Acorna’s Search (9 page)

Acorna looked at her young male friend, who was speaking matter-of-factly and—as usual—without troubling to engage many of his higher intellectual functions, as if he had suddenly manifested genius. Which, in a way, he had.

“Excuse me, Khornya,” said the Attendant in the lime and fuchsia silks, approaching from behind, “Thariinye, we must ask you to retire for now and leave the Ancestors to their own company. So much stimulation, especially in the wake of the disaster that recently overtook us and the enormous output of energy required to restore the Ancestral Meadows, drains their stamina and vitality. Do you see how translucent their horns are becoming, just from conversation, without even the strain of healing?”

“Nonsense, Granddaughter, I’m as spry as I ever was!” insisted the Grandmother who seemed to be this woman’s special charge. But the woman stroked Grandmother’s nose and cheeks and kissed her between the eyes and said, “Yes, but I can’t keep up with you. And Khornya and Thariinye have had a long journey. If you are not tired, they probably are.”

“Ah, yes,” the oldest Grandfather said. “They don’t make younglings like they used to.”

Acorna smiled at the remark, one so appropriate to the conversation they’d just been having.

The Attendant in lime and fuchsia, whose name was Imaara, led Acorna and Thariinye to a pavilion and showed them where they could lay their sleeping mats. “You know, you might wish to consult the Ancestors’ library,” she said.

“But I thought that the destruction of our planetary records by the Khleevi was total, that nothing remained of the files—” Acorna began.

Imaara said, “Oh, I don’t mean any of the Linyaari records here on narhii-Vhiliinyar. I mean the Ancestral ones we attendants use as our handbook, training manual, journal, history, chronicle, what have you. These are personal records, not part of the planetary system of pooled knowledge. The main Linyaari archive was destroyed during the attack, but not our work. Our original materials are always carefully protected, and new material is divided among us. It is a continuously growing work, you see, as parts of it are still under construction.”

“Really?” Acorna asked.

“Oh, yes, it is a careful record of our Ancestors’ preferences, habits, histories, and perhaps most important for your cause, for of course, I couldn’t help but overhear—it’s my job to do so, in fact—all of the Ancestor’s utterances. We have historical notes dating all the way back to the time when the Linyaari first began attending the Ancestors.”

Thariinye yawned but Acorna told the attendant that, yes, indeed, it sounded like something that would be helpful in clarifying some of the more enigmatic remarks the Old Ones had made. “Could you show me those records now?”

“It’s getting very late,” Imaara said.

“I understand, but we have missing people to find and we have no idea how much danger they may be in. The very restoration of Vhiliinyar may depend upon what we find here.”

“Perhaps, but you must rest sometime. The oldest documents in our archive are very fragile. We would not want you to make a mistake that would damage them through exhaustion-induced clumsiness. Also, they should be studied in natural light. Artificial light can cause deterioration of the pigments. Be calm, little sister. This thing will take what time it takes. One learns the ways of time, living among the Ancestors.”

The Attendant’s words sounded very wise and important and all that, but Acorna still had difficulty suppressing impatience as she lowered herself to her sleeping mat. Didn’t they understand how urgent this was? She was prepared to fume all night about it. It niggled her for perhaps a nanosecond before exhaustion caught up with her and she fell into a deep sleep.

I
maara woke Acorna and Thariinye before first light.

(Come. It is time to read.)

She stilled Acorna’s questions and Thariinye’s grumblings with a swift thought and led them around the lake and across the meadows, to a cleft in the hill. As they approached, Acorna noticed that windows had been carved into the hillside at three different levels, and when they entered the cave concealed by a few recently grown trees, she began to understand why the time was so important.

The sun had been rising as they walked to the cavern. As they stepped foot inside it, the first rays of the morning blazed a trail across the floor of the cavern and lit the chamber as if they were outdoors.

The walls of the cavern were covered with glowing paintings in what looked like new pigments. “Hey, they’ve fixed this up nicely,” Thariinye said. “Decorations and everything.”

