Acorna’s Quest
Page 13
(It is brave and generous of this Khariinya to offer her services further, but we must not accept.) Neeva was firm on this. (Bad enough that we have fooled with the minds of those people on the shuttle, making them forget that their flight was interrupted. We must not go on to put this one at risk from her own kind.)
(Besides, she hasn’t accomplished much so far.)
(She has found where ’Khornya is being held, and has ascertained that she is a prisoner. That is enough to go on. One of us will have to free her.)
(Oh, dear, oh, dear. I see more fooling with their minds coming up.)
(We are going to have to do that in any case. Have you looked at the screens showing us the docking area recently?)
(Of course not, I’ve been trying to understand what Khariinya was saying.)
(The other barbarians are behaving oddly.)
(So? It’s not as if we knew what was normal behavior for them.)
(I think they are curious about our ship.)
(Why? It’s a nice unobtrusive vessel, nothing gaudy.)
(Not by their standards. Look at the other ships docked in this facility.)
Neeva studied the views in the screens and had to concede that Thariinye had a point. Although the Linyaari vessel was not dissimilar in shape to the barbarian ships, the other ships were so…well, so dreary! Naked metal and blind ports; nothing to disguise the ungraceful lines of thrusters or to decorate the long plain sweep of the main body; and above all, no color, not even a discreet touch of gilding or a splash of crimson to delight the eye. And by now, quite a number of the short, hornless bipeds were gathered so near to the Linyaari ship that the screens offered only a foreshortened view of them, pointing and talking excitedly among themselves. (Perhaps they are admiring our tasteful decor,) she suggested without conviction.
(I’m afraid it is more than that,) Melireenya agreed reluctantly with Thariinye. (Nobody would choose to make ships look so dull and plain, so it must be that they do not know how to protect painted surfaces against atmospheric abrasion or meteorite damage. This ship must be quite an oddity to them.)
(How could a race be so sophisticated as to travel in space, colonize many systems, even build bases on airless asteroids such as this, and still remain ignorant of the first principles of surface shielding?) Khaari demanded crossly. (It is not logical!)
(Whether it’s principle or taste,) Neeva told her, (we are obviously too conspicuous. I am afraid our attempt to make unobtrusive contact has not been successful.)
(We had better not allow them to board…or even to pay any more attention to us.)
(I am afraid you are right.) Neeva suppressed a sigh of disquiet. Start bending the ethics of the Linyaari, it seemed, and there was no limit to how far they might get bent. The other three envoys had assured her that the only questionable action they would have to take was to make the crew and the other passengers on the space shuttle a little bit unclear about what had happened mid-flight. But just by being here, they had already exposed the hornless bipeds to a superior technology. Now one of them would have to leave the ship in order to exert a calming presence on the people who were obviously so curious about it. And who knew what that might lead to?
(Don’t worry, Neeva. I’ll take care of everything,) Thariinye thought blithely.
The base of Neeva’s horn ached. Thariinye would not have been her first choice to take on the task of calming the hornless ones…but it was a small task; what difference did it make who did it? Still, her forehead ached as though the horn were warning her of calamities ahead.
And it might have been right, for Thariinye did not stop at showing himself long enough to establish his influence over the bipeds near the ship. Cloaked in his projected cloud of (You haven’t seen anything unusual) and (Everything’s all right), he went down all the way to the ground level and casually strolled among the bipeds there. The little group gathered near the ship was breaking up now, the members of the group moving away briskly in different directions as if they had suddenly remembered something they were supposed to be doing and couldn’t imagine why they were wasting time staring at what was, after all, just another spaceship of the hundreds that docked at Maganos.
Melireenya chuckled at the sight. (Thariinye must have added a bit of “Urgent business” to his projections, to clear them out so fast!)
(I wish he wouldn’t. We shouldn’t fool with their minds any more than we have to. And—Thariinye! Where do you think you’re going?) The young fool was following several of the bipeds toward the guarded exit from the docking facility.
