I sat at the long bar and stared down into my beaker of beer. Sadly, not wide enough for drowning sorrows in. Maybe little ones but not my-sized ones. For that I’d need a sea—an ocean. And the nearest one of those lay seven light-hours downsystem from here at the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. Still, I could dream.
“Call me Ishmael.” I’ve got a thing for Pre-Lift literature, what can I say.
“Huh?” The guy one down the bar joined my private conversation with myself.
“Call me Alia.” I sighed. Why doesn’t anyone ever get my jokes? And why couldn’t a girl enjoy her quiet beer alone in a roaring solitude? The sonic wall of music that Jackman always provided made for great alone time in the middle of a crowd—usually.
“If you’re Ishmael, where’s your whale?”
Hey, what? I actually stopped staring down into my too-small-to-drown-myself-in beaker to peer at him. Even on side-by-side stools, the Wolf’s dim lighting and thick noise required peering. Rumor was that Jackman’s great-great something had installed the sound system back at the founding of Aleph Station…it clearly hadn’t been upgraded or even marginally maintained in the couple centuries since. Mostly it provided a soothing wall of multi-tonal sonic distress.
Jackman’s playlist was on his second year of doing a backward crawl through the history of music. His patrons were currently forging through “The Grind”—the era after The Lift that had mostly emptied Earth by 2150, but before the 2200s of “Rev” (Reversion Rock) which had slammed onto the scene during The Troubles.
Jackman never explained why he’d named his bar the Wolf, an animal that had never left Earth. If he knew, he wasn’t sharing. But then Jackman had never been a sharing sort of guy, which is probably why we got along so well.
My unasked-for guest lounged against the bar with the casual air of someone who was perfectly fine with not knowing he’d strolled into the most dangerous place in all of Aleph Station. This was strictly a locals’ dive, deep in the station’s bowels. Even as a control systems maintenance tech, I was kinda the high-brow gal of the whole crowd. Though, as a long-time regular, I got a pass. This guy? Not so much.
“My whale? Didn’t like deep space. Met a cute Europan semi-orca. You know how it goes: rarely comms, never visits. I wait at the shuttle gate for every offload, but nothing. It’s sad.”
“It is sad. A tragic tale of woe. You should turn it into an epic poem. Or maybe even a book about revenge, despair, and hope. Call me Alia-Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind that we’re in the timeless reaches of space—there was a woman in a space bar, lonely for her inconsiderate whale. It has potential.”
There was no reason that the new arrival should have gotten my joke. It was pretty damn arcane, even by my standards. I mean he was the same species as me and all—well, he would be if I was what I look like, which I’m not.
