The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Should he recognize his meal had become Kenna’s dilemma, Paulius would have to sacrifice the Majestic just as he had casually dropped that gravity-bowl back in the orchard once Kenna had drunk his fill. And Paulius never considers the consequences, no more than he did when he bought a pallet of silken robes—he acts, aftermaths be damned.

  He’d thought lying about his Philosophy would reveal Paulius’s heart. Now he realizes it would merely shift the performance to a different stage. Either Paulius is so kind that he would shutter everything to protect Kenna’s future, or is so committed to believing himself a benevolent tutor that he would destroy The Sol Majestic rather than see himself for what he is.

  Now Kenna realizes why Scrimshaw hates Paulius so. Paulius has lurched from dream to dream, leaving Scrimshaw to piece together the practicalities. Scrimshaw conceals the jagged edges so Paulius’s genius can work, because either Paulius’s heart or his ego is impossibly fragile when nicked.

  Paulius works miracles only because he does not realize their cost.

  The duck is beneath Kenna’s nose, drops of sauce oozing off a dark meat slice. Paulius’s eyes brim with tears, grateful to bring this perfection to Kenna.

  “… do what, Kenna?”

  “I’ve…” Kenna’s throat is dry as rust. “I’ve unlocked my Inevitable Philosophy.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Paulius says. “Try the duck.”

  Kenna tastes nothing. He tells Paulius the duck is perfect. The kitchen erupts into applause.

  This is the first lie, Kenna thinks. He vows to count every one.

  9

  Five Weeks, Three Days Until the Wisdom Ceremony

  Savor Station’s most luxurious hotel consists of one gleaming brass hallway, locked off from the rest of the station by engraved titanium bars. Kenna types Scrimshaw’s passcode into a cool blue keypad; the gateway chimes, opening inward.

  Kenna creeps along the brushed-brass walls, making his way toward his parents.

  Kenna’s a newly minted liar who hopes to convince Mother and Father of an imaginary Inevitable Philosophy—but the wealth of empty space here magnifies his fraudulence. The hotel’s hallway is ostentatiously wide, big enough for two people to waltz in. Mother and Father have always complained of being stuffed into ships. Whenever they arrived in a place with room to maneuver, Mother and Father ran around like little kids, flinging their arms out wide.

  But Mother and Father had grown up planetside. Kenna had grown up in cramped ships, where every square foot carried crippling maintenance costs. Crowded spaces bring comfort. For Kenna, big spaces are where disdainful receptionists glare at him from across a chilly air-conditioned room, where Mother discreetly elbows him to sit up straight, where Father hisses that if Kenna demonstrates dishonor then the ambassador might cancel their appointment.

  Who has more dishonor than a boy who lies about his Inevitable Philosophy?

  The door swings open. Kenna braces himself; of course entering his passcode would have alerted Mother and Father. He had hoped to at least get through the doorway before they lectured him on the bad habits he would pick up sleeping with low-class cooks. He won’t even escape the hallway before Mother and Father pummel him with words.

  Father steps out. Kenna ducks his head, palms together, bowing deep enough to ward off Father’s wrath …

  “Son.” That booming voice has swayed emperors. “Gaze upon me.”

  It takes Kenna a moment to process the word “son.” Father has referred to Kenna as his son before, but has never called him anything but Kenna.

  Father never speaks a word he does not intend.

  Surprised, Kenna glances up—and Father bounces on his toes like a boxer entering the ring, arms crooked out to hug Kenna. He looks strong enough to wrestle warships.

  Father has retained a battered dignity over the years, but his spine has been contorted by a lifetime of bowing. His brown eyes have turned rheumy from blinking back tears. Clad in a pristine robe, however, Father no longer looks like the tattered remnant of an old religion, but the vanguard of a new and exciting order—a man reforged in the fires of poverty to usher in a new era of Inevitable Philosophies. His graying braids have been dyed jet black and freshly woven with polished glass beads.

  “Son.” Father smacks his lips as he accustoms himself to the sound of this kinship. He moves to sweep Kenna up in a hug—

  That’s not me, Kenna thinks, retreating, your son would have an Inevitable Philosophy—

  And as Father embraces him, Kenna realizes the difference between being tended to and being loved. Father has always given him polite shoulder-squeezes. But this? This is the sun-warmed hug a man gives to his loved ones.