(Quit worrying, Neeva!) Thariinye’s images, slightly weakened by distance from the ship, were nonetheless sharp enough to convey a sense of slight irritation. (We agreed that one of us must find ’Khornya, did we not? And since I have already expended the effort to cloud these bipeds’ minds into believing that I am one of them, why should I not go on into the base and seek out ’Khornya right now, before her captors have time to hide her elsewhere?)
(He may be right, Neeva. Khariinya’s visit may have alerted them.)
(But you do not know where she is! The base is large….)
(Not large enough to hide another Linyaari. I shall simply wander until I sense her presence; then I shall ask her how she is held and what would be the best way to free her. I am not entirely stupid, Neeva.)
And since she could not think of any better plan, Neeva let him go without further protest.
During his first minutes inside the base proper, Thariinye kept letting his calming projections slip as he was distracted by the oddities of this alien construction, then hurriedly projecting extra soothing feelings to relax and distract surprised onlookers. As he cataloged the alien peculiarities, he left behind him a trail of slightly perturbed base workers who had the vague feeling that they’d just forgotten something very important, or that something wonderful had almost happened and if only they’d been looking carefully enough they might have seen it.
The corridors connecting the docking facility to Maganos Central, and that central complex to other parts of the shielded base, were so dark and low that Thariinye felt almost as if he were exploring a mine. After cracking his head on a projecting air vent and catching his horn a really painful blow at a slit-opening door of unfamiliar design, he learned to stoop slightly, walk slowly, and watch the way ahead very carefully for obstructions.
The high dome of Maganos Central, with its seemingly extravagant aerie of scaffolding in a spiderweb design spiraling to the top, was as much a physical relief to Thariinye as a shot of oxygen would have been. But the design itself distracted him for dangerous moments. The spiraling web of scaffolding was hung with green plants that dangled invitingly downward, and in the light gravity of this moon he could easily have jumped high enough to browse at will. What was this place—some sort of cafeteria?
A gasp from a passerby reminded him to maintain his cloaking shields. (You haven’t seen anything unusual) he projected, with a hint of (urgent business somewhere else) to hurry her on her way.
The female trotted off and later told her partner in Shipping and Receiving that she’d seen the most amazingly handsome young man just coming into Central, she’d have stopped and tried to chat him up if they hadn’t been so behindhand with the monthly report; whereupon her partner gave her a very odd look and said that the monthly report wouldn’t be due for another six shifts, and did she think she might be coming down with something?
Retreating to lean against a gently curved wall, Thariinye maintained his shielding and watched the barbarians hurrying back and forth until he concluded, with some reluctance, that the greenery must be merely an atmospheric purifier and not a buffet. At least, nobody else was nibbling on those tempting new leaves.
(Thariinye, you greedy pig! You’re supposed to be looking for our ’Khornya, not thinking about brunch!)
(Yeah, yeah, but Neeva, you should just see these plants!) But, reminded of his duty, Thariinye tore his gaze from the succulent new shoots and
leaves just above eye level and mentally felt around the central complex for some sense of another Linyaari.
He could sense nothing but the tangled, muddy undertow of a thousand alien minds muttering away, each in its separate little shell, and most too weak and garbled to be intelligible, with here and there a feeling highlighted by surprise or strong emotion: Oh, Jussi, why did you leave me?…grubble grubble grubble…payday’s next shift, then I can get OUT of here…grubble grubble grubble…Lukia, Lady of Light, help me now!
Startled, Thariinye swiveled to look at the source of that last thought, a grubby kid weaving between the adults so rapidly that Thariinye would have lost him but for the strength of his projections. The words meant nothing to Thariinye, but the image of a radiant Liinyar girl in white-silk robes that accompanied them riveted him.
A sudden thought of “Saints preserve us, what’s THAT!!!” accompanied by an image of himself enlarged to ten feet tall and glowing with a strange radiance, reminded Thariinye to maintain his calming projections while he edged through the crowd after the urchin who had so obviously been thinking about a Liinyar girl. He still could not sense any trace of another of his kind in this crowded, smelly base, but that child must have seen ’Khornya at some time, to have formed the image so clearly.
