Chanur's Legacy (34 page)

She’d said to him, “Oh, gods, I’m glad you’re all right. , . .” in a way that made him go warm and chill and warm again, all the way down to his feet. He’d stood there like a fool, not knowing what to say, except. “You too.”

Because a feeling like that was what you got in families, and what a boy always had to give up, and couldn’t count on finding again anywhere: you couldn’t count on it in the exile you had to go to and you couldn’t count on it from whatever clan you fought your way into. If you were stupid and your feelings for some girl led you to fight some clan lord you couldn’t beat, it mostly got you in trouble.

That was what was wrong with this going to space, that
na
Chanur wasn’t here,
na
Chanur who was also overlord of Anify hadn’t the least idea he existed. It was like in the old ballads, like in that book, the young fools meeting in the woods, and things getting out of hand and the clan lord not knowing about it. Only when he found out,
na
Chanur was going to want to kill him, and
na
Chanur and in particular
na
Anify was going to be upset with Fala, which was going to make her sisters and her mother mad at her, which was going to set the family on its ear, at the least, and get
na
Chanur after
na
Meras, who wouldn’t be happy with him at all, or with his sisters, for helping him get to space, and creating a problem with Chanur that
he
might have to fight over. Not to mention
na
Sahara, who wouldn’t like the publicity of a truly famous incident.

Love was all very well in ballads. It was nice
to
think that it was possible, and maybe it happened in legitimate relationships, like Pyanfar Chanur and na Khym, who had to love each other, besides being married. But in real life it got you killed and messed up families, and he and Fala both had been shaky-kneed from rescuing Chihin, and he’d been wide open. The rush of action, that kind of thing. A moment, an incident, mat wouldn’t be the same tomorrow, if
he
kept his wits about him...

But the feeling just wasn’t going away tonight. He really wanted to go off with Fala somewhere and if be did that, and the captain had
na
Chanur to think about, it just wasn’t going to help his case. If he did that, it could make it absolutely certain Hilfy Chanur would get rid of him, and that— that, in itself, began to have an emotional context it hadn’t had, because he couldn’t deal with the idea of not being on this ship. He couldn’t lose that. He couldn’t risk losing this ship or these people, and he didn’t know when he’d begun to feel that way.

Oh, gods, he was in a lot of trouble.

I’m saying get out of here, get out, I won’t live with a gods-be fool!

But it wasn’t Korin Sfaura, it was a pillow Hilfy found herself murdering, and she rolled onto her back in a tangle of bedclothes, sorry she hadn’t killed him herself—and gotten him out of her repertoire of bad dreams and stupid mistakes.

She’d gone at him in a blind rage and at a vast disadvantage, that was all—though she hadn’t been concussed, as Rhean said she had been, as Rhean was in a damned hurry to say, bringing in cousin Harun for what amounted to a power-grab, and a takeover of Chanur’s onworld business.

Which Rhean did all right at. And she was rid of Korin without offending Sfaura, which it would have done if she’d done what she wanted to do. Politics. Korin Sfaura was dead. And that business was forever unfinished, and she carried that anger, too, but she wasn’t sure all of it was at Korin, who’d been a pretty, vain, brute-selfish fool. And she wasn’t sure why she waked dreaming about a man she wouldn’t waste a waking moment thinking about.

Fact was, she’d picked him. Her judgment had been that bad. She still tried, on bad nights, to figure out why it had been that dismally bad, or what failing was in herself. And “pretty” about covered his assets. Maybe “stupid” had been another one—because deep down she had wanted a piece of furniture, something decorative, something you didn’t have to justify anything to or argue with, because when her father had died she hadn’t wanted anybody in his place, no
real
lord in Chanur, just something that would get heirs and not interfere in the politics between her and her aunts.

Only Rhean, who’d been furious at aunt Py going off from the clan, had had her own ideas how Chanur should face the new age, and what was important, and maybe—no, probably—Rhean had been right: Rhean cared, and Rhean had given up her command and come home and done what needed doing. Mauled her in the doing, granted. She’d been mad as hell about that, and about
na
Harun, and stung by Rhean’s reaction to her. But truth to tell, Rhean hadn’t been happy to go down-world either. No more than she had been.

