“Money?” Kenna says, horrified.
“You don’t know how to care a little. You go all the way. Like the way you abandoned that shipment to let me have my way with it. Like you did with—” She jerks her head to the Escargone, that tiny window now flashing erratically. “With him. Kid, if you stay and watch everyone live their lives according to something you made up, it will eat your heart. And no one deserves to go down with that ship.”
“No.” The word pops out, reflexive as a hiccup. “No, we—we are the muscle that moves the universe. We lead our people out of darkness. We save the starving millions…”
“Your mother couldn’t save a starving son.”
“That’s not her goal!”
Montgomery slams him back against the cutting block, teeth bared. “Then her goal’s irrelevant! What good is a religion if it can’t feed your fucking child?”
He grabs her arm, pushing his fingers deep into her wrist—and yanks her to one side so she loses balance, sending her plowing face-first into the floor.
Ice water floods his veins. It felt so satisfying to hurt someone who’d demeaned the Philosophies. All those years of mockery—he shouldn’t have hurt her, but he wants to do it again.
“It’s not about that!” He scrambles to his feet, retreating, afraid of what else he might do to her. “We suffer! Because we have to make it better for everyone else! We have to!”
Montgomery snurbles a great mouthful of blood back out of her nose. She looks fearful but unbowed, a cornered rat, someone who clearly didn’t expect to be losing this argument. She snaps her words off like gunshots:
“What a fucking ego trip.”
She hauls herself up the cutting block, dribbling blood down its side; Kenna snaps to his centerline, steps back into trap pose. Except his trap pose has never helped him in a real fight; Mother’s fighting tactics never work against actual bullies.
She sees him lapsing into fighting position, lowers her head like a bull about to charge. “Your parents’ savior complex,” she sneers. “That blinds them. How can they help anybody when—”
The porthole’s luminescence darkens from a soft lightbulb-yellow to an eye-watering violet.
Montgomery stops in mid-sentence, crouching to face this new threat.
The violet intensifies, solidifying, a blue-shift violet that Kenna finds both naggingly familiar and filled with inchoate danger.
“Shit,” Montgomery mutters, deer-frozen in terror. “Jesus, you dumb cocksucker, you forgot to take your meds—”
The soft light sharpens into diamond-sharp refractions, filling the porthole so full of that dead blacklight that the glass cannot contain it. The light expands convulsively; a ragged oval luminescence that swells to occupy the door, a light so strong it shines through steel.
A dimensional portal.
Montgomery leaps for the door. “No!” she yells. “You can control it! Stay inside! Stay inside the ship, Paulius—”
But that imploding light bursts open in a splatter, disgorging a jittering figure in the shape of a man.
The man shoots out of the gateway like a freight train, smashing into an oven hard enough to buckle the metal. His whole body vibrates, skin turning a mottled blue as his lungs chug like a motor engine running at top throttle, sucking in air and extracting every ounce of oxygen …
He’s moving at inside-Escargone speeds, Kenna realizes. He got jettisoned out of the time field without the ship slowing down, so he’s moving at sixty times our speed—
Kenna hammers the Escargone’s emergency off switch as Montgomery shrieks, takes the juddering body in her arms, wrestles Paulius to the floor like a flopping eel. A siren goes off, red lights whirling across the kitchen floor.
The hollow sound of massive engines powering down takes forever. Paulius’s impossible machine-gun motions slacken into rapid-fire feats of athletic prowess, then into a dying man’s weak flailings. Montgomery holds him tight against her chest, eyes closed, face up toward the ceiling as if in serene prayer.
Not prayer, Kenna thinks. She’s using her biomatrix implants to call for assistance.
He bolts over, kneeling, ready to offer Paulius comfort.
Paulius’s eyes are wide with the astonishment of someone who didn’t expect to find himself alive, and isn’t sure he’s made it out of the gates yet. His mouth hangs open in lopsided horror, lips crayon-blue; he whoops in ragged breaths which make a tiny crunch with each lung-expanding inhalation.
Kenna does not want to know what’s making that tiny crunch. But his eyes are drawn to the noise’s source:
Paulius’s waist is smashed.
