Acorna’s Quest

by Anne McCaffrey

  The shuttle for Maganos was delayed on the launching pad, giving Karina ample time to suffer from the tasteless décor of deep red and orange that clashed horribly with her personal colors of lavender and creamy white. And the shuttle was fully booked, every seat filled, and in some cases overfilled; the old woman next to her filled up her own space and overflowed into Karina’s. And somebody quite nearby had been eating Thai food: the whiff of garlic and cilantro quite overpowered the usual shuttle smell of carpet cleaner and recycled air. Karina whiled away the long wait for takeoff by explaining to the old woman next to her, who was going up to try to identify a long-lost great-nephew or something of the sort, how extremely trying she found experiences like this, with the crowd of humanity pressing so close against her.

  “I know just what you mean, dearie,” the old bat said comfortably. She shifted position and propped her legs up on Karina’s carryall. “They don’t make these shuttle seats near big enough for full-figured women like us, do they?”

  Karina glanced at the old broad’s shapeless bulk, bulging out of a shiny stretch dress two sizes too small and thirty years too young for her, then smoothed a reassuring hand down the flowing curves of lavender silk that she herself wore. Surely there could be no comparison…could there?

  “Oh, it’s not physical crowding that troubles me,” she said with a little laugh that someone, a long time ago, had mistakenly likened to the gay tinkle of water falling onto smooth stones. Karina had been tinkling gaily ever since. “It is the presence of so many souls, each with its own weight of misery and secret fears and bodily pains. I am a Sensitive, you see: I can feel these things.” She pressed a hand to her heart.

  “Me too,” her seatmate agreed amiably. “I feel it most particular after I eat fried foods. Looks like that’s where it’s getting you now. A burning pain, like, right under the breastbone?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Karina snapped. “Besides, I never eat animal fats or take alcohol.”

  “Can’t be too careful when you get to our age, can you?” The old woman chuckled comfortably and reached into a capacious silver-mounted traveling bag. It looked as if she were bringing out her portable photo album…and it was huge.

  Karina decided it would be hopeless to try and explain to the old bat that the pain she referred to was one of empathy, sharing the sorrows of humanity and knowing that her own poor talents would never suffice to heal the griefs of all those she encountered. In sheer self-preservation she was obliged to limit her healing work to those with whom she felt a certain spiritual oneness. At first she’d thought her seatmate might turn out to be one of those—the gaudy display of rainbow-flashing rings and bracelets on her fat white wrists and fingers suggested someone who could pay adequately for healing whatever pained her. Now Karina began to think it would be wiser to pass the rest of the flight in contemplative silence.

  She announced that it was time for her personal meditation, leaned back, and closed her eyes, trying to ignore both the plump thigh pressing against hers and her seatmate’s agreement that a little nap after lunch was a good thing at their age. Irritation would interfere with the alpha waves, and she wanted to arrive on Maganos projecting a serene calmness that would reassure this Acorna. Poor child, she had had no guidance in how to handle her psychic powers; no wonder she had fled to a remote lunar base! Indeed, a time of withdrawal from the world might have been most healing for her. But now it was time for her to come back to the world; Acorna herself must have sensed it, which was why she had acknowledged Karina’s fifty-seventh message. Now she would take the unicorn girl under her wing, teach her how to use her powers for the good of all without exhausting herself and, above all, without simply giving it away as she’d done during her weeks on Kezdet two years ago. The very thought made Karina feel slightly ill. Never mind; once she and Acorna were partners the girl would learn better.

  Karina fingered her pendant of opalescent moonstone set in silver and visualized a pink light of love all around herself, reaching out to envelop Acorna in its roseate glow. She felt an answering pulse, alien and surprisingly strong, and definitely welcoming. Wonderful! The shuttle couldn’t be more than halfway to Maganos, and already she could feel Acorna’s presence…it had to be the unicorn girl, didn’t it? Karina willed herself to sink deeper into trance. It was awfully hard to concentrate with that silly speaker squawking at them about minor course corrections and telling her not to panic. Of course she wasn’t going to panic…strange! The seat felt as if it were dropping away from her. She must be achieving a really good trance, almost levitational. And there was definitely a sense of an alien presence, very close now and quite different from the babbling, grumbling minds all around her.

