Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  Making his eyes wide and gesturing with his brows toward the nearest inner door, Thariinye indicated that he didn’t see why Acorna didn’t try it.

  She gave a little huff of impatience and pushed the nearest door, which slowly creaked open at her touch.

  “I believe I have some lubricant in my left ankle which could take care of that problem,” Mac offered in a sensibly normal voice

  “I’d hang on to it. I doubt you have enough for every door in here,” Thariinye told him, his voice still subdued.

  (Afraid the giant carnivorous mutant cave rats will hear you?) Acorna teased. (Because they’re a little late. We were in the cave for many hours already and they didn’t even show a tail tip.)

  (It’s lucky we had RK with us is all I have to say,) Thariinye answered.

  The psychic byplay concealed the trepidation they all felt on entering the ancient room. The light from the corridor penetrated the interior for no more than the sweep of a ball gown’s skirt. Acorna backed up, took a deep breath, stuck out her hand, and the wall she touched responded by lighting one side of the room.

  The chamber was not as vast as she had thought it might be from the corridor. Unfurnished and empty, the glowing walls decorated with a few paintings and symbols were its only salient feature.

  “What do those things say, Mac?” Thariinye asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mac said.

  “After all that translating?”

  “These are not in the same language,” Mac replied. “Certainly there are similarities, but it will take a great deal more input to be sure I am translating them accurately.”

  Acorna examined the placement of the words on the walls and above the doorway. She let out her breath and felt the emptiness of disappointment replace it. “I doubt they say anything vitally important. I recognize that one over there from my earlier adventure,” she said, pointing to a door. “It says EXIT. My guess is that other words near the entryways are also directional, telling where different rooms in the building are and their functions. These,” she spread her hand and waved it above some smaller notices at other points in the room, “probably say things like ‘please refrain from loud talking’ and ‘kindly do not run with scissors within this building.’”

  “Why would they run with scissors?” Thariinye asked. “And what is a scissors anyway?”

  “An old Terran edged implement for cutting, made obsolete by hand-held lasers. That was just an example. But I have seen signs like this in many civilizations as I traveled with my foster family—I’m almost sure, given the locations, the signs are the administrative kind of stuff put in big buildings to keep large numbers of people under control.”

  “How do you know they needed to control large numbers of people here?” Thariinye asked.

  “Well, they’d hardly have needed such a big building if they didn’t have lots of people in the area sometimes, would they?” she replied, wondering why Thariinye didn’t use his head. Did he think it was put there as an ornament?

  “That’s true,” he admitted.

  After all the trouble they had taken to get here, this place was a big letdown. Even though it was kind of eerie, deserted as it was, it was so ordinary. Perhaps their friends were here somewhere, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around. The silence of the place, and the profound feeling that there had been no life here for a very long time, discouraged the searchers.

  Acorna sent out a mental call, and Thariinye did the same. She broadcasted so loudly her head hurt with the effort, but felt nothing in return. Thariinye shook his head and rubbed it. Same results.

  Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this place had something to do with her missing friends. Perhaps putting the structure in context with its surroundings would help. “Rather than take the time to have Mac translate all of these, I think we should look around and get the lay of the land, examine some of the other structures and see if there is any clue here to what this place is, who lived here, and if it has anything to do with what’s been happening to our rescue teams.”

  The others agreed to this, and they left the building through the doorway between the two columns Acorna had noticed earlier. Along the broad street were many other buildings of size, though none as large as the one from which they had come. Most of these were fronted with columns too, or arched entryways, all of which appeared to be fairly open. Acorna looked for glass or some other barrier but found nothing, neither did she find frames in which such materials would have been contained.

  But touching exterior walls caused them to light up, and by touching every wall they passed, the team found they could see as well as on a moonlit night on narhii-Vhillinyar.

  They entered none of the buildings at first, but walked down the street until they came to a side street. This one sloped downhill to another street. The building they had just come from had another level that appeared to open out onto the lower street as well. So did some of the others.

  Mac used his sensors to search for life forms in the buildings they passed, while Acorna and Thariinye broadcast calls for their people. They stared into the gloom of the hollow-eyed buildings, lighting the walls that would light.

  “Have you noticed that none of these seem to be dwellings?” Acorna asked Thariinye. “If there are no meadows, no gardens, where did people eat? Excrete?” She evaluated the area around her again. “Of course, we’re assuming that Linyaari lived here, along with the Hosts. And we don’t know what sort of lifeforms exactly the Hosts were. But surely they needed to prepare food somehow and dispose of waste. They must have rested. And yet we have found no facilities for any of those functions.”

  Rounding a corner where the street sloped downward, they all stopped and stared for a moment at the broad expanse of water fanning out from a long shoreline at the foot of the hill.

  “Perhaps they used the sea for all of those activities,” Mac suggested, and continued walking, the other two trailing in his wake.

  Meanwhile, RK ranged on either side of them, running up and down the street and twisting circles around them, darting off down the side streets, deliberately jumping onto the walls and up onto things to touch the walls of upper stories. He was having a grand time. Acorna let him enjoy himself. There didn’t seem to be anything that could harm him here in this deserted town.

