Risk their lives, on this wild hope of proving Rhean and the rest of them wrong, paying out the Legacy’s costs and putting the clan on a footing financially that owed not a gods-be thing to Pyanfar Chanur? If she signed that stsho contract, there was a chance that she might go back to Anuurn solvent and independent of debt.
A chance, too, that she might so compromise herself that Chanur could not redeem her, not financially, not in reputation.
Hilfy Chanur did not intend to come home begging for resources. Hilfy Chanur did not intend to make her way on her aunt’s influence, her aunt’s reputation, or her aunt’s decisions. That was what she decided.
Sign the contract. Take the chance. What would aunt Pyanfar do?
Far more foolish things. Far crazier chances. Aunt Pyanfar had risked Chanur and everything they owned for a principle.
Was that not mad … when no one else of her acquaintance gave a damn—and hani did as hani had always done?
He had not slept, truly slept, in very long; and having a comfortable bed and only the whisper of air from the ducts, he had hardly needed do more than lie down and shut his eyes before he was gone.
He tried to think about things, but they escaped him. He tried to worry about where he was and where he was going, but he simply fell unconscious.
He waked after that in the disorientation of some unfamiliar sound and an unfamiliar cabin—he found he had left the lights on, and wanted to do something about it, but his eyes shut again and he burrowed under the covers and forgot about it on the instant. The next time he waked, he lay thinking about it, and realizing his eyes were tired of the light, and thinking that he ought to get up and do something, but he threw the covers back over his head and was gone again.
The third time he realized someone was in the room, and he took fright and lifted his head.
“Sorry,” the crewwoman said—one of the senior two, his scrambled wits could not recall her except as Chanur clan. His fright did not go away. She seemed friendly enough, but he was in strange territory, with strangers he had to get along with.
“Go back to sleep if you like.” She opened the closet, took his breeches off the hook and took a quick several measurements while he blinked stupidly at the embarrassing proceedings and decided it was something about the clothing he didn’t have.
“Going to need a special order on this,” she said. —Tiar was the name, he could recall it now. Tiar. Chihin. Hilfy Chanur. Someone else he couldn’t recall, the small one, the young one … “Do you some kifish outfits, stsho, whatever you like, no trouble. Even mahen stuff. Not hani. I can’t even swear we can find blue. I’ll do the best I can.”
“Thank you,” he said uncertainly. Something seemed called for, however awkward the circumstances. And it got a pursing of the mouth, a twinkle in the spacer’s eye.
“Hey. You’re safe here. Relax.”
He wanted to think so. He remembered Pyanfar Chanur. He remembered every time things got truly bad, that she had taken time to talk to him, and she had encouraged him.
It was a Chanur ship. That was the realization in which he had fallen asleep, and the reality to which he waked. It had all the attributes of a dream, that it was improbable, it arrived out of nowhere, and it promised him everything he couldn’t likely have and couldn’t hope for.
He truly wanted Tiar Chanur to like him—most of all, to think of him as a spacer. He watched the door shut, and thought that he shouldn’t lie here like a lump, he should get up and make up his bunk and be ready to do something around the ship. He wanted to make the best impression he could on Hilfy Chanur. So he got himself out of bed, hoping no one would open the door unannounced, and showered and dressed in the only pair of breeches he had, everything else being on the Sun. He made his bed meticulously.