Free Matadora by Steve Perry Page B

with him, pounding continuously. She was the lizard and he was the rat, and he never had a chance, for all his size and strength. It seemed like a long time, but Dirisha later reckoned it at about ten seconds.
    When Brute fell, it was like a refuse chute blown down by a lightning bolt.
    He hit the floor hard enough to shake Dirisha, and he did not move to rise.
    The woman stood next to the fallen man for a moment, her legs splayed in a funny-looking squat, her arms and hands held rigid. Then she relaxed and straightened. Her face was serious. She turned to look at Dirisha.
    "Th-thank you," Dirisha began. "That was-was—"
    "—nothing, girl. Don't you have any self-respect? Why are you here? Didn't he have the price?"
    "No, you're wrong, I wasn't good-timing—"
    "No? But you have, haven't you? And you will again. I know you, I've seen you on a dozen worlds. I don't know why I bothered." She turned, to leave the pub.
    "Wait!" Dirisha called. "I-I want to—I need to..." she stopped. What, Dirisha? What do you want to say? She's right, isn't she?
    No!
    Yes.
    As she watched the small woman exit, Dirisha had a moment of clarity, a vision of what her life would be like: she would meet this man in one of his many forms, and paid or not, he would use her, as he had been about to do.
    Who would save her, then? Would she grow used to it, like her older sister and mother had done? Learn to pop dorph for the pain when one of the dink-dorks abused her? File routine complaints with the Guild, like the others did?
    Would she elect to have four or five children, to help pay the overhead, like her mother did? Carefully ease them into the business, to give herself a rest after ten or twenty years of selling herself to anybody with the price?
    Yes, that was what she could do. That was all she could do, she was unprepared for anything else. What she had been looking forward to a few minutes ago now seemed a finite and futile line straight to the final chill. She was fifteen, she saw the end of the ride, and it was unbearably ugly.
    Unbearably ugly.
    No! She would get out! Get offworld, learn something else—!
    What? How?
    Dirisha looked at the fallen forms of the two men, Brute and Colin. The younger man was as a child, she knew, he could be... handled. There had to be a way. There had to be a way.

CHAPTER NINE
    DIRISHA LAY ON her back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Geneva lay next to her, propped on one elbow, gently rubbing the older woman's flat stomach.
    "What happened then?" the blonde asked quietly.
    Dirisha blinked, turned slightly to look at the woman who loved her, and sighed. "What happened? I helped Colin up from the rec-chem pub's floor, brushed him off, then took him to a cheap quick-crib and seduced him. I was his third woman, I think, and certainly his best. I made sure of that. His ship was berthed for a month; I had that long to get from him what I had to have: knowledge. I traded my fifteen year-old body for as much as I could get him to teach me. He duped a disk from his ship—the Go Placid, I'll never forget the freighter's logo, it lit every time the holoproj accessed the damned program—and that's where I got my secondary education, from that disk.
    Colin helped me set it up, he helped me start learning it, but it took two years of real-time before I could self-test a ninety percent on it. Colin was long gone, of course, but he'd been well-paid for his efforts. And by seventeen, I had a little more knowledge about the galaxy."
    "What were you doing for... I mean, how did you ... manage?"
    "To survive? I joined the Guild. Became a good-timer. But I knew it was only temporary. When I turned seventeen, I left the Guild and got a job—room and board and classes— in a local dojo. I started the study of Oppugnate, my first Art. I didn't have any money, I busted my butt, but I wasn't sexing boozed or stoned shippers. I was learning a skill which would buy my way out, I used it right. I knew it could be done—that