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

by Anne McCaffrey

  “All of you?”

  “Yes, we took the shuttle. Elviiz and I were going to come alone, but Sesseli and Hap insisted on accompanying us.”

  “Oh, no! That’s terrible. Khorii, you know you can’t return now, don’t you? Not until the quarantine is over.”

  “I don’t see why not. Elviiz and I are capable of decontaminating the ship so the Moonbase can use the supplies it brought, and Jaya is fine now, except that she grieves for her parents. Mr. Taj died before we arrived. But no one is sick now, and no one will get sick as long as we are here to prevent it.”

  “Your self-confidence is admirable, dear, but it isn’t enough of a guarantee to risk the entire student body if you’re wrong.”

  “Found them!” Shoshisha’s voice piped up behind Calla, and in the viewscreen Khorii saw Asha Bates and Phador Al y Cassidro. Someone else was back there, too; she sensed him but didn’t see him.

  “I am not wrong,” Khorii said. “You know my mother can heal and purify—so does the Federation, which is why my parents went to that other planet. My father has the same skills. So do I. It is not a matter of age with us. I can do what I say I can, Calla. I would not boast in such serious circumstances.”

  Jaya suddenly came to life. “It’s true, ma’am! I was sick, too, and she did something to me and I’m not anymore. If your stupid boss had sent her to begin with, my dad might still be alive, too.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, dear, but casting blame does no good. You simply cannot land here. I know you, Khorii, are certain that your special methods can make the ship safe, but what if you are wrong? This is not just any disease. If other students became ill…”

  “Then we’d heal them. We could heal all of you with no problem,” Khorii said.

  But Calla was shaking her head. “You’ll just have to sit it out up there, dear. Quite aside from breaking the Federation’s rules, despite your assurances we cannot risk infecting the other students with the plague. I’ll send messages to the Federation and anyone else I can reach to relay to your parents the facts of your situation, but that’s all I can do for now. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.”

  “But can we not at least land?” Khorii asked. “No one would need to come near us until you were convinced that we are not sick or carrying any disease, but even though the ship has plenty of fuel at present and the requirements for maintaining orbit are not high, eventually it will run out. It might even crash into the bubbles, then everyone would be dead.”

  “We’ll simply have to hope that the Federation finds a cure for this soon and lifts the quarantine,” Calla said, shaking her head. “When you first docked on Maganos, you came from a clean vessel that had not yet been exposed to the plague. That’s no longer the case. You must all remain aboard until the quarantine is lifted or the ship can be tested and we have clearance from the Federation.”

  Khorii almost told her how wrong she was—that she had been exposed to the plague before she even got there. But that would be telling a secret that was Uncle Joh’s. He had been so right about not trying to do anything about the dead people on the Blanca. She’d apologize to him as soon as she saw him again.

  “Stupid fraggin’ bureaucrats! Darn suckers are gonna kill us all,” Hap said, overhearing the transmissions between the Mana and Moonbase.

  Sesseli patted his shoulder, and said, “It’s okay, Hap. But one thing’s for sure. We can’t just stay in the shuttle all the time. Let’s go find Khiindi and Khorii and Elviiz.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But we might get sick, too.”

  She said, “If we do, Khorii will fix us like she said, like she fixed Khiindi.”

  He smiled at her certainty. Little kids. Even one who had been through what Sesseli had suffered still believed everything would be fine and someone would save them. He’d thought that, too, at one time. He’d thought Maganos Moonbase was his salvation. Think again.

  It was okay for him. He was used to it by now and had learned to take care of himself. But Sesseli was just a child. It wasn’t fair to leave her on her own like this.

  She was right though. The two of them couldn’t stay inside the shuttle indefinitely. He hailed the Mana’s bridge. “Khorii, don’t forget Sesseli and me. Let us know when you’ve cleaned the place up enough that we can come out.”

