Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  Acorna had to agree. It was unlikely that whatever was prowling around their flitter would be able to see them at the cave entrance. And though Mac and the cat seemed spry as ever, she and Thariinye were both hot, tired, and sick of tasting the dust of the tunnel.

  They stepped cautiously outside and each uncorked a water bottle and had a long swallow.

  Mac ran a maintenance check on himself.

  RK sat on the ground at their feet, made an L of his back legs, and washed himself along the lower belly and tail.

  “What are you doing? Get back inside the cave!” Yaniriin barked suddenly. “It’s coming toward you, whatever it is, and—wait, there’s another one.”

  Eleven

  “Where?” Thariinye asked, scanning the landscape. “I don’t see a thing!”

  “Never mind, just conceal yourselves!” Yaniriin ordered.

  Acorna had already ducked back just inside the tunnel. While Thariinye was talking into his com unit, she glimpsed, over his shoulder, two large heavy hairy beings running toward them, brandishing long sticks with points on the ends—spears. Spears?

  One of them was covered on the top with matted red fur, and on the bottom with matted brown fur. The other’s top fur was black to midway down the trunk, then mottled gray. They ran very swiftly for such ungainly looking beings but Acorna decided they were roughly humanoid—after all, they seemed to be able to use rudimentary tools.

  As they drew closer she saw their eyes from under their shag of hair. They looked wild, ferocious, definitely hostile, and they were fixed on Thariinye and the mouth of the cave.

  Thariinye had frozen.

  Acorna rushed out, grabbed his arm, and pulled him back inside the cave passage. And abruptly, she herself was pulled further back into the cave so suddenly that she fell over backwards.

  “I am sorry, Khornya, and I shall be sorry to lose the esteem of your people, but I believe these beings mean us harm. Run back into the cave and keep running. I will cover your flank.”

  Mac snapped out his pick attachment from one arm. In the other he held his laser. She untangled herself from Thariinye, who had also fallen, and rose to her feet, pulling him with her. Though she would never wish to leave a friend to danger in order to protect herself, what Mac said made excellent sense. Two such obviously primitive beings would be no match for Mac. Not that he was alone. A bristling, snarling RK, larger than Acorna had ever seen him, blocked out the twilight from between Mac’s legs with bushels of enraged fur.

  She was reassured when she saw that instead of confronting the beings directly, Mac had backed into the cavern, seeking the best place in which to make a stand. He was clearly going to use caution and good sense in his defense of them. RK looked up at Mac in astonishment then abandoned his battle stance and hightailed it back to Acorna and Thariinye. Acorna could almost hear the cat think that he could protect them as easily from back here as from up front with an android who wouldn’t feel anything if that long pointy thing got stuck in him.

  The hairy monsters suddenly filled the entrance to the cave, while Mac, some yards back, said, “I caution you not to come nearer. We are peaceful beings but my hands are lethal weapons and I will use them to defend my companions if necessary.”

  RK turned and growled and fluffed again.

  “Also,” Mac said, as the hairy monsters laughed, seemingly at the lameness of his warning. “There is a cat of great fierceness.”

  In answer to this the shaggy red-topped monster thrust his spear at Mac, who broke it off while burning the spear from the hand of the other monster with his laser attachment.

  That was all Acorna saw, for just then Thariinye grabbed her hand and all but dragged her off her feet, pulling her down deeper into the tunnel toward the cave’s mouth.

  And then they were running, panting, running, running, sweat pouring off them, running deeper and deeper, the passage walls swirling crazily in the tilting light from their headlamps.

  Behind them, very distantly, horrible roars and growls interspersed with occasional erudite exclamations from Mac, such as “I see that your hirsute condition functions as something of a shield for entrapping the weapons of your foes! Let us see if it can capture a laser beam! Aha! Take that,” echoed off the walls of the tunnel.

  Really, it seemed to Acorna that there was no need to retreat quite so far, but Thariinye’s thoughts roiled with the beat of his footfalls.

