Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  Aari stood perfectly still as horns touched in silent remembrance, and then, startlingly, clearly even to him, a keening began inside him, low at first, then rising and falling, until it turned into a melody and Acorna realized he was singing. As the first chorus began, other voices rose to join his, those of the older Linyaari, and then, more tentatively, a few of the younger ones, singing their lament for those missing as well as the dead.

  Where do you graze now that you’ve gone away?

  I no longer see you, we no longer play

  Together at sunrise, together at night,

  Gone is your laughter and gone your eye’s light.

  Your horn now is dull, it cannot ease my heart,

  It cannot ease my pain now that we are apart.

  I seek you in silence, I seek you in crowds,

  I look for your face in the shape of the clouds.

  Is that your laughter in the voice of the stream

  Where we drank together when our world was green?

  My colors are dark now that you’ve gone away

  And I cannot hear words that you used to say.

  They tell me you live in my thoughts and my dreams,

  Someday you’ll return in a newborn youngling.

  But my tears keep on falling till someday you do,

  And they’ll make a new river I’ll name after you.

  The song continued throughout the burial and on to the next and the next until the dead of all of the clans were buried. The procession ended at last at Grandam’s pavilion, where she and Maati stood beside the burial baskets of Grandsire Niciirye and Aari’s and Maati’s brother, Laarye. Grandam joined in the song, and Maati, too, their tears indistinguishable from the rain washing down their faces as the baskets were gently put in the ground.

  Acorna had sung with her people as the verses were repeated over and over again, to no music but the beat of the hard Linyaari feet pawing the soaked ground and throwing mud back over the baskets.

  She was crying, too, for the parents she had known so short a time, for Delszaki Li, for all of the children she had not been able to save, but most of all she was finally feeling what had made this place so cold and strange and distant, how the heart had been cut out of her people when they left behind the continuity of their own lines, when they left behind their home. Acorna cried for little Maati, who was left alone except for Grandam and her strange, sad brother. But it was for Aari himself that she cried hardest, Aari who had suffered as no other Linyaari had ever suffered, and lived, who had been abandoned and who had lost everything he had ever held dear, including a vital part of himself. And yet, when he had the chance to save himself, he had thought mostly of saving from pillage the bones of his people. Acorna had the distinct impression that he might never have returned except for that mission.

  As the last strains of the song drained into the ground with the rain, Acorna noticed that people were standing closer together, males and females touching horns, arms around each other’s backs and waists, walking away side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes. No one was wearing horn-hats today except Aari, and increasingly the thoughts being projected were unmistakably amorous.

  Acorna felt a rather embarrassing warmth flooding through herself as well, and Grandam, wiping her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her garment, smiled at her. “It’s a natural reaction, child. During these hard years our population has fallen off and as the song says, our loved ones will only return with future generations—so our bodies tell us it is time to start making babies.”

  Before Acorna could reply, she saw Thariinye coming toward her and warm feeling or no, she stepped behind Aari, back into the shelter of Grandam’s pavilion. This did not seem to be the smart thing to do either as other people, couples, were disappearing into the nearest pavilions with an urgency that left no doubt that they were taking care of needs far more interesting than a wish to escape the rain.

  Acorna turned away from the dispersing crowd.

  Suddenly, the front flap of Grandam’s pavilion burst open and Captain Becker ran into the middle of the room, panting, the uniformed communications officer close on his heels.

  He was shouting. “Okay, okay, I know I’m not allowed but this is an emergency! I need to find Aari and Lady Acor—Khornya. Now! Where are they?” he demanded of Acorna, evidently not able to see her in the dim interior of the pavilion, darkened both by rain and out of respect for the ceremony.

  “I’m here, Captain Becker. It’s me, Acorna. What’s the matter?”

  Aari ducked inside behind her. “Joh?”

  “I just got a Mayday on my remotest remote scanner. It’s from a ship called Shahrazad, Lady Acorna, registered on a planet called Laboue to the House of Harakamian.”

