Chanur's Legacy (36 page)

“Thank you,
ker
Chihin.”

“I don’t like your being here,” she said bluntly.

“I know that.”

She let go his hand. She didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “What do you want? What do you really want?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You want to be out here? You want to spend your whole life running from port to port, with debt at your tail? Or did you think you were going to get rich and be lord of the spaceways?”

“If I knew I could be lord Meras, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t want what’s down there. I want to be here.”

“You’re a fool.”

“They’ve told me that. But I want it. I don’t mind being junior. I am. I just want to be here.”

“You tell me that the other side of Kefk.”

“I will. I promise you I will,
ker
Chihin. There’s nothing ever going to change my mind.”

“Kid. The captain wants you out of here.”

It hurt. He’d almost hoped. He kept a polite expression all the same.

“Most ships,” she said, “are going to want you out of here.”

“I’ll find someone,” he said.

“You can’t work dockside. Stations aren’t going to want you.”

He shrugged, said, with a leaden feeling, “I’ll find a way.”

“It’s sense to go home.”

“No, it isn’t. I don’t want to go back there. It’s not sense to do what you don’t want.”

“Ships have their ways of getting along. Hard enough for any outsider to come in.
The Pride
was ... under duress. You’ve got to understand. We get called to station, sometimes in the middle of the night, you haven’t got time to dress ... I mean, it’s a thousand things like that...”

“I don’t mind.”

“Yeah. Well, others do. People talk. And heads have to be cracked for it, I mean, you get no respect if you let somebody make a remark, you know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah.
Yeah,
that’s the problem. Shit. — Look at you, your ears are flat.”

He brought them up with a mindful effort, started to get up to excuse himself and get back to work, but Chihin took hold of his arm.

“You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,
ker
Chihin.”

Chihin’s ears went down and then to half. She was looking him in the face and he stared right back.

“
‘Yeah,
Chihin,’ “ she said.

“Yeah.”

She had let him go, having made her point. He started a second time to get up, and a second time she stopped him.

“Kid. I don’t know it will do a bit of good, but I’m going to talk to the captain, say maybe we should do a wait-see. Mind, she might not go with it. But in my book you earned a chance at it. Not because you hauled me out. But because if you hadn’t, a couple more of us might have been fools.”

With Chihin you often had to replay things to figure out if they added up to favorable. And it seemed that way. He didn’t know what to think: she was canny and she was sharp and he was afraid of her jokes.

“You probably could be lord Meras,” she said. “If you wanted to.”

He shook his head. “Not me. No.”

“Your papa approve what you’re doing?”

Another shake of his head.

She patted his leg, which he wouldn’t have liked, but it was more like a dismissal: Go away, kid. Behave yourself.

He liked Chihin more for that. He got up and went back to work, feeling her watching him, weighing what he did, approving or disapproving. And, gods, he wanted to do just competently well—flashiness didn’t impress Chihin. She’d made that clear, about the rescue. Just common sense.

Just doing what you were supposed to do, consistently right. And it made sense to him, the way no one else in the universe had, not
ker
Hilfy, not Tiar, not Fala nor Tarras nor his mother or his sisters. Just do your job and be right.

He thought he could do that. He had a real hope of that, if that was the mark he had to reach.

... If the parry receiving the goods be not the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1, and have valid claim as demonstrated in Subsection 36 of Section 25, then it shall be the reasonable obligation of the party accepting the contract to ascertain whether the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 shall exist in Subsequent or in Consequent or in Postconsequent; however, this clause shall in no wise be deemed to invalidate the claim of the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 or 2, or in any clause thereunto appended, except if it shall be determined by the party accepting the contract to pertain to a person or Subsequent or Consequent identified and stipulated to by the provisions of Section 5 ...

It didn’t read any better now than then. And subsection 3 section 1 and 2 and clauses thereunto appended made it abundantly clear: the Preciousness went to Kefk.

And the captain went down to the lower deck, to
gtst
excellency’s quarters.

She made her presence known at the door. She received no word from inside. She stood waiting.

