Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  He and Acorna stood on the robolift deck, Becker holding his feline first mate, Roadkill the Makahomian Temple Cat, while Acorna scratched the cat behind the ears. Roadkill, who usually enjoyed such attention, squirmed mightily, kicking out with his back paws, which were securely tucked under Becker’s left elbow. RK’s front paws tried to jerk loose from the grip of Becker’s left hand. Every striped hair on the beast’s body was standing at attention, and the cat’s eyes, barely slitted open, had a ferocious glint.

  RK was purring, but woven into the purr was a thin stream of growly whine. The cat had been behaving wildly all during the journey to Vhiliinyar, leaping from deck to deck, racing along the tops of the Linyaari passengers’ heads with a recklessness that had seemed likely to get him impaled on a horn at any moment.

  “A favor? Certainly, Captain, if it is within my powers to grant it,” Acorna said.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Becker growled, and shoved RK into her arms. “Take the cat with you.”

  Several of the Linyaari passengers, no matter how fond they had been of the pahaantiyir species native to Vhiliinyar that RK was said to resemble, had been happy to finish their journey simply so they could leave the cat and his erratic behavior behind them on the ship. Those Linyaari who read animals well reported that RK’s thought patterns were deranged and unpredictable—not at all to the surprise of those who normally did not. Just now, the calculating appraisal RK gave Acorna, along with the paw full of claws he used to leave a lasting impression on Becker about a cat’s opinion of being held against his will, bore testimony to that.

  “Why would you ask that, Joh?” Aari asked, a little nervously. “Do you not need RK with you?”

  “Normally, you know me, I’d hate to let the little guy go, but I need to get him off NV so he can dry out.”

  “Dry out?” Aari asked.

  “Yeah. You guys got some baaad catnip there on narhii-Vhiliinyar, and it didn’t get all burned up when the Khleevi trashed the place. Old RK can’t keep out of it, and it keeps him drunk as a skunk and it takes darned near forever to wear off. I can see I don’t have to tell you that he’s a mean drunk. He’s always been a pretty shrewd character about keeping his tail screwed on straight, but while he’s around that stuff, I’m afraid he’s gonna get one of us killed. It’s a temptation he can’t resist, and it’s driving him mad—and me with him. I’d leave him with Nadhari but, uh, we had this little disagreement.”

  “I see, Captain,” Acorna said, and lowered her horn to scratch RK’s forehead where a horn would be if he had one. Tearing loose a paw from Becker’s grip, he made a swipe at her nose with his claws. The moment her horn touched him and her healing powers reached out to him, however, he detoxified. He lowered his paw, waggled it at her, relaxed to boneless limp serenity, and purred with deep contentment. “I will be happy to take care of Roadkill for you,” she said.

  “That’s the ticket, Princess,” Becker grinned, offloading the foolishly grinning beast into Acorna’s embrace. “Your buddies on the ship would have done the same thing if they’d thought of it, but nobody could catch the little monster. See ya!”

  Shortly thereafter, the Condor lifted off the rock-strewn blasted surface into the bruised purple sky of Vhiliinyar. A rush of anguish flooded across Acorna’s mind, though the pain was not her own. She looked up at Aari. He seemed to be fairly composed, his eyes perhaps a little hard, his jaw a trifle set as he watched his friend’s ship leave. But the other Linyaari were the ones having a difficult time of it as they explored the broken ruins of their former home.

  “There must be some mistake,” Liriili said. “That stupid man set us down on the wrong world. This can’t possibly be Vhiliinyar. The scouts told us our home had been ruined, but they never said the destruction was this bad! Even the sky is the wrong color! Vhiliinyar’s sky was a beautiful shade of violet, not this…this…putrescent purple.”

  “Yes, well, it darkened when the debris from all of the explosions and the smoke from all the fires filled the atmosphere,” Aari said matter-of-factly.

  Liriili snorted. “Those scouts did not do a very good job of reporting the true extent of the damage. That is all I have to say.”

  Beyond a forlorn wish that her last words would be true for a long time to come, the others ignored her, but her observation triggered disturbing recollections for Acorna, who had seen this blighted world through Aari’s eyes and knew that Liriili’s pessimism was probably justified in this case.

