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

by Anne McCaffrey

  “How was the mission?”

  “Oh, it was successful. The LoiLoiKuans are as pleased as a race that has lost a third of their population can be. But Khorii isn’t well. I think we should try to contact her parents again, since we’re somewhat closer now.”

  “I’ll get right on it, if you’ll give me the data. What’s wrong with Khorii?”

  “The problem is that she ended up not only healing the sick LoiLoiKuans, but also purifying the ocean here when she dived in. There aren’t many boundaries, and it’s a lot of water.”

  “She can do that?” Jaya said.

  “Something like that,” Elviiz said. “This is the Nakomas en route.”

  “So that’s how she does it,” Marl said. “Duh. It took a while to sink in, but I knew that damn poultice didn’t do any good. It’s the horn, right? Her handy little all-purpose tool for making everything all better. Well, well, well.”

  Khiindi did not like the way he said that.

  “And the android’s horn is just because he’s a silly ass, right? He wants to look like her. I notice he never does any of the actual healing even though she always says ‘we’ are going to decontaminate something or other.”

  The scaredy-cat part of Khiindi afraid for his own tail and pelt faded into the background, and the older, more intelligent, if not wiser part took over. This fellow could be a threat to more than him. Something should be done about him, and soon. Khiindi sat and considered, his tail lashing back and forth. Marl had caught him by surprise once, but the truth was that a bully like him was no match even for merely a smart cat, much less a cat who was only apparently a cat and had Khiindi’s background. The thing about bullies was, you had to stand up to them, even if you only came to the middle of their shins. Cats could leap, claw, bite, tear, ride, jump, and do many other things to protect themselves if necessary. But very few possessed the wits that Khiindi did, at least when he remembered to use them. It was alarming, really, how being frozen in cat form was causing him to sink into the bestiality of his nature, rather than remembering who he really was and using the skills that had always stood him in good stead. The mental ones anyway. He was an empath by nature and he had not even attempted to figure out why Marl hated him so much. All he could sense was that the fellow loathed felines, or maybe just didn’t like HIM. He did not seem particularly bent on destroying the VES at all, did not send them the sneers and narrow-eyed threatening looks he cast at Khiindi.

  That was not the point now, however. The point was that this—what was the word? Punk? Young thug?—showed signs of being a threat to Khorii. Most of the time, Khiindi let Khorii protect him, even though he was actually with her to protect her. Ordinarily if she needed protecting, Elviiz did it, and often irritated her when he did.

  But while Marl had been lazy, annoying, and insensitive, he had not done anything dangerous to anyone since the incident with Khiindi at the pool room. Meanwhile, Elviiz had been shamed by his violent reaction to Marl back on Maganos. He might process twice before acting against Marl again, and that would not be good for Khorii.

  Khiindi rose and stretched, putting a paw on Sesseli’s leg just to remind her he was there. He would be as vigilant as the VES were at a mousehole. More vigilant, since Khorii and the secret of the Linyaari people were at risk.

  Khorii drifted in her sleep, strange, deeply resonant sounds reverberating through her mind, echoing off something far away, or perhaps they were answered? This was the far talk, she realized, the LoiLoiKuan adaptation of the ancient speech of whales from millenniums ago on a world long dead. Like the whales, LoiLoiKua’s people spoke to each other across the miles of water separating one community, or pod, from another. But now she thought it might be going even farther.

  Then she saw that it was her parents sending a message to her through space. They were swimming through a sea of the little motes that Khorii had come to associate with the plague as they called out to her. But though their faces were straining with the effort and their mouths moving, no sounds came out. She studied their faces to try to read their lips and listened as hard as she could with her mind, but all she heard was “purrrr purrr purr.” She was no longer swimming, she knew, because most cats disliked water and soft, heavy, furry weight seemed to be piled all over and around her.

  “She’s waking up,” Elviiz said. “And she’s feeling better, too. Young Linyaari recover from overexertion much faster than their elders, I’ve been told. See? Her horn is already translucent, and you can detect the golden color now.”

  “Elviiz!” Khorii said, sitting up and dumping cats everywhere. “You aren’t supposed to emphasize that kind of thing to—you know?”

  “Oh? You have not been very subtle about it at all,” he replied. “It is not as if they can fail to see the changes in your horn, Khorii. It was right there for everyone to see.”

  “Of course it was but…”

  “And these are all our friends,” he said, waving to Asha, Jaya, Hap, Sesseli, and the cats. It was a sweeping gesture that even included Marl. “They will not ask questions.”

  “I have a few,” Marl said, holding up his hand. Elviiz gave the arm, the one he had broken, a meaningful look, and Marl quickly tucked it behind him.

  Khorii observed this with amusement. She was still quite tired, but also felt light and rather cheerful. “I just saved a whole planet full of people, didn’t I?” she told, rather than asked, her crew mates. “Really, I did very well. Mother and Father should have taken us with them, Elviiz. We could have helped.”

  “Yes, we could have,” he agreed. “But you must remember to heal people out of the water next time. Healing an ocean that covers an entire planet is rather ambitious.”

  She yawned and stretched and leaned over to pet Khiindi. “It wasn’t all that big a planet really. I’m fine. And I didn’t have to swim all the way out to touch the people near the reef because, when I purified the water, it carried the healing with it even to the sick poopuus far away. I must have killed all of the organisms that were in the water, and therefore in the people breathing the water.”

  “Too bad you can’t do it with people who don’t breathe water,” Asha said. “That could come in handy. As it is, I don’t know if anything can really be done to check the spread of this plague now.”

  Chapter 24

  Aari and Acorna were awakened by a strange sound. A slow, rhythmic pounding shook the door of their cabin. Calling for the pounder to come in evoked no response, so Aari rose and opened the door.

  Maak stood there, something limp and furry draped over one arm. “We are broken,” he said in a slow, slurred voice much like a recording played on a damaged machine. Aari hurriedly took the raglike form of RK from the android. Maak was emitting sparks from his oral cavity, and the arm that had been holding RK stayed upright, as if carrying something invