But all that had proliferated into their files thus far was mail, the stack of which, even from ships that had long since left port, equaled the translation. And with the comp set to rouse them for fire, collision, and interstellar war, she reckoned they knew enough. She added one more alarm word from her console: contract, and on a stray thought, added No’shto-shti-stlen.
And headed for her own quarters and for bed, tired, gods, yes.
Until her back met the mattress and her head hit the pillows. Then every detail of the day wanted to come back and replay itself behind her eyelids.
Kifish guards. That brought her eyes open, and she tried to think of something else, anything else, bright things, full of color, like the clan estate on Anuurn, with the golden fields and green forest and rolling hills.
But that did no good. She wound up thinking about family politics, remembering her father, wishing that the time-stretches that spun out her star-jumping youth had somehow reached planetside, and extended Kohan Chanur’s life. But the years had caught up with him—not a fight with some upstart, thank the gods. His daughter and his sisters and his nieces had kept the young would-bes away, had given him a peaceful old age. No one but time had defeated him. He had just not waked one morning.
Meanwhile her husband, na Korin nef Sfaura, thought he was going to move into Chanur. Pick a husband with brains and muscle and you got the hormones that went with it, you got a husband with ideas, and Hilfy Chanur had spent sleepless nights telling herself there were reasons to abide by the old customs, that shooting Korin Sfaura, while a solution on the docks at Kshshti, was not a solution on Chanur’s borders, with a neighboring clan.
Not unless one wanted to crack the amphictiony wide open, and see war on Anuurn.
Gods-rotted bastard he had turned out to be. But the male-on-male fighting men learned for territory had a few things still to learn from Kshshti docks. Korin had limped out of Chanur territory, half-wed and vowing revenge, and by the time he’d made another try, cousin Harun had come in as lord Chanur … big lad, Harun. Rhean had searched the outback to find him and get him home, out of his wilderness exile. Best fighter they could find, best lord of household, for a clan taking a lot of challenges. Of all the lads that had come home at Kohan’s invitation, and some of them even settled inside Chanur walls, Harun … was not one of that liberal, easy-going number. Ask any of the males he had sent packing, including the ones born to Chanur. A hani of the old school—hair-triggered—thick-skulled …
But it had taken him to rid the clan once for all of what she had brought home, and detest and despise na Harun Chanur as she did, and know, as she did, that Rhean had brought him home precisely to counter aunt Py’s influence … she had to think that he might be the right hani for the times; because Pyanfar’s gallivanting about and Pyanfar’s naming her head of clan had certainly raised the hair on a number of conservative backs. Change happened and you thought it was forever, and immediately there were all the enemies of that change making common cause and meeting in the cloakrooms.
And there were all the victims of that change—dead, like poor bookish Dahan Chanur, who had died for nothing more than wanting to collect his notebooks. Gods-rotted thick-headed Harun had ordered him out, Dahan had said something about his notes, headed back for his room, and Harun had flung him into a wall.
That was the lord of Chanur now. And she had done Rhean’s daughter out of the Legacy, and some didn’t forgive her for pulling rank and spending her ascendency as clan head as an absentee.
Truth be told, she was guilty of everything they said at home. Aunt Rhean was disgusted with her. High and wide she’d fouled it up, mate-picking and house-running … parted company with aunt Py, that day on Anuurn docks. And aunt Py …
Ex-clan-head Pyanfar Chanur had said, being lately hailed grand high whatever of everywhere civilized, and leaving Anuurn’s dust for good.
Aunt Py had said, Responsibility, Hilfy. Jabbing her with an attention-getting claw. I can’t go down there again. It’d be war. And every enemy I have—listen to me!
Another jab, and a grab, because she’d tried to walk out on Pyanfar, and nobody did that.