  Thariinye was clearly fascinated by the place. He sometimes walked backwards to view the city behind them, sometimes swiveled his head, scanning the streets around them, and sometimes stared out at the wide water.

  “Kubiilikaan!” he announced at last. “This must be it! The great city told of in the Elder songs, the city by the sea, the one where the Hosts lived when they brought our Ancestors to live with them.”

  “Well, I suppose that explains why it doesn’t seem to be very Linyaari-like, and why the writing is in an unfamiliar language. Still—except for being subterranean, of course, it looks so ordinary,” Acorna said.

  “Well, after seeing the needle-spires of the Iraani, hearing the Singing Stones of Skarness, even seeing the bubble worlds people construct as temporary bases, what wouldn’t seem ordinary to you? I mean to say, have you really listened to the songs and stories of our people?” Thariinye asked. “Except for a bit of poetry here and there, they actually tell of very little we haven’t seen, and grander, on other worlds in other ports,” he pointed out. “Sad, that, really.”

  “But think how wonderful it is to be walking the very streets of the original place that the main pavilion city of narhii-Vhiliinyar was named for,” Acorna said, wonderingly. “A city so old it was assumed to be legendary or lost forever.” The difference between the two places was astounding. This city, though far more ancient than anything on the second Linyaari homeworld, had obviously been built and run with considerable technology.

  As they drew nearer to the edge of the water, they saw down on one end of the shore the husks of several spacecraft and gantries, along with the domed buildings of a large spaceport. It occurred to her th
at the spacecraft were the first transportation they had encountered.

  Acorna indicated the underground sea. “Here’s your mutant cave rat, Thariinye. It was the noise of the sea, as I thought all along!”

  But Mac contradicted her, politely. “My auditory sensors detect very little sound coming from that body of water, Khornya. It is relatively still, with no tide at this time.”

  She strained her ears toward the water and realized Mac was correct. The sea was silent. In fact, she had not heard the small mysterious noise since first entering the building from the cavern.

  “I find this very odd,” Mac said, holding out his hand with a little instrument he had caused to materialize from somewhere on his versatile body. “I can see, and you can see that there is a sea, and now my detectors are also showing that there is indeed the sea we see before us.”

  “We can see that,” Thariinye said. “What’s your point?”

  “They did not show this body of water when we were above ground,” Mac replied.

  “Nor did our ship’s, nor those of any of the other ships, including Becker’s,” Acorna told him. “I suspect the same thing that blocked our transmissions to the Survey ships once we entered the cave may be responsible for concealing all of this from the ship’s sensors. This place may be in disrepair, but it has some sort of shielding devices that are working miraculously well to conceal its presence and contents.”

  The shields hadn’t protected the city from everything, though, she thought. Besides the damage to many of the buildings, there was one more very obvious breach in the defenses.

  The street they were walking disappeared abruptly into water, which was lapping against the outer walls of a row of buildings that did not appear to have been built as waterfront property. Indeed, the doors of many of the nearest structures were awash in water, which entered halfway up their doorframes.

  Farther out, lurking under a few feet of water, were the tops of other buildings. Debris that looked like it might have come from the timbers of docks floated on the water.

  But most impressive, even in the very dim glow emanating from the buildings a block away, was what was actually in the water.

  Far out into the bay an island of debris rose to the shadowy heights, blocking the view of the waters and opposite shore beyond.

  “The ceiling has caved in a little there,” Acorna said, pointing. “It must have been well built to have sustained that much damage and not completely collapsed.”

  Thariinye’s nostrils twitched till he pinched them shut with his fingers. “Nothing’s quite as revolting as the stench of Khleevi scat. I wonder that we didn’t smell that before the salt water.”

  “I did,” Mac told him. “Or rather, my olfactory senses detected it. But its range is relatively limited and the scat is in its solidified and less pungent stage. The salt water occupies a much larger area and salination has increased as the years have passed. It has essentially pickled the scat in brine.”

  “Eeewww, lovely,” Thariinye said. “Now there is a thought. I hope for their own sake there are none of those sii-Linyaari still in the water. Though I’d like to meet one. They must be very graceful and they sound so—exotic. Like aliens, only, more like us—possibly, we could crossbreed, don’t you think?”

  “I doubt that you would find anything that has been in that water sexually appealing, Thariinye,” Mac said. “Even if something living remained. And my scanners show that nothing living has dwelled there for a very long time.” He asked suddenly, “How do the songs and stories of your people say that this city came to be underground and underwater?”

  “They don’t say,” Thariinye told him. “But they talk of verdant fields and towering spires and skies—yes, skies of aubergine, skies of amethyst, skies of indigo setting the twin jewels of Our Star and the Consort.” His voice rose to dramatic heights as he pronounced these words, then sank back to normal, “So, yes, it must have been above ground when the stories and songs were written, I’d say.”

