And all the lost young lads who believed in Chanur’s taking men onto ships, all the hundreds of young lads who with stars in their eyes had begged and bribed their way up to space, where they’d be free of tradition … what did they meet, and where were they, and what became of them, on the ships they’d gone to?
She tossed over onto her face and mangled the pillow, thinking about a human face and a place she didn’t want to think about, ammonia-stink that she still smelled in her dreams. Sodium lights and kifish laughter. And Tully’d collected the worst of it, because Tully was a novelty. Tully’d escaped them once and they had something to prove…
They’d come through that, and come through war and fire, and Pyanfar had said …
You ‘II only do him harm.
Damned if Pyanfar knew that.
Damned if Pyanfar cared whether she knew what had gone on between them: Pyanfar had cared whether she took up the burden of the clan, and Chanur’s politics downworld said there’d been scandal enough— Chanur’s heir had to be something the old women downworld could deal with, and accept, and politic with. She couldn’t deal with it. She wouldn’t deal with it.
The hypocrisy gagged her. And the hypocrisy of We have to change our ways, and Men aren’t educated to make decisions, and This generation has to pass —
So Dahan was dead and Harun was lord Chanur, and a hani ship took a naive kid aboard and left him, at the farthest point hani traded, because he wasn’t educated to think and wasn’t educated to handle strangers, and because every species in the Compact believed that hani males were helpless, instinctual killers.
Gods rot the way things worked! Gods rot the old women who made the rules and the captain that had pulled a ship out with a crewman in kifish hands! Gods rot Pyanfar Chanur, whose powers extended to every godsforsaken end of the Compact and beyond … and who couldn’t do justice in her own clan!
She pounded the pillow shapeless, she thought of the kid she’d received out of the hands of kifish guards, she thought of a big, good-looking lad who’d probably paid the obvious for his passage, and she thought bitter thoughts of what was probably going through her crew’s heads … months away from home port and the sight and sound of a male voice.
She hated to make an issue. She probably should give a plain and clear hands-off order: Don’t scare the kid. Don’t crowd him. Where he’s been—
She flung herself out of bed, crossed the room in the dark and found the bathroom door cold blind. Washed her face in the dark, washed her mane and her neck and her hands and stood there with her ears flat and her nostrils shut and told herself it was her cabin, her own ship and she had no need to think tonight about that place, or to remember the stink and the look on Tully’s human face.
She did not need the light. She felt her way to the shower and shut the cabinet door behind her, turned on the water and let the jets hit her face and her shoulders, hit the soap button and scrubbed and scrubbed, until she could smell nothing but the soap and her own wet fur, until she was warm through and through and she could stand a while against the shower wall while the heated, drying air cycled.
She could forget them, then. She could forget that place, and tell herself the lights if they came on would be the spectrum of Anuurn’s own yellow sun; and the voices if she should call on them would be those of the Legacy’s crew, cousins and kin she could rely on, kin from Chanur itself, and Chihin and young Fala Anify, Geran’s and Chur’s cousins, of the hill sept.
Not unreasonable women. Not fools, not political, not planetbound in their thinking, not any of those things she had met downworld. Believers in Pyanfar’s ideas … gods, could she ever escape them? But trust her crew? With her life, with her sanity. Lean on their advice? Often.