Chanur's Homecoming (33 page)

An edge of panic there. Of outright fright.

/ don't blame you, kid. Not at all.

"Mahendo'sat are moving to cut this off," Pyanfar muttered. "We got the plot on it. This is one godsforsaken mess. But we got that hope. Fact is the kif that moved on Meetpoint is about as worried as we are-that's what we were working on. That's all that got us out of that port."

"Does our captain know this?" Fiar asked.

"About the mahendo'sat? Dunno."

"No," Haral said. "I briefed ker Sirany on ops and course and the fact we and the kif aren't cozy. Mahen business I didn't say."

That was right. It had been in the report. Otherside of jump. She was losing things. She stuffed more sandwich in her mouth. Waved a hand at Haral, who took that signal and started spilling what else she knew; Tauran ears sagged, flagged, flattened. And:

"You talk to your captain," Pyanfar said, to Fiar, to Sif Tauran, "before you head below. Tell you another thing. You're on my crew shift. Tully here's crew. Shares quarters on this shift. My orders."

"Work," Tully objected. "I wake, work."

"Shut up. You're on my shift and you stay that way. Give me trouble I'll bed you with Skkukuk." She swallowed another mouthful of gfi and shuddered. ''I got no time, we got no time." While Geran staggered off with a pair of cups Khym had given her, for herself and Chur. "We got to get there, is what. Our guns may be all Anuurn's got, you hear me?"

Tauran ears pricked and half-flattened again in dismay. And maybe, maybe an increasing bit of belief.

One of their number was lost already. Moon Rising arriving late or in any condition was a sight she would give a great deal to see. And there was less and less hope of it.

She shoved herself away from the table, shoved sandwich wrapper and empty cup into the disposal. She was working on autopilot, same as The Pride. Programmed stuff. Lower brain functions.

In the same way she turned and wandered through the bridge, where foreign crew sat working, as strange to see there as if they were mahen. Or human. Sirany Tauran acknowledged her presence, and Pyanfar flicked her ears back and nodded in return, before she wandered out and down the corridor.

Nothing else was wrong. If it were, Sirany would have said. Tauran crew was going to do something about intership communications, try to relay a coded do-watch on mahen ships. Or whatever they might manage to get across of their situation. While Aja Jin rode beside them.

She paused at Chur's open door. Geran was there, at the bedside. " 'Lo," she said, and was not sure if Chur responded; her eyes were blurring out on her. "Hey, we about got the hard part, cousin, just hang on, huh? We're all right. We'll make it."

She got into her own room, made one trip to the head, fell face-down into bed and coordinated herself enough to jab the bedside console and power the safety rig over, never forget that, gods, never forget, an old spacer never lost that reflex,

move down the corridors right smart, stay out of open areas,

get to safe small places in case the ship had to move. Broken bones and smashed skulls else. Spacers died of bad luck like that, a ship moving to save its steel hide and some poor bastard of a spacer smashed to pulp down a corridor become a three-story drop-epitaph on many an acquaintance: the luck ran out. On a ten-ring spacer it could happen-

Luck out on Tahar and Vrossaru. Gods help 'em.

After a dark space the restraint hummed, a large and warm weight settled onto the same mattress and a warmth settled about her. "We're about to brake," Khym said; and woke her up just enough to feel a drunken panic.

"Restraint," she said. "I've got it," he said, and she opened her eyes blearily on dim light and the arch of the safety web going over them, on a familiar face, a large arm going over her like the arch of the safety, a huge body shaping itself to hers, awful and stinking as they both were, straight out of jump and headed in again without respite. She hugged him back, hard.

The vanes cycled again, blowing velocity in a dizzying pulse of neither here nor there, right down to the lowest energy they could reasonably achieve. It was a hunter-ship maneuver. Honest freighter never had the reason to do a thing like that.

Urtur dust screamed over the hull, shields downed during the low-V of their turn and reacquisition, dust abrading the vanes. The whole ship wailed and keened in sound that hurt the ears.

Gods let Tahar make it after all, gods save the rest of us, where's the kif?

