Acorna's Quest

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Now, dear Karina, do tell me how it happens that a friend of Acorna’s should have been left in this sad plight,” Hafiz invited her, “and what you would like me to do to the villains who abandoned you so.”

  “Oh,” Karina said, “they are not villains, they are Enlightened Beings, and I am almost sure they did not mean to leave me in desperate straits, only they were in a hurry, and, of course, I had not told them I had no credits left. How could I? You do see, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Hafiz agreed urbanely, although totally confused.

  “They have beautiful auras, you know,” Karina rambled on, “as of course you’d expect of Acorna’s race—”

  “The Linyaari are here?” Hafiz interrupted her. Although he had put aside both his current business dealings and the tempting thought of making an exclusive trade agreement with the first sapient aliens to contact human civilization in order to look after Acorna, now that he was actually at Maganos and nobody seemed to be panicking on Acorna’s behalf, he could not help thinking how lucrative such an arrangement might be…and that he, as one of Acorna’s two guardians, should by rights have first pickings. He had not reckoned on her other guardian somehow magicking the Linyaari to his residence first.

  “Well, not anymore. They went after—”

  “Ten thousand Shaitans! I should have known that crafty old dog of an unbeliever would get ahead of me!” Hafiz drummed his fingers on the tabletop, temporarily oblivious to Karina. “But perhaps Rafik has protected my interests. Yes, that must be what he meant by ‘arrangements.’” The downward creases on his face lifted slightly. “In that case, I may well forgive the boy after all. Karina, my dear lady, I must speak with Delszaki Li’s secretary again at once; can you ever forgive me?”

  Karina’s eyes darkened with a sorrow that was not entirely due to the fact that she had not quite finished the last of the pastries. “But we’ve only just met!”

  “And I look forward to many delightful hours improving our acquaintance,” Hafiz assured her. “And although my business is pressing, I refuse to leave unless you promise me that you will take proper care of yourself and eventually retire to my suite to rest. You must eat to keep up your strength and to maintain your exquisite beauty.” He called for a portable console and left orders for Karina to be able to request anything she desired at the charge of House Harakamian.

  That should be safe enough, he thought cynically; there was nothing to buy on Maganos Moon Base except food and the simplest of basic necessities. Later he would give himself the pleasure of ordering new garments from Kezdet for this generously endowed beauty, a project that would absolutely require him to acquaint himself with her exact dimensions, and later…who knew what might not follow? Best not to alarm her; he would not want such a treasure of voluptuous womanhood to take flight while he was occupied in business talks.

  His first order of business was to extract from the secretary the terms of any trade agreements that had already been filed. With any luck there had not been time to put anything on disk. Opportunity abounded when a man was prepared to take advantage of it. Then, if Li was still not available, he could while away the hours of waiting by courting his lovely Karina. It seemed his trip to Maganos would be profitable in more ways than he could have ever predicted.

  Twelve

  Haven, Unified Federation Date 334.05.25

  It was nearly six days before Acorna started staying awake for more than a few minutes at a time, but then she returned to normal within a few hours of her last awakening.

  “You mean those poor people have been waiting all this time only for me?” she exclaimed, horrified. “Calum, why did you not go on without me?”

  “I,” Calum said, “do not possess a sweet voice, a pretty face, or a magical horn. The mere fact that I was around and helped to repair their com system doesn’t seem to be enough to make me Trustworthy. It’s you or nobody.”

  “Then you should have wakened me sooner!”

  Markel and Calum looked at each other and tried not to laugh.

  “We should’ve taken vids,” Markel said. “Acorna, you have been awake, off and on—vertical, anyway. Just long enough to use the facilities and devastate our chard and spinach beds. Then you’d stagger off without saying a word and go back to sleep.”

  Acorna shook her head. “I cannot believe it.”

  “Next time we will take vids!”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Calum said. “I’m not letting Acorna wear herself out to that extent ever again.”

  The Rushimese required that the Acadecki land first with only Acorna and Calum on board; they did not trust vids of Acorna speaking to them from the Haven.

  “I just hope that you’ll be able to convince them that the kids really want to make reparations for the devastation caused during Nueva’s coup,” Calum said wearily as they landed. “If they won’t let us use the Haven’s shuttlecraft as well as the Acadecki to ferry settlers from the flooded area to high ground, we’ll be here for weeks before Dr. Hoa can start work on drying out this settlement.”

  “I will try to persuade them,” Acorna said, “but it may take time….”

  Calum chuckled weakly. “And to think we thought we were saving time by skipping out of Maganos before the repairs were complete! If we’d waited until the ’ponics were fixed, we wouldn’t have been caught up in this mess, we might have been well on our way to searching the Coma Berenices quadrant by now…. Well, my mother always told me, ‘Haste makes waste,’ but I was always in too much of a hurry to listen to her.”

  “It is not a waste if we are able to help people desperately in need,” Acorna said, but her lovely eyes clouded over at this reminder of how much time the stopover at Rushima had cost them. “Someday we will find my people…and you know, Calum, if we had waited for Pal and Mr. Li to agree that the Acadecki was ready, we would still be on Maganos!”

