Phantom of the Seven Stars

Chapter 2

5

OUT ON THE EDGE

5

OUT ON THE EDGE

by Darrell Schweitzer

So three spacemen walk into a bar on Pluto, and it should be only two. One of them doesn’t belong there, like the extra guy on the rope on the mountain-climbing expedition, when they count everybody in the dark and in the howling wind and it’s freeze-your-nuts cold and the snow as com-ing at you sideways and it’s sharp as knives on your face and you can hardly see a thing, only somehow you are certain that there is one extra person present.

Scary, huh? You were expecting a funny punchline perhaps?

Maybe that sort of a thing can be a joke on Earth, where most people, if they’ve ever poked their noses beyond the atmosphere for a minute turn tail and go scuttling for the safety of home. But out here, if you’ve lived all your life in the Asteroid Belt or maybe on the various moons of the big gas planets, you may fail to see the humor in such a situation. Such things happen, or are alleged to hap-pen, or so the spacers will tell you.

They can even happen if you’re just visit-ing, and not a native at all.

Me, I’m an Earther, and if I’ve traveled to the outer reaches of the System it is more as dead-weight cargo than as a member of the crew of anything. Perhaps it is the occa-sional sensitive streak I have to continually suppress while writing for what is informal-ly known as the Booze and Snooze section of the Solarcast Daily that makes me want to discover what it’s like for these people, out here, to stare 24/7 into the yawning gulfs of infinity. (I am sure the editor will take that out.) What do they feel? What are they afraid of? What are their jokes like? More to the point of my ostensible assignment, how does this affect the consumption of alcoholic bev-erages in cozy settings?

Why I am actually, physically here at fan-tastic expense, rather than just chatting over very attenuated lines of communications, is due to the the whim of the Big Boss, owner of Solarcast Daily and most of the Earth besides, the fourteenth generation clone of some narcissistic 21st-century gadzillion-aire who managed to leave his steadily-ac-cumulating fortune to himself over and over again. When he says to me, “Frank, old boy, you have been a loyal employee, and as a reward for such you are going on a cosmic pub-crawl the likes of which has never be-fore been chronicled in the entire history of mankind, and you’re going to chronicle it, for me,” I just have to go. That is my assign-ment. Believe me, it is not a reward. It is my Herculean labor to visit every drinking es-tablishment in the Solar System, drink there, experience the uniqueness of the place, and report back.

So, yes, there really is a bar on Pluto. It’s called the Old Earth Pub, and the level of fakery there actually is impressive, with all the artificial, 3-D printed furnishings and the plastic plants in the corners, and the gigantic moose head mounted over the fire-place that wags its antlers and lights up its eyes every time somebody hits a bull’s eye with darts. (Which is harder to do than you might think in microgravity, and dangerous too. I am surprised there haven’t been more nasty accidents.) Now you can’t for a minute believe that the moose head actually came from an extinct Earth animal, or otherwise was not replicated somewhere on-site. But what should impress you, as the bartender, Mr. X emphasized to me, is that the bar-top itself, the counter along which drinks could be slid (also dangerous in microgravity, but he was really good at it and I never saw him