Nice-looking boy. That’s all anybody had thought. That’s all anybody would ever think. She had no personal illusions about changing the way hani were, or worked, or thought: that was aunt Pyanfar’s pet project, not hers, she had never asked to carry any banner for reforming anything, or anyone, except that hani shouldn’t be so gods-be xenophobic and so set on their own ways.
And don’t say Pyanfar Chanur got beyond biology when it came to personal choices either. Pyanfar had dumped Chanur in her lap and run off to do as she pleased, free as she pleased, with na Khym—It’s your turn, niece. You go be responsible.
Nothing in her life she had planned had ever worked and no living person she had ever trusted or wanted had ever come her way. Tell that to the jealous rivals who thought Hilfy Chanur got everything she ever wanted at no cost and no effort.
She was on a self-pity binge. She recognized it when she hit the chorus. She tried to get her mind out of the track and stared at lights reflected in the overhead, listened to the small constant sounds of the ship under way, and thought how so long as they were out of ports and so long as she had the Legacy, she was safe-how she didn’t have to go back to Anuurn ever again if she didn’t want to, how space was all she wanted, all she ever had wanted, and to a mahen hell with planets and the attitudes that grew up on them.
So occasionally she ran into other hani ships and had to meet the world-bound mindset out here, in people like Narn, who ought to know better, who ought to be free enough to spit at the han and the old women back home—but she didn’t, and wouldn’t: you couldn’t expect it of most of the clans, and you didn’t see it taking rapid hold of the spacerfarers. Quite to the contrary, there was a conservative backlash. That was the disappointment.
Which told her how badly she personally wanted to crack heads and knock courage into Narn and Padur, and how badly she wanted the universe to be different, and play by civilized rules, and not by the gods care whether a young fool wanted to fight biology and go to space, but things didn’t work that way either.
So Meras hadn’t asked for what had happened. Neither his upbringing nor his apprenticeship had taught him what he needed to know, and maybe she hadn’t been fair with him, either: she hadn’t exactly given him any parameters, just a general instruction to go out there and do what he claimed he knew how to do, as if those papers of his really meant more than a license to sit and watch the boards while a licensed spacer took a break.
There were ships that treated apprentices like that. There were ships that treated female apprentices like that—a lot of them, more the pity. The Pride had turned her out knowing what she was doing—and most ships never met what The Pride had on her tour: there wasn’t much she hadn’t met or done or seen in the years of running communications on Pyanfar Chanur’s intrigue-bound dealings.
The kid hadn’t had any such break. The kid was in the lounge watching vids, the only one of them who wasn’t falling down tired; they were stuck with him for a little while; and the more she thought about it, the more she felt uneasy with herself for the family temper and an extravagant expectation of an apprentice she’d sent onto that dockside, thanks to the lack of a coat—rather than down in the hold, also true, where he could lose an arm or a neck in the machinery. But the dust-up with the Urtur authorities hadn’t been entirely the lad’s fault … he hadn’t known his limitations, he’d probably imitated a bad habit he’d seen somebody else do—Tarras was right in that.
And he’d go off the Legacy no smarter and no better than he was if nobody knocked the need-to-knows into his head. He’d been the Sun’s responsibility; somehow he’d gotten to be theirs, and by the gods, she had a certain vanity where it came to the Legacy’s operating and the Legacy’s way of doing business.