Acorna’s World Read online

  ANNE McCAFFREY AND ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

  ACORNA’S WORLD

  To Andy Logan, for feeding bodies as well as creative spirits with her care and attention and delicious dinners while she listened to first draft readings!

  Contents

  ONE

  Roughly six weeks after she had joined the crew of…

  TWO

  When at last the Sharazad returned to Maganos Moonbase bearing…

  THREE

  Since Aari was the only one who really understood the…

  FOUR

  Once the Linyaari space travelers returned, everything should have been…

  FIVE

  Thariinye tracked the Condor’s erratic course from the data sent…

  SIX

  “Captain Becker, look,” Acorna said, when he arrived on the…

  SEVEN

  Thariinye?” Maati said. “Thariinye, we’ve landed. My arms are pinned. …

  EIGHT

  The healing retreat in the hills of the Ancestors, under…

  NINE

  The Council meeting was brief. Liriili had been questioned. The…

  TEN

  As far as Acorna could see, the problem was not…

  ELEVEN

  I think we’d all like to know how you came…

  TWELVE

  For the Balakiire, tracing the signal to the blue planet…

  THIRTEEN

  Caravan Harakamian had come to rest at its destination after…

  FOURTEEN

  Hafiz would not hear of the Linyaari remaining aboard the…

  FIFTEEN

  In the days that followed, Becker staggered around the ship…

  SIXTEEN

  The Niriian refugees endured the Linyaari reunion and the subsequent…

  SEVENTEEN

  The first invasion of the vine world was both human…

  EIGHTEEN

  Ready, Captain,” Mac said. The android was in the cockpit…

  NINETEEN

  Rafik, dear boy, and my good Captain Becker, this is…

  TWENTY

  The spaceport on narhii-Vhiliinyar took the first hit from the…

  TWENTY-ONE

  (No!) Maati’s thought was loud and clear and Aari and…

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Condor’s computers found every shortcut between itself and the…

  TWENTY-THREE

  For the first time since the Linyaari inhabited narhii-Vhiliinyar, hordes…

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  BRIEF NOTES ON THE LINYAARI LANGUAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ÇREDITS

  BOOKS IN THE ACORNA SERIES

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  One

  Roughly six weeks after she had joined the crew of the Condor, flagship of Becker Interplanetary Recycling and Salvage Enterprises, Ltd., Acorna sat on “salvage watch” at the helm of the ship, surrounded by the softly glowing console lights in the cockpit and the billions of stars beyond. She felt contented, almost as if she were once more home—back in the first home she could really remember, the mining ship she had shared with her adopted uncles. Behind her for the moment were the intricacies of Linyaari society and culture. Before her instead were the intricacies of the universe as recorded in the notes, tapes, and files of Captain Jonas Becker and his illustrious parent, astrophysicist and salvage magnate Theophilus Becker.

  To give herself something to do during the long watch, she was charting those notations methodically so that the planets, moons, wormholes, black holes, “pleated” space, “black water” space, and other locations visited by the Beckers could be easily relocated, and the sites where they had once been could be revisited if the need arose.

  Becker had grumbled at first when she started this chore. Since the death of his adoptive father, Theophilus Becker, from whom he had inherited both the Condor and the salvage business, Jonas Becker had been lord and master of the Condor, with only Roadkill—or RK for short—the huge Makahomian Temple Cat he had rescued from a wreck, for company. Becker didn’t like his belongings tampered with or moved. But Acorna had found plenty of evidence that RK periodically made nests out of the hard copies of the notes, often shredded them when he felt the urge, and, in a few sorry instances, had added his own personal—and remarkably pungent—contributions to them when he was displeased with the state of his shipboard toilet. Though she could easily eradicate the odor and the stains, nothing could make the shredded notes legible again. It was high time someone charted the notes before RK had his way with the lot of them. After a few “reasonable discussions,” Jonas had stopped grumbling and let Acorna get on with her task.

  At first RK had stayed at the helm to assist Acorna with her job, but later had wandered off in search of food or a sleeping companion, probably Aari, the only crew member other than Becker currently aboard.

  Like Acorna, Aari was Linyaari, a race of humanoid people with equine and alicorn characteristics—including a flowing, curly mane and feathery hair from ankle to knee, feet with two hard toes each, and three-fingered hands with one knuckle on each digit instead of two. The most striking characteristic of the Linyaari, to humans anyway, was the shining spiral horn located in the center of their foreheads. But in Aari’s case, the horn had been forcibly removed during tortures he’d suffered while he was a prisoner of voracious bug-like aliens—the Khleevi. While Aari’s other wounds had been healed on narhii-Vhiliinyar, the world to which the Linyaari had fled when the Khleevi had invaded their original homeworld Vhiliinyar, Aari’s horn had not regenerated.

