And Haisi was not pleased. “All you papers cleared,” Haisi said. “You go. You put stuff on market, quick as you want. Stsho you want go Kita. Wish you luck find same. Suggest you make nice thank you to busy Personage.”
“Thank you,” she said, and made two successive bows, to Haisi, and to the Personage who had never once looked her in the eyes. There was a small pile of leaves below the miniature tree. The Personage raked them together with a nail, and seemed perfectly absorbed in this activity. The Voice did not exist when the Personage was speaking for herself. And the Voice stood to the side of the room, hands behind his back, with no more to say to her.
So she left. And hoped the Personage of Urtur had more intense words for Haisi Ana-kehnandian once the door closed.
There was all this banging and sawing again. And the loaders were taking things off the ship, finally. Hall an was puzzled by the former, found the latter comfortingly ordinary, and had himself another snack while he read the tail end of Love in the Outback.
They had moved in a minifridge full of food and snacks and drinks, a microwave, a viewer, a tape player, and a stack of somebody’s tapes and books … some of them really embarrassing. But interesting. He really hoped they hadn’t known those were in the stack. Tiar had been in a real hurry when she brought them in, and said something about the captain having been in some dust-up with customs, but everything was all right now, and she was sorry, and she wished she could let him out, but they had a very upset stsho on their hands and if the stsho ran into him gtst would Phase on the spot. So please forgive them.
With which Tiar ducked out again. And the banging and sawing went on, and the loaders proceeded.
Clank-clank. Clank. Bang and thump.
It would have been very tedious, except if anybody was going to come after him he hoped he got to the end of the book first, and he hoped they didn’t catch him actually reading it.
If he were on the Sun the book in the stack would have meant one thing.
Here—he was having thoughts he’d never exactly had before … or not thoughts, exactly, but feelings. Not about Tiar, actually. Just about belonging. Dangerous thoughts—like fitting into an ancient pattern that he didn’t want, that he’d rejected for his dreams of traveling and being free, and here he was reading this stupid book, increasingly confused about what was going on with his hormones and his thinking processes. Try to be independent and put up with any crude thing the crew did, and sometimes go along with what they wanted, and he could do that without letting them really get to him; but now here he was, guiltily reading what he really hoped they hadn’t meant to be in the stack, and thinking thoughts that meant maybe Mara Sahern was right and instincts were too strong, and he couldn’t depend on using his brains—that ultimately, when he got all his size and hormones kicked in for good and earnest, he wasn’t going to be worth anything but one thing until he was as old as Khym Mahn and hormones had stopped making him crazy.
That reputation for violence was why the stsho was afraid of him. That reputation was why everybody on Meetpoint had panicked when he had panicked and swung on the kif. And that reputation scared him, because there wasn’t just the kif to deal with, there was the Chanur, lord Harun Chanur, who would break his neck if he caught him in Chanur territory, the same as there was lord Sahern to object to his presence on the Sun. It was one thing to go to space before he was old enough, quite, to have his adult growth, but after three years he was about there, banging his head on the doorways built for female crews, and finding instincts he’d thought he was immune to—worst of all, to think that, over the next few years, he might progressively lose his self-control and his reason. It just was not true. It would not happen to him, it didn’t need to happen, it was, what had Pyanfar Chanur said, that so outraged the han? —an unscientific belief system; and conforming to it was custom, not hardwiring.