The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  The flat-carbon smartpaper speakers are not good at transmitting audio over the waiting room’s hiss and whirr, yet Kenna hears snippets of objections—he was to stay in our room and he must feel compassion for kings, not cooks—

  The woman in the red tuxedo agrees with everything they say. Her body trembles like a tuning fork, resonating with their wisdom. Yet somehow, with careful interjections, Mother and Father’s great-winged circle closes around this unassuming woman, stepping closer as if she is the only audience worth speaking to. They come to realize the compassion that calls Kenna to Paulius’s bedside proves their grand instincts have fallen on fertile soil, that meditating upon death is the insight Kenna needs, that they are peckish, that perhaps a selection of fine teas would help quell the rumble in their bellies.

  The red-tuxedoed woman leads them off-camera, their heads bobbing to her tune.

  A knock at the waiting room door; Benzo pokes his head in. He keeps his distance from the cold metal walls festooned with nozzles to refill the docbot’s medical supplies. Then, seeing Kenna, his broad face opens into a brief but sunny grin, before remembering what a solemn space this is.

  He ambles in with a studied casualness. His black-striper’s outfit is rolled up at the sleeves, revealing sturdy forearms; Kenna ponders trailing his fingertips down the veins on the underside of Benzo’s arms and feeling those heathen muscles tense.

  Benzo says nothing. Kenna realizes he’s staring at Benzo, which is stupid, so stupid, why is he so awkward?

  But Benzo stares back at Kenna, swinging a wood-woven picnic basket back and forth. He squeezes the handle at the apex of each swing, knuckles tightening around it, trying to work up the strength to say something.

  Kenna doesn’t want to know what he might say. Maybe Benzo’s thinking the same thing Kenna is, in which case what would they do with that physical intensity, sitting ten feet away from a flayed-open Paulius? And maybe it’s something else, in which case Kenna wants to hold on to this flirtatious dream for a little longer.

  “Did you manufacture your broth today?”

  Kenna hates himself the moment he says it—why didn’t he let Benzo talk first? Why didn’t he relish this silence, like a Philosopher should?

  Benzo lets out a hissing laugh, like a ship emergency-venting pressurized air, then mops his blond curls back on his forehead.

  “You know, I was gonna make broth,” he says. “But then I thought, hey, what if I make the perfect broth today, on the day Paulius can’t taste it?”

  It takes Kenna a moment to realize Benzo’s made a joke. Kenna’s pure laughter makes Benzo puff out his chest. “Seriously?”

  Benzo’s grin wilts as he sets the picnic basket down on the floor. “Nah, I made it,” he confesses, the moment vanished as he plops into the seat next to Kenna. “It wasn’t very good.”

  Kenna’s heart breaks a little.

  Benzo reaches down to fumble with the basket, lifting the lid up enough to give Kenna a peek inside. There are four bread loaves, swaddled like children in checkered blue fabric.

  “I gotta remember to thank Montgomery,” he murmurs, tracing a memo on the biomatrix implants in his skin. “She took over my station so I could bake four kinds of bread for you. She never works prep duty. Don’t know what got into her. In any case, I’m sorry it’s only four breads, normally I’d pop into the Escargone and make you ten different kinds, but nobody in the kitchen will touch that thing now, they actually walk around it in a big circle like it might bite them…”

  “Hey.” If Kenna doesn’t interrupt Benzo’s breathless monologue, it might go on forever. “I fear I feel no hunger.”

  “I got a job, Kenna. I’m educating your palate. And I gotta tell you, there’s such a difference between peasant bread and pumpernickel, it’d be a shame if you never knew it…”

  “I’m holding vigil. You can’t—you can’t eat when someone languishes in surgery…”

  Benzo takes his hand.

  Kenna’s breath, his heartbeat, every neuron in his brain converges on the warm sensation of Benzo’s fingers closing around his.

  Benzo took his hand once before, to feed him soup, yet this tenderness holds no such excuse. Benzo’s fingers move lovingly across Kenna’s skin, like ice skaters moving across a frozen pond, leaving tingling trails behind.