His blue overalls are tented with jagged outcroppings where shattered bones poke up. Kenna looks up, seeing the dent where Paulius careened into the oven.
He can’t look, but the floor is an equal horror: the grooves in the tiles well up with Paulius’s blood. How fast had Paulius been moving? If a week passed at Paulius’s time for every two hours here, and it took Kenna half a minute to shake off the shock and shut down the Escargone, then how long was Paulius lying unattended?
An hour. Maybe half a day.
Paulius might die before the paramedics arrived. And what medical assistance did Savor Station have, anyway? The smaller stations only had traveling medics, men who arrived for periodic checkups, and if you had an inflamed appendix it might burst before a physic flew out to see you …
No. No. Montgomery had summoned someone. Savor Station was large, well-equipped. They’d have at least a docbot.
“Kenna.” Paulius’s voice is a phlegmy cough wrapped around slurred consonants.
“Don’t talk.” He wants to hug Paulius, but Montgomery has her arms curled protectively around his ribs, shielding his broken body.
“No. You—” Paulius sobs, a terrible and bottomless sound. “You can’t tell anyone. What you saw.”
Paulius sees Kenna’s confusion. He turns a wince into a parody of a titter, baring his teeth in his best imitation of a smile.
“No one,” he repeats, then sinks back into Montgomery’s embrace.
What just happened? Did Paulius somehow … teleport out? Men can’t do that. Yet in The Sol Majestic, anything is possible, even dreadful things …
Chefs come charging in. How could they have waited so long? And then Kenna realizes: this has taken maybe two minutes, tops. They charge in, then recoil back, faces turning white as leeks.
“The Escargone,” Montgomery hisses as the other chefs run to get towels, run to alert Scrimshaw, run away from the terror. “It malfunctioned.”
Kenna gives his uncertainty as a gift to Paulius, going numb as the sirens draw closer.
11
Five Weeks, One Day Until the Wisdom Ceremony
Kenna has slept alone in closets while his parents took shuttles to curry favor from some politician. He has cried himself dry inside toilet stalls. He has wandered through spaceports, too poor to purchase a single entertainment, waiting for Mother and Father to return.
He thought he understood loneliness.
Yet the docbot’s waiting room is blackest purgatory.
Not that the holding area is dark: it is floodlight-bright, every surface gleaming. Six plastic bucket seats sit in a semicircle around the door to Paulius’s operating room, each with ugly humped curves to dissuade people from falling asleep. Once an hour, a warning bell chimes and sprinklers blast down a chill alcohol mist to sterilize the chamber. Boxes of nitrile gloves are recessed in the wall.
He can hear Scrimshaw and Montgomery muttering through the door, the docbot’s monotone voice offering cold probabilities. Captain Lizzie, Savor Station’s owner, has arrived, and Kenna is curious to meet her; she was a surgeon of some repute in a past war, and she has kindly offered to interpret the docbot’s sometimes-cryptic diagnoses.
In another room, Kenna can hear buffing knives whirring as a bone-printer re-creates Paulius’s shattered hip from old X-rays.
No one else from The Sol Majestic is allowed
to attend, or else they’d all be here. Even though it is the dead of the night. Which makes sense—after scrubbing the kitchen sterile and calling in a repairman to fix the broken oven, Scrimshaw had commanded the traumatized kitchen staff to get some sleep while they could.
Yet no one questioned Kenna’s presence here.
He can’t determine whether that is a quiet benediction, or proof of his irrelevance.
Kenna puts on gloves, plays with the masks, ignores the cut-up clothing in the corner—Paulius’s suit, cut away by the docbot’s insectile scalpels so it could slide IVs into Paulius’s veins, the even cloth-strips deposited into a recycling container.
That shredded suit is like seeing Paulius’s flayed skin.
Paulius can’t die. He is Inevitable. Kenna pulls up games on Scrimshaw’s smartpaper, loads his corneas full of dancing dots designed to distract him—but within a few seconds he thinks of Paulius shivering on The Sol Majestic’s floor, and then his brain rebounds off the concept of Paulius’s mortality.
The ceiling drips down prickling mist.
