Chanur's Homecoming

Epilog

The docks reeked of foreignness, of metal and oil and ma­chinery, and they echoed with announcements and the snarls of monstrous machines; it was a frightening place for a boy from a land of blue sky and golden grass, Hallan heard the PA thundering advisements the cavernous gray spaces swal­lowed and gave back garbled in echo. He looked about him and saw groups of black-trousered Immunes moving down the docks in a cordon across the whole dockside: what little he did catch from the PA was alarming, snatches of adviso­ries to clear some area, but he had no idea what section four green was or why the lights were flashing blue down there and red where he was.

It was a confusing arrival for a downworld lad, laboring along with his pass and all his worldly possessions in a brand new spacer's duffel. He had spent two bewildered hours in immigration, then taken what turned out to be the wrong lift up from the shuttle dock; then into an administrative office for directions, and down another lift, then, which went side­ways as often as it went down and came to dead stop on the main docks, resisting all his attempts to get it to go up. So he had ventured out into the docks of Anuurn, which dazed him with echoes and its true size and its reality after so many dreams. It was a dangerous place, his sisters had warned him; it was wonderful; it overloaded his senses with its noise and its echoes and its foreign smells. It was too huge a place, its few people too hurried or too rough-looking to bother with a newcomer's foolish questions. The docks ran all the circum­ference of the station: he was sure of that, and surely, if he started walking in the up-numbers direction, section four could not be too far from the section seven he was hunting. He walked along where there was no traffic at all, in the shadow of the gantries, and went from berth 14 where he had come in to berth 15; 16 was a working berth, all its lights lit with a glitter which stirred his sense of the beautiful-white and gold, a hundred lights to shine on the lines and the gantry and the whole surrounds. The ramp access looked to be open. The dockers were driving their vehicles away, and no one noticed if a boy kept walking, so he might pass by as close to his dreams as he had ever come in his life.

But now-CLEAR THE AREA the speaker overhead said while he panted along at the foot of the towering machinery, there by the lights. CLEAR THE AREA, and something more that he could not hear in the garble. He looked around desperately and saw the Immunes moving and the docks suddenly deserted. His heart began to beat in panic: he won­dered was it a decompression warning, whether something had gone dangerously wrong on this dock or somewhere near-he had heard horror tales from the war years.

But in his casting about for direction he spied a spacer, a graynosed woman whose ears had, gods, a whole fistful of voyage-rings, who sat on the skirt of some huge piece of machinery, just sitting, observing the whole furor, arm around one knee, her ears backslanted in the racket; suddenly she was looking straight at him.

He dropped his ears at once in politeness: and in outright awe at the spacer rings and the easy assurance of this veteran who was everything he was not and longed with all his heart to be. He would never have come her way on his own; but she was staring at him as if he were somehow more interest­ing than the chaos and the goings-on with the Immunes. He thought he detected an invitation, a summons in the twitch of a many-ringed ear: and he hitched up his duffel and all the courage of his seventeen years.

"H'lo," he said, walking up-his smile and his friendli­ness had won him a great deal in his life, and he relied on it

now, when he was afraid, slanting an ear toward the commo­tion behind him. "Lot of noise, isn't it?"

The spacer nodded.

Not a word. Not the least ear-twitch of friendliness. He was left a fool, twice desperate. His blue breeches were brand new. His ears were ringless. His duffel still had package-creases and he swung it back behind him and dropped it where it was less conspicuous, figuring he had mistaken her invitation: he was suddenly anxious only to get his directions and go, before he found himself in something he could not handle.

The eyes raked him and down in lazy ease, flickered with some kind of interest. "Wrong side of that line, you know."

He cleared his throat, looked nervously over his shoulder. "What are they doing down there?"

"What are you doing up here?"

"I-" He looked back again full into the spacer's lazy stare, that stripped him down to the bones and the truth; there was not even a lie he knew how to tell. "I'm new here," he said; and dropped his ears in deference when her mouth pursed in dour amusement. "What's all the commotion down there?"

"The Pride's in port."

He could not help himself; he looked back again toward the distant lines and drew a large breath. The station, for godssakes, he had truly come to the station, where fantastical species came and went; where fabled ship-names were ordinary on the freighting lists, and many-ringed spacers sat about ordi­nary as could be. And on the very day he came up from the world, The Pride of Chanur just happened in, with no ad­vance notice in the newsservices, nothing at all to tell the world it was coming. He saw nothing for his looking but a solid line of black-breeched Immunes in the distance, practi­cally no one on the docks there or near at hand; and nothing at all of the ship-boards down there: gantries obscured the view. He looked back and tried to catch his breath. "Gods, I'd like to see it."

