Acorna's Triumph

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Khornya! Khornya, we are here.”

  As the tip of the first horn touched her, the dizziness dissipated, her head cleared, and Acorna sat up, waving away the Linyaari clustered around her. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Communing with the minerals again, dear?” Neeva asked.

  Acorna nodded. “But there’s another life-form, too—other beings. The ones who harvest the stones for export. We were just getting to that.”

  “Sorry we interrupted, Khornya, but you seemed to be in pain,” Melireenya told her. “Are you trying to tell us that the Singing Stones are sentient? If so, all of the off-worlders who own them, according to what I’ve studied, are in violation of your Federation’s directives against owning sentient alien species…”

  “I don’t know about sentience. It’s more of an awareness, rather than thought. They aren’t so much communicating as—well, as you put it, Neeva, communing. With each other.”

  Becker strolled away from them briefly. The stone fragments under his boots whimpered in harmony.

  “They should be reassembled,” Acorna said.

  “That would be quite a jigsaw puzzle,” Rafik said.

  “Besides, I didn’t bring enough Superbond,” Becker said. “I only brought enough for a fleet of salvaged ships, not enough for a whole planet full of pebbles.”

  “We don’t have to do the whole planet yet. But we need to reassemble the stones in this region so we can safely tell what lies beneath them without harm to them, ourselves, or what’s below,” Acorna said without fully understanding why. She picked up a handful of gravel while trying to figure out exactly what she meant. Idly, she arranged the bits of rock into different shapes on her palm. Two of them seemed to fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. She tapped their edges together with her fingernail. And felt an odd tingling in her hand as the two fragments seemed to flow into each other and become one. “We may not need as much glue as it seems, Captain.” She opened her hand and showed the others what had happened. “Look here. The oddest thing is happening. Once you line up the fragments correctly, they bond themselves together with only the slightest encouragement.”

  Rafik nodded. “Naturally. These stones are a variant of basalt. They’re thoroughly infused with high-quality quartz.” He picked up a largish piece and pointed at little lines of dark coloration appearing randomly throughout the stone. “These are rutiles of iron. Embedded in the quartz, they form a conductor of a static charge that, when properly aligned with other stones with the same rutiles, forms a strong linkage.”

  He was lecturing now. Acorna knew all of this and suspected the information was not unfamiliar to Becker. Mac might have had it somewhere in his data banks, too, but he drank it all in nevertheless. “But how does that make them go together without a bonding agent, Rafik?” the android asked.

  “Like I said, it has a static charge. You know about static electricity, right, Mac?”

  “Of course. When there is a lot of it, I can feel rather giddy.”

  “Yes, but it can also make certain things cling to other things—and they’ll remain there until the link is broken. These stones set up their own bond by forming their own static charge. In other words, if you line them up correctly, the molecules have a kind of memory for where they belong. The same phenomenon is what enables these stones to sing—the quartz rutiles act like antennae and set up harmonic resonances that allow for the range of tones.”

  “So,” Becker said, “they don’t need glue. That’s good. So we’ll have the ships’ computers scan the fragments on the surface, twirl ’em in different sequences to come up with matches, feed the data about the location of the fragments into Mac, and he can reassemble them.”

  “Meanwhile,” Rafik said, “we’ll probably still need all the glues you have to initiate the bonding. No doubt many of the fragments have been powdered when the stones got turned into gravel. The glue and some of the dust can maybe make up lost pieces. And although it won’t take much for each stone, there are a lot of stones here.”

  “Sounds like a plan. And it sure beats standing here listening to them wail. So let’s get cracking, folks!” Becker said. “…Or uncracking, as the case may be…”

  Acorna and Rafik fed a formula into the replicator aboard the Balakiire, then ran the various substances Becker had gathered through it, recombining them into the appropriate bonding agent.

  Before they had stored the last batch of glue in the last of all of the containers they used from all of the ships, Mac had taken the first batch of the stuff out and blurred across the com screen reassembling the stones.

