You’re to talk. You work with the kif. You trade with them. In what? Small edible animals?
… They were home. Kohan was sitting on the veranda where he liked to sit, in the sunshine. His mane was gold, his eyes were gold. His hide shone like copper. The vines were blooming on the wall. It was the most perfect day of the most perfect year of her life. Papa talked about going hunting…
But there was a shy, quiet kid sitting on the steps, whittling something. Dahan would sit in Kohan’s presence and Kohan never cared, Kohan was not the sort that would drive a boy off, Kohan used to sit lazily in the sun and talk to Dahan about hunting, about boy-things. Sometimes Dahan would talk about his books and his notes and the stories he’d heard, and Kohan would talk about science and what he theorized, and about his herds and his breeding, that was a passion with Kohan, talk with him as seriously about house business as if Dahan were one of the daughters, and not a someday rival; while Dahan studied genetics not because he had any original interest in it, but because Kohan did. Dahan was the sort who should have benefited from aunt Py’s politics…Pyanfar should have asked him up to station, taken him aboard The Pride, if only for a tour or two
… but Dahan was dead. She’d seen his skull break. She’d seen the blood on the wall.
Things went darker. She didn’t like this dream. She knew it too well. It tended to replay. But it was back to the porch again, and the sunlight. “What should we do?” Hallan asked. And her father said, “He’s not a fighter, the gods look on him, he’s not a fighter, he never will be, I’ve no reluctance to have him about. But I’ve got to talk to Pyanfar the next time she’s here.”
Before then, Kohan had been dead. Before then, Pyanfar’s gods-cursed son moved in. Her Mahn half-brother. Churrau hanim, the old women called it. Betterment of the race. And she hadn’t shot cousin Kara in the back. She’d played the game the age-old way. She’d married a challenger, Rhean had found another when he proved a disaster. On a civilized world, women didn’t shoot fools, no, they let the Haruns and their ilk knock the likes of Dahan into a wall, spatter the brains that had theirs beaten by tenfold. Women made up the deficit. Women had the genes that mattered, they passed down the intelligence and the quickness of wits, they passed down the cleverness they had gotten over generations. A girl got footloose, called her brother and set out for a place she thought suited her: her brother or her husband knocked heads to get it for her, and that was brains? That was the way civilization worked?
Tully, she said, refusing those images, Tully, come back here.
She could control the dreams. She could see him walking away from her the way he had—walking away into this gray distance of gantries and lines, the same as Meetpoint docks where they’d met him…
“Tully,” she called after him, spooked by that; and to her relief he heard her and turned and waited to talk with her, alone for once.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Following you,” she said.
“You shouldn’t,” Tully said. “You really shouldn’t.”
That made her mad. It wasn’t the truth anyway. Tully never spoke the Trade that well. His mouth couldn’t form the sounds. “You don’t object to Chur. Or Geran or…”
“It’s different. It’s just different with them.”
“It’s not different! Don’t listen to my aunt! She’s trying to run my life. She doesn’t know what’s good for me…”
“Have you asked what’s good for me?” he said, and turned and walked away, leaving her with one of aunt Pyanfar’s favorite pieces of wisdom. From him, she didn’t for a moment believe it, and she wouldn’t let the dream be this way. She insisted not. She went walking along the dockside, in that jungle of then and now, and places that were real and weren’t…
The kid was there, of course the Meras kid was there, when your mind attacked you with images it didn’t go by halves. Tully was acting like a fool and agreeing with aunt Py, and of course here was the kid-