Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  Sixteen

  Roadkill!” Becker cried, and the cat jumped back as if scalded. But there was nothing wrong with the critter. Not a thing. “Hey, buddy, I got hit and from what I could see, you got hit. Why don’t we hurt? If we already died and went to heaven, it’s a lot darker than advertised up here.”

  “Riidkiii?” a voice asked. It was not the cat’s voice. The cat was washing vigorously, taking inventory of all of his parts. A gray, shambling, lumpish form appeared, hovering over Becker. The face was long and the forehead had a caved-in look to it. Matted, filthy hair surrounded it. The figure was pointing to the cat.

  “No, man. Roadkill. Road. Kill. It’s a joke.”

  “Riid. Kiiyi.” The figure tried hard, but his tongue couldn’t seem to cut through.

  “Yeah, see, the joke is from back before flitters, when we all traveled in wheeled conveyances which rolled on the ground along paved stretches on planetary surfaces called roads. Critters like RK here—okay, Riid Kiiyi, if you insist—critters like him would wander out on the road and get squashed. Like he almost did.”

  The figure stroked RK’s back and the cat rose up to meet the clubbed-looking hand. Becker had thought something was wrong with the hand before, and now he saw that each finger lacked a knuckle, and the hand didn’t have enough fingers. The guy’s feet were screwed up, too. They looked more like a goat’s feet—cloven hooves—than like a person’s feet.

  “Riid Kiiyi Khleevi?” inquired the figure—a male, Becker decided, from the overall stance and bearing of the creature.

  “No, Riid—Roadkill isn’t whatever you said. Roadkill is a cat. A Makahomian Temple Cat, to be precise. Makahomian Temple Cats are bred from ancient Makahomian Cat God stock to be defenders of the temples of—ah—Makahoma. They are very fierce fighters. I guess RK kinda thinks of the Condor as his temple now and me—I must be the pope at least! That’s how come the little guy waded into Kisla’s gang, even when he could have got away. Nice kitty,” he said, and petted RK, who growled a little.

  That was when Becker noticed that the funny looking guy had a little boxy device he had positioned between himself and Becker. Becker touched it. “What’s this?”

  The other guy pointed to Becker’s mouth and made a shadow duck quacking in the flickering light cast on the wall by the fire burning in the—cave? It had to be a cave they were in. When had the fire been lit? Becker didn’t remember a fire. Maybe he wasn’t yet one hundred percent recovered. Must be still lapsing in and out of consciousness.

  So—Becker’s mouth, quacking—speaking maybe—then the man made a sweeping motion with both hands that clearly meant exchange—and pointed to his own mouth. “Linyaari.”

  “That your name? Linyaari? I’m Becker. Me. Becker,” he said, feeling like the lead character in one of those ancient icons of classic film, Tarzan. He pointed to himself. “Becker.” To the cat, who rose up again, to allow himself to be stroked, “Roadkill.” Back to himself: “Becker.” He pointed to the man again and asked, “Linyaari?”

  The man made a sweeping motion with both hands and arms to indicate either the whole cave or possibly the whole planet. “Linyaari.” Then pointed to himself. “Aari.”

  “Ari? You’re Ari! Hi, Ari. Jonas Becker. Much obliged for the rescue.”

  “Muk oblii!” Aari responded. “Hii, Biickir.” The filth on his face ran with wet streaks, glistening in the firelight. “Hii, Riid. Kiiyi.” The cat climbed onto Aari’s folded legs and began to purr.

  Over time, Becker wasn’t sure how much time exactly, Aari’s grasp of Standard improved. Aari encouraged Becker to talk and used different words as Becker brought them up. The little translator didn’t give Becker much of a grasp of Linyaari, which was clearly the language and race that Aari belonged to, and the race that had once occupied this planet.

  The coin dropped after Becker had more sleep under his belt. This planet was the one with the horns. The horns that had been mistaken for a very personal horn belonging to the Lady Acorna, the unicorn girl. That must be her race. Linyaari. The same as this guy.

