Wanted, gods help her, to see even her home up in the hills, which was purest stupidity: she and Geran had walked out of there and come down to Chanur when they were kids as young as Hilfy, because a young fool of a new lord had gotten himself in power up there over their sept of clan Chanur, and she and her sister had pulled up roots and left for Chanur’s main-sept estate with no more than the clothes on their backs.
And their pride. They had come with that intact. The two of them.
“Never looked back,” she said, thinking Geran at least might understand. “Gods be, odd things were what we were looking for when we came down the hills, wasn’t that it?”
Geran made a desperate motion at Tully that meant get out, quietly, and Tully went, not without a pat at Chur’s blanketed leg.
Chur lay there and blinked, embarrassed at herself. She looked like something dead. She knew that. She and Geran had once looked a great deal alike, red-blond of mane and beard and with a sleekness and slimness that was the hillwoman legacy in their sept; not like their cousins Haral and Tirun Araun or their cousin Pyanfar either, who had downland Chanur’s height and strength, but never their highlands beauty, their agility, their fleetness of foot. Now Geran’s shoulders slumped in exhaustion, her coat was dull, her eyes unutterably weary; and Chur had seen mirrors. Her bones hurt when she lay on them. The sheets were changed daily: Geran saw to that, because she shed and shed, till the skin appeared in patches, all dull pink and horrid through her fur. That was her worst personal suffering, not the pain, not the dread of dying: it was her vanity the machine robbed her of, and her dignity; and watching Geran watch her deteriorate was worst of all.
“Sorry,” Chur said. “Gods-be machine keeps pouring sedative into me. I don’t always make sense.”
Rotten way to die, she thought to herself, drugged out of my mind. Scaring Geran. What kind of way is that?
“Unhook me from this thing.”
“You said you’d leave it be,” Geran said. “For me. You told the captain you’d leave it be. Do we need to worry about you?”
“Asked, didn’t I?” The voice came hoarse. The episode had exhausted her. Or it was the sedative. “We letting that gods-be kif loose now?”
“Khym’s got an eye on him.”
“Uhhn.” There was a time that would have sounded crazy. Men did not deal with outsiders, did not take responsibility, did not have any weight of decision on their shoulders, on their berserk-prone brains. But nothing in the world was the same as it had been when she was a girl. “We left home to find strange things,” Chur said, bewildered that she ended up trusting a man’s good sense and an alien human’s good will, a hillwoman like her. “Found ’em, didn’t we?” But she saw that pained drawing about Geran’s mustaches, the quivering flick of Geran’s ears, well-ringed with voyages. She saw how drained Geran was, how her maundering grieved Geran, had a sure instinct that if Geran had one load on her shoulders, she had just put another there, almost unbearable for her sister. “Hey,” she said, “I was pretty steady on my feet. Machine helps. Think I’ll make it. Hear?”
Geran took that in and the slump left her shoulders and the grief left her eyes so earnestly and so trustingly it hurt.
Gods, Chur thought, now I’ve done it, I’ve promised her, haven’t I?
Stupid to promise. Now I have to. I’ll lose. It’ll hurt, gods rot it. I’ll die somewhere in jump, O gods, that’s an awful way, to go out there, in the dark between the stars, all naked.
“Not easy,” Chur murmured, heading down to sleep. “Easier to go out, Gery. But I’ll get back up there, b’gods. Don’t you let the captain assign me out. Hear?”
“Chair’s waiting.”
“You want to fill me in, treat me like I was crew?” It was hard to stay interested in life, with the sedatives drawing a curtain between herself and the universe. She remembered her promise and fought to keep it. “What f’godssakes is going on out there?”
“Same as before. We’re sitting at dock waiting for that gods-rotted kif to make up his mind to go left or right, and so far nothing’s worse.”
“Or better.”
“Or better. Except they’re still talking. And the hakkikt’s still real polite.”
“Jik hasn’t cracked.”
“Hasn’t cracked. Gods help him.”
“How long are we going to sit here?”