  In the next shipload, more of the aagroni’s assistants and apprentices arrived, as well as Aari and Maati’s parents. They came equipped with portable laboratories, that they set up near the cave along with a base camp. Once the camp and laboratories were in place, the Linyaari began to organize survey parties for their mission. All of the survey parties were to transmit reports back to the base camp via the flitter com-units on a regular schedule or, when rest breaks from the survey work were needed, in person.

  Acorna, Aari, Thariinye, and Maati chose to go out and survey the ruins of Vhiliinyar together. Neeva, Melireenya, Khaari, and Liriili, the present crew of the Balakiire, were to have been the second survey team, but Liriili suddenly balked. “I have no wish to go out into the destruction of this world I so loved,” she declared with so much feeling that, in Liriili, it had to be counterfeit, since she was widely known to be the most unfeeling of Linyaari.

  The rest of the Balakiire’s crew were not entirely unwilling to spare Liriili’s “feelings”—and their own.

  (How I wish we could leave her behind!) Khaari thought with great fervency. (I grow so weary of her grousing and sarcasm, her contradicting everything anyone says. I feel almost that the Balakiire, once such a pleasant vessel, has become like Vhiliinyar itself since the Khleevi came. Much despoiled!)

  Neeva laughed. (If you feel that way, I’m sure we can manage without her. I suppose she could run errands for the scientists and perhaps question their findings. They should not mind. They adore critical analysis. They do it to each other all the time.)

  Turning to the aagroni Iirtye, she said, (What do you think? Could you make use of Liriili’s talents here?)

  (She is a bureaucrat, isn’t she?) the aagroni said gruffly. (We will have a great deal of paperwork and accounting to do, once your findings start pouring in. And reports to send to Mr. Harakamian and test results to transmit to Dr. Hoa regarding meteorological conditions. She could be quite useful. Yes, certainly. Leave her.)

  With great relief, they did. Maati laughed. “That’ll be a perfect place for her,” she told Acorna and Aari. “Once these scientists get to work, they don’t notice anything that isn’t a specimen. They won’t even see her, much less allow themselves to become annoyed by her.”

  Relieved of their unwanted crewmate, the Balakiire’s crew, supplemented by Melireenya’s lifemate, boarded their flitter and lifted off to begin their work.

  Acorna handed RK to Maati after the younger girl had climbed into the flitter’s four-seater cabin. The cat, exhausted from his “catnip”-induced shipboard acrobatics, melted into a furry puddle across Maati’s knees. Thariinye boarded the flitter next. Acorna took the helm and Aari, as the person who knew this planet best and needed to be able to focus all of his attention on the terrain, sat in the navigator’s seat.

  Given its location on the star maps, Acorna knew intellectually that the planet under the shadow of their flitter had once been Vhiliinyar, “Home of the People,” but it was hard to believe, as they skimmed the surface of this desolate place, that it had ever supported any sort of life.

  The planet’s remaining sun, “Light of Our People,” was an amorphous gray-blue glob of smoky light in the sky, little resembling the brilliant orb she remembered from her dreams and from the descriptions Neeva had provided.

  Remembering those descriptions, Acorna realized that some of her recent experiences were at odds with them. She turned to her lifemate—perhaps he could shed some light on the inconsistencies.

 
(You know, Aari, for a long time I had the impression from the other Linyaari that you were the only one left behind when the evacuation ships fled Vhiliinyar. But I’ve recently discovered that there were other Linyaari who chose to stay behind rather than leave their homes, as well as scouts who remained to relay information on what the Khleevi were up to. I wonder what happened to them. The scouts claimed that all living beings on the planet appeared to have been killed—that their bones were piled up by the Khleevi as monuments and yet, so far, I have seen no such monuments.)

  Beside her, Aari moaned. The memories her question brought back were undoubtedly terrible for him.

