The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

“There has been scuttlebutt that I planned to cancel the Ceremony,” Scrimshaw says. “Scurrilous lies. Yet without Paulius, the question remains: who of you can head up a meal worthy of The Sol Majestic’s name—a meal that does not compromise our vision, nor betray the Inevitable Philosophies’ gloried history.

  “Therefore, in three days, on The Sol Majestic’s nominal rest day, each chef at yellow-stripe rank or above will present a sample Wisdom Ceremony meal to Prince Kenna. Prince Kenna will then judge which dishes are worthy enough to make their creator his Wisdom Ceremony’s steward.”

  Kenna flinches: I will? He tugs Scrimshaw’s fingers like a small child begging his parent for help.

  Scrimshaw is impassive as a gargoyle. She takes his hand in hers, tightening her grip as if reluctant to leave him so alone. But she does not return his imploring gaze, staring at the kitchen staff as though the chefs are a lifeless desert they will die crossing.

  Of course she believes this is a hopeless task, Kenna realizes: Scrimshaw was so convinced there was no one to lead the Wisdom Ceremony that she’d planned to euthanize the Majestic. She has set Kenna up for his best chances of success, but had she ideas herself she would have enacted them.

  If someone is hidden in this kitchen who can make the Wisdom Ceremony happen, it’s up to Kenna to find them.

  The chefs look at Kenna with astonishment, as though Scrimshaw had informed them Kenna would be cooking the meal himself. Then they twist around to extract an answer from Benzo, the lone person in the kitchen who’s actually fed Kenna, as if to confirm Kenna’s palate was more than a desolate wasteland worn to pockmarked ruin by Frosted Chocobombs.

  By way of answer, Benzo tugs his shaggy curls over his eyes.

  Montgomery’s barking laugh breaks the silence. “Oh yeah,” she purrs, clutching the cask to her chest like a popcorn tub. “This is gonna be such a clusterfuck.”

  15

  Four Weeks and Four Days Until the Wisdom Ceremony

  In all the years Kenna had starved, he had never once dreamed he would come to dread a meal.

  Yet over the last three days, a funereal tone has stolen over The Sol Majestic. The impending Wisdom Tasting—a name everyone has somehow settled upon—has riven the kitchen, separated it from one unified organism into competing factions. Not that there haven’t always been jealousies simmering under The Sol Majestic, Kenna realizes, but those struggles had clear victors. Either you lived up to Paulius’s exacting standards, or you were wrong.

  Kenna’s judgment carries no such confidence. He can tell by the way each chef tugs him aside for hushed conversations; they do not look panicked, as he’d expected, but instead have the look of learned professors about to help their student pass a test.

  They all start the same way: “We cannot view this meal through the mere lens of food,” they explain. They are kind enough to not say they could describe the Wisdom Ceremony in food, but Kenna wouldn’t know a flank steak from a pork chop. “No, we must transcend the ingredients, make this dinner about re-creating your experience. Something in The Sol Majestic’s cuisine lifted you up high enough to reach your Inevitable Philosophy.”

  Had Kenna thought he would spend these five weeks at The Sol Majestic being honest?

  He swallows back laughs until they turn to molten steel bubbling in his stomach.

  They always lean in close then: all the chefs, fat and lean, Gineer or Intraconnected, yellow-stripers or red-stripers. And if any had that merchant’s odiferous air of advantage-seeking, then Kenna would have sent them packing.

  But no; they treat Kenna like he holds The Sol Majestic’s greatest treasure. Trembling smiles dance on their lips, shy in the presence of greatness. And then they ask the same question, every time, in the same damned way:

  “What did you learn here?” They always lick their lips then, almost touching foreheads as they try to divine Kenna’s secret. “What is your Inevitable Philosophy?”

  They seek it as though it will save them: just like the bhelpuri merchant, just like the emails rolling into Father’s account, just like the starving millions who looked to Mother and still went home with empty bellies.

  These chefs have greater dreams than he ever had.

  “It’ll help them if you tell them, Kenna,” Benzo had urged him, one late night when they slumped down against a dormitory wall, his left knee touching Kenna’s right knee. “A good meal isn’t just a bunch of dishes—it’s a story. Anyone here can put together a plate that’d make Her mouth water. What they need to do is bring the diner through your journey: start with your humbled starvation, then culminate in a flurry of tastes that confirms your Philosophy, celebrates it.”

