On Mars, farming is done by a vast army of mechanized labor, a chirping and stomping pack of adorable robots with two large camera eyes, long necks, and pale white bodies. Their tracks are everywhere beneath the slope of the dome habitats, their tri-parted suction cup feet leaving trails of clover prints in the red dust of this world. It’s easy to watch these robots work, spraying and snipping and scanning each plant within the greenhouses of Mars, the only places where the ground can bear life, where the soil isn’t laden with naturally occurring toxins.
It’s easy to root for the cute little guys. These expressions of human labor, these extensions of our will to survive, even in places we absolutely don’t belong. As Sol dipped below the horizon, its feeble light was reflected by the orbital mirror Remus, ever shining, ever bright. I sat on the ground beside Kali and her brother Rufus, a pair of agritechs who were entrusted to help me create a meal for my kidnapper, the Duke of New Caledonia. A meal that had to be good enough to appease his palette used to impossibly expensive imports, and good enough to secure my freedom and let me return to a prepaid flight that was leaving in only two days.
I had visited Mars in the past, but only the urban areas, where the dust was manageable. But among the dunes, I learned to hate the stuff. It caked to the knees of my pants, the tread of my boots, into my hair and under my fingernails. It mixed with my sweat and formed an ugly slurry that a hot shower and a palm scraper could barely manage. It was soft as ashes, ever spreading, ever staining, and over decades, it was a deadly poison. These chemicals were all the excuse a rogue cell needed to break the script and replicate into a tumorous mass. In the skin, in the bowels, and especially the lungs. I’m not going to disrespect the people of Mars and think for a second they don’t understand what the dust does to them. I suppose any Martian is faced with two options when born on this inhospitable rock: trudge through the hexachromium for a working wage, to keep themselves and their families alive, or huddle in fear in their own homes as an amathophobe.
But as I sat there, watching the agridrone bump over and over into a nearby planter. Hearing the seated sibling technicians argue again over the problem that kept the drone from working properly, and kept me from getting the ingredients I so desperately needed. I found my attention drawn instead to that great pillared manor on the hill, rising above the population that worked day after day to keep it shining white, and clear of dust.
My teeth ground together as I remembered that there was, in fact, a third way a Martian can live on this planet.
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
Rufus gestured a lazy finger at the stuttering drone, while his opposite hand scratched at the seam between his rebreather and the skin of his neck. He spoke in his unhurried drawl as Kali paced outside the greenhouse entrance.
“See, Kali? Pathing. Issue. Pathing issue. I told you before and now the drone itself is basically screaming that I’m right.”
Kali pushed both of her hands through her copper red hair and groaned, the lens of her mask gleaming against the sun.
“Fine. Fine! You’re right and I was wrong, doesn’t mean the drone is any less busted.”
“Narp,” Rufus replied, “but it does mean something else.”
Kali snorted into her rebreather, stood, and crossed past us to a waiting rover. She swung a leg over the seat and clasped the bowtie shaped wheel with stained fingers. At the push of a button, yhe engine’s electric motor purred to life.
“I’ll be back with the board. Try not to be to smug about it, jackass.”
She sped off in a cloud of dust, growing smaller and smaller against the dunes. Rufus and I shared a look with each other, as the drone donked a slow beat.
“I’m gonna be smug about it.” Rufus said, and I barked single, but well appreciated, laugh. It died in my throat on his next question.
“So what motivated you to think coming to the hometown of a man you insulted for years was anything resembling a good idea, Oscar?” He stood. “Because you don’t seem like a dumb fella, but that was a mighty dumb move.”
I sat there in the dust, stunned for a moment. I tried to play it off as a joke, explaining that I’d always considered the risk of kidnapping, that it was part and parcel with fame, but that I never thought it would actually happen.
“Whelp,” Rufus exhaled, fogging the lens of his mask, “I suppose we can say you’re a dumb kind of smart, and uh, leave it at that.”
looked at him, aghast. I repeated, again, I had been kidnapped. I had been kidnapped and Rufus was insulting me?
“Oscar,” Rufus said, “Fairchild and I talked about this already, before you showed up to trail us on the job. I know the score. that’s why I asked about you coming here in the first place,” he looked off to the side.
“Person of your mindset is liable to get other people hurt. Just wanted to ask for myself before I made my mind up one way or another. Don’t mean no harm by it.”
I seethed there, cursing circumstance. Kali pulled up shortly afterwards, the course sound of sand and stone beneath her wheels, a satchel in the flat of her rover, her entire body coated in a layer of dust.
“Hey you two,” she said, hopping out and shouldering the satchel’s olive green strap. “Let’s fix this shit and get on with our day.”
She slipped a small vacuum sealed card from her pants pocket, and strode over to the stuck drone. Her fingers, practiced from what must have been dozens, if not hundreds of days in the dunes, flew over a nearby keypad. Rufus drew a small electronic wand from his pocket and approached, flicking a switch midway up its length and waving it over her filthy clothing. Where the wand passed, dust disappeared like rain from a hot street.
“Thanks bro.” she responded, barely paying attention. Rufus turned to me.
“So, what do you need?”
I brought up my Twinnon Peregrin, angling it against the glare of the orbital mirror Remus, so that all three of us could read its display at once. Rufus nodded a few times, Kali whistled low, muffled from behind her rebreather.
“Well you sure are choosy for a man in your situation,” she said softly. “Maybe a little touched in the head.” I couldn’t tell if she was smiling, but I could swear that her eyes had that particular gleam.
Rufus spoke up, scratching at the back of his head.
