Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  “That’s okay, man,” he told the cat, scratching it behind the right ear, which, like his own, was only partially there. The cat’s purr increased in volume until it sounded like a whole pride of lions right there in the cabin. “Those gravity systems are worthless anyway.”

  He knew he had a replacement system someplace among his cargo, probably a better one than the one he’d installed six months ago. Only problem was he couldn’t do these particular repairs in space. To the best of his recollection, the piece that he needed was buried so deep he’d have to unload the cargo hold to find it. As usual, the ship was packed too tightly to have any room inside to conveniently shift the cargo while he looked. He could maneuver around and manage it in a pinch, of course, but why bother?

  “So, cat, looks like it’s dirtside for us again. I was going to pass up this next trashed-out planet and head back for civilization, but it looks like we need another pit stop first. The way I figure it, with this one, we’ve pretty much replaced the whole ship since we last headed back to Kezdet—we’ll basically have a brand new Condor by the time we dock there again.”

  This wasn’t unusual. On the average, he replaced most of the Condor about three times a year. This was an occupational hazard, or maybe a hazard of the kind of personality that occupied Becker’s occupation. He hated to pay full price for anything when there was so much good stuff, only a little used, laying around for the taking. He was an expert at improvisation, refitting, retooling, and emergency landings on remote hunks of rock in the middle of space. He could do mid-space repairs, too, but it was so much easier to land somewhere with a bit of gravity where he could suit up, toss stuff he didn’t need out the hatch while uncovering what he did need, close the hatch, pressurize the ship, make his repair, then retrieve and reload his previously discarded cargo.

  He ended up making some pretty rough landings occasionally, but he wasn’t much worried about scratching his paint job, and the Condor wasn’t so big that he needed a lot of level area for a landing pad. He headed for the planet he’d selected for this minor emergency. If the rock had an oxygen atmosphere, he’d even be able to empty the cat box and let RK out to do a little business.

  Sometimes they found some of their best cargo on these pit stops. Lately he’d run across a whole string of planets, all pretty well stripped of resources on the one hand, but chock full of possibly profitable debris on the other hand. Becker lived for debris. His big regret was that he had not yet devised a way to strap extra cargo to the outside of the Condor, but so far he hadn’t found a way to do so that would allow him to enter and exit atmospheres without burning up the merchandise.

  The Condor landed on what seemed the only level bit of ground for miles around. Soil and vegetation had pretty much been stripped from the rock around this little basin in the wreckage, but here bluish grass-like plants still grew—until the Condor’s descent singed them, anyway. It was a rough landing. The atmosphere was tumultuous—roiling clouds of various red and yellow gases filled the sky. That was okay. According to his instruments—if they were working properly, and they seemed to be—it was still breathable out there. Even if it wasn’t, he had a good protective suit if he needed it. It was the one item he bought not only firsthand but also top of the line. He never knew what the conditions would be like out here in the boonies. While he could use the robolift for most reloading, loading, and hauling jobs, some of them he needed to do by hand.

  It took him a day and a half to repair his system. The first full day, with RK’s enthusiastic participation, he devoted to rooting around among the derelict shuttles, escape pods, and command capsules in his inventory, looking for an outfit in better shape than the one he was using. As usual, much of what was on top of what he wanted landed on the ground outside the vessel until he found what he was looking for.

  He eventually rounded up a replacement system and patched it in. RK “helped” again, trying to stand between him and what he was doing. Every time Becker reached past the critter, RK’s low snarl warned him off. When the cat tired of that game, he sat beside Becker and periodically reached up to sink a single claw into the man’s thigh. Finally, Becker opened the hatch again and the cat leaped out without a backward look. The work went amazingly swiftly after that.

  Prior to reloading his cargo, Becker suited up. He was a little more cautious of his own hide than the cat was. Taking a work light, a collection sack, a tin of cat food to lure his roaming partner back aboard again, and the remote to the hatch and the robolift, he popped the hatch and disembarked. All he had to do now was throw his stuff back aboard and find Road-kill. While he was looking, he might as well take a stroll and scope out the local real estate.

  The grass around the Condor was singed for about thirty feet from where the vessel sat, and Becker thought it was a real shame about that. All around the basin, bedrock lay tumbled as if something had reached in, pulled it up, and stirred it around. What a dump. Only this one little patch showed any real signs of life. Of course, it could be the planet was just in the process of giving birth to life, or it could be a failed terraforming job, but his guess was that this planet had at one time been alive. The little patch on which he stood was probably one of the last, if not the last, vestiges of that life. Damn shame, of course, but without ruins like this, he’d be out of business. Only problem was, the devastation here was so complete, there wasn’t much left, even for him. The other planets they’d come across lately had been much the same. Each of them had a few useless remnants that gave him the creepy feeling that a perfectly good civilization had been destroyed fairly recently.

  It was Roadkill who pulled him from his contemplation of mortality.

  In fact, it looked as if the cat had dug up something, and was smacking it around. Space mouse? Not very likely, with no signs of plant or animal life around, excluding themselves and the puny patch of grass they occupied.

