Scenes from the Starlanes
an excerpt

Ah, here we are,” he said as a waiter approached us with two bubbling red drinks. “Ever tried Diet Cheerwine, Ren?”
“Can’t say I have,” I answered truthfully. “And to be perfectly honest, I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Oh, it’s not very widespread,” Bairncross explained. “It comes from New Peeler, and tends to be found only in that vicinity. I was actually quite surprised to find it here, and I just had to order it.”
The waiter set the roiling drinks down on the table, and I reached into my pocket for a pair of dice. “Oh, come on, Ren,” Bairncross said pleadingly as he tried to be a bit more casual, something that wasn’t easy to do when dressed as he was, both in image and in the sheer physical difficulty of assuming a position that wasn’t uptight.
“Take it as a complement,” I told him frankly. “If I didn’t need to do this, you wouldn’t be worth anything.”
It’s general tradition among people like myself and Kyl Bairncross that when one person orders the drinks, the other rolls dice to see how many times they’re switched in order to deter the orderer from placing poison in one of them. I rolled the first one, which was a three, and we switched glasses three times. The next one was a two, so we switched twice. In the end, I ended up with the drink that the waiter had given to Bairncross. It was a muted red color, and the top of it bubbled as if it were boiling, yet from touching the glass I could tell that the drink was appropriately chilled. And it wasn’t just the top that was bubbling – massive amounts of bubbles streamed up the side of the glass, as if from some sort of carbonation gone entirely out of control.
“What the hell is this?” I asked curiously, scrutinizing the glass to try and figure out where all those bubbles were coming from.
“Diet Cheerwine.” Bairncross grinned widely behind his glass, having already taken a sip. “Beyond that, if I told you, I’d have to kill you. That is, if I knew anyway. The ingredients are a closely guarded secret.”
“I’ll bet it’s the only thing on New Peeler that’s worth guarding,” I chuckled, preparing to take a sip.
“Five hundred.” Bairncross’ words stopped me. He was staring at me above his glass, perfectly serious.
“So it’s not the only thing on New Peeler worth guarding.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You pretty much did. How long’s the offer good for?”
“Two weeks.”
“Forget it. It’d take me ten days just to get out that way.” I raised the glass to my mouth as Bairncross chuckled softly.
He started to say something, but I didn’t hear what he said. I was too busy experiencing my first ever taste of Diet Cheerwine. In terms of experiences, I’ve had better. Specifically, I’ve been given a hundred lashes with an electrified whip, been stung by what must have been the vast majority of a hive of kartoa wasps, been interrogated by some of the most vile methods known to the harshest police forces known to the galaxy, and been tortured by being forced to run on a treadmill at full tilt for five hours straight by an ambitious crime lord named Yaz Jenkins, who also moonlighted as a clown named Zestfully Zany Zachary Zonkers. He didn’t have to have his Zestfully Zany Zachary Zonkers clown suit on, a happy blend of colors and shapes both gleefully sensible and joyfully bizarre, and do his Zestfully Zany Zachary Zonkers clown act, an hour-long routine clearly targeted at children aged six to nine, over and over again while forcing me to do the running at cattleprod-point, but he did. I appreciated the effort he obviously put into the whole thing, but not so much that I didn’t shoot him on sight the next time I got the chance. I do regret very slightly that that chance came at some kid’s birthday party in a park in New Caleman that I just happened to be walking past, and that I probably killed the party too, but there are some things that I will tolerate in this galaxy and some things that I won’t, and being forced to exercise definitely falls into the latter category.
Sometimes I can’t help but think that my life is so strange.
