The Turning Point

The second part of the book is filled with the action typical of space opera. The complex plot continues. At Kirdu Station, things are bad. The Pride has been damaged in the last jump, the mahendo‘sat who run the station are upset as they accuse Pyanfar in the pidgin  language used by the Compact traders: “You come empty hand, make big trouble here. You got us knnn, you got us kif” (105). As Pyanfar draws kif ships and the wailing knn along with her, members of her own species desert her. The situation is so dire that that Pyanfar is tempted, briefly, to sell Tully to the kif:  “Tully, she had thought with an impulse of which she was heartily ashamed [….]Get rid of the outsider Tully” (97) But she doesn’t do this. she has a sense of loyalty to him, as well as a respect for “sapient” life; always the pragmatist, she feels that this wouldn’t solve her problems anyway: “would that the disentanglement were that easy.” Instead she takes him with her, publicly introducing him to the mahendo’sat station authorities and procuring for him work papers. This way it will be hard to claim that he is “just an animal.” 

She is shown the video of the knnn bringing in the dummy carcass, which they instead of the kif had found, though it was meant for the kif. She sees them appear to fight with the tc’a and chi and sees what appears to be the knnn kidnapping one of the tc’a: “and now another species descended to trading in sapients.” 

But this is only an appearance like much else in this novel. 

Another supposed betrayal occurs when Pyanfar trades Tully’s language tape to the mahendo’sat in order to procure repairs for her ship and obtain escort to Anuurn.  Tully is upset with her but she has her reasons, some of them to his species' advantage:  “maybe when your ships meet our ships…there’ll be a tape in the translators that will keep us from shooting at each other” (116). 

Badly in need of sleep, she boards the Pride again and meets her niece Hilfy who has been also going without rest to monitor messages. She speaks sternly to her, and then immediately regrets her words since she had meant to thank Hilfy for her efforts.  As she tries to sleep the images of those she feels she has wronged or enraged swirl around her: “Gods, that she had staggered through the requisite interview with the mahendo’sat, bargained with them, offended the Tahar -- and Tully, she had traded off what three of his shipmates had died to keep to themselves.” As she falls asleep she fends off  “the recollection of Tully’s face or Hilfy’s or the scuttling figure of the knnn with its prize, or the kif which skulked and whispered together out on the docks” (118). 

It is here that we see that in spite of Pyanfar’s usual swagger, she is far from the all-knowing confident space opera hero.  Under pressure she does what she thinks is best, thinking quickly and smartly, but is assailed by doubts afterward -- as we all are. Clearly a highly intelligent and moral being, Pyanfar is in the midst of the kind of danger that either kills us or provides us with growth of character. 

 

 Mahe, Knnn, Kif, Male

The situation does not improve right away but seems to worsen. The Faha ship is lost to the kif and the hani aboard who survive – though allies of Chanur -- blame Pyanfar.  It is significant that by the end of chapter 8 Pyanfar notes that “The mahe kept faith.  She expected less of the Tahar” (140). 

She is learning that politics makes strange bed-fellows and that many generalizations are not true. She now finds herself closer to the mahendo’sat than to members of her own species. She is about to face one of her several prejudices. 

She is upset at Tully sharing a bedroom with the crew since he is male and “they voyaged celebate” (143).  Perhaps the decision to be celebate while in space precludes the possibility of same-sex attraction,  though this is never mentioned. The threat is not sexuality but maleness:  Pyanfar tells Hilfy that the Outsider  “makes me nervous, niece, the way things make me nervous that just might blow up without warning.” (149) . This is a repeated worry she expresses often – it’s partly that Tully is from an alien species, but this is hard to separate that from his  gender.  

Until now, other than a few generalities, we do not know much about hani males. We now begin to learn. Pyanfar is upset when she hears that her son Kara has taken the estate of Mahn from her mate Khym:  “Khym overthrown. Dead, maybe. …The loss of her mate oppressed her to a surprising degree….he was a comfortable sort of fellow to come back to, who liked fine things and loved to sit in the shade of his garden and listen to the tales she could spin of far ports he would never see. Boundless curiosity, gentle curiosity. That was Khym Mahn” (139). 

So Khym is not the typical hani male “idolized for those natural gifts of irrational temper and berserker rage which would greet the sight of another male” (675).  Pyanfar as she heads home to Anuurn blames “Nature that made males useless, too high-strung to go off-world, to hold any position of responsibility beyond the estates. Nature that robbed them of sense and stability” (192). 

But then she corrects herself:  “Or an upbringing that did.”  

