Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Maybe Maati and you other ladies should leave now,” Becker told Acorna.

  Acorna didn’t need to translate. Maati was shaking her head, and clinging to Aari. Grandam said simply, in clear thought-speak, without hesitation or question so that even Becker could understand her, (Your concern for our sensitivities does you credit, Captain, but Aari will need our support more than ever. We will stay in contact with him as you perform your task. In that way, he may feel far less pain.)

  Becker nodded. The other doctors were all protesting but Bidiila spoke to them sharply and, although they looked away as Becker fetched his crowbar, they remained close. Aari reclined on a table and Grandam, Acorna, and Maati stayed close by his head, their horns touching his face and neck, and their hands on his arms and shoulders. Becker, without fear or squeamishness, and with the efficiency he might give to hammering some bent object into shape, brought the heavy tool down sharply on the misshapen part of Aari’s leg. Aari let his breath out in a huff and a high-pitched whistle, and by then the doctors were closing in, applying their horns to the fresh wound as they manipulated the leg so that it would set correctly.

  “You okay, buddy?” Becker asked Aari gently.

  With great effort, Aari said, “Yes.” And in a moment, after several deep breaths, added, “My left foot now, please, Joh.”

  Maati had buried her face against his mane and Acorna felt that he was more concerned about her reaction than about the pain, which was dulled by their contact and quite brief compared to what he had endured walking around with misaligned bones, twisted tendons, and atrophied, overly strained muscles. Each break and healing found him breathing easier, though all of them, especially Aari and Becker, had sweat running from every pore. Worse yet was that the sound of Aari’s crunching bones was drowned out only by the high, eerie keening of the Makahomian Temple Cat, who cowered beneath the table.

  The process took hours and Acorna was very weary, as was Grandam. Acorna could see that Grandam’s horn and those of the doctors were all becoming translucent, as hers had when she had cured the wounded following the battle between Rushima and the Khleevi.

  Aari opened his eyes only after he had healed from the last break. Becker, jaw set, functioned like a machine but his voice was always controlled, and always gentle and concerned when speaking to Aari or any of them. He knew that he was hurting to help the healing and had to keep a firm grip on himself so that each blow did not cause him almost as much pain as it did Aari.

  When at last they were done and Aari sat up, straight and five inches taller, Acorna went to Becker and laid her horn against his forehead.

  “Thank you, Khornya,” Aari said. “I wish I was able to do that, too. You are spent.”

  “We are all spent,” Grandam said.

  The cat shot from beneath the table. Maati caught and held him, soothing him with a touch of her horn that soon had the beast purring.

  Bidiila said, “We have been thinking about your horn, Aari. It is a new problem, as I said, but did you not say your brother perished on Vhiliinyar and that you have brought his bones back for reburial? Do you feel that his spirit would be offended if we took a small piece from his horn, which would have similar DNA to yours and therefore be less likely to be rejected, and tried to coax it to grow on the root of your own horn?”

  This was done, with Aari’s and Maati’s agreement.

  “Now you can come back with us,” Maati told her brother.

  He put his hand up to the bandaged place where the horn implant had been. “I don’t think so. I’ll still be an outcast.”

  Acorna said, “Maybe you could wear a prosthetic hidden by a horn-hat.”

  “A what?” Becker and Aari asked together.

  Acorna explained and Becker said, “Yeah, we could give you a fake horn inside to stiffen it. Nobody would know if you didn’t want them to.”

  “Aside from the people all over the planet who already do, thanks to those who were here earlier,” Aari said.

  “Never mind them. You want to see your old friends, and what this new world is like, or not?”

  Acorna thought it was a good thing Becker didn’t really wait for an answer.

  The com unit came on again and the officer on the other end said, “Captain Becker, the people have gathered to rebury the bones of our dead.”

  “Okay. We’ll get them onto the robolift and send them down load by load.”

