The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Kenna stares into the soup, wishing Benzo was here to hold his hand.

  The broth’s surface wobbles with fat globules, swirling with nebulae of darkened chicken particles—imperfections Kenna never had noticed when Paulius first brought him the bowl.

  Except they are not imperfections. They are Benzo’s last love-note: I will be with you in your final moments.

  This is the last moment he will be Kenna.

  He sips the broth, letting his lover fill him.

  The mask dissolves into golden tatters, streaming away to reveal his face, the crowd gasping, Paulius waving his cane and shouting, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Inevitable Prince!”

  Kenna closes his eyes as the mask floats away on the wind, saying goodbye to Benzo, to The Sol Majestic, to Paulius.

  When he opens them, the wealthy line up to drink his broth.

  He begins to become a salesman.

  33

  One Hour Until the Wisdom Ceremony

  As Kenna spoons broth out to the Ceremony’s guests, he appreciates Paulius’s genius. Do someone a small favor, and they become more willing to do you large favors, Rèpondelle had said.

  By allowing Kenna to serve the broth, he allows Kenna to dispense favors to the powerful. They line up before his stewpot, grouping into loose conversational circles as they assure each other that of course they wouldn’t have paid a billion dinari for dessert, they were on to Paulius’s foolhardy game from the beginning, detailing how they’d outfoxed the old man by making love in a hidden alcove …

  But their feet move in lockstep. Whenever someone bows before Kenna to receive their broth, the others maneuver so no one nudges them from their place in line. They saunter away with brimming bowls as if this is trivial, but when they believe no one is looking they take belly-filling slurps.

  They scrutinize him as Kenna fills their bowls with a silver ladle, and Kenna senses the flashpoint: if they feel judged in any way for their fears in the transport ship, their hatred will crystallize around him.

  Instead, Kenna thanks them as they approach, as if they have done him a great service by attending his Ceremony. Their eyebrows knot as they examine him for sarcasm—but Kenna knows he is dressed in ragged robes, his scrawny body the picture of asceticsm, and he bends his knees to look as though he offers to boost them up.

  “You’re welcome,” they say, and he can see them retranslating their discomfort into a nice thing they did for a wise man’s pleasure, associating Kenna with regained dignity and power.

  there are two kinds of rich people, Rèpondelle had told him: those who earned their money, and those who inherited it. the ones who earned wealth are forever terrified someone will take it away from them, while the ones who inherited wealth are forever terrified someone will expose them.

  Kenna has returned power to the once-poor ones, and has ensured the always-rich ones feel like their discomfort was a performance.

  By the time he steps away from the stewpot, ladle still in hand, he is surrounded by admirers. Presidents ask him, Was it as bad as that on the transport ships? And Kenna knows enough to demur: I’m sure it was nothing you couldn’t have handled. Bankers ask, Where will you go after the Ceremony? And Kenna says, Wherever I am needed most and floats his gaze around the room to mark which ones stare longingly at him so he can corner them later. Nuvawood starlets sidle close to ask, What will your Philosophy be? And Kenna waves his hands in a circle as though opening a gateway and says, You shall step through with me in a few hours.

  Except he doesn’t know long it will be. Mother and Father keep hauling people over to him—the guests pause, chests puffed out as they offer themselves up for a scan, before Kenna tells them he has no bioimplants, please, he would far prefer to hear their name from their own lips. And when he does not recognize them—which is not often, as everyone here has made galactic headlines—he prostrates himself to play the “I am a humble traveler” card Rèpondelle taught him to use to deflect a potential embarrassment into an opportunity for them to train him.

  For the opportunities also go in reverse: Let them do you small favors, and they will be more disposed to do you greater ones. It’s all about playing on people’s magnanimity, and Kenna discovers he is more adept at this than he would have dreamed—men and women hold his hand for a scandalous moment too long, he can hear them murmuring in approval as he steps away, and Mother’s prissy over-politeness turns out to be suited to these environments.

  And the people, well, they guard their decorum, but Rèpondelle’s training allows him to see through them. He’d always thought wealth and power would be an armor to shield people from fear.