“Ain’t that right… one-hundred and fifty million miles out, and this man’s looking for bees.”
But then they looked at me, and I suppose… I suppose they saw something there. Maybe determination. Maybe desperation. Maybe thick-headed pride. Whatever they saw was enough for the two of them.
We got to work. Okay, I’m sorry, that is honestly too dramatic to commit to the buffer. I make it… I make it sound like we rolled up our sleeves and started hacking away at the fields like a jungle. But no, the drones scuttled around efficiently enough, I’d point and they’d harvest. Rufus and Kali for their part were constantly surprised by how little produce I actually needed, and I reminded them that I wasn’t cooking for forty. Just one stuffed shirt that ate gold leaf like most people ate pepper.
When we returned, the rover was filled to my satisfaction with a bounty of ingredients. Bulbs of garlic and bunches of shallots lay beside rounds of sweet potatoes, adorned with loamy soil. At every rise the rover jolted over, a jar of fresh honey clinked against small bins of milled white flour. To my great fortune, it seemed the farm had an automated mill on its grounds. Rufus explained, in his direct way, that he couldn’t really picture people lining up to buy raw grains of wheat. I carried the eggs, still slightly warm from the henhouse, on my lap. The gathered and pressurized air of Mars whispered susurrations through the leaves of dandelions, through grasses dewey with their own oil.
Everything I needed to win my freedom. I felt a kind of force pushing me along, driving me onwards. There was the risk of missing my flight out and certainly it would be leaving in two days.
But in the Duke I saw an opportunity. An opportunity I lacked in that trash filled alleyway in the city of Pobre Cuchillo, facing down Mr. Ungersson the serial killer of restaurants. In the Duke I had an opportunity to wield my writing pen in an icepick grip, and get even with a person of power.
What drove me forward wasn’t desperation, listener. What drove me forward was a kind of all-comers, mustelid arrogance. Hot in my ears, sharp in my eyes.
The Rover came to a dock beside the villa. Kali mentioned offhandedly that produce would arrive here, far enough away to keep the dust of traffic from staining the walls in the manor. Rufus placed a call for Fairchild to come pick me up and left, eager to relieve himself in a building with central heating. I ran my fingers through the ingredients for that evening’s meal trying to determine ingredient quality by touch alone.
“Are you petting the sweet potatoes?” Kali asked, evoking a blooming blush across my face.
I explained myself. She snorted through her nose.
“Yeah, okay, Mr. Yasui. I don’t know what culinary school you went to, but far be it for me to tell you how to do your job. You pet those potatoes till they purr,” she was clearly fighting back a cackle.
I asked her why everyone on this pile of rust and sand seemed to be so free with their opinion. Her eyebrows dropped, slowly, and she stepped forward. Her respirator whined as she took in a great breath, and my anger surged, happy to have someone I could actually express my rage at.
A peal of coughing rocked her body, and she brought up her arms, one hand at her throat, another bent in to press against her sternum. As the coughs progressed, then intensified, I stood awkwardly, looking busy inspecting a roll out tool-kit of socket wrenches, its surface streaked with little lines of dust.
I felt a fool. As her coughs subsided, I apologized. She stared at my feet, her eyes aflame with anger. But its target had changed.
“He’s not gonna let you go, Oscar,” she said.
I asked her what she meant. She balled up a fist.
“I mean the Duke isn’t going to let you go, even if you knock his socks off, even if you convince him you’re the Saint Returned of cooking. Or whatever you’re trying to prove.”
I asked her what evidence she had.
“Because his record on keeping promises is shit, Oscar.”
She started coughing again. I stepped to help her, but she waved me off.
“If you’re polite he’s all smiles and free lunches. If you get him heated then he’ll storm off to his room for an early evening, to brood and to plan. In the end though? He just does what he wants.”
It hit me then, the state of her. I took a shot in the dark. I asked her what he did to her.
“Not to me,” she said, looking at the roof of the garage, “My Pa.”
“Pa said that the workers needed better pay, or they needed filter costs comped. Either way things would be better for us. The Duke loved the idea, said that his workers deserved the very best. Then he went on a four month vacation. When he returned, no word.”
She walked to the rover trailing her hand across its angled hood, then looking at the dust that collected on her finger.
“When Pa asked him about health insurance for the techs, suddenly the Duke had different ideas about what his workers did and did not deserve. Said that his friends at the top felt the Duke wasn’t fulfilling the grand legacy of the Martian aristocracy. Dad called him a shithead. The Duke docked him a month’s pay.”
I stepped to Kali’s side, telling her how awful that sounded. She wiped the dust of her finger on the rollout tool kit, the streak joining with the others.
“Narp. That’s what it is, but it’s nothing special, not really. When Dad died of cancer, the Duke told me he’d pay for the funeral. All expenses, nothing spared, finest food and drink.”
She sighed and looked at me.
“Oscar, if you’re entertaining any notions of escaping, I strongly recommend you quit daydreaming and start drafting. Because sooner or later, the Duke is gonna make a move, and if you’re not ready, then you better wrap your head around living here long term.”
I asked her if Rufus felt the same way. She nodded.
“But before you get any ideas, that doesn’t mean he’s your buddy on this. He’s of the opinion that sticking our necks out is a one way ticket to a worse life.”
I asked her if a life out in the hexachromium was all that good to begin with.
“We’re making enough to save, asshole,” she spat back. “That’s a privilege a lot don’t get.”
