Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read Online Free Page B

them in and let me look them over.’ She drew her heel back to the cushion and put her arms across her knees.
    ‘And I have.’ The man coughed again. ‘I have. Therethey are … but I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s irregular, and it’s illegal, and –’
    ‘I’ll tell you why you’re doing it.’ The smile softened on her dark face. ‘The economy in over a third of the equatorial geosectors is failing. Neither the political swing towards the extreme Yellow, the insurgent Crazy-Greys, nor the Free-Informationist backlash is going to mean a return to the soft-money economy that will benefit any of the polar projects, north or south. I took a look at the shape your rat cage was in before I came inside. Hot stars and cold magma! You men haven’t been properly staffed in three years, and getting rid of another mouth to feed – even a rat’s – is going to be more help than hindrance. You know it. I know it. And that’s why you’ll do it –’
    He didn’t know why she paused, but he expected her to pick up her discarded mask and put it back on now: that’s what the women on the projection screen at Muct had always done after they paused meaningfully. But that had been years ago, somewhere else in the world.
    This woman still smiled, face still bare.
    The masked man behind the desk took a silent breath. White hair moved on his chest under his shirt’s soiled net. ‘You’re quite a woman.’
    ‘I’m quite a bitch.’ She threw back her head, and her hair, which was dark and wiry, did not swing. ‘That’s how you’ll say it when I’m gone. Say it to me that way now.’
    Behind the swinging fragments, the man coughed again. ‘Well. I guess you are.’ He rose, stepping from behind the desk. ‘A bitch. At any rate. These are the ones I can let you choose from.’
    She turned on the cushion, rising to her knees. She had an expression of great concentration now, an expression the women in the projected stories never wore. Afterseconds she stood. ‘I told you I was interested in males.’ She touched her chin with her fingertips, moving them a little as if scratching some half-felt itch. She was a good head-and-a-half taller than the man in charge.
    ‘Well, we have more females here.’ The man shrugged. ‘These are the ones we can spare.’
    ‘Mmmm,’ she said, as though she knew that already. Then she said: ‘Which more or less limits me to this one. Tell me –’ She turned to face him – ‘are you ready to come away with me to strange climes and stranger lands and be my slave for ever, to obey my every command, to fulfil any and every whim and caprice I should articulate, no matter how debased or lascivious?’
    He did not know what ‘articulate’ or ‘lascivious’ or some of the other words meant. ‘Yeah …?…?’
    The man in charge coughed once more.
    The woman chuckled over her shoulder. ‘That was mostly for your benefit. He isn’t exactly what I pictured, I admit.’ She turned back, reached forward, touched his naked cheek, grimacing as if she questioned some terribly important point to which he was oblivious. ‘But you’ll do. You’ll have to, won’t you? It’s cut into your brain now, that you’ll do … do what I say.’ Her hand fell from his face, a finger brushing his collar bone in the fall. ‘How much do you want for him?’ She turned to the man in charge and, stepping over fallen cubes in her scuffed sandals, took out a coil of silver string from her leggings pocket and began to unroll it, silent lips counting the evenly spaced black beads along it to which cubes could be clipped.
    The man mentioned a price so far above twenty-eight SI units, he simply decided that they weren’t discussing him after all.
    The woman kept wrapping silver around her fist, kept counting. Finally she popped the credit cord, rolled itfrom her palm with her thumb, and put the SI payment on the desk. ‘You know you’re over-charging me by even more than some black market slaver