Acorna’s Quest Read online

  Calum knew that Mr. Li found it hard—deep in the heart which Acorna’s beauty, charm, bravery, and intelligence had thawed—to let her start out upon her search. He did make every appearance of helping to secure her ambition of finding her folk; but he was easily tempted into thinking up new ways to delay her actual departure. And Pal Kendoro, his personal assistant, was not limited by even the pretense of wanting to help Acorna on her quest! He considered himself in love with Acorna, could not or would not see why she couldn’t settle down happily with him while remaining in ignorance about her own race, and absolutely did not want her going off alone for months, possibly years, with Calum. Neither of Pal’s sisters could convince him that Calum Baird had absolutely no interest in Acorna, apart from completing his self-imposed task of finding her species.

  Cal might seem totally immersed in technologies, improvements, designs, star systems and analyses thereof, but he wasn’t oblivious to Pal’s obvious jealousy, and he did his best to defuse situations which fed that unreasonable attitude. Sometimes he wondered if it wouldn’t be better to openly declare his love for Pal’s youngest sister Mercy and his desire to marry her as soon as he had completed this mission—though that would not be fair to Mercy; she should not be tied down while he went away on a quest of unknown duration. But right now, all Calum’s good intentions of calm, rational behavior had gone out the nearest air vent as, once again, Pal seemed to be sabotaging the start of their voyage.

  “If you think,” Calum went on, his anger apparent in his acid tone of voice, “that a lousy defense system is going to stall us another few months, you’re crazy. Crazy!” And he scissored his hands to emphasize his denial.

  “Why we should require a defense system,” Acorna jumped in to support him, “so far beyond what was originally designed for that class of ship, I do not know.”

  “Is not sensible to send you so far without every possible consideration taken for your safe return,” Mr. Li said.

  “We have communications devices that can reach a habitable system soon enough to summon help if the long-range missiles, the mines, the warheads, and the laser cannon do not dissuade a pirate,” Calum went on. He was seething with resentment.

  “First”—and Acorna held up one of her blunt, two-jointed digits—“what could a ship the size of our scout possibly have that anyone would want?”

  “You,” Pal said in an unequivocal tone.

  “Second,” Acorna said, ignoring that, “the built-in weaponry already installed allows us to defend ourselves against ships with three times our capability….”

  “Not to mention our built-in speed,” Calum interjected. “Why, that drive could outstrip the fastest drone ever manufactured. And that’s saying something.” He gave an extra nod in emphasis.

  “Third, Uncle Hafiz has supplied us,” Acorna continued, “with so many identities and drive-variation signatures that anyone looking for us from one port of call would never recognize our ship in the next one. And he has already taken long enough to supply such multitudinous identities!”

  “You, Acorna, are valuable for so many reasons and to so many people,” Pal said, his tone almost as angry as Calum’s had been, “that of course House Harakamian desired to support you with alternate documentation and drive-emission camouflages.”

  “Nineteen of them? Requiring six months to develop? To be any safer, I would have to be dead already!” Acorna said, unusually sarcastic for her characteristically gentle self.

  “You can stay here, safely, and let Calum find your folk,” Pal said, desperation creeping into his tone.

  Acorna straightened her narrow shoulders, tossing the magnificent mane of silvery hair behind her. “These are my people we are trying to find. How will they know that Cal is on a genuine search unless I am with him to represent myself? We know so little about my circumstances.” She shook her head sadly. Her brilliant silvery eyes filmed over, ever so slightly, with the melancholy that was deepening within her daily, almost drowning her with an urgent need to be resolved. Sometimes, at night, she was nearly overwhelmed by the intensity of her need to find her own kind.

  “Why was my life pod evacuated from the ship in the first place? Who did it? Enemy or friend? Why was it done? To save me or to destroy me without trace? Why have no vestiges of my kind been discovered with all the explorations that are being undertaken in every direction of this galaxy?”

