Food chain
Vela learned to walk before she learned to taste anything but fungus.
In New Londrax’s sixteenth sector, and there in its lowest corridors, food always came from the same place: the tunnels of the ferris. The iron-born grew a grey, leathery fungus in their dark vaults, one that needed no sun — nobody had any — but lived off radiation the way ancient plants had once lived off light. The fungus drank the poison from the earth and turned it into food. The ferris pressed it into a paste sold in brick-sized packets, and that paste was the whole lower sector’s life. Vela ate it cold, because heating it cost money. It tasted of metal and cellar, and it kept her alive, and that was exactly why no one called it food but only a ration.
The fungus vaults were the ferris’ power. The district that ate their harvest bowed to them like minor saints — not out of love, but because hunger is the most efficient religion ever invented. When a ferrit shaman walked through the sector, people stepped aside, and afterward they whispered that the iron-kind could close the vaults whenever they pleased. As long as the fungus grew, the ferris ruled. This was Vela’s first lesson in society, though she couldn’t have named it then: whoever feeds you owns you.
Hockey entered the picture because it was cheap. Any frozen pool of water made a rink, a pipe made a stick, and when Vela turned out to be fast — there was a gork’s breadth in her and a human’s cunning, a useful mix — the block gang took her in. You were paid for playing in paste. A win earned a double ration, a loss half a one, and so children beat each other bloody on the ice over a scrap of bread that didn’t even exist. The betting ran hot along the edge of the stands. Adults staked paste bricks, sometimes rings, sometimes more. Vela noticed soon enough that hunger made her a better player than any full-bellied child could ever be. This was the second lesson.
Climbing to the district tier, the food changed — and with it, the master.
The sector’s club, sponsored by some mid-level politician burnishing his image, did not feed its players fungus. It fed them Omnidemocracy ration bars. The planned-economy factories in Omnigrad, Comradgrad, and Demokratarsk did not produce only skates; they produced food as well, algae and single-cell protein grown in tanks, ground insect mass, all pressed into tidy rectangles and wrapped in glossy foil. Each wrapper read Made in everlasting Omnidemocracy, and for many a young player it was the first sentence they ever learned to read.
The bar was better than fungus. It was warm, it was sweet, it had colour. And that was exactly why it was more dangerous. Fungus made you a debtor to the ferris, but the bar made you a believer. Vela watched her teammates begin to speak of Omnidemocracy as a distant benefactor, though Omnidemocracy knew nothing of their existence. The ration was always handed out after the match, publicly, in front of the propaganda cameraman. The food was not a wage but a promise, and the promise was bought cheap. When the politician later fell out with his sponsors and turned his coat to the workers’ side, he did it with the same weapon he had used to lure them: he promised bigger rations. Nobody voted for ideals. They voted for bars.
Vela ate and kept quiet and played, and she was picked for the camp of rising prospects.
The road to the regional championship ran through the wastelands, and on that journey Vela ate, for the first time, something that had once been alive.
The club travelled to the edge of Nullaterra for a diplomacy match against a certain tribe — these were played when a city wanted a trade agreement and didn’t want a war. A monk travelled in the convoy, whose presence alone kept the corruption from killing them all. And there, at the fire, the tribe’s necralite hunters offered their guests meat. Real meat: a mutated grazing animal, some crossbreed of reindeer and something worse, which the tribe herded on the tundra’s stubborn lichen. The meat was half-raw and sinewy and tasted of blood and smoke, and Vela threw it up the first time and then wept, because nothing had ever tasted so alive.
In the wastelands no one ate rations. There you hunted, herded, killed and died, and food was freedom in its cruellest form. The tribe’s necralites looked at the city folk with pity — these pale, tamed creatures who ate from inside foil and knew nothing of anything. Vela understood that the city had always taught her the wasteland was emptiness, Nullaterra, non-land. Now she sat at its fire and ate what it gave, and it was more alive than the whole sixteenth sector put together. This was the third lesson, and it was the hardest: the city did not lie about hunger in order to cure it, but in order to keep you inside.
The tribe won the match. The diplomat signed his agreement anyway; the result of the game was only a shell, as always.
On the team there played a necralite, city-born, who had never seen his kin in the wastelands and had no wish to. He told Vela one thing only once, quietly, and never repeated it. That when one of their kind died, they were not buried. That urban necralites had their own blocks, into which others did not go, and in those blocks death returned to food through ritual, quietly, without shame, the way it had returned in the beginning. The city knew this and did not want to know it. Vela asked no more. She understood now that the megacity destroyed nothing; it merely hid its dead on different floors than its living.
To the Golden League — the world championship played once every five years — Vela came as a star, a megacelebrity, a face known across many continents. The host was Omnidemocracy, as always. And there, at the emperor’s table, food was served that Vela had only ever seen in pictures.
It was the archeomonks’ food. Fruit that was colourful and not poisonous. Vegetables that had grown in soil and not in a tank. Water that did not corrupt. The monks walked the uncorrupted regions the rest of the world only whispered about — paradises whose existence they denied to everyone but those seated at this table. This food was not nourishment. It was power made visible. A single peach cost more than a sector ate in paste in a year, and that was its only purpose.
Vela bit into the peach she had dreamed all her life of eating. And it tasted of nothing.
Not because it was bad. But because she understood she was sitting at the top of the same chain at whose bottom she had learned to walk. The fungus had fed her from the ferris’ vaults. The bar had bought her faith for Omnidemocracy. The wasteland meat had shown her what freedom costs. The necralite blocks recycled what the city refused to look at. And at the summit the monks ate a purity the others were not even allowed to know existed. Each floor ate what the floor below it was denied. It was not chance. It was architecture.
The emperor asked her something about the match. Vela smiled and answered correctly.
But that night, at her hotel window, above the lights of the city, she found herself longing for grey, cold, metal-tasting paste from the sixteenth sector. Not because it had been good. But because it was the only food she had ever eaten while hungry — not as a believer, not as a thing owned, not at the summit. Simply hungry, the way a living creature eats.
She wondered whether that hunger had made her a champion. Then she wondered who, at this very moment, was eating her old ration in her old block. And whether that child played well.
Probably it did. The hungry always play best.