So he finished it down to the last, and set the dishes by the door.
There were vid tapes to watch. There were books to read. He wished they would let him bring his things from below.
But he didn’t ask. He didn’t use the com. He didn’t make himself a problem to them. He found himself a blanket in the storage locker in the lounge and he tucked up and watched bad vids while the loader worked. Clank. Clank-clank.
It didn’t stall. So they had listened to him. And Tarras at least knew he’d been right.
Chapter Nine
The Legacy eased out of dock and away—put her bow to solar nadir in the dusty environs of Urtur system and took a leisurely start-up, a leisurely acceleration at g-normal for their stsho passenger. The Legacy’s hold was not full, the cargo was light-mass, the crew on watch was minimal to the safety requirements, and as soon as they hit their assigned lane for the outward run, the crew was snug in beds, sound asleep, except for the captain, who had the sole watch, who was propping her eyes open and seeing ghosts in the shadows of the bridge.
She never had done such a turnaround since she came to the Legacy, never hoped to do another. And when they had gotten out past the worst of the dust, and the rocks that attended the planetary vicinity, the captain set autopilot, tilted the cushion to flat relative to the accel plane and wrapped herself in a blanket for a rest.
Musing on tc’a and outraged stsho, wandering in a mental wilderness of white on white…
Thinking of The Pride and the human aboard her, thinking of a friendly face and eyes of unhani color. Tully wouldn’t have turned on her, Tully wouldn’t have attacked poor cousin Dahan and broken his head. She hated her late husband; and hated cousin Harun. If she’d had her way, Harun Chanur wouldn’t be lounging his oversized body in her father’s chair, sitting by her father’s fire, and slapping the younger cousins around; Rhean would be back in space aboard Fortune where she wanted to be; she, for her part, would be on The Pride, with Tully, clear of all of it: the gods only knew who’d be managing the clan’s business, then. Which showed how impractical it all was.
But she wouldn’t be thinking of the Meras kid, then, and thinking how his expression had reminded her all too much of Dahan’s, kind and confused, and upset and hurt when she’d yelled at him. She had never thought she agreed on principle with Chihin, she’d stood more with Pyanfar on the question of culture versus instincts; but she found herself with Chihin this time: Meras didn’t belong in space, Meras didn’t think, didn’t think first, at least. Like backing the truck, because some mahen foreman yelled do it. That the foreman hadn’t meant him just hadn’t tripped a neuron in his brain.
Imagine cousin Harun in a position of responsibility. Imagine Harun having to use his head rather than his hands.
Men that did think had gotten killed, for thousands of years, that was the way biology had set up the hani species. Other species were luckier, maybe, and other species might be better at handling politics between the sexes, but hani hadn’t been civilized long enough to sort out mate-getting by any other means. Nobody had told her when she was growing up that every attitude and opinion she had learned was going to be obsolete when she was twenty-five. Nobody had told her the whole world was going to be set on its ear and the way hani did business with outsiders was going to change. Evidently nobody had told the rest of the home planet, either, because they were still doing things the old way. Same with the kid in the crew lounge … nobody had told him things were going to change, until aunt Pyanfar had lured him off in the promise of a miraculous change in the universe.
(Wrong, kid. It doesn’t work that way. Narn won’t have you, Padur won’t have you, we don’t want the complications you pose and the crew that took you aboard in the first place wasn’t looking at your resume, were they, kid? Hani are hani. People with power aren’t going to give it up. Fair isn’t fair, not among hani, not elsewhere. And no sister ever taught you to think before you jump.)