The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  The words squiggle up from the floor, jumping as they trace their way across an airlock—

  The bulkhead airlock to a transport ship.

  The words pulsate, pointing to the entryway keypad with a puppydog enthusiasm that suggests tonight’s guests wouldn’t know enough to press their palms against a standard bulk-transport biometric access pad. Mother and Father stagger up behind him, faces contorted as though looking for the joke.

  It’s as though the airlock has dressed up for an evening out. A few snarls of graffiti lend it artificial danger, but not the graphic patina that builds up after months of boredom. There’s no scent of rust and urine and dope. The biometric access pad gleams, not fogged with layers of skin oils.

  Did Paulius understand who Kenna was?

  This airlock’s mockery has united them. Kenna looks to Father for guidance; Father shrugs, gestures for Kenna to access the lock.

  They scoot backwards as it hisses open. Kenna knows what he will see inside; the cavernous assembly area, where ship security can round up the passengers in case of riot.

  They await his ersatz wisdom.

  I will be a light to disperse the darkness. He subvocalizes the words, remembering the rolling tones Rèpondelle has taught him to make this sham of a Philosophy sound as deep as oceans. He softens his gaze to make meaningful eye contact, prepares a cryptic smile to imply he understands his guests’ troubles …

  But no. Beyond the door is a washroom, complete with sordid squat-toilets and dry-wipe stations and graffiti-smeared bathroom mirrors. Which is ludicrous; no transport ship would funnel its passengers into alcoves that encourage them to freshen up. They’re usually jabbing your back with plastic poles to push you in.

  Who designed this stupid ship?

  “The graffiti!” Mother stifles an un-Mother-like chuckle. Sure enough, the pastel knots of gang signs on the mirror wriggle like worms, forming new words:

  As the Prince was anonymous when he arrived, so shall you be. Please. Wash your hands.

  Father sticks his hands beneath a faucet. Mother and Kenna gather round him, curious to see how deep this charade goes—and sure enough, after ten seconds the water clicks off with a red buzz. Father flicks his fingers, pleased at least they have gotten this detail correct.

  Except instead of a red laser light blinking YOU HAVE USED UP ONE UNIT OF YOUR DAILY WATER SUPPLY, the warning reads, Please. Dry your hands.

  Father and Mother exchange a look, then Father crouches down beneath the bulky blast-dryers affixed to the walls.

  Except the blast-dryers hiss like spray paint, a grid of lasers painting Father’s face as the smell of burning plastic jets out from the driers.

  A smooth white mask drops into Father’s hands.

  Father cradles it, the etch of a grin cracking his stern face. He traces the mask’s fluted edge with his fingertips, marveling at the quality of the fabbed creation: one side is made of a flexible nylon, fitted to his face’s contour like a sleeping mask, while the outside could have been a beautiful bust from ancient times.

  “Go on,” Mother says. “Try it on.”

  Father presses it to his face; it sticks. The mask obscures Father’s concerned expression with a sculpted look that is penitent, gaunt, hopeful. “It’s comfortable enough,” he says; filtered through the mask, his voice has been modulated to sound like Kenna’s.

  Mother claps. “Oh, this will be so much fun!” She gets her own mask; curious, Kenna tugs at the bathroom door to confirm that no, they would not be allowed into the party until they have each donned their disguise.

  Aside from being shaped to fit Mother’s features, her mask is identical to Father’s. In their robes, they look like assembly-line dolls.

  As Kenna affixes his mask, the door to the bathroom clicks open. Mother and Father extend their arms, touching each other at the fingertips like swans in flight. They unfurl their free hand toward Kenna, who grasps them to welcome himself into the fold—

  The thumbtacks jab his shoulder blades, reminding him of a true Prince’s posture, reminding him he is here to lie.

  “Let us go,” Mother says, holding the door open for Father, the two sweeping through first, a silent rebuke for Kenna’s impertinent lone entry into The Sol Majestic. Kenna holds his breath, preparing to enter into the great assembly area …

  But no. Correctly, they exit into a crowded side corridor, swaying hammocks filled with gray-robed passengers exhaling plumes of marijuana, thick shielded cables for power and gas, floors with rubber mats so the pooled body fluids won’t cause anyone to slip. Not that there are any body fluids; transport ships are sometimes this clean, but only before a government sanitary inspection.

