The Iceman's Lament

Eleanor Station. He was back at the Scurvy Dog, intending on holding up one end of the bar while steaming great pints disappeared down his gullet. He was jittery, talking fast, drinking hard and he was always wound-up pretty fucking tight after a long run from the Pole but this was different, an anxiety pricking at his hind brain. The Lights. He’d thought about little else.

Humankind had raced into Inner and Outer and Deeper space and no sentient life had yet been encountered. There were plenty of rumors of unexplained encounters, especially on the more sensationalist news feeds, but UNSA had the flow of information locked up pretty tight and if there was any truth in these stories they had nothing to say about it.

It was hot in the crowded bar but he felt another long shiver spiking through him.

Something…he kept repeating in his mind. Something out there.

He had a powerful thirst now and not just for the Drink because even though he’d been shaken to his very core by the encounter he was anxious go get back up into the mountains, to see them again, feel that rush. If there were no Lights, he’d know it was all in his mind. Whichever way it went, he needed to find that Breadloaf, go EVA again. Only now he had two days of mandatory rest to get through.

“Fuck,” he said mildly. He’d have to drown one thirst with another.

But it was slow going. The ale was not pleasing. It had been the same up at the Pole: the usual urge to unhinge his jaw and drink beer by the bucket was no longer there. He frowned at his fresh ale. My taste buds have been rewired he thought glibly. Ever since he’d gone EVA. Ever since meeting the Lights.

Impossible. He took up his glass, studied the foamy head, the little beads of moisture on the sides, the coldness of it through the thick glass. He lifted it to his mouth and took a deep draught, leaving a moustache of foam round his lips.

He forced himself to swallow that first slug as if nothing were remiss, fighting the urge to spit it out.

“Todd, Todd, sling me a scotch when you get a chance, mate, a double…?”

Todd gave him a look. He was in the middle of serving other customers. But shortly a rocks glass came sliding down the bar.

Tom took it in one swig.

“Damn that’s better!” he yelled, slamming the glass back down on the bar.

“Don’t be causing any trouble tonight!” Todd called out to him and Tom waved merrily. But then he was heading briskly for the bathroom. He heaved up both drinks in short order, washed out his mouth and returned to the bar.

The Lights, he thought. They don’t want you to drink. They sense the destruction alcohol has caused in your life.

“My love for you has flown away,” he muttered.

“What? No,” Todd barked. “It’s Fly Away Little Lover: Dave Brubeck.”

Tom looked at him in confusion, then realized Todd thought he’d been trying to guess the name of the record playing on the ancient Nakamichi turntable behind the bar. It was a little game they played: naming the sidemen in every ensemble, both of them having a near-encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history.

“Right you are, mate,” he nodded.

A fresh jazz number struck up.

“Cannonball Adderley,” he remarked to Todd.

“Cannonball,” Todd confirmed. But then he glanced sideways at someone approaching the bar and suddenly his eyes grew nervous. Tom followed his gaze in the mirror.

It was the celebrity, Lucy Lin. Again. Without her entourage. There were plenty of seats at the bar but she chose the one right next to his, smiled at Todd.

Tom turned away, hiding his face.

“Cannonball and Nat Adderley, in fact,” she corrected them. “Village Vanguard. 1962.”

Tom looked at her.

“Bill Evans,” he said.

“Joe Zawinul on piano,” said Todd, suddenly interested.

“Paul Chambers on Bass” the newswoman confirmed.

“Well shit,” said Tom. “Billy Cobham on drums.”

“Billy-fucking-Cobham was years later,” Todd reminded him.

Lucy Lin laughed. “He’s right,” she said to Tom.

He was flustered. Todd was grinning from ear-to-ear.

“Ms. Lin was here last night Tom,” he explained. “Knows more about Jazz than anyone I’ve ever met. Used to play the flugelhorn, didn’t you, Ms Lin?

Tom looked at her thoughtfully. “Huh….”

Two miners further down were banging their empty bottles on the bar. Todd grunted and went to serve them. Tom and Lucy Lin were alone.

There was an awkward silence. Tom tried to drink his beer, watching the single TV channel available in Eleanor Station: a continual drift of Euro-pop and Death Metal and reports of hooliganism in Sector Six. The volume was muted. Coltrane played over it.

Lucy Lin tapped her fingernails on the bar and looked at him.

