Acorna’s Search (19 page)

Maarni and Yiitir, both of the more traditional Linyaari who did not normally travel or mix with other, more violent races, gasped.

“I see they’ve passed on their gentle ways to you,” Gladiis said. “But you must remember, people like those two warriors had already killed most of the other of our kind you see here. They wanted our horns, and once the Hosts saved us, we were prepared to give those murderers horn where it would heal them of their wicked ways for good!”

“What happened to them?” Maarni asked. Maati could almost see the story collector writing in a little notebook inside her head.

“The Hosts said they would study them and then put them where they could do no one harm,” Humiir said. “They didn’t care for my ideas on the issue.”

“That is too true—a pity. But back to time travel. When the Hosts heard how the others had perished, they went back to the times before the deaths and collected these folk you see here, who did not perish but came with us. All of us were brought here,” Gladiis said.

“To live happily ever after,” said Humiir dryly.

“Are you not happy, then?” Maati asked, suddenly concerned. It had never occurred to her that the Ancestors would not have been thrilled with the daring rescue and beautiful new home Grandam had described in her stories.

“A bit too citified for me,” one of the other Ancestors said.

“Not enough meadows. Too many buildings all over. We do earn our keep. Their machines create much filth and illness, for the Hosts and the planet, and we often are called upon to cleanse and heal.”

“And help them build their ideal stable form, of course,” another of the Ancestors said. “That would be your kind, it seems.”

“I guess I’m glad they’re doing it—I mean, did it,” Maati said. “But I’m wondering the same thing as the Grandfather did earlier—why? Why breed us with two legs and horns instead of just remaining themselves and having your company. We still have you among us in our own time, though not—oh, never mind.” She didn’t want to emphasize to the
sii
-Linyaari that they were already extinct in her time. It didn’t seem polite somehow.

Gladiis nuzzled her fondly, and, despite the time, Maati felt so reassured and at home, being among the Ancestors with their familiar fragrance, their mixture of practicality and mystery, and the sense of kinship that was present even now, when she was questioning
why
she had been made akin to them.

“Bless you, Youngling. The last thing we would wish to do is damage your opinion of the Hosts. They are brilliant, and were valiant in our defense, and I truly believe they do mean well. They try very hard to be kind.”

“Pshaw!” another snorted. “They think too much. That’s their problem.”

“No, it’s that they think only with their heads and very seldom with their hearts,” another said.

“It’s amazing they do as well as they do,” Humiir said firmly. “All that shape-shifting they do—and they have done this sort of thing before, one of them told me when he came to be healed from a bout of drunkenness. On other planets, with other species. That is where some of the other creatures on this planet are from.”

Another ancestor brayed his laughter. “Distant cousins, I suppose.”

“The truth is, dear Youngling,” Gladiis said gently, “that while the Hosts are, I believe, essentially good sorts, and they live a great long time, long enough, certainly to have acquired wisdom, they simply are not very—stable.”

“That’s a joke,
frii,”
Upp informed her. “Stable, get it?”

“Too many of those Hosts, changing shapes all the time as if they’ve never found one they liked, all of them crammed into all those shifty buildings,” Humiir said. “We couldn’t stand it. Our horns were going soft and transparent with the stress. Finally we asked for a place of our own and they gave us these caves, because they could shield them from the thoughts above. They open out onto a nice bit of grassland, too. Not enough space really, no forests, no mountain meadows full of wildflowers, but no hairy warriors looking to dehorn us either. All in all, it is an improvement.”

“And here at least we are spared the chaos of their thoughts,” Gladiis said with a sigh so strong that it stirred the hairs of the little beard under her chin.

But just then Maati caught a thought—a very clear one. “Khornya!” she heard her brother cry, and she was on her feet, pushing through the Ancestors, and searching for a way to get to him.

“Her blend was maybe a little defective?” she heard Humiir inquiring behind her. And Maarni laughed and asked another question.