  A firm tap on her shoulder and a warm, mint-flavored gust of breath broke the trance.

  “Have one of these, dearie,” her seatmate said, holding out a mint that had suffered from being clutched too long in a hot, sweaty palm. “Wonderful for the motion sickness, they say.”

  Before Karina could explain that she never permitted her mind to experience such illusions as motion sickness, the shuttle gave a sickening swoop and a sideways lurch that took her breath away, then steadied. Someone across the aisle made retching sounds. Karina had to close her eyes and remind herself firmly that she was thinking of Higher Things and that motion sickness was a false messenger. Someone farther up the cabin gave a faint shriek that was echoed from various seats around the body of the shuttle. Karina concentrated fiercely on her mental image of Acorna, tall and silver-maned and welcoming her partner-to-be, before she allowed herself to open her eyes and see what the screaming was about.

  Which was why she, alone of all the shuttle passengers, was neither frightened nor amazed to see a tall, silver-maned being with a golden horn stepping lightly through a door that should have been closed and double-locked until the shuttle entered the artificial atmosphere of Maganos. Outside the open door could be seen a stable, sourceless, golden glow where there should have been empty space, blackness, and immediate death for all the shuttle passengers.

  “Don’t scream, you idiot, it’s only Lady Lukia!” one of the passengers admonished another, using one of the names by which Acorna had been known during her brief stay on Kezdet.

  “She’s comin’ to take me, and I don’t want to be took!” cried the girl who’d first screamed, burying her head in her trembling arms.

  The unicorn-person said something in a liquid, slightly nasal language, and touched the girl’s head. She looked up, trembling, and met those golden eyes. Immediately her body relaxed, and she sat back in her seat, limp and smiling slightly.

  Whatever had been done to the girl appeared to be contagious, for within seconds, the people sitting on either side of her were similarly relaxed and vacant-eyed.

  The old lady beside Karina was clutching the arms of her seat, white-knuckled, and saying prayers under her breath. Karina realized that the other shuttle passengers had no idea what was really going on.

  “Excuse me,” she said tightly, pushing herself out of the seat and starting for the aisle. “Excuse me, please, thank you, if you could move your knees a little, sir, thank you. Sorry about that, there’s nothing to worry about, it’s me they’ve come for….”

  Finally, disheveled and breathless, she reached the aisle amid disgruntled murmurs about people who didn’t have the consideration to go before they got seated and people who ought to pay for two shuttle seats if they were going to take up all that space.

  Idiots, Karina thought. We’ve been lifted into Another Dimension and Acorna has come personally for me, and all they can think of is their paltry human bodies. Throwing up, screaming, and kvetching about having their toes stepped on—what must she think of us? It’s up to me to show that some of us are Above All That.

  Smiling resolutely, and ignoring the tiny part of her that squeaked that it, personally, was worried about its paltry human body and didn’t want to go away with aliens no matter how benevolent, Karina walked down th
e aisle and held out one hand gracefully to the unicorn-person.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I know you’ve come for me. Don’t worry about these others; they’re not used to psychic manifestations on this plane of being.”

  Acorna—for surely it must be she: there was no other like her—tilted a long, shapely face and said something like, “Lllrivhanyithalli?”

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” Karina replied. Why hadn’t anyone mentioned that Acorna didn’t speak Basic Interlingua? Oh, well, they could communicate on a psychic level. She beamed and projected, as strongly as she could, the image of herself and Acorna together and surrounded by the rosy pink light of perfect love and accord. When Acorna still looked puzzled, she put one hand to her moonstone pendant and asked it to lend her its energies for the projection.

  Acorna turned away from her!

  (See, Neeva? This one wants to come with us! Can’t you sense it?)

  (It feels confused to me. If it can thought-talk at all, it’s doing so very weakly. Are you sure about what it wants?)

