The Rails

Rail travel. A technological marvel, built on the shoulders of past giants, a great edifice of human ingenuity. I will now detail the history of more than human spaceflight, but also the inception of the human vesperstrata movement.

*Oscar's voice fades and is replaced by "Editing Oscar"*

Hey listeners. I was editing today’s podcast and decided to jump in to spare you a particularly verbose explanation on the nature of space travel and the endlessly human drive to explore and exploit our surroundings. Before you complain, everything I cut was terrible, or derivative, or just… skull-shatteringly obvious.

The site I post Gastronaut to helpfully provides its users with demographic data on listeners. Age and wealth brackets, preferred podcast genre, search history, and political leanings, for example. Standard information, nothing to be nervous about. The point is: most of you have been to space at least twice in your life. Some of you travel on shuttles for your commute, others live in space full time. Besides, I’m a food journalist, not a travel blogger.

You’ve already cooed in wonder at the interior of a shuttle, where the passenger compartment’s walls are lined with flexible, liquid crystal screens. You’ve gasped at how these screens can be modified to display whatever the pilot wishes. Instead of a blank hull, you’ve traveled through a simulated ocean, rich with extinct sea life.

Smart bits of engineering and special effects, parts of our lives I really think we take for granted. Probably the one good thing to emerge in the wake of the “porthole catastrophes,” right?

Listeners, if you want some solid works on space travel, I can only make recommendations.

For a great overview on the history of spaceflight that remains entertaining, Softest Ice is a spectacular read, exploring a time before consistent in-flight gravity and materials engineering, back when most travelers still feared what space could do to our bodies.

And, for a more intimate exploration of the subject, Will My Breath Weather Steel is this highly experimental… novel, live journal… streaming experience. I barely have words for it, but its portrayal of love, hate, and the endurance of those committed to a life unbound by gravity is… Well, it was one of the inspirations for this podcast.

Also, the film Ignition Star III: Durango. Everyone should watch Ignition Star III, if you haven’t drop everything, drop your child if you have to, and watch it. I’m not being paid to say this, go, go now. It’s incredible.

“But what about in-flight meals” you might wonder. “Aren’t you a food critic?” Listener… Look people, my days of reviewing prepackaged meals and low-input/output extrusion arrays are done. Through the blogs I wrote, I more than served my time. All that content is still up on the buffer if you’re dying for that sort of thing. Leave me a comment on them telling me how bad they are, I promise I’ll read each and every one!

I’m lying. I don’t- I don’t read the comments on any of my content. You all know why.

Alright. And with that I’ll let you all… let you all get back to the podcast. Past me should be done waxing poetic by now, if we’re all very fortunate.

*"Editing Oscar" exits, replaced by the main episode*

…indomitable, indefatigable power of human inspiration. It was through those manifold pathways of engineering that the great body of the Railship Singular Devotion came into view. And with it, the start of my real journey as a food journalist.

I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.

At some point in our lives, we age into finding docking something terrifying. Perhaps it comes with awareness: a Railship is so massive its shadow can plunge passersby into freezing darkness. Or perhaps it’s a greater understanding of the inherent risks, the relatively flimsy pressurized umbilical that connects shuttle to Customs, the sensation departing home, the desire to prove oneself on arrival. Or perhaps it is the awareness of that shrinking barrier between person and cargo. As our belongings are shuttled along through pneumatic tubes, their owners too are clipped on to magnetically accelerated handholds and ferried weightlessly through the air.

It’s all a theme park ride when you’re young. Or maybe an expression of trust and love. The belief that nothing can hurt you. Invincibility born of shell after shell of engineering and promise. But… sometime around adolescence, everyone feels the talons of anxiety as they transfer over. Those who have read my work for Palladium will remember that I get terrible hiccups. Even with all these years of Rail travel, I still find myself hiccing and hopping, holding my breath as much as a talisman against disaster as a cure for the contractions in my diaphragm.