Knives carve replacement bone.
The docbot drones out muffled survival prognostications.
The door hisses open. Lizzie, the station captain, strides out in her trim gold-and-gray uniform. She’s pale, gaunt, vacuum-scarred, far shorter than Kenna thought a station captain would be. But her gray eyes are as clear as radar, sweeping across the room to size everything up.
“It’s not good,” she says.
She addresses him as though they’re old friends. Kenna relaxes under her competence; her words carry the weight of a dossier she’s compiled on Kenna.
“But there’s room for hope,” she continues. “Soon as the fabber finishes that hip, that door will lock shut and the docbot will perform the surgery. I’ve got to delegate some tasks to clear my schedule—and then I’ll be standing in the room, in case something goes wrong.”
“Is that likely?”
“My faith is in the docbot. But my hand is always on the override switch.” Kenna remembers the legends he’d heard about Captain Lizzie—once the Angel of Sauerkraut Station, a teenaged girl so talented with the surgeon’s knife that warring soldiers had declared a truce at her station lest they lose her skills.
Captain Lizzie glances toward the ceiling, the twitch of someone with biomatrix implants receiving a message.
“Anyway,” she says. “Scrimshaw and Montgomery will fill you in. Pack in for a long day, O Prince.”
It’s been a long day, Kenna thinks, then realizes the station has yet to click over to dawn-shift.
Scrimshaw slides open the door to Paulius’s room enough for her to squeeze out, then urges Montgomery to squeeze out too. Montgomery holds the Bitch-cask up as she comes out, blocking Kenna’s view. He cranes his neck to see how Paulius is doing; Scrimshaw clucks her tongue.
“Better not to look,” she says sadly.
Montgomery shivers as she exits Paulius’s chamber, turning away from Kenna and Scrimshaw to drop the cask and face the wall, eking out privacy. Her fingers creep over her shoulders, giving herself a tiny shoulder massage that expands into a self-hug.
Scrimshaw sits down next to Kenna, clasping her knees with an old woman’s daintiness. “The surgery will begin within the hour. But we can’t stay with Paulius. We have to go back.”
Kenna realizes he’s been only able to bear this waiting room null-hell because he was counting down the time until he had company again. “Back to where?”
“The kitchen, of course,” Montgomery says bitterly, dribbling a blue substance into the cask. “The Bitch never takes a break, and neither does the service.”
“People have traveled for months to get to this dinner,” Scrimshaw explains. “Spent their life’s savings. Paulius is irrelevant; what matters is the meal. Would you like to come back with us? To do small jobs in the kitchen?”
“No!” Kenna slides away across the chair until he bumps against the knobbed armrest, putting as much distance between himself and Scrimshaw as possible. How could she make the kitchen work when a great man lies dying? Even Scrimshaw hangs her vulture’s head low, as if acknowledging what a callous, money-seeking monster she is.
“He needs me.” How egotistic, assuming Paulius cares for him. “To look after him.”
Montgomery yanks up the cask, lean biceps bulging as though she wants to crack the wood. “He’s surrounded by monitors. We’re all on biomatrix alert. If something happens we’ll come running, and if that happens none of us can help anyway. Face it, kid, Paulius is either gonna die or he’s not, we’re useless, and wasting away in this stupid waiting room won’t help—”
“Montgomery.”
Scrimshaw’s single word hits Montgomery’s “mute” button. Montgomery’s grip tightens on the cask, as though considering staving Scrimshaw’s head in—
—but the docbot mutters a status update, and Montgomery whips around to check on Paulius’s condition.
Scrimshaw coughs politely, point made.
“Fine,” Montgomery snaps. She taps her goggles, focusing on Kenna. “You and I, Little Prince, we’ll have words. Just … remember.” She jerks her head back toward Paulius’s room. “Remember.”
She storms out of the room, hauling her cask.
Scrimshaw reaches out to pat his knee—but her hand hesitates in midair before she places it primly back on her lap.
