Acorna's Rebels

by Anne McCaffrey

  The crude, dimly lit humanoid figure had one elongated triangle on its head instead of two. The triangle was located squarely in the middle of the person’s head. Like a horn. The entire mural was a petroglyph of her dream.

  Emerging from the underworld of the Temple was like emerging from another dream. Acorna felt as if she were awakening. She knew that the figure in the cave drawing was a Linyaari. In fact, she was sure that it was Aari. Involuntarily, her hand went to Aari’s birth disk. It was him. That was why everyone on this planet seemed to believe that she had some special significance in their—what? History? Religion? Myth cycle?

  “You okay, Princess?” Becker asked as he helped her up the last step and onto the platform beside the throne, where the cat woman was already lounging. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Very astute, Captain. I almost have. I think—no, I’m sure that Aari has been here.”

  “When? How? Why didn’t anybody say anything?”

  “They have said something—to me. And as for when, it was a very long time ago. They just showed me an ancient petroglyph of a Linyaari. It had to be Aari—he’s the only Linyaari we know of who has done a lot of traveling through time and space. And that petroglyph definitely depicted a Linyaari.”

  Miw-Sher popped her head out of the hole. “Yes, Ambassador. You saw the Companion of the Star Cat, who alone was privileged to call him by his most sacred name, Grimalkin. Tagoth says the Companion was a being like yourself, and personally foretold your coming. I saw the glyph long ago, when I was small, before my capture.”

  The priestess’s guards, human and feline alike, glared at the newcomers chattering away so near the throne of their ruler, and Acorna quickly led her friends down the steps to a respectful distance. The priestess had not answered Acorna’s questions or offered comments of her own. She simply smiled her enigmatic, catty smile and led them back from the cavern with a “there, you see?” air, as if the petroglyph explained everything.

  Acorna was very shaken; in fact, she was worried that she might even be broadcasting her feelings. Miw-Sher put her hand on Acorna’s arm and said, “Surely you understand that this is your fate. You are the one we knew would come. Surely you knew that, too?”

  “Prophecy doesn’t always work that way,” Acorna told her.

  The high priestess spoke then, and Miw-Sher interpreted her words for Acorna. “Shabasta is puzzled that you are so disturbed by what she has shown you. She says that the Companion and the Star Cat foretold that you would come and save us. The prophecy was a true one, since here you are. She now asks when you are planning to save us.”

  Before Acorna could think of any reply to that, a sleek tawny cat with red ears, tail, and paws came bounding up the stairs, as if on cue. Its message was simple. “Come.”

  The high priestess, no doubt for dramatic effect, gathered her legs beneath her and from her sitting position leaped over the heads of her guests and a quarter of the way down the steps. Her court, or flock, or whatever the other tribal members were considered, followed after her, as did all of the cats except Grimla and the kittens.

  Acorna and her friends, except for the boy, who was gathering up his small family, trailed behind the locals.

  Jungle people with spears surrounded three priests in Hissimi garb sitting in a wagon like the ones Captain MacDonald was using. The wagon was loaded with bundles.

  “Ungrateful savages,” one of the priests muttered. “We bring them emergency food and medical relief and they treat us like enemies.”

  “We are enemies, holy brother, strictly speaking,” the youngest of the three priests said in an undertone.

  “Not right at this moment,” whispered the third. Then, showing his teeth to the assembly, he announced in a loud voice, “We are friends. We come in peace from the Mulzar of Hissim. He sends lovely gifts. Food, medicine.”

  “Why should we need medicine?” the High Priestess said.

  “There’s a terrible plague on our planet that has decimated the ranks of our own Temple cats,” the man explained.

  Haji, Pash, and Sher-Paw strolled forward and faced the three, their tails jerking angrily.

  “By their tails!” cried the eldest.

  “And their whiskers!” cried the second.

  “It’s our own Temple guardians. What are they doing here? We heard of no raid. How did you capture them?”

