“There’s blankets,” Tiar said. She opened the wall locker and there certainly were, the whole ship’s supply, it must be. “I’ll get you a reader and some tapes. Gods, I’m sorry about this.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It really is.”
Tiar stood looking at him, and finally shook her head. “The captain’s got a lot on her mind. She honestly does. You don’t understand.”
“Ker Tiar, I understand.”
“Then I don’t,” Tiar snapped. And went and locked him in.
The blast cushion was one of those arrangements that let down and changed angles, according to which axis the ship might move, one of those emergency station affairs that you had to have in every corridor, in case. So he pulled it into level with the deck as was, and got himself a couple of blankets to prop himself with, and one to throw over him, because the thermostat must have only just been reset, and breath frosted. He was not actually uncomfortable once he settled down with the blanket over him. There was more to look at, all the lockers and pipes and such. He could keep his mind busy figuring out all those. He supposed he could warm the compartment up faster by showering, but it might not warm it that much, and he was not sure they were through coming and going in here. So he sat and tried to read the locker labels from here, hearing the thumping still going on that meant they were redoing things for the stsho.
Stsho wouldn’t like to meet him at all. People wouldn’t, everywhere he went. That was the biggest shock he had had when he got beyond Anuurn’s atmosphere, that it was the same Out There as it was at home, that no matter what Pyanfar Chanur said and no matter how you really acted, nobody waited to find out if you were the way they thought, they were just afraid. Even Hilfy Chanur didn’t know what to do with him. And he was glad to hear from ker Tiar that things were going on that didn’t give the captain time to consider his case. That was reasonable. He could understand that. He really could. It was just so important to him, and he told himself that Hilfy Chanur wouldn’t really sweep him aside without listening, he just had to be patient and quiet and prove his case by that. If he was patient and quiet they would notice. If he cooperated they would be appreciative. Ker Tiar had noticed.
But he waited and he waited, and the thumping and the carrying of things down the corridor went on, but Tiar didn’t bring the books. She didn’t even bring lunch. It would be easy at this point to feel really sorry for himself, but that got no points, either.
Just be patient when you wanted people to notice you. That was what his mother had always told him.
(But she always noticed his sisters, who weren’t. She always gave his sisters what they wanted. Which was natural, he supposed. Daughters stayed with the clan, and sons went away and didn’t come back unless they were attacking the lord of the clan or stealing something. So it was good advice, the Be Patient thing, because he hadn’t attacked his father; and he hadn’t come back and stolen the livestock. His sisters had thought enough of him to talk him onto an offworld shuttle, which had led to everything hopeful in his life. He just wished patience got better results in the universe outside. Because nobody had ever taught him any other way to be. Just crazy mad. Or patient.)
The stsho aide put a satin-slippered foot into the newly-paneled room and wiped long fingers on the door frame. This passed. Gtst ventured further, onto the newly elevated white decking, to the white bowl-chair sunk into it.
Gtst crest lifted and sank several anxious times and lifted to half. Gtst looked all about, turned full circle, making little flutters of gtst hands.
“Adequate,” gtst said in Trade-tongue. “I will inform the honorable.”
Whereupon gtst retreated from the room and up the corridor, with gtst own stsho attendant.
The crew said not a word. Ears were flat. But they had said not a word about the contract.
Neither had Hilfy Chanur. She escorted the stsho out and up to the topside lounge, where the honorable Tlisi-tlas-tin sat sopping up cup after cup of tea and giving orders to Fala, whose ears were valiantly upright.
The stsho conferred, informed gtst honor the quarters were adequate, they now dared leave the honorable alone in hani keeping and could assure gtst excellency No’shto-shti-stlen that Chanur had taken at least austere care of their charge.
Whereupon the honorable Tlisi-tlas-tin wearily aroused gtstself from a chair ill-suited to gtst spindly legs, and with a flourish of voluminous gossamer, announced gtstself willing to go below with the Preciousness.
