Chaos Space - Marianne de Pierres [9]
Maybe that was why he asked the question. In a tiny space of emotional clarity that he managed to keep separate from his fugged and angry mind, he felt sorry for her.
‘What’s wrong, then?’ Jo-Jo asked one day when he couldn’t stand another moment of her sniffling misery.
Mercifully, she stopped her crying and crawled to the campfire. ‘Do you even care?’ she whispered.
Jo-Jo lightened his privacy filter so she could see him and crawled up to meet her. ‘Care is a strong word ...’
The woman gave him a watery smile. ‘I’m Bethany.’
‘Well, Bethany, let’s just settle for mild interest.’
From the darkness of his cell filter, he heard Petalu Mau snort and laugh.
‘Ignore him,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘So what’s the score?’
‘I made a mistake,’ she whispered.
Jo-Jo gave a belly laugh, the first one in a long time,
Bethany raised her hand to protest. ‘No .. . not just any mistake. Not a mistake you can be punished for and then forget. A moral mistake. A b-bad life choice. I had a man and a child—a daughter. He was different to me, a Mioloaquan.’
Jo-Jo pulled a face. ‘You were flipping a scaly? How the hell did that happen?’
The woman shrugged. ‘The way things do ... I took work on a Mio explorer studying embryonic water fauna—not the Mios themselves, but more primitive species. Well... anyway, he was the pathologist on board. We conceived a child together... went to the amalgam clinic on Prospect... paid to have the genetic alterations so she would survive.’ Some of the sadness dropped from her face. ‘Ten years of a happy enough life. Work brought us here just a while ago. I noticed on our last trip that he was spending a lot of time with the Mios, less with me. Then I found him lying with one.’ She trembled and the tears brimmed again. ‘He told me that my humanesque habits had begun to repulse him. If I wanted to keep him our child must leave. He said she was an embarrassment to him now.’ She gave Jo-Jo a swollen-eyed stare. ‘Mios don’t raise their children in family units. By the spawning age (we call it puberty) they are ready for mating. He told me it was unhealthy to have a spawn still under our care. To me, though, she is still a child.’
Jo-Jo stifled a yawn. Family hardships were only one step removed from politics on his personal measure of extreme boredom and avoidance. In his darkened cell even Petalu-Mau was snoring.
But Bethany’s misery continued to tumble out. ‘When we got here I booked a passage planetside. I put my child on it. I told her we were having a holiday but they had made a mistake with the seats and that I would be on the next shuttle down. I went to find Mio to tell him what I had done but the ship shifted. He left me. And I left my child.’
‘Why didn’t you just forget the fish-man and go after your kid?’ Jo-Jo was quite proud of himself for having stayed with the story thus far.
‘I had no lucre. It’s impossible to get work on Dowl... if you’re a woman. The Latinos don’t have any regard for them ... for us.’
‘Oh, they have regard for women, all right,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘They like ‘em plenty as long as they lie on their backs and kick their feet up in their air when they’re told.’ Come to think of it, why have I never picked up a Latino woman? He dismissed that idle thought with a shiver. Friggin’ aristos.
But Bethany wasn’t listening to him. Her eyes were brimming again. ‘They put me in here rather than let me starve.’
‘Then you’ve committed no crime?’
‘Not exactly. Some places they would just call it vagrancy. But there isn’t room on a res-shift station for people with no lucre. And Araldis won’t have me. I tried that...’
Jo-Jo snorted. ‘This place is the crud under the little toenail of the galaxy. Even the judges are in and out of here quicker than an uuli’s flange.’
‘Flange?’
‘Prick.’
Her watery eyes focused in on him. ‘They say the judge had a personal vendetta against you.’
‘You heard that?’ He was surprised.
Bethany flushed a little. It gave her sallow skin an odd tinge. ‘I know the court witness. He brings me extras sometimes.’
‘In return for... ?’
She stiffened. ‘I’m not