The power ... Rhean liked that. It was a warmer blanket than the husband Rhean couldn’t bring home to Chanur, and couldn’t likely get to that often. A continent away was a good political alliance, and what was a continent but a half an orbit when Rhean had come in from space, but things were different now.

A lot was.

And she wasn’t coming home often, herself. Could marry again, but had no enthusiasm for the institution.

There was Meras. Who was on one level like Korin: pretty face, no source of opinions. Amazing how attractive that still was to her. But not fair to a kid with brains; and he’d shown with the kif that he did think, thought right well for a young man, and clearly enough Fala was taken with him, Tarras and Tiar were...

But, but, and but. It was the middle of her sleep cycle, thoughts like that were a credit a hundredweight, and gods rot it, she didn’t want to go through the husband business again. He was bright, he would get ideas, and the politics involved at home were already difficult.

Besides, he’d made irrevocable changes in their operations, he was a liability the kif had used to get her into a face to face meeting with unforeseeable consequences. She’d been mad enough to kill him a handful of hours ago, she and Chihin both.

She grabbed the pillow and buried her head under it, looking for some place void of images.

Chihin understood what was happening, Chihin had seen it coming before she did, Tiar and Tarras were too good-hearted to space him and Fala was suffering a late puberty. She didn’t know what to do with him, she didn’t know where she was going to unload him— Kefk, maybe. Let him bankrupt the kif.

At which thought she saw that room, smelled the air, felt the ambient tension kif generated with each other, and remembered there were creatures in the universe to whom the highest virtue was the fastest strike and who didn’t lose a wink of sleep over blowing a shipful of living beings to radioactive dust. There wasn’t evil. She’d studied cultures too thoroughly and learned too many languages to believe in evil. She just knew that she’d tried to arrange her life so she didn’t have to deal with the kif at all ... and here she was again; and there it was, the kifish offer ... deal with us, learn to strike faster and first, leam to think our way, because we aren’t wired to think yours, we can’t understand hani thoughts ...

You always hoped they could. You were always tempted to believe they might cross that uncrossable gulf and deny their own hardwiring, turn off the triggers that led from impulse to action, the way a hani could turn them on, the way a hani could use instincts that
were
there, if you wanted to tear up the stones civilization laid over them, worse, you could get into the game, dealing with the kif~-the very primal-level game, that had its very primal rewards, that competed with civilization.

Hilfy Chanur had delved a bit too deeply into kifish minds. Hilfy Chanur had become expert in the language, to understand what she hadn’t understood when it was her alone and Tully, and kif had talked outside the cage. She’d learned words she couldn’t pronounce, lacking a double set of razor teeth, and words she couldn’t translate, without resorting to words of psychotic connotation in every other language she knew.

But you didn’t say crazy, you didn’t say evil. They weren’t. No more than outsiders were what kif would say,
naikktak,
randomly behaving, behaving without regard to survival.

Which said something about how kif thought of hani ... and about the frame of mind in which Vikktakkht had asked
na
Hallan to ask him questions.

Asked a hani male, who was notorious for unpredictable and aggressive behavior.

Respect for the aggression? Possibly.

Curiosity? Possibly. Kif had a very active curiosity. Kif could be artistic, imaginative, and curious. All these dimensions. They valued such attributes.

But Hallan Meras ...

Using him as bait to get her closer, that made sense. That was very kif.

But refusing to talk to her, insisting
na
Hallan do the business they’d clearly come for ...

It snapped into focus. Gamesmanship. Provocation aimed at her.

Why?

She was Pyanfar’s relative, but kif didn’t understand kinship, not at gut level. They weren’t wired for it. They’d understand it as potential rivalry, but the ones that knew outsiders were too sophisticated to make that mistake. That wasn’t what Vikktakkht was doing. It felt too gods-be
personal.