  Elviiz appeared in the screen. “Decontamination of the landing bay and corridors up to the bridge has been completed, Hap. You and Sesseli may join us if you wish, but it will not be pleasant. There are dead crew members here, and the one survivor is rather upset.”

  In the background he heard Khorii speaking soothingly while another girl ranted.

  Hap turned to Sesseli. “You better wait here till I come and get you, Squirt. We’ll get the bodies moved from the bridge.”

  Sesseli put her hands on what would someday be her hips, and said disparagingly, “Really, Hap, I can handle it. Almost everyone in my colony got killed before the Federation came to help us. Besides, I’m worried about Khiindi.”

  Chapter 18

  Khiindi was getting worried about himself. He didn’t feel at all well. It was probably all that talk of illness. He had never actually been ill before, but then, he’d never been slung into a pool—well, almost into the pool—by his tail before either. Much as he liked novelty, all new experiences were not necessarily good just because they were new. The truth was, being frozen in this one shape all the time made him less inclined to accept change in other ways, too. Not that anyone sane would like being flung by their tail, but he found it all too easy to degenerate into a purry, lap-sitting, nip-sniffing, kibble-vacuuming, common pussycat, and that alarmed him. Still, his personal philosophy aside, he couldn’t see any upside to being ill.

  He found a cargo bay and hopped up onto the topmost container for a contemplative scratch and wash. He needed to scratch far more than usual. His left ear really itched, and something bit him near the base of his tail. Fleas? They had fleas on this tub? He hadn’t seen a flea since way back before he became Khiindi, while traveling to the more rustic agro colonies. Back then, for the most part, he’d had no fur to infest and did have opposable thumbs capable of wielding antidotes to the nasty bugs.

  But now it seemed that as soon as he got one spot quieted, another two itches flared up on other parts of his body. He scratched and bit himself in first one place, then another, until the blood seeped through his fur, but that didn’t help anything. What would help was a horn touch, but those among his kind who felt he was so self-centered that he would consider personal comfort above explorations possibly beneficial to the good of all mistook his inherently noble nature.

  Besides, there might be something tasty back here that Linyaari and humans would overlook because it chiefly concerned cats.

  Not that he had his usual healthy appetite, of course, as poor as he was feeling. But he would need to keep up his strength, no matter the sacrifice involved or his personal feelings on the matter.

  He tried stalking stealthily through the labyrinth of containers but had to keep stopping to scratch. And suddenly, with his foot in midair after a swipe at the patch behind his left ear, he heard his scratch being echoed. An echo of a scratch? That was a new one, surely.

  “Someone’s out there.”

  “Of course someone’s out there. Someone has to fly the bloody ship, don’t they? Unless you’ve grown opposable thumbs recently.”

  “I don’t mean one of those. I mean someone on four feet. Our sort of feet unless I miss my guess.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t the quarry?”

  “Oh, yes, of course I’m sure it isn’t the quarry. I can see through these big opaque containers, can’t I? How should I know!”

  “Just asking,” the other voice said, making itself small.

  “Mmyow?” Khiindi inquired. And since the rest of the dialogue was, as best he could tell, conducted by thought transference, he used that mode to ask, “Who’s there?”

  “Vermin Eradication Specialists,” replied th
e loudest and most mature of the voices. “This is our patch, you know. You’re intruding. Move along now.”

  “Where are you?” Khiindi asked, looking around. Were his eyes growing dim? There was very little ambient light in the storage hold—only a faint glow tube around the perimeter of the bulkhead. But as he rounded the edge of a container the light was sufficient to glitter off three sets of coin-bright eyes. Between him and the eyes were crude bars. These belonged, it seemed, to the ordinary sort of cats. It did not surprise Khiindi that he understood their language, as he had been, in his time, widely traveled, and although his ability to change forms had vanished, his knowledge of languages and customs had not. Also, quite possibly these cats were not as ordinary as they seemed. Khiindi had sired many offspring throughout time and in many galaxies. Some resembled one form and some another, but the most common shape was felinoid. These could therefore be distant descendants of his own, but they wouldn’t realize that, and he did not feel it prudent to treat them as anything but common house cats. Or ship cats, in this case. He had, after all, been rather generous with his—uh—affections—and being related to him did not necessarily recommend them as creatures worth cultivating though they would, of course, be superior to creatures who were not of his line. “Oh, yes, of course, you’re incarcerated for the journey,” he said, with an approving glance at the bars partially concealing their faces. “You would be. Mustn’t have animals running loose on shipboard, or they make an awful mess like that beast aboard Becker’s Condor…”

