The Iceman's Lament

She was a fierce little maelstrom of a woman, coveralls coated in dust and oil, her helmet and kit dangling from the bar stool.

He kissed her quickly on the lips and the crowd at the bar hooted.

“I suppose now you’ll be wanting me to buy yer a drink,” she sniffed, unimpressed.

“I got money, Annie, I got cake,” he tossed his credit chip across to Todd who nodded and poured them both foaming tankards of Phoedran Amber.

“Come on to the snug, then,” she nodded over at one of the ramshackle booths Todd had assembled in an attempt to make the place cozy.

The tucked themselves into a booth of synthetic leather and plastic wood. Only the priceless kilim rugs on the walls and the precious glassware of the bar itself were genuine touches. And the record player, of course: vinyl that had been pressed in 1969 now playing out here, 30 million miles from Earth.

The blackness was still upon him like a cold fury. It felt as if he were physically struggling to keep himself together, a rage fermenting, broiling in its juices, itching to spit forth jets of hot bile.

He took a cautious sip of his Amber. Ashes in his mouth, fighting the urge to spit it onto the floor.

“Fuck me,” he muttered. The Lights don’t want me to drink, he thought. But I am stronger than the Lights. Right? He took a long draught. His guts churned like an ancient and asthmatic cement mixer.Jesus, don’t let me puke here, he thought.

“Are y’alright then Tom?” she beamed up at him. “Y’look a little off there, in me humble opinion.

He scowled. Annie was a clinical psychologist by training and had arrived on Phoedrus as part of an UNSA medical corps. When her rotation had ended she’d decided, like so many others, to make some real money before returning to Earth, to do something entirely different. That was how she’d ended up driving a hauler.

He smiled at her. “Long bloody day and crappy bloody weather…and crazy arseholes running me off the road.”

“C’mon then!” she said brightly. “You can dance with me.”

“Sure, let’s dance,” he roared over the noise.

Todd was playing the Pogues again. The crowd was picking up. Chairs and tables were being shoved roughly aside to make room. They danced. Or rather they lurched with ever-increasing abandon.

He felt like he was a teenage boy, back in Ireland, at the dance hall, hanging out with his friends at the Mineral Water bar, watching the ritual begin. Back then, being from London and all, he’d felt himself to be a little more sophisticated, scornful of the rubes with their concealed flasks of whiskey and the girls who sat on folding chairs around the walls of the hall as the men, little more than callow youths shuffled around, their hands outstretched to each one in turn. But still, even at his young age, he’d felt the timeless romance of it.

He remembered how it would unfold.

“Will ye dance?’ A lad would ask, circumnavigating the floor.

“No,” a girl would respond. And on he would move to the next one.

“Will ye dance?”

“Well I will not.”

“Will ye dance?”

And then the assent, the quick nod, the girl would spring to her feet with a smile and off they would twirl, bending into the dance. Jives and waltzes. Love in the time of Jameson: her arms as white as milk, his neck burned red from the sun.

And now, twenty million miles from Earth, Tom spun Annie into a jig, then a reel, the two of them laughing because nobody else on this planet could dance like that, the crowd making room for them, clapping in unison.

“Yer a mighty lad,” she yelled at him.

But then later, stumbling back to the bar, a group of junior UNSA officers were blocking the way, their neat uniforms and epaulets in stark contrast to his own filthy gear.

“Ay up, stand to…it’s the Lieutenant” sang out one of them.

“Lads…” Tom said evenly, threading his way through, leading Annie by the hand.

“Lost any more barges then have we, lootenant?” called out a JG, leaning back on his barstool.

He actually wasn’t much of a fighter, Tom. But he had a temper. And he had that stubborn Irish thing that wouldn’t let him stand down from a shit-kicking, no matter how bad the odds.

His foot lashed out, the stool flew from under the JG, who collapsed to the floor.

“Ah c’mon now Tom,” Annie yelled.

The JG struggled to his feet, his friends crowding in but Tom had him by both hands, bending them back hard, pushing the man back so that he couldn’t kick out without losing his balance or snapping his wrists.

“”Have a seat now, soldier,” Tom told him as one of his friends picked up the fallen barstool.

“No sense in this, lads,” Todd called out from behind the bar.

