Recent Reading Mar 22, that's better
Mar. 30th, 2022 07:01 pmChanur's Legacy, C J Cherryh (re-read)
It's 10 years on from the Pride of Chanur trilogy, and Hilfy Chanur is pissed off with everyone judging her against her aunt's reputation - Aunt Pyanfar being President of Compact Space, the Mekt-Hakkikt of the Kif, the Personage of Personages of the Mahendo'sat, and so on. She's also personally pissed off at Pyanfar for kicking her off the Pride post-Trilogy, because Hilfy was far too interested for her own good in the Human stray, Tully. Py made Hilfy head of clan Chanur to keep her ground-bound, which she screwed up by picking a disastrous, if pretty, husband, which her aunt Rhean had to fix by bringing in a Hani male of the old school - the old school being a muscle-bound hulk who can kill any adult male who even looks like he might grow up to be a threat without needing to engage his brain, and leave it to his wives, sisters, daughters and nieces to run the clan.
Hilfy fled back to space by appointing herself captain of the clan's new ship the Legacy, which is the one thing she's truly qualified to do - not to fly it, she has her four cousins for that - but to run the interactions with the other species of Compact space: the ape-like Mahendo'sat, the piratical Kif (about whom she has an incipient case of PTSD), the fragile Stsho and the barely understandable, multi-brained methane breathers, the Tca with their pets/symbionts/partners? the Chi, and the incomprehensible Knnn (who don't show up this time around). So when the Stsho governor of Meetpoint Station invites her for tea and opportunities she's perfectly willing to engage, and comes away with a contract that seems too good to be true - all she has to do is transport the oji, a Stsho religious object of some sort, to the Stsho ambassador at a neighbouring station, and the payoff is so generous it will get the clan out of debt for the Legacy's construction. And will she do the governor a minor favour and take on a Hani crewmember abandoned by their ship after a fracas on the docks?
Hallan Meras is that abandoned crewmember, or more specifically crewman, being one of the handful of Hani to have taken up Pyanfar's dangerously radical concept of Hani males actually being quite capable of being spacers, not killing machines. Hallan is very young, very confused and it's never entirely clear how much the crew of his former ship were using him as a novelty sex-toy rather than an actual spacer (and for 'spacer' read general dogsbody). There's no way Hilfy is leaving a Hani of any gender alone on an alien station, but she's adamant that he's not staying, whatever her cousins might think. Not even if he is huge and pretty and far too innocent to ever be a successful killing machine.
And besides, she's beginning to think she might have a bigger problem, because the contract for delivery of the oji turns out to be 240 pages of small-point size Stsho legalese, 550 allowing for alternative translations, and 28,400 if you include the ship's computer's legal commentary, and the penalty clauses for delivering it to the wrong Stsho are ferocious (to which add the complication that Stsho don't just change gender under stress, they potentially change identity). Things get worse when they get to their destination, because the entire Stsho embassy has upped-sticks and fled, and following them on to the next station only finds most of them dead. At which point Hilfy begins to realise she may have dumped herself right in the middle of Py's gods-rotted politics, with a plot that involves not just the Stsho, but a Mahendo'sat agent who claims he's only here to help her, and an enigmatic Kiffish Hakkikt who keeps wanting to talk via Hallan. And meanwhile Hallan keeps tripping over his big feet and breaking things, and the youngest of her cousins is spending half her time dreaming about him, and the others do think that maybe she shouldn't be too quick to throw him off the ship....
Hilfy is a convincingly angry protagonist, judged against a paragon she can't hope to equal, yet capable and driven to succeed in her own right, but still tangled in the emotions of what happened on the Pride, while Hallan is the convincingly naive young man, all too eager to please, while trying to parse out whether the individual crew members tolerate him, like him, or are out to exploit him.
I'd forgotten how really good this is, but you do really need to have read the Pride of Chanur trilogy first to get the full depth of the story. It's Cherryh in her deep-dive into alien mores mode, which she does better than anyone, but it's also at least halfway to being one of her stories where our viewpoint character is caught in the orbit of the true protagonist, the twist here being that Pyanfar never actually appears outside of Hilfy's in-jumpspace dreams. And mixed in with that are the crew dynamics of an all-female crew suddenly finding themselves with a very pretty male aboard.
Currently Reading: Hell's Bell, 2nd of Keri Arthur's Lizzy Grace series. In which inconvenient bodies keep coming between Lizzie and getting into bed with handsome werewolf ranger Aiden.