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    The Suitcase Clone
    The Suitcase Clone
    The Suitcase Clone
    Ebook81 pages2 hours

    The Suitcase Clone

    By Robin Sloan

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    About this ebook

    At last, the story that definitively bridges the world of Sourdough to that of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s all one Penumbraverse.

    James Bascule is adrift. College beckons—but not quite strongly enough to actually get him to campus. A trip to Europe showed him a world bigger than his Northern California upbringing—and yet, one broken heart later, Northern California is where he’s returned. Back to his old bedroom, paying his bemused parents rent with his new hobby, baking bread with the sourdough starter that is his only souvenir of what was apparently just a summer fling.

    The future is being built an hour or two down the highway—it’s 1985; the twenty-first century is just around the corner!—but that’s not his world either. While sitting in a Sonoma County bar, indulging in a little aimless day drinking with a junior college acquaintance, he meets a man. A man with . . . something like a plan. Has James ever heard of a “suitcase clone”? It’s a cutting of a vine used to clone and propagate noteworthy grapes—say, from a legendary European vineyard to an upstart Napa Valley operation. This man has an operation. He has a suitcase. He just needs an enterprising young accomplice up for an adventure.

    Just how deliriously fun and thrillingly mind-expanding an adventure, James can’t yet know. But we, of course, know how Robin Sloan crafts a story. Crossing the international literary-techno-conspiracy of Mr. Penumbra with the delicious experimentation of Sourdough, The Suitcase Clone is a tale that enriches and expands the Penumbraverse in ways you never saw coming, told by a mysterious narrator with an unexpected perspective on the great puzzles of life. Who could it be?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 2, 2022
    ISBN9780374716448
    Author

    Robin Sloan

    ROBIN SLOAN is a self-proclaimed media inventor and writer living in San Francisco. He grew up near Detroit and went to school at Michigan State, where he studied economics and co-founded a literary magazine. Since then, he’s worked at Poynter, Current TV and Twitter, figuring out the future of media. Visit his website at robinsloan.com.

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      Book preview

      The Suitcase Clone - Robin Sloan

      Overture

      There are many tables set tonight (and it is always night somewhere); think of them. The bistro top, for one, alone with a book, cover tipped up so others can see. Elsewhere, the white-clothed table, just now scraped clear of crumbs, around which sit two couples laughing too loud, all four of them rich, petrified of one another. Elsewhere still, the shadowed table with a bottle of Japanese whiskey half-drained at the center and a gun taped to the underside, toward which a hand is now spidering slowly.

      How many guns are taped to the undersides of how many tables tonight?

      How many engagement rings sinking in how many champagne flutes?

      On any night, there is somewhere on earth a table that is the strangest. Generally, you don’t have to worry about this; you sit at your own table, wherever it is, content in the knowledge that the strangest exists, and you are lucky not to be there.

      On this night, in this chamber, the strangest table is here.

      Its legs burrow like roots.

      Crystal goblets are set before plates of chitinous ceramic; beautiful plates.

      I am not a plate.

      There are no forks or knives, nor spoons, nor chopsticks; none are needed.

      Seated are six people: the ideal number around a table, strange or otherwise, in this universe and all others.

      Who am I? Ask yourself: Who in this scene has the power?

      The guests, numbering five: the baker, the builder, the teacher, the star, and the thief.

      The host makes six.

      Please, the host says. Eat. And gestures to the bread placed before them, and the cheese, and the wine, which shimmers thickly. These three things only.

      No one eats. They stare at the host, whose face is a bleached cow’s skull with eyes of quartz; whose limbs are branches of the same gnarled wood that makes the table, glued and articulated at the joints by globs of mucilaginous ooze. The host looks at the guests, is afraid they are unsettled, or worse, offended. He does not know their customs.

      I am not the host; not exactly.

      Who am I? There is only one at this table, or any other, who knows everything. Who sees it all from above and below. Who knows the origin of the bread and the cheese and the wine; who knows the fate of the baker, the builder, the teacher, the star, and the thief. Although—I thought it would be him, the thief, who reached first to grasp his cup, but I am wrong. It’s the baker who drinks. Relieved, the host smiles, and it is ghastly.

      Who am I? Think!

      A Prime Candidate

      Jim Bascule, twenty-one years old, son of Santa Rosa, has returned from his first trip abroad, where in Brussels a missed train begat a fast-burning romance, two weeks start to finish; disastrous. He feels now like a small forest mammal that has skittered to safety.

      Safety is home, his childhood bedroom. He bakes bread for his parents every week, something they hadn’t thought their son capable of; he uses the sourdough starter that is his only souvenir of the thing in Brussels. That, and the understanding of how to use it. It was a crash course: in baking, affection, disappointment. Jim’s father, if he knew that every day when his son is baking, he’s also mulling what happened, picking at the scab of it, he would knead Jim’s shoulders the way he always does. But he doesn’t know—he thinks his son has found a hobby—so he simply enjoys a higher grade of toast.

      It is 1985. Jim’s trip was supposed to be a tidy transit from Paris to Berlin. He wanted to see the wall, shiver in its shadow, read his yellowed copy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in a sunny beer garden. But the thing in Brussels derailed him.

      Jim’s friend Benji, whom he met in the ninth grade and whose trajectory he has matched ever since, lives in Berkeley, and Jim is, theoretically, supposed to follow. They both graduated from Santa Rosa Junior College the spring prior, and Jim’s plan was to proceed, after Europe, to the University of California. He assures his parents an application is imminent, but he cannot make himself fill out the form.

      Benji hangs around a place called Café Candide, which is less a restaurant and more a boardinghouse for bohemians who pull themselves together to serve, between Thursday and Saturday nights, a single prix fixe dinner. It is engineered using whatever is available at the market, no matter how scarce or cruciferous, and heralded by hand-printed menus that Benji illuminates with ornate illustrations scratched out with a ballpoint pen. Jim watched him hone this skill in the back row of many math classes, and it is a pleasure to see it productively

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