Which traveled in that box, apparently, which had its appropriate customs seals as, simply, oji, and no hint of its shape or nature.
“Honorable,” Hilfy said, with, she hoped, an expression as diplomatic as Fala Anify’s … “may I ask your honor to favor this person whom gtst excellency has trusted with your person with a viewing of this most distinguished …”
“No!” Tlisi-tlas-tin said. Which might be the most direct sentence she had ever heard from a stsho. Gtst gathered up the small box and wrapped it within the gossamer folds of gtst robes. Gtst gave them collectively and sundry a burning look of gtst moonstone eyes. “The Preciousness is not for display.”
A practical and an academic education in diplomacy did not encourage one to seize gtst by gtst skinny white throat. Being Pyanfar’s niece did; but Hilfy recovered from the fog of anger and her ears were still up and her mouth was still smiling. “Please convey yourself and the Preciousness to your cabin before some incident offends you. My aide will escort your honor to your quarters and show your colleagues to the airlock.”
And lock the gods-be cabin door on gtst honor afterwards, she thought. The crew was exhausted. They hadn’t let mahendo’sat workmen do the job, invade their ship, look at their interior, take notes on their systems. Gods-rotted certain they hadn’t had kif. And stsho of the laboring class didn’t exist outside stsho space. So that left themselves—and they had blisters on their hands and panelboard dust up their nostrils, they had broken claws and missing fur, not to mention the captain had dropped a large panel corner on her ankle and taken the hide off.
The captain was not, consequently, in a good humor. The captain was sweaty and ached from head to foot. They were two hours past their scheduled un-dock, and presented an enigmatic silence to Meetpoint docks, hatches sealed (once the supplies had arrived) hoses uncoupled, com completely silent, their own power plant supplying their needs while they underwent “technical adjustment.”
Tarras came up from downside, saying something about the shower downside being occupied, and her having to use the one topside, poor put-upon dear, and Hilfy glared at her, thinking it could be the end of a family friendship if Tarras opened her mouth on the matter of subclauses at the moment.
“Do that,” Hilfy said sweetly, with as great a control as she had left. “I’ve a few things to see to. We’ve got to recalc our outbounds.”
Tarras took the hint. “Want help?”
She thought about it, a second run-through. Thought about particles floating through the filter systems. “Shower first. We all will. We’ll just give station last-minute notice of our undock.” Satisfying notion. “Let them do the scrambling. The oji has priority. Doesn’t it?”
The banging and hammering had stopped. The hatch had cycled. For a long time there was quiet. Hallan decided the ship might be headed for undock, but people tended to forget him. So he decided it was a good idea to put the blast cushion in order, just in case, and to take a couple of blankets out of the storage lockers, because the heat still had not caught up, and also if they went out very hard or very long, one could want something to stuff in the unsupported spots. They didn’t make flight cushions his size either. Or chairs. Or most anything on a ship.
But the ship didn’t go, for a long time. He tucked up with his blankets and tried to calculate what he knew about Meetpoint and exactly what V they were going to carry if they were loaded full and going, the way the captain had said, to Urtur—which, as he understood, most ships couldn’t do without going to Hoa
s, unless they dumped all their cargo. And they were carrying cargo, he’d heard the loaders, which he was relatively sure sounded inbound. So the Legacy must have the engines for it, or they were in a lot of trouble—like lost in hyperspace, forever. Truth be told, he was scared, and a little suspicious that even Tiar had been having a joke at his expense.
If it really was Urtur they wouldn’t come in fast or close to the star, because of the dust. Urtur was a dreadfully dirty system, most of it in the disc, but not all of it—
And a pity they couldn’t see their own fluorescing trail. Riding on light. Bathed in it. At home, he had had a picture on his wall, a photo someone had caught of a mahen ship coming into Hoas. And he liked to imagine them doing that, every time they made system drop. But you couldn’t see it yourself. He had asked about it; and the Sun’s crew said it was a stupid question. Everybody was busy when you were coming in, and if you ever did see something like that they were too close and you were real busy real fast.
