Hello again, listeners. I’ve done something different this season, and I want to take the time to address you directly to explain it. I’m going to be writing more episodes in advance to make it more difficult for unsavory individuals to use my episodes as intelligence, or to retaliate against the people I interview.
I say this to avoid confusion and also to express that… as rough as my previous episodes have been, the content does get harder from here. I hope you understand.
With that in mind, welcome to Season 2, everyone. I know I sound uh… tired. But I’m happy to have all of you again. Truly.
Let’s get right into it. How do we access inaccessible goods? We all want what we can’t have, right? A fox leaping for grapes on a vine, a raven piling stones to lift treats out of a hole.
Why do we want things that aren’t ours?
To answer that question, I took a trip down Persimmon Street in the Pacheco City Blue Zone of Therevatti, guided by my traveling companion Polity Yellow, a renowned guerrilla artist and Therevatti native.
The Pacheco Blue Zone. Home of the Pau Pau starport, bustling with private vessels kangaroo’d by Railships, its terminals a tide of non-natives coming and going from the planet, myself included. The streets here bustle with people, though never enough to feel truly crowded.
From above, the city is a six pointed star; a series of flanged vertices tipped with watchtowers and checkpoints. Walled like a bronze age acropolis, hilled like Floodtown, California. Twelve meter high walls form a bulwark against the great waxy fronds of Therevatti’s widespread jungles. Polity once told me that there’s little fear of deforestation here, the Therevatti flora is rarely woody, comprised instead of winding creepers that twine together symbiotically, weaving nets that chase sunlight and sky.
If you haven’t been to Pacheco, it’s a beautiful little bubble city. Offices and finance and real estate stacked on dining and leisure. The Blue Zone springs up from a larger sprawl of development surrounding its walls. Its hotels, theaters, restaurants, and game rooms each form the rally point of a hundred different tours. Few vehicles roam the wide streets, with the exception of the freely available public transportation and the odd Brightsail armored vehicle. Polity told me the walls are a newer construction when compared to the surrounding region, topped with pulse emitters to swat down any objects that might come sailing over the twelve meters of concrete. I have to agree with them: they look the part, pristine and unweathered, white and cool to the touch, even in the midday sun. No creepers, molds, or any other signs of natural incursion.
Graffiti scatters the barriers; tourist tags, “I was here,” little jokes. The opposite side of the wall has its own share, but they exist to communicate a different message altogether. A different emotion. Drones work constantly on either side, cleaning away these little conversations of paint and burned concrete.
In Pacheco, there stands this lilac-colored blown glass mushroom, the Zenoi restaurant Calendaria. It’s constructed in what we call the “pit style,” a rotunda with chefs at the center and guests lifted above. If you’re waiting for your meal, you can watch as chefs work to prepare it, passing ingredients beneath knives, into pots, garnished and decorated, delivered by dumbwaiter to servers. Guests love the set up, but I’ve sat with more than a few chefs on smoke break who curse this sort of culinary panopticon.
At noon, the light shines through Calendaria’s murky glass walls, casting everything violet. Here, the architects have played with transparency and opaqueness blurring the boundaries of private dining. Chefs are always in view, the star animals in the menagerie, but customers weave in and out of visibility, their silhouettes warping in the glass. As we were directed to our seats, Polity mentioned that it reminded them of seeing shadows darting beneath the brilliant purple algal mats of Therevatti’s seas.
The menu lists its dishes in Thetti, the local creole. Calendaria’s chef, Anton Dani, likes to challenge his guests linguistically as well as gastronomically. If you don’t speak the language, order at random or swallow your pride and ask the maitre d.
I asked Polity what each name on the list meant. They traced their finger down the paper menu, squinting as if at some distant memory, until their nail rested beneath the word “tarranq.”
“Tarranq is good,” Polity Yellow said, their attention more focused on spoofing the IDs of other patrons.
“Oh yeah? I’ve never heard of tarranq,” I replied.
They tore themselves from their work, a free thumb rubbing their temples, the opposite hand groping at their bright yellow hoodie, their blond hair slightly limp from the incredible humidity of Therevatti’s atmosphere.
“It’s like a crab with an eel’s tail and like… swords for hands. Lives in the rivers and jumps at things it wants to eat,” a flash of a smile, “order’s paid up by the way.”
“Thanks for your hard work,” I said with a laugh. Polity bowed in response, complete with a flourish of their hand.
“So it’s like a crocodile?” I asked.
“Yeah, like an ambush predator,” they considered, then their eyes brightened with curiosity, “Why? Does that affect the flavor?”
“Not really, well, it can, higher level predators have a different muscle density, they can taste very strong, very gamey. But mostly? I’m just excited for the chance to see more of Therevatti’s ecosystem.”
