Far leap of logic. But Tarras wasn’t a shallow thinker. And couldn’t be led off.
“Honestly, no. I don’t say Pyanfar’s not crossed the path of this deal, but there aren’t any orders, I don’t know where she is—No’shto-shti-stlen, may he rot, said she was off in deep dark nowhere, and would we take this boy and would we take this marvelous deal he had? It was my judgment to take it. It looked reasonable at the time. It isn’t. But that gods-cursed thing has a double indemnity clause, for value and shipping fee. We’re stuck. We are quite thoroughly stuck, Tarras, it’s my fault, my bad decision to deal with that son, knowing he’s a canny old stsho and a politician, and here we are. If we get out of this alive and unbanished, I’m taking no contracts but steel plate and frozen foodstuffs, I’m through with exotics, and you can write that one down to the captain’s youthful foolishness. I don’t want to lose you. I for gods-rotted certain don’t want you to walk off the ship here: it’s not a safe place.”
Tarras stood there looking troubled, ears sinking to a backward slant. “I’m not walking out,” she said, as if she’d been misunderstood all along. “I’m not complaining about the deal, I just wanted to know if there was something we didn’t know.”
“I’m not Pyanfar’s. I never was Pyanfar’s. Does the crew think that?”
“It was my question. I don’t say you’d want to lie to us. But, yes, there’s been a little question. In some quarters.”
“How I got the command, you mean.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Py’s guilty conscience.”
“Huh?”
“How I got this ship.” Things came clear to her even while she was talking, absolute clear insight. “She trained me. She knew how I’d react. She wanted me as clan head, at least enough to counter Rhean, who’s good where she is.” She was perfectly aware she was talking to one of Rhean’s former crew. And maligning a closer kin to Tarras than she or Pyanfar was. “I’m a radical lunatic. Rhean’s solid conservative. She hates the han but she’d back it against the universe. And I’ve peculiar foreign tastes, Anuurn knows that. As long as I’m clan head, the han knows Chanur’s led by a depraved young radical. They cooperate with Rhean. Anything, so long as Hilfy Chanur doesn’t come home.” She shrugged. “Rhean and I get along fairly well, actually. We agree on finances. We agree I should be out here. That’s quite a lot.”
Tarras might have taken umbrage at that. Tarras merely tightened her lip in irony, acceptance of a Situation neither of them could mend: that was the way Hilfy read it, and she generally could read Tarras.
“Aye, captain,” Tarras said. “That’s all right.”
“I want you,” she said, lest there be any mistaken doubt whatsoever. “I need you, Tarras. But I respect your other obligations.”
“I’m all right,” Tarras said. “The rest of us are. It’s just—we needed to know we know.”
Ker Chihin was hurting, Hallan could tell that. But she wouldn’t stay out of action on the dockside. She kept walking back and forth, overseeing everything, talking to the mahendo’sat in the pidgin, which Hallan couldn’t speak, beyond a few words.
He only tried to anticipate what she was going to want, and what was right and what was wrong. He personally, with gestures and his lame command of the Trade, insisted the loaders park on the mark, and the loader kept going without jamming. That was the best help he knew how to be, and ker Chihin didn’t disapprove it. She finally sat down on the rampway railing and watched, and he took over watching the mahen foreman’s check-off on the manifest—brought it back for her approval when they had completed the number two cold hold, and Chihin looked it over minutely and cast looks at the cans last on the truck.
“All right,” she said grudgingly, signed it, and he took it back to the docker chief and the customs representative, full of the excitement that came of doing something real and useful, and actually dealing with the mahendo’sat himself, talking and being talked to by outsiders—a very queasy, scary situation, if he believed what he’d been taught at home; but it was what he had to do if he ever hoped to find his place among spacers, and the Legacy gave him his first real chance.
“You not damn bad,” the docker chief admitted. “Not crazy.”
“No, sir,” he said. “I’m a licensed spacer.”