  The process was tedious, but it seemed to be working. While carrying it out, they took turns sleeping and supplying Mac with sufficient bonding agent.

  Although the sleep periods were brief, Acorna was almost too tired to dream. Only once during the three sleeps did the Khleevi/Aari dream intrude, right at the end where it hung unfinished in her mind.

  But once she awakened and looked out the viewport, the dream was banished as she rubbed her eyes in astonishment. In place of the pathetic gravel pit that had surrounded the ships when they landed, stacks of whole stone towered all around them. On the ground beneath them, the stepping-stone patterns of the Stones of Skarness were starting to form a pleasing semicircular pattern. Mac had slowed down so that he no longer blurred across her vision, but he still moved very swiftly, scooping rock from the area beyond the re-formed stones, seeming to juggle the load in midair while applying dabs of bonding agent with the hand that wasn’t catching falling stones.

  “He should have been in show biz,” Becker said. “He’d have been a real hit.”

  Acorna said nothing. The re-formed rocks were singing again—at least they sang in her mind.

  (Do you hear them?) she asked Neeva and the other Linyaari.

  (Who, dear?)

  (The stones. Listen.)

  (I seem to hear something now that you mention it, but it may just be an echo of what you are picking up as I receive it through your thoughts. You do have this way with minerals, you know. Unique among us, so far as anyone’s memory extends. Keep listening, dear.)

  Acorna turned her attention inward again, hearing the melodious mental whispers of the stones again.

  Leaving the ship once more, she walked out across the newly mended stones, each of them striking a tone as her boot touched its surface.

  (Come! Make Haste! Seek! Find!) the stones sang.

  As she walked, Mac continued to lay newly mended stones on the ground. He didn’t appear to be conscious of creating a pattern, but in fact the stepping-stones formed three-quarters of a circle to the east of the ship, farthest from where the columns towered.

  Acorna walked toward the center, her heels chiming off the stones as she walked slowly and deliberately, listening, looking down at the stones as if they had faces she could read.

  (Underground, under stone, living flesh and living bone,) the stones sang.

  Mac, four stones nearer to the center of the circle than she was, suddenly stopped what he was doing and looked down. Acorna caught up and followed his gesture. A deep pit lay within the circle. This was not surprising. The planet was pocked with them. But if this one had a bottom, Acorna could not see it.

  She frowned at the stones around her. (And your point is?) she thought. They stopped singing, chiming, or making any other noise either aloud or in her head. Then she could hear the other voices, the ones from underneath, very faint, very weak, but voices.

  “Someone is trapped down there,” she told Mac.

  “Ah,” he said. “That explains it.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does. The stones weren’t singing simply because they had been ruined. They were sending a Mayday for whoever is below.”

  Quickly the others gathered while Becker, Mac, and Rafik deployed the earthmoving equipment the Condor carried for particularly heavy salvage jobs.

  “Are they right below us?” Rafik asked. “We don’t want to injure anyone.”


  Acorna searched, her mind excavating the pit, seeping between the rocks and dust of a collapse, finding open space, another collapse, and, at last, after sifting through yards of boulder and soil, meeting the minds trapped beyond. “No,” she said, “they aren’t directly beneath. But this seems to be the only opening to the place where they’ve taken shelter. I will tell them to keep as far back as possible anyway. Their tunnels have collapsed in two places, much the same as happened in Kubiilikaan and the old Ancestral caves on Vhiliinyar. These tunnels are old mine shafts, I think, but when the Khleevi came, the people who could not get off-planet hid down there to escape them. They had no idea of the destructive force they were dealing with.”

  “They told you all that?” Neeva asked. “What I’m getting is far too faint to make sense.”

  “No,” Acorna admitted. “I feel it though.” She tried to explain. “It’s partly the rock. This mineral affinity I have seems to magnify my other senses and make communication possible here.”

  “Whatever,” Becker said. “Tell ’em to stand clear anyway.”

