Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  “This is Lois,” Belasco said to everyone within earshot, “a very talented baker.” This was followed by silence. I got the sense maybe everyone within earshot was a very talented baker. Belasco continued: “She also programs robots.” That earned a raised eyebrow from the elf girl and a few murmurs of interest farther down. “Lois, this is Horace”—the round-cheeked man—“who managed the bookstore at the Ferry Building before joining us as our … What are you, Horace, the archivist?”

  “Librarian,” Horace said neatly.

  “And this is Orli”—the elf—“who sells cheese.”

  I looked down at the plate Horace had built for me: brown rice with green onions and sesame seeds, dark glistening greens, a curl of what appeared … to be … octopus. I’d never eaten octopus. I looked up at Lily Belasco. “What is this place?”

  She waved the question away. “First, eat. Gracie was just showing us her new acquisition.” She turned to the woman next to her, wide-framed with dark freckles, who cupped a jar on the table in front of her.

  “Chernobyl honey,” Gracie said.

  “Surely not,” Belasco scoffed.

  Gracie nodded firmly. “It’s gone back to nature,” she explained, “and the bees, they filter out the radioactivity. Most. Enough.” She unscrewed the jar, offered a taste. Belasco dipped her spoon and lifted it, trailing a strand that seemed to glow faintly. Put it between her lips, let it sit. Her eyes glittered. “Try it,” she said to all of us seated around her. “Try it, try it.”

  The elf—Orli—dipped her spoon. Horace dipped his, too, and from him the Chernobyl honey earned a rumble of appreciation that was conducted by the bench into the soft flesh of my thighs.

  Gracie tipped the jar toward me. “Try some, baker.” The gesture was solicitous, but her eyes glinted challenge.

  In every legend of the underworld, there is the same warning: Don’t eat the food. Not before you know what’s happening and/or what bargain you’re accepting.

  Along the length of the table, wide dishes bobbed up and down, orbiting on currents of camaraderie. I saw faces smiling and serious, all lit by the hazy light from above, but haloed with pink from the portals on both sides. Across the table, Lily Belasco watched me with dark eyes. I had come this far.

  I dipped my spoon.

 

  IN SAN FRANCISCO, there was an older woman, a Russian, the sister of Shehrieh’s landlord in Brussels from long ago, back before either Chaiman or I was born. (I’m laughing here, because this is how every Mazg story starts: “My old landlord.” The Mazg are inveterate renters.) Anyway, this Russian owns many buildings on Clement Street. She offered us an apartment, but the kitchen had no oven, just a hot plate, and when we asked for a different one, she said, You’re going to get me in trouble! But she couldn’t refuse, because many years ago, Shehrieh did something very kind for her sister.

  This is such a Mazg story, it’s sort of embarrassing.

  Anyway, Chaiman and I got an apartment with an oven. It wasn’t very big, but I felt comfortable there, and that’s where the phone rang when you called me all those times.

  THE FAUSTOFEN

  “THE MARROW FAIR is a new kind of market,” Lily Belasco explained. Picnic dinner was over and everyone who had tasted the Chernobyl honey was still alive. I was following her away from the lemon grove, back up the yellow-tape road, the way I’d come. “It’s an experiment, a place for new ideas. New tools. New food.”

  “What is this place, though?” I asked.

  “Oh. Back when the base was operational, this was a munitions depot. Don’t you love it? Long and skinny, like a mirror-image Ferry Building.”

  Like an underworld Ferry Building. Yes, I could see why this space appealed to Lily Belasco. As above, so below!

  “They kept missiles down here,” she continued. “Lifted them up through there”—she pointed back toward the skylight—“into planes, I guess? Don’t worry. The floor isn’t radioactive anymore.”

  There was a lot of weird light for a place that wasn’t radioactive …

  “Those are grow rooms. All pink LEDs! Apparently, plants absorb that portion of the spectrum more efficiently. Ask Kenyatta, he’ll tell you more.”