They said something among themselves. Not all of them spoke the pidgin. But they didn’t laugh at him, so far as he could detect. And he felt it a delicious wickedness, to be actually making sense to them, and answering a point of debate, which ordinarily a sister would step forward to do in his stead.
He took the completed form back to Chihin and then went back and told them to signal the next load, which was the number three cold hold, and listed for … he could make it out … Ebadi Transshippers. “All fine, do,” the foreman said without quibble, and shouted at his workers. He trekked back to Chihin to say that was what he had just done—she growled at him, but not angry at what he had done, he felt that, only at being asked a needless neo question.
“You’re going to wear a track in the deck,” she said. “Sit down. They’re doing all right. They understood you about parking on the line.”
“You speak it?”
“I understand it,” she said, and indicated the spot beside her. “Sit. Stay out of their way.”
He sat. Chihin didn’t sound annoyed, only tired. She said, “We’ve got cargo coming in. It’s Kefk we’re going to. You know about Kefk?”
“I know it’s on the kifish side.”
“It’s not a good place. I’ve never been there. But it’s not a place I ever wanted to go.”
“I’d go anywhere,” he said, consciously pleading his case with her. “If there’s a chance I won’t come back … that’s better than home.”
“Is it?” Clearly Chihin didn’t think so.
“I’m not a fighter. I’m really not. Not for—for what I’d have to fight for if I stayed on Anuurn.”
“Is this better?” Chihin asked. He was surprised at Chihin talking seriously with him at all. But it wasn’t asking if Chihin was going to reason long with him. He said only the short answer.
“I want to be here.”
Chihin was quiet after that. He thought he had exhausted her patience and his welcome, and he should get up and go be useful, somehow. But Chihin reached out and caught his wrist with the hand that worked.
He didn’t know what she wanted. He stared at Chihin for what felt like a long, uncomfortable time, and Chihin said,
“You kept your head. You did all right under fire.”
“Thank you, ker Chihin.”
“I don’t like your being here,” she said bluntly.
“I know that.”
She let go his hand. She didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “What do you want? What do you really want?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You want to be out here? You want to spend your whole life running from port to port, with debt at your tail? Or did you think you were going to get rich and be lord of the spaceways?”
“If I knew I could be lord Meras, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t want what’s down there. I want to be here.”
“You’re a fool.”
“They’ve told me that. But I want it. I don’t mind being junior. I am. I just want to be here.”
“You tell me that the other side of Kefk.”
“I will. I promise you I will, ker Chihin. There’s nothing ever going to change my mind.”
“Kid. The captain wants you out of here.”
It hurt. He’d almost hoped. He kept a polite expression all the same.
“Most ships,” she said, “are going to want you out of here.”
“I’ll find someone,” he said.
“You can’t work dockside. Stations aren’t going to want you.”
He shrugged, said, with a leaden feeling, “I’ll find a way.”
“It’s sense to go home.”
“No, it isn’t. I don’t want to go back there. It’s
not sense to do what you don’t want.”
“Ships have their ways of getting along. Hard enough for any outsider to come in. The Pride was … under duress. You’ve got to understand. We get called to station, sometimes in the middle of the night, you haven’t got time to dress … I mean, it’s a thousand things like that… .”
“I don’t mind.”
“Yeah. Well, others do. People talk. And heads have to be cracked for it, I mean, you get no respect if you let somebody make a remark, you know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the problem. Shit. —Look at you, your ears are flat.”
He brought them up with a mindful effort, started to get up to excuse himself and get back to work, but Chihin took hold of his arm.
“You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ker Chihin.”
Chihin’s ears went down and then to half. She was looking him in the face and he stared right back.
“‘Yeah, Chihin,”’ she said.
“Yeah.”
She had let him go, having made her point. He started a second time to get up, and a second time she stopped him.
“Kid. I don’t know it will do a bit of good, but I’m going to talk to the captain, say maybe we should do a wait-see. Mind, she might not go with it. But in my book you earned a chance at it. Not because you hauled me out. But because if you hadn’t, a couple more of us might have been fools.”
