He and RK checked out the food booths. There was a meat chili advertised as the specialty of Ma’aowri 3. It smelled really good to him, but RK took one sniff and backed off. When Becker tried to get closer, RK gave him a look that was hard to fathom, but left him thinking that maybe the meat in the dish was a little too close to home for comfort-whether to him or RK he wasn’t sure. He passed up oddly shaped fruits, cheap fructose candy and waxy chocolate, various roast beasts, some fairly bizarre vegetation, and assorted other delicacies too alien to identify. He finally settled on a good old-fashioned gyro and a cup of cat, then returned to the stall he’d rented and began to unload his container into it.
After Becker had displayed his wares as temptingly as possible, he sat in the throne-like command seat he’d taken from an otherwise totaled Percenezatorian battle wagon. RK lay on the collection bag from the last trip. It had become his bed of choice. He had been willing to part with only the smallest and most broken piece of that funny opal-looking mineral. Becker kept that piece in his pocket as a deal-sweetener. It was eyecatching enough that maybe somebody would decide that his wife couldn’t live without it.
As far as sales went, the day was pretty slow going-the usual looky-loos, a couple of rich teenage boys looking for ways to jazz up their cheap transportation. Becker figured he would offload what he could here and then move along to Twi Osiam to do some major trading and restocking. About then, ^he came along, her entourage trailing behind her.
She wasn’t really his type-too young, for one thing. She had a figure like a twelve-year-old boy who had been dead of starvation for a year or two. Her hair was long and curly in the back and short and spiky in the front. But she was fashionably and expensively dressed in the furs and skins of several nowextinct species. Amazing that clothes that cost so much could cover so little of what was, to his eye, fairly pointless to reveal.
Her entourage consisted of four men a little older than she was, all of whom ranged restlessly behind her. “Stay,” she told them, in a tone Becker would have been a fool to try to use on RK. “Helloo,” she cooed to him. Well, he had been right. He’d returned to his natural drop-dead handsomeness and now women found him so irresistible he’d get tired of it. Except, oddly enough, for Khetala. Later.
“Helloo, yourself,” he said. “What can I do for you, princess?” he asked, judging correctly which endearment she would prefer. RK, on the other hand, was clearly not about to try and flatter this customer. His back -was up; his tail, in its fully recovered state, would have made an excellent bottlebrush, his eyes were slits, his ears were flat, and he was hissing like a tubful of vipers. Becker stepped in front of him, to block his cat’s view of this doubtlessly well-heeled customer as well as to block the customer’s view of him.
“I was hoping you could advise me,” she said. “I was told you know just everything there is to know about slightly used equipment.”
“Not everything, but more than most,” he agreed.
“I’m starting a small business and it would be a big help if I had just a teensy little fleet of ships all to myself. I can get some very good bargain spacecraft, but they all need parts here and there and I was just wondering-hoping actually-that you would have a few things.”
“Like what? “
She snapped her fingers and one of the men appeared and recited by rote a string of instruments, equipment, systems, and parts. Becker suspected the man wasn’t actually a flesh and blood type, but an android. For one thing, he didn’t pause ror breath during the whole fifteen minutes it took to recite the lady’s shopping list. For another thing, while he -was talking, RK peed on his foot and shredded his lower leg and the guy didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, I got all that,” Becker said at the end of the recitation, looking closer at the guy. Yep. Android. Its foot and lower leg were smoking slightly. Cheap model. Bad wiring job. “You want takeout or shall I deliver the stuff to the hangar of your choice? Part of it is still aboard the ship.” The lady would be cleaning him out, actually, a fact that made him a little nervous. He’d have to make enough money from this sale to cover his expenses while he collected more inventory. Luckily, he was already planning to go back to all of those desolate planets and pick up the bits and pieces he’d left behind. And while he was at it, he’d check out what had done the healing job on him and RK.