Acorna’s Search

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Where they were before they were lost, or now?” Thariinye asked.

  “Hmm, I don’t know. What would you say, looking at this?”

  “I’d say it is history,” Thariinye said dismissively. “There might have been another Fiiryi in the old days. You see here? There’s the seashore and the Vriiniia Watiir, over here the mountain ranges are where they belong. This is old Vhiliinyar, not Vhiliinyar as it is today.”

  She sighed and leaned a bit heavily on the map with her palm. It disappeared, and reappeared, changed. This time the features Thariinye pointed out were missing, as was the light that stood for Fiiryi. But there was another cluster of the tiny lights, one of them purple, the others white, except for two larger lights, one the size of a pin’s head instead of its tip, the other the circumference of the pupil of an eye. The first of these was pale aqua, the second dark pink.

  Nearby was a linear representation of the blocked tunnel and the cavern.

  “Look at this!” she cried and Mac and Thariinye did so, very excited.

  “That’s the surface as it is today,” Thariinye said. “The big lights are probably the shuttles Yaniriin was talking about. I wonder if this map shows this hidden city and maybe who is down here? It would help us locate the others.”

  Acorna placed her hand on the map again, to see if it would change. It did. And it showed three small lights in the center of the map, and another, somewhat smaller and silvery in color, to one side. But what dominated the map was the depiction of the silvery column in the center of this room—and its branches spreading all over the city, superimposed on the other structures but concentrated at the top of the buildings that served as supports for the ceiling.

  “Fascinating,” Mac said.

  “This thing has tentacles?” Thariinye said, casting a wary eye on the column swirling up the center of the chamber.

  “A conduit pattern might be more accurate,” Mac said. “I believe it is a representation of energy flows in the lighting system. Touch the map again and see what it does. Touch it on the lake.”

  Acorna obliged and the map shifted dramatically. This time it showed the features of the lake’s surface again, except that the waterfall was not there as it had been in the previous image. Instead there was a flowing river, dots of blue-green light in a much vaster body of water than the current lake, and four small white pins of light among the blue-green lights. Some boat shaped things were drawn in with several lights attached to each, these a mixture of white and gold.

  “I believe that the white lights are Linyaari,” Acorna said. “I wonder—could those aqua ones, that seem to be in the water, be the sii-Linyaari?”

  Thariinye said, “I think you are setting too much store by this thing. The topography for this map isn’t right. The lake is much too big and there is no river where that one is—hasn’t been as long as anyone seems to recall—and the waterfall is not there. This isn’t a real place.”

  “Not now,” Acorna said. “But maybe it was once. I begin to think we don’t need to look at a where for finding our people. We need to look for a when.”

  She triggered the map again, and again, and again, and always she came up with a different picture. Finally one appeared where the vortex of the silver whirl showed, and its branches as they would appear if they could be seen through the surface of the planet as it currently was. Except that they were all broken up, and even as she watched, bits of the silver stuff blobbed off and bounced away from the main branch.

  “I wonder if those silver bits symbolize something that is energy or organic in nature,” Acorna mused.

  “I would say energy,” Mac replied, eyeing the column.

  “I think I had better take a look in that topmost story of the building I was in,” she said, tracing the path of the silvery line from where it began to slightly up and out. “I didn’t explore thoroughly there because I noticed that RK was missing. But I think it might be wise to take a good look there now.”

  “I will accompany you,” Mac said. “Perhaps if we find anything I may be of assistance in determining what it is.”

  “Don’t think you two can leave me down here,” Thariinye said. “I find that thing extremely unsettling and refuse to be left alone with it.”

  But before they set foot outside the chamber, RK pounced back into view and from below a familiar gravelly voice called, “Hellooo-o! Becker here! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Nineteen

  When confronted with the short, hairy creature who was the first being he met on his way into the city, Aari forgot his diplomat’s training, remembered Becker’s vids, and said, “Take me to your leader.”

  Actually, it wasn’t so much that he forgot his training as that he liked some of the new ways he had learned recently. The demand, voiced by both protagonist earthlings and protagonist and antagonist “aliens” had a nice ring to it, Aari thought. It was forthright and honest. Unlike his recent dealings with his little sister.

  But Maati would have been angrier with him than she already was if she had she known he intended to do this. He had, from the first moment he had deduced where they were, had every intention of causing disruption to the space-time continuum. He simply wanted to do it alone. One person would cause less disruption than four, he reasoned, especially if that person was well aware of the dangers. Besides, Khleevi capture had made Aari far less trusting than he once was. Until he knew exactly when they were and what the beings in charge were like, he preferred that his sister and the two elders paddle around safely in the water looking for mythical sii-Linyaari.

  The creature peered at him from under fronds of eyebrows and said, quite clearly, “Your accent is peculiar. You’re one of the new batch, aren’t you?”

  “New batch of what?”

  “Youngsters. Although you’re pretty old for a youngster. Shouldn’t you be—shorter?”

  “I was,” Aari said ruefully, referring to his twisted and broken spine after the Khleevi had finished with him. “I didn’t care for it, so I grew.”

