Away from those holds, Aari had a tougher time talking to Becker. He was trying hard to pick up Standard and Becker was trying hard to pick up Linyaari, and Roadkill wasn’t interested in speaking anything except Cat. Which meant that Aari and Becker indulged in a lot of communication through body language and charades. But that was more of an exchange than Becker usually had with the cat. Becker was enjoying the trip and the company.
RK apparently felt the same way. He showed Aari the sort of kitty cat affection he had not thus far deemed appropriate to bestow upon Becker. He sat on Aari’s lap and took to sleeping beside him in the Linyaari graveyard. The KEN unit came in handy for changing the litter box. He was not the brainiest droid in the universe, but he was rehabilitated, thanks to Becker’s new programs, and no longer said things like, “Do you wish me to tear his arm from his socket now, or would you prefer I punch out one eye in a painful and maiming, yet not lifethreatening, manner, Lady Kisia?” It had taken Aari and Becker both a lot more work to get KEN640 over some of these socially unacceptable utterances. These guys might be computers on feet and have opposable thumbs, but the computer was only there to operate the feet and thumbs in a useful way. KEN’S processor was an idiot compared to, say, the ship’s computer.
KEN was also somebody who could play gin rummy with Becker when Aari was feeling antisocial, which happened fairly often. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why a guy who’d been left behind by his people, who felt he’d failed to take care of his brother who died while the guy himself was being slowly tortured to death by alien invaders who were also destroying his home world-why a guy like that might need a little down time once in a while. And Becker wcuf a rocket scientist, albeit an idiosyncratically privately tutored and self-taught one.
Aari didn’t spend all of his unsocial time in pity-party mode, however. His Standard improved by leaps and bounds as he watched the store of ancient films and clips stored in the ship’s computer, as well as read the hard copy books.
“Did you see this one, Joh?” he asked, pronouncing Becker’s first name with a sort of a whuff through his nostrils. Aari was brandishing the How to Care for Your Kittycat book. Becker noticed that RK for once was not clinging to the Linyaari like a fuzzy leech.
“Yeah. Skip the part on interfering in a feline’s sex life. I tried it and RK was not amused. That cat on a bad fur day could give those Khieevi bugs a run for their money.”
Aari looked puzzled and retreated to the now-cleared-ofdebris berth in the newly organized crew’s quarters to pursue the cat care trends of several hundred years ago.
Becker hardly recognized the Condor. The KEN unit had tidied up the ship so that things were stored and catalogued and there was actually room to move around. Becker wasn’t at all sure he liked it. The other way had been sort of cozy.
After a while he found that having two other-well, one and a half other-people on board was distracting, so he had the KEN unit turn itself off between bouts of housekeeping. And Aari was busy studying or brooding (or both) a lot of the time, so that wasn’t too much of a problem. Becker’s real adjustment was that RK was spending most of his time with Aari and Becker missed the onery feline.
He was thinking that he had been a real sucker to think that because the cat tried to rescue him from Kisia and her men that it meant the animal harbored any affection for him. Why, he showed his fuzzy puny side more to Khetala on first acquaintance, or to this Aari guy, than he ever did to Becker. As Becker was thinking this, he felt a familiar pain in his thigh and looked down to see RK sitting there, switching his tail back and forth, and looking expectantly up at Becker.