Barb Zaneson's Miscellany

Be My Baby

"Seduce a mailman?" Shadowcake suggested, handing me his flour-smudged shipping schedule with most of the moon flights crossed out.

Paolo, an old spacehand on the couch in Shadowcake's Brooklyn apartment, muttered, "For the revolution."

"For my daughter," I corrected him, and scanned the list for pilots I had worked with. "I've met Hans before, when we had the Mars run. He does have a mail flight tonight."

Paolo slammed his whiskey bottle onto the cluttered coffee table. "Worthless government sellout bastard."

Shadowcake shrugged, making his dreadlocks quiver in their orange crocheted hairnet. "Try Hans. If he won't bring you aboard, I've got bootleg pills down in the bakery that'll knock him unconscious. We'll get you to the moon."

Paolo lurched upright, with a wild gleam in his eyes. "Oughtta blow up the moon."

*

Shadowcake sent me to a secret bar in Queens, outside the evacuation zone, that had real microbrewed beer instead of the mandated Earth Health Drink. Hans joined me there, and we each drank several jars of beer before I suggested leaving with him.

"But you must still miss Gordy." Hans had a drop of beer in his blond goatee, and his spacemail jacket smelled like sweat as he leaned forward.

"Yeah, but he's been dead six months, and I get so lonely." I gazed into his eyes and fiddled with my blouse buttons, but didn't unbutton the next one down. I raised my fingers and signalled to the human barmaid, three more beers.

"Well, but still. You shouldn't do something you'll regret. And with Desiree dead too."

I froze, and said automatically, "My Dee Dee isn't dead." I hadn't known that Hans had heard about my baby daughter. I glanced past him to the screen above the bar, which showed a mob of New Yorkers at a ferry terminal, still waiting to evacuate Manhattan.

"Right, right. Maybe the science lab on the moon can help her, and maybe it can't. I fly mail up there, and I think you're putting too much hope in those people. I'm sorry, but I don't think any of those daycare kids are coming back." He leaned back, making his chair creak. "I'm sorry, that's harsh. And I respect that you're lonely, but you and me? I just don't know."

"Let me think about it," I said, and looked at Dee Dee's scuffed diaper bag on our third chair, under my large purse.

"Yeah, I'll be right back." Hans got up and finally stumbled toward the bathrooms.

The barmaid brought me the beers. I glanced around, and saw that nobody was watching me. I pulled Shadowcake's pill bottle from my purse, and added a green tablet to two of the three jars. I took the third beer and sipped it slowly, wondering what the current fine was for drinking beer on Earth.

The screen over the bar changed to drone footage of the terrifying Not's progress through Soho. An art gallery wall crumbled into tiny crystallized rocks. A pigeon flew into the gallery and puffed into a cloud of dust motes. An abstract sculpture partially vanished and fell off its pedestal.

A man at the bar with a Mercury Station suntan mumbled, "Gotta be dark energy."

A pink-haired Earth girl next to him said, "I think the Not is an alien. Like a whaddyacallit. Amoeba. A giant amoeba."