He was off his stride. He delayed. And knew himself a fool when the old spacer took on a friendlier, amused look. Turn about for his pretense of being what he was not, that was what she had given him. Fair and fair.
“Sit. Crew’s going to be down here in a bit. What ship are you going to?”
“Not to a ship. Yet. School. I’m Meras. Hallan Meras. From Syrsyn.” Confession once started, tumbled out in the old spacer’s unchanging stare, and his ears burned with embarrassment; she had known even when she asked, but she did not ridicule him. “I want to be a spacer.” It was his dearest dream. He saw it coming true and she did not laugh when he said that either. One of the old ones. “Have you-” He cast another look down the dock, leaning forward, and saw nothing of ship names at this angle either. “Have you ever seen the Personage?”
“Lots of times.”
He looked back in awe. “Are you a friend of hers?”
“What’s the matter with you, boy, what do they teach you nowadays, all this fuss to see some Personage, what’s seeing do, anyway? Makes me worry, that’s what. Hani I knew’d spit in the eye of somebody that wanted all that bowing and guarding. You ought to.”
He understood then. “She got me here,” he said. And when the old spacer blinked: “That’s why I want to see that ship. I wouldn’t be here without her, without what she did. That’s why.”
“Huh,” the old spacer said. “Huh.” And: “Uhhnnn-” With a gesture outward, toward the sudden flashing of a strobe light and the arrival of several official cars. “Llun.”
“Are we in trouble?” Hallan got anxiously to his feet as his spacer companion stood up. He snatched up his duffel and held onto it. Immune officials and weapon-bearing marshals were getting out of the car, coming their way, while suddenly, adding to the confusion, there were other spacers coming down the ramp out of the ship, one of them a man, one of them-“O my gods,” Hallan said, having seen humans in old pictures, and having seen a picture of this one.
“Cap’n,” one of the spacers said, scar-nosed and broad-faced; and coming their way. “My gods, you going like that?”
“Too much fuss,” the old spacer said, and dusted off her trousers. “Drives me berserk, this whole business. They want a decree, I’ll give ’em a decree. Haral, meet a nice kid. Hallan Meras, meet Haral Araun. Sorry we can’t stay and talk right now. Luck to you.”
She walked off with the crew from the ship, the human Tully and all. And na Khym nef Mahn, who was the first man in space.
One of the crew lingered a moment, a small woman who looked him up and down with eyes that for a moment seemed to see-gods, inside him and around him with a force that left him all but shaking. Chur Anify. The strange one. She was the one that had charted the new Points off beyond Minar, and probes had found them, a bridge to other stars. She was almost as famous as the Personage.
“Who is this boy?” A Llun officer asked, all hard and threatening.
“He has a right to be there,” Chur Anify said, and the officer looked at her and dropped her ears and let him alone.
“Are you some relative?” that officer asked when the cars had left the dockside and grim Llun marshals stood double guard outside The Pride of Chanur’s ramp access. “Are you Chanur?”
“No,” he said, holding his baggage and still dazed as if all the stars in space spun about him. That had been the Personage, the mekt-hakkikt of the kif, the Director . . . there were as many names as there were species in the Compact. She had talked with him, this power that could move a thousand ships and mediate affairs among species.
With him, as if he were truly someone who mattered.
Or as if he might be that someone, someday.