Acorna's Triumph

by Anne McCaffrey

  ANNE MCCAFFREY

  AND ELIZABETH ANN

  SCARBOROUGH

  ACORNA’S TRIUMPH

  In fond memory of Connie Johnson:

  math teacher; bibliophile, adventuress, and friend

  Contents

  ONE

  Acorna moaned. She struggled desperately to…

  TWO

  Dinner was a lavish affair. Hafiz’s kitchens…

  THREE

  Heads will roll when Hafiz finds out what…

  FOUR

  What do you suppose made Smythe-Wesson…

  FIVE

  Acorna, the crew of the Balakiire, Aari, and…

  SIX

  Former Red Bracelet and former chief security…

  SEVEN

  I don’t like it,” Acorna said, when finally they…

  EIGHT

  Earlier Aari knew where he was long before he awakened…

  NINE

  Acorna, Mac, and Becker spent much of the…

  TEN

  Aari was about to drink the last of his water…

  ELEVEN

  Captain, we have an urgent message on the com…

  TWELVE

  Listen,” Becker said, turning the com unit up…

  THIRTEEN

  Aari huddled under the riverbank while the…

  FOURTEEN

  Khornya!” Aari awoke, digging himself out…

  FIFTEEN

  Greedy Khleevi eyes watched Acorna through…

  SIXTEEN

  Acorna struggled to free herself from the net…

  SEVENTEEN

  As soon as the Khleevi clamped his wrists,…

  EIGHTEEN

  Acorna tore the timer from her wrist and…

  NINETEEN

  Acorna awoke quickly, though she felt uncommonly…

  TWENTY

  Karina’s voice over the com unit was…

  TWENTY-ONE

  As Feriila predicted, the baby began communicating…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  BRIEF NOTES ON THE LINYAARI LANGUAGE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  BOOKS IN THE ACORNA SERIES

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  One

  Acorna moaned. She struggled desperately to regain control of herself. As always, she was powerless. She could only watch as the room changed and the time portraits swirled around her like dervishes.

  The white lights symbolizing Linyaari blurred, blinked out, returned. Vhiliinyar’s panoramas changed from lush to blighted, then became fertile again in a dizzying kaleidoscope of shape, color, time, and place. The images shifted to the deafening boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom of a drumbeat.

  It doesn’t really move that fast, she thought in an oddly detached way. And where are those drums coming from?

  Then she knew that the drumlike booming was the frenzied pounding of her own heart. Her blood seemed to be trying to leap out of her skin with each beat of her pulse. She struggled upright and reached for the door but something felt odd. She looked back to see herself still lying on the floor of the ancient time laboratory. How strange, she thought. Her hands twitched as she tried once more to rise. She had to get to the door.

  Aari would be coming through it soon. Coming with her. And the danger. She could not remember what the danger was, but she knew it was something horrible and unexpected, even though she realized that she had been through this same sequence countless times during many other sleep cycles. She knew what the danger was. She just didn’t remember it.

  Didn’t want to remember it.

  But she had to. If only she could open the door quickly enough, get herself through it, get him inside, and close it fast enough and hard enough, the terrible thing wouldn’t happen.

  The room stopped spinning, and time stood still. She rose.

  Where is the door? she thought. Then she thought, What door? She could see grass and rivers, craters and furrows, mountains and trees, but no door. But there has to be a door…

  And then she walked through the wall, coming into the room. She wore a shipsuit and helmet and she was covered in something green and slimy. Right behind her came Aari.

  That was it. That was when she had to shut the door. But there was no door, she thought. She struggled to reach out again, but then realized she was still lying on the floor.

  Klik-klak, klik-klack. The sound entered the room with her ship-suited self and Aari. It was like the beating of her heart, but a different tone. Its volume increased, and the regular beat quickened and loosened into an overwhelming cacophony of klikity-klak-klakklikity-klak-klakings.

  She reached for Aari. He didn’t seem to see her. He turned and raised his arms.

  Behind him, Khleevi swarmed into the room, their mandibles and pincers klaking, their antennae rubbing, their immense jaws devouring the floors and walls. Once more, the insect race was bent on destroying Vhiliinyar and the Linyaari who had returned to populate it.

  Acorna felt rather than saw something looming over her. Just as she was sure her death was certain, she was grabbed and shaken.

  “Khornya, Khornya, wake up! What’s the matter?”

  Acorna opened her eyes and looked up into the concerned face of her young friend Maati. They were both inside the time lab within the great ruined office building that was among the remains of the lost ancient city of Kubiilikaan. This city was the original home of the shape-shifting people who were the forebearers of Acorna and Maati’s race, the Linyaari, along with the unicorn-like Ancestors. Long buried and forgotten, the city was the only part of the Linyaari home planet that had escaped the depredations of the Khleevi invasion safe within its sophisticated shields beneath the surface of Vhiliinyar.

