Seabourne stared at the highball glass on his desk. Three freshly chipped shards of ice stared back at him. He looked up at his second officer. Normally, a Rheinlander gleefully holding an ice pick in your office was cause for alarm. Seabourne was merely confused.
"It's ice."
"Pristine ice, Herr Capitan."
"And what," interrupted Kendra from her chair, eyeing an identically filled glass in her hand, "exactly makes this ice so... pristine?"
"Think of it this way," said an excited Florian, "Every shard of ice you've ever had has been processed through some planet's water cycle. Endlessly consumed and excreted and filtered. The finest bottle of Denver mountain spring water still had its atoms make those countless circuits. The molecules in your morning coffee was likely excreted by thousands of fish over the last couple of millenia before that particular batch of H20 found its way to the mountain ranges to be harvested and bottled."
"You don't have to go that far back," said Kendra. "Crew water is reclaimed from the guests. We drink their run-off all the time."
"Truth," said Seabourne, "there's a fair chance my last drink was inside you not too long ago. We don't buy our drinks, Florian, we only rent them."
"But you do not get it! When that ice cube melts, for the first time in your life, you will be drinking untouched water, water that has never known the lips of you or any other creature. Those molecules are the primordial remains of the formation of the universe itself. Earth was still cooling when that shard first froze, and it was waited silently for this moment. For you."
Kendra snorted. "We've been harvesting ice from comets for centuries. Cortez is literally full of them."
"She's right," said Seabourne. "Water supply was one of the side businesses that kept Orbital going through some lean times. I've had my share of comet ice before, including on this voyage more likely than not."
"Actually, technically not," chimed Kendra. "Our water stores were restocked on Curacao from terrestrial sources, we haven't had to do a comet run since we started flying the Paradise Limited routinely."
"Can I finish?" said a slightly more exasperated Florian. "Yes, you've had comet water, after it was filtered and processed and the ammonia and other impurities were allowed to outgas. You have never had comet ice. That shard in your glass is pure water with no other trace elements. You could melt it and use it for scientific experiments because we lack the sensors sensitive to record what impurities if any exist there. As far as we can tell, there is twice as much hydrogen as oxygen in that glass right now... and nothing else. Taste that shard and you are truly tasting the heavens themselves."
"So you commandeered a room service cart off some poor steward," said a skeptical Seabourne, "dragged this monstrous chunk of a comet through my ship, letting it drip on my floor, chiseled off a shard sending fragments all over my quarters, just to sell me on some really clear ice?"
"Pristine ice, Capitan. Pristine ice. I confess, the magic of the stuff is not in its atoms, it is in ourselves, and in the story it lets us tell."
"You're a charlatan," said Seabourne. "You're trying to sell ice to eskimos."
"What's an eskimo?" asked Kendra.
"It's an expression. And it's irrelevant. Maybe Shetland enjoys parading her little flim flam dance about with her elixirs, but I'd like to think we have better standards on Breezewood than to charge a mark-up on ice."
"Pristine ice," insisted a frustrated Florian before catching himself. "Look at it this way," the smile slowly returned as he took off his gloves and laid the ice pick on the large chunk of slowly melting comet. "We charge a mark-up for everything on this vessel. The air, the water, the food and drink. Do you really think your finest vintages are 1,000 times more 'wine-y' than your house red, just because we buy it by the bottle instead of the box? No, it is all mashed grapes and yeast. But we sell the experience, and the experience of uncorking a 10,000 credit bottle of wine is worth 1,000 boxes of the cheap stuff. That is why we have sommeliers, to walk us through why this particular batch of crushed grapes and yeast excretions so exquisitely matches the food we just ordered, making a meal that is far better than the sum of its parts. All I am doing is offering the opportunity to sell another experience to our customers. You know they would brag tremendously over having ice in their drink older than our original solar system."
"Should I put out a job posting for whatever the hell you intend to call an ice sommelier?" quipped Kendra.
"An ice-mmelier?" offered Seabourne.
"A glarçon, but that is not important, what is important is-"
"Wait, stop," said Seabourne. "There's a term for a waiter who specializes in ice?"
"Ten credits says he made it up," replied Kendra.
Florian closed his eyes, sighed, and counted to ten. "The Gallic term for waiter is garçon, and for ice cube is glaçon, it was too good an opportunity to miss. And it subtlety ties the act of ordering pristine ice to Gallia and you know that our guests will literally and metaphorically eat that up, and who are we to correct any misconceptions they may develop?"
Seabourne turned his gaze from Florian to Kendra. "It's a good pun."
"It's a bad idea," replied Breezewood's first officer. "I know you're a sucker for good branding, boss, but a clever bit of French wordplay which goes over the heads of 95% of our customers does not a quality experience make!"
But Seabourne was looking at the small puddle of melted water at the bottom of his glass. The ice truly did seem a little more pristine, the water a little clearer, the glass a little colder than usual. He took a tentative sip of the water.
Both Kendra and Florian stared at the captain, who promptly kicked the glass back to get a small shard in his mouth which he crunched on. No one said anything until Orbital's director swallowed the ice.
"I'll be damned if that wasn't the most refreshing ice water I've ever had," said the Captain at last. Florian beamed as Kendra rolled her eyes. "Florian, go ahead and introduce the stuff tonight in the starboard lounge. Don't charge for it... yet. Let's just see what the passengers make of it."
"And get this thing out of my room before it melts everywhere!"
A smiling Florian clicked his heels together, nodded a brief salute, and walked the cart out of the room. He gave Kendra a wink as he passed through the door.
After the door closed behind him, Kendra shot Seabourne a raised eyebrow. "It really is pristine ice," replied the captain.
