Acorna's Triumph

by Anne McCaffrey

  And yet she remembered how she had longed for him to touch her, ached for him, before he returned. As those memories rushed over her, she tried to smile.

  He brightened. “That’s all right, Khornya. You will feel differently when you see what I’ve brought you.”

  He led her to a flitter parked among the restored stone columns. Two young adult Linyaari stood there, waiting. They looked dazed and confused, but when they saw her, their thoughts immediately flew to her.

  (Is it you? Is it really my little girl all grown-up?)

  (F-father?) Acorna asked, though she knew even as she asked that it was he. Vaanye, her father, the scientist who had used his new discovery to sacrifice himself and his lifemate so that their baby could escape a Khleevi attack.

  (My baby!) Feriila, Acorna’s mother cried, and rushed to embrace her daughter, as Acorna embraced her. Vaanye joined them, throwing his arms around them both.

  Aari cleared his throat. “She didn’t want me to try to find you,” he said. “But I knew she would be pleased once I brought you here.”

  Trouble clouded Acorna’s happiness. Her objections, callous as they might seem compared with the saving these precious people holding her, were still valid. Seeing the worry in her eyes, Aari laughingly explained how clever he had been to find just the proper moment to whisk her parents forward in time and onto firmer ground using Grimalkin’s ingenious devices.

  Acorna was overwhelmed by her own emotions. And she was swamped with those radiating from her parents. (Where have you been all these years? How were you rescued? Aari has told us a little, but we have so many questions!)

  (I do, too. But right now we need to return to the time I was in when Aari fetched me. One of my foster dads, Rafik, is along on this mission, and I imagine you will enjoy hearing him tell embarrassing childhood stories about me while I try to rescue some refugees who seem to be trapped in a tunnel beneath the planet’s surface.)

  She looked expectantly at Aari, who was beaming at all of them. He didn’t seem to be returning them to her proper time, however.

  (Well?) she asked.

  “Oh, er, what?” he asked aloud.

  “We need to get back to the others. My parents will want to meet Rafik especially, and I have a rescue to complete, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Sorry, Khornya, I was just caught up in the moment. It was good to surprise you and make you happy.”

  His head drooped ever so slightly, and she wondered why she always seemed to feel like a…well…she could think of any number of colorful terms Becker might have used to describe her…around him. Aari had just given her the most precious thing she could possibly have wished for, and already she had grown impatient with him. Perhaps they had been too quick to form the lifemate bond. How strange that it had been so very strong before his disappearance, and yet it was completely absent now. To Acorna, it felt like her emotional ties to him were all in the past. “It’s not that I’m not grateful. It’s just that we have to return. I don’t quite understand why if you already time-traveled to bring them here, then traveled to get me, that you didn’t come to my time to begin with.”

  “I thought your reunion should be private,” he said.

  (I was wondering about that myself,) Vaanye sent the thought to Acorna. (Grateful as we are to him for bringing us to meet you, daughter, I cannot help but feel that this time-shifting is somehow—unhealthy.)

  Feriila looked pensive, glancing between Aari and Acorna.

  RK growled and started to run a paw full of claws down the leg of Aari’s shipsuit. Aari looked down at the cat. RK sat back and began washing as though nothing unusual had happened. RK backing down from anything or anyone—but especially from his old friend Aari—would have been remarkable under other circumstances. Among so many incredible events, it went unnoticed.

  Aari tapped at his wrist and beckoned for them to follow.

  Somewhere on the Planet Skarness,

  During the Present Day

  Acorna heard Neeva’s voice mingling with Becker’s and Rafik’s.

  Neeva stopped speaking to stare at them. An amazed silence was finally broken by her words, “Feriila? Vaanye? Can it be you?”

  “Yes, sister,” Feriila said. “Did you miss us?”

  The hug they exchanged was answer enough.

  Meanwhile, while the Linyaari family celebrated a grand reunion, Mac unloaded the drill from the ship.