Every enemy I have on Anuurn will try to break the clan. That’s the only revenge they can get on me. I want you to go down there, take the responsibility I gods-rotted carried, do your marrying … Kohan’s not going to hold out forever … and get somebody in his place that can hold on to what he helped build. Do you hear me, Hilfy Chanur?
Gods-rotted right she’d heard her. Pyanfar talking about Kohan as if he was already dead, just to be written off; Pyanfar telling her to go down there and make a baby or two, when Py’s own offspring in Mahn had been trouble from birth … tell her about handling her responsibilities to the clan, when Pyanfar was off with her ship and her crew and everything in the universe that mattered to her.
Py wanted her off her ship and away from Tully, was the bare-faced truth. Go fall in love with your own species, kid. Tully’s all right for Chur and Geran, and Haral and Tirun and anybody else who wants a roll in the bunk, but don’t even think of the heir of Chanur in that picture.
Go make babies downworld. Go find some muscle-bound, ambitious son of a clan you trusted, that you have to get some other muscle-bound dimwit cousin to get rid of. It’s a tradition.
It’s a gods-be tradition we kill the ones like Dahan and keep the ones like Harun.
And all the lost young lads who believed in Chanur’s taking men onto ships, all the hundreds of young lads who with stars in their eyes had begged and bribed their way up to space, where they’d be free of tradition … what did they meet, and where were they, and what became of them, on the ships they’d gone to?
She tossed over onto her face and mangled the pillow, thinking about a human face and a place she didn’t want to think about, ammonia-stink that she still smelled in her dreams. Sodium lights and kifish laughter. And Tully’d collected the worst of it, because Tully was a novelty. Tully’d escaped them once and they had something to prove… .
They’d come through that, and come through war and fire, and Pyanfar had said …
You’ll only do him harm.
Damned if Pyanfar knew that. Damned if Pyanfar cared whether she knew what had gone on between them: Pyanfar had cared whether she took up the burden of the clan, and Chanur’s politics downworld said there’d been scandal enough—Chanur’s heir had to be something the old women downworld could deal with, and accept, and politic with.
She couldn’t deal with it. She wouldn’t deal with it. The hypocrisy gagged her. And the hypocrisy of We have to change our ways, and Men aren’t educated to make decisions, and This generation has to pass—
So Dahan was dead and Harun was lord Chanur, and a hani ship took a naive kid aboard and left him, at the farthest point hani traded, because he wasn’t educated to think and wasn’t educated to handle strangers, and because every species in the Compact believed that hani males were helpless, instinctual killers.
Gods rot the way things worked! Gods rot the old women who made the rules and the captain that had pulled a ship out with a crewman in kifish hands! Gods rot Pyanfar Chanur, whose powers extended to every godsforsaken end of the Compact and beyond … and who couldn’t do justice in her own clan!
She pounded the pillow shapeless, she thought of the kid she’d received out of the hands of kifish guards, she thought of a big, good-looking lad who’d probably paid the obvious for his passage, and she thought bitter thoughts of what was probably going through her crew’s heads … months away from home port and the sight and sound of a male voice.
She hated to make an issue. She probably should give a plain and clear hands-off order: Don’t scare the kid. Don’t crowd him. Where he’s been—
She flung herself out of bed, crossed the room in the dark and found the bathroom door cold blind. Washed her face in the dark, washed her mane and her neck and her hands and stood there with her ears flat and her nostrils shut and told herself it was her
cabin, her own ship and she had no need to think tonight about that place, or to remember the stink and the look on Tully’s human face.
She did not need the light. She felt her way to the shower and shut the cabinet door behind her, turned on the water and let the jets hit her face and her shoulders, hit the soap button and scrubbed and scrubbed, until she could smell nothing but the soap and her own wet fur, until she was warm through and through and she could stand a while against the shower wall while the heated, drying air cycled.
She could forget them, then. She could forget that place, and tell herself the lights if they came on would be the spectrum of Anuurn’s own yellow sun; and the voices if she should call on them would be those of the Legacy’s crew, cousins and kin she could rely on, kin from Chanur itself, and Chihin and young Fala Anify, Geran’s and Chur’s cousins, of the hill sept.
