“When will you men get the word that this is an honest establishment for making safety belts for flitters now? The Didis are history.”
“History?” Jonas felt stupid. “I like history. What do you mean, history? Where’s DidiYasmin?”
“In jail, where she belongs. Where have you been? Outer space?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah,” he said. “Why is she in jail?”
“I haven’t got time enough to tell you,” the girl said. “But you might try asking some of the kids on Maganos-little girls she forced into prostitution.” She glared at him.
“Hey, not with me! No, don’t look at me that way. I like big girls-grown up girls, women, actually. I never-aw …”
His hostess’s attention was diverted by Roadkill, who was rubbing against her ankles. She reached down and petted him, then picked him up. “What a pretty kitty,” she said.
“Lady, I wouldn’t do that,” Becker said. “He’ll take your arm off.”
But RK, the traitor, lay happily purring in her arms, butting up against her chin with the top of his head, shamelessly cadging caresses. Becker wished he could do the same thing.
“What’s his name?” the girl asked.
“RK,” Becker hedged.
“What does that stand for?” Now she was tickling the traitor’s tummy. It was white. Becker had had no idea that the cat’s belly was white. RK never wanted him to do any tickling. Quite the contrary.
“Refugee Kitty,” Becker lied, knowing that the truth would not go down well with her. “I found him on a derelict ship-his people had been killed in a freak accident and he was in a bad way.”
He hoped this would elevate him in her estimation from a simple child molester to a child molester who was at least apparently kind to animals. “And my name is Jonas. Jonas Becker. What’s yours?”
“Khetala,” she said.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
“I can’t say the same to you, Mr. Becker. You’ll find Kezdet has changed quite a bit since the Didis and the Piper got what was coming to them. Maybe you considered the houses harmless fun, but I was forced to work in one before the Lady Epona liberated us. I don’t share your attitude.”
“Hey, I understand. I was slave farm labor myself but I got adopted out. I ” She was staring at him stonily. Even he knew it wasn’t the same. His voice drifted off into confusion and he reached for RK, who took a slice at him. Becker ignored the cat’s reluctance to be dislodged and firmly, if painfully, extricated him from Khetala’s arms. “We-uh-nice meeting youwe’ll just be going now.”
She turned on her heel and went back inside. One good thing about meeting her. He wasn’t in the mood any more for what he had always let pass for love. So it was time to get back to work instead. He’d always found making money a fairly acceptable substitute for most pleasurable pursuits.
Before he went to the trouble of renting a container cruiser and offloading his cargo, he made a few inquiries about the state of the market. He was gratified to find that the Lady Epona who had so thoroughly cleansed the planet of evil hadn’t minded junk, presumably as long as its purveyors weren’t htterbugs.
The nano-bug market was still flourishing. He took a look around before settling in for the day. It was getting harder to find a real good deal any more. The original Mars probe, still in prime condition (because it hadn’t worked in the first place), had been recovered by a guy who used to work for Red Planet Reclamation-the outfit that was supposed to return planets to their pristine condition after the minerals were stripped. The guy wanted enough of it to build a whole new planet from scratch. Becker shook his head and moved on. He also found a great booth for rockhounds. He was particularly attracted to four new gemstones he hadn’t seen before-bairdite, giloglite, nadezdite, and acornite. Bairdite was a multicolored opaque stone with a pebbly crystalline surface striped both ways with red and yellow-probably iron and sulfur deposits. Giloglite was the color of serpentine, only translucent and cloudy. Nadezdite was a transparent purple with gold flecks, and the acornite was a blue-green stone that cleared in the middle to the most gorgeous deep teal transparency he had ever seen in any rock, real or manufactured. The sequence of names sounded familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite think why.