  This was an appalling wound for a Linyaari. A Linyaari’s horn had amazing—almost magical, even—properties. The horns had the ability to purify anything—including air and water and food, to heal the sick, and also acted to some extent as an antenna for psychic communications among the Linyaari.

  Acorna had learned a great deal more about the powers of her horn and about her people when she had returned with a Linyaari delegation to narhii-Vhiliinyar. Unfortunately, once she had arrived, her aunt and two other shipmates had been dispatched into space again to deal with an emergency, and Acorna had been left among strangers to try to adjust to her native culture, a culture she’d left behind while she was still a baby.

  Her only two real friends on narhii-Vhiliinyar had been the eldest elder of the Linyaari people, Grandam Naadiina, and Maati, a little girl who was the viizaar’s messenger and the orphaned younger sister of Aari.

  When Becker had made his unauthorized landing on narhii-Vhiliinyar to return Aari and all the bones from the Linyaari graveyard to the new Linyaari home planet, Acorna, Grandam, and Maati had been in the greeting committee. Aari at that time had still been terribly deformed from his ordeal with the Khleevi, and the viizaar Liriili and some of the less sensitive and compassionate Linyaari had not made his return easy.

  Acorna, perhaps because her own loneliness had helped her identify with his, had been drawn to Aari. When an emergency signal had called Becker away from narhii-Vhiliinyar, Acorna and Aari had shipped out with him. They had been able to help in a crisis that had threatened some of Acorna’s human friends as well as the Linyaari. As a result of their intervention, a branch of a Federation-wide criminal organization had been destroyed and many off-planet Linyaari, including Acorna’s beloved aunt, had been rescued, along with all the other captives of the criminals. Acorna, Becker, Aari, and Acorna’s Uncle Hafiz, who had also been on hand for the rescue, were now in great favor among her people.

  Acorna could have stayed comfortably on narhii-Vhiliinyar once her aunt and the other ship-bred and ship-chosen Linyaari returned to the planet. But she had decided instead to
leave with Becker and Aari.

  She wasn’t sorry. She might have been born on a peaceful planet populated by beings who had the ability to understand one another telepathically, but her upbringing had made her different, and that was sometimes a problem, both for her and for her people. Space was familiar to her, and its diversity of races, species, and personalities stimulated her. Of course, right now, just being here, quietly charting coordinates, resting her eyes by watching the stars, wasn’t very stimulating, but the serene surroundings felt wonderful. She was comforted by the routine watch, at peace with the universe.

  Perhaps, she thought, happily ever after, the permanent version, only happened in fairy tales, but happy every once in a while was restful and healing.

  The cabin lights flicked on, bringing the harsh light of the day shift to her starlit world. She blinked a few times until her eyes adjusted.

  “Yo, Princess!” Becker said. “Your watch is over. Whatsa matter with you—sitting there typing in the dark? You’ll ruin your eyes that way, didn’t anybody ever tell you?”

  He strode up to stand behind her, peering over her shoulder so intently his brushy mustache, which closely resembled RK’s ruff, brushed her horn. Becker smelled strongly of the aftershave he had begun to use about the time he began to shave again, shortly after she arrived. It wasn’t that he was trying to impress her in a courtship and mating fashion, she knew. It was simply a rather old-fashioned, by human standards, sign of gender acknowledgment and respect. “Hey, now, how about that? You’ve charted the whole journey from the time we left narhii-Vhiliinyar the first time, to that moon where Ganoosh and Ikwaskwan held your people captive, and all the way back again! I figured, with all the excitement we ran into, and all the hopping around we had to do, nobody would ever be able to figure that one out. How’d you do that?”

  “You kept good notes, Captain,” she said, smiling.

  “Well, it’s terrific! And you did it so fast, too. Where’d a sweet young thing like you learn that?”

  “Elementary, my dear Becker,” Aari said, sauntering up behind the captain and towering over him. Tall, slender, and graceful now that his injuries had healed, Aari was white-skinned and silver-maned. These were traits he shared with Acorna and the other Linyaari space travelers.

  Aari had been reading a trashed-out copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes lately. Becker and Acorna could see the immediate result of his current venture into fiction in the way that Aari had layered two baseball caps from Becker’s collection, so that the bill of one hat stuck out in back above his long silver mane, the other in the front. It was not only a pretty good imitation of a traditional deerstalker, but the hat covered the indentation in Aari’s forehead where his horn had once been. Aari also clutched a Makahomian ceremonial pipe between his teeth. It was a bit longer than an antique meerschaum, but with Aari’s height, he could carry it off. The Holmesian effect was only spoiled by the RECYCLER’S RONDY ’84 logo on the front of the cap facing them, along with an embroidered trash container rampant beneath the lettering.

  “Space-bred and space-chosen Linyaari,” Aari said, “develop a heightened sense of navigational interrelationships between space and masses, even energy fluctuations. Many of those relationships are imprinted telepathically upon our brains by our parents when we’re young. That is partially how I was able to guide you to narhii-Vhiliinyar though I had never been there myself.”