  (Laarye and I were the only youths lost in the chaos, certainly. There were others, mostly Linyaari who were reaching the twilight of their lives, who chose to remain behind on Vhiliinyar, yaazi, rather than adjust to a new world. Almost all of them resided in distant settlements. I believe they were exterminated before the Khleevi found me. Certainly the Khleevi thought so. The Khleevi showed me their bones to torment me, but in the end, all of the chaos the Khleevi let loose on our world scattered those charnel piles along with the stones of our mountains.)

  (You survived. Do you think it is possible we will find others?)

  (They would have starved here, with nothing left to eat,) Aari told her. (It was only because our ancestors’ graves were near my cave, purifying the blighted land around it and enabling the plant life to continue to grow and thrive, that I was able to find the resources to sustain my own life.)

  (I wonder…) Acorna said, and toggled the connection to Neeva’s flitter.

  “Yes, sister-child,” Neeva responded. “Is everything well?” Then she added wryly. “Relatively speaking, that is.”

  Considering the devastation below them, Acorna could understand her aunt’s disquiet. “I am as well as can be expected, Aunt Neeva. But I have a question. You once told me that our people had scouts who risked being caught by the Khleevi in order to send back reports to narhii-Vhiliinyar of what happened here following the evacuation. Are the surviving scouts among us now?”

  “Just the parents of your lifemate, Khornya. The scouts who stayed behind to see what the Khleevi did to our world sent in reports of conditions on Vhiliinyar as long as they could. But only Aari’s parents survived to rejoin us. None of the other scouts were ever heard from again after those initial reports. Because we received no images of them being tortured by the Khleevi, we assume that they made use of the substances they were issued to end their lives before they were captured.”

  “Oh,” Acorna said. She was so distracted by that revelation that she was hardly aware of breaking the connection.

  Then Maati pointed out the windscreen and cried, “Look! Those long lumpy trails, aren’t those—?”

  “Khleevi scat,” Thariinye said, disgusted. “Maybe it’s my imagination, or bad memories, but I think I can smell it from here.”

  “I smelled it back at the cave,” Maati said.

  Aari snorted. (The stench has not left my nostrils since we first landed.)

  (It has been so for me, as well.) Even as she replied, Acorna tried not to broadcast the other disturbing recollection she’d had from the scout reports she’d reviewed. The reports had spoken of Khleevi young being bred in the rivers and streams of Vhiliinyar. She shuddered, recalling her own single encounter with the Young, so voracious and vicious as to form the driving force behind Khleevi conquest. But surely all of the Young were dead now, killed on their horrific home world where they were both protected by and avoided by the adult Khleevi.

  Aari picked up her concern and, to her surprise, he was the one to comfort her.

  (I can sense when the Khleevi are close,) Aari told her. (And I do not sense them now.)

  Acorna sighed. (Yes, they must have moved on once they had destroyed all the resources here, and returned to their home world. I’m sure you’re right.)

  (They’re gone now, yaazi,) Aari repeated. (Nothing of them remains to harm us or others.)

  Gratefully, she allowed her special talent for sensing the mineral composition of any substance she chose to probe—something she’d developed while working with her asteroid-miner foster parents—to preoccupy her with the data it fed her senses. Instead of smelling Khleevi scat she smelled, tasted, mentally touched, each major mineral deposit in their flight path as they passed above it. This was a vital part of her plan to map the planet. The few survey maps they had were short on biological detail, but extremely precise when it came to mineral deposits. She could take what she learned on their surveys of Vhiliinyar as it existed now and use it to reconstruct the planet topology as it had been before the Khleevi had attacked.

  The work was a welcome distraction from the ugliness below her, and from the cold bleakness that overcame Aari as he withdrew to that inner place where he found protection when reminded too forcefully of his ordeal among the Khleevi.

  Long stretches of alluvial deposits containing copper, gold, garnets, agates, and other, rarer gems indicated riverbeds, and when Acorna sensed these she noted their coordinates on the flitter’s computer. The distribution of these minerals and gems would help her trace the rivers to their origins in the mountains and their endings in the seas. Limestone deposits in large quantities indicated former ocean floors—even recent ocean floors, since the Khleevi had diminished as well as befouled the planet’s oceans until they were turgid, lifeless swamps.

