C Cherryh - Chanur's Homecoming

Two years previous, the aggressive kif, natives of Akkht, had a hakkikt, a leader so fearsome he united more than the usual number of kif behind him in a pirate band. This hakkikt, Akkukkak, had seized a ship of a hitherto unknown species, humanity; and acquired ambitions beyond the usual kifish banditry against other species. With a species to prey on which was without the protections of the Compact, he might grow powerful enough to gather the whole kifish species under his influence, sweeping down on the Compact in a wave of conquest unprecedented in history.

But his human prey escaped him. While the hakkikt was docked at Meetpoint starstation, the last surviving prisoner ran to shelter aboard The Pride of Chanur, a hani merchant ship captained by one Pyanfar Chanur, who in no wise solicited this refugee.

Still Pyanfar and her crew as a matter of policy refused to surrender the human to Akkukkak’s demand. This was a two-fold calamity for the kif: first the loss of the human and all the information he held about his species; and then this defiance from a mere hani merchant—who continued to elude the great hakkikt in a multi-star chase. Akkukkak was suddenly fighting not only for his prey but for his life, for a kif who loses face rapidly loses followers, and becomes the target of other kif with ambitions. Akkukkak was compelled to seek vengeance on a scale sufficient to cover this humiliation; and this humiliation involved an ambition large enough to shake worlds.

He took the unprecedented step of moving on the hani homeworld, seeking first the humiliation and removal of Pyanfar Chanur and all her clan, in what may have been a kifish misapprehension of the importance of any single hani; he was thinking as a kif, and interpreted Pyanfar’s moves as aggressive ambition. He also demanded the return of his property. In all these demands he seriously misjudged the hani, for no action he could have taken would have rallied the hani against him more than this intrusion on hani home territory and the demand to surrender a living being who had taken shelter within a hani clan. Hani resisted in a battle at Gaohn station, and they received mahen help in the persons of two hunter captains, known to Pyanfar (mahendo’sat names are not easy for outsiders) as Goldtooth and Jik. This firefight would have been serious enough; but the hostilities disturbed yet another species of the Compact, the methane-breathing knnn, aliens of direst reputation and the highest technology in known space. The knnn, intervening, took Akkukkak away to a fate unguessed. And that settled that. The human Tully went home to his people. Pyanfar Chanur looked forward to a new era of trade and prosperity in which not only Clan Chanur, but all hani-kind would profit from human contact.

She reckoned, unfortunately, without the stsho, whose station at Meetpoint was the hub of all trading routes of the Compact. Total xenophobes, the stsho withdrew Chanur’s trading permit. More, Akkukkak had indeed caused a profound disturbance in hani affairs by the manner of his demise. Chanur was forced to defend itself against challenge by hani enemies who took advantage of popular fears of the knnn, and though Lord Kohan Chanur held on, Chanur lost valuable allies whose support in council Pyanfar and other women of the clan very greatly missed.

To add to the difficulties, no one kept their promises. The humans did not return and the mahendo’sat withdrew into isolation.

Two impoverished years later, Pyanfar Chanur was doing all she could to keep The Pride running, and she was not the only Chanur captain in deep trouble.

Then by some unforeseen miracle her papers cleared and she was invited back to Meetpoint to recover her trading license.

She pulled into Meetpoint with the last cargo she could afford to buy, and fell right into the welcoming arms of Goldtooth the mahendo’sat, who handed her a courier packet with the human Tully as a secret passenger and told her to run for her life: the kif were hunting him.

Now among Pyanfar’s other troubles, she had defied hani custom. Hani males were traditionally a protected class within hani society, the few who made successful challenge becoming clan lords, ceremonial heads of clans, who in fact had no meaningful authority at all, the real legal and financial power resting with the clanswomen who conducted exterior business. The rest of the males lived and died in rural exile, excluded from all society but their own; and to this pool of males a defeated clan lord must retire, to a short and wretched life among younger, ambitious males practicing their combat skills. Pyanfar’s husband Khym Mahn was defeated by their son Kara, and deposed; but he postponed his exile to help her in her fight against the kif, and became one of the few hani males ever to leave the planetary surface—by interstellar agreement, they were in fact barred from doing so, since they had a reputation for berserker rages dangerous to life and property.

But Pyanfar, faced with the prospect of sending Khym down world again to die, defied treaty and custom and took him aboard The Pride ; more, she secured working papers for him by bribing a mahendo’sat official, and listed him as crew. Having traveled and worked with alien males, Pyanfar has begun to see in her own husband traits no hani has ever looked for in a male of her species; she conceived the idea in her heart of hearts that the berserker rages might be due more to upbringing than biology, and yet—and yet she is hani; and to doubt something out of all folk wisdom, something built into all language and custom and tradition, is very difficult, the more so that Khym himself doubts her theories; he is, after all, a product of his culture too, and all the complex of beliefs which encourage him to be a man also foster his aggressive impulses and his doubts about his faculties. It is not, in sum, a comfortable situation for The Pride ’s crew either, who still cannot figure out whether they ought to treat Khym as a man or try to ignore that handicap and treat him as one of themselves—in which case modesty and custom and language are in the way: female humor and traditional curses involve sons and males; pausing to dress in shipboard emergencies is not practical; ship facilities are not designed to accommodate a man’s larger stature; and male thinking is traditionally given to be hasty and imprecise, not the sort of thing anyone wants to rely on in any use of hazardous machinery.

But Khym once-lord of Mann acquired the unprecedented (for a hani) designation of crewman aboard The Pride of Chanur.

The worst happened forthwith: Khym was involved in a riot that heavily damaged Meetpoint station. Pyanfar escaped a second loss of her license only by charging the entire bill to the mahendo’sat, who had given her a credit slip for quite different purposes—to aid her with the transport of the human, Tully.

Unfortunately this riot happened under the disapproving witness of one Rhif Ehrran, an agent of the hani government.

Now Rhif Ehrran had come to Meetpoint on quite different business. So many of the spacing clans of the hani had taken heavy damage at Gaohn that the groundling clans had seized control of the han, the hani senate. Meanwhile the xenophobic stsho, wealthiest species of the Compact, had bribed certain hani politicians, wanting to subvert hani politics from the inside for fear of two other species: first, humans, who had trespassed stsho borders and might do so again; second, the kif, because two of Akkukkak’s erstwhile lieutenants, one Akkhtimakt and one Sikkukkut, had risen to declare themselves hakkikktun. These two kif were currently battling it out between themselves, but they had already polarized kifish society into a frighteningly few predatory bands. From a fragmented piratical species, kif had suddenly achieved unity to a degree Akkukkak himself never effected.