As she breasted the hill and began loping down into the long valley before her, Acorna decided that the three ex-miners would probably be only too happy to hand her over to “her people” and know their responsibility to her was ended.
And what of her? She was supposed to be ecstatically happy at being reunited with her own race. Wasn’t that what this whole voyage had been about? Now Acorna faced the fact that she had never really imagined an end to the voyage. The planet Calum had targeted as her probable home lay so far away that the prospect of reaching it had never been quite real to her. Now, without the expected months of waiting and preparation, suddenly she was supposed to rejoice at being thrown into the arms of these strangers. They might look like her, but what else would there be to link them? “Linyaari,” she whispered to the wind, trying out the unfamiliar word. “Linyarrri? Liiinyar?”
The word evoked no recognition in her, any more than the syllables of her native language that Gill and Rafik insisted she had pronounced when they first met her. “Avvi,” she’d said aloud then. “Lalli.” They were nonsense syllables to her now, nothing more.
Calum was occupied with figuring the rate of thrust required to take off the mass soon to be inserted into the spaceship when Acorna got back to the Acadecki, tired and sweaty from her long run. She used most of their fresh water in frantic showering, afraid the approaching Linyaari would be disgusted by the sight of a hot, sweaty, barbarian relative, then purified the water and let it trickle back into the tank. Wrapped in a dark green towel, nervous over the coming meeting and what it might mean to her, she considered the meager wardrobe choices available to her. She hadn’t been thinking of clothes when they made their getaway from Maganos. The only important thing then had been to begin the search and escape from well-meaning attempts to delay. Now, as she surveyed the available choices with mounting dismay, perhaps sublimating her fear over what the next few hours might hold, clothing assumed an importance it had never before had for her.
All she had brought were plain ship’s coveralls and an assortment of gaudy disguises such as the one she had donned while pretending to be a Didi. All the disguises were frothy and elaborate, to match the large, lavishly decorated hats she used to cover her horn; they were not to Acorna’s taste at all. She would not meet her newfound relatives in something she considered vulgar and garish—but would they be insulted if she wore only her everyday ship’s coveralls? What would such highly civilized beings wear? Did they dress for dinner, like the characters in historical vids? Maybe they were clothed in shimmering force fields of light and would think anything she donned quaint and provincial….
Calum was aroused from his brown study by a tall, slender, agitated female wearing nothing but yards of green towel, a silver mane, and a sprinkling of water droplets. “Calum, this is impossible!” she declared. “I don’t even know when they will be here or what they wear! What if they don’t like me? What if they think I look barbarian and provincial? What if…and I can’t even talk to them,” she exclaimed, flinging up her arms. “I don’t remember—” The towel slipped, and she made a hasty grab for the top edge just in time to avert disaster. “I don’t remember any words of their language. My language. They’re telepathic. I’m not, so what if I’m some kind of a mental defective by their standards? You said they had trouble deciding whether human beings were worthy of an alliance with their race, and look what they had to study—Gill, Judit, Rafik, Mr. Li…if they aren’t good enough for the Linyaari, how will I ever measure up?” Her eyes were silver lines in dark pools of distress, and she was beginning to make the whinnying sound that was as close as she ever came to sobbing aloud.
“Hold on a minute, girl,” Calum said, “you’re not being rational here.”
“Oh, yes, I am!” Acorna contradicted him. “I am being quite rational; I have thought this whole thing out very carefully, and Calum, this—is—not—going—to—work! I cannot meet them, don’t you see?” She whirled away from him, silver hair flying through the air, and he thought that not all the moisture on her face had come from her recent shower. He wished to God Judit were here, she’d know how to calm Acorna down. Or Gill. Or even Rafik! Why did it have to be him who was stuck with the task? A man didn’t specialize in mathematics because he had a rare talent for human relationships. All Calum had was reason and logic, and he made one more attempt to apply it.
“Acorna, how do you know you’re not telepathic? If it only works between members of your race, and you’ve never been around any others—”
“I just know,” she interrupted him. She had thrown a second towel over her head and shoulders and was rubbing vigorously as if to dry off her hair; her voice was muffled by layers of fuzzy fabric. “I’d have felt something before now if I were a telepath. I shouldn’t be surprised if they exposed me at birth. You know the ancient Greeks used to do that with defective offspring, or even superfluous girls—I am certainly superfluous to them, don’t you think? What would they want with some barbarian who can’t even speak their language? Only, being such a high-tech race, naturally they wouldn’t just leave me on a mountaintop. A space capsule must be a much better means of disposal, don’t you see? After all, the mountain thing wasn’t totally reliable—look at Oedipus.”
“Who’s he?” Calum was completely out of his depth now.
“Really, Calum,” Acorna said in tones of freezing superiority from the depths of her covering towels, “don’t you read anything? He was exposed because of a prophecy that he would murder his father, only a shepherd took him in and raised him, and then one day he met his real father at a crossroads and they got in a fight and of course Oedipus didn’t know who he was, so he killed him, and then…well, after then he behaved most improperly, all through not knowing anything about his origins, and I think eventually he blinded himself. So you see why I can’t meet them.”
