The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “Line up,” Montgomery says. Madison laughs uncomfortably as Paulius distracts her with a too-polite-to-refuse offer of lacquered duck.

  The wealthy demurely feel each other out to see who might be amenable to amory.

  The queue is brisk. Even clad in her Inevitable robe, Montgomery is a no-nonsense guardian, ushering folks in through the doors with a bodyguard’s impassivity, slamming the doors shut, reminding them to exit on the other end. The line dwindles as Kenna seethes—

  Yet isn’t this the way it will always be? He and Benzo, they had once created something of immense beauty, burning away their imperfections until together they conceived the consommé that gave Benzo his victory against his Mistress. Perhaps this was Paulius’s hidden message—yes, the plenipotentiaries you influence will never see things as you do, you will never be alone with anyone you love again.

  Yet it is a sour mood, and by the time Kenna bumps up against Montgomery, he realizes he is last in line. Of course the Prince goes last. When he steps out, he will eat his meal, and become the light to disperse the darkness.

  He moves to step across the entryway, Mother by his left elbow, Father by his right—but Montgomery stops them.

  “Sorry.” She sounds as apologetic as a jail door. “Only two in at a time: No more, no less. As the Prince once did.”

  “But we’re his parents—” Father splutters.

  “Which is why you will go before him. Use your time well.”

  Kenna laps up their discomfort. They are not Inevitable now, they are loose ends, and everyone knows it—their toadying has been ineffective all these years; it’s Kenna’s strategies that reignited the Philosophies.

  Usurping them will be as simple as a speech.

  They vanish with an Escargone flash. Yet he is certain that they’ll spend the time mapping out a strategy to insinuate themselves within his Ceremony, so he braces himself for the pleasure of refusing them before an audience—

  It is not until Montgomery slams the door behind him that he realizes he is not alone.

  Madison stands behind him, backing up against the hatchway as she senses she is intruding. Kenna doesn’t want to think of her as an intruder, but the Escargone is filled with familiar scents of sex and soup. This should be a temple to Benzo, not a meeting hall to gladhand people.

  Yet gladhanding people is what he does now. He allows his features to relax for one pained stare at the far exit, one last honest expression to remember his lover, before engineering his body language to reflect cheery welcome.

  She stiffens, glancing toward the Escargone’s window before realizing there is no way to take her embarrassment out upon Montgomery. “My apologies.”

  “None needed.” He glides forward to take her hands, the thumbtacks poking him back into a hospitable stance. “It’s good to have company.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way.” She snaps into the brisk stance of a stockholder making a proposition. “I didn’t want to intrude. You’ve done me great favors already.”

  Kenna cocks his head. “Have I?”

  “Oh yes.” She shakes her head, a strangely girlish gesture for such a competent woman, as if to acknowledge this wasn’t going well. “I just … I wanted to thank you for improving morale among my staff. My debtors are not gifted, yet you’ve managed to turn a D-grade employee into a chef worthy of my service.”

  Madison continues to talk: “So I was hoping to hear your suggestions toward improving my household staff’s performance ratings…”

  But her words gray out—her tone is what matters. Madison is being polite to him, even cheerful, and a woman like this can’t be cheerful. Kenna knows who She is, he understands why She’s been so eager to speak to him tonight …

  “Her,” he whispers. “You’re Her. You’re Benzo’s Mistress.”

  34

  Fifteen Seconds and/or Eight Minutes Before the Wisdom Ceremony

  She flicks the name away with Her fingertips, attempting to scoot it out the doorway. “Oh, please don’t call me that,” She demurs. “That’s what my debtors call me.”

  “Is that a nickname, then? Her?”

  “Oh, God no. Not a nickname. ‘Her’ is the official name they’re contractually obliged to call me.” She offers up a peal of merry laughter, which dwindles into a quick silence when Kenna doesn’t join her. “They can’t afford to call me by name.”

  “You make them pay for the privilege of using your name?”

