[Acorna 08] - First Warning: Acorna's Children (with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough)

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Oh, Hafiz, it is truly truly awful. I don’t know what we are to do!”

  “What, my anxious angel? What demons dare distress you? Tell me that I may slay them!”

  “No demons. No clear images at all. But the waters turned black, then red, and that means only one thing, well, two actually.”

  “Yes?”

  “Gloom and doom. Disaster and despair. Bad omens indeed. Our loved ones are headed into terrible cataclysmic danger. Whatever will they do? However will we help them?”

  He peered across her into the birdbath, which looked clear except perhaps for a bit of pond scum. He’d have to speak to the gardener about that. He sighed and stroked her hair. “Come, my darling, you are overwrought and will spoil your complexion and your appetite. Your Hafiz has already taken steps to evaluate this doom of which you speak. As for worrying about what they will do, please recall, my ravishing raven of revelations, that we are speaking here of Acorna and Aari, who destroyed the Khleevi menace. They will manage.”

  “Yes, but, Haffy, they have Khorii with them, and she is just a child.”

  “Ah, but she is their child. And in that you must take comfort.”

  “But that may just be the problem, Hafiz. Have you considered that?”

  You know, Hafiz thought, she might have a point.

  On the fringes of the industrial district of the city of Corazon on the residential and tourist world of Paloduro, third in prominence in the Solojo star system, inside a rented high school gymnasium, a battle raged in an altogether different dimension.

  Jalonzo Allende, as Quetzacoatl, struggled for hegemony over the game world with the other contestants in the weeklong Carnivale Marathon Brujartisano Tournament. As usual, his full attention was on his game. As usual, he was winning. Thus he was unaware of exactly when the plague first struck.

  A master strategist, Jalonzo made up his decks and plotted his moves with the high intelligence and grasp of complex patterns that had allowed him to progress far beyond his chronological age in his studies of the sciences.

  He knew his abuelita, his grandmother, devoutly hoped he would someday apply his talents to more realistic and lucrative pursuits than gaming. Jalonzo had plans, but since the death of his parents when he was nine, he hadn’t bothered telling people about them much, not even Abuelita. For the moment, the game was what mattered.

  Though he had only been playing it four years, since just after his parents died, Jalonzo was a seasoned veteran, a mighty warrior-mage, with more wins than anyone in the city of Corazon. He was proud of his comparatively vast library of game rules, history, variations, and back stories, his albums full of cards and his collection of unusual dice—enough to fill most of his clothing locker at home. He had had to pay for only a tiny fraction of these treasures—the rest were his loot, winnings from his victories.

  The other players were not always glad to see him, but most of them said nothing to his face. They all knew that someday soon he would be invited to participate in the holographic tournament held every year on Bruja Prime, the smallest moon of Rio Boca, a moon leased exclusively to the Brujartisano Corporation, who had invented and controlled the game. Also, at six feet five inches, Jalonzo towered over most of the other players, who saw him as just a little scary. Heavy and powerfully built, with black hair and the faint black shadow of an incipient beard, he looked far older than he was.

  He had no idea when the first death occurred in the outside world, as he had been busy for the preceding three days slaying the characters of his opponents. The first real death he was aware of was the nacho guy. Camazotz the Bat God was the one who found him. Camazotz, known outside the game as Jaime Martinez, a nervy, thin, redheaded kid who had been losing often enough to have lost interest in the game in favor of food, came into the gym yelling that there was a dead guy on the sidewalk outside the gym. A dead guy with the thermal case of Mucho Nachos, the only place in this part of the city that delivered.

  “Is he really dead? How do you know?” Apocatequil the Thunder Bringer, who was also the Prince of Evil, asked, sounding just like Jalonzo would have expected his character to sound: blood-thirsty and excited.

  “Is he all bloody?”

  “Why would the nacho place send a dead guy, anyway?”

  “Can we still get the nachos, or did he do something gross to them?”