I agreed, and considered apologizing. Instead, I told her about my escape plan. I told her about the vent above my bookshelf, how I was right above the Duke’s room. How I was certain I could swipe his keys. I even went out on a limb and confessed to the earlier theft of the power drill. She folded her arms behind her head and rolled her tongue across her front teeth, lips closed.
“Yeah, I’ve heard crazier plans,” she said, working hard to keep her eyes free of opinion.
I asked her if she thought it wouldn’t work.
“I didn’t say that,” she replied. “But short of jumping the fucker and fighting your way out of the villa, I don’t think you’re overflowing with options.”
She considered her words for a moment.
“Wait, you’re not actually like a special forces Epsilon Scarlet motherfucker who uses being a food critic as cover for traveling around, right?”
Listeners, you’d be amazed how many times I’ve heard this. Really. I told her I was not, but that if I was, then I probably wouldn’t be leading with a cooking exposition as my escape plan. My hypothetical escape plan would, instead, involve turning myself invisible and snapping necks with my bare hands. I also reminded her that I was not a food critic, but instead a food journalist. I received a well-deserved eye-roll.
She walked over to the rover, throwing its low passenger door open and rummaging around in a glove compartment. She withdrew a small canary yellow device with handholds on either side and a slate gray screen. The portable endoscope she had used to fix the drone yesterday! When she extended it to me, I didn’t even move.
“Here. Since you obviously need all the help in the world.”
Was she smiling beneath her respirator? I couldn’t know. I thanked her, took the device and carefully slipped it into my pocket.
“Yeah, you’re welcome,” she said “and you better make it count too, because that’s all the help you’re getting from me, Oscar. You’re on your own from here on out.”
Kali looked through me, her eyes set on where my collarbones connected to my sternum, three inches beneath my chin.
The door opened, and she whirled around.
“Rufus?” she said, but her brother was not there. Instead, Fairchild the guard stood, shoulders hunched, suit stained rusty at the ankles.
“Nah,” he said in reply. “I’m here to take Oscar back to his room.”
Kali’s voice pitched up instantly, stretching whatever professional friendliness she had with Fairchild, stretching it to conceal her nerves, and my own awkwardness.
“Aw, sweet of you to check up on us. We made sure to get him in before curfew like you asked. How are things up on the hill?” she started to ramble. Sweat beaded up on my lip, beneath the curved body of my respirator.
“You did fine,” Fairchild replied, wiping his knuckles against his pant leg. “C’mon, Yasui, Let’s get going.”
I conceded, his point illustrated by tone and the presence of a dangling stun baton as well as a holstered electrostunner. We marched our way back to the villa, our footprints joining a steady trail, winding like a river between the garage and the manor’s rear entrance.
I was guided through corridors that were becoming familiar. I loathed how the alienness of the floorplan was beginning to disappear. Part of me knew that it would be a great help to my escape plan, but another part of me, a pessimistic one, imagined a world where the Duke’s manor was all I knew. The thought of it made me ill.
Fairchild delivered me to my room and gestured for me to enter. I didn’t turn back to look at him as the door hissed shut. I went to my bed, took a seat, and waited a few minutes. Then I broke out my appropriated journal and reviewed my recipes: one for vindication, and the other for escape.
I had everything I needed for the meal: a full night and day of prep time would be just fine, and even better: the Duke had withheld feeding me his much loathed carpaccio. Looking back, I suppose that he wanted my own dish as a point of comparison. Instead, a servant had left me a fresh plate of tender steak, herb rubbed potatoes, all soaking in the gravy of the meat’s juices.
I ignored it, though my stomach was grumbling from a long day of ordering others to then order machines to harvest crops for me. I pulled out the portable endoscope and…
Well listener, I stared at it helplessly for a few moments. I shook it around, I tapped at its screen. I even gently whispered to it, first a few variations of “start” or “power on” which transitioned to a series of hushed expletives and pleas.
So, on that note.
Dear Pleasance Electronics Incorporated, I am commandeering part of my own podcast to make a formal request of your company. Your product, the Optic Master Pro in canary yellow, serial number 567/OMP, is a lovely piece of electronic equipment, though I doubt I have ever used it for its intended purpose. However, during stressful situations, for example attempting to escape a kidnapping, I found your tool’s method for activation uncompromisingly confusing. Yes, I am now aware that you have a downloadable PDF manual online, but this is of little help to a person who has been deprived of all outside communication, with the inclusion of network connection. Please consider attaching a small pictographic guide to one of its surfaces, preferably simple enough that a child, or errant food journalist could understand, thank you.
By the way, you turn a Pleasance Electronics Incorporated Optic Master Pro on by squeezing both buttons simultaneously for three seconds. Feel free to thank me, listener. I’ve saved you one hour and a hand drawn chart by explaining this to you.
The device activated with a satisfying jingle of notes, and the screen winked on to display an austere piece of light blue and gold user interface. After some fumbling, I managed engage its camera. A small, soft-bodied and flexible tube emerged from the device’s front, and I discovered that with each joystick I could control it’s direction, extension, and movement. I practiced using it to pick up a variety of small objects within my bedroom, hooking them with its snakelike body.
Then I realized, with further embarrassment, that with the proper combination of button presses, small gripping appendages could be made to emerge from the endoscope’s farthest end.
For the sake of perspective, and to any listeners impressed with this piece of hardware, please note that it is 7,500 Nu online. Kali REALLY did me a great service by offering it to me.
I thanked Kali then, and I’ll thank her again now during the podcast: I had everything I needed. Or at least everything I could physically assemble. There was nothing else to do but say goodnight to Ernest, climb into bed, and will my body to sleep.