“So,” she began. “Jared is doing fine,” Even though he was sitting she still had to look up at him. Tom was tall, lanky; his body stretched from years in low-grav with dull food and forced exercise.

“Jared?”

“Yes, Jared. My security guy…?”

Tom mumbled, looked into his ale. He’d been trying to put that whole episode behind him.

“It was good of you, earlier,” she said. “And smart. To take care of that.”

Before leaving on his last run he had sought out the Minder, Jared, found him licking his wounds in his suite on the upper levels. He’d brought him a bottle of Jameson whiskey, something unattainable on this planet. He’d been hoarding it away for a special occasion. The significance of this was not lost on Jared. After more than a few snifters they had parted if not friends, at least not stalking each other for the kill.

“Don’t need enemies, not in this place,” Tom muttered. And truth was, he had taken a liking to the Minder. He always had a soft spot for South London.

He angled his seat to get a better look at Lucy Lin. She looked tousled, careless, her on-camera coif suspended. He wondered what the hell she was doing out here on a mining colony far from the hurly-burly of intergalactic media.

He coughed. “Here to cover a story, then?” he asked. “Probably can’t say anything about it though can you…” Inwardly he cursed himself for his inept curiosity.

She shrugged. “No actually. No story, Tom…”

“Then why? I mean, Phoedrus?”

“We missed the perigee for Clamatis,” she said. “We were trying to make the transit point and that piece-of-shit C14 they gave us lost an ion drive. We had to limp in here for repairs.”

“Lost an ion drive? Hull breach?”

She nodded tightly.

“Jesus…” he said.

“Lost two of the crew.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged.

“They were good guys…It sucks.”

An awkward silence descended. They stared at the TV. An ad for Lucy Lin’s next report scrolled beneath the picture. She drummed her nails on the bar. Tom scrubbed at his scalp.

“They couldn’t get you another ship?”

“No ships to be had, apparently,” she snapped. “Stuck with what we have. Parked in orbit while they make repairs.”

“So you’re here for, what?”

“170 days until the next transit,” she said.

“But what about your...er, your show?”

“It’s not a show, Lieutenant.”

“Right, right…I meant…”

“We have a tightbeam connection here,” she explained, as Todd bought her a gin of some kind and he sipped cautiously at his rapidly-warming ale. “We can broadcast. Not on a normal schedule but something, at least.”

He thought about the bandwidth that would take, the staggering costs.

“We have our own tightbeam, our own power-gen. If we were dependent on local resources we’d be screwed, right?”

“Of course, of course…” He felt stupid now.

Up close and unadorned, Lucy Lin was a little more plain-looking. More…normal, he thought. She was wearing the standard Phoedran blue overalls now, cut from a better cloth than his of course, reducing her to a more human scale, but...still…stunningly beautiful.

“But now that we are here I want to do a little story, a piece on the pipeline they’re building to the Pole.”

“Take ’em years,” he grumbled. “Barely started the damn thing and already its way beyond budget.”

“Well, we figure we’ll do a background piece and leave some cameras here, a time-lapse thing, come back periodically and update it. It’s quite a thing you know…”

He grunted. The pipeline, if it were ever completed, would replace the highly-inefficient and blisteringly-expensive hauler fleet. Ice would be superheated at the Pole and pumped five hundred kilometers to Eleanor Station. Along the way fission-plants would keep it warm enough to move along and the idea was that additional settlements would be built along it, the next big step in colonizing the planet.

“You’re worried it will put you out of business, huh?” she smiled.

“Hell no, I’ll be long gone, back down the Well. Young, and handsome and reasonably wealthy.”

She touched his arm. A little electric thrill coursed through him.

“Perhaps you’d allow us to interview you, Tom? You can explain how the haulers work, that kind of thing. Add some local color? Maybe give us a ride up to the Pole sometime?”

His chest swelled.

“My show goes out to over a hundred million viewers you know?”

“No kidding?”

And then he checked himself. He wasn’t someone who needed publicity.

“Glad to help,” he told her gruffly. “With technical details, background, sure. But, er…not on camera. If you don’t mind. Not my thing.”

She looked crestfallen for a moment.

“Secrets to hide, Tom?” She meant it jokingly, but the look that crossed his face betrayed him.

“I gotta go,” he said, taking one more sip of foul-tasting ale. “Leaving in a few hours.”

“Ice waits for no man?”

“Something like that…”