“We’re all against it,” Hilfy said. “We’d all like to leave him in better circumstances. We’d all like for Sahern to behave like a civilized clan and take care of its responsibilities, but that’s not going to happen. The only question is whether we throw him off our ship or we send him to Hoas where Narn will throw him off theirs. Maybe I can get a legal release out of the station office that’ll make it safer for him coming back through here—I’ll try that, in what time we’ve got, while we’re onloading…”
“Dangerous,” Chihin said. “Rattle a lawyer’s door and you get more lawyers, that’s what I say.”
“I know that. But we’ve at least got some influence to bring to bear, at least I’ve got a foot in the door with the personage of this system—not mentioning aunt Py—and the questions we can settle are questions that have to be answered, by any other ship that brings him back through here from Hoas. And Hoas it has to be. We can’t alter distances. There’s no way he can get back except through here.”
“He’s still safer with us,” Fala said, her young face earnest as might be.
“We’re not taking him.”
“I’ve backed a loader now and again,” Tarras said. “The docker chief was yelling to move it—the boy moved it. There’s not a one of us—“
“That’s fine. So we’re all occasionally guilty. We’re leaving the boy with Narn!”
“What if Ana-kehnandian thinks he knows something?” Tiar said.
And Chihin: “There’s—ah—a complication.”
“What complication?”
“The boy’s seen the vase.”
“What do you mean, ‘seen the vase’? Wasn’t it put away? Didn’t I order it taken down until we’d absolutely finished knocking around in there?”
“We were. I thought he’d gone back to quarters. I sent him there. I thought he’d stay. He didn’t.”
“Chihin, —“
“I’m sorry, captain.”
“He disobeyed orders?”
“I didn’t exactly order him to stay there. I sent him there. He came back.”
“Gods. What else? What possibly else can he get into?”
“I don’t know,” Chihin said. “But—being fair, it wasn’t as if he was deliberately doing anything wrong.”
“He’s never doing anything wrong! I’ve never met anybody so gods-rotted innocent. Gods in feathers, why is Meras wherever you don’t want him?”
“It’s a small world down there.”
“Small world. Small gods-rotted one corridor he was told to keep his nose out of!”
“The stsho took an unscheduled walk too.”
“The stsho is a paying passenger. The stsho wasn’t picked out of station detention! The stsho didn’t create an international incident on the docks and have the section doors closed!”
“What I can’t figure,” Tiar said, “is why this Haisi Ana-kehnandian wants to know what the object is. What possible difference could it make?”
“Evidently a major one, to someone.” She stirred the stew around in her bowl, stared at floating bits as if they held cosmic meaning, and thought back and back to this port, and days when one went armed to dockside. When accidents that happened weren’t accidents and you didn’t trust anything for face value. It felt like those days again and she felt trapped.
Fool, she said to herself. Fool, fool, fool. One grew accustomed to high politics, one grew used to breathing the atmosphere at the top of bureaucratic mountains, and one’s vital nerves grew dull to signals of high-level interest and dangerous associations.
One just didn’t by the gods think of it as unusual …when any freight-hauler else would have said Wait, go back, why me?
“If we leave him,” Tarras said, “somebody’s going to grab him for questioning. Or try to.”
Of course they were. Give them sufficient cause for curiosity and local authorities might trump up some charge to get the boy off any ship that was carrying him: figure that too. She had rather not have that ship be Legacy. But honorably speaking, she could not wish it to be Narn, either.
And customs had come asking about the nature of the cargo. Maybe Ana-kehnandian’s questions had put them up to it, and maybe the Personage of Urtur was innocent as spring rain. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe that angry scene with Ana-kehnandian had been only because Ana-kehnandian had produced no results. Because it had gotten noisy, and public, and Ana kehnandian had had his bluff called in a way the Personage of Urtur didn’t like.