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

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Let me see,” Khorii said. “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

  She wasn’t surprised Khiindi had found her roommate’s clothing. Shoshisha was very untidy. No doubt this was the result of having been brought up with servants who picked up after her. She left things lying around, drawers half-open, clothing draped from every possible surface. Anyone could have told her that you just couldn’t do that around a cat, especially not with anything you prized. But she probably wasn’t used to cats.

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think,” Khorii said, raising a handful of soiled silk to her face and almost gagging on the cat musk. Her horn, as if accidentally, touched the affected garments and the smell went away. “I think if we put them through the swash right away they’ll be good as new,” she said, using the students’ term for the sonic wash they all used to bathe and do laundry.

  Shoshisha’s lips clamped together to show that she didn’t believe it.

  “May I try or not?” Khorii asked.

  Shoshisha shrugged irritably and flipped her hand in a dismissive gesture.

  Khorii carried the garments into the lav between their room and the adjoining one. Khiindi’s interest in the clothing had not lessened, but he carefully kept Khorii between him and Shoshisha.

  Khorii closed the door behind her. The walls automatically glowed with light by which she saw that the horn touch had turned the cat urine as clear and odorless as water. She stuck the under-clothes into the sonic wash—seven pairs of silk panties and lacy bras, plus an extra sleep shirt, all of the finest quality, soft and sheer as moth wings. Shoshisha might be an exiled and orphaned princess, but she was evidently not a poor one.

  “You are very lucky that I am your friend, Khiindi Kaat, or that girl would have your pelt for her knickers,” Khorii scolded. “And after what you did to her knickers, she’d need it.” Khiindi wound himself around her ankles. When she pulled the underwear out of the swash he mewed for her to return it to him for further destruction.

  She held the silken bundle out to Shoshisha. “See? Good as new.”

  Shoshisha snatched it away from her, unbelieving. Then sniffed it, looked surprised, and stuffed it back in her drawer. “This is a school, you know, Khorii. I’ll bet if your grandfathers were here, they would never allow you to bring that—that—livestock in here.”

  “Well, he can’t go outdoors. There’s no atmosphere,” Khorii said reasonably.

  “A very good reason to put him out if you ask me,” Shoshisha said.

  Of course, nobody had asked her, but Khorii decided to change the subject. She was, after all, training to be a diplomat.

  “I wonder how the grandfathers are doing and if the baby is all right.”

  “I’m surprised they haven’t contacted you before now,” Shoshisha said, clearly meaning to wound Khorii by reminding her she was being neglected.

  “I don’t think they’re able to right now. Besides, everybody is probably busy with the baby,” Khorii said. “I sure hope they’re all right. Are you going to sleep now?”

  “If I’m allowed to, yes,” Shoshisha replied.

  “We will, too, but I have something to do first. Don’t worry. I’ll take Khiindi with me.”

  She decided to have a late snack and left the dormitories, taking the hubbub down to the ’ponics gardens. The garden appeared much depleted from when she had first arrived. Khorii knew she hadn’t eaten that much since she’d arrived. There was always plenty on the Condor, where the garden was much smaller and there were two other Linyaari and a human to share the harvest. Of course, the school used the ’ponics garden for fresh nourishment for the other students in addition to the starches and proteins they had from different sources.

  Leaving the gardens, she decided to try to contact Kezdet and headed to the computer lab and holo suites.

  Chapter 10

  At the lab Khorii found Hap and Elviiz building a holo-model of a very futuristic-looking structure she assumed was a space station or vessel of some sort. Or perhaps it was simply a cat toy. Khiindi had great fun jumping through it several times and getting scolded by Elviiz until Hap scooped the cat into his arms and held him, belly and paws up. Khiindi struggled, and Hap tickled the fur of his tummy until the cat relaxed and started to purr.

  Khorii sat at the console and input the hospital’s code. Elviiz asked her what she was doing, and she told him, whereupon he said, “You will receive no answer. I have tried many times today on my personal unit.”

  “But it doesn’t take a relay to contact Kezdet,” she said.