Kenna feels a vague embarrassment sublimating away. Scrimshaw shielded him from one of Montgomery’s rants, and maybe she’s right that Paulius wouldn’t want the service stopped—merchants don’t stop, but neither do Philosophers like Paulius, and The Sol Majestic muddles his conceptions of both—but he’s still mad at her anyway.
“Well,” she says. “I’m glad you’re staying here.”
It would be egotistical to agree, so Kenna studies a packet of face masks mounted on the wall.
“Don’t worry,” Scrimshaw continues. “Anticipating your desires, I convinced Lizzie to put a station camerawatch on your parents. If they take a route that intersects with you, we’ll send the best interference to ensure you retain your privacy.”
“… interference?”
“Rèpondelle.” Scrimshaw’s head bobs in satisfaction at the mere mention of this person’s name—which, given how prudent Scrimshaw is with praise, fills Kenna with confidence. “Our front-of-house supervisor. Trained to manipulate the truculent back to satisfaction. She’s gifted you with breathing space once before, though I doubt you remember it.”
When Mother and Father burst into the kitchen, worried to see their son, they close ranks around Kenna, obscuring him, until a woman in a sharp red tuxedo can be summoned …
“The woman in red,” Kenna says.
“Yes. Her. Though I doubt she’d be pleased you remember.”
“Why not?”
“She wears many faces. Keeping her confined to one makes her nervous. In any case, the kitchen has your back, Master Kenna. Guard Paulius for us.” She taps the smartpaper in Kenna’s hands. “Keep us alerted should he require assistance.”
She rises, the meeting concluded—yet before she moves to tap the door’s exit button, she slumps against the wall. Her sinewed strength drains away to reveal a geriatric woman in an old coat.
Before he can rush to her side, she clamps her teeth together, a predatory throat-ripping gesture that saps his water. Those tensed teeth are sizing up something she isn’t certain she cares for, ready to devour something too weak to survive.
“Tell me, Master Kenna.” Old as she is, Kenna fears her. “Was I—wrong to gift you with one hundred percent honesty? Should I have obfuscated the Majestic’s peril?”
That something she does not care for, Kenna realizes, is herself.
“I’m worthy of truth.” It is hard to stare straight into those chill gray eyes. “But I still resent you.”
Her lips curl as she swallows her sorrow, turning self-loathing into bitter smiles.
“So long as I’m hated for the
right reasons.”
She exits. Kenna takes a chilly solace from her departure; if the Queen of the Kitchen says that Kenna deserves a place by Paulius’s side, then he must mean something to Paulius.
Kenna waits.
* * *
The noises behind Paulius’s door must be ordinary surgery, Kenna tells himself. But even muffled, the whir of sterilized sawblades slicing through Paulius’s bone resonates through Kenna’s body until he clasps his hands over his ears. Moist sucking noises, like an old man toothlessly slurping Jell-O, ooze through the door’s cracks to lick Kenna’s eardrums.
Paulius is being rebuilt. The repair is messy.
Lizzie stands behind that door, which gives Kenna strength. He has not heard her smack the emergency override switch, and the slicing noises have an assembly line’s square-edged precision. Yet it comforts him to know someone human stands by Paulius in this needy hour.
A bleep from the smartpaper: Parents inbound. Interference dispatched.
A videocamera feed blooms across the crumpled-tissue smartpaper on his lap, a high overhead shot showing Mother and Father marching across a repair bay, headed straight for the docbot clusters. They walk with one arm flung dramatically out in the other’s direction, interlacing fingers in a lover’s hand-hold—but walking at a pace that threatens to clothesline the noontime shift’s maintenance workers.
When threatened, Mother and Father take up space in cramped places to emphasize their royal nature. They are Inevitable, prepared to inconvenience anyone to get their wayward son back to his studies.
A light touch, at the base of the shoulder. Mother and Father whirl angrily, their faces melting into sheepish confusion when they see the woman in the red tuxedo not quite bowing before them—but she flexes her knees like a ballerina, spreading her arms in a circle to make room to encompass their immense presence.
A furrow of confusion. They remember her, but not her name. No matter; the red-tuxedoed woman remembers their names extravagantly, all but begging their autographs. Her bland face reflects their concerns, wondering what great concern brought them out to this place of low labor.
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