“Wish we all knew. Captain’s figuring like mad, Haral’s laying in six, seven courses into comp. We may get home yet.”
“Doublecross the kif? They’d hunt us.” Her voice grew thick. “Meetpoint’s the only way out of here. That’s where we’ve got to go.”
Geran said nothing. The threads grew vague, but they always came to the same point. Goldtooth had left them and his partner in the lurch and run for Meetpoint, and Tully’s folk were headed into the Compact in numbers, all of which meant that a very tired hani who wanted the universe to be what it had been in her youth was doomed to see things turned upside down, doomed to see Chanur allied with kif, with a species that ate little black things and behaved badly on docksides, and did other things an honest hani preferred not to think about.
Gods-rotted luck, she thought; and thought again about the hills of home, and the sins of her youth, one of which she had left with its father; but it was only a gods-be boy, and not a marriage anyhow, and she had never written back to the man, who was no happier at getting a son than she was at birthing one (a daughter would have done him some good in his landless station), but his sisters would treat the boy all right. Rest of the family never had known much about it, except Geran knew, of course; and it was before she had joined The Pride. The kid would have come of age and gone off to Hermitage years ago; and probably died, the way surplus males died. Waste. Ugly waste.
Wish I’d known my son.
Maybe I could find him. If his father’s still alive. If he’s like na Khym, if— Maybe, maybe if I could’ve talked to him he’d have sense like na Khym.
Never asked that man—never much talked to him. Never occurred to me to talk to him. Isn’t that funny? Now I’d wonder what he was thinking. I’d think he was thinking. I’d find me a man and make love to him and gods, I’d ask him what he was thinking and he’d—
—I’d probably confuse him all to a mahen hell, I would; aren’t many men like Khym Mahn, gods-rotted nice fellow, wished I’d known him ’fore the captain got him. If he was ever for anybody but her. If a clan lord like him could’ve ever looked at an exile like me. I’d like to’ve loved a man like him. I’d have got me a daughter off him, I would’ve.
But what’s the captain got of him? Gods-rotted son like Kara Mahn and a gods-forsaken whelp of a daughter like Tahy, no help there, gods fry ’em both, no sense, no ears to listen, no respect—doublecrossing gods-be cheats.
Want to find me a man. Not a pretty one. A smart one. Man I can sit and talk with.
If I ever get home.
She pursed her lips and spat.
“You all right?”
“Sure, I’m sleeping, get out of here. I’m trying to get my rest. What in the gods’ name are those black things?”
“Don’t ask. We don’t.”
* * *
The lift opened belowdecks, and Hilfy Chanur, coming back onshift, stepped back hastily as the doors whisked back and gave her Skkukuk all unexpected, Skkukuk clutching a squealing cageful of nasty black shapes, which apparition sent her ears flat; but Tirun and Tully were escorting the kif, which got Hilfy’s ears back up again and laid the fur back down between her shoulderblades. She stepped aside in distaste to let the kif out and stood there staring as the door waited to her hold on the call button.
“We think we got ’em,” Tirun said.
“They got,” Tully said, amplifying his broken pidgin with a gesture topside. “Eat fil-ter. Lousy mess.”
“Good gods, what filter?”
“Airfilter in number one,” Tirun said. “Sent particles all over the system: we’re going to have to do a washdown on the
number two and the main.”
“Make electric,” Tully said.
“We made it real uncomfortable in that airshaft,” Tirun said.
“Kkkkt,” Skkukuk said, “these are Akkhtish life. They are adaptive. Very tough.”
The creatures started fighting at the sound of his voice. He whacked the cage with his open hand and the Dinner subsided into squeals.
“Gods,” Hilfy said with a shudder of disgust.
“Two of them are about to litter,” Tirun said. “Watch these gods-forsaken things. They’re born fighting.”
“Tough,” Skkukuk said conversationally, and hit the Dinner’s cage again, when the squeals sharpened. There was quiet, except for a hiss. “Kkkt. Excuse me.” He clutched the cage to him and headed off down the hall with the Dinner in his arms, happy as ever a kif could be.
