Chanur's Legacy quotes
Nov. 9th, 2021 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meteordustMostly for my own reference.
Context: The lionlike hani live in clans, each one headed by a male hani and supported by the female hani of his family. Men are considered unstable and emotional, suited only for fighting off challengers and producing the next generation. Women run the business of the clan - which includes captaining space ships and trading with aliens.
Pyanfar is the captain of The Pride of Chanur. Her niece Hilfy was crew on that ship, and later captain of Chanur's Legacy. Tully is the sole survivor of his expedition, rescued by them, and the lone human in Compact space.
*
Py wanted her off her ship and away from Tully, was the bare-faced truth. Go fall in love with your own species, kid. Tully's all right for Chur and Geran, and Haral and Tirun and anybody else who wants a roll in the bunk, but don't even think of the heir of Chanur in that picture.
Go make babies downworld. Go find some muscle-bound, ambitious son of a clan you trusted, that you have to get some other muscle-bound dimwit cousin to get rid of. It's a tradition.
It's a gods-be tradition we kill the ones like Dahan and keep the ones like Harun.
And all the lost young lads who believed in Chanur's taking men onto ships, all the hundreds of young lads who with stars in their eyes begged and bribed their way up to space, where they'd be free of tradition ... what did they meet, and where were they, and what became of them, on the ships they'd gone to?
- Hilfy Chanur (page 30)
*
If he were back on Anuurn, he would have had to quit the house, because when boys grew up, they had to leave. They had to go out into the outback to live, learn to hunt and to fight each other and if boys lived long enough they could come back and try to drive some older man out into the outback to die. If the man's wives and sisters didn't beat him to death before he got a chance to challenge one on one.
That was what he had been headed for. That had been the order of things forever. There were always too many boys and most of them died. But Pyanfar Chanur's taking Khym Mahn into space, her moral victory over the han and its policies, and her outright defiance of the law and the custom ... had given him a chance at the stars, at ... freedom.
- Hallan Meras (page 35)
*
She'd had two sons - had cursed bad luck, that way. They were probably dead. She hadn't stayed planetside long enough to make it worse than it was. Had had them, one and the other, but the disappointment was there from the time the tests had shown they were male. Lots of women wouldn't have carried them. She didn't know why she had, tell the truth, but she was old-fashioned, and she had problems about that. Had regretted it for years. And here came this kid, about the age of her younger boy, in space, trying to overcome what Pyanfar Chanur and a lot of her own generation called stupid prejudice, and what a whole string of other generations from time out of mind called nature.
She wasn't sure where she stood on that. If Pyanfar was right her boys had gone out in the outback and died for nothing.
- Tiar Chanur (page 50)
*
Her papa hadn't been stupid. Uncle Khym wasn't stupid. Young men were stupid, while their hormones were raging and their bodies were going through a hellacious growth spurt that had them knocking into doorways and demolishing the china. Then was when young men left home, and went out and lived in the outback, and fought and bashed each other and collected the requisite scars and experience to come back formidable enough to win a place for themselves. Seven or so years and a gangling boy came back all shoulders and with muscle between his ears.
But Hallan Meras didn't seem to have as much of that as, say, Harun Chanur. Light dose Meras had been given. Illusions he was a girl. Trying to act like one and use his head, at his age.
- Hilfy Chanur (page 150)
*
Churrau hanim, the old women called it. Betterment of the race. And she hadn't shot cousin Kara in the back. She'd played the game the age-old way. She'd married a challenger, Rhean had found another when he proved a disaster. On a civilized world, women didn't shoot fools, no, they let the Haruns and their ilk knock the likes of Dahan into a wall, spatter the brains that had theirs beaten by tenfold. Women made up the deficit. Women had the genes that mattered, they passed down the intelligence and the quickness of wits, they passed down the cleverness they had gotten over generations. A girl got footloose, called her brother and set out for a place she thought suited her: her brother or her husband knocked heads to get it for her, and that was brains? That was the way civilization worked?
Tully, she said, refusing those images, Tully, come back here.
- Hilfy Chanur (page 157)
*
"Good luck," Tully said, remote from her. And she had too much on her mind, too much on her hands, to play those games of make-believe. He'd been right to walk away. He wasn't the property of some teen-aged child: it wasn't Tully's obligation to set her life in order, or to provide her some strange halfway creature to be, instead of hani: Take care of Chanur, Pyanfar had said, shoving her out of their midst, and wrapping time and black space about herself.
