Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  “What do we trade if we manufacture nothing ourselves?” Acorna wanted to know.

  “Think about it, Khornya,” Thariinye said. “What problems do industrial societies have that we can cure?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Pollution, of course! Their manufacturing processes create toxins we can neutralize.”

  “But mindful of the example of the Ancestors,” the attendant intoned, “our envoys, emissaries, and tradesmen do not disclose the true source of our power.”

  “Of course not,” said another of the white-skinned Linyaari greeting committee. “Our trading partners do not realize the purification power lies in our horns. They think it is a mechanical process—centered in these little devices we take with us which they believe effectively dispel pollution and contamination on their worlds. Though they’ve also figured out the devices only work in the hands of Linyaari technicians.”

  “Thus, profiting from the examples of the Ancestors and the Ancestral Hosts, the vast majority of our people can live a pastoral lifestyle uncontaminated by the processes which would compromise those things we value,” a golden-colored Linyaari concluded.

  Neeva interjected, with a mixture of amusement and annoyance, “Fortunately for those who embrace only the agrarian lifestyle, our people are not of a hive mentality. While we sometimes communicate telepathically, that by no means indicates that we all agree, or think alike. There are many of us who find endless pastoralism stultifyingly boring and tedious. Some Linyaari prefer to study science and physics, to enjoy the challenge and adventure of space travel and other more technological pursuits. We have many among our kind who are inventors, who design the devices, techniques, and programs we need, and adapt alien technologies to our purposes. We space-farers serve our people as envoys and traders to supply new markets for Linyaari skills and goods, and to bring back those things our people prefer not to manufacture for ourselves.”

  “And we are content that you do so, Visedhaanye, and even grateful for the many conveniences, improvements, and innovations you bring us, so long as you do not undertake to do your work here, or make us join you out there,” said another white-skinned Linyaari with a slight shudder. “One journey in the blackness of space will serve most of us for a lifetime. And how you can live out most of your life inside a large machine, however beautifully decorated, is beyond me.”

  “I must admit,” Khaari said, “after ghaanyi in a space ship, I do love coming home—to the agrarian life where one grazes, not from a hydroponics tank, but in a real garden or field with bugs and birds and unexpected treats among the wildflowers and weeds.”

  “There are not many birds here, honored lady,” the peridot-green-uniformed attendant of the peridot-blanketed Ancestor Khaari rode said sadly. “Great grandfather here sadly misses their singing.”

  “As do I,” said the aagroni sadly. “As do I.”

  Four

  Kisla Manjari’s pout at losing the junk man and his wild cat as victims rapidly disappeared when her sandaled foot encountered a hard object on the ground. “Ouch!” she said, and bent down to pick up what she had thought was an offending rock, in order to fling it after Becker. Then she saw what it was.

  “Two unicorn horns? That girl only had one, Daddy,” she said to her father, a figure she alone could see. She saw him as she always saw him now, dressed in his finest ceremonial clothes with the blood just beginning to flow from the wound in his neck, the way it had flowed the day he died. “Where did the other one come from? The junk man said he gave me the only one. He said he had no more. He was lying, the low-born space scum.”

  “You must never let people get away with lying to us, Kisla. You should punish him,” her father told her.

  “Oh, yes. I will, Daddy, of course I will. I’ll make him tell. But if these horns are real, which one is hers, do you think?”

  “Kisla, I think this is a grave matter upon which you should consult your Uncle Edacki. He will be able to advise and help you.”

  “Yes, Daddy, I’ll do just that,” she said. She turned to her staff. The androids were quite accustomed to Kisla’s seemingly solo conversations and paid no attention to them. “I want you to finish loading the container and then stop at the registration office and find out the junk man’s name and where his ship is docked. We’ll be wanting to pay him a call later. Right now I am going to visit my guardian. In the meantime, take these things to my personal hangar and have the workmen begin integrating the useful parts into my vessels. Await my instructions there.”