  Belasco pointed out workstations as we passed them: “That’s the coffee bar. Naz Kalil runs it—he was Greenlight Coffee’s first barista. Over there they make a new kind of smoothie. Look closely before you try one. Around that corner—cricket cookies. I can smell them. Mmm.”

  We arrived at a place close to the door where I’d entered, far from the light of the lemon grove. There was a workstation here, shadowed and bare. “Here we are. This is where I want you and your robot.”

  There had been a misunderstanding. “I don’t have a robot. I just work on them.”

  Belasco groped the depot’s wall to find a switch that brought cold fluorescent tubes sparking to life above the workstation. It was outfitted with the same basic accoutrements as the rest—a countertop, some wire shelves, an industrial sink—and it boasted, in addition, a ping-pong table with no net, one folding chair (currently folded), and, finally, an elephantine bread oven, gray and stoic, the size of a small car.

  Belasco gave me a frank look. “A market in the Bay Area needs, at minimum, three things. It needs fancy coffee, weird honey, and sourdough bread. Naz has been here from the start and he roasts his beans with lasers. Gracie gets me my honey. You might be my baker. But like I said, this is a place for new tools.” She smiled. “I want robot bread.”

  “I don’t. Have. A robot.”

  She looked at me innocently. “Get one.”

  “Why can’t I just bake bread normally?”

  “Go to Colma if you want to do that. I need you to do something different here. The new ideas, they’re not always … Have you seen cricket flour? It looks like flour. Once you explain it, people get interested, but as we approach our opening, I am mindful of the need for a bit more pizzazz. You, baker, could provide this pizzazz.”

  I had never before been invited to provide the pizzazz.

  “Get a robot and this spot is yours. You’ll have the exclusive sourdough franchise. The market runs previews Wednesday mornings. Look, you’re right by the door! You’ll sell out. Get a robot.”

  * * *

  MY DISGRUNTLEMENT DISSOLVED on contact with the problem, the way it had hundreds of times at Crowley and General Dexterity. Maybe that was my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

  I guess I learned that in school.

  The elephantine bread oven’s manufacturer was etched on the thin lip of metal above the baking bays; it was a FAUSTOFEN, from MUNICH. I looked it up on Global Gluten—the depot had very fast wireless internet, network name: CRUCIFEROUS—and discovered that the oven was considered a boring but reliable workhorse of industrial bakeries.

  A Faustofen definitely did not provide pizzazz.

  It took me a bit of poking around to find an open pantry stocked with staples, including flour and salt, the latter Diamond Crystal, which made me feel for a moment like I was somewhat in the loop. I mixed the flour with water and fed the Clement Street starter, watched it bubble and fizz. It was late, nearly midnight, but I was wide-awake, buoyed by curiosity. We would see about pizzazz. I mixed some dough and set it to rest.

  I stood and faced the Faustofen. The controls were all in German, but how difficult could they be? Very difficult, it turned out. It took me ten minutes to deduce the combination that commanded ignition. When I did, the deep whoomph of the burners inside sent me leaping backward.

  As I turned the dough, I paid special attention to what my joints were doing. I imagined myself a General Dexterity robot arm. I made low, rumbling robot-arm noises.

  A smell wafted over from farther up the concourse, fishy and marine. I heard the clink of glass. I watched a sheet of steam rise in the distance. I saw a woman in a short lab coat, stunningly beautiful, dark-skinned
with darker slashes under her eyes, wandering slowly up the yellow-tape road carrying a bright blue mug, her lips moving slightly, twitching at moments into a smile. Then, suddenly, she spun in place and sprinted back to wherever she’d been working.

  I knew that feeling.

  While I waited for the dough to rise, I wandered back to the lemon grove and the coffee bar. The barista, Naz, alternated his attention between a rig upon which a laser tracked slowly across a scattered bed of coffee beans—their roasty smell rising—and a laptop that showed a long playlist.

  “Any requests?” he asked.

  It was only then that I became aware of the depot’s soundtrack: currently an ambient swell so deep it could have been the far-off foghorns that guarded the Golden Gate.

  Was it the far-off foghorns?