  Except this guy didn’t have a unicorn horn. Maybe only the girls did? Nah—quite unwillingly, Becker looked more closely at the injury to Aari’s forehead. Then he threw up what was left of the last handful of cat food. Oh, great, pretty soon he’d be hacking up hairballs, too.

  But what he had seen, when he looked, was that there was a place where Aari probably had had a horn. Now it was a deep, partially scarred-over crater that gave the guy the appearance of having a crushed forehead.

  Aari saw him looking and pulled the matted hair down over the wound as far as he could, shaking his head and weeping again.

  “Aari, buddy, what happened here? What happened to you?”

  “Khleevi,” he said, and then made motions where his horn should have been that made Becker want to vomit again, only there was nothing there to vomit, just as there was nothing more on Aari’s forehead for anyone to torture him with.

  “How in the hell did you get away? How did you survive?” Becker asked.

  “Vhiliinyar,” was the only Linyaari word Becker heard and then, the funny thing was, he sort of understood the rest of what had happened without actually being aware of anything Aari was saying. At first he thought that the universal translator gadget was actually working both ways, and then something made him realize that he and Aari were reading each other’s minds—and a third mind as well.

  RK very carefully sunk a single claw into Becker’s leg and Becker knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that RK could hear and understand the thoughts of both of them and could have transmitted thoughts, too, if he’d wanted to. The cat just preferred body language. As far as he could see, RK wanted Becker to try to learn Cat. It was beneath a cat’s dignity to speak human Standard, Becker figured. Then it hit him.

  “Hey, you’re telepathic! And so are we, when we’re with you!”

  Aari shook his head and picked up one of the horns, then made a sweeping motion with his hands, and an exchanging motion between his head, Becker’s and RK’s. Then he pointed to his own forehead, made a negative swipe with his hand, and hung his head.

  “So we understand each other telepathically because of the horns, huh?” Becker asked.

  Aari sighed deeply, shook his head to indicate that wasn’t the case, shrugged, and looked perplexed. RK sunk his claw into Becker’s leg again and fixed him with another stare, which to Becker’s somewhat rattled brain seemed to say that RK had been reading his mind all along; he just didn’t much care what Becker thought. Becker guessed he was reading the cat because—well, he had always read the cat, really, but now he had nothing better to do so he noticed.

  Aari smiled a little, and Becker could tell the Linyaari was reading him.

  Aari projected a few careful images that showed him with his horn, communing wordlessly with other people that looked just like him. So, he had been telepathic when he had his own horn. Fair enough.

  Becker didn’t ask again what had happened to the guy’s horn but Aari grimly showed them how it had been when the Khleevi were about to finish him off and, having broken his body, excised his horn in a particularly slow and painful way. He backtracked to show them how he had been captured. Aari had stayed behind during the Khleevi invasion to help his brother, who had been stuck in this cave, badly injured, too far away from the spaceport for them to get help from the ships departing with all of their people during the great evacuation. Aari had been unable to reach him in time to heal him.

  The Khleevi had captured Aari when he was out gathering rope for the rescue, and had begun long, long tortures of their captive, all the time probing, probing, as if trying to feast on his grief. They had captured some of the translator boxes from previous diplomatic missions—LAANYE, Aari called them—and used them to communicate with him, to interrogate him, though they surely learned little that could be of help to them. What he knew that they might have wished to know, he never told.

  Aari did not speak of his bro
ther, or of the new planet his people had found. The foremost thoughts in his mind were grief. His brother would be dead from his wounds by now, so he grieved, and grieved more as the Khleevi destroyed him, along with his planet. He grieved for the loss of his people, for the simultaneous destruction of his own body and the body of his home world, grieved at the pain, and the memories of better times. And all the time the Khleevi stood by jeering and gloating over their methodical ravaging of the beauty and life force of a planet and one of its children, the only one within their grasp.

  “Did they kill all those other people, too?” Becker wanted to know. “I found all those horns.”

  “No,” Aari said, and Becker felt triumph in the thought as Aari carried a light to the back of the cave. It was filled with horns and bones, carefully arranged into individual skeletons whenever possible. “These are the bones of my Ancestors. When you landed the first time, you discovered our graveyard. The residual power of the horns kept that area living when the rest of the world was destroyed. The Khleevi never knew of this sacred place, and I did not tell them. They found me some distance from it.

