Chanur's Homecoming

by C. J. Cherryh

  Luck out on Tahar and Vrossaru. Gods help ’em.

  After a dark space the restraint hummed, a large and warm weight settled onto the same mattress and a warmth settled about her. “We’re about to brake,” Khym said; and woke her up just enough to feel a drunken panic.

  “Restraint,” she said. “I’ve got it,” he said, and she opened her eyes blearily on dim light and the arch of the safety web going over them, on a familiar face, a large arm going over her like the arch of the safety, a huge body shaping itself to hers, awful and stinking as they both were, straight out of jump and headed in again without respite. She hugged him back, hard.

  The vanes cycled again, blowing velocity in a dizzying pulse of neither here nor there, right down to the lowest energy they could reasonably achieve. It was a hunter-ship maneuver. Honest freighter never had the reason to do a thing like that.

  Urtur dust screamed over the hull, shields downed during the low-V of their turn and reacquisition, dust abrading the vanes. The whole ship wailed and keened in sound that hurt the ears.

  Gods let Tahar make it after all, gods save the rest of us, where’s the kif?

  “Unnnh.” Khym clenched his fist in her mane. “Claws, Py, gods—”

  Realspace acceleration started up, the unsettling G-shift of rollover.

  “We’re going,” she said, “we’re going all right.” Which might or might not be true. There might be enemies after all. Or a big rock the shields would fail on. It was all Tauran’s problem now. Not hers. Not hers.

  The dust wailed away, changing pitch.

  “Py—”

  He burrowed in closer, arm stretched above her. “I’m holding on,” he said; and did: his weight kept her steady and comfortable, so that her groping reach after the handgrip became too much effort. He stayed like that forever, in a position that could not be comfortable for him. She tried again to move and get a foot braced against the safety-rim. “I’ve got it,” he said again, “it’s all right, Py.”

  “Sprain your gods-be shoulder,” she muttered.

  He breathed into her ear and tongued the inside of it, like in the dark of off-watch, like the two of them twenty and brand new again. “Good gods.” She caught her breath and lost it again. “Not now, Khym.”

  “Think of a better time?”

  He couldn’t, under the strain they were under. But he amused himself. While they hurtled on toward oblivion and it was clear he was in pain.

  “Gods be fool man,” she said. “Love you like my sister.” It sounded stupid. It was the only way she knew to say it to him, in hani, so he would know what she meant. “Always have.”

  “Man’s got no brother,” he said. He was breathing hard. Strain was in his voice, while the scream of the ship went on and he kept up his lackadaisical attentions. “Man’s alone. Man never even knows what I’ve got exists at all. Not alone anymore. Never alone anymore. You were right. You were always right.”

  “Gods, I wish I were.” I wish I was right about what I’m doing, what I’ve done. We’re going to jump and they haven’t got that gods-be com on, they cut the gods-be com, we don’t know when—

  She hazed out. She came to and realized G-stress had shifted and Khym had come down on her limp as a dead man, breathing hard. That was no matter. He was warm, and without him she would shiver; she felt it.

  “Mark,” a sudden voice came over com, not Haral’s, stranger-voice. “We’re outbound.”

  —into jump.

  —falling.

  “Hello,” said the young man, sitting on the rock, beneath blue sky, above a golden valley; and she took him for a Wanderer, up to no good on Chanur land. She set her jaw and drew a deep breath and made herself as tall as she could: No nonsense, man, take a look at the spacer rings and figure you’re not dealing with any young fool; I’ll shred your ears for you.

  “Hello,” she said, on her way up from Chanur lands, on the road. She had chosen to walk, when she might have made a landing here, created a little stir, coming in like that. But she was romantical in her youth.

  What it got her was a young bandit, that was what. Real trouble, if he was also crazy. And worse trouble if he carried a knife. Some did.

  “You’re on Chanur land,” she said. “Wise if you’d move along.”

  “You’re Pyanfar,” he said. And, gods, he was beautiful, his eyes large and gold-amber, his mane thick and wide. He stepped off his rock and landed on his feet in her path. “Are you?”