  “It is copyrighted. Look, I’m sorry, O Prince—you took a debtor on the verge of being liquidated, and turned him into a vital asset. That teaching should become a seminar—”

  “A seminar.”

  “Yes. I—” She smooths Her robe, hoping to brush away the awkwardness. “I’m sorry, O Prince, I suppose I should have anticipated this. You don’t deal with debtors the way I do. My asset must have told you such sweet stories when you were with him, I—I should have foreseen you would harbor sympathies toward him…”

  “Benzo.” Each word is a bullet fired across a ship’s bow. “His name is Benzo.”

  She purses Her lips, as if Benzo’s name was a test She should have studied for. “If you say.”

  Kenna is about to shriek How can you not know his name? when he realizes:

  Her slightest whims threaten to snuff out Benzo’s life. Her tantrums might sell Benzo’s brothers into new slaveries. Her snits condemned his mother to torture. She is the storm that can break Benzo, and so Benzo has to catalogue Her moods—to remember that half-hearted smile She gave him one sleepy Sunday so he can reconstruct what he did to cause it …

  Whereas Kenna realizes She has destroyed families in a fit of pique and forgotten their destruction before noon.

  He can see it in Her eyes: She doesn’t even remember the bet. For Benzo, making consommé was a rebellion that took him a lifetime’s courage to engineer; for Her, She gets a quality cup of broth or a few more generations of slaves, and She’ll remember neither when Benzo’s brothers tuck Her in at night.

  She holds up Her hands in surrender; he realizes he has backed Her against the wall. “Now, I know you believe Benzo is special.” She stresses his name, emphasizing She is taking Kenna seriously—yet She still pronounces “Benzo” like a commodity. “But his family took on massive debts. They borrowed cash from lending libraries at interest rates that you or I would never have risked—”

  “For what purpose?”

  Her studied diplomacy evaporates in a nova-hot flash. “Oh, I don’t know. I could look it up, but—” Bright green bioware spirals loop around Her pupils, then contract into a flashing red “NO” sign. “There’s no signal in here. But folks borrow for all sorts of unwise reasons. People get sick, and can’t cut losses. They don’t do the due diligence on some investment. They get sentimental about keeping homes they’d do better to move out of. In any case, O Prince, I’ve seen thousands of these cases and they are never prudent decisions—”

  “So what you’re saying,” Kenna says, measuring each word, “is your slaves are people who cared for sick relatives in ancestral homes.”

  “If they were smarter, they’d have found better options,” She snaps. “And they’re not slaves.”

  “Not legally, no. Morally?”

  “I don’t buy them. They sell themselves to me. That’s the difference. Benzo will tell you sad stories, O Prince, but somewhere his mother or his grandmother or his great-grandmother decided, Well, I’ll risk selling my childrens’ children into debt. And you blame me?”

  So many objections crowd into Kenna’s brain that he cannot fit them into his mouth. He blames Her for winding nanofilaments through Her debtors’ bodies to control them. He blames Her for taking these children’s children and using them as breeding experiments. He blames Her for letting their children’s children have children, allowing Her slaves to fall in love because that gives Her greater levers to control them—

  But he knows what She would say. She has to make sure Her property doesn’t escape, does
n’t She? She paid for the right to future generations, didn’t She? She didn’t make Her debtors break company policy to fall in love, they could have spent joyless lives focused on paying back a meaningless debt passed on to them …

  He could tear Her arguments apart: She does buy slaves. Benzo told him how She finds pools of cheap debtors from bankrupt companies and snaps them up.

  But Her real rationale boils down to one hideous truth:

  She’s better than they are.

  She wouldn’t have made these dumb decisions.

  Therefore, Her debtors deserve what’s coming to them.

  And the reason She needs a seminar is because it’s never occurred to Her that Her slaves might have inner lives worth cultivating; the people who work for Her aren’t like the Inevitable Prince and Paulius and people of import.

  The politicians and the bankers and the investors waiting for his speech feel the same way. They might want to help the laborers, they might want to exploit them, but they can come together to sup drinks because in the end, they all believe their success elevates them.

