Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)(11)

He spied another eatery of the same size and shape. Jojo’s, the sign read. Or it would have, if the pixels on the second. hadn’t been twitching themselves nearly illegible. There was no posted menu. The only other signage displayed the hours of business, which were in Ensk numerals and Ensk numerals only. (Standard time, though. They only used Solar for age, or so he’d been told.) Behind the corral, some folks in algae-stained coveralls wolfed down whatever was for lunch. A group of five or six elderly folks were arguing over a game taking place on an old pixel board. Nobody had any luggage.

Perfect.

No one greeted Sawyer as he walked in. Few looked up. There were two people behind the counter: a wiry young man chopping something, and an imposing middle-aged woman peeling shells off steamed red coaster bugs. The woman was absorbed in a loud vid on a nearby projector – a Martian period drama, it looked like. She cracked each shell segment with speedy precision, without so much as a glance down at her work. Sawyer had no real way of knowing, but he got the unshakable sense that this was her place.

The woman gave a short, mocking laugh. ‘This Solan shit,’ she said in Ensk, shaking her head at the projector. The vid music hit a melodramatic crescendo as a character in a clunky exosuit succumbed to a sandstorm. ‘Why does anybody watch this?’

‘You watch it,’ an old woman piped up from the board game table.

‘It’s like a shipwreck,’ the shell-cracker replied. ‘Once it starts, I can’t look away.’

The scene changed. A tearful group of terraformers sat huddled in their dome. ‘This damned planet,’ one actor cried. He wasn’t about to win any awards for this, but stars, he was trying. ‘This damned planet!’

‘This damned planet!’ the woman repeated, laughing again. Her eyes snapped over as she noticed Sawyer at last. ‘Hey,’ she said, glancing at his bag. ‘What can I get ya?’

Sawyer walked up to the counter. He was more or less fluent in Ensk, having crammed Linking language lessons hard over the past few years, but the only person he’d been able to practise speaking with had been the lady at the shoe shop back home, and her slang was about twenty years out of date. He screwed up his courage, and asked: ‘Do you have a menu?’

Every person in Jojo’s looked up. It took Sawyer a moment to realise – accent. His accent. He didn’t have the distinctive snap of an Exodan, the silky smoothness of a Martian, the muddle of someone who did a lot of bouncing around. His face said Human. His vowels said Harmagian.

The woman blinked. ‘No menu,’ she said. She jerked a thumb back toward the wiry man, still chopping away. ‘It’s ninth day. That means we’ve got twice-round pickle on a quickbun and red coaster stew. Only, we’re out of red coaster stew.’ Exoskeleton crunched between her hands. ‘I gotta make more, and that’s gonna be at least an hour.’

‘Okay,’ Sawyer said. ‘I’ll have the other one.’

‘The pickle?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You ever had twice-round pickle?’

Sawyer grinned. ‘Nope.’

The woman grinned back, but it wasn’t a good grin, not the kind of grin that shook hands with his own. This was a different look, a look that knew something he didn’t. Sawyer felt his mood slip a bit. He was pretty sure the board game crew was still watching him.

‘Okay,’ the woman said. ‘One pickle bun. Comes with tea.’

It took him a second to realise she was asking him a question. ‘Tea would be great.’ She searched for a mug by way of reply. Sawyer took a chance, trying to coax more conversation. ‘Are you Jojo?’

‘No,’ the woman said flatly. ‘Jojo was my mom.’

‘And she was a lot nicer than this one,’ an old man with a pipe added from the back.

‘Ch,’ the woman said, rolling her eyes. ‘You only say that ’cause she slept with you once.’

‘I would’ve thought she was nice even if we hadn’t.’

‘Yeah, well. She always was a sucker for ugly things.’

The board game crew cracked up – the old man in particular – and the woman grinned, a real grin this time. She filled a mug from a large decanter and set it on the counter as the wiry man silently assembled Sawyer’s lunch. Sawyer tried to see what was going into what he’d just ordered, but the man’s body blocked his view. Something was chopped, something was ladled, a few bottles were shaken. Twice-round pickle looked . . . involved.

The woman stared at Sawyer. ‘Oh,’ he said, understanding. He hadn’t paid. He pushed back his wristwrap. ‘Where should I, ah . . .’ He looked around for a scanner.

The woman pursed her lips. ‘Don’t take creds,’ she said.

Sawyer was elated. He’d heard about this – Exodan merchants who operated on barter and barter only. But there was a problem: that was as far as his knowledge of the practice went, and he didn’t know what the protocol was. He waited for her to suggest an acceptable trade. Nothing came. ‘What would be good?’ he asked.

Another short laugh, like the one the sandstorm victim received. ‘I dunno. I dunno what you’ve got.’

Sawyer thought. He’d only brought one bag of essentials and didn’t have much he was willing to part with, not for the sake of a sandwich. He scolded himself for not planning for this with a bag of circuit chips or something. ‘Do you need some help in the kitchen? I could wash dishes.’