Polity Yellow shrugged in reply. “I’ve never seen them in person, not a lot of game reserves on Therevatti yet. Mostly when I was as kid I was told to avoid washing my clothes in the same place twice.”
They took a second look at the menu.
“I don’t know the other word though. Galantine?” They sounded out the word.
“Galantine?” I said. “It’s um…” I trail off, trying to avoid using the word ‘forcemeat.’
“It sounds like an old timey sword.” They replied, squinting at the text.
“It’s like a tightly packed sausage where its juices form a kind of jelly under the skin. It’s very tender, and chefs mix in all sorts of spices and vegetables.”
“Meat jelly, huh?” They wrinkled their nose.
“It’s Aspic.” I replied, enjoying their reaction to a culinary unknown.
“Isn’t your job to make people want to eat food?” They jabbed, looking at me askance over their water glass.
“Nope! Common misconception about my job. Previous job. All I do is give you my opinion. The rest is up to you.”
“Ah, fine, fine. Have it your way, Yasui.” When the server came back, our order was identical. A vote of confidence that, looking back, I still feel a bit honored by. Or maybe I’m still thrilled that Polity neatly dodged the nearly two hundred dollar meal we shared that day.
Not that I’m condoning it, but every meal is free when you travel with a criminal in your company.
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
The tarranq hind galantine arrived cold, shaped and decorated like a full roast chicken; a textbook example of Dani’s ongoing desire to put his guests on their back foot. Foreign-familiar stylings, the unrecognizable shaped into something familiar, a bait and switch intended to shock appetites into open-mindedness. Welcome to the world of Zenoi Cuisine, fusion cooking in the Fusion Age, where xeno-flora and fauna are adapted by look or by taste into what Sol’s citizens are accustomed to. Pop dumplings and Fairy wraps did not get their start in Zenoi, being famine food, but this is where they got their fame.
The galantine was paired with thick slices of darkly crusted bread and a decanter of locally sourced wine. The label on the bottle displayed a ghostly woman with a hinting smile, arms wrapped around a great basket of unfamiliar fruit. The wine was wincingly sour, to my surprise, but it paired well with the tender flesh of the tarranq.
Polity Yellow jabbed a slice of their Galantine on the point of a long tined fork, as if to finish the creature off. I popped a morsel into my mouth, its surface inlaid with the orange, whites, and reds of Therevatti’s harvest.
It was cold and smooth. Ever so slightly gelatinous, trembling beneath its own aspic, yielding easily to teeth. Sweetness came through with perfect clarity beneath a creamy overtone. The inlaid vegetables, like precious stones, added pops of low and earthy flavors, or their own sucrose sugars. The false chicken traveled from fork to mouth until it disappeared entirely, revealing the sunburst logo of Calendaria engraved into the sauce smeared face of our plates. Polity Yellow leaned back satisfied, munching on bread and sipping wine, staining their teeth violet.
“Good?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, but we should get going,” Polity Yellow said, smiling, as they always did at the end of our meals, “portion sizes were small, but dining and dashing doesn’t feel great bloated anyway.”
In a flash of yellow and black, striped like a yellow jacket’s promise of pain, Polity Yellow was up and out the door. A practiced dance, innocuous and breezy, that I had yet to learn the steps to. I lingered, for a moment, looking to the kitchen pit below us, where the chefs saw nothing beyond the next meal on order. I looked to the other patrons, who debated the meaning of their Thetti menus like scholars over some moldering text.
I would have left a tip, but that would’ve required putting my information into Calendaria’s system. Instead, I put Polity Yellow’s jacket ahead of me. A fabric video display on their back depicting a caricature of a cherub, smiling devilishly. Another day, another full stomach, pleased palate, and untouched bank account.
Anton Dani can handle a free lunch or two. While I can’t confirm it personally, plenty of my former colleagues have made claims that his brash and challenging style has had ugly effects on his leadership. The same personality that spawned buffer witticisms and sly industry critiques takes on a new cutting edge when redirected. From the bowed heads and tense necks I saw in the kitchen of Calandaria, Anton Dani is no stranger to punching down.
Polity Yellow and I walked on a sidewalk that shone a light blue with embedded alloys. Sometimes we stopped at crosswalks that self illuminated, but mostly we just jaywalked. Pacheco isn’t the first human settlement to grace Therevatti’s surface, but opinion generally holds that it is the most engineered. Of its siblings, it benefits most from the advancements made back in Sol, adapted and exported for the local climate. I marveled at the presence of large gardens, and found myself only a bit disappointed that each are entirely enclosed by slant topped fences.
“Are those privately owned?” I asked Polity as we passed one, the bars casting shadows on stone sculptures of railships, on great carpets of tiny yellow flowers.