  (He who fights and runs away will live and love another day; he who fights and runs away will live…)

  Obviously Thariinye had spent too much time pouring over the hard copy books of aphorisms among the literary litter aboard Becker’s Condor.

  Had Mac appeared to be actually endangered by the hairy louts attacking them, Acorna would have returned immediately to help him. The cat already appeared to have done so, which worried her. Fierce as Makahomian Temple Cats might be, they were flesh and blood, whereas Mac’s own anatomy was much more complex and not very organic.

  But even RK’s feline battle cries faded in the distance as Thariinye pulled her swiftly along, past all of the area where Mac had translated runes, then down a corridor that branched into another corridor. At the second branch she gave a mental bellow that stopped Thariinye in his tracks.

  (Whoa!) she said. (This is a good way to get us thoroughly lost.)

  “Oh, Mac will find us,” Thariinye replied breezily.

  “That is true—if he doesn’t get pulverized. Which is another reason that we should not proceed any farther. We should be close enough to help Mac if he or RK need it.”

  Just then they heard a terrible bellow and a rumble, clatters and thumps and rattles of rocks and earth falling.

  A cloud of dust billowed toward them and Acorna charged for it. This time it was Thariinye dragging along behind her.

  She tore back through the cave corridors as quickly as she could, but from what she could see through the clouds of dust, the place where daylight had once poured into the passage from the tunnel’s entrance was now shrouded in total darkness except for the light cast by the lamps she and Thariinye wore on their foreheads. And then, through the dust and debris, another feeble light wobbled toward them, growing brighter as it came.

  “Mac! Are you alright?” she called.

  “Yes, Khornya, but the cat has sustained an injury and unfortunately my horn, while quite useful in other ways, lacks the healing capabilities of your own. He is quite a brave cat. One of the beasts attempted to decapitate me with a large sword, which would not, of course, have killed me, but would have seriously disabled me long enough for the monsters to reach you. RK distracted the monster by jumping on to its head and raking it with his claws. He is bleeding rather badly and I did not wish to continue the battle when my comrade in arms needed your help. So I collapsed a small portion of the tunnel on the monsters, between them and us. That should slow them down until the flitter arrives.”

  Acorna dropped Thariinye’s hand and ran forward to meet Mac, whose shipsuit was torn into so many tatters that it made him look almost as shaggy as his recent opponents. RK looked up at her and meowed once, and dropped his head back onto Mac’s arm. Acorna bent her head and tried to search through the cat’s fur for the wounds, but the dust was so thick she could see very little and besides, she was afraid of what all this dust was doing to all of them. The haze was far beyond the scope of the usual sorts of airborne pollutants Linyaari horns were so good at cleansing. She walked backward in front of Mac as they descended to the cave entrance, touching as much of RK as she could with her horn, while trying not to accidentally gouge Mac.

  After a few seconds of this, RK roused himself, grabbed her horn with both hands and licked it, then wriggled free of Mac and trotted down to Thariinye, where he proceeded to wash again.

  “A mighty warrior,” Mac said admiringly. “He fought bravely, and with no technological attachments to help him.”

  Thariinye knelt down and scratched RK’s head, until his hand met with a swipe of claws. “
Oh, the cat has attachments, and though I wouldn’t exactly call them technological, they are effective,” he told Mac, rubbing his horn over his new wounds.

  All of them quickly moved further back into the cave, as far away from the choking clouds of dust as they could easily get, to where Thariinye’s and Acorna’s horns could purify the air more quickly.

  “You know, Mac, you really frightened Khornya,” Thariinye said. “She taught me how to fly without the benefit of a spacecraft, making a glider of me as she towed me in her wake coming to save you.”