  “That’s another point,” Gill said, speaking for the first time and squeezing Judit’s hand in his big one. “You may not even come from this galaxy. The search could take decades.”

  “Decades it could be,” Delszaki Li said, sadly nodding.

  “Oh, Mr. Li.” Acorna leapt from the chair she was seated in and lowered his float so she could take his almost useless right hand in hers and stroke it lovingly. “I will not tarry a moment longer than necessary to hurry back to Kezdet and you. You will receive a message the moment we have found my home world.”

  “I know this, Acorna,” Mr. Li said in a gentle, understanding voice. He nodded as if he were patting her hand, an action he could no longer perform.

  Acorna bent her head, touching his hand with her horn, wishing she had the power to eradicate completely the wasting disease which slowly consumed him. She could, and did, ease his discomfort. But she need not stay for that; there were medicines which did as much as she could to alleviate his pain. And she was more and more “urged” to begin the search. Before it was too late? The phrase sprang into her mind. Startled, she looked up at Mr. Li’s black eyes, wondering if he had a vestige of telepathy. But she saw nothing other than his real love and concern for her.

  “Acorna, my love,” thundered Declan Giloglie, “you’re not going without the best defenses we can fit you out with, and that’s me final word on the subject!”

  Calum heaved a dramatic sigh. “I see there’s no changing your minds.”

  Acorna glanced at Calum, aghast at this apparent collapse of resistance. The side of his face that was turned toward her, away from the rest of the group, flickered in what might have been a brief wink.

  “I suppose you are right,” she said, bowing gracefully toward Mr. Li. “Please forgive me for causing you anxiety. It was indeed extremely selfish of me to wish to find my own people before I die of advanced old age.” She could not restrain that comment, even though she recognized as she made it that her words might destroy Calum’s pretense at acquiescence…if it was indeed pretense?

  “Women!” Calum said in a disgusted tone. “All sentiment, no logic. But I do see the force of your arguments, and I’ll explain it all to our pretty one here until she understands.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t,” Pal said. “That’s my job.”

  “Convince me later, Pal,” Acorna said sweetly. “Right now—since we are all agreed on the necessity for installing the revised defense systems—I wish to go over some matters of the ship’s living space with Calum. I am afraid we may need to completely remodel a portion of the interior.”

  “By all means,” said Delszaki Li, beaming in a way that reinforced Acorna’s belief that this talk of the new defense system was just another faradiddle designed to delay her departure yet again.

  “Make whatever changes you wish. My architect will accommodate.” Li bowed to Acorna.

  Once they were alone on the Acadecki, Calum looked at Acorna.

  “You didn’t really want to redesign the living space again, I trust?”

  “You don’t really want to wait six more weeks, which will probably turn into six months if Mr. Li and Pal can arrange it, before we take off, do you?”

  “No!” they both said in chorus.

  “We’re well enough supplied for the initial voyage right now,” Calum said thoughtfully.

  “If something happened to distract the others for just a little while…” Acorna murmured.

  On their return to the base, it seemed that distraction might just be at hand. Pal and Gill were fuming out loud at one of the com techs, who had innocentl
y sent the requested acknowledgment for delivery of a message to Acorna.

  “What is the problem with this?” Acorna asked. “It seems perfectly standard behavior to me.”

  Gill gave her a disgusted glance. “For people who aren’t celebrities, maybe. For you—the acknowledgment tells whoever-this-is that they have found your Lattice node. Now you’ll be inundated with junk mail and worse. Damn it, people send these test messages out like confetti, hitting every node where they think they might find their target, and I thought we had trained all the com techs never to acknowledge anonymous messages!”

  Acorna put her hand on the tech’s shoulder. He was young enough to have been trained at Maganos in the past two years, thin enough to have come from one of Kezdet’s factories before that, and he was shaking under her hand. She sent soothing, calming impulses to the boy until she could feel that he was steadier.

  “If you upset the people who work here for no reason at all, Gill,” she said, “how can you expect them to remember your wishes? Do not worry,” she said to the tech, “it is a small matter, soon forgotten.”