“No, not really. Anyone can use them but you have to get passes and permits ahead of time,” they clucked their tongue. “Come to think of it, this one wasn’t fenced the last time I saw it. Huh.”
My feet began to hurt as we climbed hill after plunging hill.
“Hey um, could we maybe take a bus?” I asked.
“We really shouldn’t,” Polity’s reply was so fast it shocked me a bit. “They’re free, but if anyone accuses us of theft, they provide an easy way to track where we are and where we’ve been.”
“Oh,” I said.”
“That,” Polity Yellow gave me a sheepish expression, “and I’ve never been able to crack their security. Being good at intrusion doesn’t mean that everything’s accessible. On my best day, I’ve broken military firewalls and on my worst day been foiled by a vending machine.”
I couldn’t stop the snort, “a vending machine?”
“Keep up, Yasui,” Polity sayid, a playful huff in their voice.
We parted for the day there. Polity would often head out to meet with friends at a bar called the Lady Winoa. Later, I’d learn they would exit the city as well, but they hadn’t mentioned that kind of outing to me yet. To my listeners, this behavior may appear that Polity was being secretive, but that's not how it happened. When we first arrived together at Pau Pau after deorbiting, Polity gladly offered to take me around the city, but I didn’t want to be a burden. Well, more of a burden. So I did everything in my power to get out of their way.
So we did the same dance we did many evenings. Polity would ask if I wanted to join them. I turned them down with a joke, an excuse. They would head off to their meetings, I left to the hotel room we hadn’t spent a single Nu on.
I said that I did this to not be a burden. But I think I also did this so as not to burden myself.
The air on Therevatti is so terribly humid, oppressively hot. To keep its citizens from collapsing, street lamps mist down cool water pumped and purified from the rivers India and Saigon. All of this combines to ensure one’s hair weighs damp and heavy on their head, ever pulled down by condensation. I find that I’m always touching my face, smearing moisture and skin filth across my cheeks with clumsy palms. Now Therevattins, Polity Yellow included, keep their eyes free of water with knuckles and fingertips, natural as breathing.
At another restaurant, a Saints-be-true pizza place by the name of Mercutio’s, Polity Yellow and I savored slices of pizza topped with local cultivars of mushroom and olive. A salty and earthy combination that uh… at this point I should specify was wholly inert and non-explosive. The cheese stretched from our mouths with every bite, and the parmesan dusting on the crust hopped with every crackle. When we spoke with each other, we had to raise our voices over the din of a group of Brightsail Colonial mercenaries chanting in the background. The AUG Cup was hosting football, streamed live from Earth.
Where Calandaria demanded more from its guests, Mercutio’s prided itself on delivering comfort food served in a bawdy atmosphere. The pizza we shared refuses to be overlooked. Polity and I discussed it around mouthfuls of crust and cheese.
“What in the world, this pizza is fantastic,” Polity breathed, holding a hand over their mouth for the sake of dignity.
I agreed, it was very good. So good in fact that, after a long voyage eating meal kits on the Goodenough Kanemori, I was doing my very best not to show Polity that a few tears had sprang to my eyes.
“Hey, uh, Oscar?” Polity said, having noticed I was crying, “you alright?”
“Yes,” I said, “It is very good pizza.”
“What makes it so good, do you think?” Polity had taken an olive between their thumb and forefinger, and were inspecting it under the light.
I composed myself. “Well, unless some sort of bizarre synchronous evolution has happened, these are probably cultivars from Earth that they’re growing locally. And with that in mind, trumpet mushrooms are fantastic, black olives are fantastic, mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, basil, these are tried and true staples of great pizza.”
Polity Yellow sank their teeth into the crust, and a satisfying crackle sounded across the table. I gestured at them in response.
“And that, that’s the stuff right there. Not too soft, not baked to a briquette. Look, if you get every ingredient right in cooking, if you put them together to compliment each other, if you prepare them perfectly, then the end result--it’s just going to be fantastic.”
“It’s just that easy?” Polity teased.
“Yeah,” I laughed, “totally simple, nothing to it.”
“I’m thinking there’s something you’ve overlooked, Mr. Food Journalist,” Polity had turned their attention across the room.
“I think it tastes so good because they’re the ones paying for it!” They laughed, voice too bright and careless for my liking. An outstretched nail was pointed at the back of a mercenary, staring with rapt attention at the screen.
I shot a panicked look at the seven men seated at the bar, muscled, augmented, genes as tailored as their trousers. Polity Yellow just pulled a face at me and laughed.
“Oscar, let me tell you a little secret. Most things in existence snap better when they’re stolen. Specifically, when they’re stolen and you love that about them.”