T
he sea that was no longer a sea lapped at the road like a sick animal as Acorna stared into it. Dark and dirty as it was, the water lured Acorna. The sea was where the little lights that she believed indicated the presence of Aari, Maati, and the others were located.

Although she had not heard Aari again, Acorna held an awareness of his pain, his fear, somewhere in the back of her mind and it made her feel nervous and twitchy. She had to do something. The plan they had all formed together was a good one, and Becker was on his way back to the ship with Mac and RK to help him. He would return soon with supplies as he promised, but would it be soon enough? Perhaps an hour and a half had passed since she heard Aari cry out. If only she knew how to manipulate the time device better, she could arrive before whatever had disturbed him, and prevent him from suffering whatever it was that had caused him to scream to begin with.

But she couldn’t figure it that closely. She was beginning to think she might be able to manipulate it to some degree however.

And she had to keep her thoughts from being too open to Thariinye. As Becker left she drew forth packets of seeds and stems she had brought in her pack and handed them to Thariinye. “I couldn’t eat a thing now, really, but that’s no reason you should be hungry. Please, take mine and I will eat when Captain Becker returns. One of us may as well be well fed and rested for the work ahead. I will go begin the purification of the lake. If you rest now, you can come help me finish the job if it proves more than my horn can handle.”

Thariinye’s eyes popped open with surprise, but he accepted the food gratefully. “That sounds very sensible. After all, being a male, I will probably be called upon to help with the manual labor of installing the irrigation equipment and that sort of thing. I’ll need all my strength. Maybe a nap would be a good idea, too, do you think?”

“Oh, yes. Though I don’t know how you’d manage to rest with the walls flickering away and that silver thing whirling around in the middle.”

“Actually, I thought I’d find a quiet inner room upstairs, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” she said. It was, in fact, just what she’d wanted him to do.

When he departed, munching on the food as he climbed to the upper story, she pressed her hand to the map and thought of Aari, Maati, and the others. She was not at all sure her plan would work, but she needed to try. She pressed until she found the place where all four of the white lights were visible, three of them in the water surrounded by aqua lights, one on the shore and headed up toward the city.

Having found that place, she dared not try to adjust it further and waste more time. She had trotted quickly to the edge of the water, and stood watching it lick at the land for only a moment.

Then she stuck her toe in, felt the temperature, which was not as cold as she had feared, and waded in.

If their theory was correct, the water of this planet was the main conduit for the energies of time travel. Pollution and the disruption of its courses caused a corresponding disruption in the flow of the time force. The sea before her should be the least disrupted of all of this planet’s water, since it was the closest thing to a whole body of water on the planet at the time. That was her hypothesis and she hoped it was correct.

She was about to put it to the test.

If she was wrong, she would go for a nasty swim before she purified the water and prepared it for the implementation of the rest of their plan.

If she was right, however, the wall mechanism was a control as well as an indicator of where people were and where they were sent. She was about to see if her theory would work. If it did, the others should be able to find her from what they had discussed. Meanwhile, she could save Aari from the harm that she felt sure had befallen him.

But up to her neck in filthy seawater, she could see no change in her surroundings, either in time or place. The mountain of refuse still dominated the lake, the city still loomed dead and broken beyond her, the buildings from the front street still drowned beneath the soles of her feet.

Nothing had changed. Was she wrong? And then she told herself that it was no wonder she was getting nowhere. She was not concentrating hard enough on where she wanted to go. And she had not yet committed herself sufficiently to totally submerge in this sea. So, drawing a deep breath, she jackknifed forward and plunged beneath the water.

The Hosts hurriedly left the inner chamber where the male unicorn person lay in a drugged stupor on the metal table. They had extracted from him the DNA samples they needed to test, x-rayed him, taken samples of blood, bone marrow, urine, stomach contents, sperm, and other fluids, and then left as quickly as possible.

“Gracious, what a fuss he made,” said a small winged person—currently female. Her wings were flapping very rapidly, which indicated she was upset. “I was sending all the reassurance and good thoughts I could to him and he still backhanded me so hard I flew across the room.”