She has just seen Tully behave in a way that she did not expect.  When they meet with the mahendo’sat to give them the tape, Tully saves the day. He hands the tape to the Mahe Voice saying in the hani language, “Friend to mahe.”  Then he makes his human gesture of friendship, “his own kind of gesture, who was always touching,” keeping his hand out until the surprised mahe “reached out, alien protocol being her calling, and gamely suffered Tully to clasp her hand, took it back without visible flinching[…] With courtesy she tells him, “I carry your word” (152). 

The Mahendo’sat station head, female, is wiser than Pyanfar has been.  In the mahe species apparently both men and women are space-faring. And Goldtooth, not a trader after all, but a combination spy and warrior, proves to be a staunch and clever ally. Indeed, Pyanfar’s perceptions are changing. She is learning that a generalization is only a generalization and not true in every instance, that it is unfair to judge the individual by the general rule, and also that it might be nurture (culture) rather than nature that helps to make us what we are. 

When she reaches Anuurn, she is kind to her mate Khym, who by his defeat at the hands of their son has lost all his rights, even to a relationship with her. Defeated and wounded, he expects nothing of her and waves her on to do the battle she has come to do. But when she looks back momentarily, she sees that Tully “had lingered, stared down at Khym," (193).  The juxtaposition of the two males is a crucial moment:   She calls to Tully and then “for no reason” calls Khym, whom her culture would expect her to abandon. He looks at her “with a slow gathering of hope.” 

But some generalizations are true in some instances. When the news comes that the station has fallen to the kif, and the entire Compact is in danger, Pyanfar tries to defuse the enmity between the hani factions, and we are treated to an example of the “berserker rage” the culture attributes to males when her son Kara “was past it.  The eyes were wide and dark, the ears flat, nostrils wide. Of a sudden he screamed and launched himself” (197).  A “screaming tangle” ensues (one thinks of cat fights) in which Tully again saves the day by throwing the perfume Pyanfar has given him to mask his bad smell into Kara’s eyes, blinding him temporarily and thus defusing his rage. 

It is shortly after this that Pyanfar asks poor Khym if he wants to accompany her to the station and he agrees, becoming the first hani male in space. Pyanfar has learned from Tully’s conduct that perhaps some males can become space-farers, and Khym’s subsequent action at the station fighting the kif makes her proud. Age-old taboos do not vanish overnight, and Khym must overcome the crew’s expectation that “he would be more danger than help to his own side, prone to male temper and instability”(210).  It goes without saying that a frequent space opera version of this plot is reversed – the female space cadet has to prove herself on a ship of males. 

One more prejudice to fall is the stereotype of the knnn, who are initially characterized as irrational and unknowable, but prove to be the "unsung" heros of the book. All their actions are finally explained – they saw the kif abduction of the human ship, the violation of the Compact involved in the taking of sapient life. They knew that Tully was aboard the hani ship and followed it trying to communicate through their haunting song. They rescued the rotting carcass, perhaps even believing it to be Tully, then traded it to the T’ca for a translator who helps them communicate what they have seen to Kirdu station. Pyanfar and her crew alone understand the significance of this --- Tahar and the Mahe can only complain that she has brought the kif and knnn upon them. When Tahar accuses Pyanfar of treachery, she remembers the bribe the kif leader had offered her, and her counter accusation turns suspicion onto Tahar.  At the end of the novel the knnn, whom we now understand are superior in technology—and perhaps morality-- to the other species, attack the kif ships, having had enough of kif malfeasance. 

This first book ends with many prejudices shattered —  Pyanfar has a new perception of her mate as well as the human male, Tully; the mahe; and the knnn. Tully is reunited with his own kind but refuses to lose his hani mane and clothes. Though he has proved himself intelligent and worthy by his actions--and by his ability to restrain himself from action, he is not the hero of this book. That title belongs to Pyanfar. 

One issue is unresolved. The kif are still universally despised, the dark villainous aliens of space opera, whom it is okay to hate and kill with impunity. Without revealing too much in case you plan to read the remaining volumes, I’ll remind you again that this is not a space opera in the traditional sense and even this generalization will be proved faulty.

Generalizations  help us get through life.  Our experience is so diffuse and inchoate that we must organize it into chunks of information in order to function. But it is when we forget that these are abstractions, and that no generalization is true in every instance – in other words when we ignore the individual in favor of the stereotype, we are ignoring the richness of diversity. C. J. Cherryh has created a richly textured portrait of Compact Space  and its first contact with human beings.  In doing so she has created wonderful alien species, with various degrees of  "knowability."    The great novelist Ursula K Leguin once spoke at an SF convention on a central  meaning of the alien in modern SF,  a meaning underlying the creations of both male and female writers:

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person. If you declare it to be wholly different from yourself – as men have done to women, and race has done to race, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it, or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.” 

By the end of The Pride of Chanur, a complex, action-filled epic adventure with a wise lesson for us all, Pyanfar and her crew have come a long way toward overcoming this regrettable sapient tendency.