And there went his available excuse. “All right,” he said, not cheerfully, and came back to the very small galley.
“I think the captain’s getting softer,” Fala said, with a wink. “If she let you sit on the bridge, she’s giving some. You want to get the cghos out of the refrigerator?”
He looked. He found it and put it on the counter, and she said, “You can turn on the steamer, it’s the red button.” She was busy and in a hurry, whacking slices off the lunchmeat with a knife, and piling them onto a plate with the cheese. “You can roll those if you want to, it’s just sandwiches. I figure everybody’s going to be eating with one hand and working with the other.”
“Have we found the stsho we’re looking for?” he asked, and Fala gave him a glance.
“Somebody who finds out less than I do,” she said with a flick of her ears and a frown. “No. Gtst skipped out ahead of us. We don’t know why.”
He wondered if she expected him to know. For that moment she sounded friendly and not threatening, and he suffered a moment of panic, reminding himself he shouldn’t slip into that kind of thinking, he shouldn’t be here.
“Probably Kshshti,” she said. “That’s what I hear.”
Kshshti was a border port. A dangerous place.
“Are we going there?”
A nod. A flick and settling of her couple of experience-rings, that said she was a real spacer. “I think so,” she said soberly. “You ever seen it?”
“No. No, I never was at the far stations. Except Meetpoint. And Maing Tol.”
“I’ve been there,” she said. “You really feel foreign there.”
He had slid into a personal conversation. He didn’t do that with spacers. He tried to stay businesslike. He lowered his ears, looked away and found occupation rolling up the sandwiches and skewering them together.
“Something bothering you?” Fala Anify asked. “You worried about something?” “No,” he said.
“Scared of Kshshti?” she asked. That was next to insulting. He wasn’t scared of Kshshti, he hadn’t been brought up to run in panic. But he supposed it looked that way to her, and he wasn’t willing to explain, he just didn’t want to look her in the face and talk to her, because she could really mess things up for him. He had wondered if there was a way he could possibly mess up in this port, and he had found one, that was certain. Because he didn’t think Hilfy Chanur was going to tolerate him getting involved with the crew, especially the youngest of the crew. Chihin was safer. At least she was less complicated.
“We’ll be all right,” Fala said, as if Kshshti were the center of his problems. “The captain knows what she’s doing. On The Pride, she was in and out of all kinds of situations. And we’re armed, the Legacy is, if we ever run into anything that needs it, we’ve got it. The captain knew when she set out that a lot of people could think of getting at ker Pyanfar through us … so we’re outfitted for most anything. We’re not a ship anybody should mess with.”
“That’s good to know,” he said, and flinched when Tarras put her head in and asked,
“What have we got here, a romance or a lunch?” He could have died. On the spot. Fala’s ears went down, flat, in complete embarrassment.
Chapter Eleven
There was tea, while the loaders clanked away. The galley annex that had somehow gotten established in the lowerdeck laundry had found another use, now that gtst excellency Tlisi-tlas-tin had acquired a … staff … fit for gtst station in life.
Meaning the nameless servant had acquired an interim name: gtstisi was Dlima, which meant something like Scant Necessity: not a flattering designation, in Hilfy’s estimation, but one could have settled any indignity on Dlima in the present state of affairs, and gtstisi could not on the one hand protest it, or, on the other (by all she had read on the matter, written of course by non-stsho) could not integrate it into a meaningful reality. In gtstisi condition, experiences fell randomly, and had no order. Gtstisi would follow orders, to be sure—mahen scientists suggested (and stsho were tastefully silent on the matter) that gtstisi actually required orders, so that gtstisi had a hope of discovering structure in the events that tumbled in apparent chaos.