Chanur’s Legacy by C.J. Cherryh

“Find same one time go bang I unload geo-logics, I say why not sell, lot people want like collect, like make go bang, like real lot many….”

And more like that. The entrepreneur in question was a dock worker who’d sunk his whole savings into buying this can of rocks from a tc’a trader and hiring tc’a to assemble them into tolerably high-pressure methane/nitrogen globes. Detonators came separate.

Put them on with double-sided tape. That was very nice to hear. The mahe was not an utter fool.

And, yes, oh, yes, the mahe was ever so excited to learn that a relative of the great, the esteemed Pyanfar Chanur was indeed in port and had expressed an interest, and of course the mahe would be delighted to franchise his product via Chanur’s well-reputed trading company…

Well-reputed at least where hani bankers weren’t taking a close look at the amount of debt Chanur was carrying.

But for a dock worker who’d had a geological grenade blow up in his face, gambled his life savings and had sudden interest from a Chanur ship, after months of advertising in the list at ruinous rates, gods, the fellow offered her everything but a pledge of marriage, and called on mahen divinities to look on Chanur with outstanding prosperity and confusion upon Chanur’s enemies unto a thousand thousand generations …

One would do, she thought. But the franchise offer «*= was absolutely to the mane’s liking, he was completely thrilled, he was sure the Chanur name would lend respectability to his enterprise … she could have had the marriage proposal if she’d written it in. Her proposal to put him in for a percentage of sales thereafter was, he professed, full of such real business terms he knew he was in honest hands…

Gods protect the fellow, Hilfy thought. Real business words, indeed.

For the rest she was sure Haisi was investigating every deal she’d just made, and drawing conclusions about the degree of her understanding based on what she was buying.

Which meant Haisi’s personage was going to learn in short order, plans might well be laid in accordance with Haisi’s best guess about what she had learned from the stsho, and so much the better.

Aunt had used to din into her juvenile and unwilling ear: Trade isn’t about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.

Gods, she hadn’t felt so alive since she was a teenager. She was in a situation up to her ring-bedecked ears, and by the gods she felt …

She felt something she hadn’t felt in years. She felt … as if she had suddenly understood what her aunt had been trying to make her feel, talking about responsibility to the ship and the responsibility of the merchant trade and things that had just gone into an over-hormoned young brain and out the other ear … she outright shared something with Pyanfar Chanur, over the absent years and across light-years of space.

A feeling aunt Pyanfar had given up, for …

For what aunt Pyanfar had sworn she despised— politics. Gods-rotted politics, Pyanfar had used to say, cursing the practitioners thereof.

And then she went and joined the forces.

Led them—was the truth. And why?

Hilfy began to see a certain sadness in that. Even to have sympathy for aunt Py, and to think that maybe having na Khym with her was a necessary consolation…

And what was she doing wandering down tracks like that? What in the nine or so mahen hells was into her? And why had she called Haisi back to rattle him and make him do desperate things, when Haisi going away was what she wanted most?

Pyanfar-nerves, that was what she was experiencing. She’d learned from a past master at chicanery and if she weren’t convinced she was half-crazy, she’d say she’d waked up, come alive … that she’d challenged Haisi Ana-kehnandian because she was Pyanfar’s niece, not Kohan’s well-behaved daughter.

Gods, she’d just contracted for a can of exploding rocks. And a franchise on them.

She’d just sent a very dangerous mahen agent wandering through station computer records to ask himself why she’d bought what she’d bought, and why station life-support chemicals, basic foodstuffs, and exploding rocks nobody in Compact space had wanted to buy … all interested her in the light of what she’d learned from a stsho Haisi didn’t know had Phased out of gtst former identity and out of gtst sanity.

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