He had ridden through jump himself a lot of times, the last two years in the Sun Ascendant’s ops center. He thought through all the moves Dru would be making, if he were in ops, if Dru were sitting by him. Dru said he knew what he was doing. Dru was the one who’d gotten him a license, so she could take a break and leave him with the boards, she said—which was undoubtedly true, but she also said he really deserved a license, in a way he could never get the rest of the crew to admit. Yet.
“Hallan?”
Tiar, he thought, on the intercom.
“Yes?”
“Just checking. Are you all right down there?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Gods in pink feathers! The books!”
“That’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. Look. We’re about to go into sequence. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, ker Tiar.”
On the Sun, they didn’t use words like Tiar used to him then. He’d never heard them put together that way—and from a very old, very proper clan like Chanur. He didn’t understand why she was upset.
But Tiar sent Fala running down the corridor from ops with the nutrients pack he desperately needed for jump and a book, a real, battered, tag-eared book … of Compact Trade Regulations.
He was quite touched by that. He really was.
The Legacy achieved V at a gentle burn. No more energy, in the long haul, to put a push on it—V was V, and you paid for it, until you ran past your capacity; but the Legacy had a stsho aboard, a creature that couldn’t take more than 1.5 G’s without cracking its mostly hollow bones.
Which might be tempting, but they had Tlisi-tlas-tin in charge along with the ‘Preciousness,’ whatever it was, and the reason doubtless that No’shto-shti-stlen hadn’t put the Preciousness aboard a kifish ship was the very well-known habit of kif changing loyalties when unthreatened, unwatched, and seeing a point of advantage.
And likewise for the mahendo’sat—if the Preciousness was in any sense religious, keep it away from mahen hands: the mahendo’sat knew that game too well—and some of them were crazier than others.
The methane-folk? Who knew? The stsho, maybe, knew, who had dealt more with the methane-breathers than anyone. And if the honorable Tlisi-tlas-tin had to go with the Preciousness and the honorable had to breathe oxygen, then maybe that answered that question in a very practical way.
Which left hani—since stsho traders refused to take their own ships beyond Hoas. Stupid hani. Credulous hani. Hani who hadn’t been in space until the mahendo’sat (with no one’s leave) landed on Anuurn and pitched them from wooden exploration ships into star-faring trade.
For mahen reasons, of course, some of which were sane and some of which were not.
She flipped switches to check working stations, heard Meetpoint’s thin voice in her right ear. “Coming up on jump,” she was able to declare at last, and opened channel 3 and said in stshoshi trade, “Your honor, kindly take position for jump. We trust you have your medical kit at hand.”
Silence.
“Your honor. Kindly advise us if you have done what we request for the preservation of yourself and the Preciousness.”
Fry that dimwit!
“Honorable captain?”
“Are you ready, honorable?”
“We are ready.”
“Steady, cap’n.” From Tiar, at her right elbow. “Murder’s not in the contract.”
“Don’t say that word.”
“Hey, we’ll be free of it. Shove the Preciousness and gtst honor right out the chute and be damned to them.”
“Not allowed. Subclause 3.”
“They tell you about this Tlisi-tlas-tin character, cap’n?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
From Tarras: “Do I get to pitch gtst out the lock?”
“Negative. Negative. Subclause three point two. No pitching of the Preciousness.”
“What is this thing? Do you figure?”
“Not a bit. Religious or something. Who knows?”
“That’s a blip.” From Tarras at scan. “We got somebody away from station.”
“Ha’domaren.”
“How’d you know that?” Tarras asked.
“How could I not guess? I want a readout on every ship that’s left Meetpoint since we’ve been there.”
“No problem. I got it. You want it now or otherside?”
“Any kifish ship?”
“Two kif, one t’ca. All Hoas-bound, last few days.”
“That son’s going to move. Lay you odds.”
“After us?”
