Chanur's Homecoming (53 page)

"Need me."

She opened her mouth and shut it. Of all the crew she reckoned might be steadiest, she had never even reckoned him. Like the ring, it was too profound a gift.

"Come on," she said.

"We're doing all right," she said, on a full stomach, in the crowded galley-the Tauran had gone, with Vrossaru, aboard Mahijiru, trailing the humans out. There was a matter of getting back to Meetpoint and picking up their ships and cargoes. Ayhar's Prosperity had a guaranteed run in that direction too, with a full hold, which Meetpoint might direly need. And, good or bad news, one never knew, the knnn had disappeared with the tc'a, off on a vector which ought to get it lost in limbo, if it were not a knnn, and capable of making jumps that other ships could not. Toward stsho space, it looked like. At best guess.

"We got word from Tahar," Haral said. "They got the message."

"What'd they say about it?"

"Said thanks. They said they'll believe in a han amnesty when they get it engraved, but they say they plan to shadow us awhile. Till the word gets around."

"Huh." It was prudent. Dur Tahar was that. She let go a small sigh. "We got some business at Meetpoint too, soon as they get our tail put back together." She took a sip of gfi. There was a vacancy at table. Hilfy was off doing Chanur business. Which was the way it had to be. Married, within the year: that was what Hilfy had to do, find herself some young man strong enough to take her cousin Kara and pitch him clear back to Mahn territory.

In that choice she had burned to give advice; but what was between her and Hilfy had gotten too remote for that, too businesslike. It was her own hardheaded, closemouthed pride. She saw it like a mirror. Hilfy knew everything; more than Hilfy might ever know when she was a hundred.

Then: "Hey," Hilfy had said to her when she left, not captain-crew formal, but a level, adult look eye to eye. "I'm not going hunting round in Hermitage. I'm just putting the word out I'm looking. Me. Heir to Chanur. And the winner gets a shuttle ticket up to Gaohn. I don't care if he's handsome. But he's by the gods going to have to have the nerve to come up here and meet my father."

"Huh," she had said to that. Since she had resolved to disentangle herself from clan business as long as the Personage business persisted. She did not, likewise, offer advice to Rhean or Anfy or any of the others.

"I'm telling you," she said now, to the crew, to her cousins, her husband, and a human, "you don't have to go out on this one. You want some ground time, gods know you've got it coming." With a look under her brows at Chur, who had it coming doubly. "Or station. Or discharge. To Fortune; to Light. Anywhere. I'm the gods-be Personage of Anuurn, I can get you any post you want, it ought to let me do some things I want to do."

Long silence. "No," Haral said. And: "No," like an echo from Tirun.

"World's not safe," Chur said, and shrugged uncomfortably. "But I met this Llun fellow. Immune. Quiet. Real quiet."

"You want your discharge. Or just some leave time?"

Chur sighed, a heave of her shoulders. "Gods, I want till we get the tail fixed, that's all."

Geran had looked worried. Terrified for a moment The shadow passed.

Khym looked Chur's way. And back to her, with a quiet and considerate expression. Sometimes the thoughts went through his eyes so plain she could read them. After all these years.

Epilog

The docks reeked of foreignness, of metal and oil and machinery, and they echoed with announcements and the snarls of monstrous machines; it was a frightening place for a boy from a land of blue sky and golden grass, Hallan heard the PA thundering advisements the cavernous gray spaces swallowed and gave back garbled in echo. He looked about him and saw groups of black-trousered Immunes moving down the docks in a cordon across the whole dockside: what little he did catch from the PA was alarming, snatches of advisories to clear some area, but he had no idea what section four green was or why the lights were flashing blue down there and red where he was.

