Because of The Rules. The by the gods Pyanfar Chanur way of doing things, which wasn't the exact way every hani ship ran its business and which she dared not have her peace-time crew talking about when they were home, or complaining about in a station bar.
And maybe in some remote part of her brain she didn't want to think in those terms any longer. The Compact having changed, peace having broken out— hani wanted to get back to their own business, and take their own time, and not worry about wars, and not hurry more than they had to. The crew was all right, they got along, they were still, after their few years together, making adjustments to working together: they had their operating glitches and they yelled at each other, but no serious glitches, absent hostile action. It was a different age, and instincts dimmed, and fools could steer a ship or a planetary government: precision just didn't matter any more.
Medium was just all right.
Till you rusted or some amateur assassin nailed you for a reason you wouldn't ever find out.
Mad, she was. That son had shot at her and hit Chihin.
That in itself was a sloppy presumption. Aunt Py would say.
If aunt Py were here to lecture… or to haul a young captain out of the mess she'd contracted herself and her crew into.
Not experienced enough for a captaincy, they said in the han, and behind her back.
More by the gods experienced than some — especially in the han. And a crew that was getting smoother as time went on.
But there wasn't time to let Hilfy Chanur figure out her way. There hadn't been time for Hilfy Chanur to figure things out, all her life.
She got up, took the printout from the locker to her office and scanned it in.
She edited off all the references to The Pride. She searched the crew's names, and subbed in her own…
And she came to a dead stop on the matter of Hallan Meras, on the auxiliary post.
Lock him back in the laundry?
Forbid the crew to discuss ops with him, whatsoever?
Why had Vikktakkht wanted him? Why had Vikktakkht insisted to speak to him, except to get a less wary answer, and because Vikktakkht understood hani well enough to know they'd protect him.
Meras was a vulnerability in their midst that her own curiosity had made available to the kif, and she couldn't deny that. She had a certain ruthlessness, a certain deficiency of pity, a certain willingness to run risks with other people's lives… she had discovered that in herself. Or maybe it was just that nobody planetside understood the things she'd seen, and the experiences she'd had… nobody who'd only been a merchant spacer could ever understand… and she grew angry, impatient with people who were naive, and people who were safe, and protected, and innocent…
But that she'd taken Meras with her…
There'd been a good reason. There'd been a kif offering information they had to have. There'd been a kif who could have gone off with what he knew and refused to tell them… (in a mahen helclass="underline" Vikktakkht wanted them to know what he'd said)… but at the time, she hadn't known what Meras' possible connection to Vikktakkht was, when she'd taken a young man into that place — she had, who above all knew what could happen to him. And it wasn't all the good reasons for doing it that upset her stomach. It was the angry reason for doing it. That he wasn't Tully. That he was hani, and male, and blindly naive as every charge-ahead brat of a mother's son was brought up to be, worse, he was a feckless fool of an innocent like Dahan had been, and the world wasn't kind to them, the old ways aunt Pyanfar had sent her back to didn't by the gods work, and she didn't care what her biology nagged at her to do. That didn't work either.
And she hated…
… hated a wide-eyed, good-natured, handsome kid looking at her with worship in his eyes, reminding her what she'd lost, what she'd compromised, and what she'd let Pyanfar Chanur…
… strand her planetside to do.
She was by the gods mad. She was still… that… mad….
It still hurt. She could look at Hallan Meras and see her junior over-eager self, and be perfectly forgiving and understanding; but when she looked at him and felt anything…
She got mad, just cruelly… mad… at things unspecified.
That was a problem, wasn't it?
Py had cut her off from Tully, cut her off from her dearest friends in the entire universe, and sent her home… where Py couldn't go again. Ever.
That also… was a problem, wasn't it? It was Chanur's problem. And Py sent her to solve it, and washed off Chanur, and Chanur's politics, and everything to do with the clan — forever, at that point.
Direly sad thought… for aunt Py. Py had gotten hot when she'd said no. Py had said things… maybe because Pyanfar Chanur was feeling pain, who knew? Pyanfar wasn't ever one to say so.
So bad business had happened at Kshshti, so she'd had a rough few years and she hated her unlamented husband with a passion.
But why was she so shaking mad? Why in all reason was she sitting here at her reasonably well-ordered desk upset and wanting to do harm to a young man who'd had no connection with Py except a conversation on a dockside years ago. She was a self-analytical person. She had sore spots and she knew where they were: she might have nightmares that made her throw up, but she didn't let them dominate her waking life, and she didn't let them sway her from what made business sense… gods-be right she'd deal with a kif if he had a deal she needed. She'd felt no panic at going to Kshshti. She could contemplate going to Kefk, clear over the border into kifish territory, and as it seemed now, they were going.
So she didn't have a problem, outside the occasional flashes on the past. She was free, she went where she chose, she had no problems that a financial windfall and peace in the family wouldn't cure. So why did she feel that way about Hallan Meras? Instinct? Something that deserved distrust? Something that threatened them? She hadn't read that between him and the kif. And she generally understood her own behavior better than that.
Attraction? She'd noticed he was male. So? She was also exhausted, distracted, and too harried by petulant stsho, pushy mahendo'sat, and a ship with potential legal problems, to think about any side issues.
She just didn't figure it — being at one moment perfectly at ease face to face with the lad and then, in the abstract, when he wasn't even at hand—
Enough to make you wonder about yourself, it was, what sore spots did go undiscovered, and what that one was about. But it wasn't about Hallan Meras personally. No. He was just a problem—
A security problem where it concerned the manual. Tell na Hallan to keep a piece of information to himself forever, and she honestly had every confidence he'd try. But this was the lad who'd fathered a tc'a by backing a lift-cart.