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

by Anne McCaffrey

  Calla had never had the honor of meeting Khorii’s illustrious mother, and the descriptions she had of her, while they mentioned her two-knuckled three-fingered hands, her curly silver white mane, and, of course, the horn, hadn’t really gone into detail about these aspects.

  Khorii stood, fully dressed, and said something to the poopuus that seemed to be in their own language. They didn’t surface to say good-bye to her, but Calla noticed that as soon as Khorii joined the other students and their backs were to the pool, a fish flipped up onto the side. The Linyaari girl’s cat pounced on it.

  It seemed that in at least one of the school’s populations, Khorii and Khiindi had made some new friends.

  The banner that popped up on every screen in the computer lab said “70,000 BELIEVED STRICKEN, 40,000 PRESUMED DEAD ON PALODURO.”

  “THOUSANDS OF NEW INFECTIONS STRIKE TWI OSIAM.”

  “250 CASES DIAGNOSED ON KEZDET BELIEVED IMPORTED BY FEDERATION COMMUNICATIONS CREW.”

  “MANY FEDERATION RELAY STATIONS FALL SILENT AS PERSONNEL FALL ILL, STATIONS QUARANTINED.”

  “QUARANTINE RESTRICTIONS TIGHTEN. FOOD AND WATER SHORTAGES IN PLANETARY COLONIES GO UNRELIEVED. ALL COMMERCIAL INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL SEVERELY CURTAILED.”

  There followed an alarming list of cities, continents, space stations, moons, and planets believed to be infected with the disease, along with numbers of reported cases and deaths.

  Khorii felt much as she did when sitting inside their pavilion on Vhiliinyar while a thunderstorm raged outside. Inside the weather-proof fabric of the pavilion they were so safe and dry that the wind hardly buffeted them, and the driving rain was only something that glistened in the darkness outside. It was almost imaginary. The plague seemed that way here among all of these healthy young people. Still, her parents were out there in the middle of whatever those statistics really meant, and it worried her. A lot. A whole lot. She knew her mother had done wonders in her lifetime and had seen other emergencies, many of them far worse, in the galaxy, and had coped with them. Her father, too, had battled monstrous Khleevi invaders and lived—the only one of their kind to be tortured by the buglike aliens and survive. But they were her parents—and they were so OLD! She’d found the problem first, after all—the bodies floating in a derelict spaceship. She felt like she should be out there with her parents, where she could protect them.

  It took a great deal of effort for Khorii to ignore the escalating fatality figures and concentrate on the simple lessons at hand. Her mind’s eye saw space full of ships like the Blanca, telescoping inside the hulls where blank-faced people performed an endless macabre ballet in zero G.

  Khiindi did not help. He seemed to be as worried as she was. He sat with ears erect, staring at the screen as if he could read it, mewed once, and collapsed across her thighs with a huff of exhaled breath. His face scrunched up in an expression of feline concern—which lasted only until the cat fell over in her lap and went to sleep. That would have been fine except that he then proceeded to snore, then to twitch, run in place, and rake her shipsuit’s legs with his back claws while clutching at it with his front claws.

  It was as though he were trying to save the universe in his sleep.

  She had never once considered leaving her feline friend behind when she left Vhiliinyar, but she soon began to feel as if that indicated a lack of foresight on her part.

  He did give her a reason to attend meals with the other students, however. Not to be outdone in cat bribes by the poopuus, at suppertime Hap, a little girl called Sesseli, and other students insisted that Khorii join them so they could offer Khiindi choice tidbits from their plates.

  Khorii happily agreed and brought a selection of grasses and vegetables from the ’ponics garden so she could nibble along, thus blending in more satisfactorily.

  This worked well, with Khorii happily chewing between answers to the questions of others, or nodding and asking her own questions regarding some of what they shared—excessively, in some cases—about themselves. Meanwhile one of the boys was foolish enough to voice a question about an astrophysics lesson earlier in the day and was treated to more than he could have possibly grasped in one sitting about the subject by Elviiz, in his most annoyingly superior tutorial tone.

