Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  A moment later the Maganos communications officer said in the high and low cracking voice of a boy going through puberty, which he no doubt was since the moon was now a training facility for youngsters and the trainees provided the personnel for almost every phase of the operation, “Shahrazad, this is Maganos Base. We weren’t expecting Mr. Harakamian!”

  “We’re aware of that, Maganos Base. That’s why Mr. Harakamian wishes to speak to his nephew. Can you contact him please and put him on screen?”

  “I’ll try, Shahrazad. Just a tic.”

  But the face that appeared on the comscreen was not Rafik’s but Calum Baird’s. Hafiz placed himself in front of the communications officer so that his own face and voice would appear on Baird’s screen.

  “Ah, senior and ugliest wife of my nephew, how goes it?” Hafiz asked, delighting to see the color rise above Baird’s red beard at the mention of their first meeting, when Baird, as well as Acorna, had worn veils and a long gown to promote the idea that Rafik had become one of the fundamentalist polygamist Neo-Hadathians.

  “Not so bad, oh robber baron who makes Ali Baba’s forty thieves look like rank amateurs,” Baird responded. “But I regret to tell you that Rafik had to go to Rushima. Dr. Hoa had a spot of trouble he had to discuss with him.”

  “In that case, don’t wait up for us, my friend. We will go to Rushima instead for I must speak with my nephew personally. Ah—Baird?”

  “Yes?”

  “How is my nephew’s junior wife? Has anyone heard from her or the other members of the harem?”

  At first Baird looked puzzled and then he said, carefully, “We last heard from them as they were leaving this quadrant, about twenty days ago. They were all well and uh—looking forward to being united with their families.”

  “I see. And Baird?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your last cruise with the junior wife—would your plans have brought you to the destination you wished? Did the other harem members give you a clue?”

  “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, they did. We would have come within—uh—the anteroom of the seraglio, so to speak. Why?”

  “Oh, no reason. Just curious. A small wager I had with my own navigator. Nothing of any importance.”

  “Right,” Baird said, in a tone that clearly meant “pull the other one.”

  “Shahrazad out,” Hafiz said cheerfully.

  “Have a nice voyage,” Baird replied sweetly and with an exaggeratedly effeminate wiggle of his fingers. His bushy eyebrows were twisted with concern, however, and Hafiz knew that the Caledonian understood something of the nature of the business the Shahrazad had with Rafik.

  The Condor contained certain modifications that were not purely born of mechanical necessity. A bank of multifrequency scanners was arrayed directly in front on the control console. Next to the cargo, these scanners were the most important item contained on the ship, aside from the captain and first mate.

  Becker was constantly keeping a weather eye and ear open for distress signals, blips where there shouldn’t be blips homing beacons, any sort of indication that some vessel, station, planetoid, or whatever might now be or have been in trouble in the recent past. Of course, Becker had a first aid kit and was perfectly willing to assist survivors if necessary, but his interest was not solely humanitarian—or alienatarian, as the case might be. He simply wanted to know where trouble had been, where vessels or settlements might be abandoned, leaving behind equipment and other good stuff for an enterprising scavenger. His scanning devices were aided by other sensors that detected the physical presence of largish items in the Condor’s vicinity and, just as usefully, detected the absence of the usual detritus, an indication that one of the useful holes or folds in space might be at hand. While some of these things could be plotted, others sometimes occurred where they never had before. “Space moths,” Becker Senior had postulated. “Damn space moths been chewin’ in this sector again. Shall we see where this one goes, boy?”

  It wasn’t that it hadn’t ever occurred to Theophilus Becker that he might guide the Condor into one of these little byways in space that made life jolly for astrophysicists and never find his way out. It was that neither he nor Jonas usually had an actual schedule or anything so he felt free to poke around. While it was certainly possible they could become lost in infinity, as the old vids were always postulating, the senior Becker held the opinion that there was a pattern and a predictability to these wrinkles in the space/time continuum within a given area. It was an opinion he hadn’t shared with much of anyone but Jonas, who figured what was good enough for Dad was good enough for him and took the same cavalier attitude toward worm-holes and such, new or used.