  “I do not understand how it happened, Khornya,” he said. “You were in the hole a moment ago—I have a very clear record of it in my data banks—but now you are not. I believe you said before that there are people trapped below.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did, but apparently you and I are the only ones who remember what went on from before. Once we accomplish our mission here, I think that we need to have a chat, Mac.”

  Mac nodded and lowered her once more.

  This time she was uninterrupted as she felt her way through the blockage to the cave inside. Her mind met with the minds of the people beyond.

  (We’re coming. Help is coming.)

  (Good,) a thought voice replied. (We still have hydrient, but were considering the digestibility of the most recent corpses when the stones began their song.)

  (You have been here a long time?)

  (An eternity, it seems. We stocked these tunnels long ago with emergency provisions, but we were thinking in terms of days—weeks, perhaps months. It has been over a year since the Khleevi came to rip this planet apart.)

  (I take it that this world is your home, then?)

  (We are musicians who serve the stones. Their home is our adopted home. To serve them is our great honor.)

  (You serve them? How?)

  (We are their agents to other worlds. When an ensemble has reached perfection and is ready to be heard off-world, we select it and take it to a place where it may be chosen for the honor and the wonder of all who hear it. We also help train the newly severed to reach full voice, to blend with others.)

  (Fascinating. Your relationship to the stones is what caused them to set up such a racket once they made contact with the chrysoberyls and hence, with us?)

  (Is that what happened? All we know is that so many began singing at once—and so badly—that we still have our fingers in our ears. Even so, I fear our perfect pitch is ruined. It’s a good thing you’re telepathic, or we wouldn’t know you were here.)

  (You didn’t hear the drill?)

  (Drill?)

  (Well, keep your fingers in your ears a bit longer and we’ll have you out. Stay to the back of the space you’re in now. Once the opening is visible, come out quickly. We have no idea how stable the walls will be once the rubble is cleared.)

  (How many of you are there, anyway?)

  (Many fewer than came down here originally,) the voice answered. (Maybe three hundred now? Oh, no, make that two hundred and ninety nine. Fkara’s youngest died after the stones’ first lament).

  (So many!) Acorna thought. (And yet, for the entire—er—nonmineral population of a planet…)

  (As I said, we are not the planet’s inhabitants. The stones are. On this entire world there were only twice our present number. Fortunately, most of us found shelter before the invasion. And, equally fortunately, you have now come to our rescue.)

  Using the drill’s remote laser guide, Acorna pointed the drill at the blockage from the cave-in. Its own laser quickly sliced through the first barrier. Shutting it down, Acorna crawled through the hole and guided the tip once more at the pile of boulders blocking the tunnel. (Stand back,) she told the people behind the rubble. (You don’t want this drill’s beam to mistake you for a rock.)

  When she sensed that there was enough room between the cave-in and its victims, she activated the drill and made an opening large enough for a person to climb through. She fused the edges, withdrew the drill, and helped the first of the cave’s occupants scramble toward freedom. The light on her miner’s helmet caught the face of a humanoid female who look
ed little different than the women of Kezdet, except that her ears were unusually large, long, and pointed at both lobe and crest.

  (Send them out to us, Khornya,) Neeva said. (Feriila and I will help them to the area where Captain Becker can use the Condor’s tractor beam to raise them to the surface.)

  This rescue had become a real family effort for the women of Acorna’s line. The thought deepened Acorna’s smile as she greeted the rescuees. Not that they could see it, but her smile was there, all the same.

  It seemed to take hours to free everyone, and at the end the last few able-bodied people stayed to help those too young, too old, or simply too weak to walk out under their own steam. Mostly the last, since those too young or too old to fend for themselves had not survived the ordeal.

  Finally, Acorna joined her mother and Neeva as they watched the last group ascend to the surface. As the soles of their feet disappeared, Acorna heaved a sigh of relief. From the surface came a chiming, a humming, a happy tuneful greeting from the stones. Mission successful.

  (Khornya?) her mother asked, rather shyly. (That’s what they call you, isn’t it? Khornya? Aari calls you that.)