But one of the symbols depicted there had captured Acorna’s attention. She lagged behind Imaara’s brisk steps to examine it. “Look, it’s the same one we saw on the
sii-
Linyaari artifact.”

Imaara returned to look at what had caught her guest’s attention. “Oh, those are the copies of the paintings we made from the walls of the original cave on Vhiliinyar.”

“Original cave?”

“Yes, where we first kept the Ancestral archives. That cave had been used in that manner for many years, the Ancestors said, before our people became adept at the written word. The early Ancestors used to make pictographs, though I believe many of the earliest images were drawn instead by the Friends and may be their form of the written word. Our language and writing systems are descended from theirs, but are not the same, as our vocal chords and hands could not form all the same sounds and characters as theirs. These paintings would have been lost after the Khleevi attack on Vhiliinyar, except that the Ancestors have rather long memories, good visual memories at that, and we were able to piece together the graphs from their recollections after we were forced to leave our home so precipitously. We did bring most of the written archives with us, though—some were irreparably damaged in the haste of the transfer, but most survived. Come, I’ll show you.”

She led them to an upper level, a circular room lined with fine crystals. The sun snaking into the chamber from the strategically placed window bounced off of these and caused the floor to shimmer with rainbows. Imaara drew forth some storage boxes and scooted them to the middle of the floor. A long low table with a bench on either side made a place to sit and study the contents or to add to them.

Before Imaara left, Acorna said, “This original cave on Vhiliinyar, Imaara, where was it located?”

“Near the great waterfall, the Vriiniia Watiir, in a cliff near the sea. It was a very secret place and hard to reach if you didn’t know how. The key to entering it was passed down by generations of Attendants. And—by the way, Khornya, Thariinye, these records you see today are secret as well. They are for the Attendant class of Linyaari, shared only among ourselves, and kept shrouded from general knowledge by our life-bonded words to maintain silence. I trust our privacy will remain inviolate? You may act upon anything you learn here, but not reveal the source of your knowledge. I show you this place now only at the direct orders of the Ancestors.”

“I heard no such suggestion,” Thariinye said with surprise.

She smiled. “Even the most favored of the Linyaari people do not share the most intimate confidences of our Ancestors. Good thing for them it is, too. Most of them concern the state of the Ancestral digestive system. But a few are of more interest to others—” she waved her hand indicating the records, and nodded as Acorna raised the lid of the storage container and extracted a few ornate wooden binders containing several sheets of what looked like processed leaf and grass material blanched and pressed, held together with long dark purple fibers from the
lilaala
vine.

The writing was crude and faded. “These must be the oldest surviving records of our people,” Acorna said, handling the leaves gently and with reverence, and feeling uneasy with the crumbling texture of the edges between her fingers.

“They are,” Imaara said. “It is believed that these are the records made by the first Attendant, who was in fact the biological son of this Ancestor here,” she pointed to a word that could have been a name. “The Attendant, who never names himself, we call Hrunvrun, the firstborn, and his records form the basis for the training of all future Attendants.”

Thariinye looked at Imaara and then at the paper. “I had no idea your craft had such a lineage, Lady.”

She blinked at him and Acorna heard her thought, (What is it that you suppose people who work with Ancestors would have, young man? Short-term thinking? Like, perhaps, yours?) With that, she turned and left them with the documents.

Acorna, though she was very good with languages and translations, found the faded ancient script daunting and nearly indecipherable. After all, though she had spoken a few baby words in Linyaari, the first language she had learned as a child was Galactic Standard. She still had to concentrate to be as fluent in her Native Linyaari as the rest of her race.

And though Thariinye was a native speaker, he was not particularly analytical in his language skills. Despite his attempts, he was not much help in deciphering the scrolls. The LAANYE was, Acorna’s hopes to the contrary, not a lot of help either. It could scan the written words of a culture, but these words were faded in places and written in multiple hands. Also, most of the documents were too fragile for her to dare to use it upon them. The little device worked much better with spoken words than written ones, especially ancient written ones.