With my baggage stored in the great automated bowels of the shuttle, I passed from the shuttlecraft to Customs, trying my best to avoid bouncing around with my fellow travelers, weightless balloons in business suits, in khaki shorts, a handful in support suits to battle chronic illness, or astrophobia. I fumbled with my zipclip. I can’t ever seem to squeeze my fingers hard enough, the safety loop is always snapping back, pinching my fingers, or catching fabric in it’s steel jaws. I think it might be a finger strength issue, I’m always thinking about getting those little walnut crusher machines, y’know, get my fingers stronger, but I never seem to make the time.

The line whined at a pitch just within hearing as I passed from ship to ship, pulling my person into customs, lined up with my fellow passengers like laundry hanging on a rack. Always what it feels like being pulled from scanner to holding area, to interview station, to scanner station again, the light above warm, but harsh. The world a blur of rotating T-Rings, tired security personnel, that white laminate hallway, the posters with advice for detecting anxiety attacks. I feel like they hang on every wall.

Items into the box, items through the scanner, items out of the box, body through the scanner, identification, citizenship, how long will you be gone, where are you heading next, yes sir, no ma’m, thank you, have a nice day.

To take a moment, I want to discuss my admiration for the structure of Customs. I still despise passage through a Customs ship. I find it invasive, and uncomfortable, though the staff can be lovely people in their own right. But… there is a kind of brilliance in making customs their own Adaptor Vessel, wedged between shuttle and Railship like a floating castle of bureaucracy. I imagine it really must save on training staff to understand the legal requirements of each world. Instead, a planetary body just put together a Customs Ship, fills it with their own people, and sends it to intercept anyone exiting or entering their space.

But we all must persevere and overcome these hurdles, because past transference, past the rigorous efforts of customs and flight safety, the t-wave scanners and pat downs, one has that incredible opportunity to travel on the Rail. The fear is never enough to overwhelm that sense of wonder, which is fortunate. That sense of wonder may be the only thing that has enabled us to spread out with such drive. That, and the real possibility that our home is dying. Sort of a… glass half-full, glass half-empty situation.

But there is something on the other side of all that motion and noise. Not your chosen destination, but a place that connects all places. Where time and distance are measured with crooked scales. The zipcords carry you out of Customs, through one last doorway, hull plating bloomed outwards like the petals of a flower to enable the entry of a crowd. You’ve done it. You’ve entered a Railship.

plaza of the Singular Devotion was a triumph of in-orbit engineering. The floor was lined with a warm mosaic of smooth surfaced tiles, the color of sand and cream. Riverine splashes of turquoise, emerald and carnelian wound outwards from a gleaming information pod, guiding passengers without the benefit of AR devices to their destinations. Between the color of the tiles and the bulb of the information pod, it appeared as if a great polychromatic octopus was rising to meet any oncoming visitors.

Everywhere there was the greenery of Earth in all its glory, appearing somehow brighter and more natural. The walls, the columns, and the pillars were overwhelmed with the curled fronds of ferns, the silver cascade of Spanish Moss, the bloom and bombast of hummingbird vine and passionfruit, and bougainvillea, (though with some genetic wizardry to remove the latter’s rather unappealing thorns.) All the assembled greenery here springs from great cubes or panels of what looks to be golden hued amber. Nutrient resins, cut and styled like great polyhedrons, lit from behind as to make the room glow like a greenhouse that could only exist in a dream. From the entrance I can hear the giggles or spluttering harumphs passengers make as they hurtle through the underbrush, faces and fingers tickled by the passing vegetation.

Nothing aboard the Singular Devotion was allowed to be cold, or hard, or manufactured. She was an older vessel, though significantly updated in both function and form. What was not green or petaled was forged from gleaming brass, or a ruddy toned copper. Hard angles were discouraged, or strategically disappeared in the foliage. Sinuously forged reliefs emerged, stepping from the greenery, crowned on all sides by leaves and flowers. Towering depictions of warriors fighting with spears and shields, or men and women holding aloft constellations of atoms aloft, or of the grievously injured given new limbs to stand on, to raise in ascendancy.