  They don’t see beauty because they don’t see people.

  And as She taps her foot, actually waiting for an apology, Kenna realizes if he stays pent up in here with Her, he will strangle Her. He imagines the crowds applauding as he leaves Her dead body inside the capsule. Yet other creditors wait to pick up Her debts; killing Her would just condemn Benzo’s family to be split apart like parts of a sold corporation, Her debtor-slaves re-homed somewhere worse.

  Everyone here knew who She was. Everyone. Other people had asked how Her businesses were going, and they’d not only tolerated Her, they’d accepted Her as a colleague …

  “O Prince, you should know—you traveled on transport ships, saw the bums—you can’t just make anyone worthwhile!”

  “You can,” he says. “You just don’t bother.”

  He slams the Escargone’s stop button.

  His back bleeds, the thumbtacks driven deep into his flesh.

  And when he wrenches open the door, tumultuous applause washes over him. Spotlights play across his robe, fill his eyes with white heat—but he can hear chairs shoved aside as the Wisdom Ceremony witnesses get to their feet.

  The applause rises to a thunder as he realizes the wealthy chosen ones he led through Paulius’s adventures lead a much larger crowd, standing proud—two hundred people have gathered in The Sol Majestic’s dining room, some vloggers with live ansible-feeds broadcasting to all humanity, sending his words to people huddled in tents tuning in to see the Inevitable Prince.

  I will be a light to disperse the darkness. But those poor bastards in the tents will never see that light. Kenna will redirect dribbles if he’s lucky, teaching the rich they deserve to be rich, teaching the powerful their half-hearted efforts are compassion, and by the time he speaks his belly will be full with the salmon course, the rusted egg, the layered broth …

  Except Kenna is charging to the stage, the crowd’s applause turning into a startled whoop as he knocks a chafing dish aside to bring this whole Ceremony down.

  35

  Wisdom

  “I was going to tell you falsehoods,” Kenna says.

  He stands atop a mountain of polished wood. He grips the podium with both hands as though he wants to rip up the smooth mahogany and fling it down at the people below; from this high up, he can see white tablecloths like islands, floating in the darkness.

  “Instead, let me tell you something true: there is dignity in work.”

  He closes his eyes, dizzied by thoughts of the bhelpuri merchant sleeping in his tube, the maintenance workers smuggling mad projects through Savor Station’s hidden tunnels, of Benzo steamed lobster-red from broth …

  “Every one of you fat bastards is here only because hundreds labored to make this world for you. They tilled the land to grow your food, they maintained the ships that delivered it to this door, they chopped the food to make it elegant, they built the station beneath your feet and GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  Rèpondelle tumbles backwards, eyes wide, shocked into stillness by Kenna’s rejection.

  “All those people did the work,” Kenna whispers, as though he’d never been interrupted. “Yet strangely, not a one of those laborers is in attendance. I wonder why?”

  You could drop a knife into that silence and never hear it hit bottom. His audience’s mute fear enrages Kenna; he pounds on the podium, furious they’re so uninterested they can’t debate …

  “It’s because you ignore them! You write off the men and women who didn’t want to abandon family and friends and love in some mad dash for power! Or you sneer at them because they weren’t lucky enough to start with the connections and education and money that you did! You don’t want them here because you think you’re better than they are!”

  He whirls to point at Mother. “You know why you can’t save the starving millions? It’s because people like this won’t pay them enough to eat! They’ve got enough wealth to make miracles like Savor Station happen, and yet they can’t get a fucking kid some food?

  “It’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.”

  Something wet spatters on the podium’s fine-grained surface. Is it tears? Holy Gods, Kenna is crying. But fuck it, let them see him cry …

  “And I! I was going to stand up here and tell you people how beautiful you were. That I was going to be the light to disperse your darkness. Fuck that. You need more darkness. I’ll become the darkness to smother your light.