And then a sharp crack of fist against bone. One of the JG’s went slamming against the bar, the stool still held high over his head. Tom looked up, bewildered, situational awareness shot to to hell: the JG had been about to bring that stool crashing down on his head.

But Jared had intervened.

“Alright then, mate?” the Minder asked, wiping his fist on his jacket. “Woulda put a nice dent in your cranium, that.”

The three UNSA officers came at Jared and Tom sprang to the Minder’s defense. He needn’t have bothered. There was a blur of movement. The three JG’s were repelled, sprawling, falling into the tables, glasses crashing down, other people springing up in outrage.

Jared did that thing where he straightened his clothes, uncricked his neck.

“Off you go then, mate,” he told Tom. “Your lady friend is waiting.”

“Don’t you…?” Tom looked at the JG’s, gathering themselves back up for a second attempt.

“Oh no,” Jared grinned, unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt. “I got this.”

“Well why do you listen to them?” Annie demanded as they walked down one of the long spokes that connected the domes of Eleanor. “Why do ye always take the bait, Tom?”

He shrugged.

“I was raised badly.” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He pulled her roughly into an alcove and she giggled, her body pressing into his, lips parting, her arm curling up around his neck, pulling him down into her.

She always made him feel like he was back in secondary school, the breathy way she kissed him, up on her tiptoes, giving it everything, then pulling back.

“Now,” she whispered. Not ‘Now give it to me’ but “Now then Tom, knock it off’ as he pressed himself against her and she gently pushed him back, off her.

“You know the deal, Tom…”

He sighed. He knew the deal. Annie gave herself to no man, nor woman, the tiny silver crucifix around her neck a testament to where her heart belonged. At least for now.

It infuriated him, this Catholicism of hers, way out here on the edges of the known universe. He would have done it the right way, he would given her his heart but kept his loins in check, he would do that for her. Do it the Right Way. But Annie was not in that realm yet.

“Sure there’s plenty of others for you here,” she whispered as they walked on, fingers interlacing chastely.

“I don’t want anyone else Annie…”

“I see the way she looks at you, Miss Saigon,” Annie continued as if he had not spoken at all.

“Who? Meng?”

“Ah Meng! Flanagan’s hoor…Although I know damn well you’ve had dealings with her too. No, the big star, Lucy Lin.”

He thought about Lucy Lin, peeling off his overalls, those almond eyes gazing up at him in adoration.

He shivered.

There was no more soul in that woman than there was in a fistful of lunar dust.

“No,” he said. “Not for me.”

They came to her cabin and she let him kiss her again, then giggled on past him, gently and firmly closing the door.

“G’night, lover,” she cooed.

“Ah goddamnit,” he muttered, but he couldn’t help but smile. He walked on to his own little hauler shack. His footsteps echoed on the metal passage.

But as he walked he could feel the blackness again, like an overcoat of shite, waiting for him. Sleep would elude him, he knew. He had to get back up to the Lights.

Sure enough his slumber was a twisted and tormented tossing, bedsheets strewn across the floor as he flopped around on his bunk and then when he did fall asleep the dreams began: vivid terrifying dreams. He kept waking up with a start, drenched in sweat, heart pounding. Over, and over.

The dreams had the same variant: untethered objects in deep space, things he was responsible for: equipment, cargo, asteroids, things that broke loose and went careening into other things.

Get up, he thought, move around. He stood, began to go through his stretching routine. Sometimes when he did this he was able to get back into bed and sleep. Other times he would simply make coffee and start his day.

This is why we drink, he thought now. This is why we fall into a drunken stupor. It might not be good sleep but it was something. No dreams. Just oblivion.

On the wall there was a picture of his family’s farmhouse. He’d found it online. Most likely it wasn’t their actual house, but still the white walls, the tattered thatch, the black hulks of cows in the background. No pictures of his family save one: his younger sister Mary. Nothing of his brother, his father. His mother.

He didn’t dream about Ireland. Sometimes, in the rig, he’d daydream: an imagining of life if it hadn’t turned to shit. What would he be? Would he have Gone Up, to outer space? College, for sure. Perhaps by now his own little family, going out to the farm on weekends to see the aul folks taking their ease by the fire.

Instead of which it had been juvenile prison, the army, UNSA…here. Hauling ice.