If you can believe it, I managed to see the transformative artwork, or vandalism if you will, of Polity Yellow on these art pieces. I didn’t see them do it, of course, because nobody did. Most of the reliefs were pinned under tarps, hidden from travelers, but I did see… I did see some of the vandalism, saw the cleanup crews rushing to clear away the corrosion from the acid, scraping away at the murals with rotary brushes. The brass was tarnished green and black, smeared with rivulets of chemical ruined metal. The metalwork figures had softened, spilled, physique bloated or shriveled, faces turned from stern contemplation to sagging, hollow-eyed horrors. It remains the only piece of Polity Yellow’s work that I have not yet fashioned a rationality for. I certainly hope it was worth the backlash they faced.

What would become our ceiling shone a gentle light down on every occupant, leaving shadows as little pools beneath the feet of any traveler. Everywhere there was light, from the plants, from above, from the signs on the restaurants, and listener, you’ve got another thing coming if you think this place doesn’t have restaurants. Reaching them of course was another matter entirely. Much of the modes of conveyance of the Singular Devotion were nested away, recessed into nooks and crannies, almost imperceptible if not for the slight grooved indentations in hallways and rafters. A space truly could become alive once in motion, tables emerging from the floor, stairs sliding out from the walls, truly a sight to see, as long as a person kept clear of the grinding advance of architecture. For now, meals would mostly be delivered by drones. For anyone who might need them before the vessel got underway.

If you’ve ever boarded a Rail vessel, you may have noticed how rich the smells are at every plaza, how crowded it all is with eateries. Without gravity to pull the molecules downwards, away from the nose, scents linger, enrichen, become ever more intoxicating. Aboard the Singular Devotion, eateries are stacked atop one another like apartment complexes, arranged in columns within the plaza. A food court made vertical, oriented impossibly in microgravity. Though their seating areas won’t be open until the vessel is under thrust, packaged meals hot from extrusion arrays zip on the same line system passengers connect to, routing to cabins, seats, offices, the winding warrens that house ship crew.

Okay, question: “Why crowd the entrance with so much food instead of shopping centers or recreational chambers?” Let me offer you a little insider tip, listener. Most commercial Railships are designed to take advantage of the appetites of boarders. I once spoke to a Rail Captain who invited me to a private dining experience during one of my many trips to Mars. For our dinner, we ate poached egg and bacon, cream cheese on everything bagels, chive potato chips on the side. She illustrated the intent as a three point scheme.

First, anyone boarding a Railship has been in space for at least three days, eating meals from the rather limited extrusion arrays aboard shuttlecraft. In my previous episode I spoke a bit about extrusion arrays and I haven’t changed my opinion on them. They’re fine, they’re okay. But travelers on the Rail don’t just want fine. They’re paying for an experience, they’re slipping between the stars afterall. Railships, through a combination of scale, mobility, and sheer cost contain extrusion arrays capable of manufacturing a wider variety of food. And, if you’re riding first class, you can have that option of a real person putting your meals together. For some, it really makes the difference! According to the captain, it’s not unheard of for passengers to select their Railship based entirely on which cook is onboard.

Which brings us to the second trick: many travelers are hungry for something in particular. Any Railship carries a wide assortment of culinary options. From vendomatics to restaurants, stocking options from every major culture the vessel’s route might intersect. The meal planners of each Railship carefully select ingredients, dishes, and eateries to satisfy the largest percentage of passengers and crew, while simultaneously juggling cargo and weight concerns. Obviously, this fails to satisfy everyone, but it isn’t about total satisfaction. The adventurous can snack on alien meals, but those missing tastes from home can always find something agreeable, if not entirely authentic.

