Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  Maati scowled toward the ship, angry about the threat to the sii-Linyaari. But Yiitir said, (We are quite well, thank you for your concern, but were enjoying a private conversation.) He said this quite as if everything, including themselves, was normal and under control. Maati’s scowl broke up as she failed to control a giggle. A nervous giggle, but a giggle nonetheless. They all waved nonchalantly at the watchers on the ship.

  (That won’t be enough for them. If you want to learn more, and can swim, come with us to see our horned parents,) the male said, in a tightly controlled thought-whisper.

  Maati felt a glimmer of hesitation from Yiitir, but Maarni dove right in. Maati did, too, and felt the impact in the water as Yiitir joined her. The sii-Linyaari dove deep and swam underwater as they rounded the island and headed back toward the shoreline. One of them, observing Maati’s unfamiliarity with moving through the water, towed her along behind him. Once they were safely on the other side of the island, out of sight of the ship, the land Linyaari surfaced for air, then dove back under while the sii-Linyaari fanned their fish tails impatiently.

  The sii-Linyaari, except for Maati’s guide and helper, were dark and dappled shapes above and surrounding them. Then one of the sii-children swam under Maati, popping up between her legs, swimming over the top of her and dropping down to back-paddle in front of her face in a most annoying fashion.

  But it turned out that the little sii-Linyaari was doing more than playing. As a solid wall of land loomed in front of them and she saw nothing to do but surface, the child motioned with webbed palms down for her to stay submerged, then, still back-paddling, began to twitch its small webbed fingers backward, guiding her to follow it.

  The sii-Linyaari had stopped broadcasting thoughts and Maati realized that the sailors probably possessed telepathy, too.

  Ahead of her, she saw the soles of Maarni’s feet disappear into what looked like an unbroken landmass, followed quickly by the flirt of two different tails. The child turned suddenly and thrust an arm into the bank and Maati saw the opening. When the child saw that she saw, it turned and slipped into the bank. Maati found it was much larger than it looked, but she still was able to guide herself with her hands on both sides for a yard or two until the space widened out enough for them to swim three abreast.

  She considered herself a pretty fair survivor, having come all this way, but now her breath was running out. Could she make it, or would she drown here?

  Suddenly, the tails and feet of those ahead of her turned sharply upwards. She righted herself, too, and found that with two strokes her head was once more above water. They were in an underwater grotto, deep enough to swim in, but with a good layer of air above their heads as well. They swam in silence down long stretches as the cave ceilings rose higher and higher above their heads. The water was pitch black, and very cold.

  The frii began frolicking up the stream as they swam further in and their shrill repetitive voices broadcast their thoughts, the thought bubbles bursting after every utterance, (Going to Granny’s! POP! Going to Granny’s! POP!)

  Up ahead, suddenly, Maati saw them, Ancestors, standing four abreast and at least twenty deep just uphill from where water met dry cave floor.

  (Lookit there, Gladiis, it’s our web-footed offspring, come to pay their respects!)

  (And see what we brought you! POP!) cried Maati’s young guide.

  (I hope it’s some of that nice seaweed you brought last time,) the Ancestor just behind the one addressed as Gladiis said and others showed enthusiastic agreement ruffling air through their nostrils.

  (Better! POP! We brought cousins from the future who say they’re your descendants, too! POP! But be prepared! POP! They’re not as pretty as we are, really funny looking! POP!)

  (And very, very cold,) Maarni added through her chattering teeth as they swam up to the cloven hooves of the ancestors.

  (They are land creatures, with two feet and horns! POP!) Maati’s frii friend explained before anyone else could, or the Ancestors could figure it out for themselves.

  (They are, and this bears repeating,) Yiitir said, (freezing. They need to get warm and dry at once.)

  The Ancestors took several steps backwards, their telepathy allowing them to march to the rear like precision dancers. Which was a good thing because they had crowded very close together and could have injured each other or at least knocked the foremost among their number into the water had they not all understood the intent to make room at the landing.