  “As you wish, Lady Kisla,” said the latest model among them. Since most of Uncle Edacki’s human servants were too slow and stupid to suit her, he had instead given her four of his androids for her staff. They were obedient, and were not always crying or bleeding like the human servants.

  Count Edacki Ganoosh gave his ward a slow, appreciative smile as he handled the unicorn horns she had brought him. Kisla Manjari was psychotic, of course, but she was not as stupid as many people assumed. And perhaps the craziness would lessen, over time. After all, it was bound to be a shock to a young girl to see her father kill her mother and then himself after being denounced as an arch-criminal in front of the most respected citizens of Kezdet. He’d been there that night, and it had certainly shocked him. Since Kisla was a very self-centered girl, one might have assumed that discovering that she was adopted, and had been born the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute, would have been the main shock of that night to her, but once it turned out that her parents had died before the state could officially confiscate all their holdings, and that she, Kisla, was their only heir, that part of the horror seemed to have slipped her mind. The government had still confiscated most of the Manjari empire, but Count Edacki, as the girl’s appointed guardian, had pleaded that the girl was not a criminal and should be left with certain holdings among the Baron’s legitimate enterprises, enough to constitute a solid trust fund for her upkeep, education, and a hefty income for the remainder of her life. Count Edacki secretly suspected the girl also knew of certain secret holdings the government had not yet located. Large holdings, he believed. It was such a difficult job to gain the trust of an orphaned child. The count was thus pleased for more reasons than one that she had decided to show him the unicorn horns.

  “Excellent, my dear Kisla. You’ve done well,” he said, stroking the horns and wondering if it was true what the legends said of such horns having aphrodisiac properties.

  “I don’t need you to tell me that, Uncle,” Kisla seethed. “I need you to help me find out why there are two and which one belongs to that girl who is responsible for the deaths of my parents and the theft of my property.”

  “You are impetuous, little one,” he said, laying the horns aside in order to rise from the soothing bath of rose-colored gelatinous mud from the fragrant swamps of the Haidian rain forests. Having dismissed his valet at Kisla’s insistence, the count was forced to wrap himself in his massage robe of the deepest purple plush. He then made himself comfortable on the bed-like couch that bracketed the gel pool. “While it is certainly possible that one of these may belong to Acorna, I believe word of her death would have reached us, and it has not. However, these horns might well belong to one of the others of her kind.”

  “What others?” Kisla demanded.

  “Why, the other unicorn people who came to fetch the girl a few months ago.”

  “I knew nothing of this,” Kisla said.

  “My dear, you were still distracted with grief. That and the legal affairs your late lamented father left concerning your legacy. I did not feel it was a proper time to trouble you with the news then. Oh, yes. Four others, I believe. It seems Acorna was not a goddess, as the little child laborers believed, but simply an alien creature who, being as highly evolved as they are all generally supposed to be, took it upon herself to correct what she considered our less fortunate social behaviors and economic practices.”

  “These horns could belong to them then, to those other unicorn aliens who came to g
et her?” Kisla asked. She could see a plan dawning in Uncle Edacki’s eyes.

  “Oh, yes. Or any others of her race, though they were unknown to our species before your little friend arrived.”

  “She’s no friend of mine.” Kisla spat.

  “No, of course not. I was being facetious. The junk man will have to be questioned, of course. If there are two of these, there may be more, and he must tell us where he obtained them.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Kisla said.

  “Yes, my dear. But be careful. We don’t want him to die before we’ve learned all that we need to. In the meantime, I think we really must sacrifice one of these to determine its properties and composition. I have heard miraculous things about Acorna. That her horn could heal and purify and even—no, now I’m confusing rumor with ancient legend.”

  Kisla had seated herself on the edge of the couch beside his head and now she leaned over him and spoke into his ear. “Don’t misunderstand us, Uncle. If there is a profit to be made from these, we want it, Daddy and me. But most of all we want that girl, and all of her family, and all of her friends dead, the same way she killed my family and chased away all of my friends.”

