If there’s one thing that makes Starship Captains cranky, it’s the stupid crisis that forces them to turn the ship around and head back to whatever planet they just left.

It’s a function of the wormhole drive. You have to be a certain distance away from the nearest sun before you turn it on, or else you’ll blow up. So you must go sub-light while still within solar systems, and this means that you who have just traveled let’s say a hundred light years in a subjective instant must now devote a month of travel to navigating the more persnickety physics of any space with planets, in order to get where you’re going, meaning in very real terms that the smallest part of your journey is always also the slowest part of your journey.

That’s just arriving.

And then once you’ve done whatever you have to do there devote another month of travel to achieving enough distance for going fast again.

So Starship Captains tend to grumble whenever they depart a planet and then find out that somebody’s forgotten something they have to go back for, or that somebody’s screwed up badly enough that they have to reverse course and make another planetfall. That plays hell with schedules.

In any event, Midshipman Fenn’s Captain was not at all pleased when a mysterious ailment felled Fenn less than two weeks after departure and the ship’s autodoc proved unable to fix him. And she was downright furious when consultation with the local medical authorities assessed his symptoms and told her what was probably wrong with him.

She said things like, “He has what in his system?”

And, “I thought the silly son of a bitch was smarter than that.”

And she said, “Oh, juje on a stick. We have to go back.”

And she ordered the ship turned around.

Her first words, when he awoke in a dirtside hospital, feeling groggy, were, “I should have thrown you out the airlock.”

Fenn was too groggy to respond intelligently. His thoughts felt sludgy, as if all the neural gaps his thoughts had to leap had been replaced with oatmeal. He said, “Hannh?”

The Captain’s mouth had become a lipless grimace. “You know the kind of schedule we run. You know that delays like this have a way of adding up, that every single screwup that adds a week or more to our schedule is passed on to our further ports of call, necessitating more delays and ultimately postponing our return home by months, or years. And in a perfect world I would have just abandoned you here, and done whatever I could to catch up, but I have human flaws too and I found that I could not go without confronting your stupid ass.”

Every syllable hurt Fenn’s head. He managed to scoot back against the pillows and rise to a sitting position, but the mere act dizzied him. Nothing seemed to be working. He managed, “Haanh?”

“You were briefed about local conditions. Just like you are any other planetfall. You were told that you had liberty and that you could wander about enjoying everything the port city and the surrounding countryside had to offer, but you were also told one thing, one very crucial thing: that whatever else you did, you were never to sample the local drink, Kyaaf. Not even a sip, not under any conditions. Do you remember me saying that?”

He demonstrated the beginnings of understanding. “Is that what this is?”

“Many of your fellow crewmembers were so careful about even an accidental exposure that they supplied all their travel provisions from the ship food printers, but even those who decided to visit the local dining and drinking establishments in search of delicacies better than any we have on ship were fine as long as they followed the one guideline we gave them before we even landed: no Kyaaf. Absolutely no Kyaaf. Whatever you bloody do, I said, no Kyaaf. Everybody else had no problem following this simple precaution. But the doctors here say that by the time we left you were probably drinking Kyaaf seven times a day. What were you thinking?”

Fenn winced, remembering now. On his first night here, he had made the acquaintance of a beautiful local who had promised him all manner of erotic pleasures if he just agreed to have a cup before they leaped into the preferred local venue for such things, a sauce chamber. The Kyaaf had seemed, if anything, less of a challenge than the carnal feats under negotiation, which were innovative and heroic. Intent on that consummation, he’d rationalized any number of false premises including the classic one about what one does when one visits Rome, and agreed to a little cup, just a tiny one. By the next morning, the cravings had begun. And then he entered the sauce with his lover of the evening, achieved the promised consummations, and afterward had said, Maybe we can have another cup of Kyaaf. Rather than impart all this, he just asked, “How bad is it?”

“You’re addicted, you silly ass.”

Fenn said, “I’ve been addicted to things before.”