It was a confusing arrival for a downworld lad, laboring along with his pass and all his worldly possessions in a brand new spacer's duffel. He had spent two bewildered hours in immigration, then taken what turned out to be the wrong lift up from the shuttle dock; then into an administrative office for directions, and down another lift, then, which went sideways as often as it went down and came to dead stop on the main docks, resisting all his attempts to get it to go up. So he had ventured out into the docks of Anuurn, which dazed him with echoes and its true size and its reality after so many dreams. It was a dangerous place, his sisters had warned him; it was wonderful; it overloaded his senses with its noise and its echoes and its foreign smells. It was too huge a place, its few people too hurried or too rough-looking to bother with a newcomer's foolish questions. The docks ran all the circumference of the station: he was sure of that, and surely, if he started walking in the up-numbers direction, section four could not be too far from the section seven he was hunting. He walked along where there was no traffic at all, in the shadow of the gantries, and went from berth 14 where he had come in to berth 15; 16 was a working berth, all its lights lit with a glitter which stirred his sense of the beautiful-white and gold, a hundred lights to shine on the lines and the gantry and the whole surrounds. The ramp access looked to be open. The dockers were driving their vehicles away, and no one noticed if a boy kept walking, so he might pass by as close to his dreams as he had ever come in his life.

But now-CLEAR THE AREA the speaker overhead said while he panted along at the foot of the towering machinery, there by the lights. CLEAR THE AREA, and something more that he could not hear in the garble. He looked around desperately and saw the Immunes moving and the docks suddenly deserted. His heart began to beat in panic: he wondered was it a decompression warning, whether something had gone dangerously wrong on this dock or somewhere near-he had heard horror tales from the war years.

But in his casting about for direction he spied a spacer, a graynosed woman whose ears had, gods, a whole fistful of voyage-rings, who sat on the skirt of some huge piece of machinery, just sitting, observing the whole furor, arm around one knee, her ears backslanted in the racket; suddenly she was looking straight at him.

He dropped his ears at once in politeness: and in outright awe at the spacer rings and the easy assurance of this veteran who was everything he was not and longed with all his heart to be. He would never have come her way on his own; but she was staring at him as if he were somehow more interesting than the chaos and the goings-on with the Immunes. He thought he detected an invitation, a summons in the twitch of a many-ringed ear: and he hitched up his duffel and all the courage of his seventeen years.

"H'lo," he said, walking up-his smile and his friendliness had won him a great deal in his life, and he relied on it

now, when he was afraid, slanting an ear toward the commotion behind him. "Lot of noise, isn't it?"

The spacer nodded.

Not a word. Not the least ear-twitch of friendliness. He was left a fool, twice desperate. His blue breeches were brand new. His ears were ringless. His duffel still had package-creases and he swung it back behind him and dropped it where it was less conspicuous, figuring he had mistaken her invitation: he was suddenly anxious only to get his directions and go, before he found himself in something he could not handle.

The eyes raked him and down in lazy ease, flickered with some kind of interest. "Wrong side of that line, you know."

He cleared his throat, looked nervously over his shoulder. "What are they doing down there?"

"What are you doing up here?"

"I-" He looked back again full into the spacer's lazy stare, that stripped him down to the bones and the truth; there was not even a lie he knew how to tell. "I'm new here," he said; and dropped his ears in deference when her mouth pursed in dour amusement. "What's all the commotion down there?"

"The Pride's in port."

He could not help himself; he looked back again toward the distant lines and drew a large breath. The station, for godssakes, he had truly come to the station, where fantastical species came and went; where fabled ship-names were ordinary on the freighting lists, and many-ringed spacers sat about ordinary as could be. And on the very day he came up from the world, The Pride of Chanur just happened in, with no advance notice in the newsservices, nothing at all to tell the world it was coming. He saw nothing for his looking but a solid line of black-breeched Immunes in the distance, practically no one on the docks there or near at hand; and nothing at all of the ship-boards down there: gantries obscured the view. He looked back and tried to catch his breath. "Gods, I'd like to see it."

"You don't see a ship, son, they stay out there." She was laughing at him, all dour-faced. "But you could go up to the observation lounge, the cameras'll give you a view."

"I want to see them."

"Who?"

"Them."

"The Personage? Gods-rotted lot of nonsense."