  “When the instability they caused in Vhiliinyar by their destruction caused the planet to drive them from its face, leaving me behind for dead, I dragged myself back here, and slept among the horns. Most of my wounds were healed—you cannot imagine the shape I was in before then. I did not resemble anything Linyaari. But the Khleevi had done something to me that prevented the horns from truly healing me, though nothing could block the process completely.

  “And so—” His eyes rolled slightly up, to where his horn had been. “And so even the healing power of the horns did not make me truly whole again, for among the Linyaari healing rests not only in the horn but in the guiding intelligence and empathy of the healer. After the Khleevi tortured me, I was incapable of participating in my healing. The horn merely knit together that which was broken. Except for my own horn. All of the horns of our dead could not give me back my own horn.

  “Still, the healing was enough that I could gather a few of the horns that lay on top of the ground and return to the cave. But the Khleevi had held me a long time and my brother had lain injured for a long time, waiting for my return to rescue and heal him. He was with the Ancestors, beyond the power of the horns to heal.”

  “But even without your horn, you can still read minds and everything, right? ’Cause you were telepathic before and—”

  “The horns are like—um—things on the heads of insects?” Aari put his hands up to make antennae and Becker supplied the word. “They transmit our thoughts but the ability is in the Linyaari. Without my own horn, I cannot make myself heard. I do not know how. But surrounded by so many, many horns, I have many antennae. You have antennae, too, and Riid Kiiyi.”

  “I get it. I think,” Becker said. “So, tell me, why didn’t you let me know you were here when I came the first time?” Becker said. “I would have helped you. I could have taken you to your people at their new place.”

  “You were robbing graves,” Aari said with a little shrug. “I thought you might be Khleevi of another sort. Besides, I feel—shame—at my own appearance. I do not wish to see my people again—well, more precisely, I do not wish for them to see me as I am now. They will shudder to look upon me. But I could not let the bones of our Ancestors be defiled anymore. So when you left, I disinterred the Ancestors, and brought them here to a new place.”

  “That’s why there weren’t any horns there. Well, look, Aari, it’s a good thing you did that because that gal you saw kicking the shit out of me? She has some use for the horns, and I can almost guarantee you it isn’t a happy one. Good thing your home world here decided to pop off a few explosions—”

  Aari pointed to himself again.

  “You did that?” Becker asked. “How?”

  Aari walked to the back of the cave and picked up something that was obviously a very nasty weapon. He pointed to it, said, “Khleevi,” and made a booming sound, then set it back down.

  “Is there anything to eat around here, by the way?”

  “Oh, of course. Excuse my rudeness.” Aari bent down, there was a tearing sound, and he returned with a big handful of grass.

  RK put it better than Becker could have. He looked at the grass and meowed piteously.

  Aari looked crestfallen and again Becker caught an impression of overwhelming shame.

  “You will starve because I cannot feed you that which you need to sustain life. Riid Kiiyi will starve also,” Aari said.

  “Not if we can help it. We just have to find a way to get back into the Condor. Kisla-baby tap-danced on my remote.”

  The three of them returned to the former graveyard. The grass was dying already, turning brown and brittle without the power of the horns. Becker found the pieces of his remote where Kisla had left it. It was smashed so badly even he couldn’t fix it.

  They tried a couple of horns but the horns didn’t seem to work on electronics. However, Becker did have some emergency backups. Not easy ones, not convenient ones, but he had them.

  By standing on Aari’s shoulders, he was able to grasp a tail fin and haul himself to within reaching distance of a particular area near the hatch. Touching that, he whistled the bar of “Dixie” that was the opening code. An encoder implanted inside the hull translated his whistle into electronic code. Then all he had to do was slide back down the tail fin and drop to the ground before the robolift descended on his head.

  He and RK climbed aboard and chowed down. He grabbed the spare remote he had stashed in the ventilation duct, and then he and RK returned to the surface with a bag of freeze-dried veggies for Aari.

  The Linyaari was busy hauling loads of bones to the Condor.

