[Acorna 08] - First Warning: Acorna's Children (with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough)

by Anne McCaffrey

  Khorii disagreed. It surely must have been some sort of loss. How could it not be? Even if Shoshisha hadn’t been close to her parents, it must have been quite a blow to lose them and have to leave the only home she’d ever known and a position of power and privilege to come to Maganos Moonbase, where she was just a student, like everyone else.

  By the time Hap related Shoshisha’s background, they had stepped onto the walkway and climbed beyond the computer sector to the third level, whence came the aromas of cooked food.

  “Come on,” Hap said. “I’ll introduce you to some of the others in this bubble. Everybody here is more or less your standard-issue humanoid, like me, with a few variations. But there’s a more exotic breed housed in the adjoining bubble.”

  “How are they exotic?” Khorii asked. She had no doubt that she was pretty exotic to most of these kids.

  “Well, we call them poopuus—short for pool pupils, because they live in a big salt-water pool that takes up most of the bubble. They don’t have a hub like we do, and they don’t have a kitchen because they only eat what they grow in their pool—not vegetarian like you. They like fish and some kinds of seaweed.”

  “How did they come to be here?” Khorii asked. “And how many live in the pool? Do they study the same subjects as the rest of you?”

  “Some of the same ones, but they are also studying what’s known about oceans on other worlds. I don’t know all the reasons behind it. They don’t mix much with the rest of us. I’ve tried to strike up a conversation and, you know, make friends, but they just dive and won’t talk to me. There’s sort of a language barrier, too. They study Standard but they don’t use it among themselves.”

  “How do they study if they can’t leave their pool?” Khorii asked.

  “By computer—only theirs are behind the walls in their waterways.”

  His whiskers and ears both twitching thoughtfully while the end of his tail traced curves on the shining plascrete tile of the floor, Khiindi looked up at Hap. It was as if the cat were thinking, thinking very hard. Suddenly his ears pricked up and he lowered himself to a tail-lashing squat, as if stalking prey, then galloped away from them, back down the spiral walkway, bounding off of it from the second level to land on the central street of the bubble. He ran off straight down the street toward the next bubble. The only time he slowed down was when he looked back once to see if they were following him.

  “Khiindi!” Khorii called after him as she ran in full pursuit. “Come back, silly cat!”

  “We’d better catch him,” Hap said. “They’re not used to animals around here, I’m afraid. Things are kidproofed to some degree, but not critterproof. There’s all kinds of stuff that could hurt him or that he might damage. Your grandpas would not be pleased.”

  Although they had stopped at the entrance to the dining hall, it vanished behind them as they chased Khiindi. Khorii called to Khiindi as she ran down the corridor, while students stopped, goggled at her, and moved off to the side to avoid being trampled, finally staring after her as she passed them.

  Hap and Elviiz stampeded after her, and at the end of the street they all stopped, panting, seeing Khiindi waiting by the circular doorway into the next bubble as if he were waiting for some vermin to bolt from the hole. The cat looked highly satisfied, as if he’d done something exceptionally clever.

  But it was a man, not a mouse, who emerged from the doorway as it irised open. And Khiindi had no interest in him at all. Instead, the cat leaped through the open doorway and was long gone again by the time Khorii, Elviiz, and Hap passed through it after him.

  Hap laughed. “Does Khiindi speak Standard?”

  “I don’t know,” Khorii said. “I think he understands it well enough when he wants to. But when he doesn’t…”

  “He is a sentient being on some level,” Elviiz continued. “He seems to comprehend a great many simple words or phrases, though only those that are not addressed to him as direct commands. He is developmentally challenged in recognition of the simple negative.”

  “That’s not unusual in cats,” Hap pointed out. “But are you sure it isn’t more than that?”

  “Why do you ask?” Khorii wanted to know.

  “Because I could swear he understood exactly what I was telling you about the poopuus and that they had fish in their tanks. He took off the instant I said it.”