  Yet most are like the people on the transport ships: worried about status, hoping they don’t make fools of themselves, jockeying for position.

  After a while, Kenna realizes the thumbtacks have stopped pricking him; being the Inevitable Prince isn’t difficult.

  It’s actually an interesting challenge. He seeks out the cantankerous investor who’d shrugged off Kenna’s charms and tries conversational approaches until he opens up the man’s love of gambling. Kenna knows nothing but professes curiosity, and when he ambles away the investor has promised to take Kenna to an outlaw casino where you can wager your memories to win secrets.

  Then the black-haired woman breaks through the crowd to bow to him. She does not bow deeply—but then again, nobody here does except for the actors.

  “Finally,” she huffs, flipping her long hair back over her shoulders; her face is beautiful in a cut-diamond sense, sharp and precise, genetically engineered in the Gineer fashion to have model-quality traits that blend together into a mélange that defies ancestry. Yet despite the fact that she’s fit her features together like a puzzle, she’s chosen a dazzlingly friendly smile. “I thought Paulius would never leave me alone. My name is Madison, and I wanted to thank you for helping me with my—is that a frying pan growing by your elbow?”

  Kenna turns—and indeed, a bulbous copper frond on a thick green stalk appears to be blossoming into a frying pan.

  This derails the conversation. Kenna gets on his knees in the soft loam, bumping shoulders with the cooing guests peering close to examine it. It’s a budding pan; only the handle is fully formed, jutting out like a metal stalk. The copper cooking surface is curled, its tall sides unfolding as it pulses open.

  “You can’t … grow … cookware, can you?” an energy investor asks.

  Kenna grabs the stem—and unlike the living fronds in The Sol Majestic’s orchard, this is a hollow nanite tube dyed green. If he looks close, he can see the slender filament of gray nanotech goo pulsing up into the pan-blossom, pumped up from below.

  Madison brushes her fingertips against the pan’s dull burnish before drawing her hand back. “It’s warm,” she giggles. “Of course it’s warm, it’s moving like a living being, it has to radiate energy…”

  Kenna feels the guests looking to him for explanations: They think I’m in on this. Which, now that he thinks of it, would be a sane assumption: Rèpondelle had trained him to master the seventeen-course dinner they’d prepared, but Paulius and Montgomery had assumed Kenna could wing this.

  Not that he can find them. Kenna has trained three weeks for this party, but Paulius has devoted his life to dancing through cocktail hours—he is a soiree ninja, and when he moves to bow out no one can follow him.

  Paulius has left Kenna to lead the festivities.

  The pan has unfurled, facing him like a sunflower, its steep sides revealing it is not a frying pan, but a sauté pan. He grasps the pan’s handle, smooth and Benzo-warm, tugs—

  It’s wired into the ground, tight as a merchant’s electronic wares tethered to the shelves.

  “Huh.” Madison scratches beneath her ear, circling the pan as though it is a puzzle to be solved. “Do you mind if I try?”

  Kenna realizes Madison has courteously outmaneuvered the other guests, who halt their forward lurches—they had each intended to haul the pan from the soil. By defer
ring to Kenna’s judgment, she has installed a hierarchy and placed herself second in line.

  Mother and Father cross their arms, hating Madison for wresting their scant influence away, unable to speak lest they deny their son’s specialness.

  “Of course,” Kenna demurs, feeling the giddy delight of cutting his parents off.

  She grips the pan as though she were an ancient warrior wresting a sword from a stone—but instead of hauling, jerks the pan upward in a brisk motion with no more force needed than to pop the cap off a bottle.

  The sauté pan comes free.

  She rotates it in one wrist, reflecting sunlight across the crowd, then reaches out to Kenna with it in a gesture mirroring a queen knighting someone with her scepter. She nods toward the ladle Kenna still holds in his left hand.

  “You had a cooking implement already.” She holds the pan, flat and at arm’s length, sweeping it out toward the field—a green swath of high grass in which blossoming eggbeaters and measuring cups and immersion blenders bob on stalks. “I suspect we are intended to become your staff.”