  Kenna melts into Father’s arms, clutching Father’s broad shoulders as Father clasps Kenna around the waist and hoists him high, rubbing his cheek against Kenna’s.

  He could stay here forever, drunk on the warmth of his father’s skin.

  If I could find an Inevitable Philosophy before the Wisdom Ceremony, Kenna thinks, I could feel this way forever. But he never will. An Inevitable Philosophy cuts like an axe; Kenna is a bungie cord, bending floppily to necessity.

  If there are Gods, Father always says, the only prayers they listen to are hard work and good planning. So leave your prayers on the ground.

  Nevertheless, Kenna prays for an Inevitable Philosophy.

  Father sets Kenna down and inspects Kenna. He snorts, as he plucks at Kenna’s robe.

  Kenna freezes. Father has seen right through him, of course—Kenna’s false Inevitable Philosophy is like watching a dead vidstream, all emptiness and static. Father will do what he always does when Kenna fails. He will stand statue-straight, disappointment choking his throat shut. Then he will give the slightest shake of his head and walk away, except this time he will never return …

  Father pinches the chicken-broth stain on the robe between two fingers.

  “Is that Kenna?” Mother asks, emerging from the hotel room. Kenna’s been so dizzied by Father’s affection that he only now realizes they’ve never left the hallway.

  Yet Father is tugging on Kenna’s robe, high enough the hem threatens to expose Kenna. Mother’s happy face creases into a frown as she crouches over, examining him.

  Kenna steels himself. Their parental chastising has always been a two-person show: Father glares balefully, regretful to be in a room with him, whereas Mother frets and fluffs, hauling him off for lectures. Except this time Father will walk away forever; what lectures could rehabilitate the whorish merchant his son has become?

  Mother, too, is resplendent in her new robe, her dreadlocks freshly topknotted, her face scrubbed clean to show her beautiful oil-brown skin. She keeps her robe sashed tight around her waist to keep it from tangling around her ankles. She moves in precise bursts, each step transitioning to some new and perfect stance.

  “Is that a stain?” Mother kneels to examine the robe pinched between Father’s beefy fingers.

  It takes Kenna a moment to recognize the tone in her voice: worry. She’s always been concerned for him, but never worried.

  “Look at it,” Father says. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Of course he doesn’t know.”

  “He has not endured the fourth estate’s abject distortions.”

  “Oh, Kenna.” Mother sweeps him up in a tight hug; for once, it does not feel like she is teaching him a grappling technique. “You cannot be seen sporting blemishes. Not anymore. The gatherers of lies circle you like starfighters, knowing you have come into your power; they seek to dismantle your truth. For them, the debasement of wisdom provides entertainment.”

  She waves him into the room, head hunched down as if she expects bloggers to pour into the hotel at any moment.

  Entering the hotel room first feels like being jettisoned into space. Mother and Father have never let him enter a room ahead of them before; his life consists of peering around their elbows to get glimpses. Yet he is propelled into a vast beige room, one so big there
is nothing within reach—just a wooden table, four comfort-couches with Virtual Reality Hoods, and a discreet fold-up screen in case privacy is needed. He could run in circles and never bump into furniture.

  He wants to be in the kitchen, where everything serves a purpose. He wants to smell hot peppers frying, feel the chill of liquid nitrogen–cooled dishes cascading down to tickle his ankles, feel sweat prickling between chefs as they engraved meats with the plasma cauterizing units.

  This hotel room creates nothing. It’s a mausoleum. Yet it’s the isolation Mother and Father always wanted for him; a bare place to delve into his thoughts and emerge with the treasure of a Philosophy.

  Father’s chest puffs up as he enters, though, taking strength from these gaudy surroundings. He snatches a smartpaper computer off the table, displays a mailbox overflowing with emails. Kenna reads glimpses—all seems meaningless and the suffering and seek your wisdom—as Father flicks through pages’ worth of messages until they blur into a misery-laden stream.

  Father grins.

  “They’re hearing our voice again, Kenna. Having wandered lost, they’ve come to realize they need someone to guide them to truer paths—and finally we have a way to turn our voices to thunder.”

