When he docked in the airlock the lights flickered for just a second or two before they came back alive. The station’s soothing mechanical voice said, “Increased sunspot activity affecting shipping routes until—”

Nugget didn’t bother listening to the rest of it. He’d hitched a ride on the Ibn-Sina out of Ceres, a slow, unremarkable journey that suited him just fine. The ship was a spun-out, hollowed-out rock with engines exo-fitted. Crew didn’t care one way or the other about vagrants. Nugget kept to the cargo holds where there was plenty of air and gravity was low and it was warm. He read old books there. They were mostly ancient manuals on mechanical engineering.

He stepped out of the threshold. The door irised shut behind him. He took in a breath of air. Stale, metallic, with a hint of frangipani. The light was dim, the corridor stretched out, smooth metal, peeling paint. Lagrange Five Station, somewhere in the confluence of Earth and its moon’s gravitational field. An old, old station. He tried to think how long it’s been since he was last here.

He figured at least two decades.

He made his way along the corridor, holding on to handrails as he floated. He was much younger then, a hungrier Nugget, more prone to seeking excitement. More prone to violence. He was going to make his fortune in the Outer System, back then. He was saying goodbye to the old world, he was going where every planetoid had a core of gold.

A rat slinked past him. It stopped and stared at Nugget. Nugget stared back. The rat scratched itself. Its eyes were mechanical, and a tiny antenna pushed out of its skin and turned this way and that. Some parasite. Nugget said, “Shoo,” but gently. The rat stared back, unblinking, then seemed to shrug. Maybe it knew one of its own when it saw him.

Two decades past and the smell was the same. Rust and frangipani and now fermented cabbage, the smell of space, the smell of home. Nugget pushed out of the corridor into an inner hub, one of many. Lagrange Five Station had been built like a warren in olden times, modules stacked on modules. This one was livelier than most, which was to say, not very. A single neon light flashed in the distance. The Bucket o’ Rust.

Some things just didn’t change.

“Hey, brother, spare a shekel?”

An old robotnik, wrapped in rags, sat hunched against a thermal vent pipe. Steam billowed around him but he didn’t seem to mind. Nugget checked his pocket, found a tögrög he’d been carrying since Mars. He tossed it to the beggar. The coin spun in the low gravity. The robotnik’s arm shot out, caught it gentle as a feather, vanished quicker than Nugget’s eyes could follow.

“Thanks, brother.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Nugget was hungry—for food, for a drink. But he hesitated. He stood on the balustrade and looked down at the rings of lower levels. It was him and Nazeem that time, two decades back, standing almost at this exact spot with nothing to their name but what they’d carried on their backs out of the gravity well. Back then this was just a stepping stone to the stars. Now... Nazeem was long gone. And this felt a little like home.

“You a miner?” the robotnik said. His voice felt thick with disuse, the human larynx modified with static-laden augmentation.

“I look like a miner?” Nugget said.

“I guess you don’t,” the robotnik allowed. “Where you in from, then?”

“I did the Long Crossing,” Nugget said. “Then...” He shrugged. “I guess I came back.”

The robotnik whistled.

“Jupiter?” he said.

“For a bit. I made a fortune on Io... lost it all on Ganymede.” Nugget tried to smile but it didn’t take. “Hired out for a war in Trans-Neptunian space,” he said. “Got shipped corpsicle. Old cryo tech, half of us never woke up the other end. I don’t even know who we were fighting.”

“So it was back in my war,” the robotnik said. “I don’t know which side we were on. I don’t even know if we won.”

“We won,” Nugget said. “I think. I had a buddy with me, from back on Earth. Nazeem. He didn’t make it back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I got his share,” Nugget said.

“It get you far?”

“It got me back here.”

The robotnik nodded. He raised a bottle.

“You want some?” he said.

“What is it?”

“Ethanol.”

“Thanks, but...”

The bottle disappeared. Nugget breathed the humid air. He could smell garlic frying.

“I’ll see you,” he said.

“Yeah,” the robotnik said. Nugget half walked, half floated to the neon light flashing in the distance.

He got in close and stopped a beat, then went inside.

It was the sort of dive you found wherever there were enough people. It had a bar, and behind the bar it had drinks. The lighting was low but it was low everywhere on the station. It just happened to be lower here. The chairs were old metal drums with faded inscriptions still on the side of them, and the tables were nailed to the floor. Nugget paid for a beer and a chaser. He sat down with his back to the wall. A woman took the stage by the bar and she started to sing. It was one of the old, old songs. When she was done she got off and stood by the bar. There was no applause. Nugget stood up. He said, “Can I buy you a beer?”

“That depends,” the woman said. She turned and looked at him. Her hair was red and so were her eyes.

“On what?” Nugget said.

“Depends what you want.”

“I remember you,” Nugget said. “You sang here one night. I was just passing through. Me and a buddy of mine. We got in a fight with a guy from that valley in Mars.”

“The Valles Marineris,” the woman said.

“That’s right,” Nugget said.

“What did you fight about?” the woman said.

“I don’t remember. Something stupid, probably. We got kicked out, anyway, and I never got to hear the rest of your song, until tonight.”

“You can buy me a drink,” the woman said. “What do I care, it’s your money.”

Nugget nodded to the bartender. The bartender sent a bottle floating. The woman picked it up from mid-air with a practiced motion. She put it to her lips.

“I’m Nugget,” Nugget said.