  Khiindi ingratiated himself for the sake of future handouts, sitting on first this lap, then that one, walking from knee to knee around the tables and pausing for a wash and brush-up on the lap of Sesseli. He did not even chide the girl when she interrupted his grooming session by stroking his head. Instead, he rubbed his nose and jaw against her hand, then carefully licked his paws and used them to scrub clean the area her touch had tainted.

  One set of knees, however, Khiindi avoided. When Khorii noticed this, she glanced at the student being bypassed and caught glares of hostility following her harmless little friend. What could possibly make anyone react that way to a cat? Everyone on Vhiliinyar was extremely fond of cats. The Makahomian Temple Cats presented to her and to her people by the Makahomians reminded the older Linyaari of pahaantiyiirs, a feline species many had kept as companions before the Khleevi invasion. Even the rather grouchy Liriilyi had had a pahaantiyiir she doted on and had softened considerably when Mother and Father had insisted she be given one of the Makahomian kittens to raise.

  An older boy, quite handsome by human standards, reacted the most negatively to Khiindi’s adventures in progressive grazing. His glowering heavy eyebrows knitted together over dark eyes that seemed to be trying to turn into lasers to burn her poor little cat to a cinder if only he had the power.

  Khiindi passed by him with seeming unconcern but returned to Khorii’s lap rather quickly and resumed washing. Casting a slit-pupiled eye in the boy’s direction, Khiindi raised a leg and proceeded to clean himself under his tail.

  A moment later Elviiz said, “I feel a message arriving from Dad on the Condor.”

  Khorii was afraid he’d unfasten the top of his shipsuit then and there and show everyone the receiver screen attachment with which he and Maak both had augmented their chests. Calla had already taken her aside and told her that it went against the school’s custom for students to disrobe in front of students of the opposite sex. Khorii had expressed confusion. She had naturally assumed that since all of the poopuus swam without clothing, it was the custom, when among them, to be similarly unclad. Calla said well, yes, but that was among the LoiLoiKuans and it was not the custom for the rest of the students. Khorii asked if this had something to do with mating. Calla said that yes, for the most part, it did. Khorii could not see the relevance since she was a different species from humans and not ready to mate anyway. Neither were most of the other kids, judging from their stages of development.

  However, Elviiz had his own sense of what was correct. Communications took place in the computer lab. Therefore, they would receive the Condor’s transmission in the computer lab, which was empty now since the students were all grazing—er—dining, Khorii corrected herself.

  Furthermore, Elviiz had another idea about propriety, having overheard Calla’s admonition earlier in the day. “One moment, Khorii, and we will both view the transmission on one of these screens. Anyone passing by watching you staring intently at my upper torso might be puzzled and possibly alarmed. Unlike Captain Becker, or even Uncle Hafiz, these humanoids appear to be somewhat skittish.” Thus saying he apparently took his own pulse, but with the result that one of the larger computer screens suddenly lit with the faces of Mother, Father, Uncles Joh and Maak, and RK. Khiindi hopped up onto the table in front of the screen and sat there, his lithe silvery body obscuring RK’s brindled gray furriness. Khorii lifted him off the table and held him, scratching his belly so that he forgot to be jealous and overly curious, abandoning himself to blissful purrs.

  They didn’t really need him to blur the screen anyway, as the reception was unusually poor. The Condor had the very best communications equipment the wreckage of the galaxies had to offer and that Maak and Captain Becker could modify to meet their ne
eds. Even so, its range was largely dependent on the booster relays set up by the Federation within its territories and by Uncle Hafiz to connect House Harakamian and the Moon of Opportunity. Since MOO, Vhiliinyar, and narhii-Vhiliinyar were not yet officially Federation members, and at any rate would not fall within the heavily traveled spaceways regulated by it, Hafiz would have been cut off from his supply lines without his own network. The Condor operated on both Federation and House Harakamian frequencies, but judging from the snowiness of the video and the static in the sound, both had been affected by the current crisis. Either the personnel who manned or maintained the relay stations were themselves ill or somehow incapacitated by the side effects of it—such as having staff members quarantined away from their duty stations, or needing to attend to family members, perhaps. Khorii couldn’t quite imagine all of the reasons involved. After all, this was her first plague. She hoped it would be her last.

