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

by Anne McCaffrey

  Well, sure. Ray tried to tell them that sort of thing was years, maybe decades, in the future, and they didn’t really need to worry about it, but there was no shutting them up until the Federation took the problem under advisement. With unusual speed and efficiency, the children had been lifted into tanks that were loaded aboard a huge cargo ship and transported to Maganos Moonbase. The locals didn’t write, of course, since they lived underwater. Neither did the kids. Ray certainly had not been given communications equipment sophisticated enough to allow the kids to hail the home-folk every week or so.

  So the adults had stayed unhappy and just a tinge bitter, though they still considered Ray their friend. Little did they know how happy he would have been to turn the whole moist mess over to some fresh new officer who was, as Ray confided privately to his fellow commanders, heh heh, wet behind the ears to, heh heh heh, get his feet wet.

  But he thought, when he got the invitation to speak at the council on Rio Boca, that at least the Federation recognized his work and was rewarding him by sending him home in time for Carnivale.

  That would have been wonderful, to see his brothers and sisters again, to get into a costume that excused all sorts of behavior unbefitting an officer and a gentleman, and to parade through the streets to music a whole lot livelier than a LoiLoiKuan lament.

  He simply could not believe it when the council ended early and everyone was dismissed, told to report back to their duty stations at once. Just because a few guys had gotten sick. Probably the hotel food. It didn’t keep very well in hot climates, and all of the planets in the Solojo system were pretty tropical. The incomers who had set up some of the new industries should have paid attention to his mama and other locals who knew how to preserve and prepare food in the climate. He hadn’t had any trouble himself, well, not at first, but he had been ordered back two days before the start of Carnivale. His ship left four hours before his sisters and brothers were due to arrive from Paloduro to catch him up on the news and take in the first of the parades on Rio Boca.

  After that, all of them were going back to Corazon on Paloduro to see the hometown events where Ray could let his hair down without quite so much Federation scrutiny.

  He was so disappointed and angry he felt literally sick by the time his shuttle docked on the small island containing the goofy sand castle outpost building the LoiLoiKuans had designed as an acceptable surface structure on their world.

  He felt as if he was burning up, had started to cough and yes, finally, the effects of whatever bug had ended the conference early began to tell on his own digestion. He threw up on the beach as he disembarked from the shuttle, and almost didn’t make it to the latrine. He sat in there for hours afterward, coughing when he wasn’t making use of the bowl from one end or the other. He felt as if his chest were in a vise. Finally, he had to abandon the latrine and the castle because there simply wasn’t enough oxygen in there. He couldn’t get his breath. He dragged himself out onto the beach. He had no idea what time it was when he reached the water because he kept conking out every time he pulled himself forward a little and collapsed into the coughing fits again. What he coughed up had become bloody. This was some case of dysentery!

  Finally, in his fever, he reached the water’s edge and dipped his face and hands into it. He knew it was only lukewarm, about like swimming in pee he always thought, but he was so hot that it felt deliciously cool.

  He didn’t know when the LoiLoiKuans found him and dragged him the rest of the way into the water, carefully keeping his head above water, while they called for their healers, cleaned him, and sang to him.

  He didn’t know when the healers reached him and saw him, no longer coughing, eyes fixed and glazed, limbs dangling limply, doing their own slow dance to the rhythm of the waves.

  Chapter 15

  Jalonzo was told by his school counselors that, like a lot of extremely bright youngsters, he was intellectually too far advanced beyond his peers for normal socialization. Which meant basically that he didn’t have much in common with a lot of the kids at school. He tended to watch other people a lot and not say much unless he had something to say, and sometimes other people misinterpreted his actions and had trouble understanding where he was coming from. He had the same trouble understanding them at times, too. But he pretty much understood gamers, and that and his knowledge of the structure of the games was the only protection he had for all of them.