"Unnnh." Khym clenched his fist in her mane. "Claws, Py, gods-"

Realspace acceleration started up, the unsettling G-shift of rollover.

"We're going," she said, "we're going all right." Which might or might not be true. There might be enemies after all. Or a big rock the shields would fail on. It was all Tauran's problem now. Not hers. Not hers.

The dust wailed away, changing pitch.

"Py-"

He burrowed in closer, arm stretched above her. "I'm holding on," he said; and did: his weight kept her steady and comfortable, so that her groping reach after the handgrip became too much effort. He stayed like that forever, in a position that could not be comfortable for him. She tried again to move and get a foot braced against the safety-rim. "I've got it," he said again, "it's all right, Py."

"Sprain your gods-be shoulder," she muttered.

He breathed into her ear and tongued the inside of it, like in the dark of off-watch, like the two of them twenty and brand new again. "Good gods." She caught her breath and lost it again. "Not now, Khym."

"Think of a better time?"

He couldn't, under the strain they were under. But he amused himself. While they hurtled on toward oblivion and it was clear he was in pain.

"Gods be fool man," she said. "Love you like my sister." It sounded stupid. It was the only way she knew to say it to him, in hani, so he would know what she meant. "Always have."

"Man's got no brother," he said. He was breathing hard. Strain was in his voice, while the scream of the ship went on and he kept up his lackadaisical attentions. "Man's alone. Man never even knows what I've got exists at all. Not alone anymore. Never alone anymore. You were right. You were always right."

"Gods, I wish I were." / wish I was right about what I'm doing, what I've done. We're going to jump and they haven't got that gods-be com on, they cut the gods-be com, we don't know when-

She hazed out. She came to and realized G-stress had shifted and Khym had come down on her limp as a dead man, breathing hard. That was no matter. He was warm, and without him she would shiver; she felt it.

"Mark," a sudden voice came over com, not Haral's, stranger-voice. "We're outbound."

-into jump. -falling.

''Hello,'' said the young man, sitting on the rock, beneath blue sky, above a golden valley; and she took him for a Wanderer, up to no good on Chanur land. She set her jaw and drew a deep breath and made herself as tall as she could: No nonsense, man, take a look at the spacer rings and figure you're not dealing with any young fool; I'll shred your ears for you.

"Hello," she said, on her way up from Chanur lands, on the. road. She had chosen to walk, when she might have made a landing here, created a little stir, coming in like that. But she was romantical in her youth.

What it got her was a young bandit, that was what. Real trouble, if he was also crazy. And worse trouble if he carried e knife. Some did.

"You're on Chanur land," she said. "Wise if you'd move along."

"You're Pyanfar," he said. And, gods, he was beautiful, his eyes large and gold-amber, his mane thick and wide. He stepped off his rock and landed on his feet in her path. ''Are you?"

"Last I checked. Who in a mahen hell are you?"

"Khym Mahn," he said. "Your husband."

 
-down. -alive. By the gods alive.

-and where? Gods, where? Kura. Kura. Got to get up, get to the bridge- No. First dump. Got-remember interval. "We all right?" Khym murmured. His weight hurt her, hurt her all the way to her bones. She was smothering. "We at Kura?"

"Move," she said, gasped. Gasped again when he tried, and fought and moaned her way to the edge of the bed, reaching for the console, involved in the edge of the safety net. "This is Pyanfar. We all right? Where's that gods-be com? Give us com, hear?"

There was delay. "Aye, captain," a strange voice said. And waited, by the gods waited during some on-bridge clearance, while a rag-eared bastard of a Tauran com officer asked her captain for clearance to report, that was what was going on. "Gods-be-"

Khym moaned in that way he had when he was about to be sick. And rolled over to the other side of the bed.

Com came through, a busy crackle of voices.

Khym was not sick. But she did not bother him either. She lay there listening to the data-chatter and the heavy machine-sounds of the ship.

"We're not getting buoy-output, from Kura," someone said. And sent ice water flowing through her gut.

Someone swore over com.

"Standby number two dump," a voice said then.

And the ship cycled down again, a lurch half into hyper-space-

-no buoy at Kura. -in hani space.