  “I apologize for frightening you with the cave-in,” Mac said. “But I knew the elders did not want me to kill the monsters, yet the monsters were quite persistent. It was a dilemma. I do not read minds, but after a few moments, I could understand their words, which were a very antiquated form of one of the early Terran languages, a forerunner of Standard Galactic. Oddly, they seemed to think you were the monsters, and were thinking mostly basic thoughts such as ‘Kill, kill, kill the beasts’ back and forth to encourage each other, and laughing as they did so, reminding me in their own rough-hewn way somewhat of my former owner, Kisla Manjari. I landed several blows with the flat of my pick on their heads, but they were impervious. I doubt the cave-in will damage them, but it will provide us with protection for the moment, and I can dig us out soon enough when the flitter arrives with help.”

  “Famous last words,” Acorna muttered.

  “Excuse me?” Thariinye said.

  “Nothing, just something my uncles used to say about planning things in times of danger—”

  Two bellows, some more crashing and rumbling, a great deal more clatter and rattle, and a lot more dust belching into the cave followed.

  Neither the Linyaari nor Mac coughed, but the cat ran back into the cave. Without a word, the others followed him.

  As the fluff of tail disappeared around the corner Thariinye and Acorna had not taken, Acorna called, “RK, it’s all right. We’re coming. But slow down or you’ll be lost and we’ll never find you.”

  RK peered around the corner, his tail lashing impatiently, as if to say, “Fine with me. You people are nothing but a lot of trouble,” which seemed remarkably ungrateful considering that they had just healed his undoubtedly otherwise mortal wounds.

  But then, cats were not fabled in song and story for their undying gratitude. Acorna winced at her own apt pun and joined the cat in the corridor he had chosen. Thariinye and Mac joined her, with Mac lagging behind as rearguard while the others tried to outdistance the dust.

  “Stop!” Mac said. “I can scan the images on these walls into my processor very quickly, but not this quickly.”

  “Are you still suspended from a high place on that?” Thariinye asked, literally translating a slang phrase he had picked up from Becker. “Those things are making a fine mess out of your cave-in. For all we know, they may be moving enough rock to get through to us right now.”

  “Judging from what we have seen, I would say that is quite likely,” Acorna said. “I feel it is best for us to go as far from them as possible at the moment. We might be able to lose them here in these caves, making further violence unnecessary. Besides, RK is having a difficult time breathing in all this dust. Further in and away from the worst of the haze, Thariinye and I can control the air quality much faster with our horns.”

  “Very well,” Mac said, and his tone surprised Acorna. The usually genial and cooperative android was almost grumbling. “But this data is extremely interesting and it is, after all, why we came here.”

  “True,” Acorna said, “and it is most commendable of you to show such dedication to your task. And, at some more convenient time, we will resume our work. However, I think that, rather than doing what we came here to do, our skills and lights would be put to better use for the moment looking for an alternative way out of here.”

  “These are superior lanterns with a very long life,” Thariinye said.

  “And I can always recharge them from my own cells,” Mac pointed out.

  “And who is going to recharge you when you run out of energy?” Acorna asked. “Though I realize how unlikely such an event is,” she added when Mac protested. “How long has it been since our conversation with the captain, Thariinye?”

  Mac answered. “Approximately half an hour, Kezdet time, Khornya.”

  “Not long enough,” she said. “Stay here. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Where are you going?” Thariinye asked.

  “Back to the tunnel to tell Yaniriin of what happened and what we are doing. I will also mark the way we came to this place, then we can keep marking as we go. That way we can find our way back, as soon as it is feasible. Or, once our people get past the monsters at the entrance and the cave-in, they can find us.”

  But when she reached the main cavern room, she found that the rocks from the cave-ins caused by their hairy friends outside had tumbled down the tunnel and choked half the room as well as the entrance. Now they were well and truly trapped until Mac had time to dig through the rock again. And it looked like this time the job would be a lot more difficult. It appeared her instincts were right—it might be easier to seek another way out of here than to tackle that rock fall a second time. Furthermore, her com unit worked no better inside the cavern than it had before. The survey ship personnel would be very worried about them. Still, matters were not desperate. The blockage kept the monsters at bay for the moment. And Yaniriin knew they were inside the tunnel somewhere. In time, people would come to search for them if they did not find another way out.

