“Why not?” Narhii asked.
“It’s complicated, but we’ve been exposed to a disease that you might catch. It’s a very bad one.”
“You look fine to me,” Narhii said. She didn’t sense a trick, but neither did she see why the female wouldn’t come to meet her. She had an idea about her, and as long as she was being very bold, she decided to go all the way. “I found out recently—they didn’t mean for me to but I did—that I have a mother and father alive about now. Are you my mother?”
The female, confused, looked away from the screen as if to speak to someone else—the mate? Narhii’s—father? and the first female appeared again. “Apparently so, dear, if my vision was correct, which naturally it was. Now then, tell us, from when came you and what are you called?”
Narhii didn’t want them to see that she was just as confused as they were. They would think her stupid, or guess that she had run away from what the Friends had always told her was her destiny and her duty. They wouldn’t want a stupid, lazy daughter.
“I came from—before,” she said. “I thought I was the only one like me. There were people like them.” She waved at the sii-Linyaari, who had left her the rock while they swam and dived around it. “And there were the Friends and the Others, who say they were saved by the Friends.”
“Others?” the heavily bedecked and fleshed woman asked.
“Quadrupeds with horns like mine, white like me,” Narhii explained. “And similar feet.”
“She must mean the Ancestors,” a male voice said. His face appeared on the screen, and Narhii guessed that this must be the mate of the female—her father? “I believe I have visited the time you speak of, yaazi, though I did not see you there. How did you come to be there and now—here?”
“Shouldn’t someone be taking a boat out to fetch her to shore and dry her off?” the female like her asked.
Another female face appeared. “It is being done, Khornya. Thariinye and Maati have returned from their journey and will collect the youngling in a flitter.”
Narhii felt some annoyance even though this exchange was in the interest of her comfort and welfare. She wanted to keep talking to the male and answer his questions. She was sure now that she had indeed found her parents, and, from what she could see, they were very agreeable. Nice. And not, she thought, because they wanted something from her.
“The Others tell me I was stolen while still in my mother—she was to have twins and since the thief—someone named Grimalkin, left my sister and only took me, my parents didn’t know. Are you them? Do you have a female child like me?”
“Yes,” the male said, his voice odd, as if his throat had constricted.
“Is she there with you? Can I see her? Are we alike?”
The female—Khornya?—answered, the corners of her mouth lifting as she spoke, though her silvery eyes, much like Narhii’s own, held sadness. “She didn’t have your fashion sense when we saw her last, but that may have changed by now. I’m afraid she’s not here.”
“You sent her away, too?”
A gruff-looking humanoid with mane all over his face, especially between his nose and upper lip, said, “Don’t worry, kiddo. She’s okay. Khorii’s just off saving the universe. It’s what your family does. You’ll catch on in no time.”
“So am I? Part of your family, Khornya? You’re truly my mother and your mate—”
“Aari,” she supplied, her face replacing the humanoid male’s.
“Is my father?”
“Yes, and the person who just spoke to you is Captain Becker, a dear family friend, quarantined with us.”
“Can’t you heal yourselves?” Narhii asked curiously. “I can, and the Others can, though the Friends aren’t much good at it.”
“We’ve always been able to before,” Khornya said, “but this disease is much worse than any other one we’ve ever encountered. Little one—what do they call you where you—were?”
“The Friends just called me the Mutant. The Others called me Narhii.”
“Mutant!” Aari exclaimed, his face bursting onto the screen with an anger that reminded her of Hruffli. “They would! Of all the arrogance! To treat this poor child that way. And if I ever get my hands on Grimalkin again I’ll—well, I want everyone to look away because I mean to do something ka-Linyaari.”
“Allow me instead, boy,” furry-faced Captain Becker said. “It’s the least I can do.”
A flitter arrived—the Friends had such devices though not as pretty as this one, which was bright-colored and had golden designs on it. Another female opened the hatch and held out her arms to Narhii.
“Hop in, youngling. I’m Maati, and I understand I may be your aunt.”
