Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  “I figured that the liquid in the sand washed off his killer plant repellent,” Maati said with rather ghoulish satisfaction. “And since the plant knows lunch when it sees it….”

  “You sadistic little brat, I’ll get you for this!” Thariinye threatened, beginning to flail again, resisting the gentle pull of the plant-predator.

  “Shush, Thariinye,” Acorna told him. “She’s right. It’s working. Don’t just stand there, Maati. Help us haul on the stalk and pull him to shore before the plant starts digesting him wholesale.”

  There was little chance of that, unless the plant had a taste for the various synthetic materials from which Thariinye’s shipsuit and gloves were manufactured. In any case, the plant never got a chance to find out whether it liked synthetics. Aari plucked the younger Linyaari from the bog and the plant’s grasp at the same time.

  Their group returned to the flitter to find RK washing his fur in the sun and looking at them, especially Thariinye, with a disdain that suggested they might need baths, too.

  They built another bonfire before following the cat’s advice. After they’d cleaned off the worst of the grunge covering them, Thariinye, covered to his calf curls in a metallic blanket, washed his shipsuit off and laid it near the fire to dry.

  “I will take watch tonight,” he said. “I might as well stay awake while my clothes and I dry off.” They left him staring moodily into the fire, while his shipsuit steamed in the cool night air.

  In the morning the sky was a cauldron of curdled yellow-green clouds, occasionally extruding tentacles of brownish funnel-shaped whirlwinds toward the ground.

  Despite the weather, they had a job to do, and a limited amount of time in which to accomplish it. They headed out to work on the survey, casting wary eyes at the angry sky.

  That day they saw nothing of the Harakamian vessels, staffed with Linyaari, which regularly overflew the planet on aerial mapping expeditions. They heard from them, though. Periodically these crews would ask for descriptions of the terrain at such and such coordinates and Acorna’s team and the other Linyaari teams responded with both verbal descriptions and uploads from their toporecorders if they had the information requested.

  That afternoon, Acorna heard in thought-talk that Aarkiiyi’s flitter had been caught in one of the whirlwinds, then dropped and smashed many miles away. This was not a good day to be airborne.

  They waited anxiously for a report from the Linyaari survey team nearest the crash site, hoping that despite the crash, Aarkiiyi and his team would be all right. It was the first crew loss they’d suffered on this mission, other than Liriili, and there was some question as to whether that was a loss or merely desertion. No one had seen any sign of Liriili at all, even though all crews had been instructed to keep an eye out for her.

  Acorna wondered if the former viizaar had somehow escaped the base camp undetected that first night, and was now lost in the wilderness of this harsh planet in the storm. As she and her team retired for the evening back at their little camp, Acorna could not escape the feeling that something was wrong. She shivered in her blanket as she dreamed of Liriili calling for her people to find her. Awakened by the image, she listened intently, but heard nothing. She snuggled closer to the shelter of Aari’s body for comfort and fell asleep again.

  Three

  During the second week of the mission, Acorna’s survey party had visitors.

  A flitter set down a short distance from their own and two Linyaari elders stepped out. Acorna didn’t recognize either of them, but Maati did.

  “Maarni, Yiitir!” she squealed, and ran back through the partially destroyed shrubbery to join them. “You came!”

  “Ah. Yes. Yes, we did,” said the male, whose mane was a bit less luxuriant between the ears than average, and whose stray chin whiskers were forming a long thin beard that bespoke considerable age. “Us and an entire great herd of others, all whinnying and complaining and thinking so loudly we couldn’t hear ourselves think.” His grumbling was completely belied by the twinkle in his eyes and his wide grin as he held out his arms and said, “Young Maati, my goodness, child, what a treat to see you again! And in such illustrious company. And I don’t mean you, Thariinye, you scamp. But the most talked-of couple in Linyaari current events as well, Khornya and Aari. You young people must tell me the real stories of your lives, you know. You owe it to posterity.”

