You Want Another?

“You want another?”

Lenny is standing over me, his bottle poised, a vague quizzical look pinching his lumpy face. All the chrome and neon in the bar focuses into a laser light show on the bald dome of his head. I screw my mouth up in the negative. He dashes another shot of Peptide into the empty glass and carries on with his cleaning, scrubbing the scarred chrome of the countertop. I study Lenny’s face, the bulb shaped nose, the droopy, hairy ears. All the years wasted in this hole, staring at that miserable mug. I still haven’t got a clue why Lenny tries to run a business on a mining colony with a total population of thirteen. Out here in the Soma cluster, there’s no such thing as passing trade. Desperation causes him to force drinks down the throats of his patrons. I entertain a sick idea that Lenny is paid off in secret, to boost profits and push drinks. There’s another possibility too, that Lenny believes, deep down in the core of his being, in the medicinal properties of alcohol. It forces a chuckle from my throat, it catches on the shit clogging my airway and starts a coughing fit. The Peptide helps, but it’s only temporary relief. Lenny is back again, that same puzzled look, the poised bottle, the question:

“You want another?”

“No thanks Lenny, I’ve had enough.”

There is a beat, a millisecond where I think Lenny will hear me right this time, but he inclines his head as if he’s taking an order and squirts another measure into my glass.

“Fucking dammit Lenny, how many years have I been coming in here, how many times have I said no, and then you just pour the drink anyway. How many times do we have to go through this?”

Lenny’s huge, wet, oyster eyes scan over my face, then drop to the floor, he doesn’t like conversation. He grunts apologetically and slopes over to the other end of the bar.

“It feels like we’re in an old Earth comedy skit. The same routine, every week.”

The comment doesn’t even get his attention. Lenny is good at ignoring. Probably a skill that barmen on mining ships develop, a skin thick enough to take the depressing rants of a million drunk miners. Lenny has been here since I boarded, and that was a long, long time ago. I stopped counting after the first fifteen years. Deep space core mining is not for people who quantify their existence in terms like time and space. Deep space mining at its lowest level takes more time and space than the average human can cope with. Sixty years in the freezer to wake up to the whining of rock drills and the dull bassy thuds of thermite explosions. I sigh long and hard, looking at the boiling gases swirling in the shot of Peptide, the microfilm of grey dust that follows me everywhere, coats everything.

“Fuck it Lenny, what say you and me run away and start a family?”

Lenny looks up from his mop and bucket, looking hard at me. Maybe that was the wrong thing to say, some spacers are real touchy about sex.

“Don’t look at me like that Lenny, I was only messin’”

“You know something, it amazes me how people can read emotions on a doll’s face.”

The comment comes from my left, some fruity fucker in a Yamamoto spacesuit, capped teeth, coated skin, a strong smell of ozone like he’s fresh out of the freezer. He’s looking at Lenny like he’s a sideshow, a freak attraction that we keep tucked away down here. He’s motioning with one finger, crooking and straightening, like he’s beckoning a naughty kid to come to him.

“Come here Pourmaster Twelve.”

It gets a laugh out of me, if nothing else, the command seems so out of place in the informal setting of this shitty bar, with its stale recycled air and laser lights and holograms of girls in constant strip-tease. Spoken over the bleeps and screeches of the jukebox, Richard D. James, real old world classic shit. I turn to address the space fruit;

“You wanna get his attention try using his name.”

This remark from me sends the space fruit into a fit of girlish giggles, his skin crinkling up like styrofoam around his eyes. He wipes a twinkling tear from the corner of his eye:

“Why the fuck did you see fit to name it?”

“Come again friend?”

“Why the fuck does anyone see fit to name a piece of equipment?”

“You’re gonna have to go back a few steps, I think I missed a huge piece of this conversation.”

“The Pourmaster series have always been buggy, naming it usually starts the problem and it grows from there.”

“Sorry, Pourmaster?”

The space fruit sighed as if he was about to launch into a presentation. He steeled himself against the edge of the bar. Pointing;

“You, human female. That (pointing at Lenny) is the Pourmaster Twelve. Who the fuck went and named it?”

I went blank, Lenny was standing in front of us, casually surveying the place, ignorant of our little argument.

“He’s always been called Lenny, everyone here treats him like a person. I thought he was a person.”

“That’s usually where the Pourmaster Twelve’s problems start. You hear about the Brighthell fiasco? A mining ship crashed into a colony, company put it down to the rogue actions of a Pourmaster Nine?”

I shook my head, regarding the slick liquid swirling in its glass. Poured by a machine. The space fruit slammed a heavy steel flight case on top of the bar. Popped it open with a deft double snap of his fingers. Inside were a variety of tools, tiny hammers and screwdrivers, scalpels, a pair of needles that had wires trailing off them. A little black box with a flashing display. The space fruit hopped the bar neatly and stood directly behind Lenny. There was an audible hiss over the noise of the jukebox, Lenny was venting some pale, acid smelling gas from out the back of his head. He looked even more vacant than usual in the cold light of his new synthetic status. He spoke, in the same clipped tones he always used:

“The things I’ve seen…”

I looked at Lenny’s waxy, bumpy face, so naturally ugly, who would make that face to order?

“Repeat that last statement Pourmaster Twelve.”

The fruit was tinkering in Lenny’s lower back, he craned his slick perfect head to look around Lenny’s arm and issue the command. There was a break of silence between tracks on the jukebox. Lenny made a faint whining noise as he moved to address the fruit, with his casing open his hydraulics were no longer muffled. His lips twitched in a parody of uncertainty.

“You people couldn’t even imagine…”

The fruit stood straight, leaned in to whisper in Lenny’s ear.

“Don’t worry pal, I’ll watch it all on fast forward.”

For a brief second Lenny’s eyes flared, a spark of crystalline panic, some insect-like realisation that this was it. Then the eyes dulled completely, looking no more alive than glass orbs. The fruit came up from behind the bar with a smooth black disc, on its under side a small silver inscription: Yamamoto Heavy Industries. He held the disc out at arms length, under my nose, shaking, offering. I took it with both hands, held it like a live animal. It was cold as permafrost.

“Seeing as how he was your boyfriend and all.”

I put the disc in my inside pocket. The fruit didn’t mean anything by it, he was doing his job. He went back to his work.

“So when do we get a new barman?”

He checked his watch:
“Should be any second, the whole bar’s getting a refit. Holo strippers are so post-colonial.”

I turned to face the front of the bar, where little booths lay clustered around panelled pillars, each panel projecting the image of a woman in slow motion striptease.

I had to direct my question to the floor, where the prone shell of Lenny now lay in a state of total disassembly:
“So what we gettin’ instead?”

The fruit gave a dirty little laugh under his breath, eyed me like a sand lizard, space baked and preened to perfection. Picking over a broken carcass.

“Nothing you’d be interested in sweetheart. Yama’s gonna outfit this place with the latest pleasure models, give these boys some real relaxation.”

“And what about us girls?”

The fruit poked his head up over the bar, surveyed the scene:
“Looks like you're in the minority.”

He was speaking absently, gesturing overarm towards the front of the place. Two guys in heavy suits, much cheaper than the space fruit’s, were carrying a long oblong box through the door. Emblazoned on the side was the text
“Yamamoto Sexaroid 9000”

I slid off my seat, clutching Lenny’s memories inside my coat. Some broken remnant of earth-bound emotion was knocking around inside my ribcage, useless out here in the solitary hum of the vacuum. Outside the air pocket of the bar, space stretched clear as glycerine, nothing between me and the stars.