  “Greetings, younglings,” Uncle Maak said.

  “Greetings, Father,” Elviiz said. “What is your current position?”

  Maak gave the coordinates, which placed them a bit less than halfway to the point Uncle Joh had indicated on the star charts. “There is not actually much to report, but we missed you and communications are becoming increasingly unsatisfactory, as you must perceive.”

  “The plague sounds very deadly and extremely widespread,” Khorii said. “I do not see how you can cure it, just the two of you.”

  “We can’t, of course,” Mother said. “But by healing a few of the cases, we may be able to determine the etiology and make other observations that will help the physicians of this area—those who have not succumbed to the illness—in finding a specific cure that does not involve the use of our horns.”

  “We’ve been hearing most disturbing reports,” Khorii told her. “It sounds as if it’s spreading and spreading.”

  “You can’t take all of those reports to heart, honey,” Uncle Joh said. “It’s probably just a slow news day for the Com Channels, and they’re blowing it out of proportion. One relief ship became infected and before they discovered that they’d contacted the disease, they infected some of the personnel on the relay stations—it made it all a lot more visible than it would be ordinarily. I’m sure it’s bad, but I doubt it’s anything your mom and dad can’t handle. And, hey, if they can’t, we’ll go for reinforcements.”

  “The disease, from the data we have gathered,” Maak told them, “has an erratic gestation period of between one and seven Standard sleep cycles. It appears to have a long life away from its host and is probably transmitted by droplets, as it appears to be highly communicable.”

  “We are much needed, Khorii,” Father said. His face was as gentle and loving as always when he looked at her, but strain showed around his eyes and the edges of his mouth. “The health-care providers have apparently been affected worse than any other sector of the population, and there is no one to care for the ill, especially where the disease has hit hardest, like Paloduro. We are glad you are safe on Maganos Moonbase, which is naturally isolated and has a lower probability of becoming an infection site.”

  “What if they find a cure, and because communications are so poor, you don’t hear about it?” she asked. And then, since everyone was being so open about answering their questions, she asked the one that was really bothering her. “What if you get this disease?”

  “Now, honey, don’t get all panicky,” Uncle Joh said. “Your folks will be fine. Maak and the cat and I will see to it. I guess you haven’t been out and about enough to know this yet, but you Linyaari don’t get sick.”

  Khorii nodded, but her worry must have shown on her face, since Mother leaned closer to the screen and touched it with her horn, as if she could transmit her feelings of safety and comfort across the many light-years separating her from her daughter. “Dear one, please do not worry about us. We’ve certainly been in more difficult spots than this, and I’m sure that as we work with the Federation’s resources at our disposal, we’ll be able to bring this crisis to an end very soon.”

  The transmission began breaking up then, and Khorii and Elviiz barely had time to say their good-bye before the friendly faces were lost in a sea of static.

  “Don’t worry, Khorii,” Elviiz said. “They’ll figure out how to stop this plague soon enough.”

  Khorii nodded, but she couldn’t help nibbling on her lower lip and wondering, but what if they can’t?

  Chapter 8

  Hafiz Harakamian had not attained his wealth and high position by being a patient man—not unless he was deliberately plotting or stalking something. He expected to be kept informed. And he also expected to be made godfather to the baby being born to Declan and Judit Giloglie as well as any children born to Calum and Mercy Baird or to his nephew and adopted son and heir, Rafik and his alluring lady. These children were related in spirit if not blood to his beloved adopted daughter Acorna and therefore, by Hafiz’s reckoning, they all belonged to him as well. He was far too young and virile to be a grandfather, but a godfather—ah!

