on Ganymede
The bar has no name on the door, only a strip of violet neon that has been flickering for eleven years. It sits at the edge of a mining settlement on Ganymede, between a laundry and a shop that repairs suit visors, and through its one long window Jupiter fills half the sky, enormous and banded and indifferent, turning while nobody watches.
Laras has worked behind the counter for nine of those years. She came out on a two year contract, the way everyone does, and stayed because going home would have meant deciding what home was. She pours bourbon that has crossed six hundred million kilometres to get here, and rum that has crossed more, and she has learned that people drink differently when the nearest ocean is a rumour.
There is a record player at the end of the counter, older than the settlement, and one record that never leaves it. The sleeve is gone. The label has worn to a pale circle. It is a trumpet, mostly, playing something slow that never quite resolves, and when it ends Laras lifts the needle and starts it again.
It was not hers. It belonged to a man called Arka, who came in every night for a season and always sat at the same stool, and who smelled, under the bourbon, of white flowers. Gardenia, she found out later. His mother had grown them on a balcony in Surabaya, and he kept one pressed in the lining of his coat, brown now and paper thin, and it still gave off its scent whenever he moved.
They did not fall in love, exactly. They fell into a habit, which on Ganymede is harder to break. He stayed until closing. She played his record. They talked about the things people talk about when there is no future to plan: the taste of rain, the noise of a market, a cousin's wedding that neither of them would attend. Some nights he did not talk at all, and she let the trumpet do it.
Then the transport schedule changed, the way it always does, and one morning his stool was empty and the record was on the counter with a note under it. The note said only that he could not carry it any further, and that he thought she might.
It is the hour before the settlement's lights come up, which on Ganymede is only a decision made by a timer. The last customer has gone. The neon outside is losing its intensity. Laras pours herself a finger of bourbon, which she never does, and lets the record play to the end.
There is still a trace of gardenia in the room. She knows this is impossible. She knows it is in her coat, where she sewed a flower of her own, bought at great expense from the hydroponics deck and pressed between the pages of a manual. It is not the same flower. It does not need to be.
People ask her sometimes why she plays the same record every night. She tells them it is the only one she has, which is true and also not the answer. The answer is that some things are not meant to be put down. They are meant to be carried, and carried well, until the carrying becomes a kind of company.
Jupiter turns outside the window, the way it has turned for four billion years. The trumpet reaches the note it never resolves, and stops, and she lifts the needle and starts it again.
The house made that last set into something you can wear. A bourbon whiskey accord and dark rum, with pink pepper, saffron, davana and cashmere, are the bar under Jovian neon: liquor that has travelled too far, glowing against the cold. Indian tuberose, gardenia, ylang ylang, boechera, heliotrope and orris butter are the flowers in the lining of a coat, narcotic and weightless. And Madagascar vanilla, vanilla bourbon, tonka and benzoin, held against the dark root of nagarmotha with Papua sandalwood and musk, are the hour before dawn: warmth left in the glass, and something that will not finish.
She did not try to put it down.
She learned to carry it like a song.
Distance changes everything except what we choose to bring with us. Some memories are not burdens to be set down, but songs to be kept playing, by someone willing to carry them well.