hours are better than dreams.

  Is this what an Inevitable Philosophy feels like?

  His head is light as a balloon; he lets the covers slip to the floor without a single regret. But there’s an orchard outside. And an Escargone, whatever that is. And a procession of half-naked chefs, sipping black coffee as they pad through the Majestic’s back corridors to the loading dock.

  The dock, lit by overhead fluorescents, is just large enough for pallets to be delivered from the inbound spaceships—a battered steel space, functional but not elegant, with shuttered delivery doors on every side. Thirty chefs have crowded in, whispering, their heads tilted like radar dishes toward some obscured cargo in the room’s center.

  Except as Kenna walks in, they each bob their head in respect and move backwards, their sleepy faces blossoming into cryptic smiles that they offer to him like gifts.

  Kenna would normally recoil from such welcome; boys are only friendly to him as cruel jokes, luring Kenna into revealing his hopes to them so they can fashion more cutting insults. Only scowls are honest.

  But this is already dreamlike. They were so kind last night.

  He thinks of Father, discussing his Inevitable Philosophy: each step will feel preordained, Kenna. Once you know what your life’s purpose is, you will walk fearless
ly into black depths.

  Loading docks are treacherous places, for a Philosopher. No Inevitable thoughts can be birthed in a place where men are reduced to cart animals—and if the poison of laborious sweat doesn’t befuddle your brain, the temptation of commercialized physical delights will.

  Yet the steel pallet doesn’t feel as though it could destroy Kenna’s future. It’s a waist-high pallet, wrapped in taut black plastic so no light-fingered dockworker is tempted by its contents.

  Yet it has no RFID tags dotting the plastic. Without scannable tags slapped across its surface, the station’s automated forklifts couldn’t have delivered this pallet here—knowledge Kenna feels soiled for knowing.

  “Paulius must have burned connections,” one whispers. The others bob their heads in agreement a tick too quickly; Kenna feels that soap-bubble consensus of convulsive affirmation, concurring before they’re forced to acknowledge they don’t actually know what that means.

  The chefs pace in slow circles around the pallet, keeping a cautious distance as though it might be radioactive—which it might be, for all Kenna knows. How could this even be here? Paulius welcomed him to the orchard less than eighteen hours ago. Kenna has spent his entire life traveling on ships, has catalogued their speeds: even if he assumes Paulius can afford the fastest of automated courier-ships, the ones that stick their cargo in stasis cubes so they don’t have to worry about crushing their human passengers to jelly, it would still take at least a week to get a shipment from the nearest systems out to Savor Station. Only military-grade ships can split dimensions, and that tech’s zealously restricted.

  As with most things, the rich are faster than the poor. But even the rich remain tethered to the laws of physics.

  Paulius could not possibly have summoned a dockful of Inevitable Philosophy supplies in less than a day.

  But how can Kenna be sure, unless he opens it?

  The pallet feels like a present to Kenna, or at least what he imagines a present would be if Mother and Father gave gifts. The chefs cloak the pallet in an eager silence, shushing each other’s theories as they jostle as close as they can get without actually claiming it, looking to Kenna as though he will preside over some unrehearsed ceremony.

  And Paulius is a showman, isn’t he? Wouldn’t it be like Paulius to leave a special supply cache for Kenna the Inevitable Prince to open?

  One gift couldn’t destroy his Philosophy, could it?

  Kenna presses his palm against the pallet’s smooth plastic.

  The chefs exhale, the orgasmic noise of a crowd watching fireworks explode.

  Emboldened, Kenna presses down. He wants to rip off the wrap in one convulsive gesture, but then he would know what’s inside. Kenna’s had so few pleasures, the joy of having something to anticipate is almost better than the pleasure itself.

  What’s underneath is soft. Kenna had expected to find a can’s hard ridges, or the firm crunch of some unknown vegetables, but the pallet’s soft as a pillow.

  What will it taste like? How will he eat it?

  He wedges his fingernail underneath the wrap …

  “Back, you savages!”

  A young woman as thin as a mantis pushes her way through the crowd, her cheekbones sharp enough to cut flesh. She wears a striped red-and-gold chef’s outfit—one of the highest ranks in Paulius’s kitchen, which Kenna finds comforting—but her sweat-stained collar is unsnapped, revealing light bronze skin flecked with blue mold. She wears great brass goggles with smoked lenses, so big Kenna would swear their weight should snap her scrawny neck; her short, straight black hair sticks out in every direction.

  She grips a wooden cask in her hands, brandishing it like a grenade.

  “You know what old Montgomery needs to live, you backstabbers!” she cries. “The sensation! The novelty! You’d bury me in a bland grave!”

  Kenna squints. The cask is not a weapon—it’s made of stained wood, the size of a bucket, blotched with wet mold-growth. Montgomery thrusts it forward, elbows locked, keeping it far away from her center mass as though she intends to drop it.

  Yet the chefs stiffen in a paralyzed rictus, their fingers curling themselves to catch this cask, cringing as if not catching it might spell the end of their career. They form a protective circle around Montgomery, who swings the cask around in wild arcs to keep it faced toward them, as though she was brandishing a crucifix at a crowd of vampires. The chefs hunch low, ready to dive underneath to catch it should Montgomery wobble.