  He felt bad about the nachos. Really bad. Two of the older guys got sick pretty quickly after the new game began. The others, even the girls, were so absorbed in the new game they barely noticed. When Atl of the Flowing Waters cried out as Avilix the Stone-faced slumped across the dice, Jalonzo walked around the table and patted Avilix, who was actually Jorge Ramirez, on the back saying, “Good death, Avilix! Now you have to leave until the others can bring you back to life again! I will take you now to the underworld to await rebirth.”

  It was a good thing for Jalonzo he was so much bigger than the other kids, even the older ones like Jorge, who was almost twenty. He half carried Jorge away up the stairs. The smaller boy spewed once and Jalonzo ran with him to the upstairs bathroom and got him in a stall just in time. He went back to clean up the mess, then returned to the bathroom. Jorge had fallen forward with his head against the door. Jalonzo couldn’t crawl under the door very far but managed to push Jorge’s upper body back enough to get the stall open, flush, and with a grimace, clean Jorge before laying him as gently as possible on the tile floor in front of the stall. It was a good place to be for someone who felt the way Jorge did. The tile was cool but not cold because the air temperature was too warm for that. Jorge was burning up.

  Lupe Sanchez, Princess Papan in the new game, threw up on the floor. Jalonzo didn’t want to be cleaning up girls, so he figured it was time to let somebody else know what was going on. “Princess Atl, you and Princess Papan have been kidnapped by the Trickster Twins. You come with us to the underworld now.”

  “But Jalonzo, I mean Quetzacoatl, I—”

  He shot her a pleading look and nodded to Lupe. Her eyes opened wider, her mouth forming an “O,” and she got up and took Lupe’s other side.

  He helped Maria get Lupe onto the stool, then went to clean up the mess downstairs.

  The gamers might be focused, but they could still smell. “What’s the matter with Jorge and Lupe, Jalonzo?”

  “I think there was something wrong with some of the food,” he said truthfully enough. “If any of the rest of you start feeling bad, let me know. We still can’t call our folks or the curos or even the sponsor, and of course you forfeit your standing in the tournament if you leave the building without permission. So we’re just parking people near a bathroom till they feel better.”

  Later, he switched the game around so that people played in shifts, some of them sleeping on their pads near the bleachers while three or four kept the action going at the table.

  When the power went off in the middle of the night, he found candles in the janitor’s pantry and flashlights in the security office and everyone agreed that made the atmosphere a lot more authentic.

  Only two other people got sick that night which was a good thing, because Jorge died the next morning.

  When Lupe died shortly after noon, Maria went ballistic. “One of us has to go get help. Who cares about the stupid game! People are dead, Jalonzo. Dead!”

  “Shhhh,” he said, blocking the sound of her voice by standing in front of her, even though everyone else was still downstairs. “We can’t go. It’s not because of the game. I need to show you something. Come on.”

  He led her upstairs to the window and showed her the bodies in the streets and the quarantine flags. The flies were so thick around the bodies that you could hardly see them for the black cloud. “Nobody has picked those people up, Maria. Not since yesterday. And those yellow flags mean nobody is supposed to go into those houses or come out of them. Abuelita—” His voice caught as he thought about his grandmother. Was she lying sic
k alone at home worrying about him? Was she already gone? He couldn’t believe it. Not his tough little grandmother. She was a doctor. She knew all about this kind of sickness. “—she told me that in the old days, when they had really bad plagues that killed people, the authorities would shoot people who tried to leave a quarantined building.”

  “I don’t think we need to worry about that,” Maria said. “Doesn’t look like the authorities are bothering with us one way or the other. If they were worried about well people catching something, they’d have taken away the bodies.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is—I mean, it’s really bad about Jorge and Lupe, but not that many other people seem to be very sick, so maybe the food wasn’t very contaminated. If we go out there, with the bodies and the flies and everything, more will get sick, maybe die. So the way I see it, we’re all better staying here as long as we can and keeping it quiet as long as we can so everyone can concentrate on the game instead of worrying about their folks and stuff. Because from what Abuelita’s told me and I’ve read, there’s nothing we can do without probably making things worse.”