The miner who’d called on the saints stared after Thariinye but could see nothing unusual among the swirling streams of passersby. Ramon Trinidad mopped his forehead and decided not to mention to his mates that he’d had a vision of Acorna. They already teased him enough because he had a small icon of the Virgin of Guadeloupe superglued to the dashboard of his operator cab at the loading station; if he told them he’d been seeing visions, he’d never live it down. All the same, it must mean something that the Lady had appeared to him like that, all in a blinding flash it was, and then vanished. She must be warning him that he’d been marked out for something special.
Ramon Trinidad marched down the corridor to Mining Ops IIID more jauntily than he’d moved since coming to Maganos. At first he’d thought this job, training kids from the gutters of Kezdet to operate lunar mining equipment, was high pay for light work; then he’d considered resigning and telling Personnel that he was a miner, not a kindergarten teacher; then he’d actually begun to like some of the kids. Besides, they didn’t laugh at him for invoking the protection of the Virgin and the saints each time he took a group of them out into the long, lightly shielded corridors of the active workings. The kids had their own saints—Lukia of the Lights, Epona, Sita Ram.
The urchin whom Thariinye was following was also headed for Mining Ops IIID, and praying desperately that he’d get there well ahead of Ramon Trinidad; so the image of Lukia of the Lights kept lighting up in his thought-patterns, guiding Thariinye like a flashing beacon.
Bored by Rafik’s intense study of the star maps which were projected all over the walls of Delszaki Li’s office, Gill stood up to stretch his legs and wandered over to the one wall not devoted to mapping the outer reaches of the explored and unexplored parts of the galaxy. Rafik had been unable to commandeer this wall because it was filled with vid-screens on which, at any moment, random scenes of the moon base were displayed. Although no one’s private quarters were invaded, Delszaki Li took great pleasure in observing all other parts of the base in operation, from the children’s school to the outermost mine workings. Before the progress of his disease had robbed him of the ability to control a touch pad with his right hand, the display had been designed for him to call up whatever views he desired. When touching the pad became too difficult for him, the engineers had offered to make the display voice-controlled like his new hover-chair, but he had refused, indicating that it was too tiring for him to issue unnecessary commands and that he would prefer a random display which he did not have to control. Now the images on the more than twenty screens changed constantly, on a randomly activated timer, giving a constantly varying panorama of Maganos Moon Base activities.
Gill stared unseeingly at an image of the glittering dome over Maganos Central, with its overarching glass panels and its garlands of greenery, until it shifted to a view of the bakery attached to the cafeteria, where a cook was setting out trays of fresh pastries in preparation for the shift change, then to an overhead shot of the four major mine workings viewed from a camera atop the central dome. The random changes depressed him, reminding him of the inexorable progress of Delszaki Li’s nervous paralysis, and he wondered whether Acorna would return in time to see her benefactor once again. Her image was so clear in his heart that he thought for a moment he was imagining her on one of the screens before him; then his shout surprised Rafik into dropping the laser pointer with which he had been tracing one of the Acadecki’s possible routes on the larger star map for Pal and Delszaki Li.
“What in the name of the Djinni Djiboutis—” Rafik began before remembering Judit’s request that he not swear like the descendant of twenty generations of Arab-Armenian rug merchants.
“What are you playing at, Gill? We’re trying to get some work done over here, if you don’t mind!”
“Acorna,” Gill croaked. “I saw her…on one of these screens. She’s not gone, Rafik; she’s right here on Maganos!”
“She can’t be…” Pal said, and then, “…can she?” Here on Maganos, and concealing herself from him? The thought was almost too painful to bear.
“I saw her, I tell you,” Gill insisted. “She was right…” He dropped his hand; the screen he pointed at was now showing a row of children chanting the Basic alphabet with hand signs for each letter. “Here,” he said, “only it wasn’t the school, it was some damn corridor, and the bloody automatic timer had to shift scenes before I could identify it.”
“There she is!” Judit cried, pointing at a screen in the far upper right section of the wall.
“That’s one of the new workings,” Gill said, “somewhere in III.”
At the same moment Pal said, “But that’s not Acorna.”