- Hilfy Chanur (page 346)
Context: The lionlike hani live in clans, each one headed by a male hani and supported by the female hani of his family. Men are considered unstable and emotional, suited only for fighting off challengers and producing the next generation. Women run the business of the clan - which includes captaining space ships and trading with aliens.
Pyanfar is the captain of The Pride of Chanur. Her niece Hilfy was crew on that ship, and later captain of Chanur's Legacy. Tully is the sole survivor of his expedition, rescued by them, and the lone human in Compact space.
Py wanted her off her ship and away from Tully, was the bare-faced truth. Go fall in love with your own species, kid. Tully's all right for Chur and Geran, and Haral and Tirun and anybody else who wants a roll in the bunk, but don't even think of the heir of Chanur in that picture.
Go make babies downworld. Go find some muscle-bound, ambitious son of a clan you trusted, that you have to get some other muscle-bound dimwit cousin to get rid of. It's a tradition.
It's a gods-be tradition we kill the ones like Dahan and keep the ones like Harun.
And all the lost young lads who believed in Chanur's taking men onto ships, all the hundreds of young lads who with stars in their eyes begged and bribed their way up to space, where they'd be free of tradition ... what did they meet, and where were they, and what became of them, on the ships they'd gone to?
- Hilfy Chanur (page 30)
If he were back on Anuurn, he would have had to quit the house, because when boys grew up, they had to leave. They had to go out into the outback to live, learn to hunt and to fight each other and if boys lived long enough they could come back and try to drive some older man out into the outback to die. If the man's wives and sisters didn't beat him to death before he got a chance to challenge one on one.
That was what he had been headed for. That had been the order of things forever. There were always too many boys and most of them died. But Pyanfar Chanur's taking Khym Mahn into space, her moral victory over the han and its policies, and her outright defiance of the law and the custom ... had given him a chance at the stars, at ... freedom.
- Hallan Meras (page 35)
She'd had two sons - had cursed bad luck, that way. They were probably dead. She hadn't stayed planetside long enough to make it worse than it was. Had had them, one and the other, but the disappointment was there from the time the tests had shown they were male. Lots of women wouldn't have carried them. She didn't know why she had, tell the truth, but she was old-fashioned, and she had problems about that. Had regretted it for years. And here came this kid, about the age of her younger boy, in space, trying to overcome what Pyanfar Chanur and a lot of her own generation called stupid prejudice, and what a whole string of other generations from time out of mind called nature.
She wasn't sure where she stood on that. If Pyanfar was right her boys had gone out in the outback and died for nothing.
- Tiar Chanur (page 50)
Her papa hadn't been stupid. Uncle Khym wasn't stupid. Young men were stupid, while their hormones were raging and their bodies were going through a hellacious growth spurt that had them knocking into doorways and demolishing the china. Then was when young men left home, and went out and lived in the outback, and fought and bashed each other and collected the requisite scars and experience to come back formidable enough to win a place for themselves. Seven or so years and a gangling boy came back all shoulders and with muscle between his ears.
But Hallan Meras didn't seem to have as much of that as, say, Harun Chanur. Light dose Meras had been given. Illusions he was a girl. Trying to act like one and use his head, at his age.
- Hilfy Chanur (page 150)
Churrau hanim, the old women called it. Betterment of the race. And she hadn't shot cousin Kara in the back. She'd played the game the age-old way. She'd married a challenger, Rhean had found another when he proved a disaster. On a civilized world, women didn't shoot fools, no, they let the Haruns and their ilk knock the likes of Dahan into a wall, spatter the brains that had theirs beaten by tenfold. Women made up the deficit. Women had the genes that mattered, they passed down the intelligence and the quickness of wits, they passed down the cleverness they had gotten over generations. A girl got footloose, called her brother and set out for a place she thought suited her: her brother or her husband knocked heads to get it for her, and that was brains? That was the way civilization worked?
Tully, she said, refusing those images, Tully, come back here.
- Hilfy Chanur (page 157)
"Good luck," Tully said, remote from her. And she had too much on her mind, too much on her hands, to play those games of make-believe. He'd been right to walk away. He wasn't the property of some teen-aged child: it wasn't Tully's obligation to set her life in order, or to provide her some strange halfway creature to be, instead of hani: Take care of Chanur, Pyanfar had said, shoving her out of their midst, and wrapping time and black space about herself.
- Hilfy Chanur (page 346)