  “If you’ll unlock the cafeteria, I’ll check the freezers and the pantries and see if there’s enough food to keep us from starving in the meantime. I might have to get Carlos to help me. He’s a good cook. I hate to tell him, though. He’s kind of excitable. But we’ll have to tell the others something before long. The tournament is supposed to end the day after tomorrow.”

  “Maybe help will come by then.”

  One thing about the lack of sleep and the hypnotic concentration on the game. When they did have to tell the others, and Jalonzo took them one by one up to the window and told them what he’d told Maria, nobody said much or even seemed very surprised. Jalonzo wondered if maybe some of them hadn’t figured it out on their own. He felt very proud of the gamers then that they kept their heads about them. After all, there was really nowhere for them to go. He kept trying to think of something to do, some way to get in touch with people. Maybe he’d go out himself one more time and try to find someone. After all, he’d even touched the dead guy and hadn’t gotten sick, so probably he was immune or at least resistant to the mystery disease. Maybe everyone hadn’t gotten sick, so maybe there were people out there who were still okay. It was a comforting thought. He hoped it was true.

  Khiindi tried to follow Khorii and Elviiz, but they were too fast with the hatch door. Of course, had it not been for his recent traumatic experience, Khiindi knew he would have been plenty fast enough to thwart them, but in his weakened condition he was stuck inside with the youngsters.

  They were nice youngsters, but they were not his responsibility, and he wanted none of their “Nice kitty, it’s okay, Khiindi kitty, they’ll be back soon. We can’t go out there because the air is bad.”

  Nonsense! As soon as Khorii’s horn hit the oxygen supply it would be plenty safe for anyone to breathe. He knew the power of Linyaari horns better than the average Linyaari did, and he had every faith in her ability to neutralize any contaminant foolhardy enough to cross her path.

  She was a mere child and she needed his help. Elviiz, of whom he thought rather kindly at the moment, was, of course, of remarkable intellect, strength, and versatility, but despite his programming, he was also a child. His father had designed him that way, with regular upgrades for “growth spurts” so that he would be a suitable companion for Khorii.

  Of all of the ship’s occupants, Khiindi was the only one who was an adult, and not just in cat years. He was a great deal older than any of them knew, older than anyone they knew, and if he wished to get even older, no harm must come to Khorii.

  However, in the interests of continuing to grow old, he thought it would be best if he looked after her somewhere other than Maganos Moonbase, where youthful thugs waited in ambush to wreak excruciating destruction on his poor little cat shape.

  Khiindi, feline though he was, could never be mistaken, even remotely, for a tiger or a lion or another of the large predatory members of his genus. Well, there had been a time of course when he could change his shape to resemble one of them, but temperamentally it was not his thing. He was more of a lover than a fighter, more brain than brawn, more apt to use his quick wits than his claws to extract himself from unhealthy situations.

  And it seemed to him that the best course of action for him, and therefore, naturally, for Khorii, would be to take charge of this perfectly good vessel, decontaminated by his young Linyaari charge, of course, and go find her parents. He knew from past experience that Aari and Acorna could and would look after him as well as their daughter. Whereas in times past, in other incarnations, in other shapes, he had delighted in exploring new worlds, meeting new people, siring new races upon the most friendly females among those people, new places were infinitely more threatening when one was stuck with a shape that was no more than two feet long, tail extended, ten inches high, ears erect, and fifteen pounds after a particularly satisfying meal.

  They thought his present form was descended from sacred Temple Cats who guarded the holy places of their homeworld, Makahomia. The truth was, the Temple Cats were descended from him. He was smart enough to know that temples were not to defend, they were to hide in, and once they lost their value as shelters, you found another shelter. Preferably a familiar one and preferably nearby. With a steady supply of food and water and, not unimportantly, armed two-leggeds to defend the temple and the cat.

  The thing they had to do was commandeer the ship, find Aari and Acorna and the Condor, and leave this plague-infested place to sort itself out while they went home. Acorna’s human fathers, should they survive the plague, were always welcome to visit them on MOO, weren’t they?