  “Last I checked. Who in a mahen hell are you?”

  “Khym Mahn,” he said. “Your husband.”

  —down.

  —alive. By the gods alive.

  —and where? Gods, where? Kura. Kura. Got to get up, get to the bridge—

  No. First dump. Got—remember interval.

  “We all right?” Khym murmured. His weight hurt her, hurt her all the way to her bones. She was smothering. “We at Kura?”

  “Move,” she said, gasped. Gasped again when he tried, and fought and moaned her way to the edge of the bed, reaching for the console, involved in the edge of the safety net. “This is Pyanfar. We all right? Where’s that gods-be com? Give us com, hear?”

  There was delay. “Aye, captain,” a strange voice said. And waited, by the gods waited during some on-bridge clearance, while a rag-eared bastard of a Tauran com officer asked her captain for clearance to report, that was what was going on.

  “Gods-be—”

  Khym moaned in that way he had when he was about to be sick. And rolled over to the other side of the bed.

  Com came through, a busy crackle of voices.

  Khym was not sick. But she did not bother him either. She lay there listening to the data-chatter and the heavy machine-sounds of the ship.

  “We’re not getting buoy-output, from Kura,” someone said. And sent icewater flowing through her gut.

  Someone swore over com.

  “Standby number two dump,” a voice said then.

  And the ship cycled down again, a lurch half into hyperspace—

  —no buoy at Kura.

  —in hani space.

  “I came here to wait,” Khym said, on that path, beside the way she would have had to take. Perhaps someone had just phoned. He was perhaps another romantical fool, having come this long trek to sit alone and wait on a prospective wife. His face had a kind of wistful vulnerability: she had not known it then, but when she remembered that look afterward, she knew what it was, of experience. It was hope. It was Khym’s gentle and earnest self, open to everything, entranced with her.

  And he had escaped his sisters and his wives and gotten away alone. Or they did not care for him the way they ought: that had been her first thought when she believed he was who he claimed to be:

  “You alone?” Anything might have happened to him. Some bandit might have attacked him. Some Chanur hunter might have taken him for a bandit and asked questions later. Or he might have fallen in with a group of Chanur herders who might have taken a fancy to him, and precious much they would have believed his claims to be their neighbor. A lord never got out in public. Except at challenge. And Chanur and Mahn, old allies, would never challenge each other. In those days.

  Gods, she had thought atop it all, I’m betrothed to a fool in a house of rump-sitting fools who can’t keep track of their own lord.

  “It isn’t far,” he said, pointing back toward Mahn land.

  Gods if I don’t keep you better, she had thought; and then knew she could indeed do no better. Home was not a place she stayed. She had to trust the other wives and his sisters and his female cousins, who clearly could not handle him.

  I’ll have to knock heads in this house. Do I really want to get into this? If I weren’t a fool I’d go home right now and leave him out here.

  Gods, he’s good-looking, isn’t he?

  But so’re a dozen more I could find in the bushes.

  “I don’t do this all the time,” he said earnestly. “I told them—” A gesture back toward the heart of Mahn
land. “—I was going to the garden. I guess no one’s looked. I wanted to see you—”

  He knew he was in the wrong. He knew he had made a bad impression. He knew he had even made a dangerous mistake, if she had a notion to take offense and go back to her clan, figuring a fool of a man was an easy mark for her lord; then he might die a young fool, and Mahn was in danger, if she were either unscrupulous or truly outraged. He knew this and he worried, now, when it was too late. Break her neck, he might, if he could get his hands on her. But it was not likely that he could. She was fast, in those days, and looked it; and might have a knife or even a gun (she had); and had the advantage of her clan, who could kill him under any circumstances for being where he was, but under felony charges, could dispossess his sisters and his kin and send them out homeless. He knew all of this. (“I thought you would go back,” he had said to her in after years. “I thought if you did I would have to challenge. And you would hate me. And so I couldn’t do that either. I’d spend all my life trying to get you back.”)