And trick number three… onboarding and management of expectations. Between the flavors, spices, and cost overheads, the safest bet remains to acclimatize passengers to a Railship’s own personal meal style ahead of time. There is no such thing as a free ride or meal on the Rail everyone knows that, but there are still some that fail to realize that you can’t just order out. Rail travel, as a multi-week, or even multi-month journey, demands a customer eat and pay for a large quantity of meals. A customer eating familiar meals is a customer placated, after all. Apparently, structuring plazas like food courts tends to cut down on mid-travel tantrums. As I’ve said, long form travel can be a stressful experience. Even in the lap of luxury, the vacuum of space, or a psychotic break, is inches away at all times. With that in mind, I have two tips for Railgoers. One, keep your cabins clean. And two, keep a hobby. I’ll… I’ll talk about mine in a little bit. But first…

The zipclip slowed to a halt, allowing me to brace my feet against the wall. Again, with difficulty I released myself from my anchor point, and pushed off, drifting towards the cabin that my AR feed had directed me to. The door of my cabin was almost invisible, completely covered by foliage, but on the detection of my boarding pass, the ferns and flowers parted, actuated by motors built into the doorway. The brass and wood paneled entryway slid in every direction, like the lid of a puzzle box, until I could enter without obstruction.

The interior was well furnished, with a welcome sense of restraint when compared to the ostentatious display outside. The room was styled as a stylish bungalow, each section of the wall colored and styled to replicate parquet walls, formed of the wood harvested from the rainforests that once graced South America. The wood wasn’t the real deal, obviously, just made to look like it. Though no passenger cabin has ever had an exterior wall in years, the one farthest from the entryway bore a screen that was tuned to display, with incredible color and vividness, an expansive view of a cloud forest. Great plumes of water falling from spires of metamorphic rock, trees stirred by gentle winds, and expansive flocks of birds. A depression directly adjoining this screen could be filled with water, simulating the illusion of living within a cabin built directly at the edge of a great cascading waterfall. A place that never existed, an Earth that never was.

During the period where all boarders must remain in their cabin, I sorted through my earthly possessions, carefully arranging them in the cabinets, their interior roiling with responsive impact foam, cradling the contents against the coming fury of motion. For my journey to Le Straud, I was thoughtfully provided with a gift. A quick thank you on air to Wendy Rammlin out in the Bricks. Listeners, it is my pleasure to introduce you to my co-host and gardening project, Ernest the Savorflame Mushroom! I keep him in a small greenhouse container at my bedside, and have been particularly enjoying adjusting the ratios of sulfurous compounds and humidity in his little pod. I wish you could see him, everyone. An adorable little white nubbin, barely poking out from the yellowed volcanic soil simulacra he lives inside.

I’m not… entirely sure if bringing him onboard is legal. It’s not that I lied to customs about what he was. I mean he isn’t explosive or dangerous yet, and he will certainly be a fun project to work on during my trip. Nobody objected when I brought him onboard, at least.

Do not ask me to do a voice for Ernest. I swear, I will block you on Savage.

The room lacked a bed of course, I’d have time to find a comfort setting later, but for now, where the bed should lie, stood the crash couch. A great safety-orange egg like thing, its top open like the roof of a car, revealing a padded interior lit by a soft blue light. It’s bottom was anchored, firmly, to prevent my body, bones and all, from being reduced to a thin, bloody gruel. With time remaining on my departure clock, I mostly checked over metrics for Gastronaut and spent time with Ernest.