He caught a quick breath. His ears went flat. Nonsense. My gods!

"Nonsense," the spacer said again. "No different than you and me. What d'you think, boy? Blackbreeches scurrying around like chi in a fire, shut down the whole gods-be dockside-"

"Well, oughtn't they?" He was indignant. One of the old ones, this, one of the surly old-timers, just blowing off. She doesn't like a boy being up here, doesn't like me being on any ship, ever. Walk off, that's what I ought to do. She probably has a knife somewhere, even a gun in that pocket, gods know what. "I'm going to go have a look." He grabbed up his duffel again.

But the spacer patted the machine-skirt. "Tssss. You won't get anywhere through that line. Just a lot of trouble. Have a seat, boy. All bright-eyed and new, are you?"

He was off his stride. He delayed. And knew himself a fool when the old spacer took on a friendlier, amused look. Turn about for his pretense of being what he was not, that was what she had given him. Fair and fair.

"Sit. Crew's going to be down here in a bit. What ship are you going to?"

"Not to a ship. Yet. School. I'm Meras. Hallan Meras. From Syrsyn." Confession once started, tumbled out in the old spacer's unchanging stare, and his ears burned with embarrassment; she had known even when she asked, but she did not ridicule him. "I want to be a spacer." It was his dearest dream. He saw it coming true and she did not laugh when he said that either. One of the old ones. "Have you-" He cast another look down the dock, leaning forward, and saw nothing of ship names at this angle either. "Have you ever seen the Personage?"

"Lots of times."

He looked back in awe. "Are you a friend of hers?"

"What's the matter with you, boy, what do they teach you nowadays, all this fuss to see some Personage, what's seeing do, anyway? Makes me worry, that's what. Hani I knew'd spit in the eye of somebody that wanted all that bowing and guarding. You ought to."

He understood then. "She got me here," he said. And when the old spacer blinked: "That's why I want to see that ship. I wouldn't be here without her, without what she did. That's why."

"Huh," the old spacer said. "Huh." And: "Uhhnnn-" With a gesture outward, toward the sudden flashing of a strobe light and the arrival of several official cars. "Llun."

"Are we in trouble?" Hallan got anxiously to his feet as his spacer companion stood up. He snatched up his duffel and held onto it. Immune officials and weapon-bearing marshals were getting out of the car, coming their way, while suddenly, adding to the confusion, there were other spacers coming down the ramp out of the ship, one of them a man, one of them-"O my gods," Hallan said, having seen humans in old pictures, and having seen a picture of this one.

"Cap'n," one of the spacers said, scar-nosed and broad-faced; and coming their way. "My gods, you going like that?"

"Too much fuss," the old spacer said, and dusted off her trousers. "Drives me berserk, this whole business. They want a decree, I'll give 'em a decree. Haral, meet a nice kid. Hallan Meras, meet Haral Araun. Sorry we can't stay and talk right now. Luck to you."

She walked off with the crew from the ship, the human Tully and all. And na Khym nef Mahn, who was the first man in space.

One of the crew lingered a moment, a small woman who looked him up and down with eyes that for a moment seemed to see-gods, inside him and around him with a force that left him all but shaking. Chur Anify. The strange one. She was the one that had charted the new Points off beyond Minar, and probes had found them, a bridge to other stars. She was almost as famous as the Personage.

"Who is this boy?" A Llun officer asked, all hard and threatening.

"He has a right to be there," Chur Anify said, and the officer looked at her and dropped her ears and let him alone.

"Are you some relative?" that officer asked when the cars had left the dockside and grim Llun marshals stood double guard outside The Pride of Chanur's ramp access. "Are you Chanur?"

"No," he said, holding his baggage and still dazed as if all the stars in space spun about him. That had been the Personage, the mekt-hakkikt of the kif, the Director . . . there were as many names as there were species in the Compact. She had talked with him, this power that could move a thousand ships and mediate affairs among species.

With him, as if he were truly someone who mattered.

Or as if he might be that someone, someday.

 
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