  Yet aside from the fact that everyone is dressed in starvation masks and flowing Inevitable Robes, wandering through the corridor like excited children playing Blind Man’s Bluff, this could have been his childhood.

  A knot of tension in his chest relaxes: he’d been worried Paulius and Montgomery had turned his childhood into a grotesque stage play to entertain rich fools. But this area’s accuracy is a secret signal to him that they can get the details right when they want to.

  That thought lasts until a passenger leans down, his face made up in exaggerated addict’s pockmarks, to croak, “A joint to put your mind at ease, guv’nor?”

  It is the fumellier, spreading open a selection of weed in her fingers. They are rolled into stunningly perfect joints—which is almost enough to stop Kenna from protesting, “Who says guv’nor on a ship?”

  Yet the fumellier waggles her eyebrows, directing Kenna’s attention to Mother and Father behind him. Eager masked men in robes have caught them by the shoulder, asking, “So are you the Inevitable Prince?”

  Mother and Father preen like tomcats, turning ever-so-slowly to acknowledge the question, tilting their chins as if long accustomed to possessing information others desperately seek. They lick up the way this crowd hunches in anticipation—

  Kenna is gone by the time they turn to acknowledge him. He does not want to be the Prince yet, wants to luxuriate in the last moments in which he will not have to tell a lie.

  He tiptoes through the corridors, feeling childish among these giants of industry. No one here is scrawny; the closest anyone resembles his shape are the clothes hanger bodies of models, who have sashed up the robes around their waists to highlight their figures. Actors and actresses have followed suit, rolling up their rainbow sleeves to reveal toned biceps, whereas the epicureans who’ve poured culinary fortunes into creating great jiggling bellies are content to wear the robes as is.

  Kenna feels like he’s moving in slow motion—everyone else darts past like amphetamine-crazed ferrets, opening every supply door and looking under every hammock. “It’s a Majestic production,” they mutter, moving through the marijuana smoke’s blue haze. “There’s got to be food somewhere.”

  Their speed turns this replica set into a musical. They feel the walls, looking for hidden doors with the wealthy confidence that something exciting lies around each corner, stifling giggles as they ask their fellow travelers if they are the Inevitable Prince. Whereas the transport ships Kenna traveled on were steeped in dullness, your options these gray walls and maybe a joint if you were lucky, the long hours wearing you away …

  The cool nylon pressed to his cheeks feels like a barrier Montgomery has interposed between him and tonight’s guests—Paulius and Montgomery’s secret message that everyone wants to be him, yet will never see the truth of him.

  Which is foolish arrogance. They built this replica to delight the guests. This is where Kenna’s own needs will be sublimated away, Kenna vanishing into the Inevitable Prince.

  His belly cramps. The air smells wrong. You don’t live on transport ships without picking up a working knowledge of marijuana, and long-timers choose resins to deaden the stomach. The fumellier has chosen smokes that stoke hunger, so even the exhalations of other guests circulate and generate craving. Their merry games are deteriorating into a h
unt for confections.

  A flock of barefaced guests wave at Kenna, shooting him exaggerated Isn’t-this-fun? smiles as they toke up in a repair alcove. Kenna pauses—why are they so eager to have him?—until a man huffs past Kenna, tearing off his mask.

  The guests applaud, calling out his name—Kenna has seen this politician’s face on the holovids, though he can’t remember where. The politician slicks back his hair, grabs a joint with irritation, and snarls, “I didn’t come all this way to not be seen,” before he joins the celebrities trying to sway people to their half-hearted rebellion.

  A mask-wearing woman with flowing black hair runs into the room so fast she has to hold a bulkhead to catch her breath.

  “Attention, starving Princes!” A person in his robes is calling for Kenna’s attention with Kenna’s own voice, and an irrational fear floods him that he is not himself. But the black-haired woman shakes her fists in the air with a quite-un-Kennaish restraint, vibrating as though she cannot contain herself. “Someone’s paying the vending machine!”