  Whatever it was, RK was in love with it. Becker couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that the cat’s sides were pumping up and down with the force of his purring.

  A few feet further on, something gleamed in the beam of the work light, and Becker bent to examine it. Like the object RK was mauling, the thing was long and thin, maybe had been pointed on the end at one time, but the tip was broken off. There were definite spiral markings on it, he saw as he brushed away the soil. It glistened in the light, refracting rich shades of blue and green and deep red from its white surface. It looked like a big, carved opal. Pretty thing. He tucked it in the sack and swung his beam around. It flashed on several other pieces like the one he had, all broken and sticking up through the soil. He took a couple of other specimens, and made a note of the precise coordinates of this location so he could land here again, in case this stuff was valuable. Then he grabbed RK and headed back to the ship.

  He finished reloading his cargo. As usual, he left a few of the more expendable pieces behind to lighten his load. He had inventory scattered all over the galaxy now. Well, most of the sites where he’d stashed the stuff were uninhabited, so it would keep. He could reclaim it if he found a market later. Finally, after he got the cargo stowed aboard once more, Becker lugged RK, the new treasure firmly clamped in his fangs, back onto the ship.

  First things first, he decided. He set their course back to Kezdet and lifted off. It wasn’t like he wanted to go to Kezdet. He hated the damned place, but it was—unfortunately—the Condor’s home port. The ship had originally been registered to Becker’s foster father, Theophilus Becker, who bought Jonas from a labor farm to help with the business when the boy was twelve. The old man had died ten years later, leaving the ship, the business, and his private maps of all manner of otherwise uncharted byways and shortcuts through various star systems and galaxies for his adopted son. Becker had spent every possible minute in space in the years since.

  Once the ship was out of the planet’s gravity well and the course was set, Becker turned the helm of the ship over to the computer. Too exhausted to fix himself anythin
g else to eat, he opened another can of RK’s cat food and ate that before settling down for some sleep. The cat, who had of course been fed as soon as the two returned to the ship—otherwise nothing else could have been accomplished—was already sacked out on top of the specimen bag containing the strange rocks they’d salvaged from the planet.

  Becker pushed the recline button on his seat at the console and slept at the helm. His bunk was full of cargo. Besides, he couldn’t get to it for the stacks of feed sacks full of seeds he’d picked up several weeks before.

  He woke up finally when a paw on his cheek told him he’d better do so if he didn’t want another pat, this time with the claws bared. He looked up into RK’s big green eyes. Something was different about that cat, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He fed both of them again, checked his course, and emptied the collection sack onto the console. Time to get a better look at what he’d acquired.

  He didn’t figure he needed to use gloves with these specimens, since the cat had been carrying one around in its mouth with no ill effects since they’d found them, so he dug a couple of the spiral rocks out and ran a scanner over them. No radiation, nothing to poison, burn, freeze, or sting him. He knew that, having just picked them out of the sack with his bare hands.

  RK crowded in close as Becker examined the objects, stroking them, turning them, trying to chip a piece off one with a rock hammer. The stones had a strange feeling to them—a sort of hum, as if they were alive. Maybe they were. Damn, if these were sentient life forms, he’d have to take them back. He was going to have to check this out with an expert. He dumped the rocks back into the collection bag.

  There wasn’t much else to do, so he slept again. When he awoke, it was to find RK standing on his chest. Becker thought the cat must have been sleeping on his arm, because his right hand tingled as if it had been numbed from the cat’s weight. His right ear felt funny, too.

  That was when he realized what was different about the cat. Two green eyes blinked back at him, the good one and the one RK had lost in the crash. The cat’s right ear was also whole and perfect. At that point the cat stood up, stretched itself halfway down Becker’s leg, and stuck its tail in his face. Becker was stunned to see that the tail had straightened out, lengthened to a luxuriant and elegant appendage, and now waved quite handsomely. Below the tail, well, yeah, that missing part had returned there, too.

  Becker lifted his own right hand and saw that the stubs of his fingers had regrown. His hands looked just as they had before he’d come into contact with RK—maybe minus the odd scar. He touched his ear. That felt whole again as well. What in the name of the three moons of Kezdet was going on here? How could this have happened—not that he was complaining. The only thing he could think was they’d run into some kind of healing force on that derelict planet. If the planet was capable of this kind of miracle, it was no wonder somebody had wrecked the place looking for the secret. As soon as he sold some of this cargo and reprovisioned—he was getting tired of cat food—he was going right back there to see what he could find.

  “Mercy, Roadkill, when we get to Kezdet we’re both gonna be so damned good lookin’ we’ll have to watch out they don’t snag us for the pleasure houses.” Not that he didn’t intend to go there straightaway himself. And he’d take Roadkill with him. Hell, they didn’t call those places cathouses for nothing. Must be a lady cat or two around there would appreciate the attentions of a handsome space traveler like his buddy.