  (Yes,) she answered. (My foster fathers named me Acorna because of my horn—no one else has one where we…they…come from. But when Neeva and the Balakiire crew found me, it seemed impossible for them to say Acorna, so our people call me Khornya.)

  (I was going to name you Aliliiya, after your grandam, but Khornya suits you.)

  (You must tell me more about my grandam sometime,) Acorna said. (Grandam Naadiina told me a few things, but we had so little time together that I didn’t get to ask everything I wanted.)

  (I am so pleased you’ve come to know Grandam Naadiina. How is she?)

  Neeva and Acorna exchanged looks in a darkness lit only by the lights on their heads.

  “Oh, no,” Feriila said, reading them. (It hardly seems possible. She has always been there, as long as anyone can remember.)

  They both sent her the thought-pictures they had received from other survivors of the Khleevi attack on narhii-Vhiliinyar, where Grandam had given her life to save an Ancestor, an aagroni, and almost more importantly, the aagroni’s precious specimens of the DNA taken from life-forms from old Vhiliinyar.

  “I suppose many things have changed since I last saw you,” Feriila said aloud, sighing. “From my point of view, you are grown now, and mated, daughter, when only moments ago we kissed you good-bye before placing you in the escape pod. Aari is a fine young male, of course. We both find it really remarkable how much he has learned about manipulating time and space.”

  “Yes,” Acorna agreed. “Remarkable. Incredible, really.”

  “You are troubled about him, daughter. I sensed great passion from him toward you when he spoke of you, but you seem unhappy. I realize it must be hard for you to think of me as your mother, as someone you can confide in, but—”

  “Oh, no!” Acorna cried, reaching out to touch her hand. “You have always been a part of me, you and Father both…”

  “The truth is,” Neeva told her sister humorously, “you are probably the only Linyaari living who is not privy to Khornya’s feelings on this matter. She tends to broadcast in a wide band, even her bad dreams.”

  “Well, yes, I keep confusing Aari with a Khleevi in my dreams, or Aari bringing the Khleevi or something. It gets all mixed up. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth, and the Khleevi are all dead now but…” Acorna tried to explain to her mother how Aari had come back after his voyages in time changed so much, how he wasn’t the post-Khleevi Aari with whom she had shared adventures. She told her mother about this Aari, who never had that experience, whose horn was whole, who was unscathed by torture. “In order to return as he did, he wiped out everything that happened afterwards, including me. He knew of me and of our bond only by hearsay, really. His friend Grimalkin, of whom he speaks constantly and worshipfully, made him make a record of the old Aari’s memories to refer to.”

  “Ewwww,” her mother said, as if she had just stepped in dung. “No wonder you’re upset, child.”

  “It’s almost as if time sent back the wrong person,” Acorna complained. And then listened to herself. “You know, Mother, Gill (he’s one of my foster fathers) used to tell me some of the stories from Eire, where his ancestors lived on Old Terra. His people shared the island with another race of beings who had lived there before them. Those people were magical and lived under the ground. They were mischievous and sometimes malicious. One of the things they did was to steal human children and replace them with one of their children. They would look the same, but…they weren’t the same. They were called changelings.”

  “Oh, that would never happen with a Linyaari,” Feriila said.

  “You sound so sure, Mother,” Acorna said with a sigh as she held her female family within the circle of light from her helmet.

  “Of course I am,” Feriila said. “We have our birth disks after all.” She reached into the neck of her shipsuit and pulled forth a double-sided metal locket that even in the dim light reflected several colors. “This is yours,” she said proudly. “It’s hermetically sealed, but inside is a tiny snippet of your umbilical cord. The design on the edge here”—her broad fingernail indicated looping scrollwork delicately etched along the closure—“is your DNA code. Should any of us become lost, or should any Linyaari bodies be discovered in a place or time where they were not recognized, the mother or mate of any missing Linyaari would only need to compare the code on the locket to that of the body to know.”