With Chihin you often had to replay things to figure out if they added up to favorable. And it seemed that way. He didn’t know what to think: she was canny and she was sharp and he was afraid of her jokes.
“You probably could be lord Meras,” she said. “If you wanted to.”
He shook his head. “Not me. No.”
“Your papa approve what you’re doing?”
Another shake of his head.
She patted his leg, which he wouldn’t have liked, but it was more like a dismissal: Go away, kid. Behave yourself.
He liked Chihin more for that. He got up and went back to work, feeling her watching him, weighing what he did, approving or disapproving. And, gods, he wanted to do just competently well—flashiness didn’t impress Chihin. She’d made that clear, about the rescue. Just common sense. Just doing what you were supposed to do, consistently right. And it made sense to him, the way no one else in the universe had, not ker Hilfy, not Tiar, not Fala nor Tarras nor his mother or his sisters. Just do your job and be right.
He thought he could do that. He had a real hope of that, if that was the mark he had to reach.
… If the party receiving the goods be not the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1, and have valid claim as demonstrated in Subsection 36 of Section 25, then it shall be the reasonable obligation of the party accepting the contract to ascertain whether the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 shall exist in Subsequent or in Consequent or in Postconsequent; however, this clause shall in no wise be deemed to invalidate the claim of the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 or 2, or in any clause thereunto appended, except if it shall be determined by the party accepting the contract to pertain to a person or Subsequent or Consequent identified and stipulated to by the provisions of Section 5…
It didn’t read any better now than then. And subsection 3 section 1 and 2 and clauses thereunto appended made it abundantly clear: the Preciousness went to Kefk.
And the captain went down to the lower deck, to gtst excellency’s quarters.
She made her presence known at the door. She received no word from inside. She stood waiting.
There were enough disasters. She opened the door, stsho willing or stsho not, and stared in momentary bewilderment at the drapery spread above the bowl-chair.
It was decidedly occupied. It was decidedly not the moment to call a conference. Stsho were notoriously touchy in personal matters.
That gtst excellency and gtst companion Dlimas-lyi were bound for Kefk was a matter gtst excellency might care to know about. But the captain decided gtst excellency could find out about it later.
The captain prudently closed the door, mission not accomplished, question not asked.
Is there a plausible lie I can tell Haisi Ana-kehnandian?
So let Ana-kehnandian wait to be told anything. He was loading up the message board, demanding to speak to her directly.
But the captain had things to occupy her. The captain had to get them out of port before the lawsuits started, as they could, the mahendo’sat being a litigious lot.
That they’d used firearms surely had circulated in the rumor market; and a lie was an unreliable weapon—gtst excellency’s weapon, if gtst chose to use it; and a very dangerous thing in the hands of a hani with no notion what it meant.
She had never thought she might look on Kefk as a refuge.
Everything was ahead of schedule. The loader hadn’t jammed, ker Tiar was insisting she could keep at it, she was getting used to the ice, and she could go into the heated observation room, seeing that the loader was running without a glitch. The cans just kept locking through the rotary platform and the arm kept picking them up and putting them on the chain and the chain kept rolling, delivering them to the arm that delivered them to the waiting trucks.
“I think you fixed this gods-be loader,” Tiar said.
Hallan was very proud of that. Ker Chihin was going to talk to the captain, Tiar said he’d actually solved something instead of destroying something, and he knew Fala would vote for him. And Tarras had tended to. He had real hope, real hope. He just prayed the gods of every persuasion not to let anything happen, just let him finish one job that didn’t blow up in his face.