  The walls of the time lab were not spinning now, but as usual the static maps of the planet were dotted with small points of white light that indicated the places where Linyaari personnel were located. Many teams were back on the planet’s surface, mapping, surveying, and otherwise planning each phase of the planet’s renewal by regional applications of the terraforming process.

  “Khornya, are you all right? You look funny,” Maati said.

  “I had a bad dream. That’s all,” Acorna assured her. Dream fragments filled her head. She looked around for the phantom door that had haunted her dream, but of course it wasn’t there. The room was vast and spartan and very clinical-looking. Only Acorna’s bedroll and the pool of water in the center from which a beam of energy rose to pierce the ceiling and each story above it saved the chamber from the sterile ambience of a typical research facility.

  “What kind of dream?” Maati asked.

  “I can’t even remember what it was about now. Something about the Khleevi.”

  “No wonder you were crying out and trying to run in your sleep,” Maati said. She laid her horn gently against Acorna’s head to soothe her friend and heal her of the residual effects of the dream.

  “Thanks,” Acorna said. “But I’m fine now, really.”

  “You shouldn’t be spending all your time down here alone,” Maati scolded. “You can’t pull Aari out of that machine, you know.”

  “I know,” Acorna admitted. “It’s not that I expect that, it’s just that now that I know that Aari is with one of the Ancestral Friends, and they’re using the device to cross time and even send messages back, I want to figure out how they’re doing it. And I might find Aari in the process,” she finished hopefully. “You never know.”

  Maati sighed. “I miss him, too, Khornya. I barely got to know my older brother before he disappeared on us. But staying down here all the time is just plain unhealthy. That’s probably why you’re having all these bad dreams. Really, you should come up to the surface j
ust for a little while,” Maati coaxed. “You haven’t been up in ages and ages, and you won’t believe the progress we’ve made with the terraforming.”

  “Of course I would,” Acorna said, but her attention was elsewhere. She rose to inspect a hole in the wall behind one of the great maps showing the time and place of each person on the planet’s surface. For a moment the hole gave her an odd turn, reminding her of something terrible in her dream. But that was silly. It was just a dream. And she had put the hole there herself—though with much trepidation.

  She’d wanted to see the workings of the map or whatever it was that was driving the time machine. “I can see everything that’s going on up there on the maps,” she told Maati. Returning her attention to the pictures on the surface of the wall, she gestured to the appropriate image as she spoke. “The watersheds are all exactly where they ought to be now, the streams are flowing, the rivers and their currents are behaving properly, the tides are turning the seas at the correct times, the waterfalls are falling, and even the rain is coming at the correct appointed intervals. All that water must be making everything quite green.”

  “Yes, but you don’t care about that at all,” Maati said. “You can’t fool me. You only know about the waters because they’re needed for the time travel. But honestly, Khornya, you’ve done so much to make Vhiliinyar live again. It isn’t just the planning and the exploration. You made it happen. It was all because of you that we got the catseye chrysoberyls.”

  “I wasn’t exactly alone on that journey. Anyway, it’s only because of Captain Becker’s negotiating such a good price with Uncle Hafiz that we ended up out of debt and with credits to spare to fund the rebirth of this planet.” Captain Becker was her good friend, Jonas P. Becker, pilot of the Condor, flag and only ship of Becker Interplanetary Salvage and Recycling Enterprises, Ltd.

  Becker, a canny businessman himself, was undaunted by the bargaining skills of Acorna’s adoptive uncle, Hafiz Harakamian, the semiretired former head of the also interplanetary enterprises of House Harakamian. Unlike Becker’s business, Hafiz’s boasted many ships, flitters, and other vehicles, a portion of one moon, and all of another.

  “It was pure good luck that we found the catseyes just when we needed to refine our terraforming process, so that we could restore sections of the planet instead of doing everything at once.” Acorna was fully awake now and ready to return to her investigations. Maati and the others who had already voiced similar concerns about her only fussed because they cared, Acorna knew, but it was distracting. If she was going to justify spending all her time in the time lab, she had to make it pay off by conducting real research.

  With a pointed glance at Maati, she pulled down her goggles, turned on a special saw, and with a whirring of the blade enlarged the hole she’d made so it was big enough to stick her head through.

  Maati made a face. “It’s nice to know that you’ve been listening to what we tell you when we come to visit you. But you can’t fool me. It’s not like you’ve seen anything up there for yourself. And this is a feast day. The best grasses of the season are all ready to harvest. Please come up and graze with us. Everyone will be there.”

  “Not everyone,” Acorna said.

  “Not Aari, I know,” Maati agreed reluctantly. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it’s been on you. I know that you feel like you’ve missed contact with him while others have received telepathic inquiries from him.”

