Chanur’s Homecoming by CJ Cherryh

The docks were the shambles she had expected, gray metal still supercooled under her bare feet, with a good many of the lights out-blown when the pressure went and when this dock had opened to space. Gantries loomed up down the righthand side of the docks, subtly tilting in the positive curvature of

the deck, which was the torus-shaped station’s outermost edge, to anyone who saw it as a wheel, from the outside. Here that rim was down, and floored in bare metal-Kefk had mining, metal-rich in the debris that floated around its double stars; therefore Kefk was gray and dull, except for the dirty orange of the sodium-lights kif preferred-because it never occurred to the colorblind kif to paint anything for decorative purposes, only for protective ones: they literally had to use instruments to determine what color a thing was, and gods knew whether their homeworld Akkht had ever offered them dyes other than black-though it was rumored that they had learned their color-taste from the pastel opalescent stsho, who disparaged the riot of color which hani and mahendo’sat loved about themselves; having discovered a range of distinctions beyond their senses, having the pale example of the stsho before them, and flinching before the stsho’s concept of value (such affluent consumers they set the standard for the whole Compact’s economy) and further daunted by the stsho’s disparagement of species who put strong color with color, the kif were all very insecure in their own dignity before the stsho and before others: above all no kif wanted to be laughed at. True black was one distinction they could make, true black and true white: so they naturally chose the dark that matched their habitat and their desire to move unseen, and became aesthetes of only one color, the blackest black. They valued silver more than gold because to their eyes it shone more; and they valued texture above other things in aesthetics, because they were more tactilely than visually stimulated in their pleasure centers: in fact they must be virtually blind to sight-beauty, and loved to touch interesting surfaces-that was what she had heard from an old stsho once upon a time, when the stsho had gotten quite giddy on a tiny cupful of Anuurn tea (it had a substance in it which reacted interestingly with stsho metabolism, which did nothing at all to a hani: such were the oddities of vice and pleasure between species). The kif in earliest days, this stsho said, had been victims of mahen practical jokes, who sold them clashing colors; and the kif did not forget this humiliation.

Kif were vastly changed, that was the truth, even from a few years ago: then they had been scattered and petty pirates, dockside thieves a hani could bluff into retreat, kif whose style was to whine and accuse and frequently to launch lawsuits in stsho courts which might make a freighter pay out of court settlement just to get the matter clear. That was the style of kifish banditry before Akkukkak.

Now she walked onto this dock in the company of a prince’s escort, and had her own bodyguard-Skukkuk walking along with her, armed with the gun he had taken from a kif in the fighting, looking like every other kif in his black robe and his hood and the plainness of his gear: if she looked about and if Skkukuk and one of her escort had changed places, she would not be able to tell them apart at any casual glance. That was another effect of kifish dress: of black hoods that deeply shaded the face and left only the gray-black snout in the light; it made targets hard to pick.

And from Aja Jin’s berth-nothing of that ship was visible nor any of the others, only the tangle of lines and gantries that held those lines aloft to the several ports that valved through to the ship-from behind that tangle came another pair, mahen, one of them male. The other was Soje Kesurinan, Jik’s second in command. Kesurinan was a tall black mahe, scarred and missing half an ear, but handsome in the way she carried herself-dour as Jik was cheerful, but she lifted her chin as she saw Pyanfar, and her diminutive mahen ears, whole and half, flicked in salutation.

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