“I see you’re talking a lot of nonsense,” Calum said. “I never met this Oedipus chap, and what’s more I don’t want to, because he sounds quite loopy to me. You’re not loopy, and you’re not going to kill anybody, and the Linyaari want you. They’ve come one hell of a long way for you, so I most seriously doubt that they sent you off in an escape pod to begin with. It’ll have been some kind of accident, that’s all, and no doubt they’ll explain it all when they get to Rushima.”
Acorna had dropped the towel that covered her head and was nodding silently. Under the illusion that he had calmed her fears, Calum made the mistake of adding, “Now why don’t you just get dressed; pick out some pretty thing; you want to look nice when your people get here.”
“You don’t understaaaand,” Acorna wailed, and was off again, hiccuping and whinnying. Calum patted her shoulder and prayed to the Gods of Balanced Equations that Gill, Judit, Rafik, somebody who understood females would reach them before the Linyaari showed up and wanted to know why he’d been upsetting their foundling. But to his great relief, she calmed herself quickly enough and was once again—at least on the surface—the quiet, sweet-tempered girl he had raised. It was the arrival of Joshua Flouse with the first rafts that restored her to normal. On hearing the splashing approach of the settlers, Acorna quickly dashed cold water over her face and slipped into her coveralls. “I am sorry,” she said. “I have been foolish, and we have work to do. Calum, do you not need to go to the Haven and collect that working party?”
“Might as well take the first load of settlers to high ground, then go on to the Haven from there,” Calum decided. “But they’ll have to leave their goods here for now, except for what each one can carry; when I get the kids dirtside, they can do the heavy lifting.”
That decision, announced by Calum, caused a furor, which only Acorna could calm. As she waded through the lake, speaking quietly to each group of settlers with their raftload of treasured personal possessions, the cries of outrage died down and the Rushimese farmers grudgingly poled their rafts back to the soggy “shore.” Once there, Joshua Flouse displayed the talent for leadership that had made him spok
esman for this settlement, quickly separating each pile of personal goods into those that were too fragile to be left and those that might reasonably survive Hoa’s weather modifications if carefully stored in an outbuilding.
Even with this division, and with Calum’s requirement that each refugee carry his own possessions, he and Acorna wound up doing far more than their share of physical labor. Children and old people and invalids had to be helped into the Acadecki, and the helpers could not carry anything else. Calum personally stowed a tea set brought at great expense from the Shenjemi home, piece by fragile piece, and then cursed himself for wasting time with such trinkets when he saw Acorna wading through muddy water with twin infants clinging to her neck and caressing her horn. By the time the Acadecki was filled with refugees, Calum and Acorna and the able-bodied men and women of the settlement, who’d chosen to see their weakest members to safety first, were all exhausted and dripping with mud and sweat. But the labor seemed to have been good for Acorna; or perhaps it was the twitters and coos of the babies who were entranced by her horn and silvery mane that had restored the shine to her eyes.
The settlers’ hard-won calm almost disintegrated, though, when Calum told Acorna to board the Acadecki, that they could take no more passengers on this trip.
“How do we know you’ll be back?” cried a burly man who’d all but exhausted himself helping weaker settlers board the ship.
“You’re not going with my babies, and me not with them!” a young mother exclaimed fiercely.
The imminent danger of a riot was averted when Acorna stepped out of the ship before Calum could stop her.
“I will stay with you,” she said in her clear, sweet voice, and the uneasy group subsided at once.
“Well, if she stays…”
“You’re a dammed fool, Kass,” somebody said to the burly man who’d begun the protest. “Oughta know there’s no funny business when the likes of her is involved.”
“’Ow’d I s’posed to know that?” the unlucky Kass protested. “Never seen nothin’ like her before, did I?”
“Just gotta look at her…besides, she cleared the water for us, didn’t she?”
Acorna gently urged the people away from the base of the ship and waved at Calum. “Go on,” she urged him. “Everything will be all right.”
Not without misgivings, Calum lifted off once the settlers on the ground were well clear of the area. What would Rafik and Gill say to him if they knew he’d left Acorna alone, even briefly, in such circumstances? But there seemed little choice…and with any luck, they never would know.
Acorna was not the least bit concerned for herself as Calum lifted off; she didn’t have time for that. There were too many wet, muddy, disgruntled people to be helped into some semblance of organization, too many piles of hastily abandoned household goods which the owners had left with anxiety and a great many last-minute messages: “Mind and keep all my things together and don’t let that Auntie Nagah be poking around in them…. Be sure they stow those datacubes of mine somewhere safe and dry, that’s the only library on all Rushima…. Now be sure and keep that table upside down, see, one of the legs falls off if you pick it up the other way, but ’er’s a good table and solid.”
Solid “’er” certainly was; Acorna had to enlist the help of Flouse and Kass to get it carried as far as the soggy bank. “Leave it there,” Flouse said. “I’ll ask one of the dryland settlements to send a motodray—all ours are fair ruined with this wet, see?” He wiped his sweating forehead. “Blest if I know how old Labrish ever got it that far, and him half-crippled with the rheumatics.”
