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

by Anne McCaffrey

  The first cabin he came to, he stood on his hind paws and put his front ones against the hatch. It gave easily under the full weight of his body, and he strolled in, then bolted out, wishing he still had the ability to hold his nose. Dead bodies! Oh, dear. Did his throat feel a little scratchy all of a sudden? Was that pain in his middle the beginning of some internal lesion? Were sores erupting under his fur, making his skin twitch? Was it not suddenly most terribly hot? And stuffy. Terribly stuffy. Hadn’t these people ever heard of O2?

  How long could he live before needing to seek out Khorii to get healed? He didn’t want to find her just yet, or have her find him. He did not wish to be found until it was too late for her to leave the ship.

  Chapter 16

  You look surprised, Uncle Hafiz,” Neeva said, as he gaped at the horde of Linyaari crowding like a big white cloud with multiple silver linings into his office in response to his request that the crew of the Balakiire visit him. “Did it slip your mind that we are telepathic?”

  “Not that we would eavesdrop, certainly not!” Melireenya protested, grinning without showing her teeth. “That would not be courteous. But when a friend is distressed over the fate of those beloved by both him and us, we cannot help but overhear.”

  “I am overwhelmed at your response,” Hafiz said mildly. Neeva, Melireenya, and Kharii were there, but so were Laarye, Aari’s brother, Maati, his sister, her mate Thariinye, Aari’s parents, and Acorna’s parents, plus assorted friends. Even Liriilyi was present, a poisonous female and undoubtedly the least popular Linyaari alive, she had no doubt come to gloat over the fact that the most popular were missing.

  “Since you have all read my mind, apparently” (though he thought it more likely they had heard the news in a more straightforward fashion from young Miikhaye), “you will be aware that I have been informed that much of Federation space is now under quarantine. Apparently the disease in question has attacked many worlds in many sites and has been particularly hard on the administration and troops of the Federation itself. Their relays are down and so, alas, are those of House Harakamian, though I pray our servants and employees will recover. Now that you have undoubtedly read all of my thoughts and probably my wife’s as well on the subject, I would like to hear yours.”

  “Obviously Aari, Acorna, and Khorii have been called upon to help cure the stricken,” Neeva said. “And just as obviously, if the disease is already so widespread, they will be unable to contain it alone.”

  “And therefore,” Acorna’s father continued, “we must help.”

  “Obviously,” Hafiz said. “But entrance into Federation territory is forbidden at this time.”

  “So we understand,” Laarye said. “But if the soldiers are all sick, who is going to stop us?”

  The midday sun melted across the brilliantly colored spires, cones, and domes of Corazon, the heart of Paloduro and its largest population center. Many of the city’s inhabitants were in the streets, but a playful breeze that stirred bright yellow flags at doorways, jewel-toned fluffs of feathers and flimsy gilded masks provided the only movement Aari and Acorna saw. Off to the west, a sluggish river clogged with large chunks of some mysterious material struggled to reach an unseen sea.

  Strange contraptions of delicate workmanship and rainbow hues seemed to have been cast adrift amid silent flitters and aircars, and—corpses.

  Never in her entire life had Acorna been so thankful for the purifying quality of the Linyaari horn. The putrid stench stewing in the heat of the sun gagged her, and she saw Aari’s knees buckle. By the time she held out a steadying hand, though, their horns had filtered the air reaching them, and the stink was more bearable.

  Acorna was possessed of a peculiar talent no other Linyaari had ever exhibited. She believed it came from being raised by asteroid miners and learning at an early age which drifting rocks might be profitable to exploit. Over the years, her sense of which minerals an asteroid might contain had developed into a finely honed sense of spatial relationships, so that at times, if she concentrated, she could determine what rooms and spaces—and activity—lay behind otherwise impenetrable walls.

  The stillness behind the facade of each and every building they passed was as stifling as the heat, as oppressive as the smell, and as appalling as the vast numbers of bodies strewn through the streets like discarded dolls.

  Discarded decaying dolls.

  “We’re too late,” she told Aari. “There is nobody here to cure.”

  “It is a large city, yaazi,” he said, using the Linyaari endearment he applied to both his mate and their daughter. “Everyone cannot possibly be dead already—can they? We had communication from here only forty-eight hours ago. I had the impression there were many people there, although some were sick. Everyone cannot possibly be dead,” he repeated, trying to convince himself.

  “Of course not,” she said. “We aren’t giving up, but we must search farther from the city center. I sense no life in any of these buildings, anywhere.”

  He scanned the buildings with a wild and haunted expression on his face. “What if it is very faint?” he asked. “What if someone is hanging on to the last thread of life and we are their last hope—when we leave, they will die.”

  She laid her horn gently against his, and said, “I sense no one, yaazi. But if such a one exists, we must trust that they will find happiness in their transition. If we search each of these buildings, think how many more may die who are farther away but easier to find.”

  He nodded. “Of course.” Looking at the debris and the bodies, he said, “A colorful people. What strange dress and customs they had.”

  “The plague caught them at the height of their Carnivale season,” she said. “It is a special celebration during which both people and conveyances are costumed, decorated, and disguised to dance in the streets. It is very crowded and people travel from all over the planet and all over this star system—even some others, to be here for it.”

