C Cherryh - Chanur's Homecoming

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-”