In any case, the experience of Diet Cheerwine is one that compares unfavorably to all of those experiences. It comes in stages. The first stage is when your mouth is numbed by the cold of the beverage. I’m used to this, and while it was a bit shocking at first, I could have easily lived with that. The second stage, however, is when, despite being numb, your mouth feels like it’s been set on fire by the bubbles, which zoom around every which way as if they were trying to burst through the walls of your mouth and into freedom in the open air. That’s well and good enough for them, but your mouth is saying “What the hell is this? I thought I was numb and now I’m on fire?” The third stage comes when you realize that the beverage you just drank tastes very much like cough syrup. The more esoteric history books, the ones that the really strange and dedicated people write about obscure topics, say that back on Earth in the old days, cough syrup was supremely nasty. Things apparently haven’t changed much. And your mouth, which has suffered enough for one minute, is starting to rebel and say “get it out, get it out!” But you know that etiquette frowns upon that, and so you summon all of your strength and fortitude to choke it down. The burning goes away, and for just a few moments, all is well and you can start to recover. But then your stomach starts calling up and saying “hey, what the hell is this?” and it all starts again. Fortunately, the stomach is able to neutralize the stuff with whatever it uses to do that, but not without a stern warning that that is the last time it is bailing you out on that and that any further attempts to shove that stuff down will be met with swift and outright rejection.
“What the hell was that?” I asked Bairncross between gasps of air, passing along the message from my mouth and stomach as my body, which had gone numb out of sympathy and solidarity for those two, started to get some feeling back into it. Bairncross was having a good laugh at my expense, and was having some difficulty breathing as a result (or perhaps it was from wearing all those layers of clothing, but I didn’t really care), so he didn’t answer right away.
“That was Diet Cheerwine,” he said finally, struggling to regain his composure. “Oh, you should have seen your face,” he laughed, breaking down again.
“Yes, I’m sure it was absolutely hilarious,” I growled, trying to ignore what felt like rapidly oncoming nausea. Perhaps my stomach was having second thoughts about the deal. “Is the regular Cheerwine any better?”
“For me to answer that question,” he mused, “I would have to have already reached the conclusion that Diet Cheerwine is bad.” He shrugged. “Which I haven’t. So I can’t help you there. You going to finish it or what?”
“Absolutely not,” I spat, feeling my stomach trying valiantly to hold the stuff down and realizing that I would not hear the last of this from my gastro-intestinal tract for some time. “I suppose it’s an acquired taste.”
“Not for the cultured in the galaxy it isn’t.” Bairncross smiled. “But I guess you wouldn’t really know that.”
I started to make a retort to that statement, but felt the Cheerwine on its way up and quickly shut my mouth and tried to get it back down. It occurred to me at that moment that perhaps convincing my stomach to accept the Cheerwine might count as my peace brokering requirement, but then I realized that I hadn’t really crash landed on a planet, so I decided to merely count it as some very useful practice. Bairncross laughed again, presumably at my expression. I can’t say I blamed him for it.
“So what did you put in there?” I asked him.
“Put in there?” He raised his eyebrows curiously. “Ren, first of all I put nothing in there. Yours was exactly the same as mine. Second of all, you rolled the dice to determine who got what glass. I’m smart enough to realize that there was no reasonable way I could have put something in that drink and guaranteed that it would be you who got it and not me.” He took another sip from his glass.
“So let me try yours, then,” I offered. “There’s no way that we had the same stuff.”
“Ren, I’ll guarantee you that what we had was the same stuff. What I won’t guarantee is that I don’t have poison lip balm on. You really want to risk your life over that?”
“Seeing as you’ve taken more than one sip, I feel pretty confident that you’re not,” I smiled.
“Touché,” he smiled back, pushing his half-empty glass towards me. The surface was still roiling, though not as intensely as when it had first emerged from the kitchen. “It’s lost some of its critical mass, so it doesn’t bubble as fast,” Bairncross explained. I took a moment to wonder what sort of drink would have a critical mass, and took a sip.
It was a decision that I would regret for a long time, and one that I generally regard to be among the five worst that I have ever made. The effect was no different, except that the taste of cough syrup was a bit more noticeable. My mouth, already weak from the last sip, was having none of this one. Despite my best efforts, the liquid dribbled out and dripped down onto my jacket, which to this day I am honestly surprised that it didn’t manage to melt through – it seemed that caustic. But the bubbling in my mouth didn’t go away. This time it felt like millions of tiny and very sharp needles were being poked into the inside of my cheeks over and over again. I gagged in a futile attempt to get that sensation out of my mouth, and at that point my stomach sensed, correctly so, that I was distracted, and sent the first sip of Cheerwine shooting up at lightning speed. And there was no stopping it this time.