The picture switched to an image of the docking facility. “Damn that bloody automatic timer, can’t we turn it off?” Gill demanded. “And are you out of your mind, Pal? Just how many six-foot people with golden horns do you think we’ve got around here?”
“More than one, evidently.” Pal folded his arms with the gesture of a man who is not to be shaken from his opinion, no matter how impossible and illogical it may seem to the rest of the world. “I would know Acorna among a thousand of her kind….”
Gill snorted. “How do you know? You’ve never seen a thousand of her kind.”
“I would know her,” Pal insisted quietly, “and that is not my lady.”
Judit had turned away from the screens to look through Delszaki Li’s desk. “Judit!” Gill bellowed. “What are you playing at? Get over here and watch the screens. I need some backup in case she appears again! No, first tell somebody to hustle down to III…no, I don’t know which subsection, there aren’t but six open, surely we’ve got enough security people to cover all of them? Why are you fooling around looking for office supplies, girl? We’ve got an emergency here!”
“Is searching for manual controller,” Delszaki Li put in, his dry and slightly amused whisper cutting through the fog of Gill’s emotional bellowing. “My suggestion. You countermand?”
Gill stared. “It still works?”
“Override,” Li whispered. “Useful if I wish to see something longer than five seconds…but someone else must push pad, now.”
Judit scrabbled through a clutter of carved jade tokens, laser pads, used betting slips, fact-flimsies with access codes scrawled on the back, and unlabeled datacubes, and finally held up the control pad with a cry of triumph.
“Try all the workings off III,” Gill directed her. “You’ll just have to flip through them until we come….”
“Silly,” Judit said, “we’ve got a lot more than six screens to choose from, let’s look at them all.”
With shaking hands, she tapped out the code for the cameras in IIIA, B, C, D…
“No, she isn’t,” Pal insisted.
Mr. Li whispered a command, and his hover-chair carried him across the room to float before the screen showing Mine Working IIID.
“There he is!” the other kids who were in the training session squealed when Hajnal darted into the open area around Ramon’s sledger and slid the last twenty feet, triumphant, stopping himself just inches short of the piles of rough lunar rock that marked the end of the workings. “Didja get it? Didja get it?”
“Hajnal, Master Thief of Kezdet, strikes again!” Hajnal boasted, pulling open his jacket to reveal an extremely nervous, long-eared, white-fronted marchare. The marchare squeaked and leapt out of its hiding place with a powerful thrust of its long rear legs. The other children scrambled to catch it.
“Ow! It scratched me!”
“’At’s nothing. Look ’ow it got me on the way here, but I didn’t drop it.” Hajnal pulled up his shirt and proudly showed the long bloody scratches on his chest and stomach. “Now ’urry up, you lot, and get it into the toolbox in the back of Ramon’s operator cab. I seen Ramon coming this way. Ain’t gonna believe the workings is ’aunted if ’e sees the blasted hanimal, is ’e now?”
“Poor little marchare,” crooned a girl who cradled the nervous animal in her arms for a moment, petting it until its eyes stopped rolling and the long nervous ears stopped twitching. “Didn’t mean to scratch anybody, did you, poor little frightened thing? Hajnal, I don’t think we oughter put him in the toolbox, he’ll get scared.”
“If you don’t stop petting him, Eva, he’ll go to sleep on us, and we’ll lose our chance.”
The little fiends of Kezdet’s first graduating class had been working on Ramon Trinidad for weeks, trying to convince him the combination power unit and loading station he operated was haunted by the ghost of a mining engineer who’d been killed in an accident so grisly nobody who knew the story was ever willing to use that station again. They gauged their success by the number of holy medals and icons Ramon hung on the device, blamed the miners of the next shift for “losing” most of the icons, and competed to see who could drop the most hair-raising hints about what had “really” happened to the mythical dead engineer. But Ramon was beginning to doubt their unsupported stories. It was time for some hard evidence. They were counting on the scrabbling and squeaks of the third-shift pastry cook’s pet marchare, concealed in a compartment in the back of the sledger, to provide that evidence. Hajnal, proud of his past as a free thief on Kezdet and no factory slave, had boastfully volunteered to “borrow” the marchare without the cook’s knowledge.