  Calum had to agree with that. Still, he hoped that the Rushimese got over their suspicions of the Haven quickly. The longer he was away from Mercy, the more he missed her…and since he had promised himself to see Acorna safely with her own people before he was free to be with Mercy, it was a kind of torture to be delayed and delayed here, where they had barely begun their quest.

  “The settlers are arriving,” Acorna said. “Let me see what I can do to get them organized, and you can try to raise Maganos.” She gave him an understanding smile. “Mercy, I mean, all our friends, will want to know what we are doing.”

  Calum found that he did not particularly like being “understood.” One of the many things he liked about Mercy was that even if she could guess what he was thinking, she never told him so!

  Oh, well, soon enough they would be on their way out to the Coma Berenices quadrant, and he could apply himself to nice straightforward problems of astrogation instead of the most chaotic, unpredictable problems of all…people.

  Still, this might well be his last chance to communicate with Mercy in private; it was thoughtful of Acorna to give him the opportunity. For the first time in days, Calum activated the Acadecki’s com unit.

  Before Calum could enter his request, though, the com unit gave forth the nerve-wracking squeal that signaled an incoming spurt-message. He sighed and waited the interminable seconds while the spurt codes chattered across the screen, then watched a blurry image gradually become clearer and clearer as the Acadecki’s computer expanded the compressed message. As the face on the screen became recognizable, Calum sat upright and tensed.

  What was Rafik doing in this sector, close enough to send compressed visuals? Had their first message from the Haven gotten through after all, sending Rafik on a wild-goose chase to rescue them? He’d never live that down….

  Rafik’s first intelligible words, once the entire spurt was expanded, proved this was not the case; the call for help had not in fact been received, but the “all clear” message had. And Rafik was coming on a completely different errand. Calum listened with growing surprise, replayed the
message not once but twice to make sure he had understood it correctly, then set the com receivers on “automatic.” He had to find Acorna at once!

  They had set the Acadecki down in the muddy lake where they’d first landed, thinking that a logical place to start the restoration of Rushima would be with Joshua Flouse and the settlers who already knew Calum and Acorna. Once these waterlogged hectares had been dried out and restored to productivity, the Rushimese would be more likely to trust the good intentions of the Second-Generation kids who now controlled the Haven. But Dr. Hoa had warned that the process of draining and drying the area through weather modification was likely to be brutal; even with Calum’s mathematical help, they could neither predict nor control effects with the accuracy desirable when working over populated communities.

  Calum was rather disconcerted when he came out to find the landing area deserted, while Acorna stood fetlock-deep in the clarified water, absentmindedly picking up and tasting small floating strands of filamentous algae. “Hey, where’d everybody go?”

  “They are building rafts,” Acorna informed him, “to ferry their possessions across the pond. There was some discussion of asking us to set down in a drier spot, but they could not agree on one; every little hill that is not actually underwater is too full of livestock and refugees.”

  “Oh. Well, their choice, I guess,” Calum said, “as long as they don’t take too long about it….” With Rafik’s amazing news to impart, he couldn’t really get too interested in the settlers’ logistical problems. “Anyway, I’ve got something to tell you. Acorna, we don’t need to go on in the Acadecki. There’ll be no need to test my program to find your home.”

  The jubilant note in Calum’s voice startled Acorna.

  “What are you talking about?” She had never seen Calum like this before. His eyes blazed, and his fair hair stuck up in an untidy quiff along the top of his head.

  “I’ve heard from the Uhuru. Rafik is coming here.”

  “Rafik?” She felt slow and stupid, unable to think clearly. Something very important was about to happen, or had happened; she couldn’t tell which. It wasn’t about Rafik, though; so she focused on the details to slow down the important thing, which she was not ready to hear. “But he was not on Maganos or Laboue. How did he know we were here?”

  “He was on Maganos when our message got through. And you’ll never guess why!”

  Acorna thought she did not want to guess.

  “Does he know everything is all right now?” she asked.

  Calum had sent another message as soon as they knew the situation on board the Haven, but perhaps Rafik had taken off for Rushima before that spurt came through. Why else would he be coming?

  “I guess so.” Calum scrubbed one hand over his head; the short yellow hair flattened like hay under a great wind, then sprang up again, quivering with excitement. “I mean, he must; I gather only the second message got through. The first one must have been killed when I shut down so fast. But there’s other news. Acorna, he’s not coming alone. Like I just said, we don’t need to go on with the search for your home.”

  It had been the first thing he’d said, and she had known at once what it must mean. She had been holding the meaning away from her, bracing herself against it, trying to keep him from saying it with all her questions about Rafik. But it could be delayed no longer.

  “They have found us,” she said, slowly, and regretted it the next instant. Half the bright exultation drained from Calum’s face.

  “Yes—I wanted to tell you. How did you know?”

  “I guessed. Why else would he stop here?” Acorna felt as if she were feeling her way with bare hooves across a shaking quagmire, treacherous ground that might dissolve under her at any moment. “So…they are coming for me?”

  Calum confirmed her guess.

  “With Rafik?”