  (Thariinye, I’m not so sure either,) put in Melireenya. (From your thought-images, it seems to be baring its teeth. In carnivores, isn’t that usually a threat?)

  (Not in these carnivores.) Thariinye had watched randomly captured vids from intercepted satellite transmissions while they had followed the other ship across space to the lunar base where it had landed. (They bare their teeth to indicate sociability and greeting.)

  (Oh, all right, if you say so. Anyway, I suppose we can reassure it later.)

  Karina let out a sigh of relief as Acorna turned those large golden eyes back upon her and extended a…hand? Whatever—the digits were thick and clumsy compared to human fingers, but soft like a hand. Karina grasped the offered hand and felt a twinge of unease. Was she picking up some trouble from Acorna’s mind? Or was it the fact that Acorna’s eyes were golden, not silver as in the stories? Or was it the fact that she seemed taller and more muscular than Karina had pictured her? Almost masculine in her aura. Perhaps it was the effect of the loose navy blue tunic she wore; it was so severe-looking, not the way you’d expect a young innocent girl to dress—unicorn or no. Well, perhaps Karina had been Sent to teach Acorna how to dress…among other things.

  “Just a minute,” she said firmly when Acorna beckoned her toward the open door. “I need to get my bag.”

  That occasioned another interlude of panting, wriggling, and apologizing as Karina fished her carryall out from among other passengers’ feet. She emerged from the struggle flushed and anxious that Acorna would have become impatient, so she did not demur when Acorna gestured that she was to go first up the aisle and through the door. The golden glow outside the door blinded her, and she thought about Higher Powers and stepped into it with complete—well, nearly complete—Love and Trust anyway.

  Only when the other ship appeared in the glowing light, when she saw even more unicorn-people excitedly awaiting her appearance, did Karina realize that she was just as badly off as the other passengers on the shuttle.

  She didn’t have a clue what was really going on.

  Four

  Rushima, Unified Federation Date 334.05.17

  While the Starfarer vessel was orbiting Rushima, it was not at the moment in a position to see the arrival of the Acadecki. Nor did Calum bother to check on any orbiting spacecraft since the Galacticapedia résumé on Rushima indicated the planet was in the early stages of its agricultural development and had only a message beacon. As he and Acorna saw no need to leave a message that would undoubtedly not be retrieved until whenever the colony remembered to look for messages, they thought they would simply identify a decent-sized settlement and land there. Rushima, being new with only one generation born on-planet, would not be startled or surprised by a single ship arriving. They could pay for anything they needed by transferring credits from the Li Mining Company to whatever credit institution the Rushimese nominated.

  But as the Acadecki made its approach, Acorna frowned.

  “This is the sickest-looking agricultural planet I have ever seen. Whatever can they be growing? It looks all brown, and yet this is the summer for this hemisphere. Something should look green. Even the forests look sick.”

  “You’re right. Maybe we should try the northern hemisphere. This planet, it says right here”—Calum pointed to the entry from Galactic which was displayed on another screen—“has little axial tilt, so it stays more or less the same temperate climate year-round. Hmm.”

  As they got closer, into the atmosphere, they spotted larger lake areas than were apparent in the official entry orbital scans.

  “What could have happened?” Acorna said. “Floods?”

  “Sure looks like ’em,” Calum had to agree. “But planetwide? That just doesn’t figure into”—he tapped out some directions to the screen showing the Galactic—“the sort of weather they’re supposed to have.”

  Then they overflew a vast wasteland with withered trees which had given up the struggle to survive without the rain they required. “If they don’t do something quickly, erosion will ruin this land forever,” Acorna said, for she had studied ecology along with many other subjects during her years aboard the mining ship. They continued on, over a low range of mountains, covered with sun-seared vegetation.

  “Noah, you been at it again?” Calum said facetiously, to cover his shock at the devastation: one area of land drowning next to one that had been sun-baked to extinction.

  “There’s a sizable settlement over there, to the right, Calum. And what looks like an airfield.”