  “She calls herself Microclimate,” Naz explained. “She samples the foghorns up close, then she plays with the sound, turns it into drums, voices, everything.”

  So Naz chose the Marrow Fair’s music.

  “The acoustics in here,” he began, and then words failed him, and he just shook his head in awe.

  I sat with my cappuccino in the folding chair alongside the ping-pong table. The acoustics of the concourse carried not only Naz’s playlist but also scraps of sound from other workstations. I heard low beeps, sharp scrapes, muttered conferences, and the occasional laugh. The depot was wreathed in gentle effort. It percolated.

  My dough had risen, so I formed a loaf. Technically, I should have let it sit, but I was impatient. I slung it into the Faustofen’s top baking bay and commanded the stoic monolith to bake.

  The Faustofen had, in addition to its temperature dial, a humidity control, and I’d never controlled an oven’s humidity before. I made my best guess and resolved to check Global Gluten later. Then, through cloudy glass, I watched the solitary loaf bake. It felt transgressive; a process previously private, protected by walls three bricks thick, now starkly visible.

  Naz must have switched albums, because the foghorn faded to nothing and was replaced by electronic drums—slow taps blurred by the width and breadth of the concourse into massive echoing thuds. I imagined the loading cranes at the Port of Oakland lifting their legs to plod across the airfield above.

  Inside the Faustofen, the loaf inflated.

  The crust darkened. Cracks formed.

  A face emerged, wearing just the faintest smile.

  I looked around. I liked this spot, right next to the door. I liked the folding chair. I liked the ping-pong table. I liked the pink light and the cool soundtrack and the wandering geniuses.

  It couldn’t be that difficult to acquire a robot arm.

 

  SO, YOU ASKED ABOUT THE STARTER.

  The Mazg have many stories explaining how it came to us, and they all contradict each other. Every family maintains their own starter, always in a ceramic crock like the one I gave you. Sometimes the crocks are very old. That one was pretty new. I bought it in Daly City.

  Here in Edinburgh, in the little Mazg neighborhood, when I go walking in the morning, through all the second-story windows I can hear the starters singing.

  REFURB

  I TOLD PETER I wanted to borrow a robot arm so I could teach it to bake bread.

  “I don’t eat bread,” he reminded me.

  That was well established.

  “I didn’t think the arms could do kitchen stuff,” Peter said.

  “They can’t. Not yet. I can figure it out.”

  He pressed his lips together and I saw the muscles of his jaw working. This was Peter’s being-a-manager face. It meant he was figuring out how to help you. “There’s never enough arms, and Task allocates them. But if you really think you can do it … Huh. That would be a big deal, right? It would be. We could pitch it to Andrei.”

  For all his reality-bending intensity, our CEO was accessible and approachable. He ate his lunch in the cafeteria with the rest of us, sitting with a different group every day. You could tell where he was without looking because Andrei’s table always laughed a little too loud.

  Peter and I went to lunch early. We migrated between the stations of the cafeteria slowly, smoothie to salad to waffle maker, circling vulture-like, waiting for Andrei to appear. Peter looked very suspicious circling with just a single green Tetra Pak.

  When Andrei appeared, Peter hooted an alert, and I tracked the CEO out the tail of my eye. It took him a long time to fill his tray—every step interrupted by a greeting, an admonition, a whispered report. I had never watched him this closely. Passing through the cafeteria, he left a wake of keyed-up expressions—smiles and grimaces. He was a walking amphetamine. Peter and I loitered together at the paella station. My pulse accelerated.

  Finally, Andrei selected a seat at a half-empty table.

  “Go, go, go!” Peter commanded. We sprinted across the cafeteria, Peter angling neatly between the Dextrous, me smashing into them, to bring our butts—his sliding, mine crashing—into the table’s last available chairs. Two cold-eyed wraiths had been vectoring for the same spots. I glared at them and sounded a warning hiss.

  “Peter!” Andrei boomed. “And Lois!” He looked around the table. “Do you all know Peter and Lois? Peter runs Control, and Lois works on Proprioception. Very cool stuff.”

