C Cherryh: Chanur's Homecoming

“Chur,” her sister Geran was pleading with her, and she supposed that it was Geran prying the gun loose from her fingers: she was dizzy and her vision fuzzed. She heard her cousin Tirun’s voice, and human jabber, which was her friend Tully; and she dazedly let herself be dragged one step and another into the room, someone else taking the skein of tubes. A bell was going off: the infernal machine was telling off on her, that she was stressed.

“Gods rot it,” she cried, remembering. “There’s something in here.” And then she remembered that she had seen little black things before, on the bridge, and could not remember whether they were hallucinations or not, or whether her sister took her seriously. It was embarrassing to see hallucinations. And the cursed machine kept pouring sedative into her, so that they were going to leave her alone in here and drugged, with whatever-it-was: she did not want that either.

“Look under the bed,” Geran said, while Geran was putting her back into it, and she could not remember where the gun had gotten to, which was against ship’s rules, which was against all the regulations, to lose track of a firearm; and there was a kif trying to crawl under her bed. A sweat broke out on her, cold on her ears and nose and fingertips. “Where’s my gun?” she asked hazily, trying to sit up again; and “There it is!” someone shouted from the floor.

“My gods,” Chur murmured, and her sister put her flat on her back again. She blinked, blinked again in the crazed notion that there was a kif on his hands and knees at her bedside and people were trying to get her hallucination out from under her bed.

“Sorry,” Geran said fervently. “Stay down. We’ve got it.”

“You’re crazy,” Chur said. “You’re stark crazy, all of you.” Because none of it made sense.

But something let out a squeal under her bed, and something bumped against the secure-held braces, and there was an ammonia smell to the room which was no illusion, but a kif’s real presence.

“He got,” said Tully’s voice, and he loomed up by her bedside. “Chur, you all right?”

“Sure,” Chur said. She remembered at least where she was now, tied to a machine in na Khym’s cabin because she was, since the kif had shot her on a dock at Kshshti, too sick to be down in crew quarters; and Goldtooth had given them this fine medical equipment when he had met them here at Kefk, which was before the docks blew up in a firefight and she had been holding the bridge singlehanded when the little black things started coming and going like a nasty slinking nightmare. There was a kif aboard, his name was Skkukuk, he was a slave and a gift from the hakkikt and he stood there with his black snout atwitch and his Dinner clutched in both bony hands as he stared at her. She curled her lip and laid her cars back, head scantly lifted. “Out!”

The kif hissed and clicked and retreated in profound offense, teeth bared, and Chur bared hers, coming up on her free elbow.

“Easy,” Geran said, pushing her back; and Tirun chased the kif on out, Haral’s sister Tirun, big enough to make a kif think twice about any argument, and owing that slight limp to a kifish gun some years back: Chur felt herself safe if Geran was by her and Tirun was between her and the kif. She looked up at Tully’s gold-bearded face and blinked placidly.

“Gods-be kif,” Geran said. “Readout jumping like crazy—Tully, here, get this gun out of here.”

“No,” Chur said. “Drawer. Put it back in the drawer, Tully.”

“Out of here,” Geran said.

“Gods rot,” Chur yelled, “drawer!” Living around Tully, a body got to thinking in pidgin and half-sentences. And the voice came out cracked. Tully hesitated, looking at Geran.

An even larger figure showed up in the doorway, filling it. Khym Mahn, male and tall and wide: “What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble,” Geran said. “Come on, close that door, everyone out before another of the gods-be things gets in. Who’s watching the godsforsaken kif?”

“Put the gun in the drawer,” Chur said firmly. “Tully.”

“You leave it there,” Geran said, getting up, as Khym vanished. She stood looking down a moment, while Tully did as he was told. Then the two of them stood there, her sister, her human friend; if there was ever truly such a thing as friendship between species. And the gods-be kif down the hall—Was that thing a friend, and did they have it running loose on the ship now? Had the captain authorized that?

“O gods,” Chur murmured, too tired and too sick for thoughts like loose kif, and for uncharitable thoughts toward Tully, who had done his unarmed best to save all their hides more than once. But it was in her heart now that she would not see home again, and that this was her last voyage, and she wanted to go home more than anything, back to Anuurn and Chanur and to have this little selfish time with things she knew and loved, familiar things, uncomplicated by aliens and strangeness—wanted to be young again, and to have more time, and to remember what it was to have her life all in front of her and not behind.

Wanted, gods help her, to see even her home up in the hills, which was purest stupidity: she and Geran had walked out of there and come down to Chanur when they were kids as young as Hilfy, because a young fool of a new lord had gotten himself in power up there over their sept of clan Chanur, and she and her sister had pulled up roots and left for Chanur’s main-sept estate with no more than the clothes on their backs.

And their pride. They had come with that intact. The two of them.

“Never looked back,” she said, thinking Geran at least might understand. “Gods be, odd things were what we were looking for when we came down the hills, wasn’t that it?”

Geran made a desperate motion at Tully that meant get out, quietly, and Tully went, not without a pat at Chur’s blanketed leg.

Chur lay there and blinked, embarrassed at herself. She looked like something dead. She knew that. She and Geran had once looked a great deal alike, red-blond of mane and beard and with a sleekness and slimness that was the hillwoman legacy in their sept; not like their cousins Haral and Tirun Araun or their cousin Pyanfar either, who had downland Chanur’s height and strength, but never their highlands beauty, their agility, their fleetness of foot. Now Geran’s shoulders slumped in exhaustion, her coat was dull, her eyes unutterably weary; and Chur had seen mirrors. Her bones hurt when she lay on them. The sheets were changed daily: Geran saw to that, because she shed and shed, till the skin appeared in patches, all dull pink and horrid through her fur. That was her worst personal suffering, not the pain, not the dread of dying: it was her vanity the machine robbed her of, and her dignity; and watching Geran watch her deteriorate was worst of all.

“Sorry,” Chur said. “Gods-be machine keeps pouring sedative into me. I don’t always make sense.”

Rotten way to die, she thought to herself, drugged out of my mind. Scaring Geran. What kind of way is that?

“Unhook me from this thing.”

“You said you’d leave it be,” Geran said. “For me. You told the captain you’d leave it be. Do we need to worry about you?”

“Asked, didn’t I?” The voice came hoarse. The episode had exhausted her. Or it was the sedative. “We letting that gods-be kif loose now?”

“Khym’s got an eye on him.”

“Uhhn.” There was a time that would have sounded crazy. Men did not deal with outsiders, did not take responsibility, did not have any weight of decision on their shoulders, on their berserk-prone brains. But nothing in the world was the

same as it had been when she was a girl. “We left home to find strange things,” Chur said, bewildered that she ended up trusting a man’s good sense and an alien human’s good will, a hillwoman like her. “Found ’em, didn’t we?” But she saw that pained drawing about Geran’s mustaches, the quivering flick of Geran’s ears, well-ringed with voyages. She saw how drained Geran was, how her maundering grieved Geran, had a sure instinct that if Geran had one load on her shoulders, she had just put another there, almost unbearable for her sister. “Hey,” she said, “I was pretty steady on my feet. Machine helps. Think I’ll make it. Hear?”