  The creature cackled and slapped himself on his thighs—at least, Aari was assuming it was a male. The creature looked mostly humanoid, it walked on two feet, it had two arms, rather long, and two eyes, deep set under the frondish brows, and two large ears with points at both tip and lobe.

  “Can you tell me where and when I am?” Aari inquired.

  “Where and when you—? Oh, I see, you’re one of the batch that didn’t get done properly. How’d you get way out here, child? You should be back at the palace, learning from your elders, or getting your head reprogrammed or whatever it is they’re doing to fix the ones who don’t come out right.”

  “Come out right?” Aari asked.

  “Like you. For instance, you didn’t get the Gift, did you? All of us got it, and all the unicorns, but some of the youngsters haven’t had it at all. Like you.”

  “Gift?” Aari repeated cautiously.

  “Telepathy. I’ve been trying to read you, so that I know where to take you, but I cannot figure you out. I can’t read you.”

  “Oh,” Aari said, keeping his mind as carefully blank as he had been doing, as he had learned to do with the Khleevi. Among his people, when one wanted to be understood and helped the first thing one did was open up one’s mind. He had learned the hard way that there are many circumstances in which that was not a good idea. So he would let this creature think he was a not very bright child, as long as it did what was asked. “I did say where I wanted to be taken,” Aari told him courteously but perhaps a little obstinately, as if he were indeed stupid. “I wish to be taken to your leader.”

  “So you did, so you did, and so I shall, so I shall.”

  Soon they were walking uphill, and now Aari noticed that the Host’s legs were really a lot longer than they had seemed to be at first, and that the Host himself was taller. As tall as Aari was, in fact.

  As they strode up the hill into the central part of the city, Aari tried to take in his surroundings, but
even while he was watching, they kept changing. Buildings shifted from shape to shape, from color to color, and the skyline continually altered so that sometimes a tall cone-shaped spire was in one place, sometimes in another, or a modest low round dome shape in hot pink suddenly acquired a spiral onion dome with purple and lavender jewels and enamels.

  Vertigo was setting in, and Aari couldn’t help showing his bafflement.

  His guide laughed, a low rolling chuckle. “You are much younger than you look, son. This,” he waved a broad and horned hand to indicate the city, “is your home. The changing is all smoke and mirrors of course, a trick of light.”

  Aari said nothing. He felt he couldn’t speak without revealing himself.

  His escort, the hairy fellow, not so short now as he once was, Aari was sure of it, led him up a moving ramp leading into the ground floor of a towering column whose top seemed to be in the sky.

  It changed into a pyramid as they entered, with hieroglyphics dancing on the outer walls. All around them beings in a wide variety of shapes and sizes went about their business. Many were tall and thin, and almost as pale as he was, but without horns. But the majority of the creatures displayed a fantastic diversity of appearance. Their hair came in all the colors of a laser-flashed rainbow, as did their clothing. Their skins, too, ran the gamut of every imaginable shade from pale to deepest blue-black, and some were even multicolored, splattered in various patterns. Some were hairy and squat; some massive. Some wore clothing; some were so covered in fur or hair that it was impossible to tell if they were clad—if they were, their garments were covered. Among those beings on two legs ran various four-legged sorts of creatures. Birds nested on the tops of the buildings and didn’t seem to mind that the structures’ tops bobbed up and down like the tails of the four-legged, RK-like creatures that bounced importantly through the throngs.

  No one took the least notice of Aari and his guide, but as they entered the building and descended via another moving ramp, glowing walls displayed in sequence pictures of meadows, forests, storms, blue skies, and calm seas. Aari tore his eyes away from these and found those of his host locked firmly upon him.

  “You’re not from around here, are you, son?”

  Aari realized almost immediately the problem with demanding to be taken to the leader of a species heretofore unknown to you. Which was, once your demand was met, and you were taken to the leader, you found yourself among a great many followers as well.

  Looking around at the many pairs of eyes drilling into him as if they could visually vivisect him, Aari suddenly recalled the way the vids where someone was taken to a leader usually unfolded. Once the alien was presented to the leader, the followers waited for the leader’s signal to pounce upon the intruder and administer whatever treatment was given to miscreants. Such treatments, as he recalled, were invariably unpleasant.

  His guide ushered Aari into a large room with walls filled with images and words that moved, melted, and reformed like everything else he’d seen in this city thus far. As they entered, at a look from the guide, several people stopped what they were doing and realigned themselves so they stood between Aari and the door.

  In the center of the room a large swirling silvery column ascended toward the ceiling.

  “Highmagister HaGurdy,” Aari’s guide said. “I met this being on the road from the sea. I took him for one of the new batch at first.”

  “How could you?” A small slender woman with hair like flames and snow and eyes like the lushest grasses asked in a voice as musical as the Singing Stones of Skarness. “He is much too mature. The others are children.”

  “Then it came to me that perhaps he was one of the batch living in the sea, that he of all of them had successfully mutated into the desired form…”

  “Highly unlikely,” Highmagister HaGurdy said. “Do you think we didn’t test them all before releasing them to the waters?”

  “But as I spent time with him, though I could read no one thought clearly, it became evident to me that he had seen nothing here before. He is not one of us, nor is he one of our chosen Guests or Offspring.”