  “Uncle Hafiz!”

  “Yeah, that’s right, Hafiz Harakamian. They’re under attack.”

  “This is nonsense!” the communications officer sputtered as Becker’s arrival began drawing a crowd, including Liriili. “We picked up no such communication!”

  “No, well, maybe that’s because you people don’t want anybody to know you’re here so you don’t look very hard,” Becker said. “But I have equipment that lets me pick up signals two galaxies away. Can you get somebody to sell me the damn fuel so I can go help them?”

  “I will come, too, Joh,” Aari said. “My work here is done and Grandam is taking good care of my sister.”

  “Me too,” Acorna said. She thought someone would protest but Liriili actually looked relieved.

  “I will also come,” Thariinye said.

  “No way,” Becker told him. “You make a crowd all by yourself, buddy. Unless you Linyaari happen to maintain a cavalry, which, since you’re pacifists, I’m inclined to doubt, all I want from the rest of you is refueling and we’re outta here.”

  “Make it so,” Liriili said with great relief to the communications officer and to the spaceport personnel among the crowd. She didn’t bother to hide her thoughts, and Acorna and everyone else could read her clearly. Liriili was more than a little pleased to see the backs of the contentious Becker, and the troublesome Khornya. And Aari’s presence was, as she had predicted, upsetting to many of the inhabitants. He didn’t truly belong among normal Linyaari anymore. Yes, off-planet was a very good place for them all, as far as Liriili was concerned, as far out into outer space as they could possibly go.

  Acorna turned as she heard feet galloping up beside her. Maati called out to her to wait. She did so—there was no immediate need for haste. The Condor was being refueled with one of the several mixtures that would power it.

  “I like diversity, in case you didn’t notice,” Becker said to the world at large since Aari was already back in the ship and Acorna had turned to meet Maati. The Linyaari fueling the ship did so quickly and efficiently but paid the human no undue attention. “The hatch is the Mytherian toxic waste chute, got the robolift off a Pachean tanker, and the nose cone is from a Nupiak asteroid breaker. It can take any one of a dozen different fuels and runs good on all of them or a mix.”

  Maati’s demands drowned out Becker’s voice to Acorna. “I want to go with you!” she cried. “How can he leave again when I just got him?”

  Grandam, panting a little, caught up with them.

  “Maati, we’re answering a distress call. It will be dangerous. Your brother is going to help Captain Becker and I’m going in case someone needs healing,” Acorna said.

  “I can heal, too!” Maati said. “I helped Aari. I did! He said I was the most help of everybody. I want to go into space, too, and be star-clad like he is and you are, Khornya. Make them take me along.”

  Grandam put her hand on Maati’s shoulder. “Maybe next time, child. This time I need you here. We have lost too many already.”

  “Well, then, he should stay, too,” Maati said stubbornly. “He only just got here. Captain Becker hasn’t had him always. He can do things by himself or with the cat or—Khornya can help him.”

  “Being traded in, am I?” Acorna
asked, chiding just a little. She squatted on her heels and said, “Maati, I don’t think Aari can stay right now.”

  “Why not? We healed him. All but his horn.”

  “The thing is, we didn’t. Not entirely. He is not used to being with people anymore.”

  “I will tell you a state secret, child,” Grandam said. “Do you know why the Council decided that the graves should be spread out according to clan?”

  “I don’t care about that!” Maati said.

  “No, but Aari does. Do you know that if we had buried them all together, all he wanted to do here was what he has done these last few ghaanyi and make himself guardian of the graves?”

  “You felt that, too?” Acorna asked.

  “He broadcasts quite well, even without a horn,” Grandam said. “I—rather think he believes he belongs with the dead, no matter how much the living may care for him.”

  “That’s Khleevi!” Maati declared. “Why would he think that?”

  “That’s just it, Maati,” Acorna said. “He spent a long time with the Khleevi. You saw some of what they did to his body—could you feel what they did to him inside?”

