Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  Thariinye, however, suddenly felt the need to reassure her. “We’ll be fine, Khornya, you’ll see. They’ll be here for us in no time. Why, I’ll bet the ship dispatched extra flitters which have netted those beasts in cross tractor beams and are hauling them aboard a craft specially rigged as a jail. Where do you suppose those hairy things were from anyway? I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “Mac says the language is ancient Terran,” she replied, not really paying attention. The walls just ahead bore runes that were much older and more faintly etched than any they’d seen before, and beyond them the cavern walls appeared to be bare. “So perhaps they are from some devolved space colony.”

  “Full of beings who don’t know how to comb their hair or use lasers but are capable of space travel?” Thariinye argued. “Unlikely, Khornya. Really! Use your head!”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said, and turned him gently back the way they had come. “Perhaps your skills would best be utilized helping Mac with his translations. You are the only one of us to whom Linyaari is your first and native tongue, after all.”

  When he was gone, she felt pressure against her leg and saw that RK had remained to keep her company. Quietly. She smiled at the cat.

  She opened her mind and put her hands upon the walls of the cavern, walking them one over the other as she paced the length of the corridor, not forgetting to leave her little stone quartets as she paced. When she had finished with the wall on one side of the corridor, she followed it back down the other, breathing as deeply and steadily as she could. The mineral composition was what came first and most easily to her. Limestone with veins of quartz and copper, basalt and deposits of ametrine and azurite.

  Gradually, she could feel what was beyond them, just a bit at first, and then, more deeply.

  Stone, stone, stone, sand and…water! Moving, surging water, waves and knots and fathoms of it, deep, very deep, beneath her feet.

  To one side dirt and stone, the granite of a fallen mountainside.

  The other side was what she had hoped to find—lighter, thinner, air on the other side intermixed with other things she could tell much less about, though there was stone there…Her sensory impressions were being clouded by emotional ones. Disappointment…no…something deeper…disillusionment…repugnance…and a longing…. A longing for what, Acorna wondered. Love? Nurture? The emotion felt like a child wanting its mother. In fact, it reminded her somewhat of the impressions she had received so strongly, if not always consciously, from the child slaves on Kezdet, the orphans of war victims torn from their burning and bombed homes and the arms of their dead parents to be forced into the lowest and most degrading sorts of labor. Unlike Kezdet, there was no actual fear involved in the strand of emotion. Not here. But there was anger. A lot of it. What was that about?

  She increased her concentration, deepened her breathing, and stared ahead of her. Suddenly, the corridor flooded with light.

  Along the walls where the runes had been, holos sprung into life—images, stories, vids, and vignettes of all sorts enacted themselves in a continuous loop down the corridors. She started to call Thariinye and Mac to see, and as she did so, the walls grew dark and cold again, glyphs scarred and no longer vibrant with tales of life as it had played out here.

  Slowly she coaxed the images back again, reaching out with her thoughts and emotions. She kept walking, in her excitement forgetting to lay down stones to trace her path, forgetting about the landslide, about her companions, forgetting everything but the panorama around her and her need to get to the beginning, to the very beginning, so she could begin to understand what she saw.

  But when she reached the source of the flowing river of narrative, it appeared to cascade from the ceiling at the dead end of a tunnel. Walking closer, she saw that the end wasn’t dead after all. Stone steps were carved in the walls, embellished with the glyphs and runes forming the riverbed of the torrent of tales. And above the steps was a more prosaic symbol, a sign as clear to her as any she had ever seen on Kezdet.

  “EXIT,” it said.

  Thirteen

  RK found Acorna as she started climbing the steps. The crisp sturdiness of them disappeared, along with the EXIT sign and the visual story stream, as the cat took a solid swipe at her leg and yowled for attention.

  She stumbled as she reached down to protect her leg and her hand connected with a familiar set of claws. The steps were in the past, as were the runes she had seen so clearly, and the story that had gushed through her and that seemed to have deserted her now. Stones clattered under her feet, rolling away and causing her to slide down a rubble-filled incline.