  He looked at her quizzically. A multicolored paper pompom whirled past them like the spores from the puff flower until its tendrils caught in a black pool of something that dragged it down.

  The Federation had transmitted an informational vid on the Solojo system for them before they landed. It was an unusual system in that it contained four planets nearly equidistant from their sun, all of them class M, habitable worlds, on which the colonies established many years before had thrived and grown. Whereas Paloduro was the most beautiful of the four planets, the center for tourism and the residential center of the system, another world, Dinero Grande, was the administrative and business center. Rio Boca, the planet most distant of the four from the sun, was the usual entrance and jumping-off point for interstellar traffic. However, no communication had been transmitted from there or Dinero Grande in over a week, whereas Paloduro had sent an urgent mayday only two standard days before the Federation enlisted the Condor’s help.

  “I researched the archives from the beginning while I was on watch,” she explained. “From what we know of this disease, some of the younglings and the elders should be left here somewhere. But we cannot possibly search all of this on foot.”

  They found an abandoned flitter that activated at once when Aari toggled the switch. Using the point where they had landed as the center, they flew in ever-widening circles over the moribund city. The evidence of the Carnivale disappeared within a few blocks. Several times they saw plumes of smoke from the cinders of buildings or vehicles. Then they came to a broad gash in the green of a park. Inside it were the bodies of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, not even covered, simply deposited there for later burial. When the plague was over. Now there would be no one left to haul the dead to this makeshift morgue.

  But two streets over they saw what looked like purposeful movement—just the flash of what appeared to be a sleeve that quickly passed into a building.

  This area had fewer structures that had the businesslike facade of public buildings.

  “This is the reside
ntial area,” Acorna said. “People live here. At least, I hope some of them still do.”

  “Ah,” Aari said, nodding. “Yes. The yellow marks on the doors. Do those mean what I think they do?”

  “Yes. A yellow flag was the old sign for quarantine. If you recall, we saw some with intricate symbols flying over several of the buildings. But probably by the time these people started getting sick, whichever agency or individual had been doing the marking couldn’t keep up.”

  She stood still, closed her eyes, and let her sense of what spaces contained guide her through their surroundings. Opening her eyes suddenly, she said, “Come, yaazi. There is life still inside some of these buildings. We can help.”

  Without a second thought, the two tall, white-clad, silvery-maned, and golden-horned beings crossed the thresholds of each entrance marked by yellow paint, flags, plastic ribbon, kerchiefs, or bits of clothing. Such symbols were not for Linyaari healers.

  Nanahomea sat on shore long enough to strew sea flowers over the body of Ray Alcalde. “What were we thinking, letting him off-world on his own like that?” her friend Mokilau asked mournfully.

  “He had his duties to do,” Nanahomea said.

  “Yes, but we could have had a crisis that kept him here. He wasn’t very bright. We might have known he’d get into trouble.”

  “He wanted to go home,” Nanahomea said, staring sadly at the flower mound that had been their Federation liaison and so-called governor. They didn’t need a governor, of course, since they had been governing themselves quite successfully for more years than the Federation had been federated. In fact, if she wanted to get stuffy about it, Nanahomea was actually the queen, but she was only queen as long as she ruled the way her people wished to be ruled. “He was from that place, and he missed it. People do miss their homes.”

  “Yes,” Mokilau said. “Our young ones do, too. Leave him to the sky now, Nanahomea.”

  A single turn of the tide, and she regretted wasting sorrow on Alcalde, who brought death to her people as nothing had ever done before. Her own beautiful daughter, Haina-kolo, and her daughter’s mate Keaunini were among the first to die. They did not lose their food as the man did, but though it took two more tides to finish, they gasped and choked and could not dive. At the last, they could breathe neither air nor water, and drowned. Before their funeral chant was ended, many of the mourners who were their friends sickened as well. In two more tides, three in some cases, they, too, stopped breathing.

  “It is a traveling sickness, this,” the ancient healer, Nakulakai, said. “Raealakaldai brought it with him from the stars and when we brought him into the water, he passed his death to us.”

  “Why Haina-kolo, then, and Keaunini who were young and strong?” Nanahomea asked. “Why not me and Mokilau, who have little time left?”

  Nakulakai blew bubbles at her. “If this death is what I believe, you will be joining them soon. We all will. But we must give Keaunini and Haina-kolo back to the sky along with Raealakaldai and these others, too. When they stay in the water, the death rides the tide from their mouths to the mouths of others.”

  Nanahomea knew the sense of this, but insisted that each loved one passing into death should be treated with all of the love the living could send with them. Nanahomea and Mokilau bore the bodies of Keaunini and Haina-kolo to the beach themselves and covered them with flowers plucked from the ocean floor by others. The parents of her children’s dead friends bore their own children to the beach and did the same.

  But that did not stop the tide of death. The lines of mourners grew sparser and the heaps of the flower-covered dead grew larger until they blanketed the beach near the sand house. The ocean floor was bare of its flowers for as far as the eye could see.