  “But he has never met a fish,” Elviiz told him. “He would not know what one was.”

  “Maybe not, but it sure looked like he knew where he was headed and what he wanted to me. I bet he could smell the fish from where we were and went to find some. I never met a cat who didn’t like fish. I think that there’s more to that cat than meets the eye.”

  Khorii laughed. “He is not very good at grazing, it’s true. And he seems to form his own ideas about what he likes on his menu. My mother says that his sire, RK, is a completely sentient being. Who knows what a cat thinks? I only know that he can be a rare handful.”

  As they entered the bubble, the smell of water freshened the air, and a scent Khorii would come to identify with fish and the poopuus who swam in the pool and through the waterways that occupied most of the interior of the bubble. In place of the hubbub moving walkway, water flowed upward to another pool, then, on the other side, back down in a playful waterfall.

  “It not only serves as a playground for the pool kids, it also helps aerate and recirculate the water,” Hap told them.

  But Khorii could barely hear him for the shrill noises and splashing coming from the pool.

  The poopuus were much larger than she had expected, very young but with rounded bodies that floated nicely. Their bare skin was the color of a roan Linyaari youngster not yet star-clad, and glistened in the light of the bubble. All of them had flowing hair of a black that was almost purple in its density, and they had very large, prominent dark eyes.

  Oblivious to their latest visitors, they leaped from the surface of the pool and dived back into it again. As she drew nearer, she realized that some of the shrill noises were laughter.

  “There he is!” Elviiz said, pointing. “There’s Khiindi!”

  And indeed, he was there, soaking wet, a fish in his jaws, and carefully borne aloft on the back of a swimming student. The student deposited the sodden cat on the edge of the pool, where Khiindi tried to shake himself while keeping a grip on his fish. His water taxi lingered at the pool’s edge, watching the cat with dark eyes round with fascination. Khiindi stood with his front paws on his flopping fish, shook himself vigorously, and head-butted the nose of his rescuer before ravaging the fish.

  The language the poopuus used among themselves reminded Khorii somewhat of that of the sii-Linyaari back home, the ancient beings who were forerunners of her own race. Her parents had saved the sii-Linyaari from extinction by bringing them forward in time, and now they lived in the newly reborn oceans of Vhiliinyar, a development that did not please many of the traditionalists, which Khorii thought was stupid. The sii-Linyaari were not the prettiest people, it was true, having tiny horns all over their heads sometimes instead of just the one in the middle, and they did not have the healing power of her own people, but they were great swimmers and good friends of her parents. They had also taught her to swim when she was just a baby. She pulled off her shipsuit.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Hap asked, sounding shocked.

  “I am going to go meet these students,” she said, and dived in. She was happy for a change to be taking the initiative herself instead of being herded here and there, even by someone as friendly and well-meaning as Hap. The water felt wonderful, cool but not too frigid, and though it had been a bit murky when she first jumped in, almost immediately it became as clear as glass. Beneath the surface many students—schools of them, she supposed you might say—swam through the deep waters. The bottom contained a veritable jungle of aquatic plant life, including lacy palaces of some shell-like substance that glowed with rainbows of color.

  She could hold her breath underwate
r for a long time, but when she surfaced, halfway across the pool, she found herself encircled by poopuus.

  “Hi, I’m Khorii. I’m new here. Who are you?” she said aloud.

  “We are the children of LoiLoiKua. You are not,” was the reply. It came from underwater but unlike the bubbling and popping language of the sii-Linyaari, the words came in Standard, accented so that the words seemed to be ebbing and flowing with a tide of their own. It sounded like “We are the children of LoiLoiKua. You are not.” The last words did not seem to be said any more softly, but somehow from a greater depth or distance.

  “You do not belong with us, Khorii,” one of them said, surfacing to playfully flick water at her with the tips of webbed fingers.

  “Your legs are separated,” another one said. And she noticed for the first time that their legs were fused together from their waists to their knees. “If you belonged here, your legs would not come apart like that.”