And I thought. I did a lot of thinking. I believe we all do when that interior light flashes, blue to “ready” green. As we climb into the crash couch and we slip on the intravenous cuff. All we can do is consider our lives, and our choices, there in the dark. Waiting for the ship’s internal intelligence to count every arrival, every crewman, every item, as safe and secure. Once it took hours for the process to begin. A dog had escaped its owner and crawled into a trash bin. As I listened to distant barks and yells, I felt this overwhelming gratitude that all crash couches were designed to handle human waste. But this time, it only took twenty minutes for the all clear signal. As the foam roiled around my body, burying me in its folds, and that sweet dreamstuff flowed into my veins, I considered the starred thousands. The saints on the rails. The dead lost between. They say we’re closest to the saints when we go under inside the couch. Closest as we accelerate, but also closest to that long and lingering sleep. At some point, I lost consciousness. Fortunately, I woke after acceleration had already concluded, and did not have to experience that hellish combination of claustrophobia, teeth cracking acceleration, and the screams of metal.

I awoke to sore limbs, an aching back, and once the crash couch allowed me to exit, the haunting glimmer of stars, crushed and drawn out by speed, each forming a spindle of light amidst a murky abyss of glassy, molten nothing. The absence of absence. I shut my exterior screen down, and felt that familiar side effect of accelmedication: gnawing, ravenous hunger.

You see, there is a fourth reason why the first part of any Railship is its food plaza. One tends to get an appetite while eating from an IV for a few days while the ship accelerates to travel velocity.

And as any traveler can confirm. It’s hungry work lying in a pod for days on end, drugged to the point of feeling nothing. That may have come out a bit odd. I’m not… saying I would prefer to remain conscious while sealed in a claustrophobic crash couch. Or that I’d ever be silly enough to sit outside of one during transit. Simply put, the body cannot survive on liquid diets alone, though certainly there have been many attempts. Fortunately for those of us who actually find pleasure in eating, well…

While under thrust gravity, the passengers and crew of Singular Devotion came to life. No longer did we drift like jellyfish, anchored to the conveyance tracks. Even from my cabin door I could see the space had reconfigured for an Earthlike gravity, a circumstance where stairways and escalators once again had a purpose. I traveled on a moving sidewalk, advertisements at my left and right reconfiguring to display low interest loans as I passed them by. I joined the crowds, the other passengers and I united in our destination. We made for the plaza where I first entered, with its towers of restaurants. My objective? Attempt to eat everything in sight.

The Singular Devotion was flush with options. I began my tour of its eateries alongside everyone else. There would be time enough to enter the first class eateries later. For now, I wanted to see what everyone else was eating.

Fear no Breakfast was the name of the first establishment, which seemingly drew its inspiration from Martian cuisine, particularly the fiery dishes that Phobos is known for. There, I ate a steaming plate of Shakshouka, eggs poached in a sauce of glassy onions and brilliant tomatoes, seasoned with great puffs of paprika and cumin. The eggs were a bit overcooked, their interiors given over to a chalky consistency around the edges, the cores lacking a disappointing amount of jammy yolk. Still, there were no complaints to be made for the portions, and with the dish spooned over a warm round of pita bread, I couldn’t be too disappointed. I departed certain that once the Singular Devotion stopped at Mars for our opportunity at shore leave, I’d find a chef of greater talent.

Climbing the spiral staircase that unfolded round the restaurant, I ordered a meal from Fear no Breakfast’s upstairs neighbor: Yoopy’s. Yoopy’s provided me with a small tin of kulfi, a chilled dairy dessert originally from India, now experiencing a sudden burst of popularity due to Mars’ gradually warming climate. To my great disappointment, Yoopy’s kulfi was light in texture and taste, far too aerated. True kulfi requires a certain level of caramelization in its sugars, imparting a rich and buttery flavor wholly distinct from other iced desserts. True kulfi is dense with cream, so dense as to render it shockingly impervious to changes in temperature. To my horror, I watched the strawberry pink contents melt before my eyes. Any traveler of the Singular Devotion should know: Yoopy’s does not serve kulfi, it serves ice cream at twice any sane price. I finished my meal out of a desperate craving for sugar rather than any true enthusiasm.

