“I will join the Explorer ship,” I threatened.
A wild gamble on my part; it failed utterly.
“Whatever,” she replied, casually.
“I could be killed,” I pointed out. “It’s a dangerous universe. We may never see each other again.”
“That’s too bad,” said Averil in bored tones.
I sighed, forlornly.
“Averil, I shall think of you always,” I said, with undimmed ardour.
“No doubt,” said Averil pleasantly, “you will.”
I packed my possessions into a box. Holos of my parents. A key-ring with all my metal-mind storage files, from childhood on. My identity pass. My bank folder. It was not much, after a life in service. I was well-off, admittedly, but I’d stock-piled no treasure, and I’d never been assigned my own planet. All the money I’d earned at trading, I’d spent on my women. First Shonia, then Averil.
I should have been more cunning, I realised. There were many males who kept their independence by embezzling from their own earnings before passing on their pay to their wives. I had never pursued that route; I was too much of a romantic.
Or, I mused, too much of a fool.
Mohun snorted. “You’re throwing your fornicatory life away,” he pointed out.
“I care not.”
“You have talent.”
“What do you care-you betraying son-of-a-slattern!” I sneered.
Mohun forced a smile; but I could tell he was hurt by my words.
“But you are still my friend,” I added, and the relief shone in his eyes.
“Listen Jak,” he said to me softly. “ I cannot deny that your former wife Averil has a truly gorgeous mind and lip-smackingly apt judgement. And I am, of course, privileged to be hers.”
“Indeed you are.”
“Indeed I am.”
Mohun was holding back his tears; and I respected that. For if he had wept, I would undoubtedly have done so too; and we would both have been lost.
“However, I should stress, my dear friend,” Mohun continued, “that my love affair with Averil and your consequent humiliation were not my choice, nor my desire.”
I nodded, to acknowledge that eternal truth; females choose males.
“I shall never see you again,” I said, and walked out of the Chief Trader’s cabin, to begin my new life.
BOOK 3
Sai-ias
I felt so very sorry for him.
He was, like all the new ones, angry; and savagely so. And bitter; unreachably so. Possessed by a wild desire to take revenge for what had happened to him and his people; and deranged, too, by grief and sorrow, at the loss of everything he had ever known.
And, as was always the case, he vented these feelings upon me.
“You murdering daughter-of-a-pustulent-rapist-who-fucks-whores bitch!” he roared, and then he spat at me, a rich mouthful of acidic spit that stung the soft skin of my face and left a sticky residue on my cheeks.
“You malice-tainted shit-eating-sloshy-farting father-fucker, how could you do it? How could you do it?” he roared, accusingly.
I yearned to touch him, and to soothe his rage; but I knew that my-from his perspective-monstrous appearance made my very presence an ordeal to him.
“Monster! You’re uglier-than-a-two-headed-mutant-baby monster!” he angrily told me, as he paced around his confining cabin.
“If you say so,” I replied, in the mildest of tones, but that just enraged him all the more.
All in all, my heart burst with sympathy; I knew just how this poor, sad creature felt.
For I had once felt that way myself, many years ago. And I remembered my rage then, and marvelled at its absence now.
“Let me explain to you,” I began gently.
“I’m going to fuck you with a spear in your throat and your eyes and arsehole!” he screamed.
“I wouldn’t like that,” I informed him, “very much.”
“Evil-bitch-that-even-a-fat-arsed-Southerner-wouldn’t screw! Festering cock-meat!” he screamed, spittle falling from his mouth. He was quite hysterical now, and entirely oblivious to the gentle irony of my last comment.
“Later,” I said, kindly. “I will explain it all, later.”
“I don’t know how you can tolerate that foul-mouthed creature,” Fray said to me.
“At least,” I said, as tactfully as I could, since Fray was legendary for her indolent refusal to help her fellow captives, “I’m doing something to help the poor unfortunate soul.”
“You think so?” sneered Fray, with that tone of hers which implied only a fool would say such a stupid thing.
“I do,” I said softly. For it is my self-appointed role: I greet the new ones, teach them the ways of our world; and thus I ease the pain of their transition.
“You sad pathetic arse-sucking beast,” Fray said to me, shaking her head bewilderedly. And then she roared, a powerful rising roar that deafened me, a raw hoarse trumpet sound that embodied all her rage, and pain, and grief.
I took a moment to let my hearing return to normal.
“He’ll come to terms with it,” I said, quietly and sensibly, “the same way we have.”
Fray roared again, implying she had by no means come to terms with “it,” and the sound made my skin prickle with fear and regret.
I watched the sun go down. It was a beautiful sight. The yellow orb became a red staring eye; its gaze swept slowly across the landscape, shedding a scarlet radiance on the white snow-capped mountains and the calm blue lake. As I watched, ivory clouds were metamorphosing to become daubs of orange upon an orange-black sky.
The richness and beauty of this setting sun effect was, as it was every night, awe-inspiring.
Then the sun was switched off, and pitch-darkness swathed my world. I lit a torch, and its faint beams cut a tiny slice out of the night. It was time to retire to my cabin.
That night I told my cabin friends a long and, in my opinion, delightful story about my mother. She was-or rather had been-a wonderful creature, full of warmth and love, and I had never seen her flustered or angry. (Except of course, at the end, as she embraced me, her only surviving child, in those soul-wrenching minutes before she died.)
And this was the hilarious story of my mother’s journey to the seabed to fetch pearls from the jaws of the vast and fearsome kar-fish. It was the day of the tenth anniversary of my birth, and when she arrived at my party, bloodied but triumphant, she was able to shower me with the richest of gifts: black pearls that sang and were warm to the touch; shards of coral-fish-fragments that caught the light like a rainbow; and live seabites that I could hold beneath my tongue, and which made me feel as if I were (as my distant ancestors had been) a lazy seabeast swimming through the oceans, allowing food to drift effortlessly into my mouth.
That was my mother! She’d risked her life to make me happy that day. And such kindness, in my opinion, is a rare and a special thing.
There was gentle applause when I finished my story.
“You loved your mother?” asked Fray.
“I did,” I told her.
Fray snorted.