  “We didn’t,” the priestess said. “They came here with these people who were seeking refuge from the murderous Mulzar of Hissim.” Seeing the priests’ confusion, Miw-Sher stepped forward and translated the words for the benefit of the Mulzar’s men.

  “Miw-Sher! What are you doing here? You traitor!”

  The high priestess stalked forward, her tail switching, her yellow-green eyes slitted and her ears laid back into her golden-brown hair/fur.

  The three priests fell silent, fear apparent in their eyes.

  The priestess snarled at them. The big cats moved closer and closer to the Mulzar’s men.

  “Well, now,” Becker said, stepping back from the wagon and pulling Acorna with him, “we can see you’re busy with your new visitors—the ones we were telling you about, ma’am. I can see you have things under control. So we’ll just be going now.”

  No one said a word as he and Acorna, followed after a moment of indecision by Miw-Sher and RK, returned to the flitter. The three male guardians of the Hissim Temple followed behind them, and a moment afterwards, Grimla zoomed out the door and hopped in the flitter, too. The boy they’d brought home followed close behind Grimla, carrying the basket of kittens, which he set inside the flitter. Then he retreated a short distance away, standing with his family and waving good-bye.

  The flitter rose above the trees and flew away from the jungle.

  Nadhari had not gone far before the wagon driven by the women caught up with her. She figured she had two choices at that moment. She could either walk back to Hissim and possibly be discovered along the way by Edu’s guards searching the roads for unusual travelers, or she could blend in with these women on the road, save herself some steps, and possibly win herself some allies.

  She chose the second alternative and flagged the travelers down.

  “Who are you?” demanded one, but another woman caught at her sleeve.

  “It’s Lady Nadhari!”

  “Yes,” Nadhari agreed, “that’s me.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I had to get my friends safely out of Hissim. I have done so, but I still have unfinished business with my cousin. I was hoping you could take me back to the city with you.”

  “You’d best ride up top, then.”

  “Thanks. I will, just for a little while. I think it might complicate your lives if I accompanied you all the way back. I’ll make my own way once we’re closer to Hissim.”

  “You’re cutting it close if you want to find the Mulzar. I have heard it said that the Mulzar is about to leave the city with the Fed’ration man.”

  “I wonder why,” Nadhari said, though she had some idea of what might be driving him.

  “Don’t know, Lady, but I’m sure he’s leaving soon. Maybe he’s going after the cats.”

  “Hah! Him?” said a younger woman. “He don’t care for cats. He’s got no use for creatures got more’n two legs. Him, he likes that machinery like they got at the Fed’ration post.”

  The woman shot an assessing glance at Nadhari that was, in the darkness, visible only as a gleam from the whites of her eyes. If she expected Nadhari to defend her cousin the Mulzar, she could relax, Nadhari thought. Edu was far worse than the woman thought he was. Nadhari knew from long experience that the only living creature Edu had ever cared about, two-legged or otherwise, was himself.

  After that exchange, they rode in silence.

  The little cavalcade halted once they reached the holding of the oldest woman in the outskirts of the city. None of them could pass through the gates into the middle of town until morning, so Nadhar
i took the time to demonstrate how to use the Metleiter boxes to her interested audience. She only hoped she remembered all of Scar MacDonald’s instructions on how to get the boxes up and running correctly.

  Then all the women but her hostesses—the youngest and the oldest of the ladies, a grandmother and her granddaughter—packed up their goods and their boxes and departed for their own homes. When the time came to seek a night’s rest, Nadhari was perfectly willing to sleep in her new friends’ stable. It was empty now because its former occupants had been slaughtered, victims of the recent plague, but the old woman and her granddaughter wouldn’t hear of letting Nadhari bunk down there. Instead, they made a pallet for her on the floor near the cooking fire. They tried to insist that Nadhari take their bed, but she declined, saying that she needed to be able to flee quickly if necessary without involving them.