  “That’s what you think!” said Pal darkly.

  Acorna shrugged. “I’ve never had an anonymous message before, so there is no reason to suppose this one is the beginning of a flood.”

  “Never—had—” Gill plunged both hands into his curly red beard and tugged as if he were trying to root it out. “Why, we must have bounced half a hundred of these confetti jobs back in the last week alone!” He glared at the younger man. “Didn’t you tell her, Pal?”

  “I didn’t think,” Pal said unhappily, “it would be a good idea to mention that we were screening her mail….”

  “You were WHAT?” Acorna demanded in outraged tones. “Gill, whatever gave you the colossal gall to intercept my personal messages? And Pal, did you think that because I hadn’t absolutely rejected your declarations, you owned me and my communications?”

  “See here, Acorna acushla,” put in Gill, “you can’t be talking to me that way, me that bathed you when you were a baby and that’s not so very long ago neither!”

  In a few short, scathing sentences Acorna demonstrated that she could and would talk to Gill that way and worse. By the time she stalked away, Gill’s face was as red as his beard, and Pal later swore that he had seen small puffs of steam coming out of the miner’s ears.

  “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to tell her,” Pal said.

  Gill glared at him. “You could have explained why we had to do it!”

  “Did you hear her give me a chance to get a word in edgewise?” he replied. “Besides, you could have explained, too, and I didn’t hear you saying anything!”

  Gill’s deep laugh rumbled through the com center, and he wiped his sweating forehead. “You’ve a point there, young Pal. Tell you what, let’s get a printout of all the messages we’ve deleted in the past ten days or so. That’ll explain it to her without us having to get that word in past the young lady’s offended fury.”

  “Where’ll we send it? The mood she’s in—”

  “No matter what kind of a mood she’s in,” Gill said, “you can’t stalk off very far on a lunar mining base. And you should be able to guess as well as I where she’ll go to let off steam. Why don’t you give your sister a call, let her know what to expect?”

  He leaned over the desk and began explaining to the com tech exactly what arcane procedures he’d have to follow in order to retrieve the massive amounts of “junk mail” that he and Pal had deleted from Acorna’s files before she ever saw them.

  “They treat me like an infant,” Acorna declared, stalking around the circular floor of the main dome in the living space Judit Kendoro shared with Gill. “I am not to search for my own people…I am not to read my own mail…I will not have it!” Her head came up, her nostrils flared, and the silvery mane that cascaded down her back quivered with the force of her indignation.

  “Of course you will not,” Judit agreed, taking Acorna by the hand and leading her to a comfortable couch designed with her equine proportions in mind, “but perhaps you will have a cooling drink before you quite explode with indignation? Iced kava, perhaps, or madigadi juice?”

  “If you are trying to make me forget about it,” Acorna said, seating herself, “I should tell you that it will not work! I am no longer to be treated as an ignorant child!”

  “Of course you are not,” said Judit Kendoro understandingly. “You have grown up quite amazingly in the last two years. You never lose yourself galloping in the park anymore, or get into fights with street vendors, or…”

  Laughing, Acorna stopped her. “Enough, please! I do not deny that I did some very foolish things when I first came to live with Mr. Li—but remember that nearly two years aboard a mining ship is not much preparation for social life on a planet! And I was much younger then.”

  “That’s true,” said Judit, “and Gill and Pal now realize that they were wrong to screen your mail for you.”

  Acorna looked at her suspiciously. “Then why did they not say so? And how do you know?”

  “Did you give them a chance to apologize?” Judit asked. “Or did you just stalk off in high dudgeon, O mature and sober woman of the world? Pal guessed where you would go and called to tell me that he and Gill would be sending your intercepted mail from the last ten days over as soon as it could be retrieved and printed—and here it is now,” she said as the delivery bell chimed to signal arrival of a parcel.

  And chimed.

  And chimed.