  Benzo’s saying something, but Benzo’s firm touch pushes the language out of Kenna’s head. At best, he notices Benzo’s bristly stubble, realizes Benzo had no time to shave today, wonders what it would feel like to lean over and press his lips to Benzo’s.

  Then slowly, like an animal resyncing with time after being in a stasis cube, his brain catches up to make sense of Benzo’s words:

  “You can’t do that, Kenna. Trust me, I—you don’t get a lot of good moments, working for Her. You don’t get to choose your happy times, they just show up whenever She’s not paying attention. So you learn that when you get a good moment, no matter when it arrives, you’ve gotta grab it hard, because … well, who knows when you’ll get another chance?”

  Is Benzo asking him to kiss him?

  Benzo is totally asking Kenna to kiss him.

  But if Kenna’s wrong, then things will be awkward. So awkward.

  Except Benzo’s stopped talking, and he’s still holding Kenna’s hand. These seats sit so close to each other, hip-to-hip.

  Benzo’s eyes are planet-blue and earnest, reflecting Kenna’s terror. Benzo, too, has so much to lose: Kenna is technically his employer for the time being; if he’s wrong about this then he might not get to stay with Kenna anymore, and how would the kitchen gossip about his foolishness then?

  Benzo’s lips open, just a bit, as if begging to be kissed.

  Kenna realizes he has to kiss him. Benzo’s risked enough. Kenna must risk it back.

  But what if Kenna’s wrong? This is a docbot ward. What if Benzo’s awkward because of all the sorrow? What if …

  No. Enough overthinking.

  Just do this.

  Kenna moves forward, close enough to scent the butter on Benzo’s breath. Benzo trembles, closing his eyes …

  … and the hourly sterilization spritzes them with alcohol.

  They splutter, the kiss ruined, spitting disinfectant—and as Benzo scrubs his tongue with his palm, he chokes out a laugh.

  Kenna giggles.

  All that latent tension converts into an acknowledgment of how ridiculous this is—this elaborate dance they’re doing, this gravid seriousness—and when Benzo makes eye contact, it’s like wildfire sparking off Kenna. They snort back sniggers, trying not to give in to this giggling amusement, but every time Benzo makes eye contact it’s this clean honesty of God, aren’t we idiots? and they are, it’s so ludicrous to circle each other like boxers when they clearly love each other, and whenever they exchange glances it opens a door past all this silly posturing to show how much affection is there for the taking.

  They laugh until they’re best friends.

  The door to the operating room cracks open. “Everything all right?” Lizzie asks, drawling it as though she’s talking to lunatics. Kenna realizes how crazy this must have sounded from inside the operating room, especially with Paulius still teetering on death’s door.

  Benzo chokes out a “We’re glorious.”

  Lizzie gives them a quick nod, as if to say I’ve seen stranger things in war, and closes the door. Even though they’re in the waiting room and she’s supervising an operation, Kenna feels like she’s giving them privacy.

  That sensual moment’s been cleansed from the room. There were no kisses, and won’t be today. Yet in some weird way, this newfound comfort is better.

  It feels like something to build a relationship on.

  “Come on,” Benzo says, wiping off the picnic basket. “Let’s try the bread before we get doused again.”

  The bread’s pretty good.

  The friendship is better.

  12

  One Afternoon Closer to the Wisdom Ceremony

  �
��Do not order me around like I’m one of your re-homed wageslaves!”

  Montgomery’s words haul Kenna out of a gummy dream, his back aching from the waiting room chair contortion.

  “If you won’t help the boy,” Paulius says, “I’ll crawl to the Escargone myself.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Kenna grasps for consciousness, face beaded with disinfectant, slipping out of the chair onto the floor. He’s slept fitfully in the hours that Paulius has been in surgery, a dusky exhaustion-hell.

  Paulius’s anguished groan shoves the fog away.

  Montgomery’s arm snakes out, hauls Kenna in.

  The recovery room is cramped, the ceiling an orthodontic nightmare of needles, the monitors on the walls blaring a threatening bloodred as Paulius attempts to heave himself off the bed. Scrimshaw holds him down, pushing her weight onto his chest as though attempting CPR; she is backed by a slender armada of antennae-like docbot extension arms, which advance nervously as they dart back and forth in attempts to inject Paulius with a sedative.