Not unreasonable women. Not fools, not political, not planetbound in their thinking, not any of those things she had met downworld. Believers in Pyanfar’s ideas … gods, could she ever escape them? But trust her crew? With her life, with her sanity. Lean on their advice? Often.
Risk their lives, on this wild hope of proving Rhean and the rest of them wrong, paying out the Legacy’s costs and putting the clan on a footing financially that owed not a gods-be thing to Pyanfar Chanur? If she signed that stsho contract, there was a chance that she might go back to Anuurn solvent and independent of debt.
A chance, too, that she might so compromise herself that Chanur could not redeem her, not financially, not in reputation.
Hilfy Chanur did not intend to come home begging for resources. Hilfy Chanur did not intend to make her way on her aunt’s influence, her aunt’s reputation, or her aunt’s decisions. That was what she decided.
Sign the contract. Take the chance. What would aunt Pyanfar do?
Far more foolish things. Far crazier chances. Aunt Pyanfar had risked Chanur and everything they owned for a principle.
Was that not mad … when no one else of her acquaintance gave a damn—and hani did as hani had always done?
He had not slept, truly slept, in very long; and having a comfortable bed and only the whisper of air from the ducts, he had hardly needed do more than lie down and shut his eyes before he was gone.
He tried to think about things, but they escaped him. He tried to worry about where he was and where he was going, but he simply fell unconscious.
He waked after that in the disorientation of some unfamiliar sound and an unfamiliar cabin—he found he had left the lights on, and wanted to do something about it, but his eyes shut again and he burrowed under the covers and forgot about it on the instant. The next time he waked, he lay thinking about it, and realizing his eyes were tired of the light, and thinking that he ought to get up and do something, but he threw the covers back over his head and was gone again.
The third time he realized someone was in the room, and he took fright and lifted his head.
“Sorry,” the crewwoman said—one of the senior two, his scrambled wits could not recall her except as Chanur clan. His fright did not go away. She seemed friendly enough, but he was in strange territory, with strangers he had to get along with.
“Go back to sleep if you like.” She opened the closet, took his breeches off the hook and took a quick several measurements while he blinked stupidly at the embarrassing proceedings and decided it was something about the clothing he didn’t have.
“Going to need a special order on this,” she said.—Tiar was the name, he could recall it now. Tiar. Chihin. Hilfy Chanur. Someone else he couldn’t recall, the small one, the young one … “Do you some kifish outfits, stsho, whatever you like, no trouble. Even mahen stuff. Not hani. I can’t even swear we can find blue. I’ll do the best I can.”
“Thank you,” he said uncertainly. Something seemed called for, however awkward the circumstances. And it got a pursing of the mouth, a twinkle in the spacer’s eye.
“Hey. You’re safe here. Relax.”
He wanted to think so. He remembered Pyanfar Chanur. He remembered every time things got truly bad, that she had taken time to talk to him, and she had encouraged him.
It was a Chanur ship. That was the realization in which he had fallen asleep, and the reality to which he waked. It had all the attributes of a dream, that it was improbable, it arrived out of nowhere, and it promised him everything he couldn’t likely have and couldn’t hope for.
He truly wanted Tiar Chanur to like him—most of all, to think of him as a spacer. He watched the door shut, and thought that he shouldn’t lie here like a lump, he should get up and make up his bunk and be ready to do something around the ship. He wanted to make the best impression he could on Hilfy Chanur. So he got himself out of bed, hoping no one would open the door unannounced, and showered and dressed in the only pair of breeches he had, everything else being on the Sun. He made his bed meticulously.
But when he went to go out, the door was locked.
He tried it a second time, to be certain. His heart sank, and he debated whether to try the intercom and appeal to be let out, but they knew he was here and they surely knew why they had locked the door.