And sleep did come, eventually. Fitful and dreamless, the sweat of anticipation rendering my skin clammy and my sheets frictive. Yeah listeners, I know it’s gross. But you try sleeping easy the night before a cooking event and an escape attempt.
When morning came, I leapt up from my bed, long before Fairchild came to wake me. I checked my tools, then ensured they were hidden behind a barricade of pristine encyclopedias and untouched war memoirs. My coffee that morning was cold water and a few hard slaps to my own face. Steely glares into the silver edged mirror of my bathroom.
When Fairchild knocked, I was already waiting behind the door for him. He brought me lower in the villa than I’d ever traveled before, the air cooling and humidifying as we dipped below the surface of Mars, down staircases and through halls that mercifully lacked the glaring portraits and creaking furniture the Duke seemed to adore. Here the decor was wealthy, but that wealth was spent with real purpose. Signs pointed servants to main, secondary, and tertiary kitchens. To pantries and larders and freezers. Walls gleamed with cold polished steel, lit from above by strips of LEDs in long light fixtures like the bridge of some battlecruiser. Doors bore distinctive grip-padding that squeaked and squawked with every other footfall.
“You may use any ingredients you’ve gathered from the estate’s greenhouses,” Fairchild said. “But nothing from the pantry, the larders, the wine cellar, you get the general idea. Essentially you’ll be limited to a small kitchenette used for meal prep, and all your work will be confined to that location. Clear?”
I responded in the affirmative. Something about the austere walls and the gravity of my task was having an effect on my dialogue. I realize now that I was aping a hundred extras on the set of war movies. Fairchild paid me no mind.
“Alright. I’m going to deliver you to your station, where we’ve assembled all your ingredients, and I’m going to lock you in until you are summoned for the party or contest or whatever. Duke’s orders. He ah… he told me to tell you to get well acquainted with the space down here, considering it’s where you’ll be spending a lot of your time for the foreseeable future.” Fairchild shrugged at this. His body language seeming to say “tough luck, jackass.”
I arrived in an elongated chamber, essentially an alleyway of equipment, shelving, refrigeration, and storage. A grip-pad floor extended between the furnished space, wide enough for two chefs to pass on either side. A bark of a laugh pushed up from my chest and out into the sterile air that smelled of expensive cleaning solution, causing Fairchild to stare at me like I’d lost it.
The Duke had blustered that I’d be barred entirely from his “luxury kitchen.” Instead, he’d given me a workspace three times the length of my cabin on the Singular Devotion. It struck me, as I turned again and again in this cartoon parody of a futurist’s kitchen. How much did the Duke care for food? Clearly he had invested a great deal of his time and fortune, as well as the effort of those beneath him, to create this place. I caught sight of my own awed face in the shining surface of a brand new refrigerator door.
And a realization hit me. Oscar Yasui, Quartz Rail Awarded Food Critic. Culinary wit and microcelebrity of the Core Worlds. Another work in the gallery, another appliance on the line. Another servant in thrall.
“Alright, I’m gonna lock you in, Oscar.” Fairchild said. I did not turn to face him. I watched my reflection, my eyes darkening, and my muscles bunching up around my jaw. A heat in my heart battled the frigid air of the kitchen.
“Oscar?” Fairchild said. His voice remained as uncaring as always.
“I heard you,” I replied. “Now get the fuck out so I can work.”
He scoffed and turned, letting the door hiss shut, before the deadbolt engaged with a mechanical thump. I opened the fridge and withdrew a container of farm fresh eggs, and raided the cabinets for the flour I had milled only yesterday. I had 6 hours. I’d need every one of them.
In the first hour, I concentrated my efforts on the pasta. Eggs split on the edges of bowls, cracking delightfully over the hum of refrigeration, the distant click clack of passing staff. I dropped each brilliant orange yolk into a crater of flour, moistened with oil grass drippings and seasoned with salt, spread wide over the granite countertops. Again and again I pounded and folded the mass that resulted, letting a salty, earthy scent waft up around me. I was left with a few cheerful yellow spheres, each a bit larger than a baseball. I left these suns of egg and wheat to rest and moved down the counter. Delighting as their scent filled the space around me.
I shaped yet more flour into bread dough, mixing the fresh golden orange honey by hand, leaving my fingers sticky and sweet. I tossed it into one of the lysol smelling interiors of the oven wall. No yeast for the rise, but I wasn’t looking for loaves. It would do. So many ovens, listeners, arranged like some houses have shelves for rubber bands and dead batteries and broken pencils. With a gleaming steel peeler, my arm flurried forward and back, forward and back, my frustration repurposed into mechanical labor, until every potato’s brilliant orange flesh was exposed. I divided them into chunks, sprinkled them with pepper, salt, and olive grass oil. I’d need a lot of fat for this recipe, or else the dandelion greens would be overwhelming. Onto a tray the potatoes went, and then into an oven.
Just before the start of the second hour, I warmed up the Duke’s gas stove, evidence that he apparently still had a respect for the classics. A rush of propane heat washed against my brow as blue flames burst to life, heating olive grass oil to a shimmer. I sped a knife blade through shallots and garlic, mincing them into something suitable for a pan, and in they went, pungency almost instantly converted by heat into enticing sweetness, a caramel pecan color coaxed out by flame hot metal. I put my elbow and wrist into the mixture, stirring, scraping, bringing up the parts that stubbornly clung to the metal, mining the pan for flavor gold. I bemoaned the lack of a white wine to deglaze the fond, but I didn’t exactly have grapes, or for that matter, the time to press, refine, and age them.
