Windward Passage
Vega Rillius: 144, 80
Loman’s Moon (Proprietary)
The Jova Lounge

When you sit at the bamboo bar, under the thatch canopy, in the quiet dark of the Jova Lounge, your back is to the huge domed window and its view of the seething electrical storms that rock the mighty gas giant. It's comforting to look at the beer taps, the top shelf labels and the faded pictures of grass skirts on tropical beaches.

I see plenty of deep space, plenty of that endless black ocean and those frigid stars. I've seen my share of the Cloud, my share of the void, out there on a tether of life support and maps so thin and long I ache for solid ground and the smell of muddy water.

But if I can't have that, at least I have this bar. It feels good to sip my drink and pretend, if just for a minute, that the huge galaxy and all its nightmares, aren't lurking through just a few inches of reformulated glass.

So I sip, and pretend.

It never lasts long, though. Invariably, somebody I've never seen before and will never see again steps up to the bar, a few stools down, and speaks a sentence. I nod, to let them know I'll listen.

This time, it's a human, like me. She's dressed in gray overalls, and she smells like synthetic oil from the guts of an engine well. She's telling a story, a new one echoing in from the fringes of the star charts, out among the speculators and explorers. It's about another ship, and this one's called Belfast Windfall.

She brushes the hair away from her face, and tells her story. While she speaks, I can see the flashes from the Cloud's storms reflecting in the bottles behind the dim bar...

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[Curio: This bit originally appeared March 30, 2002 as the introduction to “So Long to the City” number 58, “For Broke.”]