Zendegi (29 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
‘Really? What can you do?’
‘I can sweep the floors,’ Javeed said. ‘My father can carry things.’
Amir looked dubious. ‘You have a strong back?’ he asked Martin.
‘Yes, sir.’ That might have been a bare-faced lie in the real world, but the morning’s exercise had actually left him feeling flexible. If he was dealing with weightless provisions, he could probably lift enough to feed a small army.
Amir turned to Javeed. ‘And you’re a hard worker? The new cook won’t forgive a scrap of dirt on the floor.’
‘I’ll do a good job,’ Javeed promised.
Amir made an elaborate pantomime of thinking it over, running his hand through his beard and scowling as if weighing up all manner of pros and cons, but this part of the story was preordained.
‘You’ll need to start straight away,’ he said finally. ‘There’s a banquet tonight, for the king and three hundred guests. The cook will expect to find everything spotless.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Martin said. ‘You won’t be disappointed.’
He reached down and tapped the back of Javeed’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ Javeed added. Martin was glad that his son understood that Amir was no more real than the guides and assistants who smiled out from the screen of their home computer - but if they were going to take the story seriously, he expected Javeed to behave with courtesy - even if only to avoid acquiring bad habits.
Amir returned to his office, where he appeared to be agonising over the accounts. Martin wondered if the plot generator stretched to the kitchen manager embezzling money to bale out his no-good, hard-gambling brother-in-law, but he wasn’t about to hijack Javeed’s crucial mission just to test the machinery at its margins.
Martin found the broom and handed it to Javeed. Even though the haptic gloves could exert no net force, the sensations they produced were enough to make light objects feel eerily tangible. As Javeed set to work, Martin didn’t envy him; the floor was filthy, and sweeping up nonexistent dust and food scraps would be barely less tiring than doing the same thing for real.
When Javeed had finished in the storeroom, they moved to the preparation room, closer to the kitchen itself. Half-a-dozen kitchen hands - five teenaged boys and an older supervisor named Haidar - were plucking birds, gutting fish, and chopping and peeling vegetables. There were baskets for their waste, but most of it was ending up on the floor. The boys teased Javeed, calling him pipsqueak and dropping handfuls of feathers every time he thought he’d earned a brief rest. Martin watched his son’s face; when the pressure started to get too much for him, he took the broom himself. When one of the boys, Ahmed, made as if to brush all his peelings onto a spot Martin had just cleared, Martin rebuked him sharply: ‘Show some respect and do your job properly.’ Ahmed looked to Haidar for support, but the man said, ‘Exactly. You should be busy enough without making trouble.’ Ahmed sulked for a while, but scooped the peelings into his waste basket.
Haidar addressed Martin. ‘I need you to bring in ten sacks of rice.’
Martin handed the broom to Javeed. When he returned with the first four sacks on his shoulders - if he was going to play at being healthy there was no point taking half-measures - Javeed was gone.
‘Where’s my son?’ he asked Haidar.
‘Cleaning up the kitchen.’
Martin peered through the doorway nervously, as if the ovens and pots full of scalding water could do Javeed real harm. He hurriedly fetched the rest of the rice, then slipped into the kitchen himself.
Javeed had swapped his broom for a cloth and was down on his hands and knees diligently scrubbing at an oily puddle. This from a boy with no compunction about treating a mustard bottle as a makeshift water-pistol then leaving the aftermath for others to deal with. Three assistants were tending to the stoves; the red reflected glow on their sweaty faces was enough to make Martin feel the oppressive heat himself.
‘When’s the cook coming in?’ he asked one of the assistants, who was stirring the contents of a huge pot.
‘Soon,’ the man replied brusquely.
‘I hear he’s impressed the king already. And he’s only been here three days.’
‘He’s a master of his art,’ the assistant declared haughtily. ‘Please, just do your job and stay out of our way.’
With most of the pots now simmering gently, and the assistant cooks more fastidious than the kitchen hands, the mess in the preparation room soon became pressing again, and Haidar called them back to his domain. Javeed coped admirably, but Martin could see that he was growing tired. He made a hand gesture to summon up a private menu, invisible to Javeed, and shaved fifteen minutes off the story’s overall running time. Javeed always pleaded for a full hour when they were making choices on the weekend, but Martin doubted that he’d feel too cheated by being spared a further dose of mediaeval toil.
A raised voice spilled out of the kitchen; someone was addressing the assistants in peremptory tones. ‘More heat, more water, more salt; I explained all of that yesterday. How difficult can it be?’ The cook wasn’t shouting abuse, but even his gentlest admonitions were followed by a crushed silence. Haidar and the kitchen hands lowered their eyes, their expressions hovering between cowed and reverential.
Javeed whispered, ‘That’s him, Baba.’ He sounded a little fearful; Martin forced himself not to puncture the mood by grilling him on his resolve to continue.
‘Yeah, that’s him, all right,’ Martin agreed solemnly. Javeed knew that he could pull the plug any time he wanted; he didn’t need endless prompting.
A skinny black-and-white cat ran across the room and into the kitchen, mewing plaintively. Martin heard the cook laughing, then calling to the cat, clicking his tongue. ‘You want some food?’ he asked. ‘I doubt there’s any to spare, but we’ll see.’
Javeed was standing in a corner of the room; Martin went and stood beside him. He caught a glimpse of the cat through the doorway, circling around expectantly as if following at the feet of someone who was making promising gestures. The cat began purring loudly, and a hand reached down and stroked its head, long, slender fingers scratching at its ears. ‘Tsk, tsk, tsk,’ said the cook. ‘What have we got for you, I wonder? What have we got?’ The closer his patter came to baby-talk, the more Martin felt a chill down his spine.
