Acorna’s World Read online

  Becker gave her a sly look from under his brushy eyebrows. Her psychic powers had been increased while she lived among her own people, but she didn’t need them to know that he understood what she really meant. Teasing, he said, “Of course, really, only two people oughta watch at a time because somebody should be on salvage watch.”

  He knew that she wished to share the books and vids with Aari so that he wouldn’t spend quite so much time alone, and so that they would have something to enjoy together. She blushed a little. “I simply thought it would be more companionable.”

  “Yes, Joh,” Aari said, “and, as far as salvage watch goes, you once performed all the ship’s duties alone, and your metabolism requires that you sleep for long periods. You must have let the ship’s computers take over occasionally then. You could certainly do so now. I do not see the difficulty of sharing these vids.”

  Becker chuckled and shook his head. “What is it with you guys? Mutiny? But, okay, we’ll keep an eye out for something we can convert to a full screen setup for vids instead of the goggles.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Acorna said. She believed Aari would be much better off if he didn’t spend nearly all of his time on his own. He had spent years alone in a cave on the deserted planet Vhiliinyar, hiding from the Khleevi who’d tortured him, before Becker had found and rescued him. Aari hardly knew how to speak to people anymore. And every time he disappeared while she was not on watch and Acorna decided to go to him to try to initiate a conversation, Captain Becker always seemed to have some task he needed her assistance with or some errand for her to run. RK, too, tried to deter her. His claws and piercing cries could be quite eloquent, even to one who possessed no higher understanding of cat language than vulnerable skin that could be spoken to with fang and claw. She sensed her friends were possessed by some sort of male protectiveness toward Aari. She was sure it was not a reasoned response to her actions, but she was hard-pressed to understand it. She meant her fellow Linyaari no harm, and sought only to lead him to a deeper healing than had been necessary with the wounded she had previously treated.

  She was also as perplexed as she was amused by Aari’s “literary disguises,” as Becker called them. They were funny and sad at the same time. As he adopted the headdresses and costumes of various characters in the books and vids he was exposed to, Aari looked less like a maimed Linyaari and more like an interesting, if rather oddly dressed, human. Of course, she herself had at times donned disguises that covered her horn and feet so that she could pass for human, and it had been a useful skill. But in Aari’s case, she sensed a huge chasm of loss underlying his attempts to be someone else. It was as if he no longer considered himself fully Linyaari. The horn transplant the doctors had attempted on narhii-Vhiliinyar had not taken. A living horn transplant from a close relative might be possible with a specimen from Maati when she was older, but could not be attempted just yet while her horn was still growing. They’d have to wait until she’d reached full adulthood before they could risk harvesting enough tissue for a successful transplant for Aari.

  The com unit button lit and emitted a beep as Aari replaced the fallen papers on the console, lifted RK to his shoulders, and headed back into the hold to continue his reading.

  “You get it, Acorna,” Becker said. “It’s probably for you anyway.”

  She flipped the toggle, fully expecting to hear the voice of either her aunt, visedhaanye ferilii Neeva, checking to make sure she was all right, or that of the viizaar Liriili, spouting yet another list of instructions and requests that Acorna was to pass on to her contacts in the Federation in general and to her Uncle Hafiz in particular.

  Since the rescue of all the off-planet Linyaari spacefarers, ambassadors, teachers, students, scientists, engineers, healers and their families, and the subsequent return of those rescued to narhii-Vhiliinyar, just six weeks before, big changes appeared to be taking place on the Linyaari world. According to Neeva, the governing council had been in almost continuous session, trying to decide if, when, and to what degree the Linyaari should end their isolationist policy with regard to most of the galaxy, and whether they should open trade alliances with Federation planets and companies.