  Salt deposits provided another indication for the oceans, and basalt deposits often outlined original shorelines. Acorna’s talent for sensing minerals, a trait apparently unique among the Linyaari, was invaluable here. She could use it to help Hafiz and her people reverse engineer Vhiliinyar from the mess it had become and return it, she hoped, to something at least approaching its original beauty and vitality.

  The terrain abruptly changed and she increased the flitter’s altitude to avoid the vast ranges of tumbled boulders before them. This landscape was in constant motion, like a terrified animal pinned down and writhing to escape torture. Showers of stones plummeted from precipices, landing with puffs of dust on the hills newly formed from the avalanches. These in turn were blasted apart by subsequent slides. Plumes of ash and smoke rose from three vast craters gaping in the range like festering pockmarks on the planet’s face.

  After the calderas were some distance behind them, the ground finally stabilized a bit. For the first time they could see vegetation growing, low and scrubby at first, and then a thick parrot-green jungle rising from the battered ground.

  At the edge of this jungle, Aari indicated Acorna should set down the flitter, which she did.

  “Ouch,” Maati said to RK as she tried to pry him from her lap. The cat’s ears were flat and his tail was poofed into something that looked like a massive feather duster.

  “I don’t think he likes it here,” Thariinye said.

  “But it’s beautiful,” Maati replied as she was finally able to dislodge RK and dump him onto the flitter’s deck. She followed after him, climbing out onto the scarred stone surface of Vhiliinyar. “Isn’t this wonderful? This is the first sign we have seen that the planet is finally starting to heal and grow things again.”

  “Hmmm,” Acorna said, noncommittally, “but what kind of things?” Something scuttled across the edge of the greenery, but disappeared before they could determine its nature. It might have been an errant breeze moving a plant frond, though the air here was inert and stagnant right now.

  Actually, the whole planet was, for the most part, stifling, with much of its protective ozone layer punctured by volcanic explosions and toxic chemical reactions from its unstable land masses and destroyed seas. Add to that the effect of the hazy atmosphere, which served to trap and reflect the energy from Vhiliinyar’s sun, and the planet’s climate was far hotter than it used to be and likely to get worse before it got better. Acorna suspected that the lush greenery before them was a valiant attempt on the part of this world to restore its own much-depleted atmosphere.

 
A sudden, happy thought occurred to Acorna. This survey might well have positive consequences for their ravaged world. The presence of the planet’s native people might well speed its efforts to recover, even before Hafiz’s terraformation could begin. With so many Linyaari horns available to purify the waters and the air and to cleanse much of the poison inflicted upon Vhiliinyar by the Khleevi, the planet might well heal a little each day they were present, just as a wounded creature would heal with the application of the horn’s power.

  The Linyaari were superb healers, and their horns could detoxify nearly any substance that they came into contact with. The powers of their horns were not unique to the Linyaari, nor had they originated on Vhiliinyar. They were a legacy from their Ancestors, the ki-lin of long ago Terra, often called unicorns. An ancient spacefaring race the Linyaari knew only as the Ancestral Friends had saved the ki-lin from primitive and brutal humans who were hunting them to extinction on Terra, and brought them through the cosmos to Vhiliinyar, where they had thrived once again.

  Though the ki-lin still existed as a separate race, many of them had blended genes with the Ancestral Friends, and the result of that fusion was the Linyaari people. The powers were the same in the Linyaari as in the Ancestors themselves.

  But that was all ancient history—this was now, and they were in the midst of a terrible ecological disaster, one that needed all the healing power the Linyaari could muster.

  Maati frowned. The caution displayed by all of her friends, right down to RK the cat, in the presence of the lovely greenery before them confused her. Still new to thought-talk, she addressed the silence of the others with a perplexed protest. “But that forest is pretty. And alive! Why aren’t the rest of you happier that it’s growing things and—and—pretty?”

  Aari glowered at her, the first harshness he had shown to his little sister.

  Thariinye, picking up on Aari’s thoughts, pointed out, (How is she to know what is wrong? She was not born here! She has never been here before. She has nothing but some stories, a few thought-pictures, and Uncle Hafiz’s holos to compare it to.)