"Yes, captain."
"With luck someone will come through here and I can send you home."
He hoped not. He truly hoped not. He knew that the captain was angry and that she had absolutely good reason.
"I want more than anything," he said, "to help. I don't want to go back to Anuurn. I never want to go back to Anuurn."
"We can do better," she said, "without your help. Stay out of it, do you hear me?"
"Yes, captain."
With which she walked out. And shut the door. He sat down again. It was not an uncomfortable place to be. And he didn't get his hopes up. She'd said — there might be another ship. He truly hoped not. He hoped he would have another chance.
He sat down and thought and thought how he might have done differently about the accident; and the stsho; and how he could, still, if he could just get one break, prove to the captain that he was qualified — if they would just let him work cargo. He wouldn't back up any more trucks. But they wouldn't believe that. He wouldn't be in any corridors he wasn't supposed to be in. But Chihin had told him go there. So he'd thought it was safe…
Maybe Chihin had set him up. But he didn't want to think so. She'd been fair, about him startling her.
She'd taken shots at him, but everybody did. He didn't want to think Chihin had done it to him. And she certainly hadn't been responsible for the truck. That was all his doing.
Tiar brought him supper soon after, which was stew. Tiar asked him if the captain had explained things to him and he said that she had. Tiar said don't take the captain too seriously, and said that the captain yelled when she was upset, but that she was fair when she calmed down.
"I'm sorry about scaring the stsho," he said, and Tiar said it wasn't hard to scare the stsho, the harder problem was keeping it happy, which they had to do. And Tiar said he'd done all right, except not to take any chances, even if it seemed people were yelling at him — don't let them rattle him or make him move faster than he could think.
In other words, he thought, Calm down. It was what women said to misbehaving boys, stupid boys, who at about thirteen started having shaking mad temper fits, and their sisters said, 'That's all right, just calm down, Hallan,' and papa got irritable and refused to have him around any more, and youngest sister said, 'Try to think, Hal, just use your head about things, everybody feels like that.'
(Then oldest sister said, after he was sixteen, 'He thinks too much. He can't survive out there.' Or at home either: papa had told him get out, the girl his sisters had tried to fix him up with said he wasn't a match for her brothers, and his sisters had spent all their savings to get him a ticket to station, to a place they'd never seen, and hadn't any interest in going to; but it was everything he wanted, and they gave him that very expensive chance — for which he adored them. He couldn't come back and be sent down in disgrace they'd know about, to an exile he'd die in, because he'd trained himself to be here, that was all, and he'd rather die here than there.)
He didn't have much appetite for the stew Tiar left him. But he told himself that was male temper too, upsetting his stomach. He told himself stop it and think how he was going to feel in an hour or two; and how if they were going for jump this soon, he had to get the food down, as much as he could make his stomach take.
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.)
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.