  Becker, Rafik, and Mac set up a tripod over the hole, with heavy cables laced across the opening providing a suspension grid for the laser drill. Mindful of the Singing Stones, Becker and Rafik began digging and drilling, Mac working alongside the larger equipment. Suddenly the machinery shuddered, and a noxious gas, redolent of Khleevi scat, boiled up from the opening. Becker and Rafik gasped and coughed. Acorna and the other Linyaari rushed forward to purify the air.

  “Before you drill again,” Acorna said, “let me go down there, Captain, and clear the passage. If the air below is anywhere near as bad as what came out of the hole, it could kill any beings who have respiratory problems.”

  Becker coughed and hacked. “You mean like humans?”

  “Perhaps we should go with you, Khornya,” Neeva suggested, with a worried look at her niece. It was as if she was afraid that Acorna was not quite up to such a challenge.

  (What is it?) Acorna asked.

  (Nothing, really. You are still very upset though. You had that dream again. Do please be careful.)

  (Thanks for your concern, but I’m fine.)

  “If it’s very bad and there’s room, I’ll call for you,” Acorna reassured her aloud for Becker’s benefit. “But I hope as I get nearer to the barrier I’ll be better able to distinguish the thoughts of those trapped beyond. Also, I may see a way to bring the people out again without disturbing the Stones any more than we have to.”

  Everyone agreed this was sensible. They attached a mesh basket to one of the cables and lowered Acorna into the pit beside the drill.

  Rafik loaned her the helmet with the miner’s light he always carried with him. She wished he’d brought hers from her younger days, when she, too, mined with her foster fathers out among the asteroids. Her miner’s hat was tailored to fit around her horn. This one kept bumping into it. The light bounced around as a result so she got rather fleeting impressions of the area into which she was descending.

  There was the debris, of course, but surrounding it was evidence of the interior columnar structure that on the surface broke into the segments that later became the Singing Stones.

  The drill and the basket touched bottom and, since the machinery was very noisy, she sent a mental message to Becker to withdraw it.

  Now she would need to listen, to make her way toward the second cave in the area, to try to communicate with the entities trapped behind it.

  “Khornya, there you are,” a familiar voice said. She thought for a moment she was hallucinating.

  “Aari, how did you get here?” she asked, though she knew already. He was undoubtedly traveling through time and space, using the Ancestral Friends’ technology. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you, of course. I only had to check the log on record to know you’d be here about now. And I have a wonderful surprise for you!”

  “That’s—interesting,” she said, wondering if it was possible for a Linyaari to be insane. Because she felt like she was going what Becker would call “stark raving bonkers” just about now. Her lifemate’s insouciant flitting about through time and space made her more uneasy every time he did it. In that moment just now when he had appeared out of nowhere, goose bumps had actually risen on her skin. She tried to keep her voice level, as she said, “Aari, right now I’m rather busy, as I’m sure the—er—log recorded.”

  “That’s all right. You can do this and enjoy my surprise, too. I can return you here and now once I’ve shown you what I have for you, if you want. But this is probably going to be the most exciting thing in your entire life, so maybe you’ll want Neeva or one of the others to come down here and fill in for you.”

  His voice was as eager and enthusiastic as it had often been on a new mission, but there was also something…well…pushy about it, too. And self-serving. In all, what she was dealing with right now was Aari Whole-Horn at his most irritating.

  But she said patiently, “Aari, you know that the others don’t share my mineral-awareness. I am down here because I can best do what needs to be done at this moment. I have people waiting on me to do it, both my friends up on the surface and those who are trapped here. These beings may be injured. Some may be dying.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Aari asked, with a smug little smile. She knew he thought his “Friend” Grimalkin was wonderful, but she was beginning to think the Ancestral Being had been a bad influence on him. Even the way Aari spoke was different now, more flip-pant and dismissive of other people’s, or at least of her own, concerns. “They won’t have to wait at all. I can even make it possible for you to perform your task faster. I can return you here before now if you want me to. Only…right now we have to go. Someone else is waiting for you.”