  The guests charge out into the utensil field, racing to pluck the most interesting tools from the stalks, a few unlucky ones harvesting too soon to discover their nascent mandoline crumbling apart into black dust. Sure enough, once a guest has reaped a strainer, the other stalks become immutable as iron to them, waiting for some other guest to stake their claim.

  The first harvests come easily, but the crops soon vanish, leaving guests sadly empty-handed; they laugh, but Kenna reads the embarrassment in their tight shoulders. They’re all compensating, in their own ways: telling the empty-handed ones where to look, feigning boredom, unleashing snide putdowns of people who settled for a simple spoon, all as Mother and Father flatter them.

  Even to the powerful, being excluded from a group stings.

  “Come on.” Once again, Paulius and Montgomery have maneuvered the guests into allowing the Inevitable Prince to lead them to their destiny. Kenna modulates his voice to be a dauntless young child who is certain new adventures lie over the next hill. “It’s like gathering herbs. You have to hunt for them!”

  Yet sure enough, the scarcity binds him and these guests together, Kenna feeling oddly protective—they can be guided so easily. Instill them with uncertainty and they’ll follow anyone who presents them with a promising pathway …

  He likes being their pathway. It nourishes his soul to have people looking to him for assistance, to watch them acknowledging him.

  There are larger pieces, growing like mushrooms deep in the shadowed woods: ovens, roasting pans, a turnspit. Some require multiple people to heft them before they’ll break free. Blossom by blossom, sloping down, the organic kitchen leads Kenna down an erratic pathway—everyone peering into the dwindling sunlight, making a competitive game of “Who can find the next one first,” bellowing triumph as they find a curved countertop.

  Kenna stumbles onto a cave flanked by a massive chef’s knife sprouting from a reed.

  Paulius reappears, his suit a blinding white in the penumbral cave, to snatch the knife free. “It wouldn’t do to give such a competitive bunch a knife,” he jokes, but holds a sober gaze upon Kenna before stepping into the cavern.

  Oil-smeared maintenance workers toss off camouflaged ghillie suits, take the implements from the guests’ hands with a polite bow, file into the cave. Kenna follows, palms feeling water-wet stone as the blackness deepens, bringing him in through a maze …

  He stands upon stars.

  Kenna’s knees wobble as he sets weight on the polished clear platform, looking out into the violet-tinged emptiness. Back when Rakesh’s engineering was a poorly sealed window knocking against the vacuum, Kenna had felt terrified—

  Yet the stars wheel beneath his feet, and now he feels propelled through space, whipped around like a yo-yo as the station whirls. He falls to his knees, presses his palms against the icy surface to see the frost radiate out from his fingers.

  This is a beautiful high-wire act the station’s artists have blessed him with.

  He whirls around to hunt for Rakesh, to compliment him on this vast improvement he’s made, to ask him how he and Montgomery leveraged Paulius’s influence to convince Captain Lizzie this transparent floor was a good idea—

  But Rakesh is flattened against the wall’s knurled pipes, only visible because his chilled breath jets out into the cool room. Several servants bring in coats for the shivering guests, but Rakesh’s sharp features are steely; he slumps back from a great control panel curved before him, offering weak high-fives to his fellow programmers as the three-dimensional images of copper sauté pans and stovetops twirl above them …

  Then, with a great relieved sigh, they shut down the gray goo control routines and order the smart molecules to collapse into inert carbon.

  He realizes with a shock that Paulius had asked Rakesh to work with unprogrammed gray goo. That stuff was tightly regulated; a subtle bug in its instructions could cause the goo to absorb and consume every piece of matter it touched until the station was a malignant tumor encapsulated by vacuum. Yet somehow he’d talked Captain Lizzie into this, and what had just happened was like surfing a supernova.

  The guests hadn’t understood what happened.

  They hadn’t seen the creation blossoming beneath their noses; just spectacle.