  Acorna must have looked puzzled, because the female of the pair gave her mate a swat on the bicep and said, “You should introduce yourself, Yiitir, or they’ll think you’re nothing but a nosy old blowhard.”

  “But, my dear, as you well know, I am a nosey old blowhard,” he protested.

  “Yes, but you are a very distinguished and eminent nosey old blowhard, entrusted with the task of being chief keeper of the stories of our people.”

  “She means I teach history at the academy, my dears,” Yiitir told the others.

  “He’s a great teacher, too,” Maati said. “Everyone says he’s brilliant. Grandam always said if the Council had paid heed to Yiitir when the Khleevi were first spotted in Vhiliinyar’s vicinity, we’d have had a defense ready. He knows all about great space battles and things.”

  “Quite bloodthirsty for a member of the gentle sex of a pacifist people, isn’t she?” Yiitir said, looking down beneath his scraggly brows at Maati. “Always did say she was a splendid child.” He turned to Maarni. “Put that down in the biography along with my other deathless utterances, will you, m’dear? Yiitir always said that Maati was a splendid child. That way perhaps the Council will remember and consult her before appointing an idiot like Liriili as viizaar again.”

  Maarni shook her head and rolled her eyes. “It’s completely gone to his head that the Council has suggested he write his own memoirs as well as the volumes he’s already written on the history of our people. By the way, that’s why we’re here. In case you have any questions about Vhiliinyar as it once was.”

  “Maarni is as much an expert on the unwritten stories of our people as Yiitir is on those that have been documented, or that occurred within his lifetime so that he can document them,” Maati told Acorna.

  “And I’m nearly as old as Grandam was,” Yiitir said. “So that’s a great long time that I’ve been paying attention to what happens. Maarni is my child bride but she has more imagination than I, and loves a good story. That’s how I caught her, you see.”

  “Bored me into a stupor with a great long saga about the interclan trade wars and took advantage of me while I was unable to defend myself,” Maarni laughed, patting her lifemate’s arm affectionately. “Now then, can we do something of the sort for you? How are you faring with this—this—oh, dear, it’s really rather a horrible tangle, isn’t it?”

  “Thought you’d never notice, my dear,” Yiitir said softly.

  Aari said to Yiitir gravely and with considerable respect, “This was the Vriiniia Watiir, Elder Yiitir.”

  “Quite a mess they’ve made of it,” Yiitir said. “But then, I suppose that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it? To clean up the mess? No sense standing about weeping over dried waterfalls when, with a bit of elbow grease and application of proper knowledge, we can help put everything right again, eh, my dear?”

  “As you say,” Maarni said, her shrewd blue eyes under tight curls of mane grimly surveying the landscape as a general might the bloody aftermath of a battle. “Puts me in mind of when our twins were little and we returned to our pavilion after a day at work. Well, perhaps that’s giving the Khleevi too much credit. Our twins were very innovative younglings.”

  Maarni and Yiitir soon dug in and made themselves useful. Far from interrupting the work, the newcomers made it go much faster, and when Acorna showed them the approximate position of the falls, the mountain, and the pool, they began recalling other well-loved features of the area and asking if she knew yet where they might be. The trained memories of the two historians brought the dream of restoring Vhiliinyar to its original state much closer to
realization.

  Even the smallest of their recollections was useful. It was of great help when Maarni suddenly recalled that she used to enjoy diving for agates and garnets in the lake to use in her jewelry crafting and bead-making. Acorna was able to locate deposits of the minerals usually containing those stones several yards from where she had thought the boundaries of the lake had been—just where Maarni had indicated they occurred. That reinforced everyone’s confidence in Acorna’s mapping.

  After another hard day’s work, they shared an evening meal back at the flitter. They had all been so busy imagining the area as it had been before the Khleevi came that Acorna almost saw it that way now. Now she had the memories of the Linyaari Elders, very strong and vivid memories, in addition to her own recollection of how the falls had looked in Hafiz’s holo. Though that, too, echoed in her dreams.