  Jalonzo almost suspected this was a trick to get him to quit, go outside to check, then they’d shut him out so he wouldn’t win anymore. But that was silly. Somebody had to win, and it was a tournament after all. The fun was in playing the game.

  And even if it was a trick, he had to look, didn’t he? The guy might still be alive.

  Jalonzo rose and quickly walked through the sweat and strong-soap-smelling locker room, through the front hall to the entrance. He didn’t have to open the door to see the guy. The door was clear plas, as were the side panels on either side of it. The guy really did look dead. There were flies for one thing, but then, they’d swarm around anyone living or dead. But there were an awfully lot of them all over the guy’s face. So, yeah, dead probably.

  But if he wasn’t and the curanderos could still save him? The other contestants crowded against the panels and the door, gawking at the maybe-dead guy.

  Jalonzo, mindful of his size and powerful build and careful not to push or hurt anyone, gently moved them away from the door and opened it. Fanning at the flies, he reached for the guy’s wrist to find a pulse, as Abuelita had shown him how to do when he was a boy. As soon as his fingers touched the guy’s skin, Jalonzo could tell that he was already gone. The skin was way too cool on such a hot day. Also, he stank of something a little more rotten and less rank than most people smelled when it had been hours since they last washed.

  Backing away from the guy, he pulled out his hola to call the curanderos. But he couldn’t even get a tone. Funny. He had juice, the power cell was full. The little hola looked as if it was eager to talk to him, eager to find who he wanted, all ready to go, but it couldn’t. It just sat there in his hand. He looked down the street, thinking, and he noticed that everything was really very quiet for a holiday in that part of town. Usually there’d be a lot of loud music blaring from flitters and maybe some guys who’d had too much pulque, people in costume headed uptown to join in one of the Carnivale parades.

  The only flitters on the street were silent and grounded, including the one with the Mucho Nacho logo docked a few feet from the door. Where was everybody? Looking back at the gamers, with their faces and hands pressed against the glass, he shrugged. Some of them were scanning the street as he had. Others turned away and were frowning into their holas.

  Mucho Nacho’s logo was emblazoned like a heraldic device on the thermal container cushioning the upper half of the dead guy’s body. Jalonzo could see the hail number and tried it. This time there was a tone but no answer, which was very weird since Mucho Nacho was a busy place, three or four people at least there in the restaurant part to serve customers as well as the delivery guy. The smell of food made Jalonzo’s stomach rumble, but he didn’t much want any of the nachos under the corpse. He wandered over to the flitter to see what was there, half-expecting someone to yell at him to get away from there. But nobody did. There was nobody, but nobody, to yell anything actually.

  He found another order of nachos, also in a thermal container, and took it. After all, the one they ordered was under the delivery guy, through no fault of theirs, and they were owed an order. Then he saw there were five other thermal containers as well, tamales in cornhusk wrappers, a huge basket of taquitos, more nachos, a couple of complete dinners, and some cinnamon churros. And drinks. Well, it wasn’t theft. All that food was just going to get cold and rot out there by the time anybody came to see to this guy, so the gamers could eat the stuff and pay for it later.

  The containers were easy to lift, and he lugged all five of them plus the drink cooler back to the gym. At least, burdened as he was with food, there was no question about the others
letting him back in.

  They stood away from the door when he came in, then three tried to push past him to go outside. He shoved the food into their arms, keeping them inside the building. “No, man, wait,” he said. “It’s no big deal. Nothing we can do. Nothing the curos can do. I called them.”

  “How, man? I couldn’t even get a ring!”

  “Me, neither. But I tried. We’ll try again later. Must be a sunspot or something. Or maybe the Carnivale lights have overloaded the grid.”

  “What was wrong with him, man?”

  Jalonzo shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe a heart attack? He wasn’t bleeding or anything. Anyway, we got eats. We gonna play or what? We haven’t finished the game. And it’s dead out there.”