  The count smiled up at his ward. The truth was, Kisla had never had any friends at all, but it would do no good to mention that. Nor to point out that she had, in the same breath, referred to the late Baron Manjari, her adopted father, as if he were still alive, and yet also admitted that her whole family was dead.

  Count Edacki patted Kisla’s hand. “Have no fear, child. I think that if these horns prove as useful as they are said to be, Acorna and her kind will soon become hunted throughout the galaxy as any other creature with a built-in treasure would be hunted. There are already those who seek them. But with these”—he tapped one of the horns—“and the use of a bit of research and a few contacts used wisely, I believe we may contrive to be the first to find them.”

  Once the skinny girl disappeared, and her henchmen had loaded Becker’s container with the goods she’d bought and left, RK crept out from under the table where he’d hidden, jumped up on its surface, and scattered the stones there as he made himself comfortable among them.

  And that was where Becker found the cat later, entertaining the strokes and pats of the children of the stone vendor and idly batting one of the smaller and more precious stones back and forth between his paws. The rock glinted blue, green, aqua, then back to blue again as the cat rolled it from paw to paw.

  “Nice cat, mister,” a boy of about five said. “What’ll ya take for him?”

  Becker cocked an eyebrow at him. “That’s the second offer I’ve had today.”

  “Don’t be dumb, Deeter,” a girl of about seven with the same red hair and freckles said. “You don’t buy and sell cats like this. Can’t you see he’s a Makahomian Temple Cat? They’re sacred, you know. Probably part of this man’s religion. I bet he’s a priest or something.”

  “Pope at least,” Becker agreed. “Him, I mean. I just work for him.”

  The vendor himself was rooting around in a box and when he stood up this time, Becker finally remembered his name. “Reamer! You’re Rocky Reamer!” he said.

  “You got it, buddy,” the man said. It was clear he was the daddy of these kids. He had the same red hair and freckles. “And say, I thought I recognized you, too, but if you’re the guy I’m thinking of, you look a little different. It’s Joe Becker, isn’t it?”

  “Joe, Jonas, whatever,” he said. “Yeah, that’s me, Becker. You know what? I just remembered why those stones I was looking at earlier sounded so familiar. What were the names again? Giloglite, bairdite, and nadezdite?”

  “That’s it,” Reamer said. “They’re from new deposits the kids on Maganos found and named for the Lady’s uncles. See, that one with the red and yellow in it that has a kinda plaid look to it? That’s for Calum Baird, who’s a Caledonian Celt like me. We had a geology class together once. The serpentine looking one is for that Iroid partner of his, Declan Giloglie, and the flashy one for his nouveau richeness himself, the heir and current manager of the House of Harakamian, Rafik Nadezda.”

  Becker grinned. “That’s what I thought. So Rafik’s uncle made him heir, huh? I never could tell if he hated the old man or admired him.”

  “A little of both, I guess. You know those guys, then?”

  “Yeah, we been chasing each other around the same big rocks for years. They were looking for the unoccupied ones and I was looking for the occupied or formerly occupied ones, so we didn’t get in each other’s way much.”

  RK had knocked the stone he was playing with off the table and was allowing himself to be distracted by a string dangled by Deeter.

  Becker picked the stone up from the ground. “And what did you call this one?”

  “That’s acornite.”

  “Where’s it from? A planet where all the plant life is also mineral? You maybe grow already petrified oak trees from it?”

  Reamer’s face was blank for a second, and then he grinned and chuckled.

  “No, silly,” the little girl said. “Don’t you know anything? It’s named for the Lady, of course!”

  “I thought her name was Epona…” Becker said. “If it’s the same one, I mean. I was told that was who was on Maganos, anyway, and you said that’s where Gil and Calum and Rafik are these days.”