  “Do you know the story of how the Vriiniia Watiir came to be?” Maarni asked, when they had finished grazing from their hands on the sweet grass Maarni and Yiitir had brought from the hydroponics gardens on MOO. It was a bit stale already, but a welcome change from dried grasses they had with them. The problem with their usual diet was that the grasses didn’t retain flavor all that well. One could freeze or dry them, and survive on the nutrients they contained, but it simply wasn’t the same as grazing.

  “The origin of the lake? I’ve heard some stories,” Aari said.

  Maati said, “Wasn’t everything pretty much the way it was in the holos when the Ancestors arrived?”

  But Thariinye said, “No. It wasn’t. The lake’s beginning had something to do with lust, didn’t it? Back in the bad old days, before everyone had evolved into the thoroughly superior moral beings we are today, of course.”

  Yiitir gave Thariinye an approving glimmer from under his brows but said nothing. This was Maarni’s area of expertise and Acorna suspected that even her eminent husband stole her thunder at his own peril.

  “My, so many questions to answer at once,” Maarni said, gathering their attention as she might gather flowers for a banquet. “Let me see. Maati, my dear, things have not always been as they were in the holos any more than they are now. Worlds always change. If people don’t change them, planets rearrange themselves. Scientists can call it laws of entropy, or chaos theory, or whatever they will. I suspect planets change because they grow weary of always looking the same, and they find a good catastrophe a cure for boredom. Such change does make life quite interesting indeed for any lifeforms living on the surface of a planet at the time one of these makeovers occurs.”

  Maati giggled. “When they change, do the planets then admire themselves using other planets’ oceans for mirrors?”

  Maarni looked at her in surprise. “Why, I wouldn’t doubt it at all! That must be how they do it. Perhaps you should go into my line of work, with a mind that generates such images. Anyway, as Thariinye so shrewdly pointed out, we were not always as we are now. In the times before time as we know it, there were no Linyaari. There were only those of the race we call the Ancestral Friends and there were, after the Rescue, the Ancestors here on the face of this planet along with the plants and all of the creatures unable to share their mind’s thoughts. About this time we have only the stories the Ancestors handed down to us, and much speculation. None of the Ancestors alive today were alive then, nor were their dams or sires, or their dams or sires for many generations back.

  “So if what I say now shocks you, Maati, for I know that Grandam took a very positive tone in her interpretations of our stories, please bear in mind that the People were Becoming back then, that they were finding their way, and that although they knew many things, they did not know then, any more than most people know now, how to treat their fellow beings.

  “The Friends rescued the Ancestors from Old Terra. Perhaps they felt compassion for the Ancestors’ plight on their home world, it is true, but it is also said by some that the Friends had other reasons, or developed other reasons after the Rescue, for wishing the Ancestors to live near them. The Friends, you see, found our Ancestors very beautiful and they—yearned for them.”

  “How?” Maati asked. “They were different species, weren’t they? Surely the Friends were anthropoid so that the mix between them and the friends produced—us. Oh, I see. It did produce us. So. Yes. The Friends yearned for the Ancestors. So what you’re saying is that we came to be for other than purely scientific reasons?”

  “Yes. The Friends loved the Ancestors and yearned for them. And the Ancestors in those days were different from the precious ones still among us today. They were four-legged as they are now, true, and looked very much the same, but their temperaments were different in those days. Wild and fierce, intelligent and capable of learning, but not very learned, and very strong-willed and stubborn.

  “The Ancestors were very grateful to the Friends for the Rescue and looked upon them as protectors, but still they remained wary. They had been hunted nearly to extinction back on their home world, and trust came very hard to them.

  “One Friend in particular conceived a great passion for a particularly lovely Ancestor and followed her everywhere. She became alarmed and afraid of his ardor and one day, when she saw him, began running very fast, until she came to the edge of a great cliff. She was fleet of foot and nimble and turned aside quickly but the Friend went tumbling over the edge to his death on the rocks below. The Ancestor, with great remorse, began to weep, and her weeping became a great torrent that flowed over the cliff and formed the waterfall and lake. There used to be a rock formation at the bottom of the lake, we were told, that was actually the petrified remains of the hapless Friend.”

