Rapist talked about his relations with the mother in question. Society hadn’t made a word for his relations with the kid that resulted.
Hadn’t made a word for the situation between them or given him a word he wanted to say to Austin Bowe.
Thanks for screwing my mother? Thanks for not showing up till now. Screw you, sir, for a damned self-centered son of a bitch.
Acceleration was steady at +2 or thereabouts. The straps would hold against five and six times that. He’d no fear of them giving way. But Corinthian spent energy like it was handed out free, and he measured his breaths, feeling the anger of a ship forced out of port, maybe out of civilization altogether.
Or—remotely possible, if Marie had found her evidence—and his heart picked up a beat—they could have the military on their tail.
Which wasn’t good news, to think of it. Go up in a fireball, they would, then, and good-bye Tom Hawkins.
It was a nightmare. He didn’t know where it had started, whether he’d been in it all his life and this turn of things was someone else’s doing, or whether he was that abysmally stupid he’d let himself in for it, going into that warehouse and caring about Marie.
He didn’t want to think about reasons. He’d never got it straight about caring for people. His aunt Lydia who’d studied psych had told him when he was five he was emotionally deprived and he never would be normal. So he figured he had to copy, because he was different enough, and he figured he’d better pick good people to copy, like his nursery-mates, sometimes, like Marie sometimes, when he was living with her. Like Saja, again, when he got to know Saja. Mischa…
Definitely not Mischa.
Saja was all right. People liked Saja. But Saja wasn’t stupid.
Saja wouldn’t have gotten into it. Even if he cared what happened to Marie. And he didn’t think it was Marie’s fault, him being in the warehouse, he couldn’t blame that on her.
He couldn’t tell why things happened, most of the time. He certainly couldn’t figure this one. He didn’t know as much as most people. He’d always figured in the scales of the universe he’d somehow come a little short of what ordinary people got, and not known a lot of things ordinary people knew. It wasn’t not knowing his father. A lot of people didn’t know that. It was not knowing other things. It was like so damn many contrary signals from Marie and from aunt Lydia and Mischa and them changing their stories all the time, and the fact nobody else liked him much, of his agemates. There was just something wrong, there was something he’d missed, and getting snatched away from Sprite like that, and never seeing anybody again, it was just one more ripping away of information he couldn’t get now. He wasn’t going back, nobody could get back to their ship unless they were on the same route… he’d accumulate station-debt waiting, even if Bowe let him go finally back at Viking; and he wasn’t honestly sure Mischa would spend the ship-account to get him out of hock.
Marie would. Marie was rich in ship-account.
But maybe Marie wouldn’t want him at all, then, except to get information about Bowe. Maybe she’d call him a fool and say she didn’t know why she’d bought him back… he could hear her tone of voice, as if she were talking to him right now.
But when he imagined Marie yelling at him about being a fool, about going in the warehouse, it sort of put things in perspective, as if now he knew what he’d done, and where he’d been stupid, trying to intervene in Marie’s business. The law of the universe was, Marie knew what she was doing, and you didn’t put your hands into it or you risked your fingers. That was the mistake he’d made.
So he did understand. And the universe had a little more solid shape around him.
But he decided then, calmly, that he did want to meet Austin
Bowe after all—at least to see the man and know whether they looked alike, or what Marie had seen staring back at her all these years. That would tell him something, too, about the way of things. And that information was on this ship. That was something he could learn about himself. He could listen to Bowe. He could find out the man’s habits and figure out if there was anything genetic that just somehow he’d gotten, in the way of temperament, or whatever else could get through the sieve of genetic code.