  “No, but if one is trying to contact the hospital, it may be that the communications personnel are incapacitated. If they are lucky, they are no longer there. I do not think a hospital would be a very healthy place to be at this time.”

  He was speaking in Standard out of courtesy to Hap, and she answered in the same language. “No. I suppose not. The whole idea seems very odd, doesn’t it? Having children born in the same place where plague victims might come to be healed? Especially when the plague and some of the other illnesses aren’t something the people at hospitals can cure anyway. If only the baby could have waited until we arrived, we could have seen to its safe delivery…”

  Hap snorted. “You? What could you have done? You may be a uni—a Lin—whatchamacallit…”

  “Linyaari,” Elviiz told him.

  “A Linyaari, but you’re just a little girl. What do you know about delivering babies?”

  “What’s there to know?” she asked, puzzled. “You just encourage the mother, and the baby comes out all by itself.”

  “Ha!” Hap said. “What if it’s turned wrong or has the cord wrapped around its neck? Do you know how to fix that?”

  “Well, no. But why would that happen?”

  “You really don’t ask when it does, you just have to get the baby turned or the cord unwrapped. With big animals it’s hard enough, but with humans—well, and Linyaari, too, I’d think, since you look a lot like us—it often takes surgery.”

  “And I suppose you know how to do that?” she asked, feeling a little outclassed.

  “No,” he said, sounding a little miserable. “Not how to do surgery. But I helped deliver calves and colts a lot back home. It’s just part of life on an agro colony. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but they don’t have classes for that here. Khiindi here is the only four-footed critter around, actually.”

  “Yes, and according to some people he shouldn’t be here either,” she said. She told them about Khiindi’s encounter with Shoshisha’s wardrobe, leaving out the part her horn played in salvaging the garments. Elviiz would know what she’d done without her having to say, and Hap ought not to know. She had been warned many times by her parents, grandparents, and others that the healing and purifying power of Linyaari horns was a secret. Of course, the secret was only known to every single Linyaari, Uncle Joh, Maak, the human grandfathers and their wives, Uncle Hafiz and Aunt Karina, and other people Mother had helped before she knew to keep the horn’s abilities secret. But it was a secret from everyone else in the universe who didn’t already know.

  The secret was safe from Hap. “Wow,” he said. “What was it like? Shoshisha’s underwear, I mean?”

  “Smelly,” Khorii said, wrinkling her nose, “once Khiindi got done with it. But fortunately I got it clean in the swash. She was really mad.”

  “She’s pretty sensitive,” Hap said, dreamily.

  “Oh, yes,” Khorii said. “To anything that seems counter to her own interest, she’s very sensitive. But she doesn’t care at all that Khiindi is far from home and other cats and was only trying to mark as his territory something he thought would make a nice nest.”

  “She’s not a cat person,” Hap agreed, reluctantly admitting this small fault in his otherwise perfect dream girl.

  Khorii rolled her eyes, and Elviiz, seeing this, rolled his, too.

  Khiindi stood on Hap’s lap with his paws on the boy’s shoulder and rubbed his face against Hap’s lov
ingly. How could anyone not be a cat person, he seemed to be saying, when he was so adorable?

  Elviiz said, “Since we cannot make contact with Kezdet or the Condor, there is no need for you to violate your sleep cycle any longer, Khorii. You should return to your room and rest.”

  “I did sleep before Shoshisha’s shrieking woke me up, but I had bad dreams,” she said. “The poopuus are worried about their relatives still on their homeworld. The news banners reported that the plague has spread there, but it didn’t give details. I think they’re the only ones besides us, Elviiz, who were not orphans when they came here. I understand how they feel. Of course, I’m not worried about Mother and Father because”—she tried not to look at Hap—“well, because of our healing technology, but I wish we had gone with them to help. I wish we could help the poopuus somehow.”

  “When the Condor has finished ministering to Paloduro, perhaps they can go to LoiLoiKua,” Elviiz said. “Although the probability of that is low, since there are other sites more heavily infected.”