  Kenna doesn’t know how a meal could accomplish that. But Benzo believes it can, and so do the other chefs: they cluster around Benzo, interrogating him as to every speck that Kenna’s eaten since he arrived. Now no one criticizes Benzo’s too-fatty chicken stock; instead, they dip spoons in, debate how this fattiness might have affected a starving young boy. They usher bowls of Benzo’s broth out to the orchard like servants carrying a king on a palanquin, reenacting Kenna’s enlightment.

  (But they do not go into the Escargone, though its industrial transport-space remains empty. They shiver at the thought. That’s where Paulius almost died, they say. Even though Scrimshaw displays diagnostics from local repairmen showing nothing is wrong with the Escargone, they treat it like it’s the beast that cursed this kitchen.)

  “You should tell them, Kenna.” Benzo reaches over to slide his blistered fingers between Kenna’s. A day ago, that tender touch would have shorted out Kenna’s thoughts; now Benzo’s touch makes his skin crawl, because Benzo’s beautiful skin is pressed against Kenna’s foul filthy liar fingers, and God, how could he kiss Benzo when his very soul is as fake as a VR game?

  That vomitous revulsion saves him as each chef bends forward as if they can pluck the secret from Kenna’s brow by mere proximity. Kenna turns from them, lest his stinking breath pollute these earnest men and women.

  He’d understood he’d have to guide them one day.

  He’d never realized they would impress him.

  Yet it is he who must impress them. If they realize he has no Philosophy, they will realize he has no story, they will be unable to cook. He doesn’t understand how they form a narrative from food, but he knows they need it. They need this place. They’re so dedicated, so creative, and Kenna doesn’t know what would happen to them without The Sol Majestic to shelter and encourage their instincts. When Scrimshaw spits the words of their competitor, “Belle du Balle,” Kenna envisions a cringing restaurant that crawls on its knees to its customers.

  Unless he can provide them with the proper inspiration, the Wisdom Ceremony is doomed, and The Sol Majestic is doomed, and Savor Station is doomed, and how does Scrimshaw ever live with this apocalypse held inches above her head?

  Mother and Father made employment seem trivial, but no wonder you cannot hold both a Philosophy and a trade. A trade clutters the brain; solving the puzzle of creation occupies so many CPU cycles that there’s no room left for lofty ambitions, only the hardscrabble search for survival.

  He looks to the red door for answers, but Scrimshaw has holed herself up, having placed The Sol Majestic’s fate upon Kenna’s impoverished tastebuds.

  “I’ve told you I cannot discuss my Philosophy.” Kenna always raises his voice now, so the others in the kitchen will hear, and maybe they will stop trying to pry this nonexistent secret from him. “It’s customary to reveal the Philosophy only at the Ceremony.”

  This is not strictly true, and everyone knows it. Montgomery is right; the Inevitable Philosophies still have youth’s pliable traditions, and some Philosophers have blabbed their ideas. Kenna wishes someone would slam him up against the wall to growl, “You could tell us!”

  But no; they respect him. Like the Philosopher he is not.

  And always Montgomery lurks nearby, thrusting her tasting spoon into dishes, shaking her head and chuckling. The
chefs bristle, calling Scrimshaw over to ward her away, but Montgomery doesn’t work here and without Paulius, no one can control her.

  Yet Kenna stares at her, she licks her long-handled spoon and giggles, those insectile black goggles dark and mocking.

  Kenna’s surprised to find himself grateful at her amusement; one less person to lie to.

  Though whenever he goes to talk to her, she’s never around. Which isn’t a surprise; she doesn’t work here. But he could surely use somebody to brainstorm what his Inevitable Philosophy might be.

  All the comfort-crèche’s electronic balms cannot lull Kenna into sleep. He keeps juggling potential Inevitable Philosophies, grabbing them and then tossing them into the air: “to feed the starving”? No, that’s Mother’s philosophy. “Teach the lost to make art”? He’d die if he had to peddle that crassness when all he can make is shoddy lies. “To devote oneself to perfection”? That feels like a winner, but then he can’t devise a good answer for when someone asks him to define perfection.