  “Yes,” Maati said. “Yes, but he’ll get better.”

  “Yes, he will,” Acorna said. “But he needs time to get used to being alive. If he stays among our people now, they will never forget how he is now, and it will be much harder for him to grow into his life and become again the man he once was or could have been. Captain Becker may be a little Khleevi around the edges, but he is a good man and he does not let Aari go into himself too much. I will go and make as sure as I can that he comes to no harm and comes back to you. Then, when you’re a little older, you can come into space with us if you like.”

  “Into space—with you? Aren’t you coming back, Khornya?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But my adopted uncle is out there in trouble.”

  “So is your aunt, don’t forget, child,” Grandam said, taking Maati by the shoulders. The girl was only partially mollified and later, as Acorna, Aari, and Becker watched the ground from the comscreen, they saw her looking after them as the ship lifted off.

  Twenty-one

  The Shahrazad was still transmitting her distress signal when she was boarded. Hafiz had taken the helm after the captain was hit by falling debris from the first volley fired against the ship. It had come from nowhere, before the Shahrazad was able to deploy her shields. Their attacker was cloaked.

  Fortunately, the Shahrazad was as spacious vertically as the villa on Laboue was horizontally. And there was only one entrance, on the lower levels, and in between, the ship had a labyrinth of defenses.

  Karina watched, with a sort of horrified fascination, as pressure-suited individuals entered the main air lock, brandishing large, gleaming, fearsome-looking weapons. The leader, a small person, shucked off her garment to reveal a form-fitting silver garment much like the ones worn by ancient film starlets in vintage Asian space operas. The invader fluffed her hair and demanded of the ship at large, “Hafiz Harakamian, your guests have arrived. Surrender now and save yourself a great deal of pain later.”

  Hafiz smiled and said softly to the computer, “The baths.” Dr. Hoa, standing nearby, nodded, and pressed the control buttons for the little bubble of weather he was not averse to using as a weapon under these circumstances.

  Kisla and her phalanx of soldiers blasted open the air lock from the inside, as Hafiz had known they surely would do, disrespectful as they were of his investment in the finest, smoothest, and most aesthetic possible technology. The blast caused the onion-domed portal to the air lock to disassemble into a waterfall of beads which then tinkled away to a mere shimmer of energy as they were penetrated.

  Once outside the lock, the invaders were quickly lost in a miasma of swirling steam. The last Karina saw of Kisla or her soldiers for quite some time was the sight of Kisla pulling frantically at the neck of her silvery garment. The invaders mopped sweat out of their eyes and tore off whatever bits of clothing they could spare. They were desperate to keep themselves from broiling in the 135 degree steam heat of the artificial Turkish bath generated by a combination of Hoa’s weather wizardry and Hafiz’s design for another homey little luxury he had planned to add to the Shahrazad.

  After a bit, though, the invaders flashed their weapons again, and another of Hafiz’s elegant portals was blown open. “The camels, please,” Hafiz told the computer.

  “What will those do, Hafiz?” Karina asked. “Where have you been hiding camels?”

  “They are holograms, my beloved,” Hafiz said. “Only holograms, but we have arranged for them to appear to spit great boluses of the most noisome and slimy mixture ever to spoil the high tone of a caravan. Sadly, we did not mix the stuff with acid or poison or something a bit more lethal for fear of harming my own people. These are delaying tactics only, you understand, but perhaps this spawn of scum-born scorpions will find it sufficiently distracting that we will buy time until assistance may arrive. Meanwhile, the navigation officer is deleting our course from the ship’s computer.”

  “Won’t Yasmin have warned them about these things?” Karina asked. “You did say she knew all of your security precautions.”

  Hafiz smiled sweetly. “Not these. The good doctor Hoa and I have been amusing ourselves with these little diversions only since we left Rushima—while you were involved in your spiritual activities, o pot of passion.”