“You’d think they would have evolved past that behavior after all this time,” said a fellow with a long, serious face. “If he is the result of our work after generations of evolution, I think we should try harder.”

“Yes, after all, it’s not like we hurt him or anything. All of us were trying to calm him, but he simply kept fighting and glaring at us as if we were monsters or something.”

“But he
knew
who we are,” Highmagister HaGurdy said. “Perhaps he isn’t a final result after all. Perhaps he is only a starting place.” She sighed. “I fear we’ve our work cut out for us. We should break now. It is almost time for the feast and we all need to change into something more festive.”

Not that that will take very long,
thought a very junior cabinet minister,
given our nature.
He wanted to add, “Shouldn’t someone ask one of our unicorn guests to attend to him?” The unicorns were familiar with the needs for healing after studies done on the various subject offspring. Not only would they heal him of the holes drilled in him from the tests; they would also comfort him.

But Highmagister HaGurdy had left the building, followed by her cabinet, who fanned into the city in all directions. The minister had no one left to make that observation to.

The junior cabinet minister was destined to remain junior because of the direction his telepathic abilities took. He was not, as were the other cabinet ministers, a powerful and charismatic sender, the most useful sort of telepathy a politician could project.

Even his shape changes did not seem to be under his control. He changed according to whom he was with, which was also what the others did, but he seemed to demonstrate a different purpose in his changes. They changed into more dominating shapes—the better to control the beings around them. His own changes, insofar as he understood them, occurred to put his fellows at ease. Among the politicians, he appeared to be one of them, only less able, less forceful, and less impressive—easily ignored. Easily made the delegatee rather than being the delegator of tasks.

He had decided long ago that he was instinctively and incurably an empath, in other words, and there never had seemed to be anything he could do about it. Of all of them, only he had seen what the male subject had seen when he looked at them. He alone knew the reason for the man’s terror, and he alone did not believe the person strapped to the examining table was somehow a failure of science.

So after a moment’s hesitation, he re-entered the chamber where the subject—Aari—lay breathing his heavily drugged sleep. The junior minister administered an antidote to the sedative, released the restraints, and waited.

Aari struggled for breath against a great weight upon his chest, compressing his lungs. Confused and disoriented, he recalled meeting some people who seemed like friends, but turned out to be Khleevi. They strapped him down to torture him again. Dimly, he remembered hearing Khornya call him, trying to help. But now—he opened his eyes and after some initial blurriness, found himself staring into another pair of eyes which stared back curiously at him. Then something reached out and patted him on the cheek. It was soft but accompanied by a hint of sharpness.

“RK?” Aari asked, though the cat sitting on his chest was not quite as large, nor brindled gray as his old friend from the
Condor.
Nevertheless, he reached to pet the animal—and realized his hands were free, as were his feet, chest, and head. “Who are you? What is this? Some sort of a cats’ underground movement to free prisoners?” he inquired. “Where were you when the Khleevi had me?”

(Back here helping to create your race, and very glad of it I am too after seeing those nightmare creatures in your mind,) his furry companion’s thought answered. The cat’s fur was definitely not brindled, but it was not definitely anything else. It shifted from black to red to blondish, to spotted, striped from gray through deep brown, to pale gold, even as it changed from long to short.

(You’re—one of them? The Hosts?)

(I am one of them. I am Junior Cabinet Minister Grimaalkin.)

(Thank you for freeing me. It was you, wasn’t it? I am Aari.)

(I know who you are. I know you wish to leave before the others come back to vivisect you in the interests of making a kinder, gentler race to inhabit this planet. Come, let us go find the unicorn people and they will heal your wounds.)

The cat jumped down and Aari sat up too suddenly, felt dizzy, and had to catch himself with the edge of the table before standing. At that point he realized he was naked. His shipsuit was neatly folded and stored under the table.

(Vivisect?) Aari asked, wincing as he donned the suit. (Not really? Surely not!) After all, these were the kindly Hosts. He had heard them, vaguely in some unnoticed quarter of his mind, decry violence.