She rolled onto her back and mangled the pillow to prop her head, staring at the profitless dark.
This
was what she did instead of sleeping, too many hours of free association. Why couldn’t the mind come to straight conclusions? Why did she have to think about Hallan Meras, her unwarranted temper, and
kif,
all rolled into one package with Vikktakkht’s odd gods-rotted motives? Her mind was trying to put something together out of spare parts. And it wouldn’t fit together.

What was the kif— a
fter,
by the gods?

Hunt. Prey. Run or fight and you got their attention. Stand still and you got eaten.

She’d escaped the kif. That story was probably famous among kif. But this kif had been right there at Meetpoint, set up with a prisoner guaranteed to get a hani’s attention ...

In jail for hitting a kif. One wondered how far
that
was a set-up.

Any hani might have done. But he’d just missed

Pyanfar, who’d just gone through there. Pyanfar went through, the Preciousness suddenly became an urgent matter that No’shto-shti-stlen
had
to get to Atli-lyen-tlas, and Atli-lyen-tlas ran off with the kif while the mahendo’sat ran in panicked desperation to find out what No’shto-shti-stlen had sent.

No’shto-shti-stlen was guarded by kif. So Vikktakkht had either had access to information or had been pointedly excluded from information.

Atli-lyen-tlas had either run to the kif for transport or fallen into their hands as a prisoner. And who even knew
which
kif? Allies of Vikktakkht? Allies of Pyanfar Chanur?

It was No’shto-shti-stlen who’d rather urgently wanted Hallan Meras in her hands. That urgency might have been stsho anxiety about having a hani male on their hands—stsho didn’t understand hani touchiness about their menfolk (stsho were no more constitutionally certain what ‘male’ meant than hani were about the stsho’s third gender) but an old diplomat like No’shto-shti-stlen certainly understood that they were touchy, and that it was an issue that could come back and cause trouble of unforeseen dimensions.

So had Vikktakkht given Meras that odd promise at No’shto-shti-stlen’s urging ... or had he outmaneuvered the stsho to get into the jail and set a trap for her?

And had he set it up for
any
hani ship they could get, or had the fact that a second Chanur ship had shown up ... either suggested to Vikktakkht a connection between events that wasn’t connected, or had it offered him a second chance to involve Chanur in this mess?

He certainly would know who she was. He certainly would know she’d had an experience with kif. That she’d survived and come back to Meetpoint with a ship meant, in kifish eyes, she’d increased in rank, not diminished. In kifish eyes, aunt Py hadn’t thrown her out, she’d promoted her or been unable to prevent her rise. She was Chanur clan head, and one could bet the average kif knew what she was.

So Vikktakkht had ignored her in that interview and let himself be interrogated only by
na
Hallan. If she were kif, she might have casually shot
na
Hallan and insisted he talk to her. That would have gotten his respect. But he was too sophisticated a kif to expect a hani to do that, or to consider it in purely kifish terms that she didn’t. He was sophisticated enough, like the Meetpoint stsho, to know that hani didn’t tolerate affront to their menfolk, and probably to know that it was indecent for hani males to deal with outsiders, except when sex was directly at issue.

So was it some bizarre kifish joke? Or the careful playing of a Chanur’s desire for specific information against her awareness that if she interrupted the game or refused his rules she might not get everything he would give if she didn’t?

Interesting question.

She punched the pillow, battered it with her fist and tried for a comfortable spot in the tangled bedclothes, on a mental hunt through tangles of information. Too many weeds and not enough substance. The merest shadow of what she was looking for. Clearly enough, the kif wanted her to cross the kifish border.

Another punch at the pillow, which refused to take a convenient shape. She wanted to sleep. Please the gods, she could dump it now and not think through what just didn’t have an answer.

But what in a mahen hell made all these various pieces add up?

You could manage to read printout and work cargo. The cold-suit mittens had a spike on the thumb next the first finger that you could use to turn pages, and Tiar read on, with the loader banging and booming overhead, the giant cannisters fuming from their passage out of the cold-hold into the pressurized so-called heated hold, on their way to the docks.

Chihin had the dockside post, with her arm in a sling and a button-fuse on her temper. (“Gods-rotted nitpicking doesn’t gods-be make a
difference,
half this stuff! She says she’s going to enforce this? She’s serious?”)