  Acorna frowned and withdrew her head from the hole in the panel. “You didn’t tell me that when I talked to you from Makahomia. You said ‘indications.’ You didn’t say ‘telepathic inquiries.’ ”

  “Okay, I didn’t. But it was no big deal. Aari’s communications were very sporadic and scattered, and no one was really sure what they meant until they talked to each other and to you,” Maati protested. “This has been frustrating for Mother and Father and me, too. At least you were doing something useful on Makahomia. That’s why we decided to join you. And Aari’s okay. You found that out yourself when you heard that message from him that the priest gave you down on Makahomia. You know very well that if…no…when he comes back it will be at some wildly romantic moment, when you need rescuing or help fighting some horrible enemy, and the rest of our people are being too analytical and fair-minded to be of any help at all.”

  “You have a very big imagination, Maati,” Acorna said, dusting off her hands. “We’ve finished off the Khleevi. I can’t think of any other horrible enemies standing in line to be vanquished at the moment. And I think my own fair mind has just about analyzed this contraption. I’m beginning to understand how it works.”

  “Really?” Maati was actually very interested in the time machine, so Acorna’s ploy was successful. Maati crowded closer to see what Acorna was doing.

  “Yes, and the better I understand it, the more it explains a few things to me. Like the thought messages from Aari. I have entered all of the instances reported to me. I found that, far from being random, they fit a definite pattern—the same pattern that the time/space mechanism follows. Only at certain intervals are there connecting ladders between the time and place Aari occupies and our own time and space. Though he has made a couple of jumps.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ll show you,” Acorna said, and passed her hand across a section where the column of liquid light rose from floor to ceiling. At once a familiar shape appeared in that unfamiliar place. It was a double helix, a shape typical of the cellular blueprints comprising most life-forms.

  “What is that?” Maati asked.

  “Time,” Acorna said. “And space also. Or a road map through both of them. Where the helix twists we intersect, but otherwise we travel separately. I’ve labeled the intersections between Aari and us in this interaction. There, and there, and there. See how they form a pattern?”

  “Yeah,” Maati said. “How did you find all that out?”

  “Mostly by accident,” Acorna admitted. “But after a couple of those accidents, things began to make more sense to me. And if the pattern holds, we’re about due for another contact with Aari. So I’ve got too much work to do down here to spare the time to go to the surface.”

  She waved her hand again, and the column shimmied and turned back into its amorphous self.

  She crossed to the map of Vhiliinyar, which dominated the wall with the hole in it. While Acorna concentrated on her excavation work on the wall, Maati noticed that some white dots flickered near the underground lake, a couple of blocks downhill from their position. When white dots appeared on one of these maps, they indicated the presence of Linyaari in that location.

  Acorna noticed the dots, too. There was a breathless catch in her voice as she inquired, “Did anyone come with you when you came through the tunnels?”

  Maati shook her head. “No.”

  To reach the underground city from the surface, people had to enter through the labyrinth of caves occupied in ancient times by the Ancestors and their attendants. The caves led up into the building through an opening a few feet from the door of the room she and Acorna were in.

  Because of many previous accidents caused by malfunctions of the time device that had resulted in the disappearances of various beings, Aari among them, access to the area was carefully controlled, if not completely restricted. There shouldn’t have been any Linyaari there to make those white dots on the map.

  “We’d better see who it is,” Maati said, but Acorna had already passed her and run out the door.

  With Maati at her heels, Acorna took off, running so fast that she all but teleported herself to the shores of the lake.

  Acorna had had a premonition the moment she saw the white dots. Maybe, after all this time, Aari had returned. There was an Aari feeling to those dots, and she just suddenly knew that he had returned. And then she saw him, standing with another Linyaari beside the underground lake. It was unmistakably Aari, though he looked more erect and confident, and his horn was beautiful and gleaming, unbent, no longer stunt
ed, just as it had been in her dream back on Makahomia.

  She was down the hill in an instant. Then her arms were around his neck, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder, just as she’d wanted to be since the day he’d gone missing. Except that his arms did not embrace her back, though one hand did tap against her shoulder in a sort of awkward pat.

  Behind her, Maati cried, “Aari? Is it really you? Your horn is fixed! When did that happen? Where’ve you been? What—”

  Aari held up his hand to stop Maati’s stream of questions. “Greetings,” he said. “Yes, it is I. At least, I am Aari, and this is Laarye, and we have just arrived. If Grimalkin’s calculations are correct, you would be”—he juggled Acorna aside slightly to hold his wrist to one ear—“oh, yes, our beloved little sister Maati, unknown thus far to Laarye. And this affectionate lady”—he patted Acorna’s shoulder again—“is my own lifemate, Khornya.”

  A sour taste rose in the back of Acorna’s throat. Though Aari was here, something was terribly wrong. This wasn’t the Aari that she knew and loved!