Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [36]
In general Jo-Jo liked other sentients well enough, particularly humanesques, as long as he didn’t have to spend too much time with them. He had a particular dislike for some of the slug species on Lucas’s World and found he had a severe allergy to korm odours.
But mostly he preferred his own company.
He washed infrequently, swore aloud when he liked, and kept a substantial array of bizarre recreational flesh-simulations for which no one could reprimand him. His relationship with the hottest sexpot sims of Galaxy Productions was as close to perfect as Jo-Jo could imagine.
In short: he didn’t want a wife.
His closest, most terrifying scrape with a real woman (which had rather set the seal on his bachelorhood) had been on the planet of Ikar. He’d been delivering a Sole recount to a theatrette bulging with Studium smarts. Afterwards, a woman with several degrees, more than her fair share of chins and equally shivery thighs (which he could see through the strips of material that wound around her legs like snakes) asked him to stay behind for a drink. The faint repulsion he felt at her physical appearance was well offset by the swollen credit voucher she waved under his nose.
They drank and caroused vociferously, until Jo-Jo found himself behind rows hess and thess of the theatrette with his face trapped between the woman’s thighs.
‘Can’t breathe,’ he snuffled.
‘I’m assuming that you are having trouble breathing,’ she warbled. ‘I am told that it is the most erotic movement in my repertoire. I can clench for indefinite periods of time given the right mood. And you, God-discoverer, have put me in the mood.’
‘Let go,’ gasped Jo-Jo.
But the smart didn’t seem to hear him.
‘I don’t mean to be forward,’ she continued, ‘but you could be the recipient of other such delights for a small favour. I could be persuaded to perform in a number of ways, including my formidable chin massage—my chins massage you, ha! ha!—in return for an introduction to God.’
Chagrin was too insipid a word to describe how that made Jo-Jo feel. The woman was bribing him with sexual suffocation. Furious and desperate, he resorted to a move told to him by a court-martialled special-forces hermaphrodite on Bosun.
He bit her pubis with all musterable ferocity.
As the smart collapsed in pain, her legs fell apart.
Jo-Jo struggled to his knees and wiped his damp face on the plush theatrette seats. Then he climbed to his feet and ran like fuck.
For months afterwards he had nightmares, which only abated if he drank vodka chasers and played Malconfunk arias after his evening bong.
* * * *
Despite the chin and thigh affair, Jo-Jo’s Sole-wealth bought him another hundred years of rejuve, which fitted in nicely with his desire to continue exploring. As long as he returned periodically to a civilised world with the necessary technology to do a disease appraisal, everything in Jo-Jo’s life was, to use a Cerulean term, hunky-dory.
Then Sole mind-spooked him again.
Jo-Jo took some time to decide that the mind-voice and its pretentiously commanding greeting was real—so to speak. In fact he ignored it until his head reverberated like a tuning fork. With a flash of quick thinking Jo-Jo ordered his shipcom to ‘record and convert patterns to something audible’. The ‘record’ bit was actually redundant. As a precaution against getting so stoned that he couldn’t perform basic ship functions, he’d instructed Salacious II to monitor constantly his neural activity. When his brain turned to mush it administered him a fluid flush and a vitamin boost. The ‘audible’, though, was a better signpost to Jo-Jo’s personality than a Rorschach test. See, Jo-Jo was a person who liked to verbally restate things. If a problem was outside