I ended my first culinary tour of the Singular Devotion at a bustling coffee house. Like most Railships, the Singular Devotion had managed to keep its own personal coffee location, The Doubtful Dog purely by the attachment travelers have formed with such establishments. I have observed, with my own eyes, exorbitant amounts of money offered by the larger chains, such as Quellers and Zebrastripe, in the hopes that Rail plazas allow larger corporations even a toehold. However each plaza is guarded jealously by their unified owners. Perhaps we’lll see a major chain in the next decade, but for now, the plazas remain reasonably independent. More than its contemporaries, the Doubtful Dog treated its rejection of corporation as a brand, instead of a simple business decision. It displayed the attempts to buy it out in frames along the wall, adjacent to images of its proprietor sharing coffee with customers.

I sipped an iced coffee, occasionally peering through the plastic siding to watch the contents swirl hypnotically with stripes of cream and water. As I sat digesting my morning feast, I found myself reflexively checking our position in space. Unlike most Railships, one could actually fail to eat every meal on a line from Earth to Mars. A little under a week simply isn’t enough time to fully drink in the scope of so many menus.

Now listeners, some of you may be veterans of travel by rail, but spare a thought for our audience who hasn’t taken too many trips. I want to address some mail I received nearly a year back at Palladium, dredge it up for the purpose of making something of an example.

A reader once questioned why anyone would spend more money to exit a Railship and return “down-the-well” to a planet’s surface. I can appreciate the desire to be a homebody, to remain in your cabin or even restrict yourself to what is available at the plaza. If you’ve extended yourself financially, you’ll have even more options for comfort and care with a first class ticket. However, we also must remember that Rail travel is only enjoyable for some. On a budget, it can be a grueling ordeal. The distances only get longer, the scope of a menu is only so expansive. Once you really, truly get going during a voyage on the Rail, you’ll be essentially trapped. Trapped in comfort, as long as your budget holds and you can maintain accommodations and dietary concerns, but even the softest bed will give you sores eventually.

So take it from my personal experience: if you ever get the chance to escape the confines of your vessel, do so. Even if you aren’t a food journalist like Oscar Yasui, your brain (and stomach!) will thank you. Besides, with the Railship recharging and recalculating, you’ll have a great opportunity to experience a world and a people completely outside your own.

Still, once acceleration has begun, it’s best to enjoy yourself with whatever comforts your ticket might afford you. A first class ticket, such as mine, is just… they’re overpriced of course. Gaudy things they actually print and send to you on falsegold paper, I assume so you can photograph them and “subtly” express your wealth to your friends. At least in a way that has more style than… I’m not sure, sending them a screen cap of your savings account? The rooms, as I’ve described, are lovely, but most travelers don’t absolutely need to sleep on a simulated waterfall. They aren’t, I mean they’re not going to take away your crash couch. Every ticket is going get you a crash couch.

But I can’t sit here writing this and say that a first class ticket is completely without merit. Aboard the Singular Devotion,this sort of ticket gets you access to something particularly noteworthy. A place I make a point to visit every time I travel the Earth and Mars Passage. Cross the plaza, past all the restaurants, head towards the end of the Hestia Wing, heading for the bow of the Railship. Pass the halls and their rooms, the public bathrooms, the storage sections. Eventually, you will find a fountain running from a great sundial structure, embedded into the wall. The names of every captain who has historically led the Singular Devotion are engraved into the metalwork, gleaming beneath a gentle curtain of water. Alone, this sculpture is beautiful, but approach it with a first-class pass in hand, and the sundial will push inwards with a grinding click, and then roll off to the side. A bit of water on the jacket, (eh, don’t worry, the door cuts the flow so only a gentle mist will touch your skin) and you’ll find yourself inside a passage normally hidden from view.

Welcome to The Captain’s Hearth, Bar and Grill. Of the food that races between Earth and Mars, you really can’t do any better than this.

