Tarras stood there looking troubled, ears sinking to a backward slant. “I’m not walking out,” she said, as if she’d been misunderstood all along. “I’m not complaining about the deal, I just wanted to know if there was something we didn’t know.”
“I’m not Pyanfar’s. I never was Pyanfar’s. Does the crew think that?”
“It was my question. I don’t say you’d want to lie to us. But, yes, there’s been a little question. In some quarters.”
“How I got the command, you mean.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Py’s guilty conscience.”
“Huh?”
“How I got this ship.” Things came clear to her even while she was talking, absolute clear insight.
“She trained me. She knew how I’d react. She wanted me as clan head, at least enough to counter Rhean, who’s good where she is.” She was perfectly aware she was talking to one of Rhean’s former crew. And maligning a closer kin to Tarras than she or Pyanfar was. “I’m a radical lunatic. Rhean’s solid conservative. She hates the han but she’d back it against the universe. And I’ve peculiar foreign tastes, Anuurn knows that. As long as I’m clan head, the han knows Chanur’s led by a depraved young radical. They cooperate with Rhean. Anything, so long as Hilfy Chanur doesn’t come home.” She shrugged. “Rhean and I get along fairly well, actually. We agree on finances. We agree I should be out here. That’s quite a lot.”
Tarras might have taken umbrage at that. Tarras merely tightened her lip in irony, acceptance of a Situation neither of them could mend: that was the way Hilfy read it, and she generally could read Tarras.
“Aye, captain,” Tarras said. “That’s all right.”
“I want you,” she said, lest there be any mistaken doubt whatsoever. “I need you, Tarras. But I respect your other obligations.”
“I’m all right,” Tarras said. “The rest of us are. It’s just—we needed to know we know.”
KerChihin was hurting, Hallan could tell that. But she wouldn’t stay out of action on the dockside. She kept walking back and forth, overseeing everything, talking to the mahendo’sat in the pidgin, which Hallan couldn’t speak, beyond a few words.
He only tried to anticipate what she was going to want, and what was right and what was wrong. He personally, with gestures and his lame command of the Trade, insisted the loaders park on the mark, and the loader kept going without jamming. That was the best help he knew how to be, and ker Chihin didn’t disapprove it. She finally sat down on the ramp way railing and watched, and he took over watching the mahen foreman’s check-off on the manifest—brought it back for her approval when they had completed the number two cold hold, and Chihin looked it over minutely and cast looks at the cans last on the truck.
“All right,” she said grudgingly, signed it, and he took it back to the docker chief and the customs representative, full of the excitement that came of doing something real and useful, and actually dealing with the mahendo’sat himself, talking and being talked to by outsiders—a very queasy, scary situation, if he believed what he’d been taught at home; but it was what he had to do if he ever hoped to find his place among spacers, and the Legacy gave him his first real chance.
“You not damn bad,” the docker chief admitted. “Not crazy.”
“No, sir,” he said. “I’m a licensed spacer.”
They said something among themselves. Not all of them spoke the pidgin. But they didn’t laugh at him, so far as he could detect. And he felt it a delicious wickedness, to be actually making sense to them, and answering a point of debate, which ordinarily a sister would step forward to do in his stead.
He took the completed form back to Chihin and then went back and told them to signal the next load, which was the number three cold hold, and listed for … he could make it out … Ebadi Transshipped. “All fine, do,” the foreman said without quibble, and shouted at his workers. He trekked back to Chihin to say that was what he had just done—she growled at him, but not angry at what he had done, he felt that, only at being asked a needless neo question.