So, with nothing to do, he sat down on the carefully made bed and stared at the furnishings, listening to the sounds that a ship had even when it was at dock, the rush of air in the ducts, the thumps and occasional cyclings of hydraulics. He had no breakfast. Which he supposed they might omit, thinking he was still asleep. But he had looked forward very much to familiar food. He had thrown up most everything they had given him in the jail, and there was nothing available here but water—which at least did not smell of ammonia, there was that to be glad of.
He listened to the sounds of the cans moving out of the hold. He heard the hatch cycle more than once. Finally he lay down and stared at the ceiling, trying not to despair. He did not want to think about his situation. It was like the jail. It was better if you didn’t think there, either, or wonder about things.
He did not need to wonder about his ship. He had every certainty where it was, in hyperspace, bound for Hoas. He had every certainty why it had left him, and he supposed now he should not have been surprised. If he were back on Anuurn, he would have had to quit the house, because when boys grew up, they had to leave. They had to go out into the outback to live, learn to hunt and to fight each other and if boys lived long enough they could come back and try to drive some older man out into the outback to die. If the man’s wives and sisters didn’t beat him to death before he got a chance to challenge one on one.
That was what he had been headed for. That had been the order of things forever. There were always too many boys and most of them died. But Pyanfar Chanur’s taking Khym Mahn into space, her moral victory over the han and its policies, and her outright defiance of the law and the custom … had given him a chance at the stars, at … freedom.
Well, it was freer than shivering in the rain and killing to eat and to live. Freer than getting beaten off and driven off and told he was crazy because he was male.
He didn’t think he was crazy. He thought he did a fair job of holding his temper. He hadn’t meant to hit the kif. He’d only wanted away.
Probably, though, the captain had heard the story from the police and the station authorities, and that was why the door was locked. So he could get out of this. He just had to be quiet and patient and not cause any trouble, and prove to the captain that he’d learned something in his apprenticeship aboard the Sun.
Hilfy Chanur was Pyanfar’s niece. She was one of the crew that had fought at Anuurn. She was one of the ones that had changed the world. She wouldn’t do what wasn’t fair. She wouldn’t judge him without giving him a chance. She wouldn’t just put him off somewhere, or send him home.
He would rather die than go home. Not after … after all he’d learned, and worked for, and seen existing just outside his reach.
Granted he hadn’t fitted in. The crew of the Sun had accepted him, slowly—well, they were on the way to ac
cepting him. He tried to outlast their opinions, and they were almost, sort of beginning to take him for granted once they’d gotten used to the idea of having a male aboard. He’d gotten them to show him things, he’d done the best he could, he’d studied everything he could get his hands on, and he’d been getting better, in spite of the growth spurt he’d put on.
He hadn’t lost his temper. They’d played jokes on him, but that was just to see how he would react, it was just because he was there and he was different, and he’d proved he could take it. He’d only slipped up the once—
On the docks. Which was bad. That was really bad, and the captain had a right to be mad. But he’d gotten control of himself. He’d not hit anybody else, not even when they arrested him.
Truth was, he’d been scared, not mad. He’d been dreadfully scared. And that feeling was back with him as if it had never left.
The translator was on the fourth from-scratch pass. The legal program was on its second. If this kept up, Hilfy thought, they were going to have to put in an order for another carton of paper. She hated the hand-slate. You took notes on it and it just got messier and spread the information you were working with further and further apart. And you couldn’t punch marks in it or turn down the corners or take notes on the back.
Paper, she keyed to the Do List. The thick stuff. It massed more but it didn’t fold up while one was reading or note-making. And she had done a lot of reading this morning, while the loaders were clanking and thumping away under Fala’s and Chihin’s supervision. Meanwhile Tarras was tucked down with the datadump from station files, looking for information—who might take the transship cans, who had what for sale and what the futures list and the methane-folk routings looked like.