  She struggled to remember what she had seen in the runes, the story that had been flying past her on the walls.

  We the Linyaari, made people of the Hosts, do now see it as our only course and duty to assume the role of caretakers of our Ancestors, those whose horns we bear. Them will we keep safe and sacred from exploitation, from degradation, from suffering of all kinds, while we build our own society.

  The thread of the story fled her more quickly than it came, carrying its messages away as the sea carried messages written on the sand. She couldn’t bring it back, couldn’t pull it up in her mind to look at it, to hear the words that had sung in her cells just moments before.

  Now something else was singing, far less melodiously if no less meaningfully. Yowls and caterwauls filled the cavern and she felt something brush against her, but she was loath to return to the present. She wanted to catch those last few words, memorize them before they could drain away, look for the clues she sought in them. She knew that somewhere within them, within this place, lay the secret of the disappearances of her lover, her aunt, her friends. But the clues contained in the words fell away from her like a planet’s face falling from view when a vessel launched into space.

  She slipped, her feet flying out from under her, and connected with something that tumbled down the sliding stones with her.

  The something was RK, of course, and he didn’t like being ignored and then tumbled down a small rockslide. The cat rushed into action the moment they stopped moving.

  He would get her attention, oh, yes, he would! However could such a normally sentient being as Acorna suddenly lose her senses so far as to disregard his presence? He would have to give her the old treatment. He snagged her with a claw and darted out of the way before she could catch him to make him stop, then zapped her again from the opposite direction to the one she faced. He kept her attention until she was once more thoroughly in the ruined tunnel.

  He was still at it when she snatched her leg away from the reach of his claws and said, taking a deep breath, “Thank you, RK. I’m glad you found me, but that’ll be enough of that for now.” She tried to pull herself up from the place where she had been. The information she had gained in her trance, she knew, was useful, fascinating, and maybe even invaluable for their mission, but the feelings accompanying it were so sad. So very sad.

  She flicked a tear from her eye with the tip of her finger and tried again to remember it all, but simply couldn’t. Was she crying because of what she had seen? Or was she just thinking of Aari and wanting him back? Somehow she didn’t think the feelings that she was now at the mercy of related directly to the disappearances of her friends, but how could she be sure when she couldn’t recall clearly what she had seen?

  She felt something in her hand—she still held the last four rocks she had been ready to mark her path with when the walls began to flow. “Hmm. I fell down on the job I see, RK. Guess I’m lucky you came along. Well, that was strange. I hope the others can find us.”

  It was not an issue she had to worry about long. RK’s yowling had attracted plenty of attention, and soon Thariinye and Mac thudded up to them, the light of their lamps bobbing in the dark like some kind of crazed fairies flying before them.

  “Khornya, you’re bleeding,” Thariinye observed. “A lot.”

  “Oh, yes. So I am.” She gave RK a look
that caused him to wash rapidly as if to remove any of her blood from his claws and show that his conscience was clean. He had, after all, only been thinking of her. Well, her and maybe a nice juicy mouse, but none of those tasty little creatures were scampering around these halls.

  “Why did RK attack you, Khornya?” Mac asked, picking up on the byplay between Linyaari girl and Cat thereby displaying more sensitivity than Thariinye had shown.

  “To pull me back into this world,” she said with a sigh, and held her fingers out to RK to show that she bore no malice. He licked his paw, licked her fingers, and returned to the paw, all to show her he had no hard feelings either.

  “Were you somewhere else?” Thariinye asked, and the tone of his voice told her that he had not seen the river of images she’d seen.

  She sent him a thought picture of it, and although she still couldn’t exactly sort out one part of the story from the next, or recall any details, she felt it rushing over him as it had her. He stood reeling for a moment looking as if she had hit him on the horn with a hammer.