  Andrei knew everyone’s name and role. Everyone’s. It was said he used flash cards.

  Peter and I had planned to begin with three to five minutes of small talk before easing into our overture, but looking at the group of Dextrous we had joined, I understood suddenly that everyone at the table had exactly the same plan. We were not the only birds of prey in this cafeteria.

  “The eggs!” I blurted.

  Andrei raised an eyebrow.

  “I want to solve the egg problem,” I said. “I mean. Cooking. Specifically, baking.”

  Andrei lifted a curl of fennel from the top of his salad and popped it into his mouth, where he chewed it thoughtfully.

  Peter daintily removed the seal from his Tetra Pak.

  The other Dextrous glowered.

  “We’ve been working on that for a long time,” Andrei said.

  “Right. But I know the Control codebase, and I know the task.”

  “An integrated approach,” Peter interjected.

  I nodded. We had practiced. “Task and Control together.”

  Peter couldn’t help himself. “But if it works, Control gets the credit.”

  We had the rest of the argument ready to go—an appeal to the skunkworks spirit, a preapproved interjection from Peter praising my most recent bug fix—but none of it was needed. Andrei nodded, picked up his phone, and tapped a short message.

  “Okay. You can have a refurbished arm. Lois, this is your job now. Peter, you’ll oversee?”

  Peter slurped affirmatively.

  “Great. Make it work.”

  I told him thank you, and that I was going to sit somewhere else to actually eat my lunch. Andrei laughed (followed by everyone else at the table, too loudly) and waved me away.

  Later, I crossed Townsend to meet my new robot at the Task Acquisition Center. I walked through the rows of arms, watched them lift boxes and knock over glass bottles. I walked all the way to the back of the building, to a work area set up against the far wall, where several arms stood slack, all of them marked with wide red stickers that said REFURB.

  A woman was sitting at a small desk there in the shadows: Deborah Palmer-Grill, queen of the training floor.

  DPG narrowed her eyes. “So I hear you’re going to solve the egg problem.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “We’ve broken a lot of eggs in here.”

  “I’m going to try something different.”

  “More eggs than you can imagine. Garbage bins full of shells. Full of them!”

  “I’m going to bring you a loaf of bread,” I said with more confidence than I actually possessed. “It’s going to be perfect, and it’s going to be baked by this … fellow … right here.” I patt
ed the closest arm.

  “Not that one,” DPG said. “That one’s new. The one on the end—that’s a Vitruvian 3 from a year ago. Fill out this form. They used that one at the CDC, so if I were you, I’d wipe it down extra good.”

  * * *

  THE ARM ARRIVED on the airfield borne on a pallet, mummified in plastic wrap, delivered by a courier waiting confusedly on the asphalt whose relief showed clearly when we appeared from inside the control tower. Lily Belasco and I extracted the Vitruvian, released the brakes on its wheeled base, and brought it slowly down the vehicle ramp into the depot, Belasco cackling the whole way.

 

  IS IT STRANGE that a sourdough starter sings?

  It didn’t seem strange when I was a child. I’m now twenty-three years old (how old are you?), and yes, I understand that most starters don’t behave this way. But I still don’t think the singing is the most remarkable thing about it. (I’m not being evasive—this is the truth.) Every time I feed my family’s starter, I feel a sense of awe, because from your starter to mine to my mother’s and her father’s, it’s all the same stuff, and it goes back a very long way. Immortality is stranger than singing, if you ask me.

  Anyway, Leopold says it’s just a weird thing with the CO2 bubbles.

  In other news, I have officially received permission from Chaiman to share one of his new tracks. It’s attached.

  CATHEDRALS

  THE MARROW FAIR’S ORIENTATION wasn’t as involved as I’d expected, given that I was being granted space in a repurposed munitions depot slightly below sea level. Lily Belasco showed me the bathrooms, told me there were emergency exits in most but not all directions, then pressed a flashlight into my palm. She explained that the depot connected to other bygone facilities that were not fully mapped.

  “But really,” she said, “nothing’s radioactive anymore.”