I stared at my crescent moon of a slice, one mushroom sliver marked where my teeth had parted it, herbed sauce oozing red beneath. I thought a bit about toppings. I closed my eyes, focused beneath the din, and took a bite.
Above the salt, above the savor, above the crunch and the stretch and the glory of bicuspids tearing through cheese, sauce, and crust, there really was something there. A high note, a note of flight. Something you couldn’t taste with your tongue. Something that you tasted exclusively with the spine. Savoring with the bones of the vertebrae, flavor traveling up to the peak of the neck instead of sinking low into the gut.
You can’t put theft in a salt shaker, listener. You can’t toss it into a simmering pot. But Polity Yellow wasn’t lying. It was right there, among the flavors of our dinner. I loved this pizza. I loved it because it wasn’t more meal packs and budget food or that I hadn’t sacrificed the time in my day to assemble it. And… I loved how it didn’t hurt my personal account.
Palladium, my employer of four years, comped all of my expenses while reviewing food. A four hundred dollar a plate meal hits the tongue differently as a gift than it does out of pocket. And here I was with Polity Yellow. Not paying a dime.
On the screen, the American Compact failed to intercept a blistering kick from their rivals from the Greater Union. As it arced into the goal, the party of mercenaries erupted into screams, then lifted their voices into a mistimed and off-key anthem. They swayed together, breaks in the lyrics punctuated by thrilled laughter. Their uniforms displaying the marked pentagons of officers, the stylized black sailboat of Brightsail. Sidearms in holsters, the foldout kind that neatly keeps the weapon completely out of sight.
“Is this really okay?” I asked Polity Yellow. They kept their eyes on the mercenaries, sipping a glass of synthesized root beer.
“Places like Mercutio’s always get a lot of traffic in the middle of the month,” Polity Yellow replied, not quite answering me.
“Why is that?” I asked. I knew it was a diversion, but I was curious.
“Payday,” they replied. “Clockwork, fourteenth of every month. “Officers go to places like Mercutio’s, noncommissioned hit places for bingsoo and shrimp burgers.”
There was a smile on Polity’s face that I couldn’t quite understand. “They’ll split off to bars and sense boutiques afterwards,” they said, “it’s really good for business in the blue zones. A lot of places budget around it.” They tipped their rootbeer back, draining the amber liquid until only gleaming ice-rock remained.
“I have to go do some stuff,” they said, sliding a thumb into their mouth to salvage a streak of red sauce. “We should go.”
We gathered the remaining slices of pizza together. Though we couldn’t call a waiter over for a clamshell or a doggy bag, both of us couldn’t stand to leave any amount of food on the table. The slices of pizza were still warm in my hand, mozzarella grease slipping between my fingers.
The mercenaries at the bar cheered again as an onscreen ball slammed home into the net. I looked at their clean gray and white uniforms, the sun and sail logo stitched onto their square shoulders. Lists were tattooed into their skin in black and blue ink, on their forearms, on their wrists.
One of them met my gaze for a moment, a little more sober than his friends. Even as I made to look off to the side, to inspect the chevron decor of the walls, the mercenary continued watching me. As I hurried away, to catch up to Polity Yellow. I swore there was a shadow of recollection in that mercenary’s dark green eyes.
I fled Mercutio’s, my chest tight, fighting the instinct to look back.
Three days later, Polity and I were having breakfast with each other. We had sat down to eat at Le San te Kali, a charming cafe who’s windows perfectly captured the light of the morning sun as it rose, framed by office towers, to warm the air of Pacheco to its typical sauna temperatures.
“You know these places are insured,” they said.
I paused, a forkful of Pomperri tart poised to enter my mouth. I let my arm rest on the table. They were looking at me, the expression on their mouth hidden behind the curl of their hand. “They’re all insured. The Pacheco Blue Zone is tourist central. It’s basically an outgrowth of Lea te Suldan if you think about it.”
Outgrowth. As if Lea te Suldan was metastasizing. Spreading from where it orbited the planet, down to the surface of Therevatti. Something alien taking root.
When the two of us had entered Le San te Kali, I spoke at length with the server at the front counter. Asking a whirl of questions. Were the vegetables locally sourced? Were they untouched cultivars of xenoflora, or were they hybridized off shoots to appeal to extrasolar tourists? Were there any concerns of allergic reactions to fruits with incompatible chiralities? My dining companion, the person in the yellow jacket, had a celiac condition, were there any gluten free options for them?
Polity Yellow coughed quietly. Insistently. I corrected that bread would be fine. Polity gave me a small thumbs up in response. The woman behind the counter smiled and nodded. She had a star sticker near her right eye, positioned like a beauty mark. Unlike the servers in other establishments, she had a distinct accent, and occasionally she would pause to process what I was saying. As we sat down, I heard her speak quick bursts of Thetti into the kitchen.