  “I must set aside my shame now and ask you to take me to narhii-Vhiliinyar, the new home of my people. I must take the remains of our forebears with me. This world has become unsafe even for the dead.”

  For Markel, the Haven’s ventilation system was home sweet home. He had hidden in it and made his way around the ship after the Palomellese bandits had killed his father.

  Trained in warfare or not, the Starfarers did have one advantage over the Red Bracelets, and that was that they knew their ship. When it became clear they were caught in a trap, Markel had naturally suggested the ventilation system as a hiding place for the younger ones and the ship’s “guests.” He, Johnny Greene, and Khetala, along with the Reamer family and Starfarers under the age of five, would hide in the ducts from Decks A to D, which could be blocked off from the rest of the ship and supplied with their own oxygen.

  Of them all, only Markel realized that this section was also where many of the bandits had been gassed to death while trying to pursue him, Acorna, Calum Baird, and Dr. Hoa after Markel had rescued Acorna. As he lay flat in the duct, not speaking, hardly breathing, with perhaps a hundred other bodies lying in the same fashion down the length of the ducts, he thought he could still smell the lingering pong of the poison gas they had used. But, of course, that was ridiculous. It had been many months since the Palomellese had been overwhelmed, gassed, or spaced.

  He waited for the cries of his shipmates below—for ’Ziana and Pal to shout orders, a surrender, anything. Their faces had appeared on the comscreen and so his friends could not be hidden from any possible attackers, lest their enemies realize they were not dealing with all of the Starfarers. But he heard very little from below—no screams, no shouts, just sighs and slight shuffling sounds, before the boots of the enemy tramped across the Haven’s decks and retreated again, even more heavily.

  The bay vibrated with the noise of other ships taking off. And still no noise from below.

  Markel had positioned himself strategically above the supply lockers, a bit separated from the others so that if he was discovered, it might be presumed he was alone. Or if the others were discovered, he might not be, and would be able to help them escape.

  Johnny Greene was above his duty station, the computation and navigation room. Khet
ala, Reamer, and some of the more mature children were placed among the younger children, to keep them quiet. Not that there were many among the very young who couldn’t fight and think extremely well under pressure. But the little kids were also the smallest and the most easily captured.

  Markel took a deep breath and lifted the seal that was also the entrance to the room below. The acrid stench of some kind of gas caused his eyes to water and made him feel sleepy. He managed to wrestle the seal closed, and let his drowsiness pass while he thought about what to do next.

  He didn’t know what kind of gas it was, though judging from his own reaction, it was supposed to knock people out, if not kill them. There were gas masks in the lockers. If he could hold his breath until he could access one of the masks and put it on, then he could get masks for the others. He could also check out the status of their shipmates and see what damage was done to the ship.

  He would have liked to have communicated this plan to Johnny but the distance was great and time was short. Before they’d hidden, they had all agreed they would wait until they heard from him, or at least send someone to check on his position before anyone else acted. He was the acknowledged expert vent rat of the crew. Admiral of the vent rats, even.

  The vent rat admiral held his breath and opened the seal again. Quickly, he dropped down, letting the seal close behind him as he slipped out so it would not allow much of the gas into the system where his shipmates hid.

  The maneuver was tricky and cost him precious seconds. The greenish gas draped the room heavily but Markel held his breath and lay on his stomach, crawling for one of the lower lockers. The air was always better close to the floor, in case he had to breathe before he got to the lockers. He figured he was going to have to. He couldn’t see the lockers from here. The vent opened into the middle of the room and the lockers were along the sides.

  Then his hand, outstretched to help him swim-crawl through the miasma, touched something soft and fleshy-warm. He heaved himself up so his eyes were level with his hand. Annella! Annella Carter lay there, knocked out by the gas but still breathing, though very shallowly. And as he drew closer, wondering how on earth he would manage to hold his breath one more second, he saw that she held a gas mask in her outstretched hand. Her other hand, holding two more masks, lay near an open locker door. He knew at once that she had grabbed the masks to get them to him and the others in the ventilation system, but had already breathed too much gas. It had knocked her out before she could get her own mask on.