And this was true, probably the key reason for his carelessness. Getting addicted to new things was of course one of the key attractions of visits to faraway civilizations, and it had always been pleasantly degrading, and ultimately harmless given humanity’s progress past the dark ages when addiction to anything amounted to a life sentence. He’d gone in trusting in the ability of the shipboard med-systems to inject his bloodstream with nanofleets capable of scrubbing his blood chemistry of any lingering dependency to whatever he’d been sailing on most recently, whether that was alcohol, cocaine, dendrite bleach, gashakinzap, Jujunodules, or Sentient Poppy. Even any brain damage he’d inflicted on himself with those and a thousand other substances only available locally had always been easy to reverse, and that process had also been part of the thrill, the excitement that came with the return of sudden clarity after days or weeks of determinedly turning the delicate balance of his brain chemistry into what in the case of Sentient Poppy had been a kind of electrified, freely hallucinating pudding. Addiction? Was a simple problem, easily reversed with modern medicine, and so he still thought that the expression on the face of the Captain could be explained away as the look of someone who was merely disappointed with him.

But she shook her head. “You really didn’t read the orientation documents, did you, Fenn?”

“I skimmed them.”

“Well, if you had you would have known that the addiction bestowed by Kyaaf is universal and permanent; that once it enters your bloodstream it cannot be removed, not even by the most advanced nano-med in our fleet. It enters your very cells at the mitochondrial level, rendering your entire biological makeup a system geared toward supporting itself. You will never be able to wake up in the morning without having some. You will never be able to digest a meal without having some. You will never be able to function for more than a few days without having some. Over seventy percent of the local population is addicted. Some have a normal life without ever consuming any; but once you have, your days will forever be an exercise in feeding that beast. You’ll die if you stop. And because it’s so virulent the service we represent has banned all traffic in it, not that I would have it aboard any ship I command, in any event. You won’t survive leaving. You’re stuck here, forever.”

This was terrible news, but Fenn found that he was feeling better, anyway. He glanced down at his bare arm and saw a Kyaaf-patch, marked with the cursive k, busily feeding his system with the addictive substance. He said, “Maybe we can just buy a supply of those patches.”

“They’re illegal everywhere but here. And you can’t afford a lifetime supply, anyway. You’re stuck in this economy, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to it. We’ve deposited what pay you’re owed in a local bank. And that’s all I have to say to you, because you made this bed and I’m not responsible for you.”

The Captain stood up, and glared down at him. She couldn’t completely hide the regret in her eyes, but boy was it diluted by other things, like revulsion and the relief that came with knowing that she hadn’t fallen into this trap herself, that she’d limited her occasional chemical adventures to much less addictive substances, like methamphetamines.

She said, “Good luck, Fenn. Maybe I’ll come check on you sometime.”

He said, “I would appreciate that, Captain.”

And thirty minutes later she was back on the space elevator heading up to the ship in orbit, leaving Fenn behind forever to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

• • • •

The locals did provide Counseling.

Fenn went to a bureaucratic cube farm where he was given alien resident papers, a voucher for housing in the port’s slum district, and some cash to supplement his own savings while he found some entry into the local economy. The highlight of the visit was when his counselor offered him Kyaaf.

He sought employment. What he wanted most was assignment to the orbital transport hub, where he could at least use the skills he had used during a lifetime of interstellar travel. But jobs on that facility were at a premium, and nobody needed his skills in navigation, environmental system repair, or first contact. In those early days, his ability to manage his addiction was sufficiently wobbly—at the price of a constant lingering headache that went away only when he managed to drink some Kyaaf. He found out that there were outposts in the system’s outer reaches which were hiring people who were willing to work alone, in the tradition of the Homeworld’s old lighthouse keepers, but in the first place the price of accepting those assignments was a life lived in solitary, and in the second place he also learned that re-supply runs were at best intermittent and that Kyaaf-heads had a bad habit of consuming ever-greater quantities of the stuff when they had no other governors on their behavior, and to subsequently go crazy when their supplies ran out.