  The council had already unanimously decided on a most favored trade alliance with House Harakamian, the empire Uncle Hafiz had recently handed over to his nephew Rafik Nadezda, one of Acorna’s adopted uncles. The Linyaari hadn’t yet decided whether or not to allow House Harakamian vessels to enter Linyaari space, however. At this point, the majority of the council favored off-planet trading at some mutually agreeable location. But that wasn’t a unanimous view. Some of the more progressive Linyaari space travelers even favored entering the Federation. As they pointed out, isolation had failed to protect their people from the Khleevi or from capture and mistreatment at the hands of Edacki Ganoosh, the Kezdet robber baron. The vocal minority of the council felt that knowledge of other civilizations, both friends and foes, was better protection for a peaceful people like themselves than ignorance and isolation.

  Since most of the Linyaari diplomatic corps was currently recovering from their ordeal on narhii-Vhiliinyar, the council was entrusting all of the Linyaari’s initial overtures to the Federation to Acorna, who was a newly appointed Linyaari ambassador and also, conveniently, Hafiz Harakamian and Rafik Nadezda’s adopted niece. The council completely ignored her protestations that Becker did not intend to return immediately to Federation space, preferring for the moment to search for salvage in the galaxies occupied by the Linyaari and their current trade allies, an area neither he nor any other Federation-licensed salvage company had previously explored. Acorna had passed on the Linyaari council’s messages to Hafiz before his flagship, the Sharazad, departed from Linyaari space.

  Hafiz’s last message to the Condor, and to Becker in particular, had been suspiciously expansive and nonchalant.

  “Of course, dear boy,” Hafiz had said, “there is no need for you to hasten your business on our account. By all means stay in this congenial universe. Get acquainted. Find useful refuse. As long as Acorna is happy, her Aunt Karina and her other uncles and I are content. We’ll see each other soon enough.”

  Perhaps Hafiz was really serious about retiring after all? In Acorna’s experience, it was very unlike him to fail to seize a business opportunity by the throat and milk it for all it was worth. If he wasn’t retiring, he was clearly up to something.

  So she had reason to hear from many people of her acquaintance just at this moment. But this time the com unit surprised her. When a face appeared briefly on the screen, it was not her aunt, or another Linyaari, or even the wily Uncle Hafiz. Instead, a heavily bovine face was being transmitted, male and jowly with a curving brownish horn above each ear. It spoke in a language Acorna didn’t understand, so she reached for Aari’s LAANYE, a Linyaari device that collected samples of unknown languages, analyzed them, then served as both a translator and a sleep-learning device to implant foreign languages into the brain of anyone who wished to learn them. But the transmission trailed off just as she got the machine activated.

  According to the LAANYE, the last word the creature had said translated as “Mayday” or “SOS” in Linyaari. The only other words she’d caught in the transmission before the screen turned to white, crackling static were “Niriian” and “Hamgaard.” She did recognize the race of the creature who’d appeared on her com screen. He was from the planet Nirii—the Niriians were regular trading partners of the Linyaari.

  Acorna scanned the frequencies, trying to pick up the signal again, but to no avail. Becker put his hand over hers and pointed. She followed his finger and saw that the screens of the long-range scanners he used to detect possible salvage showed blips of white light in several locations. One of them was backed by a mass of green light. “There,” he said. “There’s a solid mass under that one. According to the readout, it’s a small planet with an oxygen-based atmosphere. If the ship was seeking refuge, that would be the most likely place in this sector of space to retreat to. Let’s go see what we can find.”

  Acorna nodded. “Yes, I see what you mean. Given the direction of the signal’s probable source, it is likely that the salvage is the distressed vessel whose broadcast we just received. The LAANYE translated the last word before the message was interrupted to mean ‘Mayday.’ Possibly the signal we intercepted was a general one sent as the ship’s systems were failing during some sort of accident or attack. I feel sure we received it only because we were within range of their emergency transmitters. If the signal had been meant for us, the broadcast would have been in Galactic Standard or in Linyaari.”

  Becker shrugged. “Yep. That’s the way I’ve got it figured. Don’t get your hopes up, though. We’re probably not going to find the cowboy who was transmitting the mayday alive, or anybody else. None of those blips on the scanners look like an intact ship. But we may be able to tell what got him from the fragments. The time stamp on the message is a couple of days ago—if the problem was indeed an attack instead of an accident, whatever nailed them seems to be long gone.”

