“Wait!” he cries.
Scrimshaw is nothing more than a gray, distant smear—but she stops. Kenna tries to sound bold.
“May I kindly make my decision in the kitchen?”
The embarrassed rustle of feet on carpet. Kenna realizes the chefs have heard him; the bar’s track lighting had hidden them from view, but not from earshot.
Scrimshaw lifts two fingers, an administrator’s signal for the AI, and the overhead lights flare to a cold fluorescent. The darkness vanishes, revealing thirteen chefs facing Kenna, squinting in his direction, hungry for gossip—then, their machinations revealed, they straighten, rebuttoning their chef’s jackets to regain their dignity.
“My apologies, Kenna,” she says. “Perhaps more illumination will help ease this decision…”
“No, no.” Giving enough light to see the scaffolding overhead, the empty black carpet below, is somehow worse. It’s like being backstage during a play after a performance, a dead space Kenna does not know how to bring to life. “I can’t. Not here. The kitchen is…”
Kenna wants to say The kitchen is my home. But a true Philosopher wouldn’t destroy his home with guesswork. A man of real strength would shut down the Majestic at the peak of its power, like Scrimshaw would, but no—Kenna is a child too in love with his pet to accept euthanasia as the kindest choice.
“This must happen in the kitchen.”
“Kenna.” Scrimshaw pads her words in velvet. “We can’t leave the chefs in the kitchen with you. Not now.” They might tear you to shreds. “And it’s heaped with dirty dishes…”
“I’ll do the dishes.”
He feels better, saying that. He is nothing. Manual labor is what a nothing should do.
“Kenna.” Her hands crook into claws. “You can’t clear out the back room just to—”
“The kitchen is where I started.” Kenna rises to his feet. His stomach has a sick water balloon weight, threatening to burst. “It’s where I’ll end this.”
“You can’t—”
He waddles past the thirteen chefs, who have frozen in place like bowling pins, so Kenna must walk through them. The heavy black curtains that separate kitchen from staging area lift as he approaches, sensors guiding him through the deep night to The Sol Majestic’s kitchen.
Kenna’s never seen the Majestic after a bad service, but the subtle changes are in place: there are no popped champagne bottles spattering fizzy toasts into crystal flutes, just shots of cheap arrack swallowed hastily as painkillers. Elbows are kept close to their sides as the chefs scrub down their stations like men strangling lovers. The laughs are sporadic as gunfire, bitter as black coffee.
Then they see Kenna, and even that loose camaraderie decays.
All sound stops, except for the soapy water pouring into the pot-filled sinks. Their hands each stroke their own personal injuries: massaging the aching biceps from stirring stew for an hour, injecting anti-radiation medications to prevent side effects from the stasis cubes, rubbing ice over the steamed fingers that boiled a hundred eggs to make the perfect one for Kenna.
They sacrificed their bodies to give him perfection.
They know he did not comprehend the gift.
They each take tentative steps toward Kenna then flinch back when no one steps with them, no one quite ready to rip the skin off this illusion. No one has yet dared to say Kenna is a fraud, not out loud.
No one can yet acknowledge this Wisdom Meal is a failure. Yet the illusion of success is so delicate a scornful cough might destroy it—
Before someone can be so foolish, Kenna taps a dishwasher’s back. Her waist-deep sink is stacked high with filthy pots.
“May I…?”
She makes confused scrubbing gestures in the air, unsure what he desires. Kenna removes the brass scouring pad from her fingers.
“I need to do something,” he explains. “Something useful.”
The dishwasher mutters protests, but falls silent when Scrimshaw’s gaunt shadow falls over her.
Kenna turns his back on the kitchen to thrust himself shoulder-deep into the steaming water, welcoming the pain shooting up his forearms. It distracts from the half-digested food sloshing at the back of his throat; when he breathes in, he feels his stomach fighting his lungs for room. Who knew being full could be worse than starving?
He feels like vomiting, but—
How do you rust an egg?
The kitchen’s attention is hot on his back. Throwing up their work in front of them would be worse than the sickness.