  The trip back was real pleasant. For one thing, the cabin and hold didn’t stink. Not even a little bit. Becker had to keep looking around to make sure Roadkill was still aboard because the whole ship had stopped smelling like cat piss. It was a smell you got used to, but it was nice to get used to not smelling it. For another thing, they were making really good time, even though they had been traveling vast uncharted distances from their—well, Becker’s—home world.

  Theophilus Becker had been much more than just a junk dealer—er—salvage broker. He was a salvage broker, a recycling engineer, and an astrophysicist. Jonas’s new master, who liked to be called Dad, was also just a tad on the reckless side. The man liked nothing better than riding the wild wormhole, finding the quirks in quarks. He’d known how to detect those places where time and space pleated up, accordion-style, to be shot through for a shortcut by a space-farer with the guts to use them. Jonas had learned a great deal from Theophilus.

  So it was a matter of only a month or so before Becker, with RK trotting along beside him like a dog, showed up in front of his favorite bawdyhouse. A girl he didn’t recognize came to the door. She was fully dressed in a long-sleeved coverall fastened clear to her neck, not the attire he was accustomed to in this place.

  “Oh, Lord, not another one,” she said.

  “You don’t sound glad to see me,” he replied, smiling. It had never been customary to bring flowers or any other greenery here—just a few hundred credits and the courtship was complete.

  “When will you men get the word that this is an honest establishment for making safety belts for flitters now? The Didis are history.”

  “History?” Jonas felt stupid. “I like history. What do you mean, history? Where’s Didi Yasmin?”

  “In jail, where she belongs. Where have you been? Outer space?”

  “As a matter of fact, yeah,” he said. “Why is she in jail?”

  “I haven’t got time enough to tell you,” the girl said. “But you might try asking some of the kids on Maganos—little girls she forced into prostitution.” She glared at him.

  “Hey, not with me! No, don’t look at me that way. I like big girls—grown up girls, women, actually. I never—aw…”

  His hostess’s attention was diverted by Roadkill, who was rubbing against her ankles. She reached down and petted him, then picked him up. “What a pretty kitty,” she said.

  “Lady, I wouldn’t do that,” Becker said. “He’ll take your arm off.”

  But RK, the traitor, lay happily purring in her arms, butting up against her chin with the top of his head, shamelessly cadging caresses. Becker wished he could do the same thing.

  “What’s his name?” the girl asked.

  “RK,” Becker hedged.

  “What does that stand for?” Now she was tickling the traitor’s tummy. It was white. Becker had had no idea that the cat’s belly was white. RK never wanted him to do any tickling. Quite the contrary.

  “Refugee Kitty,” Becker lied, knowing that the truth would not go down well with her. “I found him on a derelict ship—his people had been killed in a freak accident and he was in a bad way.”

  He hoped this would elevate him in her estimation from a simple child molester to a child molester who was at least apparently kind to animals. “And my name is Jonas. Jonas Becker. What’s yours?”

  “Khetala,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “I can’t say the same to you, Mr. Becker. You’ll find Kezdet has changed quite a bit since the Didis and the Piper got what was coming to them. Maybe you considered the houses harmless fun, but I was forced to work in one before the Lady Epona liberated us. I don’t share your attitude.”

  “Hey, I understand. I was slave farm labor myself but I got adopted out. I—” She was staring at him stonily. Even he knew it wasn’t the same. His voice drifted off into confusion and he reached for RK, who took a slice at him. Becker ignored the cat’s reluctance to be dislodged and firmly, if painfully, extricated him from Khetala’s arms. “We—uh—nice meeting you—we’ll just be going now.”

  She turned on her heel and went back inside.

  One good thing about meeting her. He wasn’t in the mood anymore for what he had always let pass for love. So it was time to get back to work instead. He’d always found making money a fairly acceptable substitute for most pleasurable pursuits.

  Before he went to the trouble of renting a container cruiser and offloading his cargo, he made a few inquiries about the state of the market. He was grat
ified to find that the Lady Epona who had so thoroughly cleansed the planet of evil hadn’t minded junk, presumably as long as its purveyors weren’t litterbugs.

  The nano-bug market was still flourishing. He took a look around before settling in for the day. It was getting harder to find a real good deal anymore. The original Mars probe, still in prime condition (because it hadn’t worked in the first place), had been recovered by a guy who used to work for Red Planet Reclamation—the outfit that was supposed to return planets to their pristine condition after the minerals were stripped. The guy wanted enough for it to build a whole new planet from scratch. Becker shook his head and moved on. He also found a great booth for rock-hounds. He was particularly attracted to four new gemstones he hadn’t seen before—bairdite, giloglite, nadezdite, and acornite. Bairdite was a multicolored opaque stone with a pebbly crystalline surface striped both ways with red and yellow—probably iron and sulfur deposits. Giloglite was the color of serpentine, only translucent and cloudy. Nadezdite was a transparent purple with gold flecks, and the acornite was a blue-green stone that cleared in the middle to the most gorgeous deep teal transparency he had ever seen in any rock, real or manufactured. The sequence of names sounded familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite think why.