  And chimed…

  “Two dozen boxes!” Acorna exclaimed when the last of the boxes of printouts had been dumped on Judit’s floor. “Impossible! I do not know two dozen people apart from the children, and most of those people I know are right here on Maganos and would have no need to send me any mail. Gill is making a joke.”

  “Well, this one seems to be addressed to you,” Judit said, picking a flimsy at random from one of the boxes. “Don’t you want to read it?”

  “Let Karina, Psychic Healer, make your fortune?” Acorna read aloud. “What is this about? I do not know any Karina, and if I did, why would I wish to join in partnership with her to sell my healing abilities at so much for each millisecond of time expended? It sounds like a most immoral notion to me!”

  “It may not be the most immoral notion you come across today,” Judit said softly. “Read some more.”

  By the time Acorna had worked her way through half a box full of requests for money, suggestions for a line of gilt plastiflex visors called “Acornas,” offers of partnership, and demands that she submit herself to some research institute or other for immediate examination, she began to understand why Gill and Pal had been so protective.

  Judit, for her part, silently blessed the men for leaving all the heartrending pleas for help and healing at the bottom of the heaviest box, where with any luck Acorna would never see them. She would never be able to resist those cries for help…yet to heal even one percent of those who needed her would so sap her energy that she would be unable to do anything else. We must find a better solution for her, thought Judit. We cannot go on hiding her from the world—the world is catching up with her, and it will destroy her.

  But, of course, Judit realized, with a catch in her breath and a queer ache in her heart, the solution was there—had been there all along. If they hadn’t been interfering with Acorna’s desire to go and find her people, she would long since have left Maganos Moon Base to explore distant regions where even junk mail had not yet penetrated. And now that one of these messages had been acknowledged, whoever had sent it was sure to be on his or her way to Maganos…to be followed by newscasters, charlatans, and the terminally ill. The fiction that Acorna’s healing abilities had faded as she matured would be exploded the first time Acorna’s soft heart was touched and she touched her horn to an ill or injured person.

  The only solution, after all, was for Acorna to leave Maganos before she was tracked down here. And even if she never came back…she
would come back. Judit blinked away incipient tears and set about the task of persuading the lost youngling of an alien species, whom she had come to love like a younger sister, to leave immediately.

  It was not, after all, much of a task. So, feeling as if she was doing something heinous, she contacted Pal’s missile-defense supplier and told him that Mr. Li wished that the installation would take longer.

  Mendaciously, she also told Pal that she had received a call to that effect: there was some difficulty in supply. She told Calum, who exploded, and Acorna, who gratified her by assuming the most rebellious expression ever seen on that lovely, tranquil face. Judit decided that frustration would have the desired result.

  It did. Calum and Acorna made discreet plans, stowed the few items they wished to take with them on this history-making voyage, and took off without waiting for permission. The Acadecki had been “ready” for all practical purposes for weeks. The hydroponics tanks had even been replanted since the original plants had gotten out of control in size or disuse, and some of Acorna’s favorites had gone to seed. The alfalfa had had to be harvested three times already and was back to lawn height.

  Since the Acadecki had long been in one of the Dehoney takeoff bays, it had been no trouble at all to board her. Nor had the Tower seen anything odd in a request for her launch, since the Acadecki was constantly being taken out for trial runs on this, that, or the other new ramification to its engines, com units, whatever. Calum and Acorna were up, up, and away and into the star-studded sky while those nearest and dearest to them slept.

  Calum had spent the entire first few hours whistling happily or chortling at having escaped so deviously. It eased Acorna’s nagging conscience that he evidently suffered from no guilt about their precipitous departure. She herself still felt pangs of grief and guilt about sneaking away without a proper farewell to Gill and Pal and Mr. Li—not to mention Rafik, who had been away, as usual, on business for his uncle Hafiz. But she could not have said goodbye without warning them…and it had seemed essential to take advantage of Judit’s offer to keep all three men busy and out of communication until the Acadecki was well clear of Maganos.