  “So we will check the situation out and report exactly what happened to the Federation?” Acorna asked.

  “Yeah, eventually,” Becker said. “But mostly we’ll know what to avoid ourselves.”

  Intricately twisted vines and stems joined and twined, braided, knotted, and separated before bursting into jewel-toned rainbows of richly hued blossoms, reminding Acorna of pictures she had seen of the illustrated borders in Celtic holy books from ancient Earth. Except that this vegetation was no mere border, but a lush tropical jungle so interconnected that it was impossible to tell where one plant stopped and the next began.

  At first, the tangle of plant life looked impassible. She, Captain Becker, RK, and Aari had stood
on the lowered platform of the robolift, overwhelmed by the sight of it. Becker was fingering the sharpened blade of his machete while Aari held the portable scanner, waiting for it to indicate the hiding place of the large piece of salvage that had shown up on the Condor’s screen.

  Acorna was busy cataloging the minerals and elements that made up this planetoid. She had already notified the others that no breathing apparatus would be required—the atmosphere was void of any substances lethal to carbon-based life forms and far richer in oxygen than Kezdet or narhii-Vhiliinyar, and the soil was as rich in nitrogen. Of course, that was just her scientific opinion. In practice, once she was actually faced with it, the air was so heavily scented with the aromas of the flowers it felt too thick to breathe, laden with a heady mixture the like of which she had never smelled before. She detected elements of the incenses that had perfumed Uncle Hafiz’s palace, like cinnamon, cloves, vanilla, and the kind of human cooking known as baking, and also smells like mint, rose, violet, lavender, gardenia, and lily of the valley, but all were much deeper and mixed together with new scents—things she’d never smelled before. The end result was so intense that it almost took on substance and color.

  Captain Becker said the place reeked like a high-priced bawdy house, which seemed to please him. Aari had sniffed curiously. “I have no basis for ascertaining the validity of your comparison, Joh, but I defer to your knowledge of such matters.” For their excursion dirtside, Aari had removed his Holmesian baseball caps and pipe in favor of a colorful scarf tied around the top of his head and a plaskin patch, inked black, over one of his eyes. Acorna deduced, Watson-like, that he had been reading Treasure Island and was assuming a piratical disguise in lieu of his Holmes persona. Though he was giving the soil a very Holmesian inspection, what he could see of it from where they stood.

  Soil was clearly foremost in RK’s mind, too. The ship’s cat leaped off the platform and hopped through the vines—which parted, almost as if the cat’s reputation had preceded him, to allow him to pass easily through them. The roots and trailers along the ground seemed to shrink away as RK pawed the soil, turned his back on his work, and deposited his own ecological contribution to the planet.

  Acorna started after the cat but Becker touched her arm and said, “Wait. Let us see if he gets out again okay.”

  The cat pawed backward to cover his work but the vines and other ground cover were already creeping back across the pile. Roadkill looked behind him, saw that this was happening, gave a little shake that could have been a cat’s version of a shrug, and bounded back through the path that had cleared for him on his way in. He then hopped up onto the robolift platform and proceeded to wash his whiskers, as if they had been somehow affected by his previous chore.

  “Okay, then,” Becker said.

  “That way, Joh,” Aari informed him after consulting the scanner, and pointed in the direction from which the cat had just come.

  “Well, then, onward.” Becker raised the machete in one of the dramatic gestures he was fond of and pointed. RK leaped to his shoulder and the four of them dismounted the platform. As they set out, the jungle growth shrank even further away this time, leaving a wide lane open before them. It gave Acorna an odd feeling to see the plants moving and shifting out of their way. Becker walked over to one side and raised the machete to hack at a thick stalk, but the stalk bent in the middle to retreat from him.

  “Wait, Captain,” Acorna said. “The plants seem to be trying to accommodate us by getting out of our way. It hardly seems right to cut them.”