  Getting out was a slippery operation for the Linyaari, since the water met the landing where the pavement sloped sharply downhill. It was all but impossible to get one’s feet under one, but Maati’s little guide boosted her from the rear and one of the Ancestors graciously bent his neck so she could grab hold of his mane. She, as the youngest and most agile, was first out, and helped Maarni and Yiitir next.

  “Oooooh, look at them, Humiir!” the Ancestor addressed as Gladiis cried aloud with a little whinny.

  “Yes, funny looking things, but kind of cute,” Humiir agreed. The other Ancestors closed around them, warming them with their heat and using horns to take the chill off their puckered and goose-bumped flesh.

  “It seems to me if they’d wanted legs and horns, four were better than two,” another of the Ancestors said critically.

  “Yes, but the Changers wanted the new ones to be part of each of us, Host and People of the Horn,” Gladiis replied. “I think they’re just lovely, really.”

  “Hmph. I suppose we’ll be seeing little feathered replicas of ourselves with wings, next thing we know,” the other replied.

  “When did they make you?” Humiir asked, nudging Yiitir with his nose. “You are an old one. That is a young one. They have not showed us your kind before. They always show us. When were you made?”

  (My question exactly, Father Humiir,) Upp said. (Hang onto your horn. You won’t believe their answer!)

  Yiitir repeated his explanation about coming from the future and Humiir grunted. The others made assenting noises.

  (How does that happen?) Upp wanted to know.

  “It is more of the magic they call science,” Gladiis told him. “They used their ability to change times when they brought us here too. By the time they were able to respond to our call for help, we were all but extinct. Humiir and I were the last of our kind on our old world and we were snatched from the very grip of death so quickly that death itself—in the form of two of the barbarians who had killed so many of us—were taken up with us.”

  Humiir gave a braying laugh. “You should have seen their faces! Our Hosts hauled them away and secluded them. They don’t believe in killing anything, the Hosts don’t, which came as a disappointment to Gladiis and me. Oh, how I wanted to get my horn into one of them!”

  Maarni and Yiitir, both of the more traditional Linyaari who did not normally travel or mix with other, more violent races, gasped.

  “I see they’ve passed on their gentle ways to you,” Gladiis said. “But you must remember, people like those two warriors had already killed most of the other of our kind you see here. They wanted our horns, and once the Hosts saved us, we were prepared to give those murderers horn where it would heal them of their wicked ways for good!”

  “What happened to them?” Maarni asked. Maati could almost see the story collector writing in a little notebook inside her head.

  “The Hosts said they would study them and then put them where they could do no one harm,” Humiir said. “They didn’t care for my ideas on the issue.”

  “That is too true—a pity. But back to time travel. When the Hosts heard how the others had perished, they went back to the times before the deaths and collected these folk you see here, who did not perish but came with us. All of us were brought here,” Gladiis said.

  “To live happily ever after,” said Humiir dryly.

  “Are you not happy, then?” Maati asked, suddenly concerned. It had never occurred to her that the Ancestors would not have been thrilled with the dar
ing rescue and beautiful new home Grandam had described in her stories.

  “A bit too citified for me,” one of the other Ancestors said.

  “Not enough meadows. Too many buildings all over. We do earn our keep. Their machines create much filth and illness, for the Hosts and the planet, and we often are called upon to cleanse and heal.”

  “And help them build their ideal stable form, of course,” another of the Ancestors said. “That would be your kind, it seems.”

  “I guess I’m glad they’re doing it—I mean, did it,” Maati said. “But I’m wondering the same thing as the Grandfather did earlier—why? Why breed us with two legs and horns instead of just remaining themselves and having your company. We still have you among us in our own time, though not—oh, never mind.” She didn’t want to emphasize to the sii-Linyaari that they were already extinct in her time. It didn’t seem polite somehow.