The interior is warm, rustic, as much wood as possible adorns the space, from the walls, to the countertops, to the chairs, tables, and cabinets. Unlike the first class cabins, this is real material: a placard on each table identifies its nation of origin, the forest the wood once belonged to, and the date and method with which it was sourced. Many are convenient items of salvage, or donations made by what powers on Earth still practice logging. To have a seat at the table in The Captain’s Hearth is intended quite literally here.

There are no menus, nothing physical is handed to the customer, nor is any information provided to displays, tablets, or readouts. Everyone has their pick from three options, written in great letters on an archaic chalkboard, itself another relic of history. I’m told they pulled it from a school room dating back to the 1900s. At ship morning they write it out, balanced on a great rolling ladder, and at ship evening they wipe the menu clear.

Dignitaries, the powerful, the esteemed, eat in tight quarters, almost shoulder to shoulder with tourists who’ve saved years to afford a ticket. The legacy of the Captain’s Hearth is such that I’ve heard some individuals have traveled aboard the Singular Devotion without a care for their ultimate destination. Only riding the rails to bring their golden tickets to the sundial, for a chance to be counted among those that can afford to eat in luxury regularly.

In my case, I eat at the Captain’s Hearth because their chef, Yarl Williamsberg, is a genius.

The menu can be deceptive, even coy about its quality. Rarely have I seen Williamsberg attempt to dazzle customers with names alone. For the first course there were tiny sandwiches, piled high with porchetta, caramelized onions, mayonnaise, and salsa verde. To Williamsburg, a sandwich is as much a work of architecture as it is food. The ingredients may threaten to burst from their golden brown, toasted ciabatta bread, but only a dedicated vandal could topple this testament to deliciousness.

The second course for my table was a jambon-beurre, a full baguette, sliced in half, piled high with ham cultured in flight, smoked to perfection. The genetic line of Hearth Ham is a closely guarded secret, intended to create a meat evolved to pair with chosen wines, and with that famous salted butter that truly makes a jambon-beurre. The crunch of the baguette, the smooth richness of the meat, the dreamy zing of the butter, it’s all less a meal and more a statement. Jambon-buerres are one of the highest selling, most numerous sandwiches in existence. Williamsburg aims to make a worldwide staple a luxury product, and his argument is a compelling one. Still, the choice to draw attention to the salt, presenting it as drawn from the seas of Europa, exotifying it, that struck me as a bit of a publicity stunt.

The final course was a spin on the ice cream sandwich. Burnt caramel ice cream, streaked with slight crunches of coarse ground salt, pressed between two full toasted, butter seared bobka. The bread had been dipped in mocha, and its surface was marbled with cinnamon sugar. Splashes of cocoa powder enhanced a subtle mocha flavor, as the heat of the bun softened the ice cream into a heaven of caramel cream. I finished the dessert shaking my head, my brain struggling to keep pace with the sensations in my mouth. My fork and knife hit the plate before I even knew what had happened.

I swear they did not serve sandwiches every day. Today, the head chef looked at the chalkboard and said “sandwiches.” Thus it came to pass. Sandwiches for every course.

I finished my meal at the Captain’s Hearth with great satisfaction. The price tag for a few sandwiches was, frankly, astronomical. And as always, my first class ticket did not in any way reduce the asking price of the meal. Yet, I had planned for this. The expenditures required at the Captain’s Hearth were wholly built into my trip’s budget.

Like, cmon. I wasn’t going to travel impoverished, but I wasn’t going to wring myself out. I’m not a fool, listener.

At least, that was the plan.

Be sure to mind your budget while riding the Rails. Hare, everything costs, and a traveler without funds cannot simply disembark. Rail Security cannot, by law, toss stowaways into space. We’ll discuss what the law permits some other time.