The spectral shapes didn’t do any harm that anyone could see, but they upset Jaya and the cats. Neither Khorii nor Mikaaye ever saw them, which both Linyaari found disappointing.
Khorii was most troubled by Khiindi’s increasingly odd behavior. He meowed and yowled at her constantly, ran back and forth and refused to be soothed or comforted. He also refused to let her rest, which she had been repeatedly warned could make her more susceptible to the disease. She tried to discuss his behavior with him because that often worked, but this time it did not. He was fixated on the cargo hold containing the graves, but although Khorii waited there for a full shift rotation, during which time Khiindi seemed calmer, though hyperalert, she saw nothing out of the ordinary aboard the ship.
As they docked on Rushima, however, things did not seem right to her at all. Rushima, an agricultural planet with a fairly uniform climate year-round, which made the crops abundant and several yearly harvests possible, looked remarkably barren from the air. As the ship descended, Khorii noted that all of the fields, regardless of the crop planted, seemed to be just beginning the growing cycle and were sparsely planted.
Jaya, sitting beside her, was looking, too. “At least it looks like they have lots of nice blue lakes.”
“That’s not water,” Khorii said, for as they descended farther, she saw that what appeared to be wetlands were actually ruined fields overlaid with the aqua of the sticky stuff she had found in her own rooftop garden.
Nevertheless, she was glad when the ship docked, landing on Rushima’s primitive airstrip, also pitted and in bad repair. The settlers seemed glad to see the Mana, too. A delegation of rather gaunt white-haired elders marched across the tarmac to meet them, followed by a gaggle of skinny children, including a young girl bearing flowers.
As on other planets, everyone was either a child or young teen or someone old enough to be at least a grandparent.
Khorii disembarked before her shipmates, looking for blue plague specks, but saw none. “It’s safe, Captain Bates. You can all come ashore.”
When all of the greetings had been exchanged, Jaya lost no time in pleading her case, saying to the elder who seemed to be in charge, “My parents and the crew of my ship died of the plague. Khorii purified their bodies and we gave them a temporary burial on shipboard. But we feel that it would be good now to give them a proper burial. I was hoping you would give us permission to bury my parents here.” Her voice was remarkably calm and businesslike as she said this, though her eyes filled and her lower lip trembled.
“You just came to this decision all of a sudden, did you?” asked another elder sharply, a small pink-skinned man with scant hair on his head and a lot on his chin. Something about him reminded Khorii of Liriili. “Ever occur to you we might have problems of our own? Two crops ruined and stores contaminated so we’d little to eat, whole dang town falling to wrack and ruin, dead people roaming around like they still own the place…”
Then from the back of the crowd another man walked forward—the people parted for him as if it was his right. He was of medium height, with wavy silver-white hair and eyes whose green color was clear and startling in his deeply tanned face.
Ignoring the elder’s litany of complaint, Hap rushed forward and embraced the newcomer like a child hugging a long-lost parent. The
man enveloped the tall boy in a bearlike embrace and patted him gently on the back until Hap broke away to grin at him. “Scar! So this is where you ended up! I thought—I mean, you made it?”
The other man grinned, showing teeth a little lighter than his hair, and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his coveralls. “Of course I made it, Hap. Nice of you to worry about me, son, but I’m too old to interest the plague.”
His face immediately clouded over with sadness, and he shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. “Lots of better folks, folks who were needed worse, weren’t so lucky.”
“No, Scar, that’s not true!” the little girl who’d brought the flowers said.
The man ruffled the child’s hair with a large hand.
“Don’t get all upset now, Mabel Dean. You know what a shortage of good water we’ve got here. You don’t want to go wasting your share.” He was teasing her, and coaxed a smile.
“Mr. MacDonald has been very useful indeed,” the persnickety elder said. “He’s used the machinery he had on board to help us clean our fields and replant and graciously put some of his inventory of diggers to use burying our dead. He’d be the fella to help you with yours.”
Breaking in before the elder had finished his sentence, an excited Hap said, “Khorii, Captain Bates, Jaya, Sesseli, and Mikaaye, this is my old friend Scaradine MacDonald. He taught me as much as he could about taking care of ag equipment—that’s what he does.”