  As they closed the distance, Calum snorted. “A very wet airfield, but safe enough for us to land on. The settlement’s not far away.

  “Not far for aquatic animals,” he amended later, when they opened the outer hatch and surveyed the lake which was the field: a rather muddy lake since their landing had stirred up the drowned soil.

  “Phew!” Calum said, turning his head away from the smell that now rose to their nostrils. Acorna’s nose twitched, but her main concern was food, not water.

  “What’s happened?” she asked. “Think the soaking’s reached the sewage-disposal units?”

  He pinched his nostrils. “I’ll just get me a set of plugs.” He paused as he passed Acorna: there were no plugs for her wider nostrils. But then she wasn’t as particular about smells, bad or good, as he was. She seemed to like them all—the more intense, the better.

  “There’s no one around, either,” Acorna said, shielding her eyes to peer around and adjusting to the odor. “I don’t understand this.”

  Her digestive juices gurgled in complaint. She hadn’t seen a need to ration what remained edible on board and had really been looking forward to a decent graze on Rushima. As far as her far-seeing eyes could perceive, there wasn’t that much to tempt her. But she needed to eat something.

  “Trees, over there, Acorna,” Calum said, pointing beyond and behind the ship toward a distant hillock. “Look! You go see if there’s anything edible there. I’ll”—he looked down at the water surrounding them—“wade over to the buildings and see what I can see. Maybe even ground transport…delete that: what we’d require is aquatic transport.” He looked at the landing ramp. “Doesn’t look all that deep.” The ramp’s edge was only centimeters into the flood.

  Blithely he stepped off, into water up to his ankles. The next step had him in water up to his knees. And he grinned sheepishly back at Acorna.

  “Must’ve been a rut or something,” he said.

  “Well, I can at least help us see where we’re going,” she said, and, kneeling on the ramp, bent over so that her horn touched the water. A few swirling motions and the silty, smelly floodplain cleared magically. She dropped her nose into the clear water and drank. “Hmm, rather nice without the effluvium. There were fertilizers dissolved in the water, too.”

  “Really? They must be in bad shape here. One-half the planet burned to a crisp and the rest of the real estate underwater. Something’s peculiar
. That’s unnatural.”

  Acorna stepped off the ramp. “It feels cool around my hooves.” She grinned with childlike pleasure. She rarely used footwear on the ship. “I shan’t be long. Now that I can see where I’m going, it’s all about fetlock height across to the hill.”

  With that, she started off, splashing through the water at a dead run, occasionally leaping a few strides, her delighted laughter trickling back to him.

  Now that he could see through the water, Calum stepped over the minor ruts that had nearly sunk him before Acorna purified things. The grooves in the dirt had probably been made by vehicle wheels on the soft ground of the landing area. Odd that they wouldn’t have paved this area over with something solid. Still, this was a new colony, and most likely it didn’t have time or money for refinements.

  Time or money for much at all, he decided when he saw the condition of the airfield buildings. They had an uninhabited and disused look to them, with dead vines clinging to the walls. The plants were little more than mushy stalks that hadn’t yet fallen to join the rest of the plant in the mud. The building was on slightly higher ground, so the water had not yet quite reached it…although it looked to have been flooded quite recently, perhaps during whatever disaster dumped all this water on what was supposed to have been growing here. A badly warped and distorted sign over the door, half-covered with mold, read,

  LOADING CENTER WEST—

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  When he touched the door panel, it was slimy. Wiping his hand, he pressed harder for admittance, and, creaking badly, the door gradually opened. Obviously no one had been here for yonks. It must have been in use once, for there were benches, tables, openings in the sidewall which had led to a ticket counter, and to a weighing office. The size of the platform suggested heavy cargoes had been shifted through here.

  Only one door was locked, and that gave with just a little push, as the damp-soaked locking apparatus fell from the softened wood. Calum had hit pay dirt—he’d found the main office, to judge by all the files. Someone had spent time and energy to pile the plastic cabinets on footings to keep them above water level.