Chanur's Homecoming (5 page)

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 emptyheaded 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, Hil-fy: 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.

Gods, gods, gods, I hurt him. I never wanted to hurt him, we can all die here and I can't get past that gods-be translator.

Why is it all so complicated?

Chapter Two

It was not a situation Pyanfar enjoyed, sitting on the bridge and watching on the vid as a pair of armed kif headed toward her airlock. They wore no suits, only the hooded black robes universal with their kind. That meant the kif put some reliance on the jury-patches and the repressurization of this zone of the dock, more than she herself would have liked to put on it-kifish repair crews had been thumping and welding away out there, motes on vid, getting a patch on those areas the decompression had weakened.

So finally the hakkikt seemed to have settled accounts with the rebels inside his camp to the extent that now he could send a message to the friends of the mahen and hani traitors who had made such a large hole in his newly-acquired space station, who had disturbed the tc'a into riot on their side of the station, and incidentally sent over five hundred unsuspecting kif out into space on the wind of that decompression.

Sikkukkut had a very legitimate grievance; even a hani had to admit as much. Though the kif that had gone on that unscheduled spacewalk were many of them Sikkukkut's enemies, a good many had been partisans of his, and while no kif had ever been observed to grieve over the demise of any other kif, and while the incident might even have contributed to stopping the rebellion, still it had embarrassed him-and embarrassing a kifish leader was a very serious matter. It was not an accustomed feeling, to have a sense of wrong on her side when she was dealing with the kif; and to know, the while those black-robed figures cycled through the lock, that The Pride was not in a position, nose to a wrecked dock and outnumbered ten to one in ships and multiple thousands to one in personnel, to negotiate anything at all, not regarding what this mass of ships chose to do, not regarding their own position within the kifish power structure, not even regarding (heir safety or their lives.