C Cherryh: Chanur's Homecoming

“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, Hilfy: 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?

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.