  The demasked protesters attempt to hide their excitement—but everyone else chases after the black-haired woman, looking like a river of flapping flags as their robes snap and unfurl behind them, leaving disconsolate celebrities looking bewildered no one wants to pay attention to them.

  Kenna follows the stampede of trillionaires, buoyed by their excitement, needing to see what vending machines could inspire such passion.

  Yet unlike the strips of Bark-Chew and SugarBomb vending machines that lined the transport ships’ walls, this replica holds a single vending machine—and holds it in an amphitheater.

  This towering vending monolith sits beneath a violet spotlight. It dwarfs the one woman standing at its base, who peers up at its rows of mouthwatering baked goods.

  The confections are held in gleaming chrome crèches—fat pink cupcakes with striped buttercream curlicues, bowls of purple rice topped with mango, dense black aniseed drops that ripple with blue flame, a delicate cobweb of spun sugar.

  Each dessert more unusual than the last. A crowd has gathered in a ring around it, swaying from smoke-hunger, pressing close like zombies about to break through the glass.

  Except the woman paces up and down the rows with the irritated curtness of a lion stalking prey, clearing space for herself. She approaches a bowl of green foam fizzing over with sugar, glances up, winces, withdraws.

  The crowd gathered in the amphitheater leans forward when she does, sighs in dismay when she backs off. One calls out, their voice turned into Kenna’s by the mask, “You said you’d made up your mind!”

  She shakes them off like a baseball pitcher waving away a bad call. “I said I’d made up my mind to do it,” she corrects them, Kenna’s voice chopped up erratically by a foreign diction. “Any of you lot feel like footing this bill, I’ll choose right now.”

  Chastened, the crowd falls quiet.

  The black-haired woman stands next to him. Kenna whispers: “Why does she hesitate so?”

  The woman directs Kenna’s attention to the vast screen hovering high above the vending machine: a trillion-dinari figure scrolls past as the woman’s attention hovers upon a coffee crunch cake.

  “Would you pay a trillion for a piece of cake?” she asks.

  “A trillion?” Kenna splutters, expecting the rich men to whirl around, realize how shabby his robes are, notice his howling poverty—but they bob their heads as if to acknowledge how insane this is.

  “For some people it’s only a few billion,” the black-haired woman whispers. “It’s scanning our net worth. Making sure that whatever we pay for it costs us. That woman has to be unfathomably rich even by our standards, and she’s determined to have the best dessert.”

  Kenna hunts for a pathway through the dense crowd, trying to make his way down to the auditorium. “She won’t get the best. That’s not what this is about…”

  The black-haired woman tents her fingers on his shoulder. “Sssh. Let her learn.”

  Kenna should help this woman before she bankrupts herself. Yet he wonders how many in this crowd expect these jailed sweets to be as good as the cost …

  “How many of them understand?” he asks, pained.

  She pats his shoulder; that militarily-crisp touch has the sensation of having passed an audition. “We who grew up in poverty fathomed this trap.” She crosses her arms, radiating grim satisfaction. “We’ve been waiting to see which one makes the Prince’s choice.”

  Still. Even though Kenna understands the trap, he can’t let anyone make the mistakes he would have made. “Wait—!”

  But the woman has made her selection. The green figures turn gold, melting into red, dripping away into nothingness as the amount is subtracted from her accounts; her mask flakes away into gold filaments, dissolving to reveal an elderly Gineer woman with genetically taut youth.

  She twirls, her robe opening like a blossom, drinking in the crowd’s applause.

  The vending machine makes a harsh clattering noise, gears ratcheting into place. The violet light snaps off, the glass goes dark.

  The coffee crumb cake is plopped onto a paper plate, shoved toward her, its sharp triangle shape squashed into a heap.

  She takes a plastic fork and prods it, as if perhaps there is some new trick hidden inside. But without the clever spotlights, it is merely a mass-produced, oversugared cake.

  She takes a new bite in disbelief. “I paid a fifth of my family’s inheritance to sample the best dessert in the galaxy…”

  “No,” the black-haired woman snaps. “You paid a fifth of everything you owned to fill your belly. Just like the starving Prince.”