  “Oh, dear,” Acorna said.

  “Hmm,” Maati said, “I never heard that one. But then, Grandam didn’t like to tell stories of Vhiliinyar all that often—not the old stories anyway. It made her sad. I guess it affected a lot of the People that way.”

  “That is unfortunately true,” Maarni said. “Some of the oldest stories have never been recorded—too fragmented, too many versions, too unsubstantiated to pass on officially, I suppose. They’re my personal favorites, however. I love to think about how to fill in the gaps in the information provided.”

  The conversation around the campfire wound down as the night lengthened and their exhaustion caught up with them.

  But before they slept, they called back to the base camp to see if there was news of Aarkiiyi and his crew, or of Liriili, but were told there was nothing.

  That was disquieting. Maarni and Yiitir slept near them that night. Nobody wanted to be out of sight of the others, and they stood watch in pairs.

  About two hours before dawn, their com unit crackled to life.

  “Mayday. Mayday. This is the wii-Balakiire. We have a missing person in our sector. Fiirki Miilkar, the animal specialist, visited our site today and was staying the night here. He offered to stand the first watch. When the next watch came to relieve him, Fiirki was nowhere to be found. We heard no outcry from him during his watch, nor have we found any sign of foul play. But he has disappeared without a trace and all our attempts to find him have failed utterly. All crews, please be alert for any sign of him. Base camp, please advise.”

  “This is base camp, wii-Balakiire,” said a voice Acorna identified as Aari’s father, Kaarlye. “Does this incident appear to you to be similar to the disappearance of Liriili?”

  “Oh, no, Kaarlye,” Melireenya said. “Fiiryi is a very useful and respected expert on the evolution and habitats of Vhiliinyari creatures. He is not at all the sort of person to just wander off, although anyone can have a call of nature. He would never desert his post. If he is missing, it is because something happened to him, something he could not prevent or escape.”

  “Perhaps Maarni and I should flitter over there and help them look for him, eh?” Yiitir suggested to Kaarlye. “Of course, we won’t see much in the dark, but we might pick him up on the infrared. Melireenya, could you use the assistance?”

  “Oh, yes. We would be so
thankful,” she replied.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Kaarlye agreed. “Keep us notified if there is any change to the situation, please.”

  “Oh, that goes without saying,” Yiitir said in an airy tone that belied the grave expression he wore.

  When he had signed off, Acorna said softly, “We should come and help, too.”

  “Nonsense, m’dear, no sense everyone rushing in. A crowd of hunters is more likely to obscure whatever sign of him there is; that is, if he’s truly lost. You know how it is with these scientists, especially those who pursue the natural sciences. Get so involved in finding a special sort of fern or some such thing that they quite forget where they are. I’m sure he’s fine. Besides, he’s on our team, you know. Second wave. You’ve important work to do right here.”

  “True enough,” Acorna said. “But please let us know what you find out as well. When you find him, I mean.”

  “Certainly, my dear Khornya,” Maarni said, laying a hand on Acorna’s arm. “In fact, we would very much like to return and speak with you further. You represent not only the youngest survey crew, but also have special knowledge among you—Aari knows more about the transition of this planet than any other living Linyaari, and you, thanks to your unusual upbringing, bring almost a totally alien viewpoint to our world that will provide a fresh perspective. Young Maati is heir to the greatest number of Grandam’s stories of any of us. If you will permit it, we wish to spend quite a lot of time with you all.”

  “And me?” Thariinye said.

  “I’m sure you’ll be a quick learner,” Yiitir said with a closed grin.

  Thariinye’s face fell for a moment, then he grinned back, showing plenty of teeth. Yiitir looked mildly alarmed, since showing one’s teeth was a sign of hostility among the Linyaari.