  Unfortunately, clever though he was, he could not open the secured hatch by himself. For that, he needed an accomplice. Widening his eyes to their largest and most golden green, knowing that his pupils would be round and black as lava in the subdued light of the cabin, he fixed Sesseli with his best stare. “Open the hatch,” he thought. “I need to use the litter box, and there isn’t one here. Open the hatch now. I will be fine. The air is fine. Open the hatch now. You must do what I tell you, little girl. You are under my spell, within my power. Open the hatch now.”

  Sesseli finally noticed him staring and gave him a quizzical and slightly worried look. “I think the kitty wants something, Hap,” she said, though she kept her gaze locked with Khiindi’s.

  “Does he?” Hap barely looked up from the instrument panel, which he was studying and experimenting with. “Don’t stare back at him. Cats don’t like that. It’s okay if they stare at you, but if you stare back, they think you’re trying to dominate them.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I think he’s trying to tell me something. What is it, Khiindi cat?”

  Never let it be said that he was a cat to miss his cue. Still holding her gaze with his own, he stood, looking back over his shoulder in such a meaningful fashion that even a very stupid child couldn’t miss the point, and walked over to the hatch.

  “Are you getting this, kid?” he asked mentally, and turned away long enough to rise up on his hind paws and scratch vigorously at the hatch. “Meyowwwt,” he said, quite clearly, but he might as well have been speaking a foreign language for all the compliance with his wishes he got.

  So he lifted his tail and gave a mighty squirt of essence of tomcat.

  “Oh, boy, Elviiz is gonna have to decontaminate the shuttle, too, now!” Hap said. “I thought you were a pussycat, Khiindi, not a civet cat!”

  Khiindi looked at them pointedly, gave a lick to his shoulder, and scratched at the hatch again.

  “No, Khiindi cat,” Sesseli said in her childish but regrettably quite firm voice. She walked over and picked him up under his front legs, compressing his chest and making it a bit difficult to breathe, which made him squirm, but still he was careful not to bite the child. This was not because he was a good kitty. This was because he was beginning to think there was more to little Sesseli than met the e
ye or the nose. “You can’t go out there. You would get sick, and Khorii and Elviiz would have to heal you, too. I guess you’ll just have to go in here if you have to go.”

  He considered going on her shoes. But actually, he didn’t have to. He was simply trying to communicate his wishes and was extremely frustrated to have them thwarted. His Linyaari people never failed to comply. Well, usually not. And it didn’t generally matter anyway. But it did now.

  Then he realized he had been frozen in cat form far too long and was thinking like some stupid lowbred dispatcher of vermin. He didn’t need a person to open the hatch. It was electronic after all, not mechanical. All he had to do was reach the right buttons on the console, which was easy enough to do.

  Hap was still playing with everything, reading diagrams and going through sequences for various procedures without actually touching the buttons. He was pleased when Khiindi, seemingly having forgotten his agenda, hopped up beside him and began playing, too. When he thought about the task rationally, he knew perfectly well which buttons to push. He had seen it done often enough in the past and had seen Khorii do it just a short while ago. Pretending to paw innocently at Hap’s fingers as they darted for the buttons, he “accidentally” hit the ones in question. Then before Hap or Sesseli could register the sound of the opening hatch, he leaped, flashing through the opening like a shooting star. He hit the deck running and was far into the landing bay before the hatch reclosed. No one followed. They wouldn’t dare. They might catch the dread disease, or so they thought. Khiindi, knowing the power of Khorii’s horn, was sure that the area was cleared of contaminants by then. All he had left to do was to get this ship back into space and away from the likes of Marl Fidd.

  He raced out of the docking bay but slowed his pace to an exploratory prowl as he entered the ship’s central corridor. Hmmm. This was a supply ship, yes? No good, as it was. No good to anyone without a nice Linyaari girl to purify things, but of incalculable value to someone who had access to such a girl. Now then, what supplies did this ship carry exactly? Spices? Replicator fodder? Tools and building supplies?