"What do we do if gtsta wants something?" Tarras asked. "What's wrong with gtsta? What's going on?"
Tarras and Fala hadn't followed a word of it. One forgot.
"That's a holiness," she said. "Don't ask me whether gtsta is Phasing or what. I don't know. And I've read every gods-be book on the species."
"Nobody knows?" Fala asked.
"Nobody but the stsho," she said. "And they've refused to talk.''
"I… you know." Hallan didn't feel he was doing well. Chihin just kept watching him, the two of them standing in the galley, Chihin leaning back against the counter, himself with nowhere reasonable to put his hands. "I just… well, I didn't know what you thought." He didn't want to say that Chihin's own best friends had warned him: that wasn't kind. "I just wasn't sure you were really meaning what I thought you meant, so I didn't want to talk to you until I could sort of figure out…"
"Same," Chihin said. "You want to go back to the quarters? Sort it out where we don't have to be proper?"
"I—" He was going to hyperventilate. He wanted to take the invitation and he was unaccountably scared to, because it would change things, and change them all of a sudden and too fast. "I—"
"Don't trust me?"
He thought about what Tiar had said. That he wouldn't always understand her. But, Do you want a rescue? Tiar had asked; and he'd said no.
"All—" he began.
“ Chihin. Report downside. Pull the white paneling out of storage — move it, we're on short schedule.” Chihin scowled and said a word. "I was going to say all right," he said desperately. But the captain said hurry and Chihin left.
“ Hallan, Report downside. We need some equipment moved. Be extremely quiet. Remember the passengers. "
If he ran he might make the lift.
Thehakkikt Vikktakkht an Nikkatu to captain Hilfy Chanur, the hani merchant, at dock at Kefk, by courier: Has the stsho survived in any use-fid way? Ships arriving from Meetpoint say that the stsho of Llyene are creating sedition and division. We must soon deal blood upon the leaders of this movement. Give us an estimated time of departure.
The hani ship, to the hakkikt Vikktakkht an Nikkatu, of Tiraskhti, at dock at Kefk: We are making modifications necessary for the transport of this person. We are finding more rapid recovery than we had thought. What is a holiness? We lack reference.
Thehakkikt Vikktakkht an Nikkatu by courier to captain Hilfy Chanur, the hani merchant, at dock at Kefk: A stsho incapable of the reproductive act. A holiness has no ability to make the alliance on which our mutual ally has placed all gtst expectation. The agents of the rival Personage will immediately take advantage and by information lately come to us, have already moved against the mekt-hakkikt. Advise us of your departure and we will delight to accompany you. Peace is advantageous. We will eat the hearts and eyes of the enemy.
… it shall be the reasonable obligation of the party accepting the contract to ascertain whether the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 shall exist in Subsequent or in Consequent or in Postconsequent, however this clause shall in no wise be deemed to invalidate the claim of the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 or 2, or in any clause thereunto appended, except if it shall be determined by the party accepting the contract to pertain to a person or Subsequent or Consequent identified and stipulated to by the provisions of Section5…
Hilfy tapped a claw on the desk, glared at the monitor, and asked the library: Atli-lyen-tlas who is the recipient has become a holiness. What is the result to the terms of the contract?
It took an entire cup of gfi for the computer to run that request through translations, permutations, legal definitions, Compact law, stsho custom references, and the cursed subclauses.
Then it said: Answer to print? File? Both?
File,she said, having learned.
The answer, when it came up, said briefly: The person accepting the contract must designate a second recipient who exists as the nearest degree of consequence to the first named recipient; if, on the other hand, the party issuing this contract disapproves this recipient, the person accepting the contract is obligated to double indemnity and the return of the cargo.
Hilfy stared at it and stared at it, then got up and blazed a direct path down to gtst excellency's white, expensive nest, signaled her presence and opened the door without waiting — there being little of Tlisi-tlas-tin or Dlimas-lyi she hadn't seen.
"Your excellency, forgive a most hasty but necessary declaration! You must become the recipient!"
A tousled crest and wide moonstone eyes appeared from beneath the sheet.
"Of course," said Tlisi-tlas-tin. "Of course. Was this not understood?"
It was white. It was clean. There was carpet over the deck tiles and they'd contrived a plastic frame and some bent struts to improvise a stsho bed; they'd made a mattress out of plastic sheeting Chihin said she hoped to the gods didn't give way, but it held air, and it held water, and when they'd covered it in white drapery it would at least protect the old stsho, Hallan was sure it would. He crawled backward out of the pit with utmost care not to put a claw out and create a disaster.
Chihin gave him a hand on the escape, and sprawled, sitting, with a swipe of stiffened paint on her sore arm and plaster bits in her mane. She leaned against him, he leaned, they were all over with spatters and the way she looked at him, brow to brow and a little out of focus, said she was as tired and sore as he was.
And they had one thought, both, in that moment, it didn't take that much reading — his went something like a dread and an anxiousness to find out, and a fear of getting into what took time to discover and being called up short.
She said, "There's the downside shower. We can clean up, catch a snack…"
She wasn't young and rushing at things. He had that figured now, it wasn't on again, off again signals, it was just a sane sense of how things worked; and he didn't know where they could go to figure out the rest of it, but he tried to slow down his breathless haste and use his wits the way Chihin did and tell himself if they got involved in this room and didn't report in, the captain was going to ship them to the kif…
"Wonder if the mattress works," Chihin said. But he thought he could read her now, when she was serious, when she was being outrageous.
"I don't want to walk from Kefk," he said; and he must have guessed right, because she put her arms on his shoulders then and laughed and got up.
"Shower," she said, and left him with his burning haste to be a fool, a sense things could always go wrong from here, there might not be another chance… Chihin could come to her senses and decide something else, or they could die and chances might not come again.
"Tiar," she said, talking to the intercom. "Tiar, we're about finished. Give us a chance to get our objectionable selves out of the passenger corridor and you can ferry the old fellow in…"
"Thank the gods. Captain says get up here, we're in count, we're just about to clear the umbilicals."
Chihin's ears went flat. "In count! Gods rot, what kind of schedule does the captain think we're up to?
We got a dying stsho, we got us so tired we can't see straight… what in a mahen hell in gods-be count. …"
The thump and clang was the umbilical bundle coming clear. Chihin was upset, besides mad. She stopped arguing, cut off the com, and looked at him, and he didn't know what help to be, but that Chihin was worried, worried him about this departure they were making, the haste they were in.