  She set hands on hips and looked him up and down. Here in this isolated place where only they knew what might happen. And flattened her ears at him and slowly pricked them up again when his drooped. “Huh,” she said. “Well, you got your border wrong.” Even a man would know where that was. The flick of his ears showed he had indeed known. And deliberately trespassed, by the difference of two hills. The one in Chanur land just happened to have better vantage. And she came up close to him and up next to him and laid hands on him, which only his wives and his sisters could do without offense.

  They were husband and wife before she walked him home. Out there on the border of Chanur land, as if she were some landless scoundrel and he some equally landless lad with hopes. She knew what she had married before she got there. A romantic, who, gods help her, asked her ten thousand questions, what was it like in space, where did she go, how long was she staying, would she come to see him every time she came back to the world?

  He was ingenuous and reckless and a veritable encyclopedia of trivialities and natural science. He loved poking about under logs and into ponds, as devoted to hunting out curiosities as he ever was in hunting the game in which Mahn hills were rich; he could study a flower for whole minutes. Or the color of her eyes. She was not sure she liked being studied, there under Anuurn summer skies. She had come up to Mahn after a husband for politics, for finance, because they had dealt with him indirectly and believed his sister, that he was a decent domestic administrator and a man with some legal sense and no disposition to quarrel with Chanur; a fast few days in Mahn, a satisfaction of certain urges that were about to come on her, and which were misery on shipboard— and she ended up with a shy-smiling young man who did a fool thing like trespass and let himself be led off into the bushes and who spent whole minutes telling her how unusual her eyes were and (being Khym) what the statistical frequency of gold-and-bronze was with her ancestry.

  She had known then she had gotten herself an odd one.

  —aren’t we coming out?

  —Gods and mahen devils, what are they doing up there? Is that the drop?

  It was. The Pride came down with a vengeance; Khym moaned; and she did; and heard the curses over com about the inlaid program in Nav, about the fools who had laid it in and the condition of Tauran stomachs.

  Got to get up there. Second dump, I got to.

  They had laid in food stores in the room, pinned to the console. She groped after them, packets the same as they used on the bridge. Dared not retract the net. Not till she got an all-clear.

  Then over com: “Gods fry it to a mahen hell! What is that thing?”

  She jabbed the com button, fighting with the net. “What is it? What’s going on up there? This is Pyanfar Chanur, gods rot it, what’s going on?”

  Delay.

  “Gods blast you, don’t you give me authorizations on my own ship! Give me Sirany! What in a mahen hell’s going on up there?”

  “Chanur. We’re stable. Proceed with crew change.”

  “Gods be.” She retracted the safety restraint, rolled over and got her stiffened legs off the edge and hauled her sore torso upright. “Oh, gods.” Never, never make love in jump, oh my ribs, my back, O gods. She got herself upright, swallowed down a rush of nausea and reeled and staggered, limping, toward the door.

  A black streak shot down the hall, about ankle-high, squealing as it went.

  “Gods and thunders!”

  The Dinner was loose again.

  * * *

  She came reeling and limping her way onto the bridge with the crew-call sounding out over the general address, and grabbed the back of observer-two seat to steady herself while she got a look at the monitors, at scan, at a situation that looked tranquil enough, except for the kif running silently ahead of them. No firing here. No output from station either.

  They were in hani space, and Kura, the second-largest station in that space, was dead silent at least as far as buoy output went.

  “Kif’ve tripped a warning,” she surmised suddenly, and staggered her way toward Sirany Tauran, grabbing the back of her seat to hold herself steady. “That’s where buoy went. Shut itself up the moment it got kifish ID. Which kifish ID it got and how long ago, that worries me. Has our escort made it in? Did they overjump us?”

  “Neat and sweet, they did, about two hours’ worth. Got plenty of power on those ships, and their emissions trail’s strong and clear. Covering up everything.”

  “Have we got a message going out? I auto’ed a message for Kura.”

  “Aye, captain,” the com officer said. “We’re three minutes out of response time.”