  “I wonder how far below the surface we are,” Acorna said. She looked away from the sea, up the labyrinth of buildings, some shorter, some so tall she could not see the tops of them in the limited light. And she began to realize there must be a reason for that. “I want to climb to the top floor of one of these buildings,” she told her companions. “Mac, could you climb up in another? And Thariinye?”

  “Why?” Thariinye asked. “I like it here.”

  “Unless you like it well enough to remain here until we starve to death, we need to explore some more. I’d like to learn what we came here for.”

  “How do we know it’s here to learn?”

  “We don’t, of course, but where else would it be? We have ships and flitters in the air, and we thoroughly explored the solar system around Vhiliinyar before the Survey team even landed. None of those ships saw anything out of the ordinary. We know whatever it was that took our people did not come from there. Besides, all of the disappearances have been from the planet’s surface. Then there’s the shielding around the caverns and this city that blocks our sensors. I believe, if we look, we might find something that will help us find our friends who disappeared.” She desperately wished that it was Thariinye who had disappeared and Aari who was by her side now—Aari and Maati both. Even the little girl would have been a better companion on a mission like this one than Thariinye. “So the answer, it seems to me, is somewhere right here. Maybe even here in this buried city.”

  “I heard what you thought!” he said. “You think I’m useless! I’m not that bad. Maati will tell you that when we find her. I can certainly be counted on to do what’s necessary—if I know what it is. Maati and I survived plenty of adventures on our voyage together. She quite depends on me, or I certainly wouldn’t be here risking my neck and the rest of me on this mission. And Aari thinks highly of my abilities, too.”

  “I will think highly of them as well,” Acorna said, “if we get Aari and Maati back to tell us what a great help you are. But in the meantime, for me to think highly of you, you need to climb highly in one of those buildings—one so tall we can’t see the top of it. I want to know what is on the ceiling of this place. Maybe we can even find a way out.”

  “Oh, well, why didn’t you say so?” he asked.

  The three of them each found one of the buildings that scraped what passed for a sky in this underworld and climbed to its top. Acorna re-entered the building from which they had entered the underground city.

  Just inside the doorway, she broadcast again. This time, maybe it was because she was alone, or maybe because she wanted to so desperately, she thought she felt a query in return, just her name, “Khornya?”

  But then RK looked up quizzically and said, “Rryow?” and she thought what she heard must have been the cat’s reply.

  She wanted so badly for it to be Aari, she thought with a surge of loneliness and worry for her lifemate that she had been suppressing during the whole adventure. Instead of concentrating on missing him, she had tackled each task she thought might bring him closer. But now, for a moment, she felt the weight of the worry that he would never return, that having found her lifemate, she had lost him again so suddenly. Worse than that, she worried that he needed her, that perhaps he was hurt and calling her name, longing for her to come and heal him, that he was facing an enemy they should be fighting together. Of course she was anxious for the fate of Neeva, of Maati and the others as well, but she ached for Aari.

  RK rubbed against her, breaking her concentration, and she patted him, then continued as she had done before, putting one foot in front of the other.

  Fortunately for both of her feet, and the rest of her as well, the upper floors of this building had staircases that were in much better repair than the one they’d faced on the lower level, and the walls lit sufficiently well to allow her to see all the way up on each level. RK was with her, making his presence felt in the usual way, dashing ahead, then jumping back down to land on her shoulders or in her arms if she st
retched them out to catch him.

  Once she reached the top of the last staircase in the building she stopped to catch her breath, then began exploring. By leaning out a broad window she could touch one of the outer walls of the building. It lit. In its gentle light she could see that there was a balcony all around this story. When she walked out on the balcony and looked down, she saw the streets of the city below where the walls still glowed from her team’s passing.

  A block away, another building lit from top to bottom and Mac’s voice crackled to life on the com unit, which worked perfectly well among the three of them, even if they could hear nothing from the other Linyaari survey team members outside of the cave. “Khornya,” the android said, “I can see you from here! I trust your rise in this world was uneventful?”

  “It was.”

  “Mine, too,” Thariinye said. As he spoke, another building a block away, its position triangulating with hers and Mac’s, lit all the way to the top story. Like three large candles, the buildings illuminated the area around them, including the sky, which rested upon their rooftops, and the rooftops of other buildings of the same stature.

  “Would you look at that! They made columns of their skyscrapers!” Acorna cried. “The buildings do not just scrape the sky. These columns hold up the sky.”

  Sixteen

  Yaniriin and Vilii Hazaar Miirl surveyed the prisoners with distaste born not from their smell, which was rapidly dispersed, thanks to the horns of the Linyaari crew, nor even their appearance, though that was frankly disgusting, composed as it was of layers of filth, matted hair, caked blood, dirt, and skin, where they could see it, that was a carapace of dirt. The creatures’ eyes were deeply shadowed by swags of hair mats, and their speech for the most part consisted of shouts and grunts and threatening noises. But the Linyaari reserved the bulk of their disgust for themselves. What actually disgusted the Linyaari most was the concept of having to hold anything prisoner at all.