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And he's studding himself into their brains so they can't get away from him,
not even into their own heads. That's what his religion is about. That's this
new arrangement he wants to make with the children of Earth."
The knowledge rises in Cowboy's gorge like bile. He takes a breath, swallows.
The sockets in his head burn at the thought of an alien mind riding him.
He shakes his head. His voice quavers. "I'm not dealing with him."
"You can't help them."
"That doesn't mean I have to help him."
He feels her step back. He braces for her whipcrack voice, but her tones are
still low.
"He and Couceiro and those other people...they killed millions. They killed
almost all my family and they put scars on me and on my brother. If I could,
I'd shoot Roon and Couceiro and Grechko and the others in the guts with
soft-nosed bullets and toss them onto anthills to die. But I can't do that."
"I won't..." He shakes his head again, the words fading away completely.
"There's only one difference between Couceiro and Roon, so far as I can see.
Couceiro wants to kill us. Roon will let us live." He feels Sarah's hands on
his shoulders again, heavy as iron, heavy as the Earth.
"That's not it," he says. "I want to stay...clean."
"Lucky Cowboy." For the first time the edge of sarcasm is in her voice. Her
voice drifts lazily to his ears. "Lucky Cowboy and his clean hands. By chance
you had a talent somebody wanted, and now you're able to afford principles.
Good for you."
The weight comes off Cowboy's shoulders and he can hear her pacing behind him.
Her words come in little bursts, run together like gunfire, obeying some
internal sense of rhythm. "There are better ways to live than fucking old men,
but there are some that are a lot worse. Let me tell you..." She steps up
behind him, so close that he can feel her breath on his neck. He tries to
control a tremor.
"My brother is a whore and a junkie. He had some surgery and took a lot of
hormone suppressants to look young, because that's how his customers like
them. The hormone blockers meant he couldn't respond very well, but even that
appeals to a certain kind of taste. But there are other kinds of tastes on the
streets...let's call one of them a taste for reality." The words come slowly,
unstoppably, each with its own impact. Slow bullets. Cowboy wants to shudder
with each one.
"Whores offer fantasy. They get good at figuring out what their customers
want, and how well they latch onto those fantasies has a lot to do with how
well they get paid. It's fake, but most of the customers don't notice, or
care. These other people, the ones who want reality-they care. They want
things to be real. Real sex, real orgasms. Real love, even. And when they
don't get it, they get mad. They want what happens between them and their boy
to be real. Even if they have to torture him to death to get a real reaction.
People like that are called thatch."
"I've heard the word."
"Yeah. You just don't know what it means." He can feel her stepping back.
"Some people are thatch, and that's bad. Some people get killed or hurt by a
thatch, and that's bad. You know what's worse?" She waits for him to answer.
The silence beats at Cowboy's ears. "What's worse,"
Sarah says, "is that a thatch has no end of victims. Because there are people
who are so desperate, or so tired, that they don't care anymore. They don't
take any kind of precautions, because it's just too much trouble to hang onto
a life that's become a pointless, endless misery.
Some even go with a thatch, half hoping they'll die, when doing what's
necessary to stay alive is
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d.txt just too much trouble, because life's just become a pain that won't
stop."
There is another heartbeat of silence.
"That's my brother," Sarah says. "That's Daud."
Cowboy stares out the glass, seeing the long rainbow fingernail-scratch of the
rocket fading, vanishing in the high winds. He finds his voice. "So," he says,
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