Chanur’s Homecoming by CJ Cherryh

Personage was more than an individual back in Maing Tol and another at Iji. It was the whole concept on which the mahendo’sat concluded anything: when a mahe was right he was right as law, and when he made a mistake he fell from power. His superiors would disown him. And if he made too great a mistake the superior who appointed him might fall: so there might be more than one agent in the field making contradictory arrangements.

The most viable would be acknowledged, the agents who stood too visibly for the nonviable policies would fall from power, and the mahen government went smoothly on.

Doublecross was the standard order of business. Betrayal of each other, of everyone but the superior. That he protected his own agents was Jik’s saving honesty, and Goldtooth’s, who had run and left Jik because he had to. It took this many years in space for an old hani to understand how it worked and to understand that it worked.

And there was still the question whether Jik might turn back on an agreement he had made, and repudiate it himself.

He had made a hard one, gods knew, with Sikkukkut.

And a contradictory one with her.

She frowned, and walked on the way others had gone, into the galley, where Tirun had gotten Jik seated at table and where Haral and Hilfy and Khym and Tully were all delving into the cabinets and the freezer hunting quick-fix edibles. There was the bitter odor of dry gfi in the air: Tirun was filling a pot. There was the rattle of plastic: disposables. Pyanfar leaned on the table with both hands and looked Jik in the eyes.

“Got a question for you. Say you got two agreements, you, yourself. And the people you made them with-get at odds. How do you resolve that?”

Jik frowned. His eyes still wept. His sweat smelled of ammonia and drug even yet. “You, Sikkukkut?”

“Me and Sikkukkut.”

“I keep best agreement.”

“The one that serves the mahendo’sat best.”

“A.” He blinked and gazed at her like a tired child. “Always.”

“Just wondered,” she said. “In case.”

Something else occurred to her, when she turned to the cabinet and took a packet of dried meat out of the storage.

Jik had just, for whatever reason, told the truth. Against his own Personage and all those interests. Which made him, in mahen terms, a dishonest man.

Gods, what’s gotten into us on this ship? We got nobody aboard who hasn’t gone to the wrong side of her own species’ business-Tully, Skkukuk, all us of Chanur and Malm: now Jik’s sliding too.

Treason’s catching, that’s what it is.

She got a cup, wrinkled her nose as Khym dosed his gfi with tofi. She poured her own from the fastbrewer, looked back at their unlikely crew crowded into the galley. At Jik sitting disconsolate and hurting and trying his best to choke down a sandwich and a cup of reconstituted milk; no one in Chanur put off any temper on him, not Hilfy and not Khym either.

So. Crew was going to give him a chance. For their own reasons, which might include latitude for the captain’s judgment; but maybe because of past debts.

It was hard, being hani, not to think like one. There were times they had been as glad to see Jik as he had surely been to see her come after him on Harukk. Even if on his side it was all policy and politics. He had saved their skins many a time.

Even if it was always to bet them again.

Chur slitted open her eyes, wrinkled her nose and blinked sleepily at her sister. Her heart sped a bit. She had dreamed of black things in the corridors, had dreamed of something loose on the ship. Noise in the corridors. It felt as if some time had passed.

And Geran had noted that little increase in pulse rate. Geran had this disconcerting habit of taking glances at the monitors while she talked, and whenever she reacted to anything. Geran’s be-ringed ears flicked at what she saw now; and it was a further annoyance that the screen was hard to see from flat on one’s back.

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