  Which brought up the point of how Nadhari was going to get into the city in the morning. At the urging of her hostesses, she abandoned her plan to climb the walls of the city and wing it from there. After some discussion, the ladies convinced Nadhari to borrow a gown from them so that she might pass through the main gate into Hissim without attracting undue attention.

  Once settled onto a prickly pile of dry grass gathered into a loose sack, Nadhari fell deeply asleep, a skill she had learned in her years as a fighter. She knew she would rouse at the lightest footfall, ready to fight or run if the need arose. But this night, at least, passed peacefully.

  The next morning the farm women dressed her in one of the grandmother’s ragged spare gowns. They all piled into the wagon together and drove it back to the city’s main gates. There the old woman regaled the guard with a tale of finding the vehicle, clearly the Temple’s property, abandoned and empty on the desert’s edge. As good citizens, she told him, they were returning it, and she was sure that the guard would reward them richly for their good deed.

  That did the trick. The soldier confiscated the wagon, chided them for interfering in civic matters they did not understand, and sent the women away as fast as he could—empty-handed, of course.

  By the time her friends had finished loudly arguing about the injustice of the guard’s behavior, attracting the attention of every person within earshot, Nadhari had quietly made her way to the wall enclosing the Federation outpost.

  The post was not large, as such places went, but it covered maybe five square miles, all of it walled, rather than fenced. She doubted electronics or surveillance equipment played a part in protecting this section. It seemed to depend on height and a guard who patrolled at intervals Nadhari timed by mentally counting hippopotamuses. She made her way through town to the end of the wall farthest from dwellings and from the post gate. The guard wasn’t due to return for twenty minutes or so.

  Though she had never been privileged to change into a cat, as Tagoth could, the perimeter wall provided no great challenge. She was over it and on the ground well before the guard was due to return. At that point, she thought she might ambush him or her and take the uniform. With that she would return to the Condor and send a message to some friends of hers in high places in the Federation. They might be interested in a few of the family stories she had to relate about the Mulzar and how he’d found a soulmate in the current post commander. If they were not interested, she was pretty sure she could persuade Hafiz to mount an investigation. Meanwhile, she would slip back over the wall and foment revolution and dissent, not necessarily in that order.

  From the shadows where she lurked, quite at home, she saw a lone Federation officer approach an apparently disabled flitter. The flitter lay abandoned in the field between the wall and where the Condor and the Traveler were docked. The large spacegoing vessels blocked the small local transport craft from the view of the Federation headquarters building. So no one would see her take out the officer and relocate, in military parlance, his or her uniform to her own person.

  Unfortunately she had lacked worthy opponents since she’d taken the cushy job with Hafiz. Her reflexes and defensive instincts were not what they once had been. She circled around behind the officer and grabbed him as he bent toward the flitter.

  But just then she was distracted by the Condor’s robolift cranking and shuddering toward the ground. She looked toward it for just a moment, thinking somebody ought to oil that thing. And that, of course, was when someone attacked her from behind. No low-tech scruples for this assailant, she thought as she crumpled to the ground with the force of the stun waves from the gun. It was her last thought for some time.

  “For a horse-and-buggy civilization, these guys make tracks,” Becker said, sounding worried. “This is starting to look ugly. I’m guessing the welcome wagons with the poison goodies are Edu’s advance guard. Soften ’em up with the disease and then send in the regular troops to finish them off or at least subdue them. Maybe we should have left both of the kids with the cat queen, rather than just one. The Mulzar won’t know for quite a while that his trick didn’t work at the jungle temple.”

  Acorna didn’t translate verbally this time. She just transferred Becker’s ideas into Miw-Sher’s head.

  “You can’t leave me behind,” Miw-Sher protested, without even questioning how she understood Becker’s words. “You need me to show you where to go—or at least sort of where to go. We need to find my uncle Tagoth. We need his help. We’ve got to get to the Aridimi stronghold before the Mulzar’s men do. It is really hard to find. Or at least that’s what Tagoth says, but he knows how to get to it. He’s been there before.”

