The End of an Arc
cocktails
Montenegro was polishing a glass when the door opened for the first time in eleven billion years.
He looked up without surprise. Surprise had left him sometime during the long middle stretch, when the last of the red dwarfs had guttered and the bar’s view out the great curved window had gone from sparse to empty to the patient black velvet it wore now. The asteroid turned slowly beneath his feet. Outside, the universe’s largest void yawned in every direction, a million megaparsecs of nothing in any measurable sense, and the bar hung at its exact center like a single lit match in a cathedral.
The Patron came in and took the stool three down from the door. He set his hands on the bar. He was dressed in no particular way, had no particular face, and seemed to have arrived without any particular means of transport. Montenegro approved of all of this.
“Been a while,” Montenegro said.
“Has it.”
“Long enough that I’ve forgotten what I charge.” He set the polished glass down. “What are you drinking?”
The Patron considered the bottles behind the bar. They were arranged in no order Montenegro had ever been able to justify, and the labels on some of them had faded to suggestions. “Your choice,” he said.
Montenegro nodded once, slowly, the way a man nods when a long-standing suspicion has been confirmed, and reached beneath the counter for the shaker.
It was an old shaker. The tin had the dull patina of something that had been used and used and used, then put away and forgotten, then taken out and used again. He set it on the bar with a small heavy sound.
From the top shelf he took down a bottle of something clear and viscous that caught the light like wet glass. “Water,” he said, and poured a generous measure. “The solvent. Everything worth having dissolves in it eventually.”
The Patron said nothing. The Patron, to his credit, had understood early that he was not here to talk.
Montenegro reached for a squat green bottle with a cork stopper. “Ammonia.” A thinner pour, pale and astringent, and the smell of it rose off the tin like a memory of cold mornings. “Methane.” A darker bottle, almost black. “Hydrogen, which is to say the oldest thing in the room, present company excepted.” He smiled at his own joke. The Patron smiled too.
Four more bottles came down. A yellow powder he tapped in with the edge of a knife, murmuring “phosphates” to himself. A dark syrup, viscous and slow, that he called “the carbon chains, the long ones, the ones that know how to hold hands.” A small vial of something that glinted metallic even in the dim light: “trace elements, iron and zinc and the rest of the periodic minor saints.”
Last, from a lead-lined drawer he had to unlock, he produced a single black bottle with no label at all. He uncorked it and poured one drop, exactly one, into the tin.
“What was that one?” the Patron asked, surprising them both.
Montenegro capped the shaker. “Lightning,” he said. “The hard part. You can have all the rest of it sitting in a puddle for four and a half billion years and nothing happens. You need the lightning.”
Then he shook.
He shook hard, harder than the size of the tin suggested was possible, and the sound that came out of it was not the sound of ice and liquor but a low sustained rumble, like weather in a jar. The bar’s lights dimmed and brightened. The bottles on the back shelf rattled against each other in a quick percussive conversation. Outside the great window, for the first time in longer than Montenegro could remember, something flickered at the edge of the void, a pale suggestion of structure, of folding, of a thing becoming a thing that had not been a thing before.
He shook until the rumble dropped into a hum, and the hum dropped into silence, and the silence had the particular quality of a silence that has something living inside it.
Montenegro uncapped the tin.
He poured with a flourish, wrist turning, and what came out of the shaker was not a liquid exactly but it behaved enough like one to fill the glass. It was the color of a tide pool at dawn. Small things moved in it that had not been put there.
He set it down in front of the Patron.
The Patron picked it up. He looked at Montenegro over the rim. Then he took a sip, nodded once, and walked out.
Montenegro watched him go. He picked up his rag, and a fresh glass, and began to polish.