Hilfy’s lip lifted; an involuntary shiver went through her as Tirun turned and went to keep an eye on the kif. Tully stayed, and set a hand on her shoulder, squeezed hard.
Tully knew. He had been with her in the hands of the kif, this same Sikkukkut who was their present ally; who sent them this slavish atrocity Skkukuk to haunt the corridors and leave his ammonia-stink everywhere in the air, a smell which brought back memories—
A second time Tully squeezed her shoulder with his clawless fingers. Hilfy turned and looked at him, looking up a bit; but he was not so tall, her Tully, that she could not look him in the eyes this close. Those eyes were blue and usually puzzled, but in this moment there was worry there. Two voyages and what they had been through together had taught her to read the nuances of his expressions.
“He’s not bad kif,” Tully said.
That was so incredible an opinion from him she blinked and could not believe she had heard it.
“He’s kif,” Tully said. “Same I be human. Same you hani. He be little kif, try do what captain want.”
She would not have heard it from anyone else. She had her mouth open when Tully said it. But this was a man who had been twice in their hands; and seen his friends die; and killed one of them himself to save him from Sikkukkut: more, he had been there with her in that kifish prison, and if Tully was saying such an outrageous thing it might have any number of meanings, but empty-headed and over-generous it was not. She stared at him trying to figure out if he had missed his words in hani: the translator they had rigged up to their com sputtered helpless static at his belt, constant undertone when he spoke his thickly accented hani or pidgin. Maybe he was trying to communicate some crazy human philosophy that failed to come through.
“Little kif,” Tully said again. She had lived among kif long enough to know what he meant by that, that kif were nothing without status, and that kif of low status were everyone’s victims.
“If he was a big kif,” she said, “he’d kill us fast.”
“No,” Tully said. “Captain be Pyanfar. He want be big, she got be big.”
“Loyalty, huh?”
“Like me,” Tully said. “He one.”
“You mean he’s alone.”
“He want be hani.”
She spat. It was too much. “You might be.” And not many hani in space and certainly none on homeworld would be that generous, only a maudlin and lonely young woman a long way from her own kind. “Not a kif. Ever.”
“True,” Tully admitted, twisting back on his own argument in that maddening way he had of getting behind a body and leaving them facing the wrong way. He held up a finger. “He kif, he same time got no friend with kif, he be little kif. They kill him, yes. He want not be kill. He lot time wrong, think we do big good to him. You watch, Hilfy: crew be good with him, he be happy, he got face up, he be brave with us, he talk. But we don’t tell truth to him, huh? What good truth? Say him, ‘kif, you enemy,’ he got no friend, got no ship, got no hakkikt. He don’t be hani, he die.”
“I can’t be sorry for him. He wouldn’t understand it. He’s kif, gods rot him. And I’d as soon kill him on sight.”
“You don’t kill same like you be kif.” He patted her arm and looked earnestly at her, from the far side of a language barrier the translator never crossed. “He makes a mistake,” the translator said as he changed into his own language for words he did not have. “He’s lost. He thinks we like him more now. We ask him go die for help us, he go. True, he will go. And we hate him. He doesn’t know this. He’s kif. He can’t understand why we hate him.”
“Well, let’s not confuse him,” Hilfy snarled, and turned and stopped the lift door which had started to close on auto when she let go the button. It recoiled, held for another wait. She looked back at Tully, who looked back, aggrieved and silent. She knew his shorthand speech better than anyone else aboard: ship’s com officer, linguist, translator, she had helped set up his translation system and help break through to him when they first met him. And what he was saying now made more sense than she wanted it to—that a kif, cold-blooded tormentor and killer that it was, was also a helpless innocent in their hands. If a kif saw another kif in his way, he killed; his changes of loyalty were frequent but sincere and self-serving. And if the captain’s subordinates treated him better, it was because the captain had accorded him more status: it was all a kif could think, it was all a kif knew how to imagine. Pyanfar let Skkukuk loose more often, Pyanfar cared to feed him, the crew was civil to him: his place in the universe was therefore improving. Gods help them, the kif became conversational with them. Two and more centuries of contact and the kif had never let slip any casual detail about their homeworld, which no one visited but kif; and here Skkukuk, bragging on his nasty little vermin as Akkhtish and adaptive, hinted at more of kifish life and kifish values than kif had said about themselves in all of history.