  He wants to yell at Montgomery: Inevitable Philosophies aren’t a catchphrase. They’re fractal, a never-ending spiral of decisions unspooling off one simple thought so meaningful it guides all his future steps.

  His proposed Inevitable Philosophies are vapid corporate slogans.

  He longs to give the chefs an Inevitable Philosophy to guide them, but whatever he tells them is a lie he’ll be lashed to all his life. Yet without it, the kitchen cannot judge. If they at least knew what his Philosophy was, then it would take the place of Paulius’s stern judgment; they might disagree on a given dish’s quality, but they would at least share the same goal. Now, Kenna hears the chefs bickering, arguing what they believe a boy like Kenna might like, how could they possibly think that gearlike display of fiddlehead ferns represents the Prince’s Philosophy?

  Kenna fears he will pick the worst dish. If he chooses something the kitchen deems unworthy, then the chefs will not respect him, and The Sol Majestic will tear itself apart in drama. Yet if he asks for assistance, then he will be seen to be choosing favorites, and The Sol Majestic will tear itself apart in drama.

  Scrimshaw is right: without Paulius, The Sol Majestic cannot survive.

  So the jealousies boil over when the Wisdom Tasting arrives. Kenna’s whole body shrinks with embarrassment every time the chefs approach the long, linen-draped dining table.

  Scrimshaw has arranged for the tasting to take place in The Sol Majestic’s bar, which—Kenna is told—is not so much a bar as a staging area, an introductory space where new guests can acclimatize themselves to The Sol Majestic’s ethos.

  Had this been Kenna’s introduction to The Sol Majestic, he would have fled screaming.

  The dining room is an auditorium, a space so vast that each step into its emptiness lets you feel yourself shrinking into insignificance. Curtains sweep shut the moment you enter, engulfing you in a velvety black; AI lights set high up in the ceiling track your progress, casting a maddeningly dim ghost-light upon you that allows you to see a footfall ahead, fluttering murky shadows upon a black carpet—but the moment you look up to see where the light comes from, it disappears before you can get your eyes on it, leaving you stranded in darkness. Audio-suppressing walls sop up the echoes, let your voice call out once before being silenced forever.

  You float through emptiness, a small asteroid, becoming smaller.

  Then, as your eyes adjust, you take in the arc of the bar, a window as big as a movie screen, a prickling of starlight as you realize you are looking out into empty space. Fitted beneath is a slender strip of polished onyx countertop, dim as dawn, where a lone bartender services your needs.

  Benzo has told him the isolation is the experience. The Sol Majestic is a state of mind based on the immensity of space, both in volume and time—the transience of all things heightens appreciation, and you are meant to feel small. The chairs you sit on are dismantled after you rise, the glasses you drink from smashed. Everything crumbles.

  Destruction brings Kenna no pleasure. Instead, Kenna clings to the sight of that bar, the colored rows of bottles that speak of work and creation. He longs for the kitchen’s crowded comfort, but Scrimshaw insisted a kitchen tasting was not fit for a prince.

  So he sits at the table as the chefs approach with clasped hands—a trio of waiters carrying elaborate meals. The dishes are deposited upon his table with the curtness of bombs dropping, each course a pointed rebuttal of someone else’s best efforts.

  Whatever he chooses today will save or damn The Sol Majestic.

  Kenna’s inexperience betrays him the moment he picks up the fine-boned chopsticks.

  The long sticks squirm between his fingers, duck breast chunks slithering out from between the rounded tips to spatter back on the plate. Why did they give him chopsticks? Everything he’s eaten has been unpeeled from crinkling plastic wrappers, crammed into his mouth with bare hands. The chopsticks amplify Kenna’s weakness, taking something he’s done all his life and transforming it into an alien experience.

  The courses come, clad in sauces dark as night, sprinkled with flecks of glimmering gold, served in woven fibrous vegetable bowls. The chefs announce the ingredients with the pride of a butler announcing debutantes to a ball, but the words are meaningless—citronic effusions, ambar-salted garum, turpenol, red-shifted iron flakes. Kenna strains to hear each syllable, as though they are magic incantations that will unlock the dishes’ beauty, but they slur into a glossolalia.

  “As you can see, this peacock-egg dish is rusted,” a yellow-striper says, presenting a single blackened egg on a red porcelain plate.