  “Wheee—ee! Is that what it means!” he exclaimed. “Did you get anything like that, Mac? Oh, sorry, forgot you aren’t telepathic.” To Acorna, he said, “I’m amazed that I didn’t pick that up while it was happening to you. I wonder why?”

  She considered the question carefully, and her answer more so.

  Some Linyaari—Neeva, for instance, or Aari, or Grandam certainly—would have picked up immediately on the unusual surge of psychic energy in an enclosed space such as this. Apparently the cat had perceived it, and he wasn’t even Linyaari. But it was probably unkind to point that out to Thariinye, so she said truthfully, “I wasn’t sending. I was concentrating very deeply on receiving mineral impressions from our surroundings. I certainly wasn’t expecting what came and wasn’t prepared for it and it was, as you saw, very…preoccupying. If you had tried to find me with your thoughts, you surely would have become as enmeshed as I was in the images.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I am very strong-willed and not as suggestible as females are apt to be. I would have picked up on it, I’m sure, but probably not been as overtaken by it as you seem to have been.”

  RK looked up at Acorna, laid one ear flat and twitched his brow whiskers as if to ask, “Should I scratch him for you?”

  She looked back at the cynical expression on the broad-striped furry face and laughed. The cat reminded her remarkably of Becker.

  It would probably be good for Thariinye if she argued with him. Maati—she felt a sudden pang and an accompanying sense of urgency—Maati would certainly have done so.

  “Perhaps we could compare what you learned during your paranormal experience with my translations, Khornya,” Mac suggested.

  “Absolutely,” she agreed. “But first, I think one of the things I learned is that there is, or at least there once was, some sort of door there up near the ceiling. I was trying to reach it when RK—er—arrived.”

  “Excellent,” Thariinye said. “Since it is near the ceiling, perhaps it will lead to ascending passages that may bring us back to the surface—with any luck at some distance from the monsters.” He brightened. “Or perhaps by now our people have apprehended them and they will no longer be a problem.”

  Acorna pointed to the pile of rubble on which she had been standing. They could all see that there were definitely slots in the wall above the pile of stone, which had evidently been a landing of some sort, where steps or a ladder had been attached. At her signal, Mac gave her a boost that raised her high enough to reach the fourth, and most complete, indentation, from which she could easily reach the ceiling.

  Feeling around the walls and overhead, she dislodged cobwebs and dirt that descended on Mac and Thariinye. Mac stood unmoving beneath her while dirt gathered in his upraised eye sockets, nose, and mouth, but Thariinye sputtered. He brushed at himself so vigorously that he brushed the light from his head, where it dangled for a moment from his horn before falling to the cave floor and shattering. RK had removed himself a safe distance before anything fell. He stirred only to walk over to Thariinye’s light and dab at it with a paw, as if testing a snake or a mouse for signs of life.

  Acorna’s long, clever fingers found the hair-wide outline of a rectangle that might have been an opening, but nothing she did could deepen or widen the tiny irregularity in the ceiling’s fabric.

  She shook her head and motioned to Mac to let her down.

  “Be very careful that my horn does you no injury as you dismount,” he said.

  “I will,” she said, jumping lightly to the floor. “And now we must trade places. I think your horn is our ticket out of here. Now you hop onto my shoulders.”

  “I am considerably heavier than you may think,” he told her. “It will take both you and Thariinye to support my weight.”

  RK flipped his tail and looked away. Clearly the android could not depend on him for support.

  Mac did not overestimate his weight. Even with both of them supporting him, it was difficult to elevate him to the necessary height. When at last he stood with a foot on each of their shoulders to distribute his weight evenly, he was still too heavy for either of them to bear it for any length of time. Finally, he stepped back onto the tops of their packs so that both of their shoulders and their backs supported his weight. In that way, they managed to support him long enough for him to explore the area using all of his varied sensors. Once he had mapped the opening’s perimeter, he said, “You may wish to duck your heads during this portion of my mission,” and craned his neck so that his horn touched the crack in the ceiling.