  “I’m going to tell everyone there is no shame in being a servant. That there is grace in being a worker. And that there is no dignity in greed. And I’m going to tell all those people—”

  He points at the vloggers, who hold their cameras rock-steady because this is the sort of footage that gets billions of hits. A prince melting down before a live audience? This is what Mother and Father warned him about. What will he tell the starving millions now?

  He has one shot to talk before he’s never heard from again.

  Fine.

  Make it a good one.

  “I’m going to tell them that if you don’t give them dignity, they should rise up and take it. You don’t have enough money to stop all of them. And they should tear you motherfuckers to shreds, because if you get in the way of billions of people’s dreams of having enough food to feed their family and maybe a drink afterwards, then you deserve to be cut down.

  “And—”

  But his fury has choked him, turning invective into hitching nothingness, and he has no idea what’s going on anyway because his tears turn bright spotlights into dazzling rainbows, maybe the audience is getting ready to throw plates at him, and Lord he’d had such a good message and he’d blown it on a tantrum …

  Kenna flees the stage.

  36

  The Wisdom Ceremony

  “Keep everyone else out of here!” Paulius roars. Kenna had never known The Sol Majestic had security guards, but of course several unobtrusive women block the entrance to the kitchen. Kenna sees vloggers rushing forward, Mother and Father pushing their way to the front.

  A blacklight curtain walls them off.

  “You!” Paulius bellows. “What did you do?!?”

  Paulius grabs at his tie like it’s strangling him, rips it off, flings it to the ground—and then takes an unsteady step backwards with the frail exhaustion that reminds Kenna that Paulius is still recovering.

  The kitchen staff abandon their posts, dropping dishes to rush to Paulius’s rescue. He waves them off, his cane clattering to the floor.

  Paulius buries his face in his hands.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done, Kenna?”

  Montgomery creeps out from the garden entrance, clutching the Bitch’s cask; Kenna cannot tell whether she holds it like a shield, or holds it out to Paulius as a peace offering. Yet she walks like a woman hoping to wake from a nightmare.

  “It’s my fault, Paulius—I shouldn’t have put him in the Escargone with that bitch, I was so an
gry She showed up…”

  He picks up his cane, flings it at her badly; it bounces off a spice pantry, scattering cinnamon. “Why do you think I kept Her away from him, you narcissistic fool? Kenna! Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  A man who can lift you up can also cast you down. He’d seen Paulius’s anger before, but Paulius’s disappointment feels like gravity has doubled, Kenna shrinking beneath the terrible understanding of how much he has let Paulius down.

  Still, he can’t just take this. “They—they’re wrong, Paulius…”

  “You just destroyed The Sol Majestic!”

  The words ring out like gunshots. The kitchen staff, who had been making half-hearted attempts to keep the meal preparation going during this ruckus, come to a stunned halt.

  “Paulius, no—I—I got you the money to—”

  “You just told the workers on Savor Station to tear Captain Lizzie to shreds!” Paulius thunders. “How long do you think she’ll let me operate here when I’ve unleashed a rebellion? Her family’s tended this place for generations! I’m surprised she’s not evicting me now!”

  The worst part is watching the workers back away as they realize their job has evaporated. A moment ago they’d been united to make a meal fit for kings—now Kenna sees them tabulating résumés, tallying finances, wondering if they can book a flight out before the rush causes prices to rise.

  “No,” Kenna protests. “I lied. I lied to save the kitchen…”

  “Then lie again.” Paulius sweeps the cinnamon into a pile—and that hurts most of all, feeling that he is less important than a random mess. “No station owner will let you board. And you just told every Inevitable follower your religion was a sham. You need to get out there and do damage control.”

  “… damage control?”

  Paulius rolls his eyes. “Apologize, boy.”

  “No.”

  He won’t apologize. Not for the truth.

  Paulius wipes cinnamon dust on his shirt, leaving brown smears. “Kenna. I’ll accept the loss of my business. But not you. You’re too young to understand what a short, brutish life you’ll experience if you don’t recant. You need to walk that back.”