Steven Campbell - Suck My Cosmos

“I’ll have to read my contract. I’ll let you know.”

I didn’t trust Garm. She was far craftier than I was. She didn’t sleep. While I was busy snoring, she was still scheming.

How can you outthink someone like that?

The funeral wasn’t much.

Those who died on Belvaille were cremated. You can’t have a bunch of caskets floating in space that ships run into and real estate was too precious for cemeteries.

Tamshius had been an old time gang boss. He was one of the few people who had been on Belvaille before me. He had retired ages ago and ran a soup shop.

The funeral was sad.

Not Tamshius’ death. He was old. Old people die. And he had long since stopped really living in any meaningful way.

It’s just that there were only a handful of ancient men and women present. They wore shabby clothes, five sizes too big for their tiny frames. A few had on the heraldry of minor nobles, maybe having the dubious distinction of wiping down furniture so the owner could brag that they employed a real live gang boss from the primordial days of Belvaille.

Garm walked over to the coffin, spat on it, and walked away.

“I’ll be in touch, Hank,” she said, and then left.

I didn’t much go to weddings. Weddings didn’t mean anything. Those were just words, no matter what people said. I went to funerals. A funeral was the real deal. Tamshius wasn’t going to have a second or third funeral or a bunch of ex-funerals.

The two truly important moments in a person’s existence were birth and death. And no one knew anything about you at birth other than you had a round head—depending on your species.

There was a reception after the funeral and I drank punch and ate cookies. A man approached and sat next to me.

“Hank?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“I am the attorney for Tamshius. He has left you something in his will.”

This struck me as very odd. While we did go back hundreds of years, I wouldn’t consider us very good friends.

The man seemed to catch my confusion.

“Not many other people left,” he said, indicating the sparse attendance.

“What is it?” I asked, hoping it was money. Tamshius had been quite wealthy at one point.

“His soup restaurant. You will be required to pay taxes on it, I’m afraid.”

What a jerk!

“What am I going to do with a soup shop? Can I refuse to take it?” I asked.

Tamshius had his little ramshackle business in the northeast of Belvaille. It was now the Trade District and one of the most highly taxed regions in the whole city.

“I’m afraid not. You can sell the restaurant, but you’ll still have to pay the initial taxes. And then taxes when you sell it,” he said.

He was doing this on purpose! I must have pissed him off somehow and now he was reaching out from the grave to bankrupt me.

“You’ll need to sign some documents. It won’t take more than a moment of your time,” the attorney said, standing.

But maybe I was wrong. I hadn’t been to the restaurant in years. Maybe Tamshius had fixed it up. The whole city had changed. It was possible.

“You’ve seen the restaurant lately?” I asked.

“Yes. I had to do the assessment and write up the will.”

“Is it any good?” I inquired.

“No,” he answered flatly.

There it was, my very own soup kitchen. Squatting between two massive bank buildings like an ugly bastard they were ashamed of but couldn’t abandon for legal reasons.

It was one floor. Dilapidated. Workers on adjacent buildings had thrown their trash from renovations and repairs on top of the store.

Every region had its own architecture. Its own designs. The northeast of Trade was stuffy and imposing. Lots of hard angles. There was no soul to this area. It felt like the temperature was a few degrees lower than the rest of the city. Maybe it was.

This was one of the swankiest areas of Belvaille, where much of the high-level financing took place. Whole asteroids of minerals bought and sold. Planets put to labor. Deals beyond imagining.

And a tiny soup restaurant.

I wondered immediately if I could sell the land. Presumably it was worth something. The parcel was just so narrow. What was I going to do with this thing?

The restaurant had a padlock on it. A real life padlock with a metal key. It was almost comical.

The insides were, amazingly, worse than the exterior. The place had been bad when I was last here, and it had deteriorated since then. The seats were uneven, the tile floor cracked, only half the lights worked, the counter was dirty, and the kitchen was small. I checked the cash register and it was empty.

Screw you, Tamshius!

I had been given a big envelope with the deed. It had the key to the restaurant, an incredibly long recipe for a type of soup, and a short note from Tamshius:

Hank. If you are reading this, I am gone from this reality. Please drink a bowl of Tamkian soup to my passing. I spent many years perfecting it. The recipe is enclosed.

Tamkian? I wondered if he named that after himself. There were dozens of pages of instructions. For a soup.

I just didn’t feel like dealing with it.

I exited and thought about leaving the door unlocked. There was nothing to steal. The place certainly hadn’t sold any food in years. But I locked the door and turned to go.

I pocketed the key and as I was walking away, I stopped in my tracks.

Right across the street, staring at me, were the two guys who had run away from the building where Ray’Ziel had been killed!

It was definitely them. They were wearing suits now, but had the same bald heads and muscular builds.

“You!” I called out to them.

And they ran off.

I sighed because I knew I couldn’t catch them. I hadn’t even officially taken the contract to find the killers. And if I did catch them, the job would end and I wouldn’t get paid.

I wrestled with all this a moment and then ran after them anyway.

We wove through a few streets, heading further east and south.

I rounded a corner and suddenly sprawled out on the ground. One of the men had tripped me. They had been pressed against the wall.

As I was getting to my feet the other one jumped in the air and punched me with so much force my head rang off the metal sidewalk.

I blacked out for a few seconds.

The next thing I knew I was being lifted off the ground by one of them.

He appeared very calm.

He turned and threw me against the side of a building, where I smashed into it face first. I must have flown fifteen feet through the air. And I’m not a light guy.

I’m a really heavy guy, actually.

I slumped to the ground, blinking my eyes, trying to focus.

“Hey,” I managed to slur, and one of my front teeth dribbled from between my lips.

The two men walked away and I slid on my side, contemplating the beauty of my inner eyelids.

I woke up in bed.

“I’ve sent for the jeweler to come tomorrow, sir,” Cliston said. “I was thinking a diamond capped in gold.”

“What?” Cliston often forgot us biologicals needed a moment to wake up and gather our thoughts.

“You are missing a tooth, sir. It needs to be replaced.”

I whistled out of my mouth.

“It will regrow,” I said, knowing my mutation would take care of it—eventually.

“Sir, you can’t go around without a tooth. It isn’t appropriate.”

“Hang appropriate. How did I get here?”

I started to rise from the bed but my head throbbed and I quit.

“The Central Authority delivered you. Quite unconscious. Your friend MTB.”

“He’s not my friend.”

But that meant he was watching me. Though not closely enough to prevent my ass-whupping by those bald guys.