  His horn’s drill attachment began to hum, and dirt sifted down, but after only a moment he stopped. “I am unable to move my head with enough freedom to trace the opening with my drill.”

  “Can’t you unscrew it?” Thariinye asked.

  “My head? Yes, I could, but that would detach it from my central nervous system, which contains the controls and power for the drill. The same problem applies to the horn. Besides which, it appears to me that this fissure, while it indeed indicates the opening Khornya professes it to be, has been in some manner sealed shut.”

  “You could try your laser. That would probably open even a seal,” Acorna suggested.

  “Oh, very well,” he said with un-androidlike peevishness. “But I wished to make use of my horn. Its capabilities have not yet been field tested, and this seemed to me to be an excellent opportunity.”

  “You shouldn’t have dropped all that dust in his nose, Khornya,” Thariinye said. “I think you made him blow a chip.”

  “Maybe. But before I gave voice to that thought I would remember that from where he is standing he can squash you easily.”

  “You are right,” Thariinye said. “Mac, you can wield the laser from down here. If you would jump down please, before we are each several inches shorter?”

  “Very well,” Mac said, “but, while injury is possible, I doubt that it would cause significant compression in your bodies. The scenario you have outlined is extremely unlikely.”

  “You aren’t the one standing here with an android pressing you into a pulp. Now, you can use your laser on that doorway or whatever it is from down here just as well, can’t you?” Thariinye asked.

  “Yes, I have the template recorded so I can target it easily,” Mac replied, and hopped down, sending chips flying from the stones paving the floor of the cavern.

  Stones paving the floor of the cavern?

  “Caverns don’t usually have floors,” Acorna said, kneeling to inspect the damage as Mac wielded his laser.

  “Nor doors in their ceilings,” Mac said, restoring the laser to its hiding place and flipping the pick attachment out into his hand. “And doors that are meant to be opened generally are not sealed.”

  This gave her a moment of pause. Why had the door been sealed? Was there something harmful above? But she had felt no fear in that morass of emotion that had come to her through the walls. Grief, yes, but not the same sort o
f grief she was so familiar with in Aari’s makeup. “It was sealed long ago,” Acorna said reasonably. “It cannot have been sealed to keep us in or out after all this time. Use caution, but open it.”

  Mac gave a short nod of understanding and backed up a little distance, as they all did. With a slight flick of one finger he caused his pick to grow a handle. It extended far enough that he was able to sling the point of the pick into the rectangle on the ceiling. It did not give when he pulled, but as soon as he jerked the pick back, the sealed door creaked slowly open.

  Mac flipped the pick back up so it caught the upper edge of the exposed ceiling.

  He glanced at Acorna. “I believe Captain Becker has indicated that it is courteous to allow ladies to precede one through a doorway, Khornya.”

  Acorna looked up into the darkness, her lamp’s beam swallowed before it reached the top of the hole.

  “I suppose I could go first, but may I begin by standing on your shoulders again, Mac?” she asked.

  “Or,” he countered, grabbing the pick with his other hand, and walking himself up the wall until his feet were even with the ceiling, “we could try this.”

  “Now what?” Thariinye asked.

  “Now I release my hand from the pick, and do a flip that will insert my lower body into the space beyond the hole. Then I haul the pick up, reattach my hand, and lower the pick to pull the two of you up behind me,” he said. He no longer sounded peevish. Now he sounded smug.

  Apparently RK thought so, too. With a light and graceful feline leap he launched himself from the floor to the small of the android’s back, then delicately put first one paw, then the other, on the top of the hole, sniffed, meowed, and jumped up, the slightly twitching tip of his brushy tail the last they saw of him for a second. Then suddenly his eyes and teeth appeared in the opening once more, looking down at them as if from a tree.

  “Hmmm,” Acorna said. “I wonder if someone has been reading to RK from Alice in Wonderland.”