  “Hmm,” Becker said, surveying his shipmate’s latest odd outfit. “You make me wonder if my old man might not have been part Linyaari. You’re sure finding your way to the planet wasn’t simple deduction?”

  Aari looked puzzled. “No, Joh. We do not use footprints, types of mud, or tobacco ashes to do this thing. It is a matter of the mind.”

  “Must be,” Becker said. “Acorna’s indicated the wormholes and black space with a precision that you don’t see on regular charts, given the instability of the features being charted and the dangers of getting close enough to map them thoroughly. Even got the whole wormhole system we ducked back through to blast Ganoosh and Ikwaskwan to kingdom come.”

  Acorna glanced up from her charting and shrugged. “We were there. The notations of the holes and folds are roughed out in your notes, and made precise in my mind.” She paused to consider something else Jonah had said. “About your father—he is probably not part Linyaari. I do not think it is possible for our two species to interbreed. In the pictures you have shown me of your father, he certainly doesn’t look Linyaari, though I will admit his intuition about such matters as spatial relationships, as well as yours, seems to me to be similar to some of the psychic abilities our race possesses. I can certainly understand that, lacking a crew and managing all phases of your operation alone, as you do now and as your father did when you were a child, you did not take the time to properly collate and chart your observations. But, frankly, only psychic ability would explain how you were ever able to find anything in this chaos.” Her spread hands took in the mounds of papers, chips, and recorded tapes scattered around the console.

  “I usually know which pile or computer file to access for what I need,” Becker protested. “At least, I did once,” he muttered. Then he added graciously, “But I’m sure it’ll be helpful to have it all nice and orderly.”

  Roadkill jumped up on one of the piles of hardcopy and sent the papers into an avalanche that slid clear across the deck.

  “RK, you silly cat, you already had your chance at these,” Acorna said, madly grabbing for the flying papers.

  The cat chased the furthest sheets until they settled to the floor, pounced upon one and shredded it with his back feet, then abruptly lost interest and began washing his brindled belly instead.

  Acorna bent down and shuffled the papers, somewhat the worse for wear, back into order.

  “I’m pleased you approve, Captain. The task needed doing and it keeps me productively occupied.”

  “Yeah, I guess you must have been pretty bored after you reprogrammed that junked replicator I had in Cargo Hold Two to make all my favorite dishes, so I wouldn’t have to eat cat food when I got busy, and after you and Aari turned Deck Three into a hydroponics garden for your own noshing needs, while you meantime inventoried and catalogued all my remaining salvage.”

  “It was not so much, Captain. It’s not as if I am new to this sort of thing. I used to replicate food and help grow my own meals when my uncles and I lived aboard our mining ship. I also catalogued our specimens and assisted with charting. I like to be helpful.”

  “No kidding! Between you and KEN,” he said, referring to the all-purpose KEN-640 android unit that they had acquired, more or less by accident, during the Condor’s last voyage, “the way he keeps the ship soooo—”

  “Shipshape, Joh?” Aari offered. “I have been reading the nautical works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and that term is employed to describe a flawlessly maintained vessel.”

  “Yeah, what you said,” Becker agreed. “Between you two and Aari, I could take up knitting or basket weaving in the spare time I got these days.”

  “A very good idea, Joh,” Aari said. “You have some excellent references on crocheting, beadwork, handweaving, pottery making, and origami, as well.”

  “You should know, buddy. I’m glad you’ve been getting so much out of the pile of old books I found in that landfill, not to mention the vid collection. But let me warn you—steer clear of the do-it-yourself veterinary books.” Becker glanced down at RK who had one leg poised in the air and was looking up at him with suspicious, wide, golden eyes. In a stage whisper Becker continued, “I once tried some stuff out of one of those vet guides on the cat there. Bad idea. Neither of us came out whole.”

  Aari looked puzzled. “Why would I read veterinary books, Joh? If ‘Riidkyii’”—that was as close as Aari’s Standard could come to pronouncing Roadkill’s name—“becomes sick, Acorna could heal him. We have no need for the invasive measures described in those books.”

  “Damn good thing, too,
” Becker huffed. “The problem with using invasive measures on ol’ Riidkyii is he can’t get it straight who’s the invader and who is the invadee. We were both short a few bits of choice anatomy after that little adventure. Luckily, Roadkill and I eventually got put back together, courtesy of the Linyaari.” He turned to Acorna and said, “While we’re on the subject, you know you’re welcome to the library, too, Princess. Anytime.”

  “Yes, Captain Becker, that is very kind of you, but I already accessed most of the reading selections you have available during the time I lived with my uncles and guardians. I was raised by humans—unlike Aari, who had no previous exposure to human culture until he met you. So I won’t be using the books. The vids are another matter. However, I regret very much that we have only vid goggles available to view the films. It would be such fun if we could all view them together.”