He grips the scouring pad tight enough to hurt, picks up a saucepan.
He will cleanse the kitchen and destroy himself.
How do you rust an egg?
The burnt-match egg or the clear broth that evolved into a stew? The evanescent grape-salt chemical cuisine, or the duck’s simplicity? Does he choose the simple meal his ignorant palate liked, or does he choose the flashy meal that impressed his ignorant sensibilities?
How do you rust an egg?
He bears down, shaking caustic soda onto the pans’ steel surface before scrubbing them clean, his fingers numb from the near-boiling sink. He smells reminders on every pan: the garden-fresh scent of the stew still clinging to the tureen, the thick dark lacquer glazing the saucepan …
How do you rust an egg?
His robe is a ruin—slopped with dishwater suds, smeared with grease. He does not look up as the chefs approach him, one by one, to deposit their pans apologetically into his sink.
He will never bring enlightenment to anyone. He will never inspire anyone. He will scrub dishes until his fingers are raw, turning soiled dishes white again, and he is surprised to find there is a deep satisfaction in scourging both himself and these pans.
It’s not his fault he can’t judge. Who could do this but Paulius?
How do you—
A familiar hand rubs his back. Benzo. Kenna closes his eyes, lest seeing his friend rob his strength.
“Don’t,” Kenna whispers. “Please.”
Benzo steps toward him, and for a moment Kenna feels Benzo’s hands sliding around his belly, drawing him backwards against Benzo’s lean body. But it’s just a fantasy. He needs to scrub pans until his Princely veneer falls away, until he becomes another manual worker, becomes nothing …
Instead, Benzo squeezes his shoulder and pads off.
A layer of pans later, Kenna realizes: he hears no other noises. The clatter of women recalibrating the gravitizer has ceased. No shots are being poured. No cook is frying up a quick post-service meal.
Kenna’s fingertips are sodden, wrinkled, shredded by the scourer. He is, for the first time, nothing more than a body; his thoughts have been scrubbed away like the grime on the pans.
No. No, that’s not what’s happened at all. That’s what he wants to happen. The truth is, immersing his hands in caustic water has not transformed him; his thoughts still dance through his head, even as his body places the pans into the autoclave. Dishwashing does not transform him into the brute he longs to be, leaving him to find inspiration somewhere before morning, and—
The hollow thump of wood against steel. A cask, slammed onto the sink.
“You need to look after this for me.”
Montgomery affects casualness, balling one fist into her bony hip, but she leans on the cask a little too heavily, masking her body’s sway. Kenna can’t make out her eyes through her goggles’ smoked-glass lenses, but he’d bet dimes to dinari that her pupils are blown wide on some drug.
“Watching your possessions is not my task,” Kenna snaps.
“It’s not mine, either. I don’t work here.” She tosses the words around him like smoke rings, taunting him. She’s no longer in her mold-stained chef’s outfit—instead, she’s dressed to party in a bright red, faux-leather skinsuit, with so many buckles across her ribs it hurts Kenna’s fingers to think of her squeezing herself into that thing. “I need a guard for my party. My usual suspects are too traumatized—you’re the only one left standing.�
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She shoves the cask against his chest and stumbles for the exit, leaving Kenna to grab for the Bitch before she hits the floor. He feels the loose slosh inside the cask, hears a soft meep of complaint.
“I have dishes to wash.” And a decision to make.
She teeters back on too-high heels, her ankles flexing as she swaggers toward him. She snatches the cask away, almost toppling over backwards. “If my precious gets stolen while I am dancing among the stars, I’m blaming you.” She emphasizes the “you” by thumping the cask against his breastbone. “Do your dishes. Do your duty.”
She pivots away, but Kenna has known Montgomery long enough to sense the challenge buried in her words.
“What kind of party?” he asks.
She heads for the door. “A very illegal one. Packed chock-full of drugs your parents would disapprove of. Involving carefully applied vandalism in the service of art. Or kink. They’re the same at heart, really.”