Aggregation, disassembly, damaging a thing in a way that brings out flavor, but never completely destroys. Cooking is not a purely creative process, but when do ingredients ever survive a metamorphosis unchanged?
I wrote about this a lot in The Void Table. For some of my listeners, this might seem as a retreading of old concepts, but not for me. I wrote The Void Table, it exists now, but that doesn’t mean all the thoughts and ideas that created it no longer bear any meaning for me. I still think, often, about childhood, education, family, and the soundless stillness of ships passing each other in the freezing burn of dark nothing.
Years ago, I wrote “The Void Table has a seat for all of us, a spread made wholly of the self, the soul, and the shame.” I still believe that, even as my own writings melt in my head, even as the words on the page become more and more alien with each passing month.
There will be a day when it will be like a different person wrote that book. I wonder if that experience will fill me with dread, or wonder.
In the third hour, I suffered. Making dandelion greens edible isn’t generally worth the trouble, unless you are trying to be particularly healthy, or trying to prove a point to an obstinate, vengeful prick. But, if you want to make them…
Dandelion greens are bitter. Not “acquired taste bitter” no, unpalatably bitter. At least when they’re fresh. You can reduce this bitterness, just reduce it can’t be removed entirely, by soaking the greens in boiling water, then changing the water, then repeating the process two to three times. I did as such, nervous at how the roiling pot added an unpleasant vegetable smell to the room and then watched as the greens disintegrated before my very eyes.
They tend to do that. Disintegrate, in the boiling water. I know because I tried a second time, then a third. Greens would come out intact, but still inedible. The clock ticked ever onward, and forty five minutes passed before I was able to produce a bunch that I deemed acceptable. I fried them in olive grass and garlic, hoping the sweetness of the bread and the fat of the oil would even everything out in the end.
My teeth remained tight in my jaw during the entire process. I am certain the Duke gave me less time than I absolutely needed. If I was less of a cook, then he’d have won by default. Thank the Saints I had the idea to bring more greens than the recipe absolutely required. Just in case.
In the fifth hour, the bread was out of the oven and had finally finished cooling, crusty and golden brown, crackling beautifully at the prod of a fork, filling my lungs with that rustic, time defying scent. Nothing quite like fresh baked bread, no matter how far you travel from Earth. A lack of yeast kept the sourness from the smell, and the bread was low and dense, but I didn’t need it to be fluffy. I tore into it, pinching it apart like a crab from a baker’s nightmare. I drew fresh noodles from a pot, I toasted breadcrumbs, I stared at the digital clock, ticking ever upwards. I was sweating from the steam, from the heat of two ovens and a merry-go-round of pans. My arms throbbed with fatigue as I mashed the roasted sweet potatoes into small chunks and combined them into the fresh and still steaming fettuccine.
But I did it. I stepped away from my work with a tired grin. The clock in front of me read sixteen hundred and thirty five hours, keyed to what was once military time. Everything was assembled with 25 minutes to spare, steaming happily before me in a series of little bowls. I was no professional chef, by any means, but a career of peering over kitchen shoulders, of researching at late hours of the evening made me a passable amateur.
It appeared to be enough. My shuttle flight, however, was scheduled to leave at 9 PM. I’d have to be… well, I’d have to be very efficient with dinner.
Or I was going to be stuck here on Mars, the worst case scenario, obviously. I was preoccupied with one, simple and singular drive.
I couldn’t wait to see the stupid look on the Duke’s stupid face.
The door clicked open, and a young woman with dark black hair and a constellation of freckles across her face stepped into my kitchen labor camp. She cast her eyes down towards the grip surface below, and cleared her throat.
“Sir Yasui, it’s time. The Duke has sent for your meal. He told me to ask you, well, um, ‘are your meals fully prepared, or are you satisfied with accepting a forfeit to this competition?” her voice was thin, nervous, clutched by anxiety, though I couldn’t tell what the source of her fear was.
I gestured wordlessly to the plates, my arm lifting with less enthusiasm than I intended. A clotting, stiffened soreness was settling in across my limbs. My back ached. She nodded in response.
“I see.”
Then she bowed her head to me, and began arranging the meals on a tray. In a few moments, she was gone out the door. I leaned my back uncomfortably against the counter behind me, and closed my eyes, feeling the smell of my work drift out through the ventilation network that circulated air through the entire villa. The metal was cold, and that cold reached out through my sweat and chilled my body to shivers and goose pimples. All I could do now was wait.
So I drifted away, seated uncomfortably on the grip pads of the floor, my back twisted around a column of shelf knobs, head cradled against hard edged stone, with only my scruffy hair as a pillow.
The door buzzed again, and the voice of that same servant called through, her words slipping under the door jam and into my dreams.
“S-Sir Y-yasui? The Duke has sent for you. He wants to discuss the meal you’ve p-put together.”
The door hissed open, and she caught a gasp in her throat. I cracked my eyes open, rubbing my hands against them, and then wincing as salt lodged in my right eye. I rose to my feet amidst a cracking of knees, elbows, back.
Listeners, it is such an honor to be my age, truly. Every day I rediscover my own skeleton, and every day it reminds me of my three decades of existence.
I told her I would happily accompany her, and she hustled me out the door. As we crossed back up the cold sub-chambers, the Duke’s private labyrinth of cooking, a thought struck me.
I asked her if her name was Maggie.
She looked at me, confused. I repeated my question.
“Y-yes sir.”
I allowed myself a smile, and asked her how Fairchild was doing. Her face relaxed into bland blank nothingness.