Acorna sent a message to Imaara, (I realize these documents are secret, but could we have permission to make copies of some of them for linguistic analysis?)

(Oh no,) Imaara replied. (I’m afraid not. The content of the documents must not leave the library or be shown to anyone else who is not an Attendant.)

(Then could you spare someone to translate them for us?) Acorna asked. (We are having great difficulty understanding the contents. And time is very important in this matter, as I said. The problem is both a personal one and also one that affects every living being in our society—Linyaari and Ancestor alike. The terraforming project on Vhiliinyar is on hold because of the missing people from the Survey team. Many of my friends and relatives have vanished without explanation. We must get back to Vhiliinyar and try to find them before we can move forward to reclaim our home planet.)

(A moment,) Imaara thought.

In a few minutes an Ancestor spoke, very formally compared to the conversational tones of yesterday, to Acorna’s and Thariinye’s minds.

(You have seen the Attendants’ library. That is enough. Go. Return to Vhiliinyar and do what you must. We have helped all we can for now. Perhaps later we’ll be able to help more.)

“They’re dismissing us?” Thariinye asked. “Just like that? I don’t believe it! I had no idea this was a quiz, did you?”

Acorna shook her head, as perplexed as he was. “No, I didn’t. Perhaps for now it’s better not to read too much into what the Grandfather said. It seems to me the Ancestors are often quite literal, which makes them hard to understand. You’ve had more practice at it than I have. But we’re clearly not wanted here, and nothing we’ve seen is going to help us without a translator fluent in the ancient language. Time is not standing still. If Captain Becker is ready, we should return now to MOO, relay what we’ve discovered, and go back to Vhiliinyar.”

“So we can disappear, too?” Thariinye asked. “I don’t know, Khornya. Don’t you have more of a plan than that?”

“You don’t have to go with me,” she told him. “You could even stay here on narhii-Vhiliinyar. After all, you have your family and friends to consider.”

“Whereas yours have vanished, first lost in our wars and now snatched from Vhiliinyar during the Survey. Yes, yes, you make me feel
so
much better. Of course I’ll go with you. Aari would not forgive me for letting you go unprotected,” he added, puffing out his chest a bit and adding a strut to his walk.

“That’s very kind,” she said with a perfectly straight face. “We will mark ourselves, of course, with all sorts of tracers. Hafiz will wire us up so we resemble Mac. We will not return to Vhiliinyar until we can be found by other means than telepathy,” she told him. “We’ll have personal locators, olfactory and visual indicators, and anything else anyone can think of. I promise, we will be
very
hard to lose.”

“Y
ou’re taking Mac,” Becker told her on the way back to MOO. “No argument. I can’t send the
Condor
’s computer, but now that Mac’s finished upgrading himself, he’s smarter than Buck.” Buck was what Becker called the
Condor
’s computer.

As they approached the Moon of Opportunity, Mac approached the bridge. His gait was curiously off balance and he held his head at a strange angle. As he tromped down the metal grid leading from the crew and main cargo bays to the bridge, Thariinye asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

And then they saw that there was now what appeared to be the long end of an exceptionally large screw coming out of Mac’s forehead.

Becker groaned and buried his head in his hands. Acorna read his mind. He was suppressing a very obvious and bad pun.

“Is that a joke?” Thariinye demanded of Mac, pointing at the metal horn.

“Androids do not joke, Thariinye,” Mac said. “I have modified my cranium in an attempt to assimilate myself to your culture. If your people object, as Khornya has told Captain Becker, to the presence of non-Linyaari on your troubled homeworld, then I seek to become more Linyaari. Also, while my horn cannot heal, it is excellent for prying and tearing and boring into things and could be used to hold the supports of collapsing substructures together in an emergency. Also, if I spin it reverse, it can extract things. I have attachments for it concealed in my abdominal wall. Do you wish to see?”