There were enough disasters. She opened the door, stsho willing or stsho not, and stared in momentary bewilderment at the drapery spread above the bowl-chair.

It was decidedly occupied. It was decidedly not the moment to call a conference. Stsho were notoriously touchy in personal matters.

That
gtst
excellency and
gtst
companion Dlimas-lyi were bound for Kefk was a matter
gtst
excellency might care to know about. But the captain decided
gtst
excellency could find out about it later.

The captain prudently closed the door, mission not accomplished, question not asked.

Is there a plausible lie I can tell Haisi Ana-kehnandian ?

So let Ana-kehnandian wait to be told anything. He was loading up the message board, demanding to speak to her directly.

But the captain had things to occupy her. The captain had to get them out of port before the lawsuits started, as they could, the mahendo’sat being a litigious lot.

That they’d used firearms surely had circulated in the rumor market; and a lie was an unreliable weapon—
gtst
excellency’s weapon, if
gtst
chose to use it; and a very dangerous thing in the hands of a hani with no notion what it meant.

She had never thought she might look on Kefk as a refuge.

Everything was ahead of schedule. The loader hadn’t jammed,
her
Tiar was insisting she could keep at it, she was getting used to the ice, and she could go into the heated observation room, seeing that the loader was running without a glitch. The cans just kept locking through the rotary platform and the arm kept picking them up and putting them on the chain and the chain kept rolling, delivering them to the arm that delivered them to the waiting trucks.

“/ think you faced this gods-be loader, “ Tiar said.

Hallan was very proud of that.
Ker
Chihin was going to talk to the captain, Tiar said he’d actually solved something instead of destroying something, and he
knew
Fala would vote for him. And Tarras had tended to. He had real hope,
real
hope. He just prayed the gods of every persuasion not to let anything happen, just let him finish one job that didn’t blow up in his face.

Then a one-can truck showed up, with its load, coming back to the
Legacy’’s
dockside. The mahen driver got out and talked with the foreman, talked with customs, mahendo’sat (it was always the species name when you were talking about more than one) were waving their arms and saying not a word he understood.
Ker
Chihin was on her feet, but he was closer, and he had the tablet which might tell the story. He didn’t think a proper spacer would hang back and wait for his supervisor, it wasn’t a male/female business, it was a can trying to come back as damaged or wrongly addressed or not cleared or something, and he didn’t want Chihin to have to solve a problem he’d created. He walked up to the shouting mahendo’sat with his tablet and his manifest list.

“Excuse,” he said. “Got list. All right, not all right, why?”

He was reasonably proud of that sentence.

But they waved arms and shouted at him. He looked at the frost-coated can, number 96, lot 3, and he looked at his list, about the time Chihin walked up, asked, “What’s the matter? —What matter, here?”

More shouting. Something, when the mahendo’sat recovered their command of pidgin, about the can being a mistake, that the contents didn’t somehow match the manifest, that the contents were listed as grain, the buyer had stipulated dried fish, and there was a complete foul-up.

“Load wrong at Kita!” the customs agent said. And the truck driver shouted, “Off my truck! Not my fault what got!”

“
Na
Hallan,” Chihin said wearily.

“Ker
Chihin,” he began, with reference to the checklist, but the mahendo’sat thrust an arm past him and began pointing to numbers and trying to clarify what they meant, he supposed, loudly, in his ear.

“Quiet!” he said, louder than he intended to. But they got quiet, all at once.

“Dangerous,” the customs agent said, retreating.

“He’s not gods-be dangerous!” Chihin shouted, and Hallan folded his tablet against his chest, calling out, “I’m sorry,
na
mahe, for the gods’ sake!”

More shouting, then. And the mahen truck driver saying he was going to offload it, now, here, and they could handle it.

“Now wait,” Chihin said, but everything was getting confused. He said,
“Ker
Chihin ...”

Chihin paid him no attention. The trucker was getting up on the truck bed, threatening, evidently, to roll the can off and let them handle it; which wasn’t a good way to treat a heavy canister, and the dockers were yelling.