"I came here to wait,'' Khym said, on that path, beside the way she would have had to take. Perhaps someone had just phoned. He was perhaps another romantical fool, having come this long trek to sit alone and wait on a prospective wife. His face had a kind of wistful vulnerability: she had not known it then, but when she remembered that look afterward, she knew what it was, of experience. It was hope. It was Khym's gentle and earnest self, open to everything, entranced with her.

And he had escaped his sisters and his wives and gotten away alone. Or they did not care for him the way they ought: that had been her first thought when she believed he was who he claimed to be:

"You alone?" Anything might have happened to him. Some bandit might have attacked him. Some Chanur hunter might have taken him for a bandit and asked questions later. Or he might have fallen in with a group of Chanur herders who might have taken a fancy to him, and precious much they would have believed his claims to be their neighbor. A lord never got out in public. Except at challenge. And Chanur and Mahn, old allies, would never challenge each other. In those days.

Gods, she had thought atop it all, I'm betrothed to a fool in a house of rump-sitting fools who can't keep track of their own lord.

"It isn't far," he said, pointing back toward Mahn land.

Gods if I don't keep you better, she had thought; and then knew she could indeed do no better. Home was not a place she stayed. She had to trust the other wives and his sisters and his female cousins, who clearly could not handle him.

I'll have to knock heads in this house. Do I really want to get into this? If I weren't a fool I'd go home right now and leave him out here.

Gods, he's good-looking, isn't he?

But so're a dozen more I could find in the bushes.

"I don't do this all the time," he said earnestly. "I told them-" A gesture back toward the heart of Mahn land. "-1 was going to the garden. I guess no one's looked. I wanted to see you-"

He knew he was in the wrong. He knew he had made a bad impression. He knew he had even made a dangerous mistake, if she had a notion to take offense and go back to her clan, figuring a fool of a man was an easy mark for her lord; then he might die a young fool, and Mahn was in danger, if she were either unscrupulous or truly outraged. He knew this and he worried, now, when it was too late. Break her neck, he might, if he could get his hands on her. But it was not likely that he could. She was fast, in those days, and looked it; and might have a knife or even a gun (she had); and had the advantage of her clan, who could kill him under any circumstances for being where he was, but under felony charges, could dispossess his sisters and his kin and send them out homeless. He knew all of this. ("I thought you would go back,'' he had said to her in after years. ''I thought if you did I would have to challenge. And you would hate me. And so I couldn't do that either. I'd spend all my life trying to get you back.")

She set hands on hips and looked him up and down. Here in this isolated place where only they knew what might happen. And flattened her ears at him and slowly pricked them up again when his drooped. "Huh," she said. "Well, you got your border wrong." Even a man would know where that was. The flick of his ears showed he had indeed known. And deliberately trespassed, by the difference of two hills. The one in Chanur land just happened to have better vantage. And she came up close to him and up next to him and laid hands on him, which only his wives and his sisters could do without offense.

They were husband and wife before she walked him home. Out there on the border of Chanur land, as if she were some landless scoundrel and he some equally landless lad with hopes. She knew what she had married before she got there. A romantic, who, gods help her, asked her ten thousand questions, what was it like in space, where did she go, how long was she staying, would she come to see him every time she came back to the world?

He was ingenuous and reckless and a veritable encyclopedia of trivialities and natural science. He loved poking about under logs and into ponds, as devoted to hunting out curiosities as he ever was in hunting the game in which Mahn hills were rich; he could study a flower for whole minutes. Or the color of her eyes. She was not sure she liked being studied, there under Anuurn summer skies. She had come up to Mahn after a husband for politics, for finance, because they had dealt with him indirectly and believed his sister, that he was a decent domestic administrator and a man with some legal sense and no disposition to quarrel with Chanur; a fast few days in Mahn, a satisfaction of certain urges that were about to come on her, and which were misery on shipboard-and she ended up with a shy-smiling young man who did a fool thing like trespass and let himself be led off into the bushes and who spent whole minutes telling her how unusual her eyes were and (being Khym) what the statistical frequency of gold-and-bronze was with her ancestry.

She had known then she had gotten herself an odd one.