“Most popular grave digger in the history of the job,” MacDonald said. Khorii saw reflected in his face all of the grief and pain around him. This was a warm-hearted man who felt much and gave what he could. Impulsively, she stepped forward and embraced him, laying her horn against his chest, hoping to heal a little of the sadness.
He patted her shoulder as if he were the one comforting her. “Thank you, honey. You’re a real nice girl. You put me in mind of another girl I met one time on the way to Makahomia—Acorna they called her. Not just because she was a Linyaari, like you, but there’s something else about you—”
“Khornya, her name in our tongue, is my mother,” Khorii said. “She told me! She told me about meeting you! You helped her and RK and Uncle Joh get Nadhari Kando there in time to protect Miw-Sher and the sacred Temple Cats!”
“I didn’t really do anything,” he said modestly. “Drove a wagon, helped them through another plague. I’ve sure seen enough of that kind of thing. So, back to what you were asking, if Jaya’s folks need burying and it’s okay with Elder Bawb here, I’ll be glad to help.”
“We had hoped to cremate them,” Khorii said to Elder Bawb. “That is the custom of her people.”
“Out of the question,” the elder who looked like Liriili protested.
Elder Bawb held up his hand to stop the other man, then said in an apologetic tone, “Much as we’d like to oblige you, it’s been pretty dry around here lately. I don’t reckon starting a big fire would be good and well, there’s no oven—”
“No, no, that’s fine,” Jaya assured him quickly so that she didn’t have to hear anything more about ovens. She would do what was necessary but she didn’t like to think about the details. “But if you will give their bodies a permanent resting place, I’d be very grateful.”
The persnickety elder, whose name turned out to be Mr. Plimsoll, raised an objection about foreigners being buried among the native dead, but Elder Bawb overruled him, saying, “Good grief, Horace, what difference is a few bodies more or less going to make now?” He turned back to Khorii. “Can you stay the night? There was a terrible fire over at Bug Gulch last week. Took out an elder and three young’uns. But five others are injured and when we got your hail we told them you were coming. They’re on their way now and will be here by morning.”
Khorii turned to Captain Bates and Jaya, not because she thought they’d object but because until someone from Krishna-Murti Company said otherwise, the ship was Jaya’s, and Captain Bates was the elder aboard. Since the plague, Linyaari had gone from being oddities who had to explain themselves to being treated as if they were in charge of the entire universe, a distinction they had neither asked for nor wanted.
Jaya shrugged. “Sure,” she said.
Captain Bates asked, “Wouldn’t it be faster if we went over there to them using one of the shuttles?”
“That’s right kindly of you, ma’am, but they’ll be here soon enough. And we have some healings we need here when you’ve finished your buryin’.”
“The living come first, Elder,” Captain Bates said before Khorii could.
“Sure they do. But if we can bring your folks out now, Scar can get them in the ground while the unicorn youngsters are doing the healing, then everybody can gather round to send them off proper.”
“Will the injured coming from Bug Gulch be further damaged by the journey?” Khorii asked.
“No, ma’am. They have a team of geldings and a fine wagon that used to belong to the doctor. Ride will be smooth as a baby’s bottom. These ben’t life-threatening injuries, from what I hear. Everybody hurt that bad went to join their maker right after it happened.”
A young girl, bright red pigtails flying, ran up to them, and said, panting, “Elder, there’s been an accident over to the forge. Horse jack busted and the horse sat down on Grampa while he was shoein’, and I think Grampa’s back is broken.”
“Show me,” Khorii said.
The girl grabbed Khorii’s hand and pulled her back through the crowd, which parted before them. Her feet were dirty and bare, and her simple shift dress was an extremely familiar saffron cotsyn, its humble origins as a shipping sack betrayed by the logo and title of the Krishna-Murti Company printed in purple curly letters down her back.
Behind them, Mikaaye’s footsteps, as hard as Khorii’s own, pounded the loose rocks of the street.