  Their eyes flicker toward Scrimshaw’s red door, hoping for their boss to save them.

  “You were sleeping, Montgomery!” a lowly black-striper pleads, bowed low to dive underneath the cask.

  “Prevaricators! You’re all prevaricators of the highest order! I never sleep! I have bitches to tend! And speaking of bitches—” She rattles the cask; something doughy flops against wooden staves. “She wants to die, you know! I have carried this bitch on my back across star systems, cajoling her with nostrums to prod her back to existence, using all my skills to keep her vivified! A good shake”—she rattles it again, and lesser chefs faint—“and this sad bitch would deliquesce into mold! And then where would you be, ay?”

  “Let them alone!”

  No one is more shocked than Kenna to hear himself speak. The chefs turn to face Kenna; their disbelief lends him strength. He won’t let them suffer when this is his fault.

  “The chefs here had no plans to broach the integrity of your possessions,” Kenna tells her. “I, however, did. So if you plan to punish anyone—punish me.”

  Montgomery snorts, then bends down to scrutinize him, her lenses whirring as those brass goggles focus in on him.

  “The boy,” she murmurs. Her head bobs with metronome regularity. “I suppose you do have claim.”

  She reaches back, her limbs unsettlingly spiderlike, to nestle the cask into a webbing of mold-furred leather straps on her back. The chefs breathe a sigh of relief as Montgomery strokes the cask, then clasps her hands in apology, bowing to the room.

  “An overreaction,” she purrs. “I thought you gents failed to understand my condition.”

  “And I failed to understand this pallet was your purvey.”

  “My purvey?” Her laugh is like a can of bolts rattling down stairs. “No, that pallet belongs to Paulius. I swiped his shopping list before he … burned connections.” Her sly grin is a dancer sliding a veil aside to give an indistinct glimpse of her body beneath. Kenna knows Montgomery is the only one in this room who understands how “burning connections” works, and she keeps that knowledge locked up.

  “So he did order in supplies.”

  “Not just any supplies, my sweet project.” Montgomery licks imagined flavors off her fingertip. “Ingredients old Montgomery here has never tasted lie beneath that tarp—racks of funky mushrooms and salted seagull eggs and some crazy herb called rehmannia. And while old Montgomery owes you a debt for—”

  “You’re all of thirty, ma’am,” Kenna says. “I refuse to recognize you as old.”

  She thumps her chest, releasing a skirl of mold that sets Kenna coughing. “Age isn’t tallied in years, boy. It’s the sum of your experiences. There are newborn octogenarians and teens as old as pharaohs. Interview doddering nursing home victims; see if they’ve done half the things I have. I’m antiquated. I’m dying as you look at me.”

  “From the mold?”

  She raises her eyebrows—which Kenna can only tell via the lifting of her goggles. She reaches down to her belt, which is bandoliered with an assortment of eyedroppers, patting each before settling upon the one she needs. She shakes it like a thermometer before squeezing its contents into a hole in the cask.

  Something in the cask sighs, a yeasty breath. She pats it like a baby’s bottom.

  “No, no, boy,” she says. “My sweet moldy bitch helps keep me alive. She’s never the same twice. That’s what a woman with my condition needs.”

  “I’m sorry—your condition?”

  She stiffens,
bracing for revelation. “I’m a Sensate.”

  Kenna’s irritation is upended, tumbling into sincere pity. Kenna’s more used to the transport ship chemists, sore-pocked men who specialize in siphoning whatever synthetics they can tap from the ship’s engine supply-lines, then refashioning them into haphazard drugs. But he knows addicts too well. And Sensates, addicted to novelty, are among the worst passengers on transport ships—needing to travel to new planets to satisfy their quivering need to see new skies, but trapped like cats in a cage during the trip.

  Some clawed themselves bloody, unable to tolerate staring at the same walls for a week. Some bolstered themselves against the monotony of starship travel by hurling themselves into unwise relationships with incompatible companions, recognizing the impending heartbreak but taking solace in a new flavor of drama.

  They’d seemed so miserable to Kenna. The Sensates would babble endlessly, relentlessly, about the joys of what it would be like to frolic in the red-frothed waves in the ruby seas of the next port—but a day after running naked on the beach, the experience lost its luster. Once the newness was gone, sameness rubbed against them like sandpaper. And they’d scrape funds together for their next trip, anguishing at the routine of menial work, forever itching to be anywhere else …

  Montgomery snaps her fingers close enough to Kenna’s eyes that he flinches. Then he recognizes the insult he’s given her; to an addict fighting their compulsions, pity is poison.

  “I see you’re familiar with my condition,” she says.

  “I am, but … you’re restricted here. Working in the same place, manufacturing the same meals? That would destroy the Sensates I’ve met…”

  “I don’t work here,” she sniffs, offended. “Paulius knows of my condition, and convinced me to stay for a time. He knows I’m a culinary Sensate, restricted to new tastes. I spent years enduring the traveling prisons of transport ships until he convinced me if I stayed at the best restaurant in the stars for a time…” She looks longingly at the pallet. “People would bring the new foods to me.”