“Everyone else for that matter. I don’t know a friend we’ve got.”
“Tahar,” Tirun said.
“Tahar,” she recalled.
A pirate and an outlaw.
And: “I’ve got Skkukuk?” Hilfy said. Her jaw had dropped, her ears were flat.
Pyanfar nodded. They stood where she had caught up with Hilfy, in the galley. And Tully sat sipping a cup of gfi, his blue eyes following their moves and his human, immobile ears taking in the whole of it. His com-translator would whisper it to him.
“Luck of the draw. He’s sitting down by Tirun on the jumpseat, but he’ll be working off your board. Just keep your finger by the cutoff. If we have to. And get your wits about you when we come out of the drop. I have to ask you this: how good are you on kifish nuance?”
“I’m good.”
“Objective assessment: good enough to pick up the subtleties in a kif’s transmissions?”
Hilfy paused, and gathered her cup off the counter. She glanced Tully’s way and back again. There was clearest sanity in her golden eyes. “I know what you’re saying. No. But Skkukuk can do it. What I’ve got to do is watch what he-‘s saying. And be fast on the cutoff.”
“You tell me this: is a kif going to damage a ship he’s on?”
Hilfy thought about that one too. Her ears dropped and lifted again. “No,” she said. “Not when you put it that way. But there is a point he’d turn on us.”
“He’d be alone. Crew wouldn’t go along with him the way it might on a kifish ship. Kifish crew’d turn on their captain and mutiny. Hani won’t. I think maybe Skkukuk’s got a glimmering of that. It’ll make him behave.”
Again a dip of Hilfy’s ears. One ring swung there. But the eyes were not that young any longer. “I tell you what that son’s thinking. He’s thinking the crew’s conserving its own position and it’s rallied around you out of fear of him. That’s what he’s thinking. He’s thinking if we got into trouble we’d do a real stupid thing, standing by you just for fear of him. He thinks if we prove tough enough other hani will join us on Sikkukkut’s side. It’s all very simple to him. One thing I’ve found the kif astonishingly free of is species-prejudice.”
“I think you’re right.”
That seemed to soothe some raw spot in Hilfy. The ears came up again, pricked in an expression that made her look young again. And they flagged when she looked at Tully.
So you’re not a fool, Pyanfar thought. Thank the gods great and lesser. And did not miss that distracted look that passed between those two. No species-prejudice there either. Too little species prejudice. O Hilfy, you’re a long way from home and gods-be if I care if you’re two outright fools in that regard. I ought to be shocked. I can’t even find it anymore. Gods save you both, I hope you’ve done what I don’t even want to think about. I hope you’ve had a little bit of what I’ve had forty years of.
And what kind of thinking’s that?
Khym was sleeping when she came into their quarters. She dropped the trousers on the floor, quietly, pocket-gun and all; and came and got into the bowl-shaped bed, down in the middle of it where he was, a huge warm lump all hard with muscle and tucked up like a child. She put her arms around his back, buried her head against his shoulder. He turned over and nuzzled her shoulder.
Sleep, she wished him, with a bit of regret. Among pleasures in life a warm bed and a nap in her husband’s arms was not the least. She had not the heart to wake him, not when he was this far gone.
“Py,” he murmured, in that breathy rumble of his voice at whisper. And bestirred himself, perhaps for his own sake, perhaps just in that way a man would who knew he was wanted: matter of kindness, for a tired wife who came to him for refuge. What they did had nothing to do with time of year. That would have shocked the old gray whiskers back home. Wives and husbands were a seasonal matter: men were always in and wives got around to it when they were home, by ones and twos and, in spring, a confounded houseful of women with hairtrigger tempers and demands on a single, harried man; then the house lord got round to driving out all the young men who had overstayed their childhood, before some scandal happened: young women went to roving, older sisters heaved out any near-adult brother the lord happened not to take exception to. It was housecleaning, annual as the spring rains.