Acorna's Quest

by Anne McCaffrey

  The surreptitious harvest didn’t take long. Both Markel and Acorna had nimble hands and were agile on their hands and knees. They gathered up their booty and retreated to the tube, and Markel refastened the grill behind them. He beckoned for her to follow him some distance away from the ’ponics unit before he signaled her to stop and start eating. Which was perfectly understandable, for carrot chomping could be heard if one was listening for it. Even, perhaps, if one was not, because she was chewing as fast as she could. She took chard next, then experimented with the dark red thing he handed her, and that was good, too. Well, almost anything would have tasted good to her at that point.

  After those sorely needed restorative mouthfuls Acorna thought again of Calum. He, too, would be hungry and thirsty. If only she knew where he was being held!

  She tapped Markel’s shoulder as he was chewing away at a raw potato and indicated she wanted to speak. He nodded but cautioned her with a finger across his lips to speak quietly.

  “My friend will have no food or water. If only you could figure out where he is being kept, could we get to him with something to eat and drink?”

  Markel considered and finally gave a sharp nod. “He’ll be in the secure area,” he whispered, “where they keep the important prisoners.”

  Acorna’s heart sank. “I tried to make them believe he knew nothing.”

  “Didn’t work,” Markel told her, “or they’d’ve tossed him in the holding cells like they did you. It’ll be a lot harder to sneak into the secure cells—but you’re right, we gotta try. Even if we can’t break him out—and I ain’t promising, those cells are a lot tougher—we can prob’ly slip him a water bottle and some greens. He’ll need it, too! Sometimes they ‘forget’ to feed the folks in detention. I hate it,” he whispered. “I keep thinking, what if somebody dies, and I could have saved him…but some of the ones they throw in the cells are Palomellese. If they found out I was free, they might sell me out to gain favor with Nueva.”

  Acorna’s heart ached at the decisions that had been forced on the boy, decisions that would have been heartbreaking for a mature adult. “Well, I can assure you that neither Calum nor I will sell you out—no matter what happens!”

  Six

  Balakiire, Unified Federation Date 334.05.17

  Once she got over her shock at being surrounded by four unicorn-people instead of facing just one, Karina realized that she might really be onto something here. The entire rest of the populated galaxy thought that Acorna was the only one of her kind. But here were four more of the unicorn-people—and she was the one who had been Chosen to act as their guide and interpreter! Once it had been established, with a great deal of pointing and head tossing and shrugging and mane twitching, that none of the four around her was Acorna, Karina was able to guess that they were looking for Acorna. It was strange, the way their meaning seemed to come into her mind if she just let them say their strange nasal words and didn’t try to understand. The trick seemed to be not to think about it, to convince the busy part of your head that you were actually thinking about something else and just sort of accidentally overhearing their conversation.

  In the first minutes on the unicorn-people’s spacecraft, Karina found that trick quite easy to pull off. Everything was so different, so…magical? Or just alien? She couldn’t decide. The soft, flowing draperies they wore, the glowing translucent horns on their foreheads, the couches where they reclined so gracefully, even the gentle radiance that lit the interior of the spacecraft all spoke to her of a Higher World guided by thought and love, the Upper Realm she had so long been seeking to contact. But when one of them went through a slitted opening into another part of the spacecraft, she saw a board covered with twinkling dials and long projecting levers that had not been made for any human fingers to manipulate. That made her nervous, so she decided not to think about it but to concentrate on boosting her psychic awareness so that she could communicate better on a pure and spiritual level.

  But every time she achieved the kind of calm that was supposed to bring connection with one’s spirit totem and access to higher levels, she lost that sense of almost understanding what the unicorn-people were saying. It was most irritating and not at all what she would have expected.

  (Do you have enough data from its thought-images to use the LAANYE yet, Melireenya?)

  (Not quite, though I have learned that it is a she-creature.)

  (Had to be, with those engorged mammaries. Don’t they hurt?)

  (Well, those could be the result of some kind of illness. They certainly don’t look natural, do they? But her images are distinctly feminine…what I can read of them. You’ve noticed how weak her transmissions are? And every time I think we’re communicating, something breaks it off and all I get is this image of a long, pointy crystal—see?)

  (Maybe she’s trying to tell us that they use something like that to amplify their naturally weak thoughts.)

  (Good idea! I hadn’t thought of that. Shall we make one?)

  (Might as well try it. If we have to build the data for the LAANYE by pointing our horns at things and listening to her grunt their names, it’ll take forever.)

  Something heavy and sharp-edged dropped into her lap and interrupted Karina’s meditations and earnest efforts to establish communion on the spiritual plane.

  “Hey!” she exclaimed, opening her eyes. “Be careful what you’re tossing around, will you—Ohhh….” Her indignant comment died away into a long gasp of awe and wonder as she lifted the ten-inch, doubly terminated quartz crystal. “Now where did you get that, I wonder?”

  (Well, that came through loud and clear. She doesn’t like us dropping rocks in her lap.)

  (She likes the rock, though. Look how she’s holding it!)

