looked up suspiciously as Dirk and I entered the bar. He opened his mouth, as if to issue an automatic complaint about me needing to pay off my tab, but closed it, presumably realizing I was uncharacteristically up-to-date.
“A pretty-boy transfer is gonna come in here in a few minutes,” I said. “Long hair, short beard. Send him to the booth in the back, would you?”
“All right,” Buttrick said as he polished a glass in classic bartender mode. “But no rough stuff.”
I threw up my hands. “You wreck a joint one time . . . !”
Dirk and I headed to the back. I chose this booth because it was near the door to the kitchen, which had its own exit into an alleyway; it was always good to have an escape route in mind. This booth also had my favorite bit of graffiti carved into the tabletop: “Back in ten minutes—Godot.”
Shortly after we sat—side by side, both of us facing the rest of the bar, Dirk on the inside of the booth and me on the outside—Diana appeared, and I got up and gave her a hug. She stretched up to kiss me on the cheek. “Hey, baby,” I said.
Dirk, I noticed, was content to look at Diana’s killer rack while she and I spoke. “Hi, honey,” she replied, smiling warmly at me; she had a great smile. I brushed some of her brown hair away from her brown eyes. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too,” I replied, and I kissed her briefly on the mouth. Diana stole a look over her shoulder to see if Buttrick was watching. He was. She turned back to me, flashed her smile again, and said, “The usual?”
I nodded, and she tipped her head down to look at seated Dirk. “And for you, tiger?”
Dirk hesitated. I’d been there before: the moment when you’re supposed to order something but can’t really afford to.
“On me,” I said, returning to the booth.
“Beer,” he replied.
“Domestic or imported?”
“Domestic,” I responded. No need to go crazy.
There were only three domestic choices, all synthetic. Diana rattled them off in what I realized was descending order of crappiness. Dirk hesitated again; he clearly hadn’t been on Mars long enough to know the brands. “Bring him a Wilhelm,” I said—which was a cute name for a beer, if you knew Mars history; Wilhelm Beer and his partner produced the first globe of the Red Planet back in 1830.
Diana headed off, hips swaying. I watched, and I imagined Dirk did, too. Blues was playing over the speakers—I think it was Muddy Waters. “When Berling gets here,” I said to the kid, “watch him like a hawk. I don’t know what his game is, but he’s one angry man.”
“Here he comes,” Dirk replied.
It hadn’t been twenty minutes, and that made me even more alert; Berling might have been getting here early to plan his own escape after an altercation. Buttrick pointed in our direction; Berling nodded and headed this way. He passed Diana, but he didn’t spare her a glance; well, he was sleeping with Vivien Leigh. When he reached us, he sat down. I liked having the wide table between us; he couldn’t grab my neck or punch me across it.
“Who’s this?” he said, indicating Dirk with a movement of Krikor Ajemian’s head.
“My assistant,” I said, and before Berling could object to his presence, I pressed on. “You wanted to talk about—that ship.”
He nodded. “You just startled me, is all, when you brought it up at Gargalian’s.” He looked past me, more or less at the door to the kitchen, which I knew had a round window in it. “You know, when I went to NewYou, I asked them if there was any way to edit out portions of my memories as they did the transfer, but they said that’s not possible. I’d trade all my fossils to get rid of those memories, those flashbacks.”
At that moment, Diana reappeared, depositing my gin and Dirk’s beer. “And for you?” she said to Berling.
He looked at her with a blank expression. Alcohol was wasted on transfers, and most of them soon gave up paying for it; they could get a buzz or deaden their pain in other ways. Buttrick could rightly say, “We don’t serve their kind in here”—but only because they almost never came in.
“Nothing,” he said. Diana headed off. This time I didn’t watch her depart; I didn’t take my eyes off Berling.
“I didn’t know the history of that ship when I brought