  “I will need to supervise,” Aari said. “I am the only one who still knows who was buried where and remembers the clan designations of each body. Where would I find a—horn-hat?”

  Bidiila reached into her lab coat pocket. “Take mine,” she said. “I have several others. They come in handy when you spend the day listening to minor complaints from patients who should have had the sense not to overgraze.”

  Becker had gone to work with a torch and hammer on a piece of lightweight alloy and in no time fashioned it into the semblance of a horn. A slot on either side held a band that slid beneath Aari’s mane to hold it in place. With Bidiila’s horn-hat, it was difficult to tell him from another Linyaari.

  The three women stayed aboard the ship and helped Aari and Becker load the robolift time after time. Then Becker remembered something and came back with what looked like another man, albeit one somewhat scarred and with a peculiar skin tint. This, Acorna learned, was a KEN unit, an android, and he was able to work five times faster, if not more accurately, than any of them. Aari had to indicate to Becker whose bones were whose before riding down with each load and supervising its disposition. The road to the spaceport was lined with Linyaari of all clans, all come to claim the bones of their dead.

  “How did they find out so fast?” Becker asked.

  “Thought transference is a very swift form of communication when used correctly,” Grandam said. “I suspect Liriili set up a relay of some sort to inform the clans.”

  “Will you look at that guy?” Becker asked, nodding toward Aari. “I was the pounder and he was the poundee and he is working rings around me. You’d think he’d been sitting around watching the stars go by all morning instead of getting every bone in his body rebroken and mended.”

  “He is a very determined young man,” Grandam said. “He had to be or he would not have survived all that he has.”

  When Aari returned for the last time, he carried a single skeleton, this one carefully wrapped in the thermal blanket Becker had given Aari to sleep with.

  “Grandam, I was very careful with Grandsire Niciirye but I brought him back to you. I do not wish you to be concerned, but Grandsire’s horn is missing from his remains.”

  “His horn?” Grandam asked, and Acorna saw that she was trying to picture her lifemate as Aari was now. “Not the Khleevi?”

  “Captain Becker will explain,” Aari said. “I must go below now.”

  “Thanks a lot, buddy,” Becker said.

  Aari allowed himself a small grim smile. “You have nothing to worry about, Joh, even if I had not already hidden your surgical instrument. We are a nonviolent people. Grandam will not cause you much physical damage for desecrating the remains of her lifemate. I do not know if that will be true for the others whose kin are missing their horns. Those bones I have left in the hold for now, but Grandsire’s at least I can return.”

  His voice contained elements of black humor, but his emotions were hollow and cold with grief, as they came to Acorna. His thoughts had been harder and harder to detect as the bones and horns left the ship and it came to Acorna that he might be lonely without them.

  She turned back to Becker and to Grandam, who was watching the salvage man with a curious mixture of pain and reproach. “You are a grave robber, Captain?” she asked.

  “I take full responsibility, ma’am,” Becker said, and pointed at RK, washing on top of the control console. “It was the cat’s fault. Your old planet is a mess. We landed there looking for salvage. Some of your people’s horns were laying around on the ground. It was night, the light was poor,
and I thought since the cat liked them I’d pick up a few and see what they were. Well, honest, they really were just laying around.”

  “So you took them?” she asked, the reproach still there.

  “I’m a salvage expert, for pity’s sake!” he said. “I pick up stuff nobody claims—and it sure didn’t look like there was a living soul there at the time. I didn’t even know what they were till we got back to Kezdet and a couple of people thought they belonged to the Lady Acorna or her shipmates.”

  Acorna was a little startled at the idea at first but it made sense. She and then her aunt and the others were the only Linyaari the people of Kezdet and Manganos had met.

  “One fellow was ready to turn me over to the cops for murder, and one nasty little—female individual, an old enemy of Acorna’s—tried to kill me more than once to take the horns. Then she followed us to your old planet and took the horns I had with me. If she hadn’t I swear I would have returned them, I don’t care how much they were worth.”

