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nothing in the world was the
    same as it had been when she was a girl. "We left home to find strange things," Chur said, bewildered that she ended up trusting a man's good sense and an alien human's good will, a hillwoman like her. "Found 'em, didn't we?" But she saw that pained drawing about Geran's mustaches, the quivering flick of Geran's ears, well-ringed with voyages. She saw how drained Geran was, how her maundering grieved Geran, had a sure instinct that if Geran had one load on her shoulders, she had just put another there, almost unbearable for her sister. "Hey," she said, "I was pretty steady on my feet. Machine helps. Think I'll make it. Hear?"
    Geran took that in and the slump left her shoulders and the grief left her eyes so earnestly and so trustingly it hurt.
    Gods, Chur thought, now I've done it, I've promised her, haven't I?
    Stupid to promise. Now I have to. I'll lose. It'll hurt, gods rot it. I'll die somewhere in jump, O gods, that's an awful way, to go out there, in the dark between the stars, all naked.
    "Not easy," Chur murmured, heading down to sleep. "Easier to go out, Gery. But I'll get back up there, b'gods. Don't you let the captain assign me out. Hear?"
    "Chair's waiting."
    "You want to fill me in, treat me like I was crew?" It was hard to stay interested in life, with the sedatives drawing a curtain between herself and the universe. She remembered her promise and fought to keep it. "What f'godssakes is going on out there?"
    "Same as before. We're sitting at dock waiting for that gods-rotted kif to make up his mind to go left or right, and so far nothing's worse."
    "Or better."
    "Or better. Except they're still talking. And the hakkikt's still real polite."
    "Jik hasn't cracked."
    "Hasn't cracked. Gods help him."
    "How long are we going to sit here?"
    "Wish we all knew. Captain's figuring like mad, Haral's laying in six, seven courses into comp. We may get home yet."
    "Doublecross the kif? They'd hunt us." Her voice grew thick. "Meetpoint's the only way out of here. That's where we've got to go."
    Geran said nothing. The threads grew vague, but they always came to the same point. Goldtooth had left them and his partner in the lurch and run for Meetpoint, and Tully's folk were headed into the Compact in numbers, all of which meant that a very tired hani who wanted the universe to be what it had been in her youth was doomed to see things turned upside down, doomed to see Chanur allied with kif, with a species that ate little black things and behaved badly on docksides, and did other things an honest hani preferred not to think about.
    Gods-rotted luck, she thought; and thought again about the hills of home, and the sins of her youth, one of which she had left with its father; but it was only a gods-be boy, and not a marriage anyhow, and she had never written back to the man, who was no happier at getting a son than she was at birthing one (a daughter would have done him some good in his landless station), but his sisters would treat the boy all right. Rest of the family never had known much about it, except Geran knew, of course; and it was before she had joined The Pride. The kid would have come of age and gone off to Hermitage years ago; and probably died, the way surplus males died. Waste. Ugly waste.
    Wish I'd known my son.
    Maybe I could find him. If his father's still alive. If he's like na Khym, if- Maybe, maybe if I could've talked to him he'd have sense like na Khym.
    Never asked that man-never much talked to him. Never occurred to me to talk to him. Isn't that funny? Now I'd wonder what he was thinking. I'd think he was thinking. I'd find me a man and make love to him and gods, I'd ask him what he was thinking and he'd-
    -I'd probably confuse him all to a mahen hell, I would; aren't many men like Khym Mahn, gods-rotted nice fellow, wished I'd known him 'fore the captain got him. If he was ever for anybody but her. If a clan lord like him could've ever looked at an exile like me. I'd like