But that she’d taken Meras with her …
There’d been a good reason. There’d been a kif offering information they had to have. There’d been a kif who could have gone off with what he knew and refused to tell them … (in a mahen hell: Vikktakkht wanted them to know what he’d said) … but at the time, she hadn’t known what Meras’ possible connection to Vikktakkht was, when she’d taken a young man into that place—she had, who above all knew what could happen to him. And it wasn’t all the good reasons for doing it that upset her stomach. It was the angry reason for doing it. That he wasn’t Tully. That he was hani, and male, and blindly naive as every charge-ahead brat of a mother’s son was brought up to be, worse, he was a feckless fool of an innocent like Dahan had been, and the world wasn’t kind to them, the old ways aunt Pyanfar had sent her back to didn’t by the gods work, and she didn’t care what her biology nagged at her to do. That didn’t work either.
And she hated …
… hated a wide-eyed, good-natured, handsome kid looking at her with worship in his eyes, reminding her what she’d lost, what she’d compromised, and what she’d let Pyanfar Chanur …
… strand her planetside to do.
She was by the gods mad. She was still … that … mad ….
It still hurt. She could look at Hallan Meras and see her junior over-eager self, and be perfectly forgiving and understanding; but when she looked at him and felt anything …
She got mad, just cruelly … mad … at things unspecified.
That was a problem, wasn’t it?
Py had cut her off from Tully, cut her off from her dearest friends in the entire universe, and sent her home … where Py couldn’t go again. Ever.
That also … was a problem, wasn’t it? It was Chanur’s problem. And Py sent her to solve it, and washed off Chanur, and Chanur’s politics, and everything to do with the clan—forever, at that point. Direly sad thought … for aunt Py. Py had gotten hot when she’d said no. Py had said things … maybe because Pyanfar Chanur was feeling pain, who knew? Pyanfar wasn’t ever one to say so.
So bad business had happened at Kshshti, so she’d had a rough few years and she hated her unlamented husband with a passion.
But why was she so shaking mad? Why in all reason was she sitting here at her reasonably well-ordered desk upset and wanting to do harm to a young man who’d had no connection with Py except a conversation on a dockside years ago. She was a self-analytical person. She had sore spots and she knew where they were: she might have nightmares that made her throw up, but she didn’t let them dominate her waking life, and she didn’t let them sway her from what made business sense … gods-be right she’d deal with a kif if he had a deal she needed. She’d felt no panic at going to Kshshti. She could contemplate going to Kefk, clear over the border into kifish territory, and as it seemed now, they were going.
So she didn’t have a problem, outside the occasional flashes on the past. She was free, she went where she chose, she had no problems that a financial windfall and peace in the family wouldn’t cure. So why did she feel that way about Hallan Meras? Instinct? Something that deserved distrust? Something that threatened them? She hadn’t read that between him and the kif. And she generally understood her own behavior better than that.
Attraction? She’d noticed he was male. So? She was also exhausted, distracted, and too harried by petulant stsho, pushy mahendo’sat, and a ship with potential legal problems, to think about any side issues.
She just didn’t figure it—being at one moment perfectly at ease face to face with the lad and then, in the abstract, when he wasn’t even at hand—
Enough to make you wonder about yourself, it was, what sore spots did go undiscovered, and what that one was about. But it wasn’t about Hallan Meras personally. No. He was just a problem—