  “Were—worth, Captain?” Maati asked, touching hers.

  Grandam looked horrified, and Maati said, “Oh, no! You mean like in the story of the Ancestors? How the people didn’t want them, they only wanted the horns? But dead horn? Healing using dead horn doesn’t work nearly as well as healing done by a living person!”

  “It works better than no horn at all, I’m afraid, honey,” Becker said. “And there are a lot of us out there in the galaxy without healing horns.”

  “You say this woman knew me?” Acorna asked. “Who is she?”

  “Kisla Manjari.” Becker filled her in on Kisla’s attempts to murder him and RK.

  Acorna sighed. She had hoped that perhaps when Kisla learned of her own humble birth from her adopted mother, the girl might have been cured of some of her arrogance, but apparently she was even worse. Becker’s thoughts were not as easily discernible now, nor were the cat’s thought patterns as clear as they had been with the bones aboard, but from what she could tell, Kisla was more badly disturbed than ever.

  “Could she have followed you here?” Acorna asked Becker.

  Becker shook his head. “We lost her this time. Aari scared her away with a Khleevi weapon.”

  Grandam looked vaguely shocked but Becker said, “It simulated explosions in the earth—maybe it was a mining tool instead of a weapon to use against people—he said they used things like that to destabilize the whole planet. Anyway, it worked, and she took off. She only found us that time because of a homing device on the droid, but we got rid of that finally.”

  Acorna sighed. “That’s good, then.”

  “I also have an—idiosyncratic way of navigating that’s unpredictable to me as well as other ships. Besides which, I had no idea where we were going. We steered by Aari’s memory of what he had been told was the evacuation route before the invasion.”

  Grandam sighed. “I think that whatever the others do, I shall bury Niciirye in the field beyond my back door. And Captain—if you—if you should recover the horns, by any chance, I wonder if there is any way you could somehow return them to us? It is a very important link between us and our dead. I don’t know why; maybe scientists would say that an extraordinary amount of DNA material is encoded in the horn and survives death. But however it is that it works, it is a connection and now—”

  She looked away but Acorna felt Grandam’s pain as if it were her own, a sudden cold void, an open pit of grief she had never before sensed in Grandam.

  Twenty

  It took nearly a week—a ghiiri-ghaanye—from the time the bones were unloaded from the Condor and handed over to their descendants for the Council to decide where the burials were to take place. During this time, the bones stayed in the homes of their respective clan members.

  The presence of the dead from the past cast a pall over the living that was at least partially connected to their fears for those who were currently voyaging through space and had been out of communication for days now, completely silent.

  Grandam had accompanied Aari to a Council session where he told the story of the cemetery’s unwitting desecration and how he had preserved the bones against further pilfering. He described the thought-images he had received from Becker regarding the unwholesome interest in the horns by some of Becker’s fellow humans. The Council, Grandam said, had become rather agitated after hearing that, both concerned about the possible invasion of other horn-seeking aliens and troubled that there could be some connection between the alien interest in the horns of the Linyaari dead and the lack of contact with the space-faring Linyaari.

  Liriili had dismissed that concern (rather shrilly, Grandam noted). “These particular aliens are galaxies away. This one found us only because of Aari’s memory. And these humans had never seen one of us before Khornya.” The viizaar did not say that she wished the aliens had never seen Khornya, that she could almost wish the girl had perished with her parents rather than be the instrument of bringing such danger upon them. But Grandam heard the thought, even concealed. And worse, she knew that others on the Council shared it. The possible threat from aliens preoccupied the Council during that session to the extent that discussion of burial sites was temporarily tabled.

  Later, Aari told Grandam, “I hope they will put the burial ground somewhere protected, where the graves will not be disturbed again. A cave would be good. Like the one I hid them in on Vhiliinyar. The bones were easy to guard there, and the cave could always be collapsed upon them if outsiders came to disturb them again.”