  An argument ripples across the crowd: some grumbling How dare Paulius do this to us, others braying bitter laughter, folks rushing forward to try this sodden cake, the woman batting them away to savor every last gram of this trillion-dinari investment, licking the plate like a starving child as her peers try to snatch it away.

  Kenna knows the scent of nascent riots. He balls himself against the wall, bracing for the first person to throw a punch …

  The floor shakes: the booming shudder of transport ship docking maneuvers.

  The cold violet light phase-shifts into a warm, golden radiance.

  The crowd halts as a crackling noise booms down from the overhead speakers—an old-fashioned recording spinning to life:

  I’ve had canned meat, dried noodles, pickled eggs. If I … if we … ever came back into favor, would I … appreciate anything else? I can’t tell. All this surviving is killing me.

  With a great clack, the vending machine sinks into the floor, and more of that golden light spills through into the cramped darkness. It illuminates the crowds’ faces, their hateful sneers relaxing into drop-jawed wonder as they realize Paulius has played them like instruments, and their orchestrated anger was a part of the performance.

  (Though Scrimshaw rushes in to grab the Gineer woman, whispering reassurances that of course they’ll refund the money, actually charging her accounts for the full trillion was a clerical error, she’d talk with Montgomery about giving the impression they’d—ha ha—intended to keep the dinari…)

  Then the rich chicken scent hits their nostrils and the crowd shivers in pleasure. Their bellies have been primed by the fumellier to short-circuit conscious thought when the hunger hits; their noses lift to follow this aroma, leaning forward to walk toward the luminous space opened up by the descending vending machine.

  The sun-warmed scent of chlorophyll filters through; Kenna’s eyes adjust to the patches of blue overhead, the green thatches, looking as beautiful as the first time he laid eyes upon The Sol Majestic’s orchard. Although it’s overgrown, with waist-high brush thickets turning the once-neat fields of olive trees wild and dangerous.

  Paulius and Montgomery stand on a hill next to a gigantic bubbling stewpot, waving its scent down onto the crowd with great green fronds.

  “Shall we gather by the river?” Paulius asks, waving his hand to encompass th
e heavens. Paulius’s white suit is as clean as starlight, his long braid wrapped in gleaming silver, looking so hale Kenna can hardly believe he had his pelvis sawed open a month ago. “You have survived the Prince’s travails!”

  “Now taste the broth that birthed the Inevitable Prince’s Philosophy, and be reborn!” Montgomery’s wearing an Inevitable robe—an act that makes her unsettlingly feminine after all her red-leather violence. The Bitch rests at her hip in a newly refurbished oak cask, her goggles clear of mold specks.

  The crowd erupts from the transport ship’s cramped confines, hands extended like zombies …

  “Don’t you dare bum-rush this show, my friends.” Paulius’s voice drops to a stage whisper. “This is a sacred experience. Come with cramped bellies, one by one, and let the Prince’s Inevitable wisdom fill you.” He points his cane at Kenna. “You, sir! Why don’t you sup first?”

  Kenna’s skin prickles into chill goose bumps, cold as a corpse. His knees lock; thumbtacks jab into his spine, prodding him into the regal stance Rèpondelle taught him, but his body refuses to respond to Paulius’s call—

  And why not? When he drinks from that stewpot, Kenna will evaporate away like steam, leaving behind the Inevitable Prince’s mirrorlike reflection. He will not officially become the Prince, not until he gives his I am the light to disperse the darkness speech after the meal, but …

  Kenna’s body refuses to attend his own funeral.

  Montgomery slaps a silver ladle into his palm and steps away, abdicating responsibility for Kenna’s choices. She knows his Philosophy is false, she has told him to run—and now she refuses to look at him, directing her gaze out over the crowd, her face contorted into a cultist’s stiff grin.

  She has orchestrated this for his benefit—but having catapulted Kenna into the adoration of the powerful, she has withdrawn her approval.

  She’s left before he can, which makes this easier.

  Paulius, however, catches Kenna by the shoulder as Kenna leans down to scoop up the broth. He detaches the mask’s mouth, freeing Kenna to drink—but Paulius cranes his neck to peer up at Kenna with a fierce pride, as if he wants one last moment to savor this dish before sending it out to the dining room.