All around him, the citizens and travelers of the Ceres Station Spaceport milled like ants on their hill, their voices making an undifferentiated roar that was just as good as silence. It amused Amos that this metaphor was one that no one on Ceres would actually understand. Himself, he hadn’t seen an ant in close on two decades, but the childhood memories of watching them take down a cockroach or clean the carcass of a rat were vivid and sharp. Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been.
Adapt or die.
If Amos could be said to have a philosophy, it would be that. The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks.
The anthill of Ceres bustled around him. There were people at the top of the food chain buying snacks at the kiosks or tickets for the shuttles and long-flight ships leaving the station. The people in the cracks were there too. A girl no older than ten with long dirty hair and a pink jumpsuit two sizes too small eyed the travelers without staring at them. Waiting for someone to set their luggage or their hand terminal down long enough to be snatched away. She saw Amos looking at her and bolted for a maintenance hatch set low in the wall.
Living in the cracks, but living. Adapting, not dying.
He swallowed again, grimacing at the ache. His hand terminal beeped, and he looked up at the flight board that dominated the station’s public space. Bright yellow letters against black, a font designed for legibility over beauty. His long-haul flight to Luna was confirmed for a launch window in three hours. He tapped on his terminal’s screen to let the automated system know he’d be on board when it left, and walked off looking for something to kill three hours.
There was a bar by the gate. So that was easy.
He didn’t want to get drunk and miss his flight, so he stuck to beer, drinking slowly and methodically and waving at the bartender as he approached the bottom of one glass so that the next was waiting when he finished. He was aiming for fuzzy and relaxed, and he knew exactly how to get there in the shortest possible time.
The bar didn’t offer much in the way of entertainments or distractions, so he could focus on the glass, the bartender, the next drink. The lump in his throat thickened with each swallow. He ignored it. The other patrons in the bar were quiet, reading hand terminals or whispering in small groups as they drank. Everyone on the way to somewhere else. This place wasn’t a destination; it was something you bumped into in your travels, accidental and forgettable.
Lydia was dead.
He’d spent twenty years thinking about her. The tattoo of her face over his heart was some of that, of course. Every look in a mirror without his shirt on was a reminder. But beyond that, every day had choices in it. And every choice he made started with the little voice in his head asking what Lydia would want him to do. When he’d received the message from Erich, he realized he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in over two decades. That meant she was twenty years older than when he’d left. How old had she been then? He could remember the gray in her hair, the lines around her eyes and mouth. Older than him. But he’d been fifteen, and “older than him” had been a wide space most people fell into.
And now she was dead.
Maybe someone twenty years older than the woman he remembered was old enough to die of natural causes. Maybe she’d died in a hospital, or her own bed, warm and comfortable and surrounded by friends. Maybe she’d had a cat sleeping on her feet. Amos hoped that was true. Because if it wasn’t – if it was anything other than natural causes – he was going to kill every single person even remotely involved. He examined the idea in his mind, rotating it this way and that, waiting to see if Lydia stopped him. He took another long swallow of beer and burned his throat. He really hoped he wasn’t getting sick.
You’re not sick, Lydia’s voice said in his mind, you’re sad. Grieving. The lump in your throat. The hollow space behind your sternum. The empty feeling in your stomach no matter how much beer you put there. That’s grief.
“Huh,” Amos said out loud.
“Need something, buddy?” the bartender asked with professional disinterest.
“Another,” Amos said, pointing at the half-full beer he still had.