“Well, I wouldn’t know, Mr. Yasui. I mean, Sir Yasuio, I mean Sir Yasui.”
Then there was nothing. Only a long and deafening silence. Maggie played with a lock of her hair, a look of intense discomfort spreading over her features. Listeners, when you’re meeting a new person, don’t be like me. Don’t insinuate that you know the sex life of a stranger. Show them photos of your pet. You will make friends more easily this way.
We broke from the main hall, feet bouncing on the cushioned carpeteting as we did so, coming to the same grand door that fed guests to the Duke’s combination parlor and dining room. There came the apprehension of standing, waiting for the door to open, the grunting of guards putting their shoulders into the mullion, the growing sliver of sight into the main room.
The Duke’s eyes met mine the instant the obstruction between us was removed. He was mad already, which I appreciated. And then… Then he…
He had a small round tin clasped in the palm of his right hand, constructed like cans of tuna have been for hundreds of years. The container had a pair of rubber prongs, rising from up from the top like the horns of a goat. He had wedged them into either nostril of his oddly small nose, maybe half an inch deep. His opposite hand was pressing down on a small plastic replica of a leather arm chair the size of his thumbnail adorned the top of the can, itself decorated with a newspaper… a kind of old fashioned print media, rolled up beside a pair of spectacles. When he pressed down, a wretched vapor the color of cured animal hide roiled from what little gaps remained between the meat of his nostrils and the rubber of the insert. The label was obscured by the knuckle of his hand, but I knew the brand.
Nostalgia fucking Air. Premium Platinum. Coffee and Fatherhood. MSRP 39.99 for a pack of four. First released Christmas holiday of this year. I knew because I make it a habit to hate read every catalog they released, because the product lives, regrettably, rent free in my brain. Calorie, cholesterol, sugar content: all zero. Pretentiousness quotient… unimaginable.
He’d read my articles for Palladium. My posts on Savage. The piece of shit knew my opinion. He knew how much I despised them, and he was thumbing that knowledge in my face just to spite me. Even recording this episode after the fact has done… very little to cool me down. God damn you, Duke.
My earlier mania evaporated from my body, and I crossed the room and folded my arms behind my back. I intended to present a front of determined resistance, but afterwards having looked at myself doing this exact pose in the mirror, I’ve come to realize I only projected the image of a defiant schoolboy.
The Duke put down his hateful… dessert.
“What exactly did you serve me this evening, Oscar?” His voice carried equal parts anger and grudging respect.
I recited his meal back to him, as I had practiced so many times locked up in my room. Fresh fettuccine with roasted sweet potatoes, caramelized shallots, garlic and oilgrass for flavor, and toasted breadcrumbs. He nodded at each ingredient, then raised a finger to stop me. I obliged.
“And the greens, Oscar. Where did you find those greens on my estate.”
I told him that his fields produced dandelion greens, which I had used to balance the sweet potato and carmelized onions.
“Dandelion greens.” He pursed his lips. “You… you fed me animal feed. You claimed to have a dish superior to carpaccio and you bet your own freedom on one of the single most bitter vegetable products a human can safely put down their gullet.”
I explained to him that the point of the contest was to demonstrate that I could make something with common ingredients that could stand up to the rich fare he imported from Earth. I asked him if I had, or had not, proved that point.
The Duke’s eyes relaxed in acquiescence, his anger growing threadbare and moth-eaten, like a wedding tuxedo in an attic. When he spoke, he spoke with a quiet tremor to his voice.
“How… did you do it? How did you make them taste so sweet?”
The Duke was twisting the rings on his hands now, pinching them between finger and thumb, eyes gazing through the table on which he sat. He spoke slowly and carefully, keeping his enunciation clear.
“The meal was delicious, Oscar. I commend your efforts in my kitchen.”
The Duke motioned for me to sit. I did not. He regarded me for a time, and gave a half shrug, putting his wine glass to his lips and gulping once, twice, then thrice before setting it down.
I reminded the Duke of our agreement.
“All this time, Oscar. All this time I thought the quality of ingredients was the stalwart core of any meal. At least, any meal worth the consideration of a man of my… public stature. This competition was meant to solidify my point. In my hubris I thought that an amateur like me could stand against you in the culinary ring. I thought to touch gloves with a professional.” He looked me up and down for a moment and pursed his lips. “Perhaps not a champion, but it seems even a narrower gulf remains a gulf.”
I told him that I hadn’t taken him for a boxer. He swirled his drink around his glass.
“A fan, not a practitioner. Regardless Oscar, you have done me a great service this evening by cutting me down to size. You’ve reminded me what’s important. That it isn’t the quality of ingredients, but instead the vision of the chef.”
He raised his glass suddenly, hard enough to splash red wine onto his carpet.
“To the moon!” he called out, loud enough for me to wince at the volume, loud enough to rattle the silverware. A frenzy burned in his eyes, but only for a moment. He returned to his chair.
“That was the mindset of those people who settled here first, my ancestors who overcame the naysayers, the small minded, the weak handed. Men and women who said that a city could rise from dust, that royalty could exist in the age of faster than light travel, that an ape could command the sun.”
He was lost for a moment in reverie. I heard him murmur “visionaries” under his breath. I noted the rosy color in his cheeks, his nose, the sweat on his forehead.
I’d only read about conversations like these in books, or heard them delivered in movies. I hadn’t had much real world experience with megalomania outside of pompous auteurs of cuisine. I wondered what a person was expected to do in moments like these. Should I… should I start clapping politely? I resisted the urge.
