“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.” / 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 e 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 ice water 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 hyper-space-
-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: