She would not have heard it from anyone else. She had her mouth open when Tully said it. But this was a man who had been twice in their hands; and seen his friends die; and killed one of them himself to save him from Sikkukkut: more, he had been there with her in that kifish prison, and if Tully was saying such an outrageous thing it might have any number of meanings, but emptyheaded and over-generous it was not. She stared at him trying to figure out if he had missed his words in hani: the translator they had rigged up to their com sputtered helpless static at his belt, constant undertone when he spoke his thickly accented hani or pidgin. Maybe he was trying to communicate some crazy human philosophy that failed to come through.
“Little kif,” Tully said again. She had lived among kif long enough to know what he meant by that, that kif were nothing without status, and that kif of low status were everyone’s victims.
“If he was a big kif,” she said, “he’d kill us fast.”
“No,” Tully said. “Captain be Pyanfar. He want be big, she got be big.”
“Loyalty, huh?”
“Like me,” Tully said. “He one.”
“You mean he’s alone.”
“He want be hani.”
She spat. It was too much. “You might be.” And not many hani in space and certainly none on homeworld would be that generous, only a maudlin and lonely young woman a long way from her own kind. “Not a kif. Ever.”
“True,” Tully admitted, twisting back on his own argument in that maddening way he had of getting behind a body and leaving them facing the wrong way. He held up a finger. “He kif, he same time got no friend with kif, he be little kif. They kill him, yes. He want not be kill. He lot time wrong, think we do big good to him. You watch, Hil-fy: crew be good with him, he be happy, he got face up, he be brave with us, he talk. But we don’t tell truth to him, huh? What good truth? Say him, ‘kif, you enemy’, he got no friend, got no ship, got no hakkikt. He don’t be hani, he die.”
“I can’t be sorry for him. He wouldn’t understand it. He’s kif, gods rot him. And I’d as soon kill him on sight.”
“You don’t kill same like you be kif.” He patted her arm and looked earnestly at her, from the far side of a language barrier the translator never crossed. “He makes a mistake,” the translator said as he changed into his own language for words he did not have. “He’s lost. He thinks we like him more now. We ask him go die for help us, he go. True, he will go. And we hate him. He doesn’t know this. He’s kif. He can’t understand why we hate him.”
“Well, let’s not confuse him,” Hilfy snarled, and turned and stopped the lift door which had started to close on auto when she let go the button. It recoiled, held for another wait. She looked back at Tully, who looked back, aggrieved and silent. She knew his shorthand speech better than anyone else aboard: ship’s com officer, linguist, translator, she had helped set up his translation system and help break through to him
when they first met him. And what he was saying now made more sense than she wanted it to-that a kif, cold-blooded tormentor and killer that it was, was also a helpless innocent in their hands. If a kif saw another kif in his way, he killed; his changes of loyalty were frequent but sincere and self-serving. And if the captain’s subordinates treated him better, it was because the captain had accorded him more status: it was all a kif could think, it was all a kif knew how to imagine. Pyanfar let Skkukuk loose more often, Pyanfar cared to feed him, the crew was civil to him: his place in the universe was therefore improving. Gods help them, the kif became conversational with them. Two and more centuries of contact and the kif had never let slip any casual detail about their homeworld, which no one visited but kif; and here Skkukuk, bragging on his nasty little vermin as Akkhtish and adaptive, hinted at more of kifish life and kifish values than kif had said about themselves in all of history.