  Highmagister HaGurdy walked toward Aari. Like his guide, she grew nearer his height as she drew nigh him. Her scent, which was basically one of wildflowers and musk, had an unpleasant overlay of chemicals. Although she was clad in a gown of velvety deep blue, it was incongruously covered by the same white laboratory jacket sported by the other occupants of the room.

  Aari tipped his horn to the lady respectfully. “I beg to differ with my guide, Hiimaagii,” he said, the limitations of his Linyaari tongue not allowing him to speak more of her title than that. “I believe that I am one of your offspring, but many generations removed from now. I have become lost in time and I come to ask you to return me to my own time.”

  He deliberately suppressed thoughts of his friends. He would tell this formidable female of them when he knew if she could be trusted. In all of the stories the Ancestors told, the Friends, the Hosts, were benevolent and helpful and there was no reason to mistrust or fear them.

  But he knew all too well that reality could be somewhat different than stories.

  “Now how can that be?” she asked. “Certainly you appear to be exactly what we are working toward in our current creations. Except for your somewhat misshapen horn, you are all that we hope our new batch will be when they are grown, but they will not reach physical maturity for thrice a twelvemonth.” She looked at Aari and he felt as if more than his mind was being expertly probed. “And you, my lad, are well past that age, and no youth. You know, based on the evidence before me, I am tempted to believe your wild claim.”

  But her incredulity was no greater than his when he realized that if all the stories were true, this slender and beautiful female before him was his ancient ancestress on the un-horned two-legged side. How could she be his many times Grandmother, though?

  A small smile played across her lips and her contours grew softer and broader, her cheeks plumper, and her hair tucked itself into a braid, the snow overtaking all but a hint of the flame of it. The meadows of her eyes were undimmed, however. “Is this guise more appropriate to your way of thinking, Great Grandson?” she asked Aari. She had clearly read his thought, even though he had tried to suppress it.

  “It is less distracting,” he replied.

  Dimples morphed into her cheeks and she gave him a Grandmotherly smile.

  “So when do you come to us from? And how have you come to be here?” she asked. “And where are your companions?”

  “When? I take it then, you truly believe I have traveled from the future…And what companions are you talking about?”

  “Surely you did not come alone from the future. I see hints of those who accompanied you in your mind. And why, if you don’t mind my asking, did you come at all? We, of course, travel to many times and places in the space/time continuum, but you are the first unauthorized visitor we have ever received from another time. At least, I assume no one here sent for him?” she sent the question around the room and all of the other people shook their heads and declared that they had nothing to do with his appearance. “Besides, if we had sent for you, you would have arrived in this room. How did you happen to arrive elsewhere on this world? Or at all, for that matter?”

  “Yes, how?” the others asked and now that he looked at them, they appeared a bit older than he thought at first, all were grayer, and had kindly aspects to their faces. Though they were not Linyaari faces, still, they now had something of the Linyaari about them. Something from the two-legged, un-horned side. They gathered around chattering questions at him and asking for facts of physics to explain his journey. How could he explain to them what he didn’t understand himself? But he was about to relate everything that had happened to him on his journey here when the lady took his arm in hers, and one wall of the room opened to yet another, more interior chamber. “Never mind all that for now. He has come to us at the right time. He is no larval being, but a full-grown male in his prime,
and the prototype for our descendant species. Great Grandson, if you will just lie on that table there, we need to take a few samples.”

  They surrounded him and their kindly aspects were revealed for the lies they were. They all grew monstrous eyes and pincers, looking exactly like Khleevi to him as they forced him onto the table. They ignored his protests and struggling, except when the Highmagister tsked, tsked him, saying, “We cannot hurt you—at least not permanently. The other side of the family can immediately heal any small hurts you might feel, you know…”

  But it wasn’t the hurt or lack of it that made him struggle under their hands. In fact, it wasn’t who they were or where he was that concerned him now. After his experiences at the hands of the Khleevi, he simply could not stand being strapped to a metal table again. Not for any reason. His mind was no longer his own, and he fought harder than he could ever remember fighting anything. And somewhere, from far away, he heard the only comforting sound he could imagine, maybe the last comforting sound he would ever hear. His beloved lifemate crying, “Aari!”

  “Khornya!” he bellowed, with all of his voices, physical and mental. That cry alone and then all was blackness.

  Twenty

  “Oh, Captain Becker!” Acorna cried. “Thank goodness you have come! Our Ancestral Hosts have this machine here, and I believe it allows time travel. Help me fix it so that I can fetch our people back, please. I believe they have become lost in time.”

  “Is that what is going on?” Becker asked. “No problem. We’ll have ’er fixed in a jiffy.”

  “What is a jiffy?” Thariinye inquired.

  “Another time thing,” Becker said. In an aside to Acorna, he said, “Why don’t you let him fetch your lost ones back, Princess? You’re handy to have around and he’d be no great loss.”

  “I heard that,” Thariinye said, with a curious combination of indignation and dignity. “And I think it highly premature to start talking about who is useful and who is not until we have determined how this device works and how best to retrieve our missing friends.”