  He made his fifth visit in as many hours to the Moon of Opportunity’s communications terminal. “We have heard nothing from them—any of them—for two days! Two days! I know that Rafik feels he needs no advice in the administration of House Harakamian, but he could send word that he is well, he could say if he has had word from the Giloglies, he could say if the Condor has arrived yet at Maganos Moonbase. Am I so interfering, so difficult to talk to, that I am abandoned by my beloved family when they could most use my wisdom? Is consultation with me desired only when they wish to avail themselves of my wealth? By the three books and the Three Prophets I am sorely distressed and feel greatly wronged.”

  “Now, Haffy, my potentate of passion,” his lovely wife Karina said, laying a scrumptiously plump beringed hand upon his chest while regarding him from her large and lovely eyes made deepest purple by art and by proximity to the priceless catseye chrysoberyl jewels she bore in abundance upon her shell-like ears, her delicate wrists, and her delicious decolletage. The parts of her person not covered in jewels were swathed in drifts of gossamer in a sunset of purples, lavenders, violets, and plums. His treasure, his beauty, his bride, and yet even her presence did not soothe him.

  “Maybe something’s just wrong with the relays,” she said. “One little glitch in the nearest one, and you know how that affects our communications.”

  “Yes, my delectable dumpling, but to hear nothing! Now that I ponder upon it, no merchant ships have docked of late, none of the cargoes for which I have already paid good currency, no one from home at all.”

  “I understand that you are disturbed, O my lord of love, and it pains me to see you so. Therefore, I shall look into my scrying pool and employ my heightened sensitivity to the harmonies of the cosmos to determine what is causing this deplorable lack of consideration on the part of our beloved friends and relations.”

  “Oh, that would be nice, dear, how thoughtful, thank you,” Hafiz said, a trifle flatly. Karina meant well and truly believed she had telepathic and even magical powers; although even to him, her doting husband, it was very obvious that for the most part she had all of the psychic sensitivity of a food replicator. Perhaps less. But it did not take any mind-reading ability whatsoever for Hafiz to realize that any implication on his part that her powers were less astounding than she proclaimed them to be would be hurtful to her and detrimental to the recreational marital activities they so deeply and mutually enjoyed.

  So he would graciously support her efforts to seek information in her way while he sought the same information in his.

  “Go you to prepare yourself, to meditate and free your mind to receive the images in your waters, my lavishly endowed love, and I will join you in an hour’s time.”

  “Certainly. I go now and await your pleasure, most spectacular of all spouses.”

  When she had gone he turned back to the communications terminal and to the young Linyaari boy, Miikaye, interning with his chief
communications specialist, and said, “Send for the captains of the two ships in my private fleet that are docked here. I have a mission for them.”

  “That would be finding out why we’ve had no word from the relays, sir?” the boy asked. Hafiz smiled paternally. Most Linyaari addressed him as Acorna did, as Uncle Hafiz, but it was good that the child had learned the proper form of address to one’s employer early. Of course, “sir” was not as good as “my lord” as Hafiz’s more experienced vassals called him, but it was a start.

  “Yes, my lad. You have interpreted my order most correctly.”

  The boy smiled, with his mouth closed so as not to show his teeth, since to do so was considered hostile in his culture. “Yes, sir. Not too difficult considering the number of inquiries you have made yourself already today.”

  “Even so, my son, even so.”

  When his captains came his orders were simple, “Go forth and seek the truth. Also seek to repair the accursed relays if they are down again. You, Captain Ling, will follow the course set by Captain Becker and my beloved daughter to the first relay. You, Captain Gallico, will travel to Makahomia, and confer with the regent Nadhari Kando concerning the presentation of a kitten for my new godchild and will also gather intelligence from Nadhari and other useful informants during your journey.”

  Both men nodded and withdrew to prepare their ships for their respective voyages.

  Practical matters seen to, Hafiz retired to the private and personal garden of delight he shared with his beloved. She was seated beside the glass and titanium birdbath he had ordered to be installed when she requested a small body of water for her prophetic pursuits. Her arms were crossed on the edge of the small pool, her head upon them, and he thought she was meditating perhaps, or catching a quick nap until, hearing him, she raised her head and turned. Her eyes and nose were both red and rather wet.