And what would a man know about anything? was her gut reaction, staring into Tully’s eyes. She did not think of Skkukuk as male, gods knew; hardly thought of Jik or Goldtooth as anything but female and rational, despite the male pronouns which were ordinary in pidgin and otherwise in hani: but Tully was definitively male to her, and stood there saying crazy things about an enemy, talking to her about self-restraint, which was a female kind of thought, or Pyanfar was right and males had a lot of hidden female about them: it was an embarrassing estimation. But the sense that it made also reached somewhere inside and found a sore spot, that Tully had found some kind of peace with the thing that had happened to them among the kif, where a sane, technically educated woman failed.
Because he’s older, Hilfy thought. She had always thought of him as near her own age: and suddenly she thought that he must be, of his kind, old as Khym, whose years had burned the tempers out of him and given him self-control and lost him his lordship over Mahn. Suddenly she suspected that she had always been wrong about Tully, that he was wiser than a young man could possibly be, and cooler-headed: and there was something still he had not been able to tell her. There was something still bottled up in him, she could almost read it, but it was too alien an expectation; or too simple. She could not guess it. The lift door hit her in the shoulder again and gave up, and she reached out and gently touched Tully’s face with the pads of her fingers.
“If you were hani,” she said, “we’d—” But she did not say that. It sounded too foolish; and hurt too much, without an answer that resulted in anything but both of them being fools. Laughable fools.
“Friend,” he said in a small voice, and touched her face. While the lift door hit her again, on shorter and shorter reminder. “Friend, Hilfy.” With a peculiar stress in his voice, and a break, as it would do when he was grieved. There were things he did not commit to the translator. More and more he tried to speak hani. And to be hani. And he grew sadder and more wistful when he would look at her and say a thing like that, making fools of them both.
Gods, Hilfy Chanur, she thought, what can you do? When did you go crazy? When did he? When we were alone and we were all we had, with kif all about? I want him.
If he’s older than me, why doesn’t he have an answer for this?
Then an alarm went off. For a moment she thought she had tripped it by holding the door, and Pyanfar was going to skin her.
“Priority, priority. We’ve got a courier at the lock,” Haral’s voice said then from com, from every speaker in the hall. “All secure below. Hilfy, Tirun, arm and stand by: looks like you’re the welcoming committee, captain’s compliments, and she’s staying topside. Protocols. You get that?”
“I got it,” Hilfy said.
Lock up the kif, that meant. Fast.
“Tully,” she said, and motioned to the lift. Panic had started a slow, hysteric beat in her heart; habit kept her face calm as she stepped aside and held the door with her arm for Tully.
I could help, that look of his said; I could be down here, I want to be here. I want to help you—
It was not the kif’s feelings he had so laboriously described: you make him part of the crew, you let him believe it, you don’t know how cruel you are to let him believe you.
He’d go out and die for you, Hilfy Chanur. Because he believes you.
No. It was not true of the kif. It was what he felt in himself.
“Up,” she said. “Bridge. Haral needs you. I got enough down here.”
And, gods, why put it that way? She saw the pain she caused.
He went into the lift, and turned and pushed the Close, so that the door jarred her obstructing arm and she drew it back in confusion. She opened her mouth to say something like you can’t help in this, which was no better than she had already said; but the door closed between their faces, and left her speechless and harried in recalling that it was an emergency Haral had just sent her on—kif, and trouble, and gods knew what.
The whole situation could be unraveling. Jik might have talked, might have spilled something; it might be the beginning of the attack they had feared; it might be anything, and gods help her, she had just fouled it up with Tully and there was no time, no time, never time to straighten it out between them.