He searched my face for a response, before grunting. It was the grunt of an artist unappreciated in his time, of a comedian whose audience “just didn’t get the joke.” During the pause I made a show of checking the clock on my Twinnon all-black Peregrine. I explained that, seeing as I’d effectively made my point, I’d need to hurry to get to my shuttle. It was leaving in an hour and forty-seven minutes after all.
“Now this may come as a shock, Oscar, but it is precisely this demonstration tonight why I can’t let you go. It pains me to say this, but in this matter you’ve been the architect of your own fate somewhat.”
It didn’t come as a shock, not really. Kali’s warning had offered me the opportunity to harden myself against this betrayal. Even so, it felt like my organs jumped inside my body cavities.
“Oh. You’re taking this quite well,” the Duke said, appraising me. “Very good! I was worried that there would be a bit of an acclimatization period. Honestly, I was a bit worried you wouldn’t leave your room for the first two months, but rest assured, you’ll be more comfortable on my staff than you’ve ever been in your life. And after you’ve settled in, we can take our time changing your mind on my carpaccio plate, a win for both of us! I’m…” he giggled to himself “I’m very excited to have THE Oscar Yasui at my side.”
Well, if cooking wouldn’t get me out of this place, there was always plan B. I looked the Duke in the eye and told him, flatly, that he was hopeless as a chef.
“Now you’re just being childish, Oscar. I’ve got the kitchen- ”
I didn’t let him finish.
I explained that all the tutoring, all the teaching, all the hand holding in the world would do him no good. That his problem stemmed from the inside of his own skull, a mind that had failed to consider dandelion greens an ingredient, a mind that used wealth and glamor as an easy shortcut to quality. I told him that even his epiphany here was meaningless. That he had chose only to substitute quality of ingredients with the star power of the individual cooking them. That skill in cooking, that taste itself would forever be out of his reach. Not because he was helpless, but instead because he consigned every part of labor, every element of the task to paid underlings. He wore his meals like fashion, but he himself was a mannequin. No person on Earth, or Mars, or the Rings, or Tiquo Astana or even Le Straud would ever respect him, because there was nothing to respect. He was just a prop holding up markers of quality, of skill, of wealth, assuming the affect of entrepreneurs long dead, holding a station meaningless in our modern age, willing something, anything to finally adhere and give him that which he would always lack. A fucking personality.
The Duke’s face was a picture of shock. I then added that I’d rather swallow the poison soil of this planet than eat his carpaccio again.
The Duke’s face grew ruddy beyond the rose of drunkenness. His wine glass exploded in his hand, leaving expensive port to mix with cheap blood. I thought he might have a mild stroke. I thought it might make him easier to get along with.
Three minutes later, I was hurled bodily into my room by security, the Duke’s roars ringing in my ears, still audible through even the carpeted floor beneath my feet.
I climbed into bed, feeling the expensive mattress envelop my sore shoulders. Worse for wear, but a quick check of my watch told me I was still on time. Fifty-four minutes remained until my flight would be headed for orbit. My incendiary comments had the intended effect, and the Duke, and his key fob, were right below me. Thank you again, Kali.
Forty minutes later, the Duke’s roars stopped, and I rolled out of bed, pushing aside the books, and snatching tools from my makeshift cubbyhole. I crept to the ventilation duct and gently rocked it free of its housing, then flipped on Kali’s loaned canary yellow Optics Master Pro and sent the endoscope slithering through the twists and turns of the duct network, aided by the screen display I held in my hands. The newly opened portal smelled of stale air and dead metal.
Past the first threshold, past my room’s blessedly still fan blade, plunging downwards into the Duke’s room, where I saw it, beside the slumbering bulk of his body, the fob. The fob that controlled the lock to my room.
Gently I pushed forward, extending downwards until the small endoscope rested just beside the keyring. A quick depression of the trigger grips, a twist of the sticks and… I had it. Rising into the air, the body of the Duke getting smaller and smaller over the keyring, grasped in the insectlike grippers of my endoscopic tool.
My breathing hissed between my teeth, sweat slicked where my skin met the textured paddles and grips of the Endoscope’s controls. A ringing clink in the vents, a bang, a clatter, heard over the zip and whine of the retracting scope.
Clink clink. Keys in my hands, the button beneath my thumb, an on and off symbol worn down from repeated, imperious pushes from strong fingers. A ridged pattern of bumps differentiating open from closed. I gazed at the door I had rattled when I first arrived in my cell. I stashed everything I had in my travel pack, my Twinnon Peregrine, the micro-power drill, Ernest the Savorflame Mushroom and his little greenhouse pod.
Approximately six limited edition designer pens, with a combined value of nearly five thousand. I had been stealing them at every opportunity, listeners. I had… developed some kind of compulsion. They’re arrayed around me now as I write this script. I barely even use them, I just stare at them, turning them in the light so as to observe them from every angle.
I pressed the button labeled “open” with steady firmness. My response was immediate, the door hissing open in front of me, revealing the hall beyond. A madman’s giggle erupted from my lips, and I hurtled into the hallway, directly into a body lighter and shorter than my own, turning my vision into a purple, green, and electric blue flash, knocking both of us to the ground.
Across from me, sitting on the carpeting, holding a hand to a bleeding nose. Maggie the maid. Friend of Fairchild the guard. Our eyes locked, my hand extended.
I asked her to stay still, not to move. I begged her, the desperation in my voice equalling the fear in her eyes. She was shaking, eyes looking at the open door, back at me, then at a nearby painting of the Duke, scowling forever, eyes fixed on any and every viewer.
“Please don’t,” I whispered. “Please.”
