Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [7]
‘Godhead, have you ever done something that made you wish you were dead and yet you’ve known that you can’t take such an easy way out before you try and set things right?’
Tekton had no answer. Her heartfelt manner had taken him aback. He was not used to such ingenuousness. There was no melodrama with Bethany Ionil.
She hunched her shoulders and stabbed at the mussels on the plate before her with a tiny silver fork. ‘Josef says that everyone does things that they regret, but I don’t believe him. Not things they would die over.’
‘Perhaps your friend’s experience is more expansive than yours? You may think yours the worst of mistakes but in fact it is not.’ Tekton, to his surprise, found himself speaking gently. Supportively.
Get a grip, fool. Free-mind was in a feisty mood.
‘What can be worse than abandoning your own child? I’m really not sure of much any more. In fact I am sure of only one thing ... I will do anything to rescue my child from that planet.’ The direct look again. ‘Can you help me?’
She loaded the last four words with so much emotion that Tekton excused himself to attend to his ablutions and digest the situation.
He vacillated between amusement and chagrin. He had thought to lure the thin woman to him and use her against her brother, but here she was attempting to use him instead.
He’d been trumped.
The notion rather dampened Tekton’s appetite for seduction.
He returned to the table and told his moud to request brandy. It was no longer a champagne type of evening.
Their conversation continued into the shipboard evening. Bethany answered Tekton’s questions with candour, showing not the slightest effects of the brandy that was making him drowsy.
She’s drinking you under the table, said logic-mind. But the warning seemed to come from the end of a long, long tunnel.
‘What brought you to Rho Junction, Godhead?’ asked Bethany.
‘My project. I intend to build beauty.’ Tekton would have explained it more elegantly if his tongue had not been so thickened with alcohol.
‘Beauty,’ said Bethany mildly. ‘Is beauty as subjective as our culture would have you believe, do you think?’
Tekton felt a rush of akula at the introduction of one of his favourite topics. ‘Beauty is universal,’ he declared with vehemence. ‘I will create something that will make you weep for its perfection and writhe for its passion.’
‘A noble and worthy cause, I imagine, but - pardon my ignorance of artistry - why would you feel it necessary to do such a thing?’
‘For the glory, of course. I will be the foremost tyro,’ Tekton replied without thought. ‘I will win the Entity’s favours.’
Fool! both minds cried at once.
Their emphatic rejoinder sobered Tekton somewhat. He had talked far too much.
Moud! Chilled water!
JO-JO RASTEROVICH
Jo-Jo lay on his bed, in his cabin, in a maudlin fug fuelled by some of Carnage Farr’s most brutal home-grown whisky. Some of his misery he could attribute to the strains and scrapes from his last-moment attempt to get on board the biozoon. Another portion of it was due to the chronic allergy reaction that seemed to have settled into his airways and the nagging worry that Carnage Farr had given him a dose of something lethal. The major part, however, fell squarely on the shoulders of Mira Fedor.
Where in all God’s hells had the Extros taken her? And why? Jo-Jo just couldn’t figure it out.
Underneath the maudlin, though, was a simmering soup of other emotions; the foremost of which revolved around Rast Randall. The mercenary had left Fedor alone when she should have been watching her. Jo-Jo wanted to split Randall from orifice to orifice for her neglect, yet he couldn’t. For a start, she knew Mira Fedor best. He needed her to help find the Baronessa. But also the mercenary had admitted something to him. Loves a bitch, ain’t she? she’d said.
She hadn’t levelled that just at Jo-Jo.
Randall was in love with Fedor as well.
It should be amusing. Really it should.
But