“I’m aboard because I’m a total fool.” A frown was on his face, rumpling up his brow. “The rest came later. Py, don’t talk like this.”
“Gods, you don’t understand.”
“I don’t own this ship. It’s Kohan’s. I can’t come here, bed his kin-”
Male thinking, hindend-foremost and illusionary. Downworld thinking. It infuriated her in him, when so much else was extraordinary. “This ship is mine, gods rot it,. Kohan’s got nothing to do with it. And if you want to bed down with Skkukuk, he’s mine, too. I’ll also shred your ears.”
That struck him funny. And wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“I didn’t consult with Kohan,” she said. “I don’t consult. You know gods-be well how the System works, how it always worked, your sweat and your blood and you never owned a gods-be thing. Now you really do. Something you can’t lose. You can do as you godsblessed please, and you do it, husband. Forty years I’ve been out here. You’ve been here two and already your thinking’s skewed. You at least listen to my craziness. All those years in Mahn, you used to ask me what the stars were like. Now you know what I come from, why I didn’t get along with the rest of the women . . . why I never could make our daughter understand me. Tahy thinks I’m crazy. Some kind of pervert, probably. Kara knows I am. I just can’t get excited about what they think down there. I don’t have those kind of nerves anymore. Their little laws don’t seem important to me. That’s dangerous, I think. I don’t know how to get back to where I was. None of us do. Haral’s got a bastard daughter off in Faha; Tirun’s got a son somewhere still alive, left him in Gorun. Gods know they usually take precautions. But they’ve never married; they never will; they just take their liberties down in Hermitage with whatever takes their fancy, and I don’t ask. You know why they do that? I was lucky. My sister Rhean-one spring that we coincided down in Chanur I asked her how her husband was, you know, not a loaded question. But she got this look like she was dying by inches: ‘Pyanfar,’ she said, ‘the man doesn’t know where Meetpoint is. He doesn’t know what it is. That’s how my husband is.’ And I never asked her. That’s lord Fora she was talking about.”
“He’s not stupid, I knew him in Hermitage.”
“No, he’s not stupid. Rhean just can’t talk to him. Her world isn’t where he lives. His isn’t where she lives. Nowadays she comes home as little as she can. If she could go to Hermitage and do her planettime there, I think she would far rather. A man you pick up in the hills, he’ll pretend you’re all his dreams, won’t he?”
“You ever do it?”
She hesitated. Which was as good as yes. She shrugged. “Not after we were married.”
“A Morhun found me like that; and left me a week later. Me, a kid out in the bush, hoping for an ally. Playing games with a boy like that-that’s cruel.”
“I was honest about it. I said I was down on leave. When I was. When I was younger than that I was honestly looking.”
“No boy of that age’d know you meant gone in the morning. No boy would know that that ship’s worth more to you than he ever could be. No boy would know he couldn’t follow you where you’d go, that the territory you want isn’t- isn’t something he could take for you. And he’d want to lay the whole world in your lap, Py, any man would want to, and he’d try to talk to you and maybe learn by morning he couldn’t give you anything you cared about. That’s a hard thing, Py. It was hard for me.”
“You were lord of Mahn!”
“I was lord of the place you used to go hunting, the house you lived in when you wanted a rest. I was a recreation. I never could give you anything. And I wanted to give you everything.”
“O gods, Khym. I said I was lucky.”