  Normally he didn’t go out of his way to pay these instruments undue attention as long as they were working. If he didn’t notice, RK often did and would sit staring pointedly at one screen or another until Becker did likewise.

  But he was a little nervous about being followed by Kisla Manjari and company and also was on the lookout to restock the inventory as soon as possible.

  As soon as he had cleared Kezdet and her moons, he turned his attention to the scanners. He hadn’t expected to be sought real soon, actually, but one of the short-range scanners was keeping up a continuous, pulsing bleep. It had to be close, but he couldn’t see its source on any of the screens.

  “Well, doggone it anyway,” he said. “Where are you, little bleep?”

  It bleeped again. Still nothing on the screen though he looked fast, as if he was expecting the visual manifestation of the sound to be playing peekaboo with him.

  By the time the Condor had cleared Kezdet’s solar system and warped through a couple of wormholes, Becker was getting pretty tired of the beep. He also noticed that RK wasn’t hanging out on deck much anymore. When they were back to cruising through what was usually calm empty space, Becker went below decks with a can of fish he’d picked up on Kezdet before hitting the pleasure house, intending that RK should be able to take it as an offering to his temporary mate. There was quite a bit of time before the Condor hit the next “black water,” as Theophilus Becker liked to refer to the pleated, holey portions of space where he found his best shortcuts.

  “RK? Hey, cat! Where the hell are you?”

  He finally found the cat by the smell and the noise. Since acquiring the sack of horns, Becker hadn’t smelled RK’s particular perfume but right now C-deck reeked of it. Which reminded him that RK was once more a fully functional male cat with the begetting capabilities and prerogatives thereof, supposing there had been a lady cat who was interested.

  Which fortunately there wasn’t. Becker didn’t even want to think of a ship with a whole bunch of little Roadkill clones playing hide and seek through the cargo.

  Meanwhile, if the cat was going to stink stuff up, Becker would just have to wear nose plugs or carry a hanky with something pleasanter to counter the stench—garlic maybe. If it worked with vampires, maybe it would work with cats.

  It better, because Roadkill was damn sure going to stay fully equipped. No way was Becker going to go through that again. It made his two formerly missing and now mostly restored fingers ache just thinking about it.

  Finally, the stink led him to the cat, claws scrabbling at the side of the cargo hold that opened to the outside. This hold had been the airlock of the hatch of an ancient model of Antirean space craft, and it fit well into a hole Becker had to fill during one of his impromptu redesigning sessions of the Condor.

  “Mrrrrow!” RK said, looking up at Becker as if to say, “It’s about time you got here, you damn fool. Help me out with this, huh?”

  Becker had rigged a bin-style entry door to the hold that opened outward. The door was totally slimed with RK’s personal signature testosterone blend.

  “Okay, cat, why didn’t you say so before?” Becker asked, but realized he had been busy at the controls when he wasn’t sleeping. Besides which, RK was used to keeping his own counsel. He knew how to get Becker’s attention when he w
anted it. He had obviously just preferred to work on his own so far. Becker had to admit that he couldn’t have improved on the job RK had done on the cargo hold door. It was well and truly slimed—a piece of feline artwork in its own way. Becker had to find a piece of cloth to wipe off the mess before he could punch the button that opened the hold.

  The hold door fell open, rather than sliding. And lying on the inside of it was what looked like a dead man.

  A familiar-looking dead man—and not just familiar looking. Becker knew who the fellow was from the torn and stinky pant leg.

  “No wonder you were carrying on,” Becker said aloud to Roadkill. “It’s your old scratching post, hitching an unauthorized ride.”

  He put his hands under the android’s armpits and started hauling him out of the cargo hold. There was a pulse. Funny. These older models didn’t have a true circulatory system. There was something strangely familiar about that pulse though, and as soon as Becker hauled the guy back to the command deck and heard the little steady bleep again, he knew what it was.

  “Well, RK, here’s our little homing pigeon, giving away our position with every beat of his heavy metal heart. Shee-it. I wonder if you can hear this thing through wormholes?”