  Kenna reaches out to read the mails individually. Mother whips the tablet away.

  “Now, only the poverty-stricken contact us,” she says, placing it back on the table. “But soon our message will reach the people who can help them. The diplomats. The advisors.” Her fingers clench as though she longs to grab royalty’s collar. “The emperors.”

  Father preens. “I’d always insisted on finding a new patron to revitalize us, hadn’t I? I hadn’t thought of a restaurant owner, but … this Paulius has reach.”

  “And surprising insight, for an entrepreneur. Sending Kenna to a training camp where he does nothing but taste Grandmother’s foods? I would not have required so earthly a bond to our glorious past, yet it seems to have ameliorated Kenna’s limitations.”

  Mother extends one slender arm, wiggling her fingers; Father reaches out to intertwine fingers with hers, a polished gesture, as though they are about to do a pas de deux. “It was right to come here.”

  As always, Kenna feels a powerful need to be anywhere but here. The love Mother and Father feel for each other is so intense that their holding hands is like a force shield glimmering into existence around a warship.

  Except this time Mother and Father extend their free arms, urging him into their embrace.

  He shuffles forward, feet numb, as their arms drop over his shoulders.

  Much like the lacquered duck, Kenna discovers that grand glories brought by falsehoods bring no pleasure.

  Mother whips the robe off Kenna.

  “Hey!” Kenna dances behind her, grabbing at the robe, but Mother moves toward the incinerator.

  “This is blemished. We should have trained you better for this day, Kenna—but ah, even our faith wavered.”

  “For what day?”

  “With our resurgence in popularity come the reporters. They brought down our great-grandparents. They mocked the faith. They twisted our words until we appeared to be nothing more than ticks. And even such a tiny thing as a stain”—she bares her incisors at the robe’s faint discoloration—“will mark you as a hick. They’ll turn you into some backwoods dispenser of maladies.”

  “But that’s my robe!”

  “Tch.” She sucks air between her teeth. “Scrimshaw can get us new ones.”

  Scrimshaw is going broke, Kenna wants to say. He doesn’t dare. No true Philosopher concerns himself with low money.

  “The Sol Majestic has a dry-cleaning wing,” Kenna lies. “Their guests, they … stain their garb all the time. With unearthly ingredients. Paulius, he … offers to cleanse their apparel. At no charge!”

  Mother hefts the robe, dubiously weighing the miracles Paulius might produce. “Kenna, the very point of these robes is that they cannot be cleaned. Like the Inevitable Philosophies themselves, once stained, no amount of effort can restore them. We wore shabby robes back when we had no choice—better a stained pride than none—but now? We can afford to be profligate.”

  Kenna debates grabbing the robe and running, but Mother has always shrugged off his grapples.

  “It’s…”

  His belly aches. This lie might be the one that eviscerates him.

  Get used to lying, he thinks, digging his fingernails deep into his diaphragm. You have a lifetime of fraud to perpetrate.

  “… it’s the robe I wore when I discovered my Philosophy!”

  Mother’s grip on the robe slackens as she presses it against her breasts, a serenity creeping across her gaunt face, as if absorbing Kenna’s enlightenment from it. His nonexistent enlightenment.

  Her dreamy expression seeks permission from Father, who nods gruffly. “I guess we can allow for a new tradition.” Father frames the robes between his fingers, as if taking a test-shot for a vidblog. “‘A stain is a small price to pay for Inevitability.’ Yes?”

  “Yes!” Mother lifts the robe up high, then allows it to slide off her fingers as though she is raining grace down upon Kenna. Her lips compress, slyly, with feigned nonchalance; she’s never been as good a liar as she believes. “So tell me, Kenna, what is your Inevitable Philosophy?”

  This, at least, is the part of the lie Kenna has mapped out. “I will speak only at my Wisdom Ceremony.”

  “You see?” Father says. “His Inevitable Philosophy ignites, and for the first time our son—our son!—forges tactics for a bold future! That’s right, Kenna; reveal your Philosophy to no one. Germinate it in isolation. Let no one drop a speck of doubt in your rich soil.”