  “She does not swim as if her legs are separate,” another one observed. “She swims correctly, the way of the ocean people,” and he demonstrated the undulating full-body motion that propelled him through the water.

  “I was taught by ocean people,” Khorii told them. “They have no legs at all. They have tails. They were distant relatives of mine, and they didn’t care that I have legs. So I didn’t think you’d mind either. If you do, I can get out. I just thought it might be friendlier to greet you on your own—well—territory.”

  “Look at the water,” another one said. “Look at the ’puter screens. See how crisp the images appear, how the murkiness of the water has gone since she came.” Khorii did not comment. In another moment, perhaps the observant student would think she imagined the change in clarity. The horn’s powers were a Linyaari secret.

  “She looks like Our Founder!” said another, this one with long, flowing hair that caught the webs of her fingers and floated up around her thighs.

  “What do you mean?” asked one with pale skin and a thousand little brown spots across her wide nose.

  “Look,” said the first one, and swam to the edge of the pool. Now Khorii saw that a deep band around the pool’s lining was clear, and behind the covering, computer screens waited for students to activate them.

  The poopuu with the unruly hair did just that with a squeal pitched to turn the nearest machine on. A series of pictures flashed by—an elderly human Khorii did not recognize, a younger Uncle Hafiz, and her human grandsires, then—Mother!

  “Our Founder,” the student said.

  “That is my mother,” Khorii said.

  “Does she not swim like you? Where is she? Is she here with you?” the student asked excitedly.

  “Oh, yes, she swims really well—and correctly, too. But she and my father had to go to another world to help end a plague.”

  “Ahhh, do you speak to them in the far talk while they are gone?”

  “You mean do I hail them on the ship’s computer?”

  “Noooo,” the student said. “Do your water-kin not use the far talk?”

  “I don’t think I know what that is if it is not using the com units,” she said. She wondered if they were telepathic.

  “Mostly we use it only at night, when the others are sleeping,” said a pretty young girl with a face like a full moon. “Otherwise, it interrupts studies. The dorms are farther from our lagoon than the classrooms.”

  “Is it loud then?”

  “No, but it carries. It is the far talk. When we are very quiet, we listen for the far talk from our parents and grandparents on LoiLoiKua. They miss us. So we answer back.”

  “Could you do it just a little?” she asked.

  “Oh, no, Calla asked us not to,” the girl said. “She said ‘You should use your ’puters like the land folk.’”

  Khorii wanted to stay and ask the poopuus more questions, but footsteps echoed through the hallway leading to their pool. Moments later, several children trooped in, led by Calla Kaczmarek.

  Oh, bother, what now? Khorii thought. Looks like I’ve put my hooves in it again.

  Chapter 7

  Calla Kaczmarek ordinarily enjoyed the open plan of the bubbles on the Moonbase. However, at times it was a pain in the keister. Times, for instance, when a much-anticipated visitor finally arrived and was on the verge, some people hoped, of satisfying their curiosity about her, when she suddenly turned tail and ran away.

  Which wouldn’t have been so bad except that she did it where a whole cafeteria full of kids just as nosy and curious as Calla could see her do it.

  She hoped that Khorii wouldn’t have to pay for her small gaffe.

  Her hope died when a snarling voice that Calla knew all too well emerged from the students.

  “What, we aren’t good enough for the kid of the great Lady Acorna?” sneered Marl Fidd. This one, Calla knew, had never been a slave, as Calla had been during her early years. At least, nobody else had enslaved the brat. He’d done a good job of tying himself up in knots, however. Like many of the newer kids on Maganos Moonbase, he’d been sent here because the authorities had no idea what else to do with him. He had been found during a raid on a rave shack, plugged into the machines and oblivious to everything around him. He wouldn’t say where he was from or who his parents were; but once he got unhooked, the authorities deemed him salvageable and shipped him off to MM. Calla was not at all sure their judgment about him was correct. He was, in her opinion, a punk. A punk with a mean streak a mile wide, and a bully who liked to push around anyone who didn’t have the nerve to stand up to him. He was going to cause trouble someday, Calla figured. Big trouble. She only hoped she wasn’t around when it happened.

