Робин Слоун: Sourdough

But as the mornings passed, I grew uneasy. The floury scent of the King Arthur starter was so innocent. When I scooped up the little utopia and dropped it into the arena with the Clement Street starter, I felt a twinge of … something. More than a twinge. It was as if trillions of voices suddenly cried out in terror …

Agrippa’s logic had led me to this strategy, and to the survival of the Clement Street starter. But Agrippa’s logic also demanded that I see it this way: not as a simple kitchen operation, but as a clash of civilizations.

It seemed silly to attach such a grandiose label to something so small … but was it really small? There had to be a scale somewhere—the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings—upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.

To them, I was the cosmic super-being, and what did I wreak with my vast and implacable powers? Total war. Utter annihilation.

I oscillated between finding this vision totally ridiculous and finding it deadly serious.

The bread had never been better! The faces in the crust were stoic and satisfied. Some of the scent of domination lingered in the finished loaves. Lily Belasco noticed the difference. “It’s a bit … peaty,” she said. “How do you do that?”

What I thought was: Well, every morning, I sacrifice a teeming civilization to the Clement Street war machine.

What I said was: “Who knows! Ha-ha! Sourdough is complicated!”

Agrippa had solved my problem, and he had created a new one.

I’d known the Clement Street starter wasn’t normal, of course, but I honestly hadn’t realized the depth of its strangeness until now, because the King Arthur starter was very normal. It was happy and dopey like a big brown dog. It had no special high-maintenance desires. It just wanted to grow.

I let it.

Every day, the Clement Street starter required a larger sacrifice. It was absurd: I was brewing the King Arthur starter in garbage bins. Now, instead of adding the King Arthur to the Clement Street, I did the reverse. Only the tiniest trace of the culture of the Mazg was required. I tipped a cup over and deployed a dollop of hunter/killer starter, potent and relentless. In just fifteen minutes it would sweep through the whole bin, destroying/consuming/reproducing, venting plumes of banana and gunpowder. When it was finished, nothing of the happy floury folk remained.

* * *

AS I WAS DOING THIS, I was also reading the book that Charlotte Clingstone had selected from Horace’s library and left for me, Candide —her café’s namesake.

It was, unexpectedly, a screwball action comedy. The hapless main character, whose name was Candide, traveled with a band of companions from Europe to the New World and back. Along the way, characters were flogged, shipwrecked, enslaved, and nearly executed several times. There were earthquakes and tsunamis and missing body parts.

One of Candide’s companions, Pangloss, whose name I recognized from the hundred-dollar adjective he inspired—I’d never known the etymology—insisted throughout that all their misfortunes were for the best, for they delivered the companions into situations that seemed, at first, pretty good. Until those situations, too, went to shit.

The story concluded on a small farm outside Istanbul, where Candide plunked a hoe into the dirt and declared his intention to retreat from adventure (and suffering) and simply tend his garden.

The way the author told it—the book was written in 1759—it was clear I was supposed to think Candide had finally discovered something important.

I could see why the book appealed to Charlotte Clingstone. It was a rejection of ambition; a blueprint for her small, perfect, human-scale restaurant—a safe space set apart from the scrum of the world.

* * *

NOW THAT THE CLEMENT STREET STARTER was back on track, even if distressingly, I had to contend with my other limitations. The Vitruvian was working as fast as possible, but not fast enough. I needed another arm, but that wasn’t in the budget. Not yet.

So I joined it.

We stood side by side. I watched it work, every so often adjusting my motions to match its hyperefficiency. The student became the master.

Other vendors, in the days before the market’s public launch, had started to stay overnight. They unrolled sleeping bags in the lemon grove and slept there. I joined them.

The depot sustained me. I wolfed down cricket cookies and tube-fish tacos and Lembas cakes, which had somehow gotten even worse—now both gritty and gluey—but they kept me going. I drank ten coffees a day. When Naz wasn’t around, I operated the espresso machine myself, and my drinks were quadruple shots.

I was working more hours than I ever had at General Dexterity, but here, I was ecstatic. I hardly worried about anything; for days I would enter states of perfect flow, eating/drinking/feeding/folding/baking/sleeping. While I slept, the Vitruvian still worked.

Then, one morning, I overslept beneath the lemon trees. I must have looked mildly postapocalyptic as I sprinted up the concourse: hair wild, eyes dimmed, clothes stale with bits of cricket cookie on them.

When I reached my workstation, I discovered the tub that contained the Clement Street starter tipped onto its side, and a taut, silvery tendril extending outward, reaching for the King Arthur where it waited in its garbage bin. The tendril flexed and flowed. The Vitruvian had retracted and was watching it warily. It wasn’t programmed to handle this.

The sight jolted me out of whatever dream I’d been lost in.

This was not okay.

I had to stop. I had to figure out what I was dealing with.

* * *

I ROSE FROM MY SLEEPING BAG in the middle of the night. The depot was quiet, powered down. The only light came from the grow rooms.

I carried the Clement Street starter in front of me—now transferred back into its ceramic crock, quarantined—and padded in my socks toward Jaina Mitra’s laboratory.

There, I found the hulking sequencer, the ILLUMINA HYPER CENSUS, its plastic carapace gleaming in the darkness, a line of pinprick status lights rippling silently. It seemed to be twiddling its thumbs.

I fumbled around the lab, looking for one of the sample plates. I opened one cabinet, found the Lembas cakes assembling themselves, closed it. Opened another. There.

Jaina Mitra had only needed a tiny bit of Horace’s saliva. I dabbed my finger into the crock and let a dollop of starter ooze onto the plate. I pressed the button to open the machine, and its tray extended, along with a wash of blue light from its glowing heart. I put the sample plate into the tray and pressed the button again. It was simple; there was only one button to press. This machine that could crack the code of life was easier to operate by far than the Faustofen, or even my microwave.

The machine reclaimed the tray and began to hum.

I whispered an apology for the massacre to come. Then I sat on the floor.

Minutes passed. The hum gave way to the pulse of abrasion, then a high-pitched whine. Then silence.

I would take the information I gleaned from this machine and enter it into an expedient internet search engine. There would be something, surely, about this organism. A warning. A remedy.

I was waiting for the machine to chime, but there was no chime.

I wandered through the sleeping depot, carrying the Clement Street starter with me in its crock.

I wandered through Horace’s library. Up and down the vehicle ramp. Through a loop of corridors I’d never found before, which deposited me back near the door to the tiny pier. Then I followed the corridor toward the cricket farm. I could hear them chirping.