  “The speech you give at your Wisdom Ceremony will reshape not only the galaxy, but you,” Mother says. “Spend these next weeks in meditation sharpening the truth so you will cleave all doubt when you speak.”

  This will be my final respite, Kenna thinks. Five weeks at The Sol Majestic. Five weeks with Paulius, and Benzo, and Scrimshaw. Five weeks helping devoted men turn effort into beauty … and then a lifetime of lies.

  “This will be a good place to study,” Father says. “Free of distractions.”

  … what?

  “Free of reporters,” Mother says. “Free to find your truth.”

  No, no, Kenna thinks. No, no, no …

  “I can’t—” Kenna turns in circles, half-naked in his smallclothes. The hotel room a mausoleum, friendless, a tomb to seal his dreams. “This isn’t—”

  “Now, Kenna,” Father says. “You’re a prince. Your Philosophy can’t be improved by hanging around workmen, even fine ones like Paulius owns. But we’ll be with you. Every step of the way.”

  Mother extends her hand to interlace her fingers with his. “You are our son.”

  Kenna finds the words he has always craved to hear are heavy enough to crush his heart.

  Father shuts the door, walling him away from The Sol Majestic.

  10

  Five Weeks, Two Days Until the Wisdom Ceremony

  Once you have hauled your Inevitable Philosophy up to your conscious mind, Father had said, you will not sleep; your dreams will prod you to action.

  The umbral lights above him dim to dusk, then darken to the black night, calculated to adjust his circadian rhythms; Kenna cannot sleep. Liquid nanoengines in the bed lovingly massage his shoulders, biosensors triangulating his tensest muscles to squeeze the stress away; still Kenna cannot sleep. The bed whispers hypnotic, brain-numbing lullabyes; still Kenna cannot sleep.

  Kenna has no Inevitable Philosophy.

  He will not sleep until he finds one.

  He needs to talk to Paulius. Only Paulius can properly witness his suffering. Kenna imagines crouching in the transport ship’s puke-stained hammocks, talking to the mothers combing lice from their daughters’ hair: They locked me in a comfortable room where all I could do was play VR games.

  They would stave his ribs in for such audacity.

  But the
VR games are the nutricrackers of the mind, dazzling holoworks that provide triumphant fever-dreams, yet you wake to realize you’ve done nothing. The Sol Majestic’s kitchen will lace your body with scars: knives gash your fingers into bloody flaps, red-hot pans will sear blistered trails into your flesh, liquid nitrogen spills will freeze your skin into nerveless gray permafrost.

  Yet when you are done, all you see is that green asparagus threaded with black licorice, three stalks placed equidistant on a perfect, bone-white plate.

  He can endure being taken away from that crucible of creation. But he can’t pretend the sacrifice means nothing. Mother and Father would know he was lying if they knew how he loved The Sol Majestic.

  He has to talk to Paulius. Only Paulius would understand this horror of a blank page left unwritten. Yet Mother has snored for two hours. Guarding her baggage on the transport ships has made her sleeping form taut as a mousetrap, ready to snap shut on any intruder.

  It takes Kenna a full twenty minutes to creep his toes out from under the covers and down to the floor.

  Yet the comfort-crèches assist him. When he dares to sit up, noise-cancelling algorithms muffle the sound. Mother twitches, ever-vigilant, and Kenna’s breath goes ragged; if they caught him sneaking out, they would see the lies written on his face. He would no longer be their son.

  He is in the hallway. Freedom.

  He thumbs his way past the hotel gate, sneaks across Savor Station’s scurrying nighttime. A spaceport can’t afford to sleep. The overhead lights are dimmed, but the maintenance crew rolls the benches away, shines UV lights on the walls, scanning the station for metal fatigue. Others sweep detritus off the floor, dumping plastic into recycling bins; every ounce of plastic they can recycle is an ounce that doesn’t have to be shipped across solar systems to replenish their supplies.

  Kenna’s not even certain he can get into The Sol Majestic; he avoids getting too close to the entryway’s chipped obsidian surface, threatened by its monolithic nature. Paulius created a temple for food, and so the entrance for customers is hewn out of glistening volcanic rock, shelved with thorny plants in sandy crevices. Placed against Savor Station’s smooth titanium walls, it looks like a gateway to some alien dimension.