  “If my parents were still alive, I’d do a better job of keeping them that way now,” Hap said fiercely. “I would have just refused to leave if it had been me.”

  Khorii started to say he didn’t understand but all of a sudden she did understand what he meant, how strongly he felt he had failed his family for having been the only one to survive when somehow he should have been able to save them. So instead she changed the subject again. “Something’s wrong with the ’ponics garden. The beets, turnips, potatoes, corn, and carrots are all gone, and so is much of the lettuce and cabbage. There’s still plenty of alfalfa and clover, but everything else is looking pretty spotty.”

  Hap said, “That’s because the whole school’s been eating out of it since the quarantine started. I guess you wouldn’t notice, since you don’t eat what the rest of us do, but we’ve been on short rations since right after you came. The supply ship is late. I overheard Calla talking to Captain Bates, and they’re pretty worried about it. There’s little to feed the replicators to keep them reproducing food either. We’ve had beans for the main course three times this week already, and Calla said we’re going to have to raid the poopuus’ fish hatchery next.”

  By the time she left the computer lab, Khorii felt so worried and twitchy she was sure she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep no matter how hard she tried.

  But the room was dark and Shoshisha was already emitting delicate little snores. She had closed the drawers firmly and picked up all of her other belongings from anywhere a cat could mark them. Khorii gave Khiindi a wry smile and an extra pet and settled down. Khiindi curled between her shoulder and her cheek, washing his back and feet and her face with equal attention until she fell asleep.

  She awakened sometime later, while the bubble was still dark, to an eerie echoing that sounded a bit like a whistle, a bit like a long moo, and other noises so peculiar she could not readily identify them. Then she was suddenly overcome with longing for her parents and for her homeworld, where the waters covered the ugliness of the land. No, wait. That wasn’t how Vhiliinyar looked. Vhiliinyar had mountains and meadows, rivers and streams, as well as the ocean. Then she heard the singing underneath the eerie sounds and understood. This was the far talk of the LoiLoiKuans, calling home.

  While the other gamers stuffed their faces, Jalonzo tried again to contact the curos and also Abuelita. When again he had no luck, he thought perhaps the gymnasium was interfering with the signal, though it had not done so before. Certainly the devices had been working when they called Mucho Nacho for delivery. Sometime between then and now something had happened to their holas, to the building, maybe—and he had no reason to think so, really, except for a very small nagging feeling in the back of his mind—maybe to the world?

  There was one other person he could contact—as the sponsor of the tournament—who should still be in his office in an old three-story warehouse building a couple of blocks away. He ought to know about the dead guy on the doorstep of his tournament anyway. The sponsor, Miguel Lopez, owned the local Brujartisano franchise. He came to the gym long enough to get the tournament started and tell everyone to have a good time and what the stakes were, but he only sold merchandise to gamers. He wasn’t a gamer himself, so he’d given Jalonzo, because he knew him better than the other players, the building keys and gone back to his office. Jalonzo knew where it was because he’d been over there a bunch of times to pick up prizes for other tournaments he’d won. You could see the warehouse from the top floor of the building containing the gym.

  Jalonzo climbed the stairs to the top and went back to the hallway between the gym wing and the school wing of the building. It had a good view of this part of the city.

  The sun was low in the sky but it never exactly set this time of year—it simply rotated around the horizon. You could still see everything clearly. Usually at this end of town people didn’t decorate a lot for Carnivale—that was more to stimulate business up-town and for the tourists. When Jalonzo was little, he had enjoyed going to the parades with his parents, dressing up in the Diablo costume Abuelita made for him. But now it was either too childish or more adult than he wanted to deal with.

  He was surprised at first to see the yellow flags with the designs in the middle and mistook them for Carnivale decorations. But he could not avoid seeing the one on the Brujartisano office’s warehouse. The design wasn’t decorative; it was a biohazard symbol. Most of the buildings he was looking at had quarantine flags on them.

  How could that be? It wasn’t that way when they’d come to the tournament just three days ago.

  He didn’t see any activity in any of the buildings, though admittedly he couldn’t see much as the windows were all shaded against the sun.