Then a one-can truck showed up, with its load, coming back to the Legacy’s dockside. The mahen driver got out and talked with the foreman, talked with customs, mahendo’sat (it was always the species name when you were talking about more than one) were waving their arms and saying not a word he understood. Ker Chihin was on her feet, but he was closer, and he had the tablet which might tell the story. He didn’t think a proper spacer would hang back and wait for his supervisor, it wasn’t a male/female business, it was a can trying to come back as damaged or wrongly addressed or not cleared or something, and he didn’t want Chihin to have to solve a problem he’d created. He walked up to the shouting mahendo’sat with his tablet and his manifest list.
“Excuse,” he said. “Got list. All right, not all right, why?”
He was reasonably proud of that sentence.
But they waved arms and shouted at him. He looked at the frost-coated can, number 96, lot 3, and he looked at his list, about the time Chihin walked up, asked, “What’s the matter? —What matter, here?”
More shouting. Something, when the mahendo’sat recovered their command of pidgin, about the can being a mistake, that the contents didn’t somehow match the manifest, that the contents were listed as grain, the buyer had stipulated dried fish, and there was a complete foul-up.
“Load wrong at Kita!” the customs agent said. And the truck driver shouted, “Off my truck! Not my fault what got!”
“Na Hallan,” Chihin said wearily.
“Ker Chihin,” he began, with reference to the checklist, but the mahendo’sat thrust an arm past him and began pointing to numbers and trying to clarify what they meant, he supposed, loudly, in his ear.
“Quiet!” he said, louder than he intended to. But they got quiet, all at once.
“Dangerous,” the customs agent said, retreating.
“He’s not gods-be dangerous!” Chihin shouted, and Hallan folded his tablet against his chest, calling out, “I’m sorry, na mahe, for the gods’ sake!”
More shouting, then. And the mahen truck driver saying he was going to offload it, now, here, and they could handle it.
“Now wait,” Chihin said, but everything was getting confused. He said, “Ker Chihin, …”
Chihin paid him no attention. The trucker was getting up on the truck bed, threatening
, evidently, to roll the can off and let them handle it; which wasn’t a good way to treat a heavy canister, and the dockers were yelling.
“Ker Chihin,” he said, and nobody at all was paying attention.
He shouted, “It’s not our can!”
And everything was breathlessly quiet after.
“Not our can?” Chihin said.
And everybody started shouting again, but Chihin was looking, while he was trying to point at the manifest entry, which showed a different local weight.
“Make mistake at pickup!” the foreman said. “Got no pilfer here.”
“Open can,” the customs agent said.
“No,” Chihin said. “You take it, you open it. It’s not our can. You get it off our dock!”
“The can is list dry fish,” the customs agent said. “We open. Find out.”
“We’ve had one gods-be incident!” Chihin said. “Hallan, get off the dock. Now.”
“But—”
“Get!” Chihin said, and waved her good arm at the docker crew. “Bomb,” she said. “Blow up. Explosive. Boom!”
He was horrified. So were the mahendo’sat, who looked dubious, then in one mass, took out across the dock. The truck driver left his truck and ran for the far side of the dock, while the customs agents hesitated beside the suspect canister, big enough to hold a lift-car full of people or a godsawful lot of explosive.
He knew better than to disobey orders. But Chihin was still there, talking on the com to the ship, and he ran back toward her and met her as she started toward the ship, running and trying to cushion her wounded arm.
He didn’t ask. He just grabbed her around the waist on the good side and hauled her up the ramp, as the Legacy’s outermost gate and cargo lock began to seal.
“Gods rot!” Chihin gasped.
Up the curving yellow tube, and he was dragging her, now. He stopped to snatch her up and ran as hard as he could, for the airlock still open for them.
He set her down there. Chihin had the presence of mind to slam her hand onto the Close plate, and it sealed in a rush. Then she leaned against the wall, and he did, panting from the run, trying to be sure she didn’t fall.
That meant an arm around her, and hers around him, and as she caught her balance, all the way around him. He held on, she did, and since the universe failed to end, it ended up with Chihin patting him on the shoulder, and him feeling—very short of breath, very, very short of breath, and her likewise, and then both of them with their arms about each other.