  Becker gave her a look. “Yeah, well, we don’t know how long it will take us to find the ship. And we don’t know what wrecked it. We might be looking at the cause of the trouble right now. How do we know these plants won’t close up around the Condor and bury it so deep we won’t be able to get it loose again? They’re several stories high, after all. We wouldn’t even be able to see the suns if they had decided not to part for us.”

  “I think ‘decided’ is a relevant term in this case,” she said. “These plants seem to have some kind of limited sentience, or at the very least the ability to react quickly to stimuli. I think it might be wise to sheathe the machete. Maybe we had better not make them angry. Besides, we could find the ship with the portable scanner, couldn’t we?”

  “Yeah, but I always like to have a backup plan,” Becker said, while putting the long knife away.

  Aari dug in the pocket of his shipsuit and pulled out a ball of shining thread. “I have just the thing, Joh.” He tied one end to the robolift and held the rest in his hand. “We can leave a trail behind us, like Theseus seeking the Minotaur in the labyrinth. This also works very well in caves when searching for lost cascades of gold and jewels.”

  “Caskets, buddy,” Becker said.

  “As you wish,” Aari agreed amiably, and began unrolling his ball of string.

  “Ow,” Becker said as his shoulder was punctured by the claws of the suddenly hyper-alert ship’s cat, who hunkered down and switched his brindled gray and black tail, his ears perked and his eyes intently following the gleaming thread as it unwound behind Aari. “Belay that, mister,” Becker said.

  The cat immediately leaped from Becker’s shoulder to Aari’s. “Aaargh,” Aari said, rolling his as instead of his rs. “Avast there! It is my faithful paro, Pol.”

  RK made a dive for the thread. Acorna intercepted the cat and received a few scratches for her trouble.

  “I am sorry, Khornya,” Aari said. “I think Riid-Kiiyi does not wish to be a paro.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, cuddling RK up close to her body and scratching him gently under the chin. He immediately abandoned his quest to play with the string in favor of purring and rubbing the side of his face against her skin.

  The small party set out into the jungle. The vegetation now made a path as wide as the Condor, the stalks bending almost flat to avoid contact with the people passing among them. The heady fragrance turned to an acrid stench.

  “Sheesh,” Becker said, holding his nose. “What are these, skunk vines?”

  Acorna looked around. “No. They are the same sort of plants as the rest, but see how the flowers are closing up and the scent they are emitting is changing? It is as if they are afraid of us.”

  “Hmmm, well, it does smell like the last guy who tried to gyp me out of some money he promised me,” Becker admitted. He leaned closer to a stalk and the stench grew stronger.

  “Joh, don’t,” Aari said.

  “Just testing,” Becker said. “Sorry, plants. No harm intended.”

  Aari was busy unwinding twine with one hand and holding the scanner with the other. “It should not be far now, Joh,” he said. “The salvage is just ahead.”

  An opening in the canopy was visible before them, and Acorna saw a long cylindrical pod lying among some twisted and charred stalks right in their path.

  Becker prodded it and turned it over. Beyond it, they could see other bits of the downed ship visible among the stalks. Although there was nothing overtly useful in the wreckage they could see, Becker decided he wanted to haul all of the pieces back to the Condor. “We might be able to figure out why the Niriians sent the mayday,” he said. “Maybe find some clue to who exactly they were, what kind of trouble they were in, who attacked them.” He scratched his head. “Don’t think that this is a normal part of my business, Acorna, because it’s not. Finding wrecked ships, yes, but not stumbling on the wreckage before it’s cold. And I have a funny feeling about this one.”

  “Me, too,” Acorna said.

  Aari looked up, surprised at their words. “I apologize, Joh, Khornya. I did not realize that you had not understood the Hamgaard’s broadcast. I would have translated it for you if I’d known.”

  “Hamgaard?” Becker asked.

  “That is the name of the Niriian ship that broadcast the message that brought us here. Niriians have been trading partners of my people for many, many years. Like us, they are a nonaggressive race. Before I—before my brother was lost—I traveled on more than one trading mission to Nirii.”

  He turned away, stepping over nearer pieces of wreckage to retrieve others farther from the ship.