Yeah count yer blessings, he reminded himself. He’d found Major Gottlieb, or Gottlieb had found him. Blessing or further curse? He knew no more. No less.

He thought of Annie. She was the only person on this planet who knew of his past, the distant past, on Earth, in Ireland: the events that had taken place on the bog road from Abbeyknockmoy. There was no hiding it, once you knew where to look, and Annie had recognized him, remembered the story in the papers, his face on TV. She was from the next county but it had been big news in such a small place.

The funny thing was that she hadn’t been completely freaked out by him. He’d long since given up trying to prove his innocence, ceased caring what people believed. Nobody, apart from Major Gottlieb, his CO, knew about Tom’s history before UNSA, before his flight training, until Annie had shown up.

She had been a regular passenger on his shuttle: he’d dubbed it the WB Yeats, an older UNSA caravelle now used for ferrying passengers and cargo along the daisy-chain of space platforms stretching all the way back to low-Earth orbit. She was in the Psych unit of the UNSA Medical Corps and they sent her all over the place. She’d heard his accent and they’d talked about where they were from. She didn’t recognize his name at first, as innocuous as it was.

“I liked you right away, Tom,” she’d told him. “You had a nice way about you. You weren’t an arrogant sod like most o ’them pilots.”

He didn’t remember her at first. Everyone wanted to talk to the pilots. That’s why they became so arrogant.

But apparently towards the end of one journey, he thought it might have Ganymede or Io, somebody else on the shuttle had twigged him. A JG most likely, jealous of Tom’s field promotion, resentful of the attention he attracted. Word to the wise, people, he’s a father-murderer. Google the fucker when you get to a tightbeam. Space could be a small place. Gossip was the main entertainment. He remembered the chill that had come over everyone on his little ship, how they all avoided him. That he remembered. It had happened before.

And then, when he arrived on Eleanor, banished, she’d recognized him again. Now of course he was famous all over again because of the accident at Shawmut 71. Somehow an unlikely friendship had bloomed. She knew he wanted more. He made no secret of it but she demurred. She always demurred, deflected, kept him contained. Whether it was her Catholicism or his criminal record, he was unsure.

Or perhaps it was professional interest. Unravelling his secrets, an exercise in therapy.

He only knew he liked her, more than anyone he had ever liked.

He tried once more to sleep. It wasn’t going to happen. He rose again. The road beckoned. The Lights beckoned. He may as well head to to the docks and clean out the rig. Maybe they’d let him get an earlier start.

“Well it’s a lovely day, top o’ the mornin’ to ya,” Greg sang out on the hauler channel in a fake Irish accent.

“We don’t actually talk that way, ya fecking convict,” Tom grumbled, slumped back in the pilots seat.

“Ah to be sure, begorrah and begob and all of that stuff!” Greg continued. “May the road rise up to meet ya.”

“How many kangaroos did you hump in your youth?”

“As many sheep as you have shagged...”

The usual banter commenced but he was anxious that day, driving too fast, the hauler lurching from side to side and all of the gear that he hadn’t bothered to stow properly clanging around. He was anal retentive about such things, under usual circumstances.

“This is not shipshape,” he muttered. “This is not Bristol-fashion.”

“You need to get laid, mate,” Greg called out. “Oh by the way, watch out for yer China Doll girlfriend, she’s on the warpath.”

Lucy Lin and her film crew had been waiting on the docks that morning as planned but Tom had gotten cold feet at the last moment and given them the slip. The thought of them all crowding into his cabin with their infernal cameras and sound booms and assorted gear made his stomach churn.

Blood in the water now. He was bait. The once-lofty Lieutenant whose rise from rigger to officer was well-chronicled, especially in the wake of the disaster at Shawmut 71: poster-child for lack of oversight and recklessness that he had become.

It wasn’t fair. It never was. In the wake of the disaster UNSA had been happy to pile the blame upon his back and offer banishment as an alternative to public trial, a trial he would surely lose. The deck was stacked in their favor.

But then the radio did that glorious thing where the high-gain antenna bounced back off the skinny stratosphere, reverb echoing throughout the cabin like some ancient amplifier.

It sounded like the Lights. He rammed the throttles home.

“....mangy Irish git...” Greg cackled.

“Fackin’ convict...”

Up ahead loomed the mountains. And the Lights. Nothing else existed, anymore.