  “It tells Kura what we can. Advising any ships here to get home. Fast.”

  “Same I sent,” Sirany said. “Same all the others been sending, their own ships’ wrap on it. The mahe’s been transmitting coded stuff, long burst just before we left Urtur.”

  “Huh.” More than huh. But not with Sirany. Worry broke out all over again. Jik’s still with us. Still on our side. She scanned the monitors and saw the positioning of ships, the still-broken pattern, the hole where Tahar ought to be and was not. “No sign of Tahar.”

  “No sign.”

  She gnawed her mustaches and waited, eye on the chrono. “We get any response?”

  “Negative.”

  “We got some gods-rotted vermin run through here,” Sirany said.

  “I know it. We cleaned it out once. Skkukuk’s godscursed food supply. Something’s got loose again.”

  “F’godssakes. What are the things eating?”

  “The ventilation filters.”

  “Lifesupport?”

  “We got an electrical screen on the main systems from last time. We got it covered. Don’t worry about it. The problem’s in our watch. Just a stray, more’n likely. We’ll get it.”

  “You thought of sabotage? That gods-be kif—”

  “Is crew.”

  “Not in my watch, captain. That door of his is locked from the boards.”

  Question my judgment! On my bridge, in my chair, rot your hide! It was also a sane and reasonable suspicion. She restrained herself and got her voice quiet. “That kif,” she said, “is our translator. Protocol officer and a gods-be decent one. Crew.” It half-choked her. Get your backside out of my chair, Tauran. “He takes orders. Takes ’em fine. He’s had a lot of chances to kill one or the other of us. Saved my hide back at Kefk.” And I don’t let him loose either, but he’s not risking his neck in those corridors hunting vermin. “Shift. I’ll spell you, work with yours and spell ’em off as mine come in. You did a marvel, Tauran, got us here through that soup, real fine job and strange boards—” Compliment the graynosed bastard. Keep us friendly. It was a good job. We’re alive. We still got all our ships behind us, Jik and Harun and the rest, and all three kif out to front, and she’s trying real hard to be polite, isn’t she, Pyanfar Chanur? More suspicious than young Fiar. Wiser and harder and she has to be. She’s got to push me a little. Got to keep
her eyes clear and play the hardnose and try to get at truth, that’s what she’s after. She didn’t fail us. Hasn’t failed us.

  “Fancy stuff,” Sirany said, still sitting. “Mahen-make. Real fancy. That comp’s a wonder.”

  What’d you pay for it, Chanur? What buys equipment like this, state of the art, class one stuff, when Chanur’s broke and bankrupt and all space knows it?

  What’s this we hear about you and mahendo’sat and the Meetpoint stsho?

  Before we go to sleep again—what kind of ship are we on?

  “We got our tail shot up. Emergency patch at Kshshti. The mahendo’sat wanted us out of there real bad. It’s this passenger of ours.”

  “The kif or the human or the mahendo’sat?”

  Pushing hard now. Her pulse hammered and her ears flattened as Sirany turned in her seat to look up at her.

  Out in the dark places too long, maybe, Chanur?

  “I’ll argue that in the han,” Pyanfar said. “But our records are unlocked. Had a look, have you?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Sirany said. “Real busy.” Her ears were flat. “Interesting stuff. But the important thing’s still to get home, isn’t it? We do it your way. Your rules. You want that kif in on com, that’s fine. We got two more jumps to go. You want us to bed down with the gods-be kif, if you want to vouch for his manners, I’ll take your word on it.”

  “Listen. I mean this. Don’t expect him to be hani. He’ll take your hand off if he thinks you’re pushing me. Tully’s quieter, but he’s scared of you and he’s got troubles you don’t know about; let him be. And my husband—let me tell you, ker Sirany, since you’ve said not a word on it, let me tell you: my husband’s steady as anybody at the boards, and gods help him, you won’t shock him, not after this trip, he knows what ship life is; he knows how to take orders, and you don’t have to worry about him. Or Tully. They work together in galley. No problem with tempers. They like each other.”