C Cherryh - Chanur's Homecoming

Gods knew how those black slinking pests had gotten up from lowerdeck.

Climbed the liftshaft? The airducts?

The thought of a myriad little slinking black bodies loping along the airshafts and into lifesupport lifted the hairs at her nape.

What were the gods-be things eating?

She scooped up a last couple of papers with a wince and a grimace and sat down again. Rested both elbows on the table and rested her aching head in her hands.

She saw within her mind a dark kifish hall; sodium-light; and a table surrounded by insect-legged chairs—her partner Jik sitting there with one of Sikkukkut’s minions holding a gun to his head, and that bastard Sikkukkut starting to ask closer and closer questions.

She had not had a way to help him. She had been lucky to get her own crew out of there alive; and to keep herself and her ship as free as it was, under kifish guns at a kifish dock.

Send another appeal to Sikkukkut to ask for Jik’s release? Sikkukkut’s patience with her was already frayed. Perhaps it was personal cowardice not to send another message. Perhaps it was prudence and saving what could be saved, not to push Sikkukkut into some demonstration of his power—at Jik’s expense. Kifish heads adorned the stanchions of Sikkukkut’s ship-ramp. That image haunted her rest and her sleep. A moment’s off-guard imagining set Jik’s head there beside the others.

She opened her eyes abruptly when that vision hit, focusing instead on the maps and charts and printout, where the answer had to lie, where she was convinced it was, if she could cudgel her aching skull and battered brain just a little farther through the maze.

Jik had left them another legacy: a coded microfiche which even Soje Kesurinan, in command of Aja Jin, might not know existed. And The Pride ’s computers had been running on that, trying to break that code, ever since they had gotten back to the ship and had a chance to feed it in.

“Again,” said Sikkukkut an’nikktukktin, hakkikt and mekt-hakkikt, lately provincial boss and currently rival for ultimate authority among his kind; while Jik, Keia Nomesteturjai, kif-hunter, captain, and what other rank among mahendo’sat this kifish pirate would earnestly like to know—focused his eyes with difficulty and managed a twisted grin. That tended to confuse hell out of the kif, who knew facial expressions were a second and well-developed language especially among mahendo’sat, and who had never quite learned to interpret all their nuances.

“Again,” said Sikkukkut, “Keia, my old friend. Where are the human ships? Doing what? Intending what?”

“I’ve told you,” Jik said. He said it in mahensi, being perverse. Sikkukkut understood that language, though many of his listening subordinates, standing about their table in this dim, sodium-lit hall, were not as educated. Sikkukkut, on the other hand, had a good many talents.

Interrogation was one of those. Sikkukkut had performed that office in the service of Akkukkak, of unlamented memory. All these questions, each pacing and each shift of mood Sikkukkut displayed, were calculated. It was, at the moment, the soft touch. Have a smoke, my old friend. Sit and talk with me. But now the frown was back, a slight drawing-down of Sikkukkut’s long black snout. Hooded and inscrutable he sat, on his insect-legged chair, in the baleful light of the sodium-lamps, while Jik smoked and stared at him eye to eye. There were numerous guards about the shadowed edges of the hall, always the sycophants and the guards. In a little time the order would come to take him back to lowerdecks; and they would try the harder course again. Constant shifting of strategy, the hard approach and the soft, Sikkukkut usually the latter. Usually.

Jik kept himself mentally distant from all these changes, observed the shifts and absorbed the punishment with a professional detachment which was Sikkukkut’s (surely, Jik reckoned) intention to crack. And he looked Sikkukkut in his red-rimmed eyes with the sure feeling that the kif was analyzing his every twitch and blink, looking for a telling reaction.

“Come now, Keia. You know my disposition, how patient I am, of my kind. I know that you had ample time to consult with your partner before the shooting started. We’ve been over these questions. They grow wearisome. Can we not resolve them?”

“My partner,” Jik said, silken-slurred: Sikkukkut afforded him liquor, and he pinched out a dead smokestick and took a sip from the small round footed cup, and drew a long, long breath. Pleasures were few enough. He took what he could get. “I tell you, hakkikt, I wish / knew what my partner’s up to. God, you think I’d have been out on that dock if I’d known what he was about to do?” He fumbled after his next smoke and his fingers were numb. Doubtless the drink was drugged. But there were enough of them to put the drug into him another way, so he took his medicine dosed in very fine liquor and quietly gathered his internal forces. He was deep-conditioned, immune to ordinary efforts in that regard: he knew how to self-hypnotize, and he was already focused on a series of mantras and mandalas into which he had coded what he knew, down paths of dialectic and image no kif could walk without error. He smiled blandly, in secret and bleak amusement that Sikkukkut’s methods had incidentally eased the aches and the pains of previous sessions. His thoughts swayed and wove, moved in and out of focus. The docks and fire. His crew. Aja Jin. Friends and allied ships were just down the dock and as good as lightyears away. “Let me tell you, mekt-hakkikt, I know Ana’s style. Think like a mahendo’sat who knows kif, hakkikt. If he’d asked you for leave to operate on his own you’d never have given it.”

“Therefore he wrecks Kefk’s docks.”

Jik shrugged and drew in a puff, blinked and stared at the kif beneath heavy lids. “Well, but independence is Ana’s way. I’ve known him for years. He’s damn stubborn. He thinks he sees a way and he takes it. Agreements to this side and that—sure, he’s working the mahen side. And maybe the human side too. Most of all he’s gathering assets—" (Careful, Keia, the brain’s fogged; stay to the narrow, the back-doubling path and lead us all round again.) Jik drew in smoke and let it out again in a shaky exhalation. “He’ll negotiate with you. Eventually. But think like a mahendo’sat. He has to get something in hand to negotiate with, something to offer you, hakkikt, to demonstrate his worth.”

“Like Meetpoint? You weigh upon my credulity, Keia.” Silk, silk and soothing-soft. “Try again.”

“Not Meetpoint. But some matter of substance he can come to you with. I think he means to come back to talk. But he will bring something.”

Sikkukkut’s snout twitched in a dry sniffing, kifish laughter, which came for many reasons, not all of which were civilized. “Like a million human ships and a great number of guns?”

“Now, that is possible, hakkikt.” Jik blinked and narrowed his focus still tighter on what he had resolved to say, never on what he was hiding. Find the threads of the story and stay to them, walk the narrow path, while the drug and the alcohol and the stimulants in the smoke flowed through his veins. “That is remotely possible; but the advantage would be too onesided for the humans. What good to mahendo’sat, to exchange one powerful neighbor for another of unknown potential?”

“Unknown, is it?”

“You speak excellent mahensi. Far better than I speak your language. Mechanical translators are hardly a substitute for living and fluent brains. The best human translator we know can ask for a cup of water and say he wants trade. Now, what does that tell us about human motives, human government, human minds, a? Friend, they say. You say friend, I say friend. Do we mean the same thing? What do humans mean with that word? Assuredly Ana doesn’t know; and I much doubt he means to upend the Compact as long as he doesn’t know.” Jik held up a blunt-clawed forefinger, to maintain attention to a point. “Goldtooth, our esteemed Ana, takes orders. He also interprets them freely. This is the danger in him. The Personage who sent us both knows this. Therefore he sent me to restrain Ana from his excesses. I have failed in this. But I know Ana’s limits. I am saying this to you, and you speak such excellent mahensi; but I don’t know whether you know the meaning of this word limits in the way we do. It implies the edge of Ana’s personal assumptions. Ana still obeys the Personage at Maing Tol. As I do. And I tell you that negotiation with you is in the Personage’s interest and human ships running freely through Compact is not in those interests. Therefore I make alliance with