  “Oh,” Acorna said, touching the one she wore. “Aari’s mother gave me his. I had no idea there was more than a sentimental purpose to them, though.”

  Neeva shook her head in exasperation. “That Miiri! Such a romantic! She’s a scientist. You’d think she’d have imparted the scientific reason for the disks.”

  “Okay, below, all aboard!” Becker called down to them.

  The three of them stepped to the spot where the tractor beam lifted them to the surface. It was not a particularly pleasant sensation. Acorna felt as if her horn was about to be sucked off and her mane pulled out of her scalp. Her suit rode up around her neck and pulled at the arms and legs where the fabric tried to rise more quickly than the rest of her.

  (I should have brought one of Aziza’s antigravity belts,) she told Neeva.

  When they reached the surface, Mac moved the beam to the edge of the pit and deposited them among the refugees, who resembled large-eared humanoid skeletons, thanks to their long imprisonment, and the crooning stones. The stones sang a song of welcome and joy. Some of the humanoids tried to sing with them, but they were very weak indeed.

  (Sorry about the tune, folks,) one of them said. (It’s true that musicians are usually hungry, and it only makes their voices finer. But I think we’ve gone a bit beyond that right now.)

  (You poor things!) Acorna said, contrite that she had been dwelling on her own problems instead of focusing on the far more urgent ones of those around her. (We really didn’t rescue you from starvation below just so you could starve on the surface.) Aloud she said, “These people need food and water. How much have we aboard the ships?”

  “We used almost all the water and raw materials aboard the Condor to make the glue for the stones,” Rafik told her. “We reserved enough to feed ourselves for the voyage home, of course, but that’s about it.”

  “We have ample stores for our usual crew on the Balakiire,” Neeva said. “But of course, it is our food, and they may not find it nourishing. Besides, we don’t have enough to feed this many people. However, once we harvest we could start growing more. It will, of course, take time.”

  RK clawed his way up to Becker’s shoulder and sat glaring at Aari.

  “Oh, yeah, we’ve got the c-a-t-f-o-o-d,” Becker said, holding his hand between his mouth and RK’s face. “If they leave enough for the first mate, he’ll probably share, as long as nobody tells him about it.”

  “That won’t be en
ough to support this many people until we return from our mission,” Rafik said. “And we may lose some more of them by the time Hafiz can send provisions.”

  Becker scratched his perpetually bewhiskered chin. “Well, the supply has lasted us several years already, but we gave some away to the cats on Makahomia. I’ve done some fancy navigating out here since I met up with Aari and Acorna and the rest of you folks. I could probably make it out to MOO and back before any of Hafiz’s folks that weren’t following my course.” He nodded toward Neeva. “But even with every shortcut I know, it still takes us almost thirty watches to get here—that’s what? Seven standard Kezdet days? Then there’s the trip back. I don’t think the cat food will last this mob that long.”

  (Perhaps one of the nearby planets has something we could eat?) the fellow who had spoken to Acorna before suggested when she transferred the conversation into thought-images for him. She quickly returned images of the other planets they had seen. (That bad, huh? Worse off than we are.)

  Aari said eagerly, “But there’s no problem, really. I—we can go for the supplies and be back before you come out of the hole.”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ buddy?” Becker asked, his deliberately calm, soft tone indicating he had had about enough of Aari doing fancier tricks with time than he himself could using the wormholes and warpings in space.

  “Oh, uh, Grimalkin, of course. He’s in the ship that brought Khornya’s parents and me here. I will simply fly the flitter back up to our ship, and he can return us to MOO. He could return us there before we left and we will know to load up with many extra provisions this time, enough to feed all of these people for a very long time. And more.”

  “There was someone else aboard besides us?” Vaanye asked. “Where was he? I didn’t see him.”

  “He was sleeping during my watch,” Aari said. “And it just happened that you slept during his.”

  “But we should have met him!” Feriila exclaimed. “After all, he was the one who taught you the skills that enabled you to save us. We should have thanked him.”