Chanur's Homecoming

Probably a letter to his wife. Gods know. Has he got a wife? Kids?

We’re going to die here and this stupid machine can’t go any faster and what can we do anyway? Pyanfar’s already out there with the kif. And we can’t get to her. Whatever happens.

Harukk occupied a berth well around the rim, beyond the weakened section, but not beyond the damage: wreckage lay about them, walls and decks were fire-blackened and pocked with shells and laser-hits.

And the approach to the hakkikt’s ship was more ghastly than before, hedged with a veritable forest of poles and stanchions on which he had put the heads of enemies and rebels against his power.

Pyanfar had seen the display before; so had Kesurinan. Hope he changes them off, was the wisp of thought that leapt into Pyanfar’s distressed mind. M’gods, putrefaction. The things life-support has to put up with on this station-filters must be a gods-be mess.

—in a distracted, callous mode because she had gotten used to such horrors, and only her heart flinched in a forlorn, pained recollection that there were places where such things did not happen, where naive, precious folk went about their lives never having seen a sapient head parted from its body and hung up like a traffic warning.

This kif is going to expand beyond Kefk. Going-gods know how far. Gods help the civilized worlds.

A sneeze hit her. She stifled it, turned it into a snarl and wiped her nose. She was allergic to kif-had taken another pill when she changed clothes, but the air was thick hereabouts. Her eyes watered. Lives rode on her dignity and she was going to sneeze, the very thought that she was going to sneeze made her nose itch and the watering grow worse. But she squared her shoulders and put the itching out of her mind, eyes fixed on the ramp, on the access which lay open for them.

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” Hilfy murmured, as the screen came up with more and more whole words, as it broke the code on a few key ones and spread the pattern wider: a makeshift job of encoding, a kind of thing one ship’s computer could do and another one could unravel, if it had a decoding faculty; and The Pride’s did. The Pride’s fancy-educated communications officer had taken her papa’s parting-gift in the form of the same system she had studied on by com-net back on Anuurn; it cost; and it worked, by the gods, it sorted its vast expensive dictionaries for patterns, spread its tentacles and grabbed every bit of memory it could get out of the partitionings, and sorted and cross-checked and ran phonemic sorts, linked up with the decoder-program in the fancy new comp-segment the mahendo’sat had installed in The

Pride back at Kshshti-gods knew what all it did. While no one who wanted to keep a document in code was going to be fool enough to drop proper names through it or use telltales like ?? or -to, or -ma extensions, it had the advantage of that mahen code program it sorted in as a crosscheck. The result was coming out in abbreviated form, truncated, dosed with antique words and code phrases no machine could break, but it was developing sense.

Prime writes haste* not * runner/courier accident* eye/see.

Events bring necessity clarify actions take* prime/audacity....

She added a hani brain’s opinion what the choice ought to be in two instances. The computer flicked through another change.

Number one writes hastily ? Do not hold this courier or risk disclosure. Events compel me to clarify actions which Number One has taken—

“Haral,” she said, and felt a shiver all over as she added another suggestion to comp.

. . . since ghost? is not holding to agreements support will go to? opposition all efforts supporting candidacy—

“We got some stuff here,” Tirun muttered. “Jik’s talking doublecross of somebody.”

“Who’s Ghost?” Hilfy said. “Goldtooth?”

“Akkhtimakt?” Tirun wondered in her turn.

“Ehrran?” Geran wondered, which possibility of double-dealing sent a chill down Hilfy’s back.

“Maybe some human,” Haral said, and the hair bristled all the way down.

O gods, Pyanfar needs to know this.

And may never know it.

If they lay a hand on her; if we blow this place; gods know what we’re taking out-if we have to. If they make us do that.

Good gods, we’re talking about conspiracy all the way to Maing Tol or wherever-Candidacy, who in creation has a candidacy anyone out here worries about—

—except the hakkikt.

The corridors of Harukk would haunt her dreams-ammonia-smelling and dim, with none of The Pride’s smooth pale paneling: conduits were in plain view, and bore bands of knots on their surfaces that, Pyanfar suddenly realized in a random flash, must be the kifish version of color-coding. The codings added alien shadows to the machinery, shadows cast in the ubiquitous and horrid orange of sodium-light and the occasional yellow-green of a coldglow. Tall robed shadows stalked ahead of them and others walked behind, as a door opened and let her and Kesurinan and Skkukuk into the hakkikt’s meeting-room.