“I can’t look after the—” He doesn’t want to say “the Bitch” out loud. “I cannot vouchsafe your cask during your escapades. I wouldn’t know how to feed her…”
She turns to fire a laugh in his direction. “I wouldn’t leave her with you all night. I need someone to come with me. I don’t know when I’ll get vacuum-sealed—they’ve spent hours setting it up—but when it happens, I need someone to hand her to right away.”
“Why do you require a party? Tonight, of all nights?”
Her utter indifference stills Kenna’s tongue. She does not, as she is so quick to remind people, work here. She scratches the tip of her nose.
“To answer your question…” She pulls herself up on the counter, crossing her legs underneath her. “People find out who they really are at parties. At least the parties I attend. Unfortunately, some people discover they’re unscrupulous bastards who steal your shit. Hence my need for your pathetic ass.”
He waves at the remaining pots. “I promised Scrimshaw…”
“You’re a good boy, Kenna.” Her words form a compliment, on the surface. But the way she grimaces reminds Kenna of the dismissive look Father once gave him …
I love you now as I would a pet, Father had said. But I hope one day to love you as a man.
When she says “good boy,” it carries the fondness of a woman petting a faithful hound. He feels the cage of being a good boy, that itching sensation that he’ll do what’s expected of him.
And for what? All this punishment? These dishes aren’t getting him any closer to making a decision, yet he’s shackled himself to this sink as though The Sol Majestic will somehow be better if he destroys himself in some sad semblance of repentance.
What does he have to lose?
“All right.” As he straightens, he does not feel Inevitable. But there is a new strength in his spine; his arms are wrinkled with foul physical exertion, yet he has remained Kenna. Since he cannot erase himself, maybe he should discover who he is at parties.
Montgomery hops off the table, landing nimbly on spiked heels. She does not waver. She is not on drugs. She never was.
She tosses him the keg. “Let’s get starbound.”
16
Half an Hour Until the Party
Trailing behind Montgomery as she leads the way to the Illegal Drug Party, all Kenna can notice is her skinsuit’s shining red curves. He’s clasping the Bitch to his chest, but it’s hard because the wooden cask keeps slipping against his soapy robe, grinding sauce-stains deeper into the thin fabric.
A thin worry surfaces, swells, pushes his other thoughts away: is he stylish enough to attend this party?
Kenna has never been to an Illegal Drug Party. He’s watched people piss away the hours on drugs, of course, but that’s never been cause for a party on the transport ships; drugs were both tedious and omnipresent, all tin-foil packets and cracked glass pipes. After you took them you laid down in filth and let the light-years slide beneath you.
The hopheads kept telling Kenna drugs were phenomenal—and they looked phenomenal when you saw people doing them on the holovids, where rich children snorted smart-drugs engineered to make them witty before the world came alive for them in psychedelic bursts.
But on the transport ships, drugs just made people giggle at rust stains.
The idea that one could celebrate drugs is as exciting as celebrating food. Yet if the Illegal Drug Party is like dining at The Sol Majestic, maybe Kenna is underdressed. He can’t afford to rust another egg.
Maybe he should get a new robe from Scrimshaw. Montgomery’s dressed to kill, even if she can barely amble about on those high heels. Will he look stupid?
She leads him into Savor Station’s utility tunnels. She teeters down hallways crowded with snakelike bundles of power cables, the oil-slicked walls crammed full of access panels and emergency release valves and industrial plugs.
She taps her forearm three times. A map evanesces across her coppery skin, a green knot of hallways flaring with dangerous red cones sweeping back and forth. She brushes the map away before shoving him against a steam pipe, fingers clamping tight over his mouth.
A bright yellow maintenance bot cruises down another corridor, a massive engine suspended from a track on the ceiling, blocking the corridor. It sways pendulously, rattling as it drags a thousand thin antennae along the walls and floors, sensors analyzing for pipe breaks, open hatchways, severed cables.
Kenna tenses to run. If it turns left in their direction, it’s big enough to smear their bodies along the walls.
“Don’t,” Montgomery whispers, flattening him against a pipe’s scalding heat. “It’s shit at hearing, but its eyes are real good at picking up motion. If it gets you on camera, you’re getting thrown off this station.”