We had done this scam many times, now. But this time something felt very different in my chest.
The feeling did not clear.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this right now,” I said, eager to take my first bite of tart. The pectin in the pomperri, the stuff that holds jams together, had firmed the filling beautifully. Bright red, listeners, the color of cut and polished rubies, with a delicate smell like sugar and just the slightest hint of cherries.
“It’s no trouble. I just--” Polity Yellow paused. Their lips puckered around unformed words. I could feel them internally exchanging synonyms.
“I want to make sure we’re on the same page,” they finished.
“Is this how you got caught on Lea te Suldan, just discussing your crimes out in the open?” I popped the piece of tart into my mouth. It was as sticky as I dreamed. Across from me, Polity Yellow set their fork against their plate with a clink of metal against porcelain.
“What do you mean?” Their voice was level. Not yet committed to anger.
“Nothing,” I said around my mouthful of tart.
Polity Yellow and I sat together in a silence broken only by the light sounds of cutlery and good food. The tart was delicious, with a zing that was balanced out by the butter in its crust. A burst of tongue tingling astringency smoothing into melonlike sweetness and just a brush of spice. Pomperri smells a bit like cherries, but it has this spice to it. Not the burn of capsaicin or horseradish’s isothiocyanate, but more the delicate bite of cinnamon. It was a marvel on the tongue, these glassy candy preserve quarters of pomperri melting away in spicy sweet sugar. If it ever makes its way back to the Sol system, it might very well shake up the spice industry as we know it. Cinnamon as a commercial product is mostly a synthesized flavor substitute. It isn’t completely extinct. But I’m willing to bet that Therevatti has a hell of a lot more pomperri than we do surviving cinnamon trees.
I did not have that feeling in my spine, that simple thrill of theft. Instead, my stomach wound around itself. The flavor of the tart zinged, of course, but the sensation in my mouth didn’t make its way to my heart. A new seasoning, then. The seasoning of guilt.
It was quiet between us, for a while. I couldn’t stand it. I spoke without thinking.
“None of this is right is what I mean,” I said. “These places are insured, fine, I’ll believe you on that.”
“Oh! Thanks so much for the vote of confidence,” they said.
“Right,” I ignored their tone, “but who is going to get blamed for all this theft?”
Polity Yellow looked at me from behind their bangs. Their smile was empty.
“Now who’s not keeping their voice down?” they replied.
“You’re evading the question. I’m fine with the restaurant owners and their investors taking a hit, hell, I know better than anyone that they can absolutely survive us skimming like this. It’s just that-” I stopped short, thinking of Rufus and Kali. Of Sad-Eyed-Girl.
I came back from my thoughts, Polity Yellow was staring at me in shock. No. Not shock. A glimmer of realization had struck their eyes. A puzzle piece had fallen into place.
“Oh,” they murmured, the muscles in their own face seemingly fighting to keep their mouth from twisting into an arc of disgust. “It’s like that then.”
They shifted forward in their seat, palms flat against the table. But they stopped themself. A sigh.
“Oscar, let’s just table this conversation. Please. We’re both tired.”
I looked at my meal, half eaten. Lobes of pomperri preserves frozen in sugary jam, oozing out of a light brown crust. I realized my nails were sticky with the stuff. It left red smears on a napkin as I hurried to clear them away.
“Tired of what?” I asked. “Eating good food for free?”
“Oscar,” Polity Yellow was almost glaring now.
“No,” I said, meeting their eyes, “Answer the question. Stop talking around this and pretending that… that everything’s fine. Le San te Kali isn’t a chain or some bullshit gourmet place…”
“What, Oscar?” Polity Yellow crossed their arms, “It’s what, staffed by real people? We aren’t hurting robots?”
“Stop putting words in my mouth,” I said.
“Then fucking actually say something!”
I lowered my voice and leaned in. A few workers from the kitchen glanced and smiled at the two of us, misinterpreting anger as intimacy.
“I don’t want to just steal from just anyone, Polity, I want to have some goddamn scruples here.”
“We’re surviving,” was their reply.
We had been traveling together, eating together, for about two weeks. We had never slept or eaten at a place with a review below four stars on the buffer. We had spent maybe 60 Nu the entire time.
“At a fancy cafe? At Calendaria? At Mercutio’s? This is just taking what we absolutely need?”
Their arms came out of the jacket, crossed across their chest.
“If you do it right.”
I grunted in reply.
“Oscar,” Their voice was tight. “At dinner you mentioned that you were aboard a work vessel.”
They meant the Goodenough-Kanemori, where I sifted trash for valuables to pay for packaged meal kits. I did not nod.
“Did you like that? Was that fun for you?”
I remained silent.