  Gladiis nuzzled her fondly, and, despite the time, Maati felt so reassured and at home, being among the Ancestors with their familiar fragrance, their mixture of practicality and mystery, and the sense of kinship that was present even now, when she was questioning why she had been made akin to them.

  “Bless you, Youngling. The last thing we would wish to do is damage your opinion of the Hosts. They are brilliant, and were valiant in our defense, and I truly believe they do mean well. They try very hard to be kind.”

  “Pshaw!” another snorted. “They think too much. That’s their problem.”

  “No, it’s that they think only with their heads and very seldom with their hearts,” another said.

  “It’s amazing they do as well as they do,” Humiir said firmly. “All that shape-shifting they do—and they have done this sort of thing before, one of them told me when he came to be healed from a bout of drunkenness. On other planets, with other species. That is where some of the other creatures on this planet are from.”

  Another ancestor brayed his laughter. “Distant cousins, I suppose.”

  “The truth is, dear Youngling,” Gladiis said gently, “that while the Hosts are, I believe, essentially good sorts, and they live a great long time, long enough, certainly to have acquired wisdom, they simply are not very—stable.”

  “That’s a joke, frii,” Upp informed her. “Stable, get it?”

  “Too many of those Hosts, changing shapes all the time as if they’ve never found one they liked, all of them crammed into all those shifty buildings,” Humiir said. “We couldn’t stand it. Our horns were going soft and transparent with the stress. Finally we asked for a place of our own and they gave us these caves, because they could shield them from the thoughts above. They open out onto a nice bit of grassland, too. Not enough space really, no forests, no mountain meadows full of wildflowers, but no hairy warriors looking to dehorn us either. All in all, it is an improvement.”

  “And here at least we are spared the chaos of their thoughts,” Gladiis said with a sigh so strong that it stirred the hairs of the little beard under her chin.

  But just then Maati caught a thought—a very clear one. “Khornya!” she heard her brother cry, and she was on her feet, pushing through the Ancestors, and searching for a way to get to him.

  “Her blend was maybe a little defective?” she heard Humiir inquiring behind her. And Maarni laughed and asked another question.

  Twenty-two

  The sea that was no longer a sea lapped at the road like a sick animal as Acorna stared into it. Dark and dirty as it was, the water lured Acorna. The sea was where the little lights that she believed indicated the presence of Aari, Maati, and the others were located.

  Although she had not heard Aari again, Acorna held an awareness of his pain, his fear, somewhere in the back of her mind and it made her feel nervous and twitchy. She had to do something. The plan they had all formed together was a good one, and Becker was on his way back to the ship with Mac and RK to help him. He would return soon with supplies as he promised, but would it be soon enough? Perhaps an hour and a half had passed since she heard Aari cry out. If only she knew how to manipulate the time device better, she could arrive before whatever had disturbed him, and prevent him from suffering whatever it was that had caused him to scream to begin with.

  But she couldn’t figure it that closely. She was beginning to think she might be able to manipulate it to some degree however.

  And she had to keep her thoughts from being too open to Thariinye. As Becker left she drew forth packets of seeds and stems she had brought in her pack and handed them to Thariinye. “I couldn’t eat a thing now, really, but that’s no reason you should be hungry. Please, take mine and I will eat when Captain Becker returns. One of us may as well be well fed and rested for the work ahead. I will go begin the purification of the lake. If you rest now, you can come help me finish the job if it proves more than my horn can handle.”

  Thariinye’s eyes popped open with surprise, but he accepted the food gratefully. “That sounds very sensible. After all, being a male, I will probably be called upon to help with the manual labor of installing the irrigation equipment and that sort of thing. I’ll need all my strength. Maybe a nap would be a good idea, too, do you think?”

  “Oh, yes. Though I don’t know how you’d manage to rest with the walls flickering away and that silver thing whirling around in the middle.”

  “Actually, I thought I’d find a quiet inner room upstairs, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” she said. It was, in fact, just what she’d wanted him to do.

