Rosamund cheered up considerably. She did like to shop, especially in downtown Agora, where everything was so utterly alien and fascinating. Of course, sometimes it was dangerous, too, like when she’d bought a scarf that tried to strangle her, because it turned out she’d actually purchased a species of snake thatlookedlike a scarf.
Or when she’d leaned in to smell some flowers at a flower shop, and one of them had bitten her on the nose.
How was she to know that she’d just stuck her face right into the face of the Glarfleerara ambassador? She’d thought the tall, swaying flowers were merchandise, not customers. They’d been inpots, for heaven’s sake.
She glanced over at Dot-R. “Can you warn me of any dangerous merchandise that’s being sold by the stores in downtown Agora?” she asked. “Like, say, if I bought a Rarbeelian and tried to wear it as a scarf?”
Dot-R looked at her askance. “Why would you buy a reptile to wear as a scarf? That seems ill-advised. They subdue their prey by asphyxiating them.”
“You’re coming with me,” Rosamund said decisively. “We’re going shopping. Just warn me if I try to buy anything that might bite, strangle, poison or otherwise kill me.”
This was great. She’d buy some new outfits, she could say that she’d looked for Kodran, and there was just about no chance that she would actually find him. Win-win.
“What are we going to buy?” Dot-R asked.
“Whatever you want. What do you like?”
Dot-R brightened. “Can we go to the Bot Swap Shop? That’s where you buy interchangeable parts. I wouldn’t mind a few pairs of new feet. It’s how we senti-bots buy new shoes. Oh, and I could swap out my hair. There’s a retro-fIip that I was thinking of trying.” She patted her metal curls with her hand, making a faint clanging sound.
They made the Bot Swap Shop their first stop. The marketplace in Downtown Agora was a maze of streets lined with shops, their windows crammed with exotic goods from planets, lunar colonies and city-ships across the galaxy. They sold everything from shoes and clothes – some of them designed for people eleven feet tall or with nine legs – to furniture in an equally bewildering range of designs.
Competing with the shops for custom, stalls spilled out onto the streets themselves. These sold mysterious herbs and spices, strange sticky substances in bottles, and miscellaneous weird-looking artifacts whose use Rosamund couldn’t even begin to guess at. The people running these stalls were of all shapes, sizes and species, but they all had one thing in common. Shifty eyes. They spoke to their customers in furtive whispers and kept a wary look-out for the authorities. Most of their goods had probably been brought on-world by the smuggling rings that did a brisk trade between Agora and its moons.
Scattered among these were stalls that sold food and drink. Exotic smells mingled in the air, some fragrant and appetizing, other startling and alien. Rosamund stopped to buy a plasti-paper cone full of a steaming, creamy brown liquid that smelled like expensive chocolate.
As she raised it to her lips, Dot-R said, “I was unaware that humans were able to metabolize Drr’inthian hovercraft fuel.”
Rosamund froze. “Ah…perhaps I’ll save this for later. Drr’inthian hovercraft fuel gives me heartburn first thing in the morning.”
The next time Dot-R looked away, engrossed by a display of sleek metal hairstyles on blank foam heads, Rosamund took advantage of the opportunity to dispose of the cone of liquid in what she assumed was a strangely contoured Dumpster.
It burped as she walked away.
It was a good thing that she had Dot-R with her. The wrist comm was supposed to be a universal translator, but it actually only seemed to translate about twenty percent of known languages, at best. Dot-R had a translator module that was first-rate.
After lunch, they were loaded down with shopping bags and they hadn’t spotted Kodran anywhere. In other words, they were having a great day. They’d rented a floater, which was a kind of hovering shopping cart that would fly back to its shop after they’d dropped off all their purchases. However, the floater was getting overloaded now.
Rosamund decided to head back to her apartment to drop off her things. Then she would go to the office and ask if there were any updates on Kodran’s whereabouts. With any luck, there wouldn’t be.
As she and Dot-R walked alongside their floater, they heard a shriek of outrage coming from the crowd ahead. A woman was hurrying off angrily, looking over her shoulder and glaring at a big blue-skinned Yarl’fa.
When the Yarl’fa spotted Rosamund and Dot-R, he stepped into the middle of the sidewalk and blocked their way.
He looked them up and down and licked his thin white lips. A string of drool leaked out of his mouth.
“Hey, sexy, want to find out what Yarl’fa cock tastes like?” he leered. Unfortunately, Rosamund’s translator apparently worked just fine when it came to Yarl’farian.
Once upon a time, Rosamund would have quailed, turned and run. But for the last year and a half she’d had Talia as a best friend, constantly telling her how great she was, and it had done wonders for her self-confidence.
“Thanks,” she snorted, “I’d rather give myself a home appendectomy with a rusty knife.”
A slender, white-haired girl tried to walk around them, and he reached out and grabbed her butt cheek and squeezed. She leaped back with a shriek, then turned and ran.
“Sorry,” he sneered. “That is how we court women on my world. It is our custom, and therefore you must permit it.”
Part of Rosamund’s training was to study the laws that were common to all planets under the Galactic Federation rule. She knew that it didn’t matter what the customs were on Yarl’fa; ass-grabbing was strictly prohibited on all planets that were part of the Federation. So was any other kind of grabbing, unless a woman had given her express permission.
“Shall I neutralize this penile appendage?” Dot-R asked. She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “I have laser fingers and I am not afraid to use them.”