  Grandam told Acorna about it later, when Aari had returned to the Condor with food for Becker. “I got the strongest impression that what he intends to do the rest of his life is guard the burial ground.”

  Acorna could not suppress a shudder. “I suppose that’s what the Khleevi did to him that none of our horns can touch.”

  “Yes, well, perhaps. But it’s nonsense. That is a brilliant young man. He excelled at every aspect of our culture and had already traveled to other worlds as an ambassador and educator. He is like a shell, from which the little creature within has been stolen. No— I exaggerate. Perhaps his essence is only hidden, but hidden from himself as well as from others.”

  Later, when the Council decided that each clan would be responsible for burying its own dead in separate burial places, Aari insisted on attending all reinterments. The clans whose dead were not returned to them with the rest of the bones did not mention the missing remains, which Acorna found odd. However, the entire city of Kubiilikhan was actively, prematurely, mourning the ones now believed to be lost in the cosmos and so a few absent dead from the past mattered less than the burial of the many bones reclaimed.

  Acorna accompanied Aari as he attended the first reinterment.

  The sky looked like an open wound that day, yellow, with huge red and burgundy clouds boiling in the west, split now and then by the green lightning she remembered from before. The pavilions creaked, extruding and retracting their ramps like snakes’ tongues, raising and lowering their floors as the breezes and dampness shifted.

  Aari was very quiet and Acorna felt from him confusion and grief, and sensed this might be coming from the Council’s decision to have no central burial place, so that even the tenuous position he had found for himself as guardian of the dead was now lost to him.

  This was confirmed when she noticed that when a few people addressed him, he ignored them.

  “Aari,” she said softly, “Techno-artisan Maarye just greeted you.”

  Aari looked genuinely startled. “Oh. I’m sorry. That was real then?” He passed his hand over his face. Healed and wearing the prosthetic horn Becker had devised for him, he seemed a handsome, stalwart example of Linyaari manhood.

  “Of course it was real,” she said. “You looked right through him.”

  “I’m sorry. I should apologize. I’ve kept company with phantoms for a long time, Khornya. They don’t generally expect manners, or even answers.”

  Thunder cracked just then and the rain drenched ever
yone within a single moment. No one ran for cover, however. This was a solemn moment. All of Kubiilikhan and most of the rest of narhii-Vhiliinyar was here. All of the clans had at least sent representatives, gathered up in the shuttle belonging to the new ship being assembled by the techno-artisans. Only one communications officer remained on duty at the spaceport, and even that officer was frequently relieved so that everyone could attend the appropriate burials.

  The rain was welcome, even fitting. It made the new ground softer for burial of the old bones. The Ancestors were in attendance, and that alone kept the procession from speeding its slow, mournful pace.

  This was the burial ceremony of Clan Neeyeereeya, the clan with the most members to be interred, and the most above ground, though many of the latter were far too young to remember those buried on the world they had never known.

  And yet, the atmosphere was as heavy with sorrow as the sky was with clouds. Clansmen with heads bowed against the torrential rain carried the burial baskets containing the remains of their kinfolk to dark holes in the long blue grass. Acorna had sorely missed her dear, departed Mr. Li, but though her loss had been new while these losses were old ones, she had not previously experienced the raw expression of grief she felt from the other Linyaari. Unlike the grief of men, this feeling carried no morbidity about it, no consciousness of the flesh rotting or ghoulish fascination with death. There was no threat or anger here, only a kind of wounded wonder at the mystery of how a loved one who had walked, slept, and eaten beside you could be rendered to a few calcified fragments.

  She picked up the clearest image of bones, not these bones wrapped for this burial, but of the bones of the Linyaari missing in space, as their relatives and loved ones imagined burying them. The grief for the long-dead kin was only part of the loss being mourned here. The planetbound Linyaari cried for future as well as past deaths, grief joined with fear for the safety of the missing husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Acorna suddenly felt tremendously protective of her own people, and wished she could do something, anything, to help.