And that was my week and a half, dining at the eateries of the plaza, and every three days, a trip to the Captain’s Hearth for a meal to surpass all others. When the Singular Devotion reached the Mars Railstation, I had, as predicted, only seen a fraction of what the eateries aboard had to offer. Yet, my second stop on this trip awaited. And, let me get something straight, this podcast is about the cuisine of Le Straud but that world orbits a star vastly distant to our own. Le Straud is one of the farthest colonies we can reach by Rail. The menu of the colonies are the menus of mankind, lensed through distance, lensed through necessity, changed and shifted from what we know of core food. Listeners, to understand Le Straud cuisine, we have to understand the cuisine of the diaspora, and to understand the cuisine of the diaspora, we have to see how food has grown and changed as we travel the stars. Mars might be right next door, but it’s still a world beyond Earth.

New Caledonia, Mars. Home of the Sun and Stars Patisserie, where only the finest products of the red world’s agriculture were channeled, resulting in, frankly, some of the single most groundbreaking examples of pastry in the known universe. It was that sparkling sign, lights on black velvet, that I was looking for once I exited the starport and emerged into the arid and cool climate of New Caledonia. A spread of low buildings, lacking the height and architecture of old Earth. Some have written, somewhat famously, that the Martian people are a people too exhausted to raise towers into the sky. Sort of makes sense to me, considering how they tamed almost a whole planet. The sun shone in my eyes, cold and bright, dimmed by distance and the great white skin of the dome above me.

“Mr. Yasui?”

A voice called out to me, thick with that martian smolder, the kind that settles into the lungs when you grow up with dust in your throat and sand in your teeth. A pair of men dressed in white and dull crimson, a small pin of the New Caledonian crest visible on their lapel. The silhouette of a man, driving a great needle through the eye of a shrieking, and very large bird. All gold and red. Their bearing was cool, their strides measured and bolstered with an innate, internal understanding of their own authority. As the men approached me, I noticed a second emblem delicately stamped near their collars, white on white. A woman’s serene face. Flawless Dynamics, that purveyor of tactical combat gear.

I began to panic, remembering a certain alleyway in a certain city, a lifetime ago. A gloved hand fell on my shoulder. I stammered that the man might have me confused with someone else.

“Unlikely. We identified you at the starport. I was merely confirming now.”

A visor on his eyes blinked across the edges of his vision. I assumed my face had been matched to a larger database. I took a step back, a reflexive jerk of muscle.

“Mr. Yasui, you are not in any danger. Your presence has merely been requested at Villa Campos De Gloria.”

I informed him, as delicately as I could, that I did not have any plans to visit the Campos De Gloria. I knew a fellow who lived at Campos De Gloria in New Caledonia. Yet I did not particularly wish to meet with him. Nor did I know why he might send suited muscle after my person.

“Your plans have been altered. Please do not make this difficult, sir. Again, we do not intend to harm you, but our orders are to ensure your arrival.”

I swallowed, and agreed to accompany them. They moved me over to a waiting car, and bundled me in, sitting on either side of me in the backseat. Despite myself I… couldn’t help but notice the real leather seats, which warmed as we sat on them. The vehicle drove us up and away from New Caledonia’s town center, towards a great manor that squatted on a hill above… fields and fields of shining wheat and leafy crowns I could not identify. The vehicle’s ball wheels made short work of unpaved ground where it found it, taking us up the winding terrain, to the entrance of the manor. The building was neo-classical in design, all white pillars and columns, three domes, each taller than the last, jutting bulbous into the sky. Pennants and banners waved, each the height of twenty men, bearing the same insignia, the coat of arms I suppose, of the goons who walked me up to the entrance. One wall was marred with dust caked along its walls, though a group of workers were attacking it with a power washer, leaving great crimson tears to drip and pool at the villa’s titanically proportioned steps. I crossed over the spreading puddle as I approached the entryway…

Where stood, to my incredible and ongoing shock… The Duke of New Caledonia. Who, not only appeared to remember me, but also, his countenance carried a look of barely constrained disdain.