(Oh, they wouldn’t mean to,) Grimaalkin assured him. (And they would ask the unicorns to heal you, of course, but what they would do to you wouldn’t make you happy. A couple of the unicorns already have come very close to not surviving the experiments. Good thing they have the healing power they have. On other planets, I understand, races with other abilities have not always survived our wish to improve their stock by blending it with our own.)

Aari braced himself on the table and stood, more firmly this time. (I have to get back to my own time. And my friends, as well. Can you help us?)

(Certainly. Any idiot can run the time transport.) The cat bounded from the chamber. When Aari did the same, a young man with long ginger hair, overlong eyebrows, and a sparse mustache that was longer than his face stood in front of the wall. He was wearing only a white coat, such as all of the scientists had worn, and his bare legs and feet—heavily covered with curling red hairs—looked incongruous with the coat. But his thoughts came to Aari in Grimaalkin’s voice.

(When is your true time?) he asked.

(Not so fast,) Aari answered, and was taken aback when Grimaalkin chuckled.

(I meant in years, not in speed,) the cat/man said.

(So did I. I was using a figure of speech I learned from a friend. It means, in this instance, please don’t rush me, for you are moving more quickly than I am prepared to do. I was not alone. My little sister and two companions came here with me. They are in the lake. I need to collect them before we leave this place—or, rather, this time.)

(That presents no problem. The lake is a very good place to begin a time transport. I don’t care much for it when I’m in cat mode but I like a good swim otherwise. Since the unicorns have been here to keep it clean, the sea is a good place to be, if you can stay clear of the sea unicorns.)

(I believe my friends are with the sea unicorns,) Aari replied.

(Then you are wrong. I am not too fast. We haven’t a moment to lose. It may be too late already. Quickly now, tell me when you are from so I may set the transport. Then as soon as we find your littermate and friends, we can activate from the lake. Hurry!)

Aari gave him a year, but that meant nothing. Finally, at Grimaalkin’s urging, he described the area and era from which he and his friends had been transported. Grimaalkin, working furiously, changed the shape of the map to look like post-Khleevi Vhiliinyar.

Then the junior cabinet minister turned to Aari and said, (Now. Follow me!) Before Aari could blink, Grimaalkin blurred back into a cat and raced for the inclinator to the ground floor.

(Wait! It’s all very well for you. You belong here. But someone will see me.)

(Not tonight! Feast night! They’ll all be there, or at least be too busy with their own changing to notice you. Come on!)

Aari ran after the cat as fast as he could, down the hill toward the docks and the sea once more. In the middle of the sea, he saw the island his friends had been heading for. He saw the boat, too, floating upside down in the water. He took a deep breath to steady himself—surely his friends were fine. They
had
to be fine.

(I hope we’re not too late,) Grimaalkin answered Aari’s alarm with more urgency of his own. (If you think my fellow cabinet members are bad, you should see their offspring by the unicorns!)

In one fluid motion the little ginger cat grew longer, paler, broader, and bumpier, and with a flash of white buttocks dove into the water. Aari, shipsuit and all, dove in after him, and both began swimming toward the upended boat.

Then, suddenly, he was swamped by an upsurge of water that left him gasping and floundering.

He felt a touch and opened his eyes. Acorna swam to him—and through him—and when he surfaced, she was gone.

He was in a dark wet place which shook constantly, as if with horror.

(Is this your time?) Grimaalkin asked. (No wonder you were so scared!)

Acorna plunged beneath the surface of the lake and felt it—somehow—deepen beneath her. She opened her eyes and saw the filthy sea giving way to a younger, cleaner wash of water below. She turned to head back for the surface, her eyes open, and saw what she thought were jellyfish swimming above her, transparent, indistinct, ghostly. She was heading straight for one and she swerved to avoid it. It had been further off than she thought, however, for as she neared collision with it, she saw it was a man—her man. She cried out, swallowed water, reached to embrace him…and lost him.