“Lay you any money you want that’s a mahen agent, for some gods-rotted personage we don’t know who, with an empty hold. It’s politics, it’s politics, it’s some one of Pyanfar’s rivals …”
“Possible,” Tiar said.
“It’s going to come,” Hilfy said. “They’ll try. There’s never been a dearth of Personages… .”
“Coming up on mark,” Tiar said.
“Advise our passengers.”
“Got that,” Fala said from belowdecks.
The numbers ticked down, everything automated, more so than The Pride. Progress. And more things to go wrong. She still watched the lines, and compared the numerical readout, scary large numbers. She’d done it on The Pride, with her aunt’s hand or Haral Araun’s on the controls. These days it was Tiar’s. She wasn’t a pilot, never would be. She could just ride it through.
“Here we go. Suppose we got that mass calc right?” Ship dropped. Everything went hazed.
—You could dream in jump.
—Sometimes you even knew you were dreaming, if it was an old dream, an often dream.
Dream of gold hair and a human face.
Waiting there. He always was. Even if he was on a ship fifty lights away. Hello, he said, most times, though he was always distant. He had been, since they had parted company at Anuurn. Clearly Pyanfar had talked to him. Told him the practicalities of things. Laid down conditions.
Hello, kid.
But she wasn’t the kid any more. Things had changed. She’d been married. And widowed. Thank the gods there were no offspring to promote permanent ties with Sfaura.
Give No’shto-shti-stlen the gods-be puzzle egg. And good luck to gtst with it.
Meanwhile there was a human face, a human presence, distant and shadowy, a comfort in her traveling.
You have to take care, Tully said to her. He had never gotten that good at hani speech, that she knew of. But that was years ago.
I always take care, she said.
You trust this deal you’re in.
Let’s not talk about business. She knew what she wanted to do. Exactly what her aunt frowned on her doing. But Tully was evasive. He walked away from her, with his back turned.
And the lights dimmed, and there were bars about—ammonia, and sodium light.
She took alarm. “Tully?” she said, and he looked at her, scared as she was. She didn’t want to be here again. She didn’t w
ant this part.
He came and held on to her. He had then. He did until the kif came and then he went with them because they threatened her. The whole thing passed in a kind of haze, the way the hours had in that kifish cage. There were sounds to hear. She chose not to hear them. She could govern the dream now—she had learned to do that, and she kept saying, over and over again, Tully, come back. Tully, listen to me. I don’t want to remember that. What do you go there for? I don’t want to see that—
Come back and talk to me.
“Tully!”
He came back then, just a shadow. And wouldn’t talk to her.
“He knows better,” Pyanfar said, out of nowhere and uninvited. “He had his choice, go or stay. He understood. You wouldn’t. You still won’t.”
She did. That was the trouble. She loved him, enough to make them both miserable. Go have babies, Py had said. Thank the gods that had failed. And maybe Korin had never had a chance, maybe he’d sensed that, male-wise, sullen, quarrelsome, and unwisely set on running domestic affairs. Maybe that had set up the situation from the first day he moved in. Maybe—
Maybe in some remote way that had set up everything else, because she had come home with violence, with anger, with the habit of war and the indelible memory of a kifish cage. Korin couldn’t have imagined that place. He’d made assumptions, he’d made assertions, he’d struck out to make her hear him—
And she couldn’t have cared less … what he thought, what he wanted, who he was. The only thing she’d wanted—
—was kif in her gunsights. Korin dead. And Tully, on her terms.
“He’s not your answer,” aunt Pyanfar said, in that brutal, blunt way Py had when she was right. “Look past your gods-cursed selfish notions, niece, and ask him what’s right to ask of him, and don’t tell me it’s helping you outgrow him.”
That day she’d swung on Py. Not many people had done that and gotten away unmarked. But Py had just ducked, and faced her, the way Py did now, hand against The Pride’s main boards.
“Meanwhile,” aunt Py said. “Meanwhile. You have a ship to run.”