  Paulius thrashes, sending vibrations through the medical tethers connecting him to the docbot—the blood pressure cuffs, the pulse oximeters, the heart monitors, even his long white braid, all jiggling like an obscene puppet show.

  “Bring me to the Escargone!” Paulius huffs. He clenches his teeth as the stitches across his naked body flex. “It is inspiration that feeds a man! I will not leave that boy to wander! I will—”

  And then he notices Kenna, and relaxes quickly enough that Kenna wonders if a sedative-arm got to him. But no. He lifts his arms in greeting, allowing Scrimshaw to shove him back against the pillow. Yet Paulius’s mouth creeps into a hesitant grin, as though he can’t quite believe that this angel, that Kenna, has come to see him.

  “Kenna,” he whispers, a tear trickling from one eye. “I should have known you’d never leave.”

  Gravity shuts down. Kenna is wafted aloft on the happiness of realizing he was right, Paulius needed him here.

  They need each other.

  “I was by your side, sir,” he gasps, his lungs a vacuum. “All along.”

  Paulius’s exhausted smile is as radiant as any sun.

  This is a betrayal, Kenna thinks without a scrap of regret, this beautiful oxytocin acceptance flooding his veins. This is what I should have felt when Mother and Father hugged me.

  Scrimshaw bats away an inbound sedation needle.

  “No,” Montgomery rumbles, pushing Paulius and Kenna apart like a referee separating two boxers. “No, no, no. I brought you in here to talk him out of this damn-fool plan, not talk him into it.”

  “… what damn-fool plan?”

  “He wants to hole up in the Escargone to heal.”

  Paulius’s mouth crooks in a disdainful sneer, as if to ask, And what’s wrong with that?

  Kenna can’t see why that’d be a bad idea himself, with the impending Wisdom Ceremony; why shouldn’t Paulius bring a nurse with him into the Escargone, compress the painful weeks of recovery into a single afternoon’s time to emerge hale and hearty?

  Yet Montgomery snorts like an angry dog, prepared to brain Paulius with her cask rather than let him near the Escargone. Scrimshaw looms over him with a teacher’s grave disappointment. Even the rows of sharp-toothed docbot instruments ripple as though they might surge forward to grab his tongue.

  “Okay.” Kenna waves his hands in peaceable circles. “What, precisely, makes you believe Paulius’s course of action is suboptimal?”

  Montgomery thrusts her fingers deep into her hair, pulls hard. “He’s got Niffeneger syndrome, for the Gods’ sake!”

  Kenna’s skin goes clammy with embarrassment. He’ll have to admit ignorance twice in short order.

  Paulius touches his fingertips to his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “You speak as though it’s a fatal disease.”

  “It is a fatal disease,” Scrimshaw snaps.

  “Life is a fatal disease. We all have our own terminal velocity. I merely have a more colorful endpoint than most.”

  Scrimshaw rolls her eyes, a magnificent rolling, like stars wheeling overhead. “Most people’s terminal velocity doesn’t involve actual freefall through an atmosphere, you gossamer-dreamed lout.”

  “I’d kill to die so close to civilization, you rickety old birdcage. My days will end in a black void, feeling my eyeballs frost over, and you know it.”

  “You act as though I’m eager to see the end of your financial contributions, when you know damned well I’ve taken every risk to ensure your dimensional stability…”

  Kenna makes a time-out “T” with his hands. “Fine people—before we continue this most studied sniping, may I request an explanation of this Niffeneger syndrome?”

  Both Scrimshaw and Paulius cross their arms and study the walls, pointedly ignoring each other. Scrimshaw taps one rubber-soled boot against the plastic floor; in response, Paulius taps his fingers against his bicep in a counter-rhythm, both using tiny noises to war peevishly.

  Montgomery blinks, twice, as if to ask Are you shitting me? and then kneels next to Kenna. “Okay. So. You’re familiar with dimensional splitters?”

  “The most expensive warships in existence? Yes, I believe I’m familiar.”

  “Yeah. Well, a couple hundred years ago some bright boys got the idea to try to breed humans with the capacity to fold dimensions.”