  Nakulakai told everyone in Nanahomea’s home pod that travel was forbidden, as they would take the death with them to the distant pods. Meanwhile the sickness traveled from them like the ripples on water and for many days they heard reports in the far talk of families sickening and of new bodies on other parts of the crater reef. Nanahomea’s old sister Hiilei lived beyond the crater reef with her pod, and Nanahomea sent her a message in the far talk the ocean carried for leagues and leagues, asking after the health of her people and the health of the people near them. At first the news was not so bad, as if the sickness had not reached them or been stopped by the reef, but then the word came, far talked from one pod to the next, that Hiilei’s eldest son was sick, and his mate.

  Nanahomea was glad that the young ones were not there to see their parents die. How would she get word to her granddaughter, Likilekakua, of the last moments of Keaunini and Haina-kolo? That was when she had the most terrible thought of all, worse than anything that had happened upon LoiLoiKua.

  If the Federation officer had brought death to them, might other Federation officers have spread the same death to other peoples in other places? The Federation men were as many as drops in the ocean and had people everywhere. If others among them had the same sickness as Ray Alcalde, they could take it to Maganos Moonbase, where Likilekakua and the other children lived.

  Chapter 17

  Jaya’s grief surprised Khorii a little. People on Vhilliinyar didn’t grieve in quite that way, seeing death as a simple transition. It tore at Khorii’s heart how hard it was for Jaya to accept her parents’ transitions to their next lives. Also, she felt a sneaking suspicion that if something happened to her own parents, even though she knew the acceptable attitude of a Linyaari toward death, she might feel much the same as Jaya did.

  And although Jaya seemed to want to grieve by herself, and clearly needed time to adjust to the alterations in her world, to the disappearance of the familiar and the invasion of strangers, it didn’t take Khorii’s newly developing psychic skills to know that the girl should not be left completely alone.

  Standing aside, Khorii returned her attention to the bodies on the deck.

  “What are you doing, youngling?” Elviiz asked. “They are, as you have observed, in a moribund state, beyond your help.”

  “I know,” she said, softly, wishing she could adjust his volume control. “But I need to study them for a moment and try to form an image of what the plague looks like, as opposed to other illnesses, so I may identify it if we encounter it again and take preventive measures. Also, we must purify the bodies so that when they are set to rest they won’t spread the disease through the flowers if they’re buried, through the smoke if they are cremated, or to some curious passerby if they are spaced.” She pulled the sheet aside from the unknown man on the deck. His eyes were sunken deep in their sockets, the flesh of his cheeks had collapsed inwardly, and his skin was as waxy as the artificial fruit Auntie Karina decorated her private dining quarters with because the real thing rotted or was eaten too quickly.

  The smell of the man’s illness, and probably his death, was strong upon him as she touched her horn to his face. She was glad now that they had not known about the plague when they’d found the Blanca. She had been able to imagine the lives that had inhabited the bodies floating around her without having to look at them, and because of the lack of gravity and low levels of oxygen aboard the Blanca, the smell had not been as bad as it was here.

  No wonder Captain Becker and the cats had been ill. There had been toxic gas there, as they said, but before the gas, the plague had claimed at least some of those people. Luckily her parents and she had been with the Condor’s crew and cats when they were stricken. Otherwise…

  There were stories among the books and vids on the Condor that treated the dead as frightening or malevolent. She could not understand this. The body she touched with her horn was solid to her touch, much more substantial than a hologram of a person, for instance, and yet, also much emptier somehow. There was simply nothing there any longer. No one at home.

  Khorii arose feeling a bit dizzy, the spots that swirled and vanished adding to her sense of vertigo. It was almost as if she had been leaning over an unfathomably deep hole and was in danger of falling
in herself if she lingered too long on the edge.

  She told Elviiz, “Let’s notify Maganos Moonbase of our location and that we’re decontaminating the ship and—er—personnel so the Mana can dock. I wonder if Mr. Al y Cassidro had considered that the ship could crash into one of the school’s bubbles, which would also be bad for everyone’s health.”

  “It would kill everyone,” Elviiz corrected her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Definitely unhealthy.”

  Elviiz did as she said. Shoshisha had taken over com off duty and did not look very happy about it.

  “What are you doing on the com screen, Elviiz?” she demanded, ignoring the information he had automatically imparted when he hailed the Moonbase.

  “Communicating with Maganos Moonbase, obviously,” he said.

  “So—you guys are up there on that supply ship, right?”

  Khorii interrupted. It was rude, but Shoshisha was being curious and not helpful. “Shoshisha, Khorii here.”

  “Oh, really? I thought it was some other student with a horn in the middle of her head.”

  “Is there another one?” Elviiz asked. “I do not believe there is.”

  “No, Elviiz. There is not. Shoshisha is being facetious. Shoshisha, we need to speak to the teacher in charge on this shift.”

  “I’ll bet you do. That would be Calla. Just a nan.”

  It was a bit longer than a nanosecond before Calla Kaczmarek appeared in the com screen, but she was out of breath and red in the face, so she had been hurrying.

  “Khorii, Elviiz, where are you? Have you seen Hap or Sesseli? We’ve been looking all over for you kids.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, Calla. We are aboard the Mana with Jaya.”