The cat turned in ever tighter circles, rubbing its head against the long fingers. A second hand joined the first, stroking the cat’s flank, seeming almost to urge it on as the cat moved faster, its shape blurring with speed, black and white patches melting into grey.
The cook’s long hands caressed the whirling cat like a potter moulding clay. The sound of its hopeful purring grew louder, pulsing with the pressure of the fingers against its skin. Then the hands squeezed the spinning body tightly, bringing it to a halt before withdrawing from sight. The blur of cat-fur froze into clarity again, but now its shape had changed: its tail and rear end had been replaced by a mirrored copy of its head and chest. The poor animal had been transformed into conjoined twins, with two hungry, complaining mouths in place of one.
The two heads grimaced and snarled at each other; their single body postured and feinted, but the animal was too unbalanced to fight in the way it was accustomed to and within seconds it had been reduced to a writhing, ungainly ring of fur, thrashing around on its side, snapping and clawing at itself.
The cook said coldly, ‘Plenty of food within your reach now,’ and kicked the brawling animal out of sight.
Martin looked around the room, but nobody showed any sign of having witnessed the abomination; they had all kept their eyes conveniently averted. For a moment he was close to real frustration and anger: This ‘master of his art’ is not what he seems, you fools! But the whole point of the game was for Javeed - and himself, as the hero’s sidekick - to be the only ones to understand. The cook was not a man at all: he was the demon Eblis in human form. His culinary skills were meant to seduce this weak-willed king; if the banquet was successful, Zahhak’s display of gratitude to his impressive new servant would end in a transformation just as terrifying as the cat’s, and vastly more fateful.
Javeed looked daunted; Martin touched his hand. ‘What are we going to do?’ Martin whispered. ‘If Zahhak likes the food and he embraces the cook—’
‘Feathers,’ Javeed announced. ‘We have to mix in some feathers.’
Martin smiled. ‘Good idea.’ He’d been thinking of using a few handfuls of rotting waste from the garbage dump, but this sounded just as effective. It would also spare him any qualms about the wisdom of encouraging his son to spread dysentery.
Haidar and the kitchen hands finished their work: every pheasant had been plucked, every herb chopped, every vegetable diced. As Haidar surveyed the mess on the floor, he promised Javeed, ‘I’ll put in a good word for you with the boss. I’m sure he’ll want to keep you on.’
Javeed tried to be polite, but he seemed to realise that there’d be something dishonest about assenting to this notion unreservedly. ‘I might be busy with a different job tomorrow,’ he confessed.
Haidar was a little taken aback, but his software could supply no sensible response, so he just bid them goodnight and left.
‘Have fun, pipsqueak,’ said Ahmed, brushing a pile of aubergine skins onto the floor.
‘I will!’ Javeed retorted.
They were alone in the preparation room now. Martin helped Javeed finish sweeping the floor, but as they gathered up the last of the waste and carried most of it out to the dump, they kept one basket aside and filled it with the plucked feathers.
They stood by the kitchen doorway, listening, Javeed still holding his broom in case someone chanced upon them. Finally, the assistant cooks started carrying some of the dishes through to the banquet hall. The cook himself went with them, to watch over the serving of the meal and bask in the king’s delighted praise.
Martin peeked into the kitchen. ‘Okay, it’s empty! Quick!’
Javeed carried the basket of feathers past the long row of stoves; it might have been weightless, but he struggled with the sheer size of the basket, which forced him to hold his arms uncomfortably wide. There were only two pots still sitting on the flames, at the far end of the room.
Martin removed the lid from one of the pots and started scooping feathers into the stew. He felt them tickling his palm, and watched them sinking into the simmering liquid. ‘This is so disgusting,’ he enthused. It was almost impossible not to conjure up images of people pulling feathers from their mouths, grimacing with distaste. Maybe he and Javeed could sneak into the hall and actually witness that spectacle of discomfort. If no one was watching, Zendegi would gloss over all the details, which would be an awful shame.
Javeed tapped his free hand urgently. ‘Baba, they’re coming back!’
Martin hurriedly replaced the lid of the pot. The footsteps were close; the doorway through which they’d entered was too far away. He looked around and saw the entrance to a small room; the door was already half-open. He grabbed the basket with one hand and Javeed with the other and led him into the room.
They stood behind the door. Beside them, metal pots and earthenware vessels were stacked on wooden shelves.
Two of the assistants entered the kitchen, grumbling, and left again - presumably carrying the last of the pots. Martin stuck his head around the door, just in time to spot the shadow of someone else approaching. He withdrew quickly.
‘Zahhak, Zahhak, Zahhak!’ the cook sighed dreamily. ‘All I want in thanks is one royal embrace.’ Martin had read the story in Javeed’s book: when the king took the demon cook in his arms in gratitude for so fine a meal, his humble subject kissed him once on each shoulder - and from each shoulder, a snake grew out of the flesh. They were hacked off by the king’s surgeons, but rapidly re-grew. The only thing that would appease them was a regular meal of human brains.
The cook whistled happily; from the sound of his footsteps he was practically waltzing around the room. Martin smiled down at Javeed. Soon there’d be shouts of outrage from the banquet hall, and a royal summons quite unlike the one Eblis had been expecting. No beheadings, though; Martin had even emailed Nasim to check that he’d ticked the right boxes to rule out that kind of violence. In the story, Eblis had simply vanished after conjuring up the snakes; confronted with failure, he could do the same.
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