  He stifles a disbelieving cough. “That’s ludicrous. You couldn’t possibly breed a dimensional splitter into a human body. They have to siphon mass from stars to get it to work.”

  “Didn’t say it was easy, kid. Or that they were entirely successful. Only way they could do it was to splice nanobots into the people’s genes, and those nanobots drew power from … somewhere. High-powered techno-juju. But the ’bots had a loading time that made bureaucracies look nimble. Couple of times a year, these folks would build up enough of a charge to crack open a rift, and…” She clasps her hands together as if in prayer, then makes a diving motion as if plunging through dimensions. “Poof.”

  Kenna frowned. “I’m guessing this fine tale does not end with an army of super-engineered warriors.”

  “No, it does not. Because for one thing, even though they tried to breed in some navigation senses, space is large. Far too large for meat-brains to calculate with efficiency. For every planet, there’s ten trillion planet-sized gaps. Most walked straight into vacuum. If two somehow charged up at the same time and landed on the same planet, they might land continents apart. Or plummet through the upper atmosphere.”

  “So they discontinued the program.”

  “We assume. All we know is when you breed a race who can teleport anywhere, well, it’s hard to keep ’em down on the farm. One escaped to planetfall, made a little love, and we have reconstructed what we can of this story by analyzing the nano-genes that sometimes resurface in his escapee’s distant relatives. And … voilà!”

  Montgomery gestures at Paulius like a magician producing a rabbit.

  Kenna tries not to stare. “So you’re a super-soldier.”

  Paulius whips the blanket off in response, displaying his body for Kenna’s edification; he highlights his scrawny biceps, demonstrates the paunchy belly-bulge resting atop his storklike physique, runs his fingers through his unruly gray chest hair. All that, highlighted by the space-dark bruises and machine-tight stitches embroidering his re-created hip.

  His eyes demand respect. “Do I look like a killing machine to you, O Prince?”

  Kenna hands the blanket back by way of apology.

  Paulius tucks himself back in as best he can, grunting as the pain drives him down. His pallid face flushes with the effort of covering his feet.

  “No, Master Kenna. I’m no mono-browed thug with a penchant for pugilism. I’m the secret shame of a failed military program, a superpower watered down into disease. And I live with the consequences.”

  “So you … part the dimensions and step onto another biomass?”

  “I don’t do
anything.” He slumps back into the bed, speaking in a resigned monotone as he tries to regain strength. “From my perspective, it’s more like a … a seizure. It happens every few seasons, whether I want it to or not. And—well, maybe it’s more like a sneeze in that I have some control over it, if I sense it coming. And I have them in spasms, so I’ve usually gotten there and back. Though that’s not guaranteed. Sometimes, I’ve wound up seven solar systems away and had to hitchhike back. Yet the charge builds slower if I work. Sleep just seems to empower the damned thing, so…”

  His smile is a rueful twitch. “I did a lot of drugs. Then I discovered how easy it is to stay awake for sixty hours when you’re creating something beautiful.”

  “Which makes it easier to stay put,” Kenna finishes.

  He taps Kenna on the nose fondly. “Precisely, my sweet prince. I have experienced many foreign cuisines, most accidentally.” Then he sighs. “One day, I’ll disappear, and no one will know where I’ve gone. So I made myself big enough for someone to miss me.”

  Kenna looks around at the docbot’s monitors, realizing they now have full records of Paulius’s medical status. “But … why promote this clandestine nature of your … condition? Will that government track you down to dissect you, or…”

  “Oh, probably.” Paulius makes a disgusted snort. “The bigger deal is investment.”

  “Investment?”

  Scrimshaw makes a distasteful little cough. “No serious investor would sink money into a celebrity chef who might disappear. They’re already leery of his tendencies to go on daylong benders where he cannot be found.”

  “If I feel it coming on, I pick a fight,” Paulius admits. “I fling plates. Then I retreat into my private lair before I vanish. Mostly, they think I’m temperamental.”

  “You are temperamental,” Scrimshaw adds.

  “That has nothing to do with my condition and you know it, you penitentiary proctologist! I am temperamental because when I ask for the finest vichyssoise and some oaf hands me a bowl of paste, she should—”