Робин Слоун - Sourdough

The goats feasted. The Lembas shrank. I reached out, gently now, and brought a sliver of the substance to my tongue. It didn’t dissolve into slime or stick to my teeth. This Lembas was a light, crispy bread with a deep well of flavor.

It was … really good.

Horace was still swinging with his book, enraged, protecting his archive. I unlocked the Vitruvian’s brakes and pushed it slowly forward on its base. Its great swipes sent chunks of Lembas the size of beer kegs arcing slowly through the air.

At last, it was too much. The Lembas could not hold. A thin crack crept up the trunk, then spiderwebbed out, and it all began to fracture, glacierlike, huge slabs coming unstuck. The giant top, deprived of its foundation, came tumbling down—but gently. I tucked my chin into my chest, covered my head with my hands, and held my breath. The collapse was nearly soundless; just the whisper of a Rice Krispies Treat moving against itself.

I peeked. I was covered in the stuff. Everything was covered in the stuff. The smell of bananas was overpowering.

* * *

LATER THAT MORNING, the people of the Marrow Fair surveyed the damage in a deep, padded silence. Sometime during the scuffle, Chaiman’s album had reached the end of its oonc ing and the playlist, mercifully, had not been set to repeat.

The Lembas had filled much of the depot, and Agrippa was going corridor by corridor with his insatiable goats. Hercules, however, had reached his limit. The alpaca was sitting in the ruin of the lemon grove, apparently asleep.

Horace had successfully defended his archive, and the cricket farm had resisted the Lembas without assistance; there, the wave front stopped abruptly, ragged-edged, gnawed to a standstill by thousands of tiny mouths. The crickets chirped contentedly.

I looked around the depot and for a moment I saw it with Agrippa’s eyes. These were the ruins of a glittering, overnight civilization. There were aeons packed into those hours.

More people were milling around the depot now and the spell was breaking. I heard cries of alarm and dismay, and then, increasingly, laughter. Vendors dug out their workstations, checked to see what had been wrecked and what was intact. Our bodies were all coated gray-green with a dusting of Lembas. We might have been made of Lembas ourselves.

Lily Belasco arrived, her lips curling in disbelief that such a disaster could have unfolded on the day before the market’s public launch. She conscripted Orli and me to help Naz excavate the coffee bar and return the espresso machine to operational status.

“Quick,” she urged. “Quick quick quick.”

* * *

WE ALL WORKED TOGETHER, hauling the Lembas away in slabs, piling it up like firewood. Finally, we reached the epicenter, and there we found Jaina Mitra, who had scratched out a little cave for herself. I’d expected panic. Instead, she was exultant.

The bioreactor told the tale. The metal twisted apart in a wicked pucker. It had been breached from the inside.

Through the broken skylight, I heard sirens on the airfield.

“You used the starter,” I said. “You just took it.”

Jaina Mitra nodded, unrepentant. Her eyes flashed white and wild beneath a mask of Lembas dust.

* * *

THE FIRE DEPARTMENT blocked off the airfield and set up a perimeter around the control tower, clearing us out of the depot, but there was a languor to their efforts. The bloom was quiescent. In its great leap into the world above, the hybrid Lembas and Clement Street starter seemed to have burned itself out.

The firefighters stood around, not sure what to do. A helicopter hung low overhead. I waved.

“You can eat it,” I heard one firefighter say to another.

“ Eat it?” the other said.

“Yep. Not that I’m gonna. But you can.”

All the vendors of the Marrow Fair stood in a loose ring around the control tower, chatting and checking phones.

I saw Jaina Mitra coming around the side of the brewery, leading a scrum of people in lab coats. I recognized one of the figures, tall and scary-skinny: it was Dr. Klamath from Slurry Systems of Fresno, California.

“You’re in charge of the market?” he said to Belasco.

“That’s right,” she said. She was on her fifth espresso and seemed finally to have found her equilibrium.

“I need to assert our intellectual property rights in this matter. We have a claim under the Budapest Treaty…”

My Klamath-as-Marrow theory was dashed.

“You’ll have to work that out with Mr. Marrow,” Belasco said. “I’ll pass along your … assertion?”

“Please. We have work to do here.”

“Work to do!” I rounded on Jaina Mitra. “Did you do this on purpose ?” I waved at the city-scale panettone.

“Of course not,” she said flatly. Her face was still dusted gray-green. “I was terrified. But…” She had that Jaina Mitra look in her eye. The gleam. “Consider the physics of it. The efficiency … I estimated the mass and, even accounting for gas inflation, it’s at nearly the thermodynamic optimum. Don’t you see? Almost perfect conversion.”

“Cool, but did you see your bioreactor? It exploded .”

Dr. Klamath waved his hand dismissively in the direction of the bloom. “We’ll build a stronger one. We have to tame it, yes … but—that’s the breakthrough. We have something to tame! Dr. Mitra found the key.”

Did she.

They both looked at me with eyes hard and bright while the tower of pale Lembas behind them glittered in the rising sun.

“Yes, I did.” Jaina Mitra said it with the confidence of recitation. “I cultured it myself from freely occurring bacteria in the environment. That’s how sourdough starter works, you know.”

* * *

BECAUSE THE HYBRID LEMBAS was safe to eat, the bloom was ruled not a biohazard, and therefore not subjected to the various quasi-military quarantine procedures that would otherwise have been triggered. The CDC had nothing to say about snacks the size of houses.

The weekend following the bloom, the bridges and tunnels into Alameda were crowded to a standstill and the ferries were packed full with curious residents bringing their families to inspect up close the phenomenon they’d seen from across the bay.

They parked wherever they could find space, cars spilling onto the airfield, and walked across the cracked asphalt to break off a piece of the Lembas and tentatively put it between their lips. A thick swirl of people circled the bloom, levering off large chunks, which were broken into smaller pieces and handed down to children, who liked it most of all. The whole scene was very Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . Very Strega Nona .

An intrepid falafel truck pulled up and began to fry bits of the bloom into a new kind of fritter.

Agrippa and his goats watched from a distance.

Below, the market had its grand opening. It wasn’t the one Mr. Marrow had planned; it was ten times better. Fifty thousand people came to Alameda that day.

People sampled cricket cookies and tube-fish tacos and pink-light kale. Every teenager on the airfield gripped one of the smoothies with … things swimming inside them. I never did find out what those were.

A week passed. Traffic across the Bay Bridge resumed its normal speed as drivers got their fill of the sight. The bloom sagged on the airfield, depleted but still enormous. Even the assembled nibbling power of the Bay Area had left it largely intact.

Klamath’s team erected a field laboratory beside it. They were trying to reverse engineer the bloom, determine what had activated it so they could do so again, this time in Fresno, inside a stronger vat. A bigger one, too.

I saw Jaina Mitra stalking the bloom’s perimeter, gazing up at it with a hungry expression.