Giving up on space, he found out that Kyaaf had an agricultural component hailing from the planet’s rain-forest regions and that he would be perfectly welcome as a worker there—but at the price of strict rationing necessary in an environment where anybody with a yen for the stuff would stuff themselves to the point of death, thus eliminating the profit margin.

He ran out of money and was homeless for a while, stumbling through the streets and begging random passersby for the price of some Kyaaf. He was kicked, abused, and in some rare cases helped, and this went on for quite some time, gradually culminating in the inexorable construction of a life.

Many years passed.

Many, many years.

And then—

• • • •

The little bell over the door tinkled. It was an actual physical bell and the sound it made was not exactly a ding, so much as a ching. The low tech was a deliberate aesthetic decision by the proprietor, who could have installed an AI with a customized voice saying, “Yo, somebody just came in.”

The air inside was redolent of Kyaaf, and for those whose bodies were habituated to it, the scent in the air was enough to make their mouths water, the anticipation of the chemical jolt a beautiful high all by itself.

The newcomer was clad in a style best described as “ostentatious concealment,” to wit, a voluminous concealing robe and a hood that hung low over her face, plunging the features into shadow. It would not have been any more overt if she had also been carrying a wooden placard reading Incognito. Nobody cared, though, and after a moment’s hesitation that might have been flavored with disappointment, she sat at one of the circular tables, in between one hosting a big bald man with an impressive beard and a lithe woman who was holding her paperback book in a manner that called attention to the table and advertised the specific flavor of her literacy. Both were drinking gigantic mugs of Kyaaf, peppered with various sweeteners and spices.

One of the servers behind the counter approached and got within five paces of her before he stopped and said, “Captain? Is that you?”

The hooded woman growled. “It’s been many years, Fenn. I’m impressed you recognize me, with my face obscured and all.”

“I don’t recognize the face. I recognize the hood. You wore that outfit that one time we had to go negotiate with smugglers in a sleazy dive. Much sleazier than this one. We haven’t ever had any garroting here. Would you like something? Most of our drinks have Kyaaf, but we do have water laced with other approved euphorics.”

The Captain said, “Do you have any water not laced with euphorics?”

“We have water laced with a very mild hallucinogen. Designed to cause peripheral-vision butterflies. I am told they’re very nice.”

She said, “If you can take a fifteen-minute break to talk to me, I’ll have that.”

He went off and performed whatever negotiations were required for servers who wanted a break from their serving. Then he returned, sans apron, but with what was left of his hair freshly combed. He had aged a bit, which was always surprising given the medical science that permitted people to resist aging entirely. But some people choose to, for the gravity, and he saw that she was among them, having acquired a pair of smile lines from the corners of her lips to the outer edge of each nostril. He gave her the bottle of butterfly water and sat opposite her, a sixteen-ounce cup of Kyaaf steaming before him.

It was very special Kyaaf, his favorite kind, grown on one mountainside wandered by mega-llamas who flavored it with bowel movements prayed over, at length, by an order of local monks who to protect their crops were said to subsist only on water and an herb known as Good Intentions. The concoction was brewed at a precise temperature just below scalding and then whipped to a froth that could only be achieved when the mixing blades were spun at the speed of sound. Then sugar was added. It all amounted to idiocy, Fenn supposed, but for him it imparted clarity. He took a sip, licked his milk mustache, and smiled at the Captain, feeling a general affection for the woman who had once stranded him here. He asked, “So how are things?”

She sipped her butterfly water. “I see you’re still addicted.”

“Yup,” he said. “And I always will be. It took me a while to get used to that. In the old days, I liked to flit about from one chemical enthusiasm to another, but for a while now I’ve been accepting that this one will always be my background music, and I guess I’m okay with that.”

“Even though you’re now reduced to working as a waiter?”

