Chanur's Homecoming

It confused her to a mahen hell. The door shut. Tauran security check. They had had a door open.

Black things. Might feed on a body while it was helpless. Kifish life, active in jump, when they lay inert and unable to move, to feel pain. Might wake up with fingers gone. Bleed to death. Gnawed to a rack of bones, aswarm with slinking vermin. A siren went.

“We’re going,” Khym mumbled against her shoulder. She grabbed him and held tight. Trust their lives to Tauran. And her programming and the Nav-comp, and the lock on that door.

“Last jump,” Hilfy murmured, in her bunk beside Haral’s and Tirun’s and Geran’s, down in crew quarters. Two beds were empty. Chur’s and Tully’s. She clenched her claws into the mattress, counting breaths. Tully had stayed topside with Chur. She had been shocked when Geran showed up to join them. But: “I got to work otherside,” Geran had said. As if she had turned all emotion off. Their lives and more than their lives rode on Geran, otherside. That was true. And Geran came down to rest with them, face cold and set, leaving her sister to Tully’s care a second time. “He’s good with her,” Geran had said. “She wanted him.”

And sent you away? Perhaps Chur had done that. Gods knew what Chur’s condition was. Geran kept her mouth shut.

“How is she?” Haral had the nerve to ask. The same question. Forever the same question, as if it was going to have some better answer.

“Holding,” Geran said. “Holding.” No optimism. Geran had stayed up there a long time and come down at the last moment of stability, with the alarms ringing.

“She able to eat?” Tirun was merciless. Trod right in where even Haral did not dare.

Long silence out of Geran. Then: “Yeah. Did pretty well.” In a flat and hopeless voice.

Last jump.

“I programmed that son to take us right in close to Anuurn,” Haral said between her teeth. “Forty-five and eight by six. Lay you odds we get it inside point five.”

“We’ll string it a bit,” Tirun said, all matter-of-fact calculating the drag and push of entering and already-arrived ships on the gravity slope. Deformation calc. Keeping the mind busy.

It was Geran and Chur who always laid the bets. Even that was offkey. Geran refused to take the bait. She remained in dire silence. It was not money Tirun and Haral were betting. It was drinks in the nearest bar.

Hilfy stared at the overhead. Terrified.

We’re not going to make it, we’re not going to make it, we’re too few and the kif too many, we can’t push them. Sikkukkut’s ships are a throwaway-we’re all throwaways.

What’s a kif care, how many ships he loses?

Cheap annoyance to his enemies.

And we were pushing him too hard.

“Otherside,” Pyanfar murmured, “we got to move. We’ll run stable right after the first cycle-down. You got to count. First pulse, then get up and go even if we got an alarm going. I don’t know if Tauran’s going to call us. I don’t trust that.”

“First pulse,” Khym said against her ear, all indistinct. “Right. Got it.”

“Got to-”

—down.

—the wide dark again.

She struggled to remember her own name. It was important to recall. She lay with an alien snuggled tight against her, his strange smooth hand holding hers ever so loosely. He had drugged himself before this, and lay helpless, as his kind had to be, in order to face the deep.

Chur, the name was. She stayed, tied by that loose grip on her essence. She could not have left him alone.

Left my son. Lost him. Never find him again, never know.

Not leave my friend out here helpless. No.

She was aware. It was not normal to be this hyper-stretched. She knew this. She had time, in this long waking of subjective days, to sort through things, not in the waking dream of time-stretch, the dim haze with which minds got through the deep, slower than bodies, but wide-awake in the twisting dark. She stretched out like the ship, and ran calculations in her head with one part of her brain, and kept the tether of that strange, fine-boned hand.

Not leave him. She thought of Tully and remembered why they were here, remembered aliens, and the ship, and the Situation, Situation, the captain would call it. She forgot about time with Geran, Geran being forever, like the stars and the movement of the worlds. But Tully came from elsewhere; was more lost than she was. Tully had period and limit. There was a time when she had not known him. There was never a time but this that she had lain so close to him. She tried to tell Geran this, explaining why she wanted Tully to stay. “Get out,” it came out of her mouth. Not the way she had meant it, but speaking with her mind that full was a surreal experience. Calculations. Numbers. One could spill out too much. “Gods rot it, get. Go. I don’t want you here. Him. He’s enough. You got work, Gery. Get to it. You want to kill us at those boards?”

I’m sorry.

She wiped that scene. Built another. She sat in bed, propped with pillows.

“We got troubles,” she said, which was what she had meant to say. “Gery, I want my place back.”