“No. You didn’t. Who would? But you learn to accept it. Because it feels like you have no other options, and when you’re desperate, not only do you condition yourself to deal… you start to believe that everything you want is a million miles away. That you don’t deserve anything until you’ve worked yourself to the bone.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In the circles I occupied, Polity Yellow’s work was discussed with a kind of breathless joy. Even their more criminal activities, like the caustic defacement of the Singular Devotion’s mural, was treated with quiet and reserved applause. Attacking a tasteless exhibit exulting yet another jingoistic age of manifest destiny, the hubris of racing out to the stars. “Get em, Polity!” I had cheered to my fellow columnists.
But this?
“So all those art installations, the stunts, how exactly does that help anybody? Like, what exactly do you do, Polity? Who are you?”
Polity jerked away as if struck. But there was no shock on their face, just that familiar twist of disgust across their features.
“I steal food for me. I have the knowledge and the ability to steal the good stuff whenever I want. I don’t do it to help anyone. I do it to eat, and I pick my targets because, like I’ve said, they can handle it. And my events, my work? Don’t you bring that into this shit.”
Their finger pushed out and jabbed into my chest, below my left collarbone. The people in the kitchen weren’t smiling anymore. A conversation was occurring now, communicated entirely with worried looks.
“And you’ve been eating alongside me. Because Oscar, something I hope you can get into your skull, is that when you play against power, all the Nu in your wallet evaporates real quick. You can write snippy articles and pretend you’re some kind of firebrand, but when you really get people’s attention, the kind of attention that can get you in jail, you either learn to steal or live with starving.”
The finger withdrew back into their coat.
“You aren’t thinking about who gets caught in the middle, Polity,” I said. “Who’s going to take the fall for all of this? Who are they going to send to clean up your mess? When you screw with power-”
I didn’t get to finish.
“People get hurt, right?”
The anger had left their face. They looked almost serene. As if the argument no longer mattered.
“That’s it? We shouldn’t do what we do because little people get hurt? Because one time you made fun of a rich prick and you feel guilty that something like thirty people lost their jobs?”
Not a flicker of emotion behind Polity’s eyes. They had locked themselves away. Anger that had boiled over, skipping past rage into some placid lake of molten glass.
“Fuck ‘em.”
They stood from the table, and walked right out. A flagrant violation of how we had dined and dashed up until this point, leaving together, always ensuring the other person could catch up. Waiting for a window where the staff weren’t as attentive, wouldn’t notice.
My shock only lasted a few seconds before I hurried up from where I sat, leaving my pomperri tart only half eaten. A bright voice called out before I could go further.
“Sir? Are you done eating with us?” the woman with the star sticker called out. “Is there anything I… can do to help you?”
I mumbled something. I feigned going to the bathroom as a pretense to look for exits. When I returned, the server was waiting, alongside a gaunt looking man clutching a stained towel. The woman had a neat, packaged smile. The kind that service workers mosaic together to obscure boredom, loss of dignity, rage. I knew it because I had worn it myself for 6 years, off and on.
The gaunt man, the kitchen worker, had an open expression of miserable resentment. I gave both the loose grin of a golden retriever who had just shit on the new carpet.
“There seems to be a problem with your account?” the woman said, a bit stiff. “I’m… very sorry? But could we scan your chit again?”
I told them that I would be happy to help in any way that I could, that I had no idea what could be wrong, and that I was sure that everything would work out in the end.
Fifteen minutes later, the sleeves of my shirt were rolled up past my elbows, damp with soap and dirty water. I was scrubbing a red stain from my own breakfast plate.
One obstacle in pomperri’s future success? They stain like a bastard.
Only later did I organize my thoughts. Collected observations, tallied up each of the restaurants, cooled off. And… Extended some empathy to my dining companion. Swallowed my own pride.
Here’s what I’ve figured out. It’s an answer to my earlier question, the one about Calendaria’s menu and how you can’t go ordering it anywhere else.
Who can tell me how a dish gets into space? Easy answer is: “with a rocket,” but… c’mon. Back in the mid-1900s, mankind’s understanding of space flight was in its infancy, so it was only fair that we almost exclusively ate baby food. Beef and vegetable purees. Chocolate sauce in a squeezable tube. Cornflakes pulverized into mash then sealed into capsules with gelatin.
When space food was first prototyped, the focus was on convenience; reducing fuss and crumble, matter and mess. Then, later, priorities changed to familiarity and comfort. Space was, and still is, wide and dark and terrifying. So we brought as many safety blankets as we could. Desiccated strawberry ice creams and squeeze assembly pizzas. If you squinted in space, you could make out the vicinity of your homeland. If you squinted at dinner, you might be able to make out the outline of a familiar and beloved meal.