  (Great, we can generate as many of those as we need from the spare-parts assembler. Maybe we can use them as trade items. Go on, now, get some more complete utterances from her. The LAANYE needs syntactic data as well as semantics, you know!)

  (Barbarian! Can you say…shit, I’ve lost her again.)

  Holding the quartz crystal, Karina was deep in meditation, imagining the flow of energies that moved in a stream of golden light through the crystal, into her hands, through her body, and out to embrace the Guides around her. She imagined so effectively that she was completely unaware of the thought-images directed at her by Melireenya.

  (We got a burst of transmission when we gave her that crystal. Maybe she wants another one.)

  (Maybe we should just drop something heavy on her foot and see what she says.)

  (Thariinye, when are you going to grow up?)

  After a bit of tinkering, the spare-parts assembler was able to produce not only quartz crystals but also a number of other crystalline mineral specimens. They started with the varieties of quartz, showering Karina (gently) with rose quartz, amethyst, and citrine; then, for variety, Thariinye adjusted the assembler to produce other silicates such as tourmaline and iolite, orthoclase and microcline. He was particularly proud of a large, tabular orthoclase with a bluish white sheen in two directions. Their biped seemed impressed by it as well.

  (She likes the feldspar group. I got a lot of good data from what she said that time.)

  (Of course! Look, she’s wearing a feldspar; maybe that’s her totem.)

  So moonstone, labradorite, anorthite, and other feldspars dropped into Karina’s open hands until she was all but buried in their silvery shimmer, and Melireenya turned the LAANYE settings from collection mode to analysis mode with a sigh of relief.

  (That was a job and a half! These beings can’t concentrate at all!)

  (Oh, well, it’s done now. Let’s eat while it’s analyzing, then we can put the LAANYE in sleep-teaching mode and in a half turn we should be able to talk to it, I mean her, with mouth-noises.)

  (What do you suppose she eats?)

  (I hope she likes sprouts.)

  Karina wasn’t the least bit unhappy to be offered a vegetarian meal. Although her hosts worried back and forth at e
ach other about the poor variety of foodstuffs and the drab flavor of ship-grown fruits and greens, Karina found the meal, at least, to be everything she would have imagined spiritually advanced beings to ingest. She had been a little worried that the unicorn-people would be too spiritually advanced to require any nourishment beyond a little water. The salad they offered her, full of crisp greens, its flavor set off by a tangy dressing of ground seeds that tasted a little like mustard and more like dill, reassured her on those grounds. She wouldn’t have minded a tofu brownie or some sprouted-grains cake for dessert, but the bowl of fruits and berries was a reasonable alternative. The little brown berries proved surprisingly sweet and embarrassingly juicy—the first one she bit into felt like an explosion of sweetness in her mouth and startled her into a minor coughing fit. After that she took the berries with respect, to offset the tart flavor of the yellow thing that wasn’t exactly an apricot, and found that the combination made a reasonably satisfying dessert.

  After the meal they showed her a tiny cubicle, high enough to accommodate the unicorn-people but barely wide enough for Karina, and after some puzzlement she worked out what the facilities were for and how she could use them. That solved another problem she’d been trying not to worry about and left her feeling quite confident that she would be able to handle anything else that came up. And after all the excitement and that really very filling meal of salad and strange fruits, she was quite tired and more than willing to lie down on a couch in the main cabin when they dimmed the lights in there.

  (I’ll keep watch this shift,) Khaari volunteered. (She can sleep on my couch, and you three can use the LAANYE. I don’t really want to hurt my head learning another barbarian language anyway.)

  (Khaari! We must all be able to negotiate with these people!)

  (Why? Somebody’s got to stay with the ship, and I nominate me because I’m the only one who can navigate you out of here.)

  (Self-thinking is un-linyarii.)

  (Huh! I’m Liinyar, and I’m doing the thinking, so by definition it’s linyarii.)

  (This younger generation,) Neeva sighed toward Melireenya. (We would never have talked like that. There’s no telling what Thariinye and Khaari will do next.)

  (So maybe it’s a good idea Khaari doesn’t learn their language. In fact, we might be better off if Thariinye didn’t either.)

  This last comment inspired Khaari to take her turn with the LAANYE after all, sleeping on a reclining chair in the control cabin since the barbarian female was snoozing on her usual couch. As for Thariinye, he was already stretched out on his couch, wearing the headset that connected him with the LAANYE. He hadn’t even waited to make sure the barbarian was comfortable…but the light snores issuing from Khaari’s couch reassured Neeva and Melireenya on that score. With a mutual glance that spoke more eloquently than their thought-images on the subject of this impulsive younger generation, they, too, donned their headsets and settled for a strenuous night of sleep-learning.

  By the beginning of the next shift, when Khaari brought up the lights in the main cabin, they could talk to Karina in her own tongue.

  Which was very nearly the same as knowing the Basic Interlingua used for trade, diplomacy, and war in all the worlds inhabited by Karina’s people.

  It was easy enough to explain, now, that they were relatives of Acorna’s who had been searching for her.

  (This is not the entire truth,) Neeva fretted. (It is even an untruth, if we allow her to believe—as she surely will—that we came to this portion of the galaxy in search of our lost little one. Should we not tell her of the Khleevi, and that we came to warn her people and seek alliance with them?)

