C Cherryh: Chanur's Homecoming

Tirun reached out and took the cylinder. And delayed one lazy moment in a gesture that could not have been wasted, especially on a kif. “Be courteous, Hilfy.”

With fine timing, with a little flattening of the ears that might be respect and might be something else again, ambiguous even to hani eyes—Tirun delivered her signal to Hilfy and turned with authority and walked off, at a pace both deliberate and fast enough.

While Hilfy stood there with the gun in her fist and two kif to watch.

Steady, kid. For the gods’ sakes, Tirun’s done it right, don’t wobble.

No one said a thing on the bridge. It remained very, very quiet until the lift worked, back down the corridor from the center of the bridge. Then Pyanfar got out of her chair and went to wait for Tirun, who came down the corridor at a much faster clip than she had used below. While at the boards, Haral and Geran kept to business, monitoring everything round about the ship and inside it and everything coming from station.

“Captain,” Tirun said by way of courtesy, and handed over the cylinder.

The cap stuck when she pulled at it. For one awful moment Pyanfar thought of explosives; or deadly gas. “Wait here,” she said, left Tirun standing on the bridge, and stepped outside into the corridor, pushing the door switch to close it between them.

She hooked a claw into the seal then and gnawed her lip and pulled the cap. Nothing blew. Nothing came out. It was a message, a bit of gray paper.

The door shot open again in the same instant, which was Tirun; and Tirun stood there aggrieved in the tail of her eye while she fished the paper out and read it.

Hunter Pyanfar: you have made requests. I will give you my response aboard my ship at 1500, expecting that you will came with ranking personnel of allied ships.

“Captain?” Tirun said.

She passed the letter over and cast a second look up at the chrono in the bridge display: 1436.

“It’s a trap,” Tirun said.

On the bridge even Haral had taken one quick look around.

“Invitation from the kif,” Pyanfar said. “Ranking personnel of allied ships. On his deck. Fast.”

“My gods,” Khym exclaimed.

“Unfortunately,” Pyanfar said, and thought of Hilfy down there in the corridor with two kif alone. “Unfortunately we haven’t got a real choice. Get Tahar and get Kesurinan. I’m not taking any of you—”

Mouths opened.

“It’s a trap,” Khym said, his deep voice quivering with outrage. “Py, Tirun’s right, listen to her.”

“Not taking any of you,” she said carefully, “except our friend the kif. Get to it, Geran, get our friends out there.”

“That dock,” Geran said.

“We got worse risks than a leaky dock, cousin; one of ’em’s being late and one of them’s missing a signal with that kif. I’m going down there, I want Tahar and Kesurinan just the way the kif asked, and about the time I clear the lock down there I want The Pride powered up and held that way till I get back again. Make the point with ’em we still got teeth, hear? And that my crew’s on full alert.”

“Aye,” Haral muttered, far from happy.

Neither was Pyanfar happy. She went and pulled one of their APs out of the locker by the bridge exit and headed back down the corridor, with the heavy sidearm and its belt in hand.

Not to the lowerdeck straightway.

First came a stop in her own quarters, for a fast exchange: for a bit of glitter, because appearances counted, a psychological weapon as essential as the gun at her side.

Sikkukkut meant to move now. In some regard.

She clenched her jaw and started cataloging things, fast, things that wanted doing. In case she had just said goodbye to her crew and her husband.

Gods, Khym had just stood there and took an answer for an answer. Her heart did a little painful thump of pride when she realized belatedly what that had cost him: he was not the gentle ignorant she had married, not the feckless man who had walked out on the docks at Meetpoint and run straight into a kifish trap. If she died today at kifish hands he would not act the male; would not rush out there like a lunatic to take the kif on hand to hand—he had grown a lot on this voyage, had Khym, when he was no longer a boy and no longer young at all. He had finally found out what lay outside his limits and what the universe was like—had found friends, b’gods, female friends and one who was even male, friends which she suddenly realized in grief that Khym had never had in all his adult life, excepting her and his other wives, and I them but scarcely: clan-lord, shielded from all contact with the world by his wives and his sisters and his daughters, he had finally come out into the real world to find out what it was, and he was not just her Khym anymore; or even Khym lord Mahn; he was something more than that, suddenly, long after he should have gone to die in Hermitage, outworn and useless—he grew up and became what he always could have been; discovered the universe full of honest folk and scoundrels of all genders, and learned how to win respect, how to ignore the barbs and become ship-youngest and work his way out of a second youth, with utterly different rules. That was more change than most women had the fortitude to take in their lives; but by the gods he had made it complete back there; he would do his fighting from that bridge and that board, under Haral’s command if something went wrong, part of the crew that drove a ship of mass enough and internal power enough to turn Kefk and Sikkukkut and all his ambitions into one briefly incandescent star.

The docks were the shambles she had expected, gray metal still supercooled under her bare feet, with a good many of the lights out-blown when the pressure went and when this dock had opened to space. Gantries loomed up down the righthand side of the docks, subtly tilting in the positive curvature of

the deck, which was the torus-shaped station’s outermost edge, to anyone who saw it as a wheel, from the outside. Here that rim was down, and floored in bare metal—Kefk had mining, metal-rich in the debris that floated around its double stars; therefore Kefk was gray and dull, except for the dirty orange of the sodium-lights kif preferred—because it never occurred to the colorblind kif to paint anything for decorative purposes, only for protective ones: they literally had to use instruments to determine what color a thing was, and gods knew whether their homeworld Akkht had ever offered them dyes other than black—though it was rumored that they had learned their color—taste from the pastel opalescent stsho, who disparaged the riot of color which hani and mahendo’sat loved about themselves; having discovered a range of distinctions beyond their senses, having the pale example of the stsho before them, and flinching before the stsho’s concept of value (such affluent consumers they set the standard for the whole Compact’s economy) and further daunted by the stsho’s disparagement of species who put strong color with color, the kif were all very insecure in their own dignity before the stsho and before others: above all no kif wanted to be laughed at. True black was one distinction they could make, true black and true white: so they naturally chose the dark that matched their habitat and their desire to move unseen, and became aesthetes of only one color, the blackest black. They valued silver more than gold because to their eyes it shone more; and they valued texture above other things in aesthetics, because they were more tactilely than visually stimulated in their pleasure centers: in fact they must be virtually blind to sight—beauty, and loved to touch interesting surfaces—that was what she had heard from an old stsho once upon a time, when the stsho had gotten quite giddy on a tiny cupful of Anuurn tea (it had a substance in it which reacted interestingly with stsho metabolism, which did nothing at all to a hani: such were the oddities of vice and pleasure between species). The kif in earliest days, this stsho said, had been victims of mahen practical jokes, who sold them clashing colors; and the kif did not forget this humiliation.