Acorna rubbed the small of her back in rueful agreement. Although strong, she was already tired from carrying most of the children to the ship. But they seemed calmer in her arms than in anybody else’s, even their parents’.
One of the parents was sitting at the water’s edge, uncaring of the mud that smeared the cuffs of her coveralls, crying quietly. The woman’s tears ran in an unending stream down her face to join the silty water of the acres-wide shallow “lake.”
Acorna recognized the young mother who’d protested against her children being taken off without her.
“They will be all right,” she said quietly, sitting down beside the grief-stricken woman without regard for her own clothes. “I promise you that. And very soon Calum will come back for more people, and you will be with them again, in a nice dry place where you can get them clean and they can sleep dry and warm; won’t that be better?”
“They’ll be frightened without me!”
“But you’ll be with them very soon,” Acorna repeated, “and in the meantime…they do have your own elders from this settlement to watch them, and Calum himself is very good with children.”
The young woman sniffled. “Doesn’t look like a man who’d have much patience with their little ways.”
“Looks are deceiving,” Acorna said with a smile. “Calum raised me from infancy, and he is much more patient than he seems.”
“You? Garn!” The woman looked up and down Acorna’s tall body. “He ain’t hardly old enough!”
“Looks,” Acorna repeated, “are deceiving.” She did not add that it was her appearance, not Calum’s, which was deceptive; the settlers had accepted her strange looks with surprising equanimity. She did not wish to remind them of her alien nature by explaining that she came of a race which could apparently grow to physical maturity in just four years.
By personally promising to see that the young woman was taken on the very next shipload, and talking in a low, soothing voice, Acorna got her somewhat calmed down; and that calm seemed magically to spread through the crowd. This was shattered as the roar of a ship’s engines filled the air and all but drowned out the voices of those on the ground.
“Oh, good,” Acorna said cheerfully, “see, here’s the Acadecki back already….” But it didn’t sound like her own dear ship; in fact, it didn’t sound quite right for any ship she had ever heard. It came down much too quickly, and the roar stopped too abruptly, and she had barely glimpsed a flash of gold and scarlet before it landed with a hiss of escaping heat that turned the shallow lake bed to a wall of steam clouds.
As the clouds cleared, Acorna saw a craft not dissimilar in shape to the U-class starships of Delszaki Li’s fleet, but ornamented with gaudy scrollwork of scarlet-and-gilt ribbon shapes that curved about the hull. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. How did they do that? No decorative paint could survive repeated searing journeys through a planet’s atmosphere…no paint known to humanity, she thought with a flash of panic, and suddenly the ship seemed utterly and completely alien.
Around her there were sudden cries of fear, and the young mother beside her leapt to her feet with the evident intention of running away. Acorna jumped up, too, if only to keep the girl with her; if these people ran in panic, this frail young woman and many others might slip and be trampled…who were these new arrivals? They could only be the Linyaari…her people.
My people—alien, alien, alien—no, my own people. Her heart thudded irregularly, and the young mother pulled away from her with the strength of sudden, desperate panic. Acorna realized suddenly that she herself was contributing to the fear of the crowd. Perhaps if she could calm down and set an example…
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She raised it slightly. “You don’t know who is in that ship, but I know. These are more of my kind. You aren’t afraid of me, are you? Well, then! They’ve come to help, not to hurt you.”
As her commonsense words percolated through the crowd, the momentary danger of a panic-stricken flight passed. The settlers were still nervous, Acorna could feel that in the tense movements of their bodies and the way they stood poised on both feet as if ready to fight or flee; but they were listening to reason again.
If indeed it was reason…she could not be sure that this alien ship held her own people, could she? And yet, beyond all reason, Acorna was sure of it, even before a hatchway to
o far up the side of the ship opened and let down a ladder whose treads were too steeply set for human legs, even before the eerie sensation of looking in a distant mirror came over her at the sight of tall, slender, silver-haired people slowly descending the ladder with their hands open in a sign of peace and the golden horns on their heads glittering in the Rushimese sunshine.
Thirteen
Rushima—Unified Federation Date 334.05.25
(There she is…my ’Khornya…our ’Khornya!)
(We must tell her…them…now. It would be wrong to keep them in ignorance, Neeva, and there are surely enough of us here to prevent any panic.)
(Let me greet my ’Khornya first. Can we not have this one moment in peace without being reminded of…)
Acorna had a confused image of something alien and terrifying, something like a metallic ant heap writhing with hatred and destruction.
(As you will. But she must be told soon.)
They were within speaking distance now, lifting their long, elegant legs clear of the muddy water with each delicate step. Behind them, Acorna recognized Nadhari Kando, Delszaki Li’s personal bodyguard. She had no energy left to try and figure out what Nadhari was doing here; all her attention was on the beings so like and yet unlike herself, who were so rudely discussing her to her face. Acorna couldn’t figure out how she had heard them so clearly even when they were still quite some distance away, but it didn’t really matter now.
“What is it you need to tell me?” she asked.
The tall woman in the lead blinked and said something in a rush of liquid, nasalized sounds that meant nothing to Acorna. She shook her head, feeling dull and stupid, and suddenly all too aware of the sweat that soaked her coveralls and the mud that ornamented them in soggy brown blotches.
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