  The camel charge was a sight to behold and it certainly did have the element of surprise. If only Hafiz and Dr. Hoa could have made the camels spit something as deadly as it was disgusting, Karina thought, so that these miscreants could be sent back to their creator to have their spirits adjusted and be refitted for their next lives as lizards, snakes, and insects of various species.

  The girl pirate’s head was encased almost immediately in a blob of green goo. Soon enough, all the invaders were wiping their eyes, coughing from the fumes, and otherwise displaying their displeasure at the welcome they were receiving from the Shahrazad. They realized quickly enough that the camels were holograms, of course, but that did not stop them from slipping and falling on the pseudospit, causing their weapons to discharge accidentally. Two of the invaders were wounded in the struggle.

  The ship’s computer tracked their progress on the diagram of the hull’s interior and showed that the next portal they blasted open led them through a maze of halls that caused them to actually go back the way they had come, though not through the Turkish bath.

  Instead, the hologram this time was of a vast and endless desert and the walkway designed to help load the ship before takeoff was looped to operate treadmill fashion. The invaders walked, then ran, then walked, but never escaped the desert hologram, nor its arid climate, also courtesy of Dr. Hoa and the ship’s computer. By the time someone had the presence of mind to shoot into the simulated rolling sand dunes beneath their feet, the tongues of all of the invaders, at least the human ones, were hanging out, and they were looking parched dry and burned from the sun-lamps, fixtures from the ship’s spa, that augmented the artificial climate.

  The desert disappeared, the portal opened, and the very hot and weary invaders stumbled through to the desert oasis.

  “Dancing girls,” Hafiz said. The diagram showed that the invaders had climbed through the desert up to the next level. The oasis looked as inviting as it was supposed to, and featured a hologram of Hafiz’s favorite garden with a fifteen-layer cascading fountain looking like a waterfall. At this point, Karina noticed that all of the crew except for themselves, Dr. Hoa, and the fallen captain had disappeared. “Where?” she began.

  “Watch,” Hafiz said. “In deference to the pacifistic nature of our dear Acorna’s people, we brought no deadly weapons—but this does not mean my crew has suffered a lapse of their very fine training that makes them the most skilled of warriors in all manner of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat. See you, my blossom, this is what the intruders will behold.” And a squad of improbabl
y endowed and incredibly agile and flexible dancing girls—well, persons, as Hafiz had added a pair of dancing boys to the troop, all muscles and flashing dark eyes, with skills to match those of the women. Clad, but not very, in peekaboo veils of glowing, translucent silk in emerald, sapphire, garnet, raspberry, saffron, all were likewise adorned with jingling coins of purest gold fluttering from between lush breasts, cascading over rippling abdominal muscles, twinkling with the twitching of hips, sliding over sinuous arms and necks, and flirting from between brows and just under the lower eyelashes where coy veilings began. Two dancers for each invader, Karina saw, and the invaders, who surely knew this must be a hologram also, could not quite bring themselves to shoot. In fact, as the dancers kicked up little sprays of water from the quite-real fountain, quite-real water touched the parched, would-be conquerors, who disregarded their weapons long enough to drink, to wash their hot faces, to reach for proffered flesh.

  Meanwhile, the crew members, clad in blue from head to toe, including transparent facemasks, were concealed by the dancing holograms. They snatched up weapons and disabled the invading troops before any of them knew what was happening.

  Kisla Manjari squealed as the dancing boys disappeared and she found herself hoisted aloft by two blue clad crewmen.

  “Oh, Hafiz, you are wonderful!” Karina cried. “You’ve saved us! Was it your ancient Hadathian spirit guides who told you how to do all of this?”

  “Very close, o luscious lemon drop, it was the strategy of an ancestor portrayed in one of my collections of rare and venerable vids. The occasion was an athletic contest but the principles were much the same—except we had to employ holograms and our own humble resources instead of the living creatures at the disposal of my ancestor.”