Those days are long, long gone. These days we have a much more complicated, satisfying, and subtle method to get worthy cuisine up and out of the well. Now food enters space, crosses between planets, because people see an opportunity to make some Nu.
Pop dumplings, those self rising treats built on explosive mushrooms. Fairy wraps, those clever packets of sparkling pink gelatin derived from neurotoxic fruits. Both of these have swept the core worlds, taken the distant population of Sol by storm. Taken establishment critics alike by complete surprise.
And provided a significant windfall to anyone with the resources and wit to capitalize on this colonial dish, this distant trend.
The restaurants in Pacheco, what Polity Yellow considers the “outgrowth” of Lea te Suldan, are a kind of testing bed. Lea te Suldan station is a popular resort for the cosmopolitan, for the traveled, and bears its share of meals derived from Therevatti’s kitchens among other elsewheres. But here in Pacheco is where the prototypes are drafted and assembled. This is where the thrill seekers and early-adopters come. It’s all relative; the blue zone is labeled as such because it's safe, occupied by a garrison of imported mercenaries and colonially trained locals. You can’t see anything of the conflict that grips Therevatti from here. In fact, the local news doesn’t even report on what's happening. You can’t hear it from the Blue Zone of course. Wouldn’t be much of a “blue zone” if you could. But sometimes an armored vehicle guns up the road, or an autocar rockets for Pau Pau spaceport.
But those thrill seekers come here to push their personal boundaries. They come to Pacheco to shock their tastebuds into zeal. Calendaria represents one doctrine that responds to such a craving. The familiar made deeply foreign. Bold and brash. Alien crabs and unknown fruits. The kind of buffer clout that puts an influencer head and shoulders above those without the resources to make a Rail Journey.
Mercutio’s is another, an inversion, making the foreign familiar. Proving that domestic cultivars can survive on alien soil, proving that alien cultivars can thrive in domestic dishes. I mean, how else can I put this? It’s a thirty Nu a plate sports bar. The collective “we” of humanity has set a pizza parlor on a world where the clouds are purple with algae in the middle of an armed insurrection.
Mercutio’s, Calendaria, Le San te Kali. They’re all showrooms. They’re all places where potential investors can eat. Like a hook in a fish, an investor who’s personally been wowed by an entree is an investor more easily snared. Try before you buy, so to speak. And these dishes are then carried off, returned back to the root of all Rail Lines, to Sol, where they’ll be celebrated and marveled at before becoming staples, curiosities, or experience extinction like gelatin salad and baked Alaska.
But it's extractive. Huge amounts of money are changing hands at every level of the food industry, from mealkits to gourmet, and Therevattins aren’t going to get a byte of Nu. One day they might, but consider that existing establishments, often owned and managed by off-planet investors, are going to get the first seat at the table. It takes a lot of money to put a meal into orbit, and a lot of money isn’t what street vendors, local cooks, and the odd homegrown chain seems to have.
Le San te Kali, where I challenged Polity and ended up washing dishes, is an example of that extraction. Therevatti natives, generations descended from the initial colonial venture, pulled over the Pacheco perimeter wall to wash dishes, wait tables, and take orders. I spoke with a few during my time here; they’re predominantly young, seeking the opportunity to escape into the stars through the pipeline of Pau-Pau to orbit. As they attempt to build connections, they are paid primarily in tips and the lingering promise that anyone might make it big. Escape to the wider anthrosphere.
Washing dishes, even under the threat of being turned in to local security forces, wasn’t the worst job I’ve done this year. My listeners might get visions of me suffering under an endless load of plates, buried alive in ceramic and suds, but I found myself waiting for work more often than not. The evening rush was worse, but… well…
I was deep into washing the leftovers of a party of six, sponge running little circles on plates stained with that infernal pomperri filling. I learned to count how many rotations it took. Thirty, if you were curious, to remove a single three inch patch of jam. Dishes were piling up from other servers. The tendons in my wrist screamed in protest, my fingers softened and stinging. Soak, sud, dry, soak, sud, dry, soak, sud, dry.
Someone slid in beside me. Grabbed a plate, scrubbed like they’d been scrubbing their whole life. Pomperri stains vanishing in fifteen little rotations.
Polity Yellow. Their mouth was puckered, pouting. Eyes shifting away from mine. Soak, sud, dry, soak, sud, dry.
“Hey Oscar,” They said. The cavalry had arrived, dressed in a light grey sweater with a bright yellow chick on the chest. The chick wore a nightcap, with a trail of black Zs marching up their right shoulder.
“Hey Polity,” I said.
For a while we washed dishes in silence. When the stacks of plates and glasses around us began to shrink, when we didn’t need to work furiously to keep up the pace, Polity started to talk about the city. They weren’t born in Pacheco. They were born in Mirea Des, almost twenty five hundred kilometers away. But despite Pacheco’s small size, it cast a long, long shadow.