"You don't see a ship, son, they stay out there." She was laughing at him, all dour-faced. "But you could go up to the observation lounge, the cameras'll give you a view."

"I want to see them."

"Who?"

"Them."

"The Personage? Gods-rotted lot of nonsense."

He caught a quick breath. His ears went flat. Nonsense. My gods!

"Nonsense," the spacer said again. "No different than you and me. What d'you think, boy? Blackbreeches scurrying around like chi in a fire, shut down the whole gods-be dockside-"

"Well, oughtn't they?" He was indignant. One of the old ones, this, one of the surly old-timers, just blowing off. She doesn't like a boy being up here, doesn't like me being on any ship, ever. Walk off, that's what I ought to do. She probably has a knife somewhere, even a gun in that pocket, gods know what. "I'm going to go have a look." He grabbed up his duffel again.

But the spacer patted the machine-skirt. "Tssss. You won't get anywhere through that line. Just a lot of trouble. Have a seat, boy. All bright-eyed and new, are you?"

He was off his stride. He delayed. And knew himself a fool when the old spacer took on a friendlier, amused look. Turn about for his pretense of being what he was not, that was what she had given him. Fair and fair.

"Sit. Crew's going to be down here in a bit. What ship are you going to?"

"Not to a ship. Yet. School. I'm Meras. Hallan Meras. From Syrsyn." Confession once started, tumbled out in the old spacer's unchanging stare, and his ears burned with em­barrassment; she had known even when she asked, but she did not ridicule him. "I want to be a spacer." It was his dearest dream. He saw it coming true and she did not laugh when he said that either. One of the old ones. "Have you-" He cast another look down the dock, leaning forward, and saw nothing of ship names at this angle either. "Have you ever seen the Personage?"

"Lots of times."

He looked back in awe. "Are you a friend of hers?"

"What's the matter with you, boy, what do they teach you nowadays, all this fuss to see some Personage, what's seeing do, anyway? Makes me worry, that's what. Hani I knew'd spit in the eye of somebody that wanted all that bowing and guarding. You ought to."

He understood then. "She got me here," he said. And when the old spacer blinked: "That's why I want to see that ship. I wouldn't be here without her, without what she did. That's why."

"Huh," the old spacer said. "Huh." And: "Uhhnnn-" With a gesture outward, toward the sudden flashing of a strobe light and the arrival of several official cars. "Llun."

"Are we in trouble?" Hallan got anxiously to his feet as his spacer companion stood up. He snatched up his duffel and held onto it. Immune officials and weapon-bearing marshals were getting out of the car, coming their way, while sud­denly, adding to the confusion, there were other spacers coming down the ramp out of the ship, one of them a man, one of them-"O my gods," Hallan said, having seen hu­mans in old pictures, and having seen a picture of this one.

"Cap'n," one of the spacers said, scar-nosed and broad-faced; and coming their way. "My gods, you going like that?"

"Too much fuss," the old spacer said, and dusted off her trousers. "Drives me berserk, this whole business. They want a decree, I'll give 'em a decree. Haral, meet a nice kid. Hallan Meras, meet Haral Araun. Sorry we can't stay and talk right now. Luck to you."

She walked off with the crew from the ship, the human Tully and all. And na Khym nef Mahn, who was the first man in space.

One of the crew lingered a moment, a small woman who looked him up and down with eyes that for a moment seemed to see-gods, inside him and around him with a force that left him all but shaking. Chur Anify. The strange one. She was the one that had charted the new Points off beyond Minar, and probes had found them, a bridge to other stars. She was almost as famous as the Personage.

"Who is this boy?" A Llun officer asked, all hard and threatening.

"He has a right to be there," Chur Anify said, and the officer looked at her and dropped her ears and let him alone.

"Are you some relative?" that officer asked when the cars had left the dockside and grim Llun marshals stood double guard outside The Pride of Chanur's ramp access. "Are you Chanur?"

"No," he said, holding his baggage and still dazed as if all the stars in space spun about him. That had been the Person­age, the mekt-hakkikt of the kif, the Director . . . there were as many names as there were species in the Compact. She had talked with him, this power that could move a thousand ships and mediate affairs among species.

With him, as if he were truly someone who mattered.

Or as if he might be that someone, someday.