And they had one thought, both, in that moment, it didn’t take that much reading—his went something like a dread and an anxiousness to find out, and a fear of getting into what took time to discover and being called up short.
She said, “There’s the downside shower. We can clean up, catch a snack …”
She wasn’t young and rushing at things. He had that figured now, it wasn’t on again, off again signals, it was just a sane sense of how things worked; and he didn’t know where they could go to figure out the rest of it, but he tried to slow down his breathless haste and use his wits the way Chihin did and tell himself if they got involved in this room and didn’t report in, the captain was going to ship them to the kif…
“Wonder if the mattress works,” Chihin said. But he thought he could read her now, when she was serious, when she was being outrageous.
“I don’t want to walk from Kefk,” he said; and he must have guessed right, because she put her arms on his shoulders then and laughed and got up.
“Shower,” she said, and left him with his burning haste to be a fool, a sense things could always go wrong from here, there might not be another chance … Chihin could come to her senses and decide something else, or they could die and chances might not come again.
“Tiar,” she said, talking to the intercom. “Tiar, we’re about finished. Give us a chance to get our objectionable selves out of the passenger corridor and you can ferry the old fellow in…”
“Thank the gods. Captain says get up here, we’re in count, we’re just about to clear the umbilicals.”
Chihin’s ears went flat. “In count! Gods rot, what kind of schedule does the captain think we’re up to? We got a dying stsho, we got us so tired we can’t see straight … what in a mahen hell in gods-be count….”
The thump and clang was the umbilical bundle coming clear. Chihin was upset, besides mad. She stopped arguing, cut off the com, and looked at him, and he didn’t know what help to be, but that Chihin was worried, worried him about this departure they were making, the haste they were in.
“Are we running from the kif?” he asked.
“From dead stop at dock?” She put her arms around him a moment. Stupid question, he thought. Totally stupid question, but he’d thought the situation might be more complicated than that. Maybe it was and she knew and wouldn’t tell him, they never told you anything … it’s not your business, boy, we’ll take care of it, don’t worry yourself …
He was scared of jump this time. He was really scared. “There were tc’a,” he said. He could only be twice the fool. “In jump. When the alarm went off. I saw them go right through the ship and nobody was moving and I hit the alarm. In my dream, I did. And it was going off when we came out. I know it’s stupid,” he said, when she stood back to look at him in a worried way; and it was more disturbing that she didn’t laugh, didn’t offer the immediately obvious: You were dreaming, stupid kid.
“Nobody was moving,” she said.
“In my dream.”
“Chur dreams like that.”
Chur Anify. On The Pride. Chur the map-maker. Chur, that they said could walk through hyperspace and see what kif saw and maybe knnn and tc’a …
He didn’t believe that. People exaggerated, especially the world-bound ones who didn’t know the limitations. You didn’t expect it out of Chihin, who was Chur’s cousin, if you reckoned it.
“What did you do?”
“I just got up and reached over and hit the alarm. But maybe it went off itself and I just dreamed—“
Chihin was looking at him in all seriousness, maybe thinking she didn’t want to be associated with somebody that crazy.
“It’s my fault, about the tc’a,” he said. “Maybe that was why I dreamed it.”
“Kid. If you punch any more buttons on my board you by the gods be sure what you’re touching.”