  “What is he talking about, mammy? It doesn’t make any sense,” said the smallest voice.

  “Naturally not, child. He’s an unstabilized male. Can’t you smell him? You have to watch out for his sort. Nothing on their so-called minds but rape and murder.”

  The kitten’s voice reflected the natural bloodthirstiness of the young. “Really, mammy? Why does he do that? What’s unstabilized mean?”

  “It means he has not had his hormone balance surgically adjusted, as we all have had.” Khiindi saw her tail lashing in the dark like some kind of a whisk broom sweeping back and forth as she paced the front of the cage. “His kind can think of nothing but sex and lives only to kill little kittens like yourself to force their mothers to go into heat again so he can have his way with them and make more kittens, which he would not scruple to kill any more than he would you.”

  “I assure you, madame, that although I am, as you say, unaltered, I have no designs on you or your adorable offspring,” Khiindi said in his smarmiest tone. You had to be gentle with beasts such as these—they were only cats, without his superior knowledge or experience. It wasn’t their fault they were mere beasts, but to Khiindi that fact made them far less stable and their reactions more volatile than the female supposed his own to be. “I am Khiindi, and I have worn many guises before donning this cat form for the duration of this life. You are in very grave danger, though not from me. A plague has overtaken the humans—your humans.”

  “These people are nothing to us,” a male voice said, “and we are only cargo to them. They have not brought us food for weeeeks.”

  By this he knew he meant weeks in terms of feline feeding schedule, which meant they had probably missed two feeding sessions at most. Inflation of the times between food was an ingrained feline cultural characteristic, a survival mechanism to ensure that if a steady supply of food was not received according to schedule, those responsible would be shamed into correcting their dereliction of duty at once. Khiindi had heard Uncle Hafiz Harakamian and Captain Becker discussing this topic once, with the comment that cats would make excellent bill collectors, if only the language barrier could be overcome.

  “Perhaps, but they were the ones flying the spacecraft and if they cease to do so, none of us will be in very good shape,” Khiindi told him. “I will help you as best I can.”

  “Very good of you, I’m sure,” the male said jovially, but the female spat and hissed.

  The kitten said, “I’m called Kali. If you aren’t going to kill me, would you like to play? I’d very much like to have a go at your tail.”

  “That’s only because yours isn’t long enough to play with yet,” Khiindi told her kindly. “And some other time, I’d be delighted to accommodate you, little one. But we are all in danger now. And the truth is, I don’t feel very well. I could do with a little therapeutic grooming, actually.” He heard himself mewing quite plaintively. He pressed himself against the bars and the kitten stuck her muzzle through and went to work on his right ear.

  “Get away from him, Kali, he’s probably infested with those itchy things,” the belligerent queen said.

  “Yes, madame, I am,” Khiindi admitted reluctantly. “But surely you all are similarly beleaguered?”

  “We are not, and it is my belief that it is my enforcement of good hygienic practices on the family that has kept us safe from them. Oh, they tried nibbling at us, but they were quickly discouraged and disappeared.”

  “He’s crawling with them,” Kali informed her mother with ghoulish satisfaction. “I expect if we don’t pick them off him and kill them, they’ll eat him all up. Maybe not his tail, but everything else.”