Becker’s eyes were running with water. He kept blowing his nose noisily on his sleeve. Acorna could see he was struggling to keep from dissolving in laughter. His valiant battle was so convulsive he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

“Captain!” Acorna said, and thumped him on the back. She’d try her horn next, if she had to, but she had no idea if it worked on someone who was threatening to die laughing.

“I’m s-sorry, P-Princess. But you gotta love that guy. And you
gotta
take him! Oh, Lord, his horn has handy dandy attachments! I love him. I really do love him.”

Mac smiled a broad, if unaccustomed, smile. He’d been working on his facial expressions.

Thariinye, still a bit worried after watching Becker’s reaction that his race had been insulted, changed the subject. “Speaking of love, Captain Becker, I have not heard you mention Nadhari Kando on either leg of the voyage. How is she?”

Becker shrugged. “Energetic as ever, probably. I dunno. Haven’t seen much of her lately.”

Acorna was immediately concerned. She had thought the two of them happily mated, and surely these things turned out well for
some
people, even if her own love life was—she wouldn’t consider that now, not until she could do more about it. With Aari among the missing, it hurt too much to think about. Instead she said, “Oh, Captain, have you had a falling out?”

“Not really, nothing like that exactly, Princess. No, don’t look so worried. Salvage consultants don’t have lifemates the way you people do. Neither do lady-commando-warrior-security-chief-honchos. The truth is—well,” he looked a little bashful and slightly shamefaced. “She took a shine to the new commander of the Federation outpost.”

“She is unfaithful?” Thariinye asked. “Really? The females I know are all extremely faithful.” He said the last somewhat regretfully, which was understandable. He was very good at flattering members of the opposite sex. Since he was a very attractive, articulate, and virile young male of excellent family, and since the Linyaari mated for life, the ladies took him at his word, which was in Thariinye’s case not, unlike the words of the Ancestors, to be taken literally. Especially in matters concerning sex.

“I wouldn’t put it that way exactly. Nadhari let me know what was going on. Pretty loudly. She got all ticked off just because I was enjoying the dolmathes Andina fixed for me. These warrior ladies really have bad tempers, you know. Though they’re awfully flexible, they can be kind of—lumpy—off the training room floor. Not cuddly, much. Actually, Nadhari took the incident pretty well. For her. It only took Kaarlye a touch of his horn, and my arm and head healed right up. Nadhari even said she was sorry, afterward. But she still spends all her off-duty time with that soldier boy.”

Acorna sighed. Apparently Nadhari was not the only one who had made other mating arrangements. Becker did not appear to be distraught, though, simply cautious.

Thariinye was fascinated. “Does it not injure your honor to be thrown over for another male like that, Captain?”

Becker looked as if he wanted to protest, then grinned wryly. “Not as much as it would have injured the rest of me to be thrown the way Nadhari would have liked to. Her finer sensibilities and fondness for me plus my great personal charisma kept her from doing worse. Frankly, son, between you and me, I was getting worn out. I was still real flattered at how much she cared, but I was getting exhausted. That’s how Andina and I got to be—uh—close. She noticed how puny and thin I was becoming, and she decided I needed feeding up. She suggested ways to get rust out of my hull, too, and clean up some of the cargo. Her company owns the cleaning concession for MOO, you know, and all of the cleaning products Hafiz intends to peddle to people in this little corner of the universe.”

“Impressive,” Thariinye said. “Though not as impressive as Commander Kando, I must say.”

“Go ahead and say what you like. You know what Nadhari told me the last time we were together? She said she found me restful.
Restful!
That’s not the kind of thing a man likes to hear from an exciting female. But I gotta tell you. I find Andina restful, and it’s pretty nice not to be constantly sparring with someone.”

“Andina suggested the shape and purpose of several of my horn attachments,” Mac said with what passed in him for enthusiasm. “The scraper-sander and dicing attachments were entirely her idea, and she helped modify some of the others as well.”

Becker looked at Mac again as he spoke and burst out in helpless laughter once again. “So she helped you cook this up, did she? I don’t suppose you have an attachment that will help you with the gardening?”