^“
Ker
Chihin,” he said, and nobody at all was paying attention.

He shouted, “It’s not our can!”

And everything was breathlessly quiet after.

“Not our can?” Chihin said.

And everybody started shouting again, but Chihin was looking, while he was trying to point at the manifest entry, which showed a different local weight.

“Make mistake at pickup!” the foreman said. “Got no pilfer here.”

“Open can,” the customs agent said.

“No,” Chihin said. “You take it, you open it. It’s not our can. You get it off our dock!”

“The can is list dry fish,” the customs agent said. “We open. Find out.”

“We’ve had one gods-be incident!” Chihin said. “Hallan, get off the dock. Now.”

“But—“

“Get!” Chihin said, and waved her good arm at the docker crew. “Bomb,” she said. “Blow up. Explosive.
Boom!”

He was horrified. So were the mahendo’sat, who looked dubious, then in one mass, took out across the dock. The truck driver left his truck and ran for the far side of the dock, while the customs agents hesitated beside the suspect canister, big enough to hold a lift-car full of people or a godsawful lot of explosive.

He knew better than to disobey orders. But Chihin was still there, talking on the com to the ship, and he ran back toward her and met her as she started toward the ship, running and trying to cushion her wounded arm.

He didn’t ask. He just grabbed her around the waist on the good side and hauled her up the ramp, as the
Legacy’s
outermost gate and cargo lock began to seal.

“Gods rot!” Chihin gasped.

Up the curving yellow tube, and he was dragging her, now. He stopped to snatch her up and ran as hard as he could, for the airlock still open for them.

He set her down there. Chihin had the presence of mind to slam her hand onto the Close plate, and it sealed in a rush. Then she leaned against the wall, and he did, panting from the run, trying to be sure she didn’t fall.

That meant an arm around her, and hers around him, and as she caught her balance, all the way around him. He held on, she did, and since the universe failed to end, it ended up with Chihin patting him on the shoulder, and him feeling—very short of breath, very, very short of breath, and her likewise, and then both of them with their arms about each other.

Then it wasn’t a thought-out thing at all, they were just holding on to each other, and the bomb still hadn’t blown up. Tarras was asking, via com,

“Are you all right? Chihin?Na Hallan?”.

But holding on seemed more important than making sense, and breathing more important than answering, and Chihin was all right, that was what he kept thinking, Chihin was the senior officer, she ought to answer if she wanted to.

“Chihin?Na Hallan?”

He hadn’t any breath at all to answer.

“They look all right, “
he heard Tarras say, almost off mike.

And someone else, a younger, outraged voice:
“Gods
rot
her!”

He knew he was in trouble then, he didn’t want to make Fala mad, but he didn’t know how to extricate himself, he didn’t even try—he wasn’t thinking quite clearly, and knew it.

“Is it a bomb?” the
captain’s voice said, off mike.

“ I think they ‘re calling in the bomb disposal people. The customs agent left. “

“I think we’re going for Kefk.”

“Now?”

“We’re off-loaded all but two cans. We call the dealer, say we ‘re unable to deliver those two, we deduct the price, we get our tails out of this hellhole, right now. Advisegtst excellency and gtst—whatever. —Can you get those two fools out of the airlock?”

The captain was up there. Fala was. Tarras. Everybody. There was a bomb on the dock as large as a country haystack and the ship was going to leave. And all he could think of was the face, the very mature face of someone he couldn’t believe was attracted to him.

“Got to get inside,” Chihin said. And he was scared of the ship going or the can blowing up outside, but more vivid was the thought that Chihin was too different and too common-sense and too steeped in spacer morals to realize he cared for her, he truly, really cared for Chihin—who, with every prejudice she had, honestly made the effort to understand him.

“You gods-rotted idiots, get topside, report in immediately, do you hear me?”

That was the captain. Chihin said a word his sisters never said, then with the rake of a claw through his mane, breathed, “We better do it, kid. Or she’ll make us hike to Kefk.”