“Red,” the woman said.

They sat down. Red said, “How long ago was this?”

“Twenty years, maybe,” Nugget said.

“Then you’re twenty years too late.”

“Too late for what?” Nugget said.

Red shrugged. “Too late for everything”, she said.

“Were you here all this time?” Nugget said.

“Where else would I be?”

“I don’t know,” Nugget said. “There’s a world out there. More than one.”

“There’s a world right here”, Red said. She took a sip and studied him over the bottle. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said.

“Get what?”

“You think going out there fixes what’s inside here,” she said. She tapped him on the chest. It pushed him up so for a moment he was floating, just an inch or so above the seat. “Yeah,” Red said. She finished her beer and tossed it back to the bar. It floated to the old bartender. “I see guys like you every day of the week,” Red said. “Young and ignorant when you come up the gravity well. Old and ignorant when you come back. You think, if only you went out there you’d find whatever it is you’re searching for. But you never did find it, did you?”

“I don’t know,” Nugget said. “I lived a life.”

“No,” she told him. “You only ran away from one. Listen, thanks for the beer. I got to get back to work.”

Nugget sat there and he listened to song after song as Red sang. Later, he took his bag and found a capsule hostel where he rented a bed for the night.

“You need anything else?” the old robot behind the reception desk said. There was a big ugly fish in an aquarium behind the robot. The fish stared at Nugget. Nugget looked at the robot instead.

“What’s your name?” Nugget said.

The robot said, “You can call me Rust.”

“I stayed in a place much like this when I first passed through here,” Nugget said.

“Everyone stays in a place like this when they first pass through here,” Rust said. “You want to pay upfront for three nights? There’s no ships on account of the solar flares.”

“I’ll pay for a night, to start with,” Nugget said.

“That’s all right with me.” Rust said.

“You been here long?” Nugget said. He tried to remember what it was like, the place he and Nazeem had stayed when they came before. But nothing came to mind. It could have been this place, it could have been another. You saw one capsule hostel and somehow you saw them all. Crisscrossing the solar system as he did, Nugget sometimes thought he did see them all.

“Two hundred years.” Rust said.

“Two hundred?” Nugget said.

“That’s what I said.”

“What was it like here, before?” Nugget said.

The robot turned its smooth metal face in what could have been its version of a shrug.

“The same, more or less,” it said.

“Do you remember me?” Nugget said on an impulse.

Rust shook its head.

“Don’t retain customer information for longer than three months,” it said.

“How come?”

“Company policy.” It seemed to consider. “Also, I wouldn’t want to. What’s the use of remembering all these folks who pass through here? Empty eyes and sad luck stories, and you never find out how the stories end. No, thanks. I just rent out the capsules. I wash the linen. I scrub out the stains. Stains I know. Stains I remember.” Its metal fingers drummed a tuneless beat on the washtub counter.

Nugget remembered that night, long ago, when he and Nazeem came floating into the station. Heads full of dreams and hearts full of hope. Or so he liked to tell himself the story. He thought of that night, station-night, with the neon light of the bar flashing, when a younger version of the woman called Red sang songs about loss he, Nugget, couldn’t then understand. How could he, then? First you had to learn to lose.

He stared at the fish in the aquarium behind the robot. Its small sad eyes, its gelatinous face.

“What’s that?” Nugget said.

“It’s a blobfish,” Rust said. “They’re deep water fish. I keep old Henry here on compressors.”

“That’s a blobfish?” Nugget said. He remembered suddenly what the fight had been about. He and Nazeem were just listening to the music but this one guy wouldn’t shut up, he was drunk and very loud, and he kept going on about these fish—these blobfish. He was going to import them from the oceans on Earth and sell them for pets in the Valles Marineris. It was the sort of fool’s dream a guy like Nugget could recognize even then, when he still had fool dreams of his own.

They asked the guy to keep it down, he was disturbing the singer, and the guy got aggressive and they took it outside. It was a short and almost silent fight, and Nazeem got cut with a glass to the face and Nugget broke the Martian guy’s nose and knocked out two of his teeth before someone called the guards.

“That be it,” Rust said. It knocked on the glass with the tip of its metal finger. The fish turned and butted the glass where the robot’s finger was. They seemed fond of each other, in some strange way.

“Some guy imports the blobfish from Earth,” Rust said. “Puts them out all over the inner system. Must have made a fortune selling them all.”

“No kidding.” Nugget said. Thought about that night long ago, and fools’ dreams. “No kidding,” he said again.

“You want to pay for three nights upfront?” Rust  said. “There’s no ships on account of the solar flares.”

“You already asked me that,” Nugget said.

The old robot didn’t reply. Nugget picked up his key. He found his capsule and slid in. The thin blanket was beautifully pressed. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts swim lazily. He listened to the station, old metal stretching, someone coughing, someone else crying in their sleep. The last notes of a final song came wafting through the humid air from the bar. It felt to Nugget then that someone came and sat by his cot. He felt the weight of the body as it pressed down on the thin mattress, felt rather than saw the silhouetted outline of a face leaning over his own.

“Nazeem?” Nugget said. “Nazeem!”

Then the presence was gone, if it was ever there, and Nugget didn’t dream again. Tomorrow he would pick a destination, wherever a ship was going that would take him. Perhaps to the moon, perhaps back to the Earth: where fish were free and fools still dreamed fools’ dreams. For now he slept.