  Aari’s tone was deliberately mysterious, mischievous, and playful, but she did not share his mood.

  “I have to tell the others what’s happening,” she said firmly.

  “There is no need,” Aari Whole-Horn said.

  He shot his hand out of the shipsuit sleeve, and tapped at a rather large object strapped to his wrist. It resembled a watch, but it had a keyboard and a very substantial face. When he stopped tapping, he grasped her hand, and said, “Here we are.”

  “I know that,” she said, almost snapping. They hadn’t moved at all, as far as she could see.

  “Of course you do. It’s the same here, but it’s rather different now. It’s much earlier in time, before the Khleevi attack, even. Come on. The ship is out here. They can hardly wait to meet you.”

  Ten

  Somewhere on the Planet Vhiliinyar,

  During the Time of the Khleevi Invasion

  Aari was about to drink the last of his water when something occurred to him. Water was the conduit for time-sliding on Vhiliinyar. It had been so in the time when Kubiilikaan was great, and it had been so when Aari fell out of his own time.

  Could this little bit of water perhaps take him where he needed to go? It wasn’t a lake or a river or even an ocean, and it hadn’t, as far as he knew, come from Vhiliinyar. It was the last tiny drink he had to see him through to distant Kubiilikhan, or Grimalkin’s return, or recapture by the Khleevi. A small risk by comparison with what he might gain. He was unsure how exactly to use the water, but he thought giving it something of Vhiliinyar might serve to connect it to the time-water partnership the Hosts had installed on his poor homeworld.

  He bent low and sloshed the thermos a bit so that the water met the gnarled nub of his horn. Maybe it could serve two purposes. Perhaps he could time-travel with it and drink it as well? How he wished Grimalkin had explained more about how the time apparatus worked. If only he could go back to pre-Khleevi Kubiilikaan and examine the time machine, then he would have the whole ocean to experiment with until he could send himself to his own time, Khornya’s time. But, for right now, all he had was his last drops of drinking water. It would have to do.

  Somewhere on the Planet Skarness,
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br />   During the Time of the Khleevi Attack on Vhiliinyar

  When Acorna and Aari emerged from the hole, the Condor, the Balakiire, Rafik, Captain Becker, Neeva, Melireenya, and Khaari were missing from where they had been only moments before. RK, however, sat glaring at them.

  Acorna found the cat’s presence reassuring. “Look, he waited for us,” she said, scooping the cat into her arms, which was not an easy thing to do since he stiffened himself into a straight-legged, flat-eared, flinty-eyed scowl of a cat.

  “But how?” Aari asked. He did not seem pleased to see RK. The cat hissed at him. Which was very strange. RK and Aari had always been fond of each other. When Aari touched Acorna’s elbow to guide her across the stones, RK took a swipe at him with five right hooks.

  “What has gotten into you?” Acorna asked RK, squeezing him a little as a reprimand. RK pulled his paw back, looked up at her with a hurt expression in widened eyes, and meowed reproachfully, as befitted a misunderstood cat who had been wronged by someone he trusted.

  “He can’t come where we’re going,” Aari said. His wound continued to bleed, and Acorna wondered why he didn’t heal it. She allowed RK to squirm away from her, then she stopped Aari with a glance. Holding his sliced forearm aloft, she bent her head to it and healed the scratches.

  “You should know by now that you can’t keep a cat from going where he wants to,” she said. “And, for RK, that’s even more true than it is with most cats.”

  “That is so. But that cat does not appreciate his opportunities. If I had been in your arms, I would not have jumped down. I know where I want to be,” he replied, and tried to pull her into his arms.

  She disentangled herself from his embrace only slightly more tactfully than RK had exited her own.

  It was Aari’s turn to look wronged. Remorse washed over Acorna again, but she couldn’t help it. He kept rushing her.