  “I don’t think they eat anything up,” Khiindi said, moving away from the bars to preserve his dignity, then ruining it by having to scratch compulsively at his left ear while biting the base of his tail on the other side. He found it hard to work up the necessary vigor, however. His limbs felt heavy, his breath came with difficulty. Even his nose felt sweaty. Also, the figures of the other cats behind their bars were less distinct than they had been. His third eyelid, the nictitating membrane that covered his eye from the inner corner to the middle, had spread across his vision as it did when there was too much light or he was otherwise indisposed. “But they make you very sick—they are making me very sick—and I hear many have died already.”

  “Poor hygiene,” the female said smugly. “You’re speaking of the two-legged sort, are you not? You know they never wash, don’t you? I’ve never seen one grooming himself. I don’t suppose that bothers an unstable male like you though.”

  “You have no idea to whom you are speaking, my dear—uh—puss. Although I am indeed endowed with rather splendid reproductive equipment, I am, far from being unstable, as you put it, the most stable I have been in far more years than you have seen in all of your lives put together. And I can tell you for a fact, stability is highly overrated.”

  “So is your opinion of yourself,” she said, with a flick of her tail.

  Hmm, perhaps the lady was protesting too much? That would be it of course. The mere sight of his own magnificent physique was enough to send any female of the appropriate species into heat. He kept forgetting the effect he had on the fair sex, having weightier matters to occupy his intellect. Poor puss. She’ll just have to wait. He scratched again. Why didn’t the vermin leave him and go to the others, where they could, if the reputation of these cats was truthful, be eradicated?

  “You lot don’t seem to be bothered by these space fleas. What did you use?”

  “Stabilization,” the female said. “It protects us from a variety of ills, including this one. Unfortunately for you, the crew member in charge of stabilization and other procedures pertaining to the health of the four-legged crew members was among the first to die. She neglected to stabilize herself, it seems. So you, too, will be dying soon.”

  “Nooooo!” he yowled.

  “Khiindi!” a voice called from far away, “Where are you, Khiindi? Here, kitty, kitty.”

  He tried to arise from where he’d been sitting and run back the way he’d come, but found he could no longer move. It was as if someone were lying on his face and upper torso now—he couldn’t seem to get his breath. He yowled again but could barely hear himself.

  “Help me!” he told the others.

  “Why should we?” the female said. “There’s not enough food left for us, much less an unwelcome stranger.”

  “Food…” he told her, though it
was difficult to focus his thoughts enough to make a clever answer. “My people will bring food. Enough for all of us. Fishes…”

  The caterwauling of starved, neglected, and mistreated cats filled the cargo hold, spilling into the corridors beyond.

  The last thing Khiindi heard was his own pitiful mew.

  Chapter 19

  Across the street from the building where Aari and Acorna stood, a curtain twitched in an upstairs window. Acorna caught the movement in her peripheral vision and immediately felt the shifting of the space in that building. “Wait,” she told Aari. “Someone is coming.”

  The someone was a small, hunched woman, who walked with a slight lurch and regarded them through squinted eyes, her mouth screwed up in concentration.

  “What exactly are you?” she asked them.

  “We are Linyaari—a race of healers,” Acorna explained. “We’ve come to help you.”

  “We have a lot in common then,” the woman said. “I am Luz Allende, but everyone calls me Abuelita. I am a curandera. Not a curo, not like these modern ones. I use old things because I am an old thing. But this is good. I am alive and the young curos are not, so evidently my medicine works better on this sickness.”

  “What is it that you’ve used successfully?” Aari asked.

  She shrugged. “Symptomatic stuff. Heat for comfort, cold for swelling, blankets, food when they can take it, liquids always, flam-go for fever, sit them up when they cannot breathe. That sort of thing.”

  “And it works?”

  “More often than anything else. And more often on people my age and the children. The others—well, they were mostly too gone by the time I reached them. The younger curos, too. The Federation health teams and epidemiology people, the hazmat teams, all are gone. It is said that many of them died also, in spite of their precautions. I do not know who would wish such a disaster upon us, but it is better for you if you go.” The old woman’s voice was cracked and broken, but matter of fact.