  Acorna patted the girl’s hand, trying to cut through the questions and feelings that were cycloning through her own mind and concentrate instead on reassuring the frightened child. They both had a job to do.

  “I’m sure that we can find Tagoth if we need to,” Acorna said. “He can’t have gone too far on foot. Had I known we were going to have the use of the flitter, I would have asked him to wait for us at some hidden place, and we could have all gone there together. But why is it we need to find this stronghold, especially right now? Do the Aridimi also have many cats and other creatures who could be endangered?”

  “Oh, yes,” Miw-Sher said. “Next to the Makaviti Temple, the Aridimi one is said to be the most highly guarded on our world. You see, it is where all of our sacred stones come from. I am sure that the Mulzar will be wild to get to it. Were it not for the Aridimi location being secret and hidden, all of the tribes would have raided it long ago, Tagoth says. It is so far out in the desert that none of our armies can survive the trip. But I believe we can get there in this conveyance.”

  “So what heading should I take?” Becker said.

  Acorna relayed the question and Miw-Sher said, “North, as if to Hissim, but then west toward the dunes and white hills. We call them the Serpent Spine. That is as far as I know how to go. But I think we should be able to see Uncle Tagoth easily from this machine. The desert is vast, but it is barren, and he will be going the same direction as we are.”

  Acorna passed the information to Becker as they overflew the last of the rainforest and saw the terraced steppes rising before them, wrapped with glittering ribbons of water. This close to the jungle, and far from the Temple where Edu’s plague had been introduced, the fields were healthy and fertile, covered with red, green, and golden grasses waving in the wind.

  “Pit stop,” Becker announced, and landed the flitter.

  “Why is he stopping?” Miw-Sher asked. “I thought everyone agreed that we need to hurry.”

  Acorna wanted to know exactly the same thing. She turned to Becker and asked him.

  “Well, this is as close to safe as we’re likely to be for quite a while. The first wave of bad guys headed in our direction have been apprehended by the jungle cat folk, who may be making lunch of them right now. I don’t think the second wave is going to be coming in the next few minutes.

  “So now is as good a time as any—maybe the best time for Linyaari girls who have healed well but not always wisely to graze and get drinks
of water. All of us need a break—pussycats, too. Maybe they can catch a quick mouse or something—that is, if they can move after all they ate last night. We don’t know what kind of reception we’re in for.”

  “But the stronghold…” Miw-Sher protested.

  Becker held up his hand to ward off her objection. “If this Aridimi place is so hard to find, I bet their pussycats haven’t got their nice present from the Mulzar yet, and we’ve got a little head start here, thanks to this flitter. We need to take the time to take care of ourselves. I think we should be as ready as we can be for whatever will happen. Heck, I have to go find a handy bush myself.”

  Acorna didn’t translate the last part. She did realize that Becker’s point was well taken. She needed to eat and drink as well as rest long enough to catch her breath, if she was to do any more mass healings. Possibly he was also correct that the cats at the Aridimi stronghold wouldn’t require her help as a healer, but if they did, she must be prepared.

  The place Becker had set the flitter down was as beautiful as any Linyaari dream of the lost homeworld. A stream frothed like fine lace over rocks that glittered with as many colors as a gemstone tiara. The water’s depths were the soft, clear pink of rose quartz. Still, just to be safe, Acorna dipped her horn into the running water and also cleansed the grasses of the field before she ate them.

  “RK, you and the guardians should bring any prey you catch to me to purify before you eat it.”

  To the disgust of the cats, however, the fields were barren of even the smallest prey, which made Acorna fear that the plague had already spread farther among the animals of the world than she had previously believed.

  The grasses were delicious, though, and the water as well. She enjoyed the chance to stretch and walk about. She was feeling more like herself by the time they reboarded the flitter.

  That was when she realized Becker had not been following his own advice about relaxing. “Mac, come in. Do you hear me? Condor, this is your captain speaking. Give me a call if you can hear my voice.” But despite his various attempts to adjust, repair, and reset the equipment, all he received in return was static.