  “Maybe she’s just bashful,” suggested six-year-old Sesseli in a voice so shy it was seldom heard unless she was called upon directly. As she said it, however, the little girl rose from her seat and started for the walkway.

  “Where are you going, Sesseli?” Calla asked.

  “To see if I can help. She’s come a long way, and she doesn’t know anybody.”

  “Hap’s with her,” Calla said.

  “Yes, but he’s a big boy, and he talks so much, maybe he scared her. I’ll go see.”

  “Me, too,” two more voices said in unison.

  “Well, I certainly don’t think it’s right that the poopuus get to meet her first,” said Fawndra Makatia, a good friend of La Shoshisha. “I’m going to see what’s up as well.”

  That was the beginning of a general exodus. Calla, being the lunchroom supervisor, their teacher, and their nominal leader, followed them. Since she couldn’t seem to stop them, it was her next best option.

  The “poopuus,” as the pupils inhabiting the pool had been dubbed by the general student population, were not, despite the administration’s best efforts, well integrated. They were from one of the oldest human colonies in Federation space, and had been on their watery planet for so many years that no one remembered or could find a record of when their ancestors inhabited Old Earth. The theory was that they had been island people to begin with. When their once-idyllic home became so littered with other people and industry that their own identity had all but vanished, their leaders volunteered to colonize, and that was the end of it. Presumably, at some point in its evolution there had been more land on LoiLoiKua, as they called their new homeworld, but apparently when the LoiLoiKua version of the great flood from Terran myth and folklore occurred, the land did not come back—at least most of it didn’t. Well adapted to making a living from the sea, however, the new inhabitants found their new sea even more inviting and over the years spent less and less time on land until they became complete sea creatures.

  That was what the scientists had decided about them, at least, and it matched some of what the elders of LoiLoiKua had told the Federation when their world joined. The world was in jeopardy now, apparently, and the elders had asked that their young be sent off-world to study and search for new habitats. Calla had not been able to get very far with the LoiLoiKuans, however. They accept
ed their pool and their own bubble, which was a good thing since it had been built at great expense to the foundation endowed by the late Mr. Li and House Harakamian. The poopuus seemed to enjoy their lessons, but they were not eager to mix with the others. No wonder Khorii was drawn to them. Despite her mother’s role in the founding of MM, the lone Linyaari girl must feel as much of an outsider as her waterbound classmates.

  Calla was still trying to decide if poopuus was a derogatory term or simply descriptive when she reached the interbubble iris.

  She felt a moment of anxiety. One other thing they didn’t actually know about the students from LoiLoiKua was how they might react, unsupervised, to unwanted company. Their culture was a simple one, even primitive—well, regressed at least. Their reactions might be rather basic.

  The anxiety heightened when she saw the pool roiling with poopuus but no sign of Khorii in the pool or out.

  Then suddenly the child she was looking for bobbed to the surface, looked startled to see the audience alongside the pool, then gave a small tight-lipped smile and waved.

  Smiling, Calla wedged a path for herself among the staring students. “Khorii, I see you’re making friends already, but now the rest of the students would like to welcome you as well. Please come and join us.”

  Hap, who she now saw was sitting on the edge of the pool beside the android child, jumped up and picked up her abandoned clothing lying beside the water. As Khorii swam to the poolside, he handed it to her. Crumpling the garment in one hand, Khorii gave a hop and popped gracefully—and nakedly—onto the side of the pool, then began donning the shipsuit as another student might dry off.

  Snickers, embarrassed giggles, a wolf whistle and one call of, “All right, horny girl!” greeted her, and the girl looked puzzled. In truth, she was still flat on top, and her lower half was actually covered with some of the same short curly hair as that which feathered down her spine and calves to feet that were surprisingly like cloven hooves.