It's tiny, it doesn’t escalate down from high rise to strip mall to suburbia. Those that visit or work there temporarily define it by its nightlife, its public transit, its fresh and clean architecture. Whatever. Polity didn’t speak about all that.
Polity spoke about how many blisters you get walking in the town. Running across the too wide crosswalks, panting in the heat, the skin of your heels always grinding against the fabric of your socks. The sweat would pool down there, and no athletic wear in the world would stop the chafing. Every scrap of forward momentum would disappear into a turn. Every straight line to anywhere seemed to bisect a private park, a business, a monument. No trespassing. Turn and turn, and turn again.
None of this was a problem, according to Polity. Nobody would ever notice any of these issues unless they chose to walk, which as a choice was almost laughable. Public transportation was free after all, you could get anywhere in a climate controlled, whisper quiet, self-driving bus. Unless you wanted to stay off the grid or just hated buses, which was your own damn fault.
They inspected a drinking glass for a moment, watching the light catch its dozens of crystal facets.
There was a protest years ago. Pacheco’s then governor had been implicated in a forced labor scheme involving passport theft, mispaid wages, and brutal work hours to lay the foundation of an AUG affiliate sports stadium. Brightsail promised he would be tried off-world, but nobody had any faith they would follow through. As the governor was moved to Pau Pau station for transport, someone noticed him out of handcuffs, laughing among his escorts.
I watched Polity tip the glass in the light, creating an effect of multiple smaller points of light racing to link up at each verticy, all with a simple movement of their wrist.
Someone took a picture, that picture went viral, and a march coalesced, with the intention to block the flight of the governor. The buses disappeared almost immediately and what buses that could be found simply listed themselves as “not in service” in red block text. Protestors arrived at Pau Pau with blistered feet and heat exhaustion.
Polity lowered the glass and dunked it into the foamy murk of the dishwater. It submerged entirely, disappearing from view.
When Brightsail Security arrived, the protestors couldn’t erect defenses in the wide streets. Spewgas rained down, leaving marchers vomiting and dizzy. The protest routed, but security forces did not disengage. Clusters of marchers were harried through chokepoints. No parks to rally in, no alleyways to flee down. Some found themselves pinned with their backs to the perimeter walls, their scared eyes reflected in a march of shield toting Brightsail mercenaries.
Everyone who gathered that day learned the other face of Pacheco. The protestors that were caught experienced steep fines, in some cases prison sentences. Some were beaten quite badly during the protest, some lost eyes to launched spewgas canisters, or feeling in limbs from electroshock beamers.
I asked Polity if they were in the protest and they gave a sad smile.
“No, but my dad was. He still can’t move his pinky and ring finger too well.”
They washed dishes with a bit more force than before, eyes hidden under the fringe of their hair.
“He considers himself lucky, always laughs about it,” they scowled, “lucky us.”
By the time we had finished washing dishes, it was late at night. The scowling man from before, the cook I think, offered the two of us a few sections of pomperri tart, rumbling that it would go stale by next morning, so somebody might as well have it.
Polity and I sat on a stoop under unfamiliar stars, the tart’s filling staining our fingers pink. Polity broke the silence first.
“I’m sorry I left you like that,” they said, sucking some pomperri off their thumb.
More silence. Across the street from us, a bus had been pulled over. A few mercenaries were checking worker’s papers before they left for home. A construction yard towered behind them, cradling an unfinished sports coliseum. Small flowering creepers had drifted in on the wind, and were growing on a row of parked earthmovers.
“I just don’t want to hurt people,” I said as we watched.
“I know,” Polity said.
“Things are bad here, right?” I felt stupid for saying it.
“For a lot of people,” Polity said.
“I just don’t want to make it any worse.”
The bus moved on, leaving the mercenaries behind. They yawned, checked over their equipment, and made a brief report into their commlinks. One of them took a long pull on his electronic and let a cloud of blue vapor smolder from his lips. The other made a face behind his helmet.
“You want to make things better, right?” Polity said.
“I do,” I replied.
“Well, I can understand that. Saints know I fixate. I don’t really want to hurt anyone either. It’s why I stick to art and vandalism and stuff.”
They took a bite of pomperri before continuing.
“How about, if you ever feel uncomfortable… maybe we just don’t hit the place. Give you some veto power, alright?”
That could work.
We sat together, under the stars, eating pomperri tarts and reeking of dishwater. The tarts were sweet, spicy, buttery. But there was another flavor there, one you can’t put in a salt shaker.
Better. Not the flavor of guilt, or at least not to my fickle tastebuds. Something soft, something gentle. Something close.
For Gastronaut, I’m Oscar Yasui, signing off.