  Chapter 9

  It wasn’t until the end of the first week on the Moonbase that things began to go wrong. Up until then, while Shoshisha’s public fawning over Khorii was annoying, and there were a few more mean looks from the one boy, looks that were not only for Khiindi but for Khorii and even Elviiz, classes were, if not challenging academically, at least good opportunities for studying human nature.

  And then, before she realized it, Khorii’s psychic ability began to manifest itself, and she was studying human nature far too closely for the comfort of most of the humans involved.

  Furthermore, without realizing it, the human students in her applied astrophysics class were privy to some of her thoughts. This became apparent after a test, when the teacher, Captain Bates, reviewed the results. Shortly afterward, the captain, a pleasant-faced woman with soft, wavy, brown hair, a smile as quick as her keen intelligence, and a pantherlike prowl when she was unhappy about something, prowled back and forth in front of the class. Her expression said that this panther had found more prey than she knew what to do with and was just considering how to use them up without ruining her digestion.

  “If I were going to plagiarize a test paper,” she said, “I would have sense enough to change some of the words and at least a couple of the answers, especially if I were dumb enough to plagiarize answers from the paper of someone else in this class. I would not pass out the test answers to everyone else in the class ahead of time either.”

  Everyone looked baffled. At first Khorii was, too, but when she saw the papers, she understood what had happened. The answers on the paper she turned in were hers—and so were everyone else’s. All of her classmates thought the answers they’d turned in were theirs because they had put down the answers that were in their heads. She’d put the answers there. Her answers.

  She had been sending. Ulp. Aunt Maati had told amusing stories about Mother when she first arrived on narhii-Vhiliinyar, after she first began realizing and developing her psychic abilities. She was a strong sender. Everyone on the planet could know what she was thinking almost before she herself did. Of course, that was on narhii-Vhiliinyar, where everyone else past puberty was also psychic, but a strong sender could influence nonpsychics as well. Oh, dear.

  She should tell Captain Bates and she would. She would. Only, maybe not right now in front of everybody.

  Unfortunately, Captain Bates had to rush off after class, and Khorii had no opportunity to speak with her. She started to go after the teacher, but suddenly she smelled food and the thought occurred to her, Why bother? It’s not like we’re real students here anyway. We’re only observing. Our education in these matters already far surpasses what they’re learning. If everyone else heard our answers, then they heard the right answers, didn’t they? Maybe they learned something. Isn’t that the point?

  But then she wondered, What am I thinking? Our answers? They were mine. Elviiz certainly isn’t telepathic. It’s not the kind of thing his father could program into him. But before she could pursue that line of thought, Khiindi looked up at her with a wide-eyed stare, whiskers, ears, and tail tip all atwitch. Hmm. He hadn’t had a nice fish since the first day they were there, at least, not that she knew of. And some tasty varieties of reed grew in the poopuus’ pool. Really, it would be more interesting to lunch with the waterbound students than sitting in the cafeteria while her own lunch wilted watching that nasty boy, Marl Fidd, make threatening faces at Khiindi and make fun of Hap for talking all the time. She wondered what made him so unpleasant. It was as if he wanted to do her harm but was waiting for just the right moment to take her on. Right now, for instance, she knew very well that he would have been nasty to her, too, but Shoshisha made a point of sitting with her and showing everyone what great chums she and her “alien” roommate were. And Marl liked Shoshisha.

  Most of the boys did, in fact. Shoshisha, Khorii had noticed, depended on this fact and cultivated her male acquaintances carefully. All except Hap. She wasn’t very nice to him at all. She laughed at the jokes Marl and Fawndra made at Hap’s expense. Like there was something wrong with him. Really, he was just smarter and a lot more skilled at so many practical things, he ended up doing much of the maintenance in their bubble. For some reason, according to the ranking among the students, that was supposed to make him inferior.

  Khiindi put a paw with claws slightly extended against her knee and narrowed his eyes at her.

  “Fish,” she said. “Very well, Khiindi. We will visit the poopuus.” So she and Khiindi headed for the iris door between the bubbles. Meanwhile Elviiz explained to anyone who would listen how the laws of probability were against all of the students in their class coming up with identical equations in answer to the questions as they all headed to the cafeteria.