  Everything looked about the same as usual, except that there were some people sleeping on the streets—more than the usual homeless who somehow or other found their way there to be homeless in a good climate, where they would not freeze to death. But maybe those weren’t homeless after all, or sleeping. Maybe they were like the nacho man. Maybe they were bodies. Here and there he spotted some animals lying in the street and in yards, too.

  He really wanted to go out and see what was going on, check on Abuelita, make sure she was okay, but he knew right away that was probably the dumbest thing he could do. Other than getting food out of the truck where the driver had undoubtedly died of whatever it was the yellow flags were about.

  Not everything was quarantined yet, but evidently the disease, whatever it was, had spread as quick as a rumor and that, he decided, must be what brought down the communications. The workers were all sick maybe. One little glitch in the system and with no one to fix it, the holas went silent, and probably computers and vid screens as well.

  He unlocked the computer lab and tested his theory. There was still power, but the network was down. The vid screens came on but showed static.

  Very well. He tried to think what Abuelita would do. She would not panic, she would be thinking of how to help other people. Not the people in quarantine probably. The curos would be helping them. The best thing he could do there was stay out of the way, keep the rest of the gamers out of the way—and keep them from leaving until somebody said it was okay to do so. Not that anybody had told them to stay. If the sponsor was in that building, behind that flag, and the parents of most of the gamers were also behind flags in their pueblos, then perhaps nobody who knew about the tournament could tell anyone else to check on them.

  He returned downstairs. He didn’t really want any of the food now, but it wasn’t like he was sharing it with the nacho guy. It came inside packages after all. And it smelled good. And he was very hungry, when he thought about it. Who knew what else they’d get to eat for quite a while?

  He sat down at the table, stared at his cards and the dice for a moment, then threw the cards faceup onto the table, where everybody could see he was set to win again.

  “Amigos, I’m bored. I know it’s no fun for you guys with me a
lways winning, and it’s getting to be where it’s not that much of a thrill for me either. So I’ll tell you what. Let’s play another game—I’ve been working on this one for a while, and I want to try it out, but I can’t do it by myself. If you guys will play along with me on this, I’ll forfeit the tournament to whoever wins the new game—and I will just be the evil overlord this time, not a player.”

  “You don’t mean you are giving up your chance to go to the hologames on Bruja Prime!” Maria Maldanado said. “You’ve been heading for that since you started—we all have.”

  “I can do it later. If I still want to. It’s not like I can’t beat you guys anytime I want to,” he said, grinning in his best evil overlord fashion.

  “What about cards?” one asked. “What do we do with the cards?”

  “Sí, and what about our prizes for winning the individual games? We get those in the real game, not in something you make up.”

  He thought about it. Yes, there would have to be incentive. Getting his glory wasn’t going to be tangible enough for some of them—some of them weren’t very into abstract concepts like glory. They wanted stuff. He had another idea. One that would definitely keep the other gaming freaks interested and occupied. He sighed. He didn’t like it. He really didn’t like it. But it was the only sure thing.

  From his pack he extracted three heavy notebook folders packed with his collections from the last four years. “We just use the dice for my game—I’ll explain the rules. And at the end, when we total who won the most games, each winner starting with the champion and working down to the one who wins the least gets to pick their choice of my cards. Agreed?”

  By their words and nods and the expressions on their faces, he could see he had them. He began explaining the new game, all the while wondering when—or even if—help would find them.

  Chapter 11

  The entity in feline form who was commonly called, but who did not necessarily answer to the name “Khiindi” reflected, while cleansing the fur below his rib cage, that this mission had somehow strayed far from his initial concept of it. This was, of course, due to the poor planning and incompetence of his bipedal subordinates. If they weren’t so young and cute, he would have seriously considered showing them the rough side of his paw. However, since they were in his care, and he was actually rather fond of them, he exercised the patience and strategy all catkind employed when stalking a goal, a tidbit, or, if things were dull, a leaf or a dust mote. All of his wiliness, feline and otherwise, would be required to turn this trip around, and he knew it. Fortunately, he was more than up for the challenge.