“You wouldn’t appreciate most of it,” he said with a lewd grin, then shrugged and gave her a hideous wink. “Or who knows, by the time I’m finished with you, maybe you will.”
Bunny suppressed a shudder and continued to inspect his tools and computer screen while he told her about whore-houses on planets in several different galaxies, not excluding the impressive tricks he’d seen performed by humanoid alien exotic entertainers with a wide variety of sex organs and practices.
The subject made her a little queasy, especially the lip-licking relish with which he related it and the way he kept eyeing her as if she were already undressed. She realized he was in no hurry at all. In fact, he seemed to be relating these stories with the expectation that she might want to try some of the things he was talking about. They did give her a good excuse to make loud, shocked exclamations, which covered up the noises coming from beneath the rug. Still trying to appear fascinated, she worked her way backward while he swigged from his bottle until she shoved a corner of the rug back with her foot. A rectangular trapdoor was concealed beneath it.
Maybe the lout would drink himself to sleep.
No such luck though. Having exhausted the topic, he kept patting the mattress, then hoisted himself up, his expression growing ugly again.
“So,” Bunny said quickly. “What made you decide to give up something as glamorous as shipping with Onidi Louchard to come back to Petaybee?”
He was less steady on his feet now than he had been and his next words were slurred. “When my shipmates found out I was from Petaybee, they told me what idiots we all were to be sitting on the biggest cache of raw ores in the known universe and pretending it wasn’t there. I told ‘em the company kept us all barefoot and pregnant, so to speak, which is what I heard all the time I was growing up here. Then I realized I’d bought into the whole Petaybee trip ever since I was a kid: how the planet doesn’t want us to take this and the planet doesn’t want us to take that.” His voice slipped into a mocking whine. “So I thought, screw the planet. The company’s going to do it sooner or later, so how about me? I knew how the planet and the people get around the company, and how the company could get around the planet and the people if it had the balls to come down and take what it wants, so I ‘borrowed’ a little company technology, showed up in one village or another on foot, parking my shuttle out on the tundra, looking wise and finding out who might be in need of a shaman. McGee’s Pass had come in for a few of the planet’s less benign tricks and they had no shaman. I did a little recon, set up my base, and arranged for a disaster in the local communing place.”
Bunny strove to keep her voice steady and sound shocked instead of simply furious as she asked, “Wwhy? Why did you do that?”
“Because, the first time I saw the way raw ore looks before it comes out of the ground, I realized I’d seen it back when I was a kid and the planet was scaring the shit out of me for not being real interested in all the little mind tricks it plays on people around here. Don’t you get it? There’s a good reason your so-called elders feed you all this bunk about the communing places that makes you scared to go in there without them.”
Bunny thought he must have had a much different elder than Clodagh to think that anyone was barred from talking to Petaybee any time they felt like it, but most times people just got by on what was offered on the surface until it was time for everybody to go visiting.
“The communing places are also the entry way to the planet’s goodies. Frag it, girl, you don’t even have to dig very deep or blast your own tunnel in the surface. Ore’s right there staring at you every time you go talk to the rocks.”