  On to the next matter. How to mark their passage? Even if no rescuers arrived, such markings would help her own party retrace their steps when it became necessary. She had no ball of yarn, no bread crumbs, no chalk. The sensors in their ship suits did not work in here. Or did they? Perhaps they simply did not work outside the cave to detect what was inside and vice versa. They might work very well inside the cave itself. It was a good idea, and she would test it as soon as she rejoined the others. Nevertheless, she and her friends must be able to count on something more tangible to retrace their steps. Equipment that had failed once for no apparent reason could do so again. Of course, it was possible that Mac had already stored in his database the entire sequence of runes from one room to another, and so the whole exercise was unnecessary. But if Mac became separated from them, they needed a fallback position.

  So what could she use to mark their paths? Something effective…Something easy to use…Something more basic…Something there was a ready supply of…And here it was all around her: rocks.

  She filled her pockets and hands with them and began laying them in fours, one for each of them. She placed each pile six paces apart, the distance between herself and the end of her lantern beam. That way, they could always see the next pile of rocks. And, even if the lantern was dead, they should be able to find the rock piles by pacing.

  She handled each pebble before piling with the others, so it would be marked with the scent of her hands, which quickly grew rough and chafed under the unaccustomed work. When that happened, she used her horn to heal them, and continued laying a path of rock cairns until Thariinye tapped her on the shoulder.

  Twelve

  Acorna looked up from her passage-marking to see three expectant faces—Mac’s, Thariinye’s, and RK’s where he lay draped across Thariinye’s shoulders.

  “We’re on our own for now,” she told them. “That cave is half full of rubble from the cave-in, and it will be tough getting into the passage. So I’m marking a trail. You two might want to fill your own pockets with rocks while we’ve got such a nice supply of them. I’ve already marked this far. I’ll go back for another load now.”

  Her friends agreed with her. While they loaded up with rocks, Mac also continued his work on the cave drawings, which he certainly had the time to pursue now. The flitter was only an hour away, according to Mac’s calculations.

  “Well, then,” Thariinye said, “actually, all this effort is
unnecessary. We could just wait to be rescued. Those monsters aren’t likely to find us through the mess they made. The ship will have warned the flitter and Yaniriin has undoubtedly sent properly equipped reinforcements to help capture our guests.”

  “True,” Acorna said, “but I still believe we should continue our own efforts here. The survey ship might decide we were killed in the cave-in. Or there may be some problem up on the surface with digging us out that we’re unaware of. For example, what if there are a lot more of those hairy things running about the planet? Besides, we came here to explore. Why don’t we do it? I agree with Mac—he should return to deciphering runes. And I’d like to see if my mineral sense can tell me more about the geological origins of this place, and look for another way out.”

  “Even if there was another exit at one time, there’s probably not now,” Thariinye advised. “After all, the main entrance was buried pretty deep.”

  He looked dejected, and rather frightened. Thariinye was not a coward, no matter how cautiously he had behaved recently. She had seen him charge Khleevi when his friends were in danger. But he was not one to court death unnecessarily—especially when no one interesting was around to be impressed.

  So she gave a smile and a little shrug and turned toward the hidden mysteries of the unexplored cavern, saying, “You have a point. On the other hand, the recent upheavals we’ve witnessed and those caused by the Khleevi when they were here may have exposed something that was less accessible in the days when the Attendants used this place. Who knows what we might discover? We might even be heroes! Look on it as an adventure.”

  Thariinye perked right up.

  Mac’s pace, as he tried to translate and record the runes all around them, was much slower than the one they’d have used if the situation was truly desperate, but Acorna was in no real hurry. They continued for a little while in this way. She, too, needed to concentrate as she mapped out the geology of the rock around them.