  Inside the air felt fresh and moist. Light dapples danced on the inner skin of the bubble, diffusing the businesslike illumination into something slightly mysterious.

  Khorii did not need to call out. Her friends of a few days ago bobbed in the water at the pool’s edge, watching their approach. One of them dived and surfaced with a wriggling fish, which Khiindi pounced upon the moment it hit the deck.

  Khorii didn’t disrobe this time. There was no practical need to since her shipsuit was waterproof as well as fireproof and windproof. It was made of a lighter version of the same fabric from which the pavilions of Vhiliinyar were constructed. She’d undressed on her previous visit to be polite, only to be told that it was actually considered not merely rude but shocking to the other students. The poopuus did not appear to care. No one greeted her in the conventional way, but once she dived in, she was surrounded by so many swimmers the water lapped in waves around her chin and face.

  She noticed that the bobbing in the water and the swimming back and forth was rather nervous. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “What do you know of the sickness?” one of them asked.

  “I know that it’s very widespread,” she said. “But my parents have gone to the place where it’s the worst to try to contain it at that source and cure as many as possible with—our Linyaari technology.”

  “What place is this?” asked another one.

  “A place called Paloduro. Why?”

  “Because the disease has come to LoiLoiKua, according to the ’puters,” another said, pulling her underwater and pointing at the screen which, beneath the lessons being transmitted, had a plague status banner scrolling through the current statistics, place names of the newly quarantined areas, and, in some cases, links to find the names of the dead in certain locations.

  “What’s LoiLoiKua?’ she asked.

  “It is our homeworld. Our parents and elders are there. They sent us here to learn in fresh new waters, hoping that if we do not find a way to save our own world, we might at least escape the destruction of our seas. But all we learned is that now we are far away from our kinsmen while a sickness comes upon them that strikes elders but not children. And we are not there to care for them. I am Likilekakua. I want to go home.”

  “I know what you mean. I want to go home, too. This trip is not working out at all in the way I thought it would. But the Federation won’t allow any of us to go home now.”

  It came to her that she and the poopuus had in common something the
other students lacked: living parents.

  Khorii did not sleep well that night. She dreamed she was looking through a telescope and saw her mother drowning, much too far away for Khorii to save her. She scanned the pool—which turned out to be a sea, and saw something circling overhead. It was RK, carrying Khorii’s father in his mouth as if he were a mouse. Khorii wanted to tell RK to put her father down, but if he did, then Father would drown, too. But someone had to save Mother. Then the dream turned around and it was Khorii who was drowning, though she was actually her own mother. But then RK knew about it and reached out for her, fishing for her with one paw, claws cruelly extended, digging into her shoulder.

  She cried out and RK gave her a disdainful look and turned tail. The underside of the tail brushed her face, which was not so bad, but RK also “marked” her at the same time with some of the hormonally charged tomcat urine that Uncle Joh claimed could eat through steel.

  Khorii was really drowning now, gagging and coughing and wiping at her mane. Of course, the smell was dispersed almost immediately by her horn, but the sound of her mother screaming was not.

  However, it did change. It was not her mother. It was Shoshisha screaming. “I’m going to kill it!” she wailed. “That cat just sprayed all of my new silk underwear. I waited months for it to arrive!”

  Khorii sat up, fully awake. That part of her nightmare, at least, was quite real. Shoshisha was on her feet, brandishing a shoe and dodging back and forth around her cot in an effort to head Khiindi off. Khiindi, of course, thought it was a great game. Khorii rose, lay across Shoshisha’s bed, and picked her cat up by the nape of the neck before holding him firmly, though perhaps not tenderly, against her.

  “Bold, bad cat,” she scolded, but stroked his head as she did, so he broke into a loud purr.

  “He ruined it!” Shoshisha was crying. “I forgot to close the drawer all the way last night and he got in and soaked it with that horrible smell.”