Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust

mind off things like bombs and bodies.” She nodded. I said, “It all feels so unreal—the killing, bomb scare, all that. I keep expecting to wake up.”
    She nodded. “A friend of mine had her husband die, and she said it was like that. She was walking around knowing it had happened but not really feeling it, and knowing it would all hit her, and wondering when and how hard.”
    I said, “That’s it, yeah. It’s been like that since the first time we jumped, and that was more than two years ago.”
    “Jumped?”
    I caught myself. “Never mind.”
    “No, tell me about it.”
    “You won’t believe me.”
    “So?”
    I had lost count of the slips I’d made to her. The events of the last day had shaken me, but I knew myself well enough to know I couldn’t make that many by accident. So all right. I started from Earth in the late 1980s and worked forward from there.
     
    Twenty-four hours later Tommy and I were sitting next to the window in the back booth at Feng’s. Jamie and Rose were gossiping with Libby in the taproom while we waited for our food to arrive. I realized that I’d be seeing Souci again in less than four hours and my heart leapt. I cleared my throat and said, “So, how are things going with Carrie?”
    “I think I’m in love,” said Tom.
    I said, “Is that what it is? And here I thought you two hated each other.”
    “What about you?”
    I felt a sudden tension that I couldn’t account for. “I enjoy her company,” I said carefully. “She seems to enjoy mine. That’s pretty much it.”
    Tom nodded. He said, “I told Carrie about us.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I told her about how we’re from Earth, and keep getting moved around by being nuked.”
    “You’re kidding. You really told her?”
    “Well, yes and no.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I told it like a story, like I didn’t expect her to believe it, and then I just kept filling in details about Old Earth and stuff like that.”
    “Do you think she believed you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Do you care?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Would you rather she did or didn’t?”
    “I don’t know. Except—” He caught my eyes and suddenly looked very earnest, almost angry. “If this place goes, I want her with us.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I understand. I keep wondering if, when we hear the alert, we should try to fill up Feng’s with as many people as we can. But—” I shrugged.
    “It’s hard,” he said. “Who do you grab? How do you convince them? We don’t even know where we’re going.”
    “It really sucks,” I said. My matzo ball soup arrived. I started to have some, stopped, and said, “I told Souci, too.”
    “What?” He looked torn between disbelief and laughter.
    I said, “I told it straight, but I said I didn’t expect her to believe me. I don’t know, I just wanted to have told her.”
    “You enjoy her company,” he said, nodding sagely.
    “Shut up, asshole.”
    We didn’t practice again that week. Thursday, a local band whose name translated, according to Eve, to “Pan’s Dream,” came in to audition. Libby asked Tom and me to judge them, and Rose and Jamie and Carrie and Souci were around as well. They were a three-piece outfit with a tall guy with brown curly hair playing flute, a short, dark, long-haired fellow swapping between six-and twelve-string guitars, and a big guy with muttonchop sideburns playing six-string guitar, acoustic bass guitar, and balalaika. We listened for half a song, then Tom turned to me and said, “Jethro Tull.” A few minutes later I turned to him and said, “Hot Tuna.”
    Their approach was traditional, and I suspect most of their music was “traditional” for this colony; sixty years is plenty of time to build up a body of music. It had its own style, too, not very similar to the French Canadian music I was familiar with. It seemed to emphasize minor-key verses changing to major-key chorus, like old Slavic folk songs; and had far more complex chord patterns