Unification - Jeri Taylor [48]
She glanced over toward a wall panel where she knew she could catch her reflection, and grabbed a few licks of salt as she did. She looked good enough, she thought. Maybe she was a little heavier than when she was young, but roundness was not necessarily a draw-back; lots of men liked a little bounce in a woman, and Amarie could bounce with the best. Her hair was always neatly done, its black ringlets upswept, and her makeup artfully applied—quickly, too, because her four arms came in handy for more than keyboard playing (and more than a few men would agree with her). Her nose rings were elaborate and artfully inserted; her gown was one of her best—a rose color (quite flattering to her), with just a bit of a sheen to it.
“Amarie, my pumply…” The dreaded voice of Shern, the owner of the hideaway, knifed into her reverie. She glanced up at him with a bored expression. “What, Shem?”
“The patrons they are asleep failing. May we not more music lively be having?”
Shern drove her crazy. In this age of the Universal Translator, there was simply no reason not to use one. Why Shem had to murder the language in his pathetic attempts to be native was beyond her. She hated his thin, scaly face and his unblinking, beady eye. But mostly she loathed him because he held her livelihood in his control, and lately it seemed she could not please him, no matter what. Well, rune him.
“I do my kind of music, Shern. You liked it when you hired me.”
“But the sameness again and again occurs. Is not there some variety possible beingT’
Variety. She could play maybe four thousand sepa-rate melodies, enough to run continuously for several days, and he accused her of not having variety. Annoyed, she grabbed at her salt stick and stuck it in her mouth. “You tell me what you want, Shem, I’ll give it to you. Better than anybody else you could get to do this job for what you’re paying.” The words were a little muffled behind the salt, but she knew he’d get the idea.
“If no there is customers more, job will be continuing not,” he hissed, and, glowering at her portentous-ly, moved off.
Amarie’s second-greatest fear was that she would spend out her days in this runey little hovel, sucking salt and making music, without ever knowing the love of a good man or the fulfillment of children.
Her greatest fear was that she would not spend out her days here, would in fact not spend any more of them here, and be cast out jobless to make her way on Qualor in whatever fashion she could work out. And that would be next to impossible, because she and the weird little runes known as Zakdorn did not get along at all.
She’d never have chosen this place to live; it was light-years from her home planet in more ways than distance. Talemstra, where she’d been born, was inhabited by a peace-loving, creative species, all of whom had four arms and who used them in the pursuit of the arts. Music, sculpture, dance—her people delighted in these activities, and Amarie would give anything if she could get back to them. She’d been abandoned on Zakdorn by her third husband, Nard, a handsome adventurer who had his own starship, but who unfortunately also had a roving eye. He’d left her for a Siblite beauty who was too young for him, and far too thin, and she figured they hadn’t lasted long at all. But in the meantime, she was stuck on Zakdorn.
She hated it here. They were such dull, officious little runes; they had no appreciation for a creative soul. And she was incapable of doing any of the jobs they offered her—she couldn’t deal with columns of numbers and lists of files. Music was all she knew, and if she lost this job she’d be in real trouble. She’d die homeless and friendless on this awful planet, with no one to mourn her passing.
Amarie crunched the last of her salt stick in her mouth and winced as the bitter