“Thrown off?” Savor Station is a way station situated between empires, nested in a solar system with no habitable planets. Stations are governed by no laws but their captains’ whims, though he’s heard Captain Lizzie is a reasonable woman as captains go. Would she really eject them into the vacuum?
Kenna looks down the winding corridors, tries to remember which way they’d come from. Could he find his way back to safety without Montgomery’s help? “Why would—”
“This isn’t like you sneaking into the loading docks, kid. Worst you could do up there would be to steal some spices. Down here in the station’s guts, you could blow the whole thing up. Captain Lizzie takes that real serious.”
“Why did you—”
She presses him harder against the wall, not quite shaking him, but reminding him not to move while the maintenance bot is within reach. “I told you this party was illegal, kid. Did you think I meant we had a couple of smokes? There’s a reason you find out who you are at my kinds of parties.”
“Surely you wouldn’t—”
She rolls her eyes so hard her head rocks back. “No, we will not blow up the ship.” She speaks mechanically, as if reciting a denial to a cop. “Okay, we might cause a little explosive decompression. If we’re stupid. But we’re not stupid, we’ve read up on this.”
This fails to reassure Kenna.
The maintenance bot whirs, jiggling on the thick bundle of cables that tethers it to the ceiling. It reaches down with an octopoid-like series of actuators, picking up the cables strewn on the floor beneath. Then it rolls away from Kenna and Montgomery, straightening the cables as it retreats into darkness.
“I cry pardon for the misunderstanding, Ms. Montgomery,” Kenna says, and for the thousandth time he hates that stiff, prissy tone in his voice. “But I agreed to watch your fungal child, here. I did not agree to have the station chief view me as a saboteur. The restaurant you work for—”
“I keep telling you, I don’t work for them.”
Kenna lets the matter drop. “Regardless. The Sol Majestic depends on me, and I cannot afford to take risks.”
Montgomery sighs and flops back against the far wall. She holds her index finger and thumb together like she is aiming an imaginary dart between Kenna’s eyes, viewing
him through two pinched fingertips.
“See? That’s why nobody trusts you.”
When she speaks, it’s like The Sol Majestic speaks through her. She knows all the gossip. When she tells him that, her words thump against his heart.
Kenna’s soap-damp robe feels clammy at the thought of the next morning’s decision. He hugs the Bitch’s splintered cask, retreating behind it.
She rips it from his arms, stealing his shelter. She looks for a safe place among the cables to rest the Bitch, then, finding no place she deems adequate, decides to berate Kenna some more.
“You can’t make a decision because you don’t have enough experience. And you don’t have enough experience because between Mommy, Daddy, and this terror of somehow betraying your sad-ass heritage, you have been terrified to do anything that could get you in trouble.”
I thought about kissing boys sometimes when Mother made me meditate, Kenna thinks sullenly. Then he realizes how pathetic a rebellion that is, and slumps back against the pipes.
She slaps him.
“See?” she hisses, not quite daring to yell with the maintenance bot rattling around the corner. “Anyone can shut you down by thumbing your ‘guilt’ button. Everybody loves having you around, because you’re like an appreciative ghost, always smiling, never getting in their way—but your cheerful agreeableness will destroy The Sol Majestic when you become their manager.
“Those kids who starved you for three days,” she continues. “They beat you up, stole your nutricrackers. Betcha dimes to dinari they fucked over other kids, too. Why didn’t you form a rival gang and get your fellow losers to beat the crap out of them? You acted like some poor scared asshole!”
Hot, embarrassed blood pours into his cheeks. “Forming gangs was illegal. We could have gotten thrown off.”
Montgomery’s cynical smile could slice a heart in half. “And those other kids weren’t a gang?”
“They were…” They were friends, Kenna starts to say, but his lungs deflate as the realization digs into him. They were a gang. He’d been such an obedient son that he wouldn’t have recognized them as such unless they’d walked up and introduced themselves to say, “Hi, we’re a gang.”
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