Chanur’s Legacy by C.J. Cherryh

“Tully!”

He came back then, just a shadow. And wouldn’t talk to her.

“He knows better,” Pyanfar said, out of nowhere and uninvited. “He had his choice, go or stay. He understood. You wouldn’t. You still won’t.”

She did. That was the trouble. She loved him, enough to make them both miserable. Go have babies, Py had said. Thank the gods that had failed. And maybe Korin had never had a chance, maybe he’d sensed that, male-wise, sullen, quarrelsome, and unwisely set on running domestic affairs. Maybe that had set up the situation from the first day he moved in. Maybe—

Maybe in some remote way that had set up everything else, because she had come home with violence, with anger, with the habit of war and the indelible memory of a kifish cage. Korin couldn’t have imagined that place. He’d made assumptions, he’d made assertions, he’d struck out to make her hear him—

And she couldn’t have cared less … what he thought, what he wanted, who he was. The only thing she’d wanted— was kif in her gunsights. Korin dead. AndTully, on her terms.

“He’s not your answer,” aunt Pyanfar said, in that brutal, blunt way Py had when she was right.

“Look past your gods-cursed selfish notions, niece, and ask him what’s right to ask of him, and don’t tell me it’s helping you outgrow him.”

That day she’d swung on Py. Not many people had done that and gotten away unmarked. But Py had just ducked, and faced her, the way Py did now, hand against The Pride’s main boards.

“Meanwhile,” aunt Py said. “Meanwhile. You have a ship to run.”

That wasn’t what Py had said. Maybe it was her own mind organizing things. The brain did strange things in jump. It dreamed. It worked on problems. At times it argued with itself, or with notions it couldn’t admit wide awake.

Most people forgot what they dreamed. It was her curse to remember. Mostly, she thought, she remembered because she wanted to be there. She wanted to be back on The Pride, before the kif, before anything had happened.

“Time to come back,” Pyanfar said.

Alarm was sounding. Wake, wake, wake.

They were in Urtur space, with the alarm complaining and the yellow caution flashing. The computers saw dust ahead.

“You there?” she asked. “Tiar?”

“I’m on it. We’re close in. Going for secondary dump.”

You can be a gods-be fool, aunt Py was hanging about to say. Because there’s no way you’re not being followed.

“Ship out there,” Tarras said, on scan.

‘ ‘Ha’domaren ?”

“Sure the right size and vector.”

She reached after the nutrients pack, bit a hole in it and drank down the awful stuff. They were, as their bodies kept time, days away from Meetpoint. On Meetpoint docks, on Urtur station, it was more than a month. As light traveled, it was years. And the body complained of such abuses. You shed hair, you lost calcium, you dehydrated, your mouth tasted of copper and you wanted to throw up, especially when the nutrient liquid hit your stomach and about a quarter hour later when the iron hit your bloodstream. But you got used to it and you learned to hold it down, or you didn’t, and you didn’t last as a deep-spacer.

“You all right?” she heard Fala ask of Meras, below, heard him answer, brightly, “I’m fine.”

Like hell, she thought. It wasn’t fair if he was. The stsho would be coming out from under … stsho and humans had to sedate themselves for the trip, whatever those completely different brains had in common— though Tully could survive without; had had to prove it… once, at least; and was still sane…

Woolgathering, Pyanfar called it, and damned the habit. She didn’t have her hands on controls. She’d been ship’s com tech, protocol officer, and that didn’t have a thing to do with running the ship. But she followed the moves, she knew in her gut when it was time for Tiar to kick in the third v dump, and Up-synched the order, tense until Tiar gave it, and then satisfied.

She could do it herself. She was tolerably sure of it. But she never bet the ship on it. And certainly not on this jump.