Chanur's Legacy cs-5

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  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 hi 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 'II 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. H
e 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, team 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 accepting 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.

  The party initiating the contract requires of the party accepting the contract that in the event of the activation of Subclause 14 Section 2 the party accepting the contract shall perform according to the provisions of Subclause 14 Section 2, notwithstanding this shall not be construed as negating the requirements of Section 8 parts 3-15, provided that the party receiving the goods be the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1, and not a Subsequent of said person; if however the party qualified to receive the goods be the Subsequent of said person or Consequent of the Subsequent named in Subsection 3 Section 1, then the conditions set forward in Section 45 may apply.

  She had a headache, and sipped gfi and put a purple clip on the side of the paper for performance and a blue one for identity, took another sip and winced as something hung up in the Legacy's off-loading system. A new ship had glitches in common with an old one, systems with bugs in them.

  One of the bugs was in the out-track, the very simple chain-driven system that should take one of the giant container-cans smoothly from the hydraulic lift to the hydraulic loader-arms. They had tried lasers to find a fault in the line-up, they had tried carbon-coated paper to turn up an imprecision in the teeth, they'd marked the places on the chain that jammed and the places on the wheel that jammed, and no joy. She had preferred the system because it was what The Pride used, it was old, it was tested, it was straight-forwardly mechanical, cheap to repair, but that gods-rotted chain was going to break and kill somebody someday. Every time it jammed like that she flinched.

  A small problem, the outfitter swore. Easy to fix. Just pinpoint the problem, and we'll make it right.

  The loader started up again. So nobody was killed. Hope it wasn't the mahen porcelain they were hauling. But the chain was intact. She heard it working.

  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 by the provisions of Section5…

  However the provisions of Section 5 may be delegated by the party issuing the contract, following the stipulations of Subsection 12 of Section 5 in regard to the performance of the person accepting the contract, not obviating the requirements of performance of the person accepting the contract…

  Another sip of gfi. A chase through the stack of paper after subsection 12 of Section 5. She could S
earch it on the computer but that meant moving the output stacks, the notes, the reference manuals and the microcube case that was sitting in front of the screen. Somewhere in Library there was a reference work on Subsequents, at least as far as mahendo'sat understood stsho personality changes. She would have the computer look it up. When she found the monitor screen. She took another sip of gfi.

  The Rows were the open market at Meetpoint— anything you wanted, you had a chance of finding scattered on the tables of a hundred and more smalltime merchants, stsho and mahendo'sat… stsho and mahen hucksters shoving things into your attention and claiming miraculous potency for unregulated vitamins and curious effects for legal and peculiar compounds, offering second-hand clothes and trinkets, carvings by bored spacers and erotic items peculiar to mahendo'sat and curious to everyone else.

  But to a hani in a hurry, with specific measurements and business already in the hands of a mahen tailor in a real established Rows shop, with a pressure-door and every indication of permanency and respectability, the glitter and gaud and traffic of the market were an obstacle — and Tiar tried to make time against it.

  Though an honest hani watching her waistline could get distracted here, because among the glitter of cheap jewelry and real gold, the echoes of argument and the twittering of doomed kifish delicacies — came the smell of baked goods and spice; mahen pastries. And a number of worldbound hani might turn up their noses at sweets, but she was cosmopolitan in taste: truth was, there was a good deal about mahen sweets she found to like.

  And maybe the kid did. And certainly Tarras had the habit.

  Well, maybe a dozen. The captain liked some sweets. Fala might. Chihin favored salted things. She could manage that.

  And if they were in a mortal hurry and did not get back to the market on this rare stop at Meetpoint (she had asked the tailor to deliver, at soonest)… she could take a small detour.