The smith, a wiry old man, was on the ground, groaning and sweating so profusely that the skin of his arms, shoulders, and upper chest visible above his coverall was shinier than if he’d just showered, except that dirt clung to the moisture, making dark patches against his cedar red skin and bald scalp. His eyes, when not squeezed shut with pain, showed a great deal of white. While his upper torso was tense with pain, his lower torso, hips, and legs were motionless and relaxed. A foul smell indicated that his bowels had also relaxed.
A large piece of equipment, a heavy metal frame with a hammock-wide sling of knitted plasteel attached, lay in pieces on the ground near him. Its metal seemed to have corroded and broken in midspan.
A horse, apparently the one that had injured him, stood to one side and regarded the man with a puzzled expression. Khorii caught a fleeting thought from it. “Don’t ask me. That thing almost broke my back when it gave out from under me. If it hadn’t been for the smith beneath my belly, I might have been seriously injured.”
The beast looked startled when Khorii replied wryly, “I am sure that will be of tremendous comfort to him.”
Two boys about the size of Jalonzo were bent over the injured man. When Khorii and the others arrived, the boys anxiously stood and stepped aside. One of them had big tears standing in the corners of his eyes, and one of them held a mug of water he’d been trying to give the injured man.
Khorii knelt beside the smith on one side, Mikaaye on the other.
The forge hearth had died down to nothing, tools gleamed dully against the metal sides of the building, but she saw these only peripherally, her attention focused on the man in front of her.
As she and Mikaaye bent their horns to him, the man’s eyes focused, and his upper body relaxed from the contorted posture he’d assumed in his body’s effort to protect its injury. She felt the spinal cord knit back together. Pieces of vertebrae found each other as if by magnetism and recombined their cells to a seamless whole. The damage to the tissue the shards of bone had invaded when displaced healed, and the bruised places lost their swelling as blood and other fluids were reabsorbed.
All of this took place in a moment, but she thought it must ha
ve seemed like an eternity to the man.
He sighed, a deep “aaahh,” then stood up. “Thank you kindly. Be right back.” His posture erect and his gait reasonably normal, he quickly entered an adjoining building.
“Thank you so much,” the girl who’d fetched them said. “Gramps is all we got left. I’m Moonmay Marsden and this here is my brother Percy and our cousin Fleagle. I expect Grampa was off in search of clean britches.”
“The air smells better anyhow,” Fleagle said, his tears evaporated. He playfully punched his cousin in the arm. “Mercy, Percy, even you smell better.”
The smith reemerged with a big grin. “I think you cured my sciatica while you were at it, young’uns. I retired about five year ago and let my son take over the business. Right away the aches and pains started, payin’ me back for all the abuse I done myself in the past. But, shoot, now I feel like I could work another twenty years—or at least long enough to teach Fleagle and Percy here the trade.”
“We were happy to help, but we need to return to our ship now, sir,” Khorii told him.
“I don’t suppose you could stay for supper? We’d be honored to have you, and Moonmay cooks as good as her mama. Fried chick—”
He started to say “chicken” but Moonmay, bearing in mind what most people now knew about the Linyaari and their vegetarian dietary needs, tugged at her grandfather’s coverall. He tilted his head so she could say something into his ear.
“Fried chickpeas. Moonmay makes the best fried chickpeas on Rushima. Mashed tubers and of course, your pick of the garden.”
“We’d love to, sir, but we have some friends to bury.”
“Me and the boys will help, then, and pay our respects,” the smith said, and all of them trooped back to the ship.
The smith and his grandsons followed Khorii and Mikaaye aboard the ship and into the cargo hold, where Hap and Jaya stood, shovels in hands, over the graves. Khorii introduced the blacksmith Marsden, Percy, and Fleagle, and, after a nod, Marsden took the shovel from Hap’s hands and Percy the one from Jaya’s, asking her if there was another for Fleagle. They wouldn’t accept any help until it was time to pull the carton coffins from the graves. The coffins had deteriorated under the soil, which was to be expected. The black body bags containing the remains were not in much better shape, which was not surprising either. There seemed to be very little left of the dead, which was probably just as well.
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