  “They have their own ship, of course. They think it is faster; Rafik is not so sure, but he wanted to be sure you had the news before they reached Rushima. He thought it might be too great a shock if you saw them without warning.”

  “That was…considerate of him.” Shock? What was that? This numbness through which she moved, half-disembodied, half-sinking under feelings she did not recognize—was that shock? She felt as if she had been poisoned; her limbs tingled, and her eyes could not take in the light that had been there a moment ago. If she had really been poisoned, though, she would be able to heal herself. And this moving darkness was not something she could heal with a touch of her horn.

  “Acorna?” Calum sounded far away. “Acorna! Are you all right? I thought you’d be happy!”

  “Of course I’m happy,” she said with an effort. She forced a smile to her lips. “My people. My dream come true. How could I be anything else but happy, dear Calum?”

  “Well, that’s what I thought,” he said, still sounding doubtful, “but for a moment you looked almost ill. Are you coming down with something, do you think? But you shouldn’t…you don’t get sick.”

  “No more I do,” she agreed, with another smile. “I think I was a little dizzy for a moment. It was quite a shock, you know.” She thought of the disappointment that Calum must have been loyally concealing. Such a good friend…he and Gill and Rafik had always been so good to her, the only family she had ever known. He had wanted to discover her home himself, not have the location handed to him. The least she could do now was play up to him.

  “And, Calum, now we will not have to wait months to find out whether your deductions were correct. My…people will surely be able to tell us the exact location from which they came. Won’t it be interesting to find out whether it matches the destination we chose on the basis of your program?” He could still have the satisfaction of being proved accurate…if he had been correct.

  Calum grinned. “You’re right! We don’t need a construction proof; we’ll have an existence one! And another thing—”

  “Calum, you know I don’t speak mathematics,” Acorna said in warning.

  “Not about my program. About your people! Rafik says they are telepathic, isn’t that wonderful? And they have a very high code of ethics; it took them quite a time to decide whether we were worthy to know them.” Calum blithely condensed what Rafik had already abbreviated, the Linyaari discussion over whether humans were linyarii or khlevii. “Oh, by the way, they call themselves Linyaari, although I expect it just means something like ‘People’ in their language. Their technology is way beyond ours in some respects—apparently they’ve got some kind of automatic language-learning system. The ones who are coming already speak Basic, so you’ll be able to talk to them right away, isn’t that great? And best of all, Acorna, one of them is your aunt!” Calum beamed as if he were giving her a wonderful present.

  “Talk to them?” Acorna said faintly.

  “Yes, right away. Although now I think of it, you probably won’t need to use Basic. If they’re telepathic, you must be, too. You’ll just be able to merge minds with them.”

  “That’s…wonderful.”

  Calum looked suddenly uncertain. “Your own people, a family of your own…Acorna, don’t quite forget us, will you? Gill and Rafik and me?”

  Acorna stood up, pleased to find that her legs would, after all, support her. Standing, she was now taller than this one of her three foster parents.

  “Calum, I will never forget you. You three are my family, and nothing can change that,” she said firmly. “But I…I need to think. Do you mind if I go out for a run now? I can think better in the fresh air.”

  “All right, but be careful, won’t you? All that heavy weather’s done some funny things to the terrain. You don’t want to go spraining an ankle or getting your mane snagged in a wire fence,” Calum warned, exactly like any overanxious parent who can’t quite grasp that his or her child is grown-up.

  The fetlock-deep water slowed Acorna and forced her to lift her feet high as she set off at a steady pace for the distant horizon. She had to stay constantly aware of minor changes in the
underlying ground which she could not see through the mud her running stirred up. She was grateful for the difficulties of running; they were a welcome distraction from her thoughts.

  All too soon, however, she reached the edge of the lake bed and was running upward over a gentle slope covered with soggy wet grass that squelched underfoot but required no particular attention from a runner. The oversweet smell of rotting vegetation came up to her nostrils with each breath; the land was waterlogged, water-poisoned. But under the cover of soggy, rotten dead grass there might be living roots and the promise of new life in a gentler season. Was there a similar promise for her, of life in an environment that was truly hers? Or was she a misfit, neither of the Linyaari nor of the race that had fostered her? As Acorna’s pace evened out she found unwelcome thoughts and fears once again plaguing her. Her people…did that mean Calum and Rafik and Gill were no longer hers? Calum had asked her not to forget them, but was the truth not more likely to be that they would soon forget her?

  What had she ever been to them but a burden and a complication? They’d lost mining time to raise her from infancy, lost their jobs to protect her from Amalgamated’s unethical scientists, and then had been thoroughly entangled in her crusade to rid Kezdet of child labor…a cause they might sympathize with, but would surely never have undertaken but for her. Even now their lives were being distorted around hers. Did Gill really want to be a foster parent to the children relocated on Maganos, or did he secretly long for the freedom of asteroid mining? Did Rafik resent being called away from House Harakamian business? Was he only coming to Rushima because his sense of duty required him to be present when Acorna met her own people? And as for Calum—would he ever have undertaken the long and risky voyage they’d planned if he had not felt it his own duty to restore Acorna to her home? Certainly he had not seemed all that disappointed to learn the voyage and search were no longer necessary.