Another sip of gfi. A chase through the stack of paper after subsection 12 of Section 5. She could Search it on the computer but that meant moving the output stacks, the notes, the reference manuals and the microcube case that was sitting in front of the screen. Somewhere in Library there was a reference work on Subsequents, at least as far as mahendo’sat understood stsho personality changes. She would have the computer look it up. When she found the monitor screen. She took another sip of gfi.
The Rows were the open market at Meetpoint— anything you wanted, you had a chance of finding scattered on the tables of a hundred and more smalltime merchants, stsho and mahendo’sat … stsho and mahen hucksters shoving things into your attention and claiming miraculous potency for unregulated vitamins and curious effects for legal and peculiar compounds, offering second-hand clothes and trinkets, carvings by bored spacers and erotic items peculiar to mahendo’sat and curious to everyone else.
But to a hani in a hurry, with specific measurements and business already in the hands of a mahen tailor in a real established Rows shop, with a pressure-door and every indication of permanency and respectability, the glitter and gaud and traffic of the market were an obstacle—and Tiar tried to make time against it.
Though an honest hani watching her waistline could get distracted here, because among the glitter of cheap jewelry and real gold, the echoes of argument and the twittering of doomed kifish delicacies—came the smell of baked goods and spice; mahen pastries. And a number of worldbound hani might turn up their noses at sweets, but she was cosmopolitan in taste: truth was, there was a good deal about mahen sweets she found to like.
And maybe the kid did. And certainly Tarras had the habit.
Well, maybe a dozen. The captain liked some sweets. Fala might. Chihin favored salted things. She could manage that.
And if they were in a mortal hurry and did not get back to the market on this rare stop at Meetpoint (she had asked the tailor to deliver, at soonest) … she could take a small detour.
She bought two dozen of the sweets. And decided, well, there were the fish done up in salt crystals, a crate of those, deliver immediately. And the smoked ones. Practical, and a welcome change in the menu aboard. The stsho merchant offered samples, and, well, a box of those. And there was the herb and spice section, right adjacent, where a hani could inhale her way along, collect a bottle or two—she did no small bit of the cooking, and she felt inspired, here.
Then she thought, with her arm considerably weighted with parcels, well, the poor kid had come aboard with nothing in hand. He could use a few toiletries—such things as a young man might like. Brushes, yes. A couple of combs. A mild cologne, something clean and pleasant.
A pair of scissors. A file—it was absolute hell to be without that, and have a claw that snagged. Tooth-brash. Of course. Creme for hands and feet—Meetpoint air was dry by hani standards, and he had been in it for days. A good conditioner for all over, while she was at it, not spicy, something like sweet grass. Any young man would like that.
A kit-case to hold it all. Second-hand, with real silver ornament. Never mind the inscription was in mahen script, and probably some love sentiment, it was a nice piece and if nobody but mahendo’sat could read it, who cared?
“Hani officer. A word?”
She looked around, at a brown mahen belly; and up, quite a distance up, at a sober mahen face.
“Legacy?”the mahe said, laying a hand on his chest. “Friend to Chanur, I, long time, follow the Personage.”
Gods, another one.
“Look …” Tiar shifted the packages in her arms and suddenly realized she was far along the Rows, she had spent longer than she intended collecting her odd items, and a mahendo’sat with religious enlightenment or a crackpot scheme either one was not going to get her home any sooner.
“I know, I know, too many come you ship talk crazy. Not me.” A hand larger than her head applied itself to approximately a mahen heart.