  The maintenance workers assemble a small kitchen before them, Madison and the others taking charge even though the workers know how to do this, managing the stove’s assembly, and as the chefs bring out the duck, words float over empty stars as though Kenna speaks to the galaxy:

  “… you didn’t taste the duck?” Paulius’s recorded voice asks.

  “I needed to be there,” Kenna replies. “To see it made. You can’t just hand me the food, Paulius. I … I have to watch it happen. The creation, it … it inspires me. Without viewing the entirety of the process, anything you give me might as well be—a nutricracker.”

  He’d lied once to Paulius about that, but his lie had become truth.

  The chefs dunk the duck into boiling water to defeather it—but when it becomes apparent this will produce no immediate dish for them to sup, the guests converge upon Paulius and Montgomery to congratulate them for this, as though the kitchen staff were some extension of Paulius’s will, as though the transparent floor beneath their feet hadn’t been installed by Montgomery and Rakesh and the workers who’d understood this …

  They didn’t see the beauty.

  (Neither did you, some small part of Kenna objects, noticing he’s not paying attention to the duck, he missed the nanotechnology art, but by then he’s scanning the crowd to find someone to use…)

  The rich can’t see beauty the way I can, he thinks, sweeping past Madison as she attempts to start another conversation, but that’s all right. I can aim them like weapons. He remembers who he’d discussed art with, plucking out the energy investor who enjoyed funding unique approaches, and he pretends not to hear Madison as he takes them by the elbow to say, “Excuse me, have you met my friend Rakesh?”

  Rakesh is starstruck; he daubs oil-streaked sweat off his cheeks with a rag so filthy it moves the blotches around, but that’s okay, to this crowd a bit of dirt is credentials, and by the time he is done Rakesh is not a worker with artistic expressions, he is an artist.

  I am a light to disperse the darkness, Kenna thinks, realizing these words are true in a way he’d never intended. The wealthy will always have money, of course—that’s the darkness—but he can disperse that wealth to better hands, granting Rakesh and the bhelpuri merchant celebrityhood, shining lucre wherever he faces, and Kenna realizes the Inevitable Prince will be a force for good.

  “Now that you have stood in the Prince’s kitchen,” Montgomery says dramatically, “we take the final step in the Prince’s journey.”

  Kenna glances over at the sous station, confused; the lacquered duck isn’t prepared yet—

  Montgomery taps a button on her smoked lenses and darkness falls
away, revealing a battered steel hatchway dripping with chicken-scented condensation, yawning open to reveal a cramped tube of refrigerators looming over a dented copper table:

  The Escargone.

  Kenna remembers kissing the scarred knife-ridges on Benzo’s knuckles, and for a moment he wishes they’d never returned to The Sol Majestic.

  “A properly lacquered duck will take hours to prepare!” Montgomery gestures into the Escargone’s cramped interior, as if demonstrating she has nothing up her sleeve. The three chefs scoop up their ingredients and march into the Escargone; she slams the door shut, it hums with bright light, and the chefs walk out twenty seconds later with a hot duck sliced onto appetizer trays.

  The guests descend on it, the broth not enough to stave off their hunger. Yet Kenna shrugs off Madison’s third attempt at conversation to peer into the depths:

  They’ve removed the shower at the Escargone’s far end, refitted it with an exit hatch.

  “The Prince spent months in here one day, giving of himself to help a humble kitchen staffer.” Her dark goggles give away nothing. “And so you shall be given fifteen minutes alone in the Escargone with the friends you have made here tonight—fifteen minutes that shall pass in seconds.”

  Paulius chuckles as a hologram of Kenna, kneeling before a slippery naked Benzo, flashes overhead. “And remember—whatever happens in the Escargone, stays in the Escargone.”

  A ripple of amusement flashes across the room, people stifling knowing smiles with their fingertips. Except it wasn’t that way; that image was from when Benzo had slashed at the lock with the knife, bloodying himself in an attempt to free Kenna, and they were naked because they were desperate and dying …

  Mother and Father move to flank him, ensuring he’ll never have such adventures again.