  When he departed, munching on the food as he climbed to the upper story, she pressed her hand to the map and thought of Aari, Maati, and the others. She was not at all sure her plan would work, but she needed to try. She pressed until she found the place where all four of the white lights were visible, three of them in the water surrounded by aqua lights, one on the shore and headed up toward the city.

  Having found that place, she dared not try to adjust it further and waste more time. She had trotted quickly to the edge of the water, and stood watching it lick at the land for only a moment.

  Then she stuck her toe in, felt the temperature, which was not as cold as she had feared, and waded in.

  If their theory was correct, the water of this planet was the main conduit for the energies of time travel. Pollution and the disruption of its courses caused a corresponding disruption in the flow of the time force. The sea before her should be the least disrupted of all of this planet’s water, since it was the closest thing to a whole body of water on the planet at the time. That was her hypothesis and she hoped it was correct.

  She was about to put it to the test.

  If she was wrong, she would go for a nasty swim before she purified the water and prepared it for the implementation of the rest of their plan.

  If she was right, however, the wall mechanism was a control as well as an indicator of where people were and where they were sent. She was about to see if her theory would work. If it did, the others should be able to find her from what they had discussed. Meanwhile, she could save Aari from the harm that she felt sure had befallen him.

  But up to her neck in filthy seawater, she could see no change in her surroundings, either in time or place. The mountain of refuse still dominated the lake, the city still loomed dead and broken beyond her, the buildings from the front street still drowned beneath the soles of her feet.

  Nothing had changed. Was she wrong? And then she told herself that it was no wonder she was getting nowhere. She was not concentrating hard enough on where she wanted to go. And she had not yet committed herself sufficiently to totally submerge in this sea. So, drawing a deep breath, she jackknifed forward and plunged beneath the water.

  The Hosts hurriedly left the inner chamber where the male unicorn person lay in a drugged stupor on the metal table. They had extracted from him the DNA samples they needed to test, x-rayed him, taken samples of blood, bone marrow, urine, stomach contents, sperm, and other fluids, and then left as quickly as possible.

&
nbsp; “Gracious, what a fuss he made,” said a small winged person—currently female. Her wings were flapping very rapidly, which indicated she was upset. “I was sending all the reassurance and good thoughts I could to him and he still backhanded me so hard I flew across the room.”

  “You’d think they would have evolved past that behavior after all this time,” said a fellow with a long, serious face. “If he is the result of our work after generations of evolution, I think we should try harder.”

  “Yes, after all, it’s not like we hurt him or anything. All of us were trying to calm him, but he simply kept fighting and glaring at us as if we were monsters or something.”

  “But he knew who we are,” Highmagister HaGurdy said. “Perhaps he isn’t a final result after all. Perhaps he is only a starting place.” She sighed. “I fear we’ve our work cut out for us. We should break now. It is almost time for the feast and we all need to change into something more festive.”

  Not that that will take very long, thought a very junior cabinet minister, given our nature. He wanted to add, “Shouldn’t someone ask one of our unicorn guests to attend to him?” The unicorns were familiar with the needs for healing after studies done on the various subject offspring. Not only would they heal him of the holes drilled in him from the tests; they would also comfort him.

  But Highmagister HaGurdy had left the building, followed by her cabinet, who fanned into the city in all directions. The minister had no one left to make that observation to.

  The junior cabinet minister was destined to remain junior because of the direction his telepathic abilities took. He was not, as were the other cabinet ministers, a powerful and charismatic sender, the most useful sort of telepathy a politician could project.

  Even his shape changes did not seem to be under his control. He changed according to whom he was with, which was also what the others did, but he seemed to demonstrate a different purpose in his changes. They changed into more dominating shapes—the better to control the beings around them. His own changes, insofar as he understood them, occurred to put his fellows at ease. Among the politicians, he appeared to be one of them, only less able, less forceful, and less impressive—easily ignored. Easily made the delegatee rather than being the delegator of tasks.