“Oh, yes,” Mac said. “I have an excellent one for weed pulling, though it is somewhat awkward to use without further bodily modifications.” He demonstrated by assuming the weed-pulling-with-the-horn position, which required him to all but stand on his head.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Becker said. “Somehow I don’t think that’s going to catch on with the Linyaari. But it’s a good try.”

Acorna said thoughtfully, “You know, Captain, I think perhaps it is a good idea to take Mac. So far as we know, everyone who has disappeared is a Linyaari. It may be for lack of a better target. But despite Mac’s courteous attempt to assimilate himself to our race, if whatever is taking our people wishes to take Linyaari specifically, perhaps it will ignore Mac and allow him to witness the disappearance of—”

“Us?” Thariinye asked. “That’s reassuring, Khornya.”

“Perhaps not, but it’s not unlikely either,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “And Mac could be very hard to stop if he decided to rescue us.”

“I would,” Mac said earnestly. He turned to Acorna and said in an almost flawless imitation of her Linyaari accent, “I take it then, Khornya, that you now accept me as part of the rescue team?”

She smiled at his use of the Linyaari pronunciation of her name. “I doubt we could do it without you,” she told him.

It took several precious hours to convince the Council that Mac should be included in the roster of the search and recovery team, and it took almost as long to convince them that Acorna, Thariinye, and the cat should be the other members of the team.

Had Liriili still been
viizaar,
it would have taken longer still. However, with many of the council members, including the
aagroni
and Neeva, missing, only five were present to make the decision. Their concerns were more for the team’s safety than anything else. That was why they were concerned that Acorna should participate, even though they acknowledged her losses—of Neeva and Aari and his family—gave her a strong motivation to solve the problem. Once they convinced the council that the controls they proposed to safeguard themselves were as stringent as possible, the Council was more amenable to allowing them to proceed.

Another persuasive argument was that fewer, rather than more, people on Vhiliinyar’s surface, backed up by intensive air surveillance, was not only the most cost-effective method to proceed, but also probably the most effective method of locating the lost ones, and the least likely to result in more personnel losses. They acquiesced to Acorna’s plan.

The council’s approval of the addition of Mac to the team, however, was not made thanks to logic alone. Nor was it made because they considered him a device instead of a person. The Council, which could have found Mac’s “modifications” insulting, instead were touched by the inventiveness of the android’s attempts to blend into their society, and his earnest desire to help them. His horn impressed them so much that one of the senior Council members joked that Mac would next have to modify his hair follicles to make his short sandy brush cut grow out long, curly, and silver as befit a star-clad Linyaari. Mac promised to give it his full attention as soon as the current mission was successfully completed.

Once the Council was won over, it was just a question of getting the equipment Acorna wanted supplied by House Harakamian. It was a lot like a gambling game Hafiz had taught her as a child—a shell game. It involved multiple ships, each a bit farther out from Vhiliinyar. A large ship would monitor the surveillance ship and Acorna’s party from the depths of space. A smaller surveillance ship would enter close orbit around the planet, ready to send down help to those on the surface at a moment’s notice, though it would return to the mother ship as needed for refueling or necessary maintenance. Between the two ships, there would never be a moment when Acorna and her friends would be out of contact with those monitoring them. While in orbit, the smaller ship would monitor the team’s every word and breath as well as all of the many other signals transmitted by the sensors Acorna, Thariinye, Mac, and RK wore. The cat’s sensors were embedded in a special collar which Becker and Acorna had buckled around RK’s neck with some trepidation, despite Acorna’s best attempts to communicate its function to the cat. However, for once the cat didn’t object, and seemed to rather admire himself in the ornate neckpiece.

Becker fussed during all of the preparations. Acorna and the others could hear him muttering to himself all the way down to Vhiliinyar’s surface as they began their mission, only seven days, Vhiliinyar time, since Aari, Maati, Yiitir, and Maarni disappeared.

He was afraid that his friends would vanish, no matter how careful they were.

Acorna did not have the heart to tell him that it was her fear, too—and perhaps the heart of her plan.