  “Rusted?” Kenna’s curled up to sleep on many rusted floors, but had never thought to eat the flakes. “How do you rust an egg?”

  “Rustic,” the chef snaps, squeezing her hands as though she wishes she were strangling Kenna.

  “Oh.” Kenna looks down at the mottled egg. “I don’t suppose there’s a cooking technique where you rust something…”

  “No.”

  This boiled egg tastes like a burnt match. Is that how it’s supposed to taste? Kenna can’t imagine the chefs presenting him with a dish that’s anything other than they intended, but he heard someone cursing from the kitchen as the deadline approached; maybe the burnt match taste is a mistake, and choosing this dish will tell the other chefs their best efforts won’t matter. Or maybe it’s the height of cuisine, they’ve eaten so many peacock eggs that an egg that tastes like a burnt match is a glorious change of pace, and Kenna should choose this sooty egg to demonstrate his worldliness.

  Kenna wishes for more burnt-match dishes. If all the dishes were awful, then he’d feel good about choosing at random. Yet the truth is, the instant he manages to negotiate each bite up to his tongue with these clumsy chopsticks, time freezes.

  The dishes, they are stories.

  He takes a bite of a duck stew, and at first it’s a light cinnamon dusting, then the rich duck taste, then a light blossoming of flowers across his palate like an orchard blooming. Is this bowl too simple?

  Some dishes are engineering feats that seem cold: glistening artificial grapes that dissolve into salt-sprays of foam when they warm on Kenna’s tongue, crackling into a fizzy heat when he inhales. Others grow in complexity with each course, beginning with a bowl of clear broth as the chefs slide an ingredient into the tureen between Kenna’s sips until the bowl brims over with a spicy meat stew.

  Still others seem needlessly flashy; two waiters haul in a flower pot of periwinkle orchids, then pluck the blossoms from green stalks to assemble a salad, the “dirt” at the bottom of the pot a peppery seasoning. The petals evaporate on his tongue, empty perfume puffs.

  Yet when the inevitable lacquered duck appears, it seems leaden in the wake of that salad’s flower-play. It’s just a duck, and yet that oily mouthful is so rich and crackling with fat that it’s almost a gamey assault after the delicate blossoms …

  Which dish is worthy of The Sol Majestic?

  He cannot dar
e to enjoy them. He rolls the sauces over his tongue, judging them. Will this culinary story keep these ever-imaginative chefs employed? And all the while, he remembers:

  He’s the ignoramus who asked about a rusted egg.

  The words bounce around in his skull, becoming louder and dumber with each iteration: How do you rust an egg how do you rust an egg how do you rust an egg

  All those years starving, and he never imagined a time he’d want to stop eating. Yet each course is a mystery to Kenna; he has never eaten glass noodles, let alone decided whether these are the universe’s finest glass noodles.

  The chefs scrutinize his every bite, Kenna’s every hesitation transformed into free-floating terror. They know when he should be closing his eyes in bliss: when Kenna does not match their scripted reactions, their hands tremble.

  How do you rust an egg? They knew they were doomed then.

  And just when Kenna is about to vomit on this fine white cloth, Scrimshaw grants mercy.

  “That’s the last dish,” she tells him. “Have you made a decision?”

  It is not so much a question as a command: Guess quickly, and choose this killing meal.

  Kenna lifts his head to Scrimshaw, begging her for assistance—tell me what to do—but she steeples her long fingers before parting them apologetically: I told you I could not help.

  Kenna is not a Philosopher. Nor is he a merchant.

  He is nothing.

  The chefs stand in the soft darkness, the tracking lights above reducing them to ghostly blurs. They pretend not to listen, but their faces are masks of suppressed horror. Scrimshaw snaps around, interposing her grand matron’s body between them and Kenna.

  “So the boy needs more time.” She makes shooing motions. “Give him time.”

  They walk into the bar’s darkness, fading away, swallowed up by the stygian gloom. Within moments, only Scrimshaw stands by this long table, which seems to float like the sole thing in the universe, the stars mockingly distant.

  She turns to leave. Kenna realizes with horror that she expects him to make his decision here. In this silent void. And why not? The chefs are toking up in the kitchen already, commiserating …