  Kisla Manjari pitched a fit when she saw what had become of her mechanoid henchmen. “He killed them!” she told her uncle. “Smashed them with his junk then took off with one of them—stole it. Stole my KEN unit! He can’t get away with that—oh, no.”

  “Certainly not, my dear,” Uncle Edacki said smoothly. He could see the scene in question on her portable comscreen. “Most unwise of him indeed.”

  “I wonder why KEN640 doesn’t answer when I try to reach him,” Kisla said. “He is still operational, according to his sonid button. He should answer and obey my command to kill the junk man and bring his ship back here.”

  “Hmmm, perhaps,” Uncle Edacki said. “But, Kisla darling, are you sure that would be the best use of this fortuitous situation?”

  “What do you mean fortuitous? They were my units! Now who will help me assemble my fleet?”

  “I’ll get you some others. But for the time being, you say you are still receiving the signal from 640’s sonid, and 640 is presumed to be with Becker in his craft going—where? To their next destination. Which will be—where do you suppose?”

  “Back to where he found the horns?” she asked, the light dawning finally.

  “And the sonid signal, with its tiny trail of electrons—”

  “Will let me track him and everything!” Kisla said, very excited. “Oh, Uncle, may I?”

  “Yes, sweetie. You are doing so well today—first finding the horns, then cleverly arranging for your unit to be captured so we can track Becker by the signal. Just for that you may handpick a crew and take command of the Midas in order to follow Becker’s trail.”

  “Oh, Uncle, you are the best!”

  “Nonsense, my dear, you’ve earned the privilege.”

  Edacki Ganoosh signed off with a feeling of satisfaction at a job well done. He would have his horns one way or the other now, both with Kisla tracking her android to find Becker’s source, and then there was the little matter of sending the Pandora to follow a similar sonid implanted in certain key employees—such as Yasmin, who was even now emitting her signal from her hiding place aboard the Shahrazad.

  Honestly, the things a girl had to do to get out of jail. Confronting her almost-ex-husband wasn’t so bad—there had always been a better-than-average chance he might try to buy her off, if she had been able to act sad enough about poor dead Tapha. Well, she hadn’t. Tapha was no great loss to anyone. And really, she would have almost paid for the opportunity to see Hafiz’s face when he realized what the powdered horn was. That made up for all the cracks about her acting and dancing ability when they were married.

  Actually, what with being supplied all the security codes she didn’t already know, it had been no trouble to smuggle herself aboard the Shahrazad, like her bosses told her. It wasn’t that Yasmin wasn’t perfectly comfortable either, even though she felt that as Hafiz’s senior wife she should have been occupying the master suite instead of the quarters generally assigned to the pedicurist. She chose those herself because, as the pedicurist was one of the lesser servants, her quarters were farthest away from those of the family and other crew members. Here Yasmin could be as inconspicuous as a little mousie while all the time the transmitters she would sprinkle about the Shahrazad could send signals back to her bosses so they could monitor its movement.

  But what got to Yasmin was that it was just too, too cruel of the bosses to make her go along on a “honeymoon trip” with Hafiz and that big cow he had married, thinking to replace her.

  Never mind. She’d fix the wedded bliss stuff. It had never been all that blissful for her. All those cracks Hafiz had made about which end she thought with, all that worry about trying to keep her looks so her rich husband wouldn’t get ideas. Keep her looks, hah! To think of all the dieting she had done to keep her shape and here he was with that—that—rhino-whale in purple robes!

  So even though she was supposed to keep a low profile and let the Shahrazad lead her bosses to the unicorn people planet, where the bosses would then put her in charge of punishing Hafiz and his new playmate, Yasmin couldn’t resist playing a few little tricks. Well, if a girl couldn’t turn a few tricks, the least she could do was play some, huh?

  She had, of course, bugged the boudoir. She really couldn’t imagine failing to do so. It was a standard security measure in the brothels. Kept the girls from cheating by keeping tips for themselves, or the customers from becoming enamored with a particular girl and trying to run off with her.