She jolted, I lunged. My fingers grasped the hem of her dress, then in a burst of heat born of friction the fabric vanished. I clutched my hand to my chest in muted shock, feeling a trickle of blood slip down the bridge of my nose from a wound on my forehead.
“Help!” Maggie screamed, running down the stairs. “Sir Yasui is escaping! Get the guards! Wake the Duke!”
I hauled myself up, breath fast and thready in my throat, the world slowing with the drum beat of my heart.
“Window,” some reptilian voice hissed at me from the jiggling meat fat of my brain, taking a break from keeping my lungs inflating and my heart blasting. “Jump out the Window or your fucked, critic boy.”
Light shone against my back, casting my shadow down and across the hall. A hall already sounding with the thump thump of boots on expensive carpeting. I turned and ran, slamming my clumsy body against the window pane, undoing the latch faster than I could think. A two story drop stretched out beneath me.
Something easily forgotten about Mars, listeners, is its reduced gravity. It’s one-third that of what we’ve grown accustomed to on Earth, twice that of our own Moon, Luna. Less gravity means less weight, both for objects carried, as well as for our own bodies, making landings much less harmful, even from higher distances. On planets like these, a man can feel like a superhero. A feeling like that can give even a slight person such as myself the confidence to jump.
I pushed out from the windowsill, my heels balanced on its edge, overlooking the dizzying height below. That same reptilian voice spoke again in my brain.
“You’re gonna die, critic boy. Go back inside.”
I yelled that it was my brain’s idea and jumped. The descent was slower than I expected. Languid compared to what I’ve seen in the past. I was amazed at the amount of time available to me, to regard the intricacies of my fall, and the approach of the ground. I hit easily, almost softly. You can imagine my surprise when a cracking reverberated through my leg, carried up to my ears, followed immediately by a blooming flower of pure agony that left me hissing and crying on the ground, hands reaching spasmodically for my immobilized ankle.
You see listeners, reduced gravity is an excellent thing for falls. But any idiot can tell you that you have to land right. If you are ever falling, land with your feet flat on the ground, bend your knees, and avoid any sloped or angled surfaces. Do NOT land with the edge of your foot towards the ground, or else you will experience the sensation of the tendons in your ankle exploding, and you will wish you were dead.
My options rapidly disappearing in the sand, my gasping lungs inhaling massive doses of cancerous dust, I began to drag myself across the ground, plunging clawed fingers into soft soil.
Things get blurry here, listeners. I’ll admit I have a lot of pride in my memory, but even I have my limits. I know I dragged myself a few meters, and then hurled myself down a hill, rolling down its length. I remember the pain every time my toes brushed the wall of the dune. I remember figures relaxing by a rover. I remember begging, blind from dust, spitting and howling from fresh pain.
I remember conversation as I mewled to myself, as I begged further. A baritone drawl and a sharp, panicked woman’s voice.
“He’s nova’d” the woman said, “by Jesus and the Saints-on-the-Rail we gotta go!”
I remember yelling in pain, and being shushed as someone much stronger than me picked me up and limped my body over to a hard surface. I remember saying thank you as I bounced along in a car. As somebody pressed a hypospray against my leg and pulled the trigger.
“Don’t thank me,” a woman said, a woman I am convinced was Kali.
“Thank Rufus. I said to leave you behind.”
drugs faded the pain in my ankle to levels I could charitably call “bearable.” On arrival, Rufus and Kali grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and hurled me out onto the pavement. I remember the gasps of onlookers as they climbed back in and drove off, the tread of their rover leaving skidmarks and plumes of rubber vapor in their wake.
I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. They were already gone, never once did they look back. From where I lay on the concrete walkway, I saw they had brought me to the doors of the starport. I hauled myself up on one good foot and limped inside. The crowds parted, eyes averted. My business was my own.
I staggered my way to the automated teller, and began flight check-in procedures. Back to the Singular Devotion, back to the journey to Le Straud.
“We’re sorry,” a female voice responded, synthesized to evoke benign and friendly calm. “Shuttle flight 226 has departed, and no further flights are scheduled to the Railship Singular Devotion. For customer assistance…”
The world felt like it was made of glass. I lingered at the terminal, one finger hanging in the air like an inverted coat hanger.
They had to be coming. I knew they had to be coming. The Duke’s mind, from my short time with him, seemed only to have room for haute cuisine and vengeance. I scrolled through the rush ticket options. The prices displayed were a long march of digits. I can picture them reflected in my dead eyes. This was far beyond my carefully curated budget for the trip.
I hit accept.
“Thank you, Oscar Yasui,” the voice said, seeming to be far away. “Shuttle flight 028 is leaving for the Goodenough-Kanamori within the next 7 minutes. Rapid purchase snacks are available on all concourses, please remember to hydrate-”
Goodenough-Kanamori. Good enough. Named for a long deceased physicist. I looked him up after I caught my breath. Worked with magnetism. Oldest man to be awarded the nobel prize, before Seguri topped him at 114.
The Goodenough... it would have to do. I limped my way to the gate, leaning on moving sidewalks where I could, all possessions that mattered carried on my back. Red dirt clung to every hair follicle on my body, my ankle swelled around its torn tendons. The internal intelligence at the gate scanned my newly purchased boarding pass, with a flash of green light I was permitted through the air bridge, and onto shuttle flight 028, away from the Duke, his villa, and his kingdom of dust.
I’m Oscar Yasui, former licensed food critic for Palladium, current food journalist, impromptu chef, and newly minted pen-thief. Thank you very, very much for listening to my podcast.