He did not tell her that on this world the servers of Kyaaf considered themselves a privileged and beloved class who would never define themselves with a job title as banal as waiter. He did say, “Define ‘reduced.’ I work in a place that smells great, and that’s an improvement over the average starship, with all that recycled air. My customer base is entirely comprised of people who are having a pleasurable break from their days. Everybody comes in and I get to talk to all of them. And whenever I start feeling bad I have some Kyaaf, and I have come to love it, as well as need it. It’s a life of small pleasures, but it’s a life, and I’m happy I have it. What about you, Captain?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t drink the butterfly water, but she did stare at his Kyaaf from a distance, and she did lick her lips in a simultaneously revolted and fascinated thirst. She said, “I’ve always wondered what happened to you. I always felt bad about having to leave you behind and I always imagined you dead.”

“Well, I’m clearly not that.”

“No. But your life has become about feeding your addiction.”

“So what? I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, Captain. Everybody’s addicted to something. It’s the nature of the human animal. Our bodies generate pleasure chemicals just to encourage certain kinds of behaviors. Romantic love is just our brains making us feel good for a while, so we can stick around the person we most want to mate with. The buzz we get from intense exercise is another chemical, generated to reward us for a healthy activity that we would otherwise shun as sweaty and unpleasant. We become addicted to the things we’re good at, because it’s advantageous to the species to learn how to do them well. It’s only when our addictions start interfering with us, turning us sloppy or careless or incapable of caring out anything but our own need, or destroying our health because they provide the immediate reward with no special gain, that they become a problem.”

“And Kyaaf?”

“It’s a stimulant that has some unfortunate side-effects, but which assists in cognition and gives our hands something pleasant to do, raising the mug to our mouths, while we do something that some of us have a problem doing, relate to the person sitting across from us. I find I live with it comfortably, and that’s more than I say for any of the other addictions I’ve tried over the years. Working in this place fuels another addiction, making me feel like part of a community while I serve those who come in to fuel theirs. It’s a good thing. I’m happy enough. What about you?”

She drank some more of her butterfly water, and this time her gaze darted toward the periphery, following the random fluttering of unseen insects. And she sighed and said, “You’re a good man, Fenn. You were a good man then and you’re a good man now. It was a long time before the trade routes brought me back here, and I just wanted to know how you were doing, and say that I’ve always been sorry this happened to you.”

“I’m not.”

“But I am.”

“But I’m not,” he said, putting an end to it. “Want some more butterfly water?”

She shook her head and this time glanced down at his Kyaaf, which still steamed on the table before him, and which still gave off a spicy and wonderful aroma that joined with the miasma saturating the rest of the establishment. The temptation was palpable, and he neither encouraged nor discouraged it, understanding that the first sip was a life decision, and that if made prematurely it could be tragic, as it had nearly been for him. And then she said, “If I leave this place, if I walk out the door and head back to the ship, I’ll encounter another of these places on every street corner between here and the elevator anchor point. Curiosity alone might condemn me to the inevitable. And I don’t want it, but I do. I think I always will. I came to check on you, Fenn, but it’s the Kyaaf I’ll be taking with me. Even if I don’t have so much as a single sip.”

“It fills a hole,” Fenn said, with considerable sympathy. “But if you start back now, you might make it.”

The Captain tossed a handful of scrip on the table, and headed out, her head held so high that it skipped any resemblance to pride and went on looking like a fragile package that had to be handled with care, lest it crumble from jostling. The bell over the door jingled again as she left.

She had not taken the butterfly water with her.

Fenn went back to the counter, put on his green apron, and began to rearrange the scones, an activity that he always found relaxing, mostly because they looked a little like starships and straightening out the display was a little bit like being an admiral and ordering them into strict military formation. The Kyaaf he’d had was a happy little presence in his belly, and in his bloodstream; he felt up and awake and fully at peace with the world. Tonight, he knew, there’d be the poetry reading, mostly sonnets about Kyaaf, and that was the favorite part of his week, and that made it among the favorite parts of his life. He was happy. He felt like something good, steeped in cinnamon, and the absolute best thing about that sensual association is that it made him feel like Kyaaf too, and that was a flavor that made life worth staying awake for.

He only felt sorry that he hadn’t told the Captain that he was only working here until he finished his novel.