  The little girl looked unsure of her information at this point and turned to her dad, who said, “Nah, that’s one of what you might call her titles. See, she and old man Li—he died this year, did you know?”

  “Delszaki Li died? Shards, I thought he was immortal in spite of the wheelchair.”

  “Nope, he finally died. Turned out he was head of the Liberation Movement that saved Kezdet. Li had already done some of the groundwork for the revolution, but nothing really got moving until Gil and his buddies brought the Lady down here. She didn’t know much about politics, but she knew for sure she didn’t like to see kids being sold into slavery. Took her about a year to bring down the houses and the Piper and start up the education and mining center on Maganos. Of course, it helped that she also forged an alliance between the houses of Harakamian and Li so she had almost unlimited money behind her. Anyway, the kids got real superstitious about her and some of them thought she was some kind of goddess, depending on the religions they’d had where they’d come from. So they call her Epona, Lady Lucia, or the Lady of the Light, but her name’s really Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li.”

  “Maybe I’ll go look up my old buddies then,” Becker said. “I’d like to meet this lady. I was a slave when I was a kid. If it hadn’t been for my adopted dad, I’d probably be dead now.”

  Reamer rubbed the red heads of his offspring. “I’ll tell you what, buddy, it sure makes me feel better knowing those places have been shut down. In case anything happens to me, I don’t have to worry about my kids getting sent to the mines or some godawful thing.”

  Becker thought for a minute, then pulled out the collection bag, carefully extracted one of the opalescent objects, and kept it concealed in the palm of his hand except to open the hand a little to let Reamer have a look. “While I’m at it, I think I just made a big mistake letting some of this go to a customer. It didn’t come from Maganos, but I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere. Do you know what it might be?”

  “Ho-oh-oly hematite!” Reamer said, touching the thing as if afraid it would burn him. “Where did you get that, Becker?” His voice was not very friendly this time, and his blue eyes had gone ice cold. “Kids, I want you to leave the cat alone and go get yourselves some candy,” he said, dropping a credit in each hand.

  “But, Dad…”

  “Scat!”

  They ran off and RK emitted a mournful and, for him, curiously resigned mew, watching his new friends disappear into the crowd.

  “That’s why you look different. You were missing an ear the last time I saw you!” Rocky said. It was an accusation.

  “What about it?”

&nbs
p; “People say the Lady’s horn can heal. Then you turn up with one like it and your ear fixed, so what am I supposed to think?”

  “Keep it down, will you? Jeez! I found it, I tell you. Does this lady of yours control everything? Wipes out child labor, closes the pleasure houses, and now you’re about to kill me because she has a horn like mine? So what? Maybe she found hers the same place I did.”

  “I don’t think so,” Reamer said coldly.

  “No? Why not? She might have.”

  “No way. Hers is growing from the middle of her forehead. At least it was, the last time anybody I know saw her.”

  Five

  The crew of the Balakiire and the dignitaries among the greeting committee rode the Ancestors into Kubiilikhan with as much pomp and circumstance as the Ancestors could give them. Acorna feared that if dignity was what the Ancestors wished to impart by having others ride them, in her case it was rather a lost cause. Her long legs dangled below the belly of the Ancestor she rode, so that her feet were almost as low as the unicorn’s cloven hooves.

  Riding the Ancestors certainly didn’t make the trip quicker, either. It took almost an hour to ride the two or three miles between the spaceport and the town, which at first seemed to be a tent city of massive gemhued, gold-trimmed, tasseled pavilions the size of the circus tents Acorna had seen pictured on vids and in the books at Uncle Hafiz’s. Walking would have been much quicker. The ki-lin of legend were supposed to be fleet of foot. If so, you couldn’t tell it by the Ancestors, who kept their pace to a slow, deliberate strut.

  Maybe it is because they are so ancient, Acorna thought, and immediately felt an impression of reprimand at the notion.

  (We’re as spry as we ever were, impudent youngling, and can beat you in a race any time, any place, just try us.)