  She was delighted, on hearing the pillow talk between her husband and his new “wife,” that neither of them had told the other about their encounters with her. These little deceptions on their part opened many exciting possibilities for troublemaking on hers.

  Her familiarity with Hafiz’s tastes and habits helped, as well as Karina’s penchant for “meditation” and believing her superstitious nonsense about dreams and communication from the dead, that sort of thing.

  Yasmin might not be a brain but she was a very practical woman, in her own way, with no sentiment in her makeup. She believed in the physical, and in what she could buy and sell. If anybody thought she was jealous of Hafiz’s new bride, or even of the lap of luxury Karina had fallen into, they should just think again. After all, she, Yasmin, had abandoned all of that to follow her personal star.

  But she thought it was really insulting that Hafiz had been able to forget her, to replace her with someone he actually claimed to like better! She, Yasmin, was the unforgettable beauty, the succubus who haunted men’s dreams. How dare another woman think she could fill Yasmin’s place in Hafiz’s bed!

  Of course, despite her considerable premarital experience, Yasmin had been little more than a gifted amateur when she married Hafiz compared to what she knew now, but she couldn’t imagine how, after tasting her own charms, Hafiz could so much as bear to look at that fat, ugly, insipid cow who was not fit to fill Yasmin’s douche bag!

  When Karina returned to her “meditation chamber” to consult her spirit guides, as she had done before, Yasmin hovered on the floor above, listening through the replicator that was connected in the same spot on the wall through both levels. She’d discovered how easy it was to hear Karina’s spiritual rantings quite by accident while planting one of the transmitters in the replicator shortly after the journey began.

  Karina tended to “meditate” out loud when nobody was around.

  “Yoo hoo, Mr. Li! It is I, Karina, your dear friend and faithful follower. I ask you to manifest answers for me. Hafiz—that’s my husband, you know him, Hafiz Harakamian, you did business together in life? He wishes to know what you would have us do. You see, Mr. Li, I keep getting this image of you looking back over your shoulder. Are you disturbed, gentle spirit? Are you disoriented by this departure from your home planet? Or—
” The fat woman paused and her voice quavered as she asked, “Are you trying to warn us somehow?”

  Yasmin couldn’t think of any reply to that so she waited. And waited.

  So did Karina until she said finally, “Mr. Li, you know you can tell me. Come on, what is it that’s troubling you? Funny, but I can’t even get an image. It’s as if there is some sort of interference in the ether. Oh well, perhaps you’re not feeling very sociable today. Hmm. Are there any other spirit guides who wish to make contact? I am here to help you.”

  Yasmin’s lips curled back in a snarl that would have earned her a severe scolding from her cosmetic surgeon for making unsightly creases in his work. While it was true that while in a vertical position, Yasmin was not an imaginative woman, she was after all an entertainer of sorts and as such had a highly developed flair for the dramatic. She wasn’t about to pass up an opening like this one.

  Wishing she had the gauzy veils she had danced with and discarded in one of her old numbers, the better to haunt Karina with, she settled for letting her low voice rumble through the replicator. “Beeeewaarrre…” she said, trying to sound all dead and ghostly.

  “Well, yes,” Karina said. “I do realize that I should beware of a great many things. I’m afraid you’ll have to be a more specific—er—entity. Can you tell me who you are? I’ve never encountered a haunted replicator before.”

  Yasmin was far too clever to give her own name, of course, especially since she had, very much in the flesh, confronted Karina, who nevertheless had failed thus far to mention the visitation to Hafiz. From that omission, Yasmin gathered that she must have been mistaken for one of Karina’s less corporeal acquaintances. The fat idiot thought she was a ghost.

  Yasmin quickly stripped her right ring finger of the four rings she had piled on top of the dinky gold wedding band in the shape of a snake Hafiz had bought for her and sent the wedding band down the replicator chute. On the inside of the ring was her name entwined with Hafiz’s, and their wedding date. Yasmin hated to let go of even that insignificant amount of gold, but it would almost be worth Karina’s weight in gold to see the stupid sow’s complacency shaken up.