  (All things in their proper time,) Melireenya replied. (Remember how the people of that first world were so frightened that they closed themselves within an impenetrable shield? If those harboring ’Khornya (for so Linyaari tongues had rendered her name, turning it into something pronounceable in their language) should do the same, we might NEVER get her back!)

  (First we must find our ’Khornya,) Thariinye agreed. (Think, Neeva: she will surely tell us all we must know of these barbarians, so that we can judge whether they are khlevii or linyarii, whether we wish to make alliance with them or to disappear before they can attack our worlds.)

  The unspoken interchange went so swiftly that Karina was not even aware of any pause in the conversation; she was still exclaiming in delight over how quickly they had picked up her language.

  The Linyaari envoys were equally delighted when Karina confirmed their hope that Acorna was to be found here, on the lunar base to which the shuttle had been bound.

  “I had a Lattice note from her, out of this node, just a few days ago,” she told them.

  “Oh, then you are acquaainit—acquiintee—You know our little ’Khornya?” Neeva asked eagerly. “How does she? Has she been well treated here?”

  Karina looked down. Much as she longed to claim acquaintance with Acorna, was there any point in doing so, when a few hours would prove the claim false? “We have not met in person,” she evaded, “only in correspondence. But our auras are attuned.” Surely a Lattice note from one person and an acknowledgment from the receiver constituted a correspondence?

  “Then she…” Neeva fumbled among unfamiliar words. Their shapes in her thoughts were blurry and poorly defined; could the LAANYE be malfunctioning? “Your karma is joined with hers…she is expecting you?”

  Karina gazed soulfully at the heap of moonstones in her cupped hands. She had been fondling them and playing with them ever since she awoke.

  “Will she be conceerin…worriid,” Thariinye substituted the easier-to-pronounce word, “that you were not on the shuttle?”

  “Oh, no,” Karina said unguardedly, then tried to retrieve matters. “That is,” she said with her tinkling laugh, “we didn’t have a definite arrangement. We just left it that if I did not hear from her that this was not a good time, I would be coming to Maganos within the next few days. Synchronicity, you know”—she waved her plump little hands vaguely—“all will manifest for the good of all; we need only maintain the appropriate space in our hearts. But I am quite sure,” she said earnestly, “that she is looking forward to finally meeting me on this plane.”

  “Plane flies through atmosphere,” Thariinye said, puzzled. “Atmosphere is not on this moon.”

  Karina laughed again. “I meant, on the physical plane. We have long been close on the spiritual plane,” she said.

  (What is she talking about? Do these beings move through different dimensions?)

  (They appear to exist in three dimensions and move along a fourth at a fixed rate, just as do we and all other entities,) Khaari told him. (You must have been confused by some idiom of their language. What is the Linyaari for what she said?)

  (I don’t think you can say it in Linyaari.) “I hear you,” Thariinye said aloud to Karina, having picked this up from the LAANYE as an all-purpose phrase meaning, “I don’t know exactly what you mean, but let’s not argue about it.”

  Rafik’s worries about Acorna grew to monumental proportions when he reached direct-communications range of Maganos Moon Base and got no satisfactory answers to his queries. All he wanted to know was that Acorna was still there and unharmed. All he got from the com techs working the boards at Maganos was static, missed connections, and finally a bland statement that questions about Acorna were to be passed directly to Delszaki Li.

  “Fine,” Rafik said, “patch me through to Mr. Li’s suite.”

  But Delszaki Li was napping…or in a private meeting…or investigating some new workings out of reach of the base-to-ship communications system…or simply not to be found at the moment, depending on when Rafik tried to contact him and which technician was asked to forward the message.

  “I don’t believe it,” Rafik said flatly when for the second time he was told that Delszaki Li was visiting the new mine workings on the far side of Maganos. “The man’s old and paralyzed and confined to a hover-chair, he’s not going to
be hopping around Maganos like a performing flea!”

  “Mr. Li has a very good hover-chair,” said the com tech. “State-of-the-art. And, uh, the light gravity here means that he has more energy, of course. Less, umm, strain on the muscles, you know?”

  “Ten thousand bazaar dogs and Shaitans take the hover-chair!” Rafik shouted into the mike. “He doesn’t USE those muscles, what difference does gravity make?”

  “Transmission unintelligible, please moderate volume,” the tech said. “Signal fading…” Her voice slowly dissolved into a crackle of static. Fuming, Rafik decided that he would just have to wait until he landed on Maganos. Then he would See For Himself.

  Even landing took longer than usual; a vessel of unfamiliar design, whose pilot seemed completely unfamiliar with standard docking facilities and commands, was just before him in the queue and held up docking for everybody else.

  “Sorry about that, Uhuru,” said the breezy voice of the second-shift guidance-control officer. “These idiots just ahead of you in the queue come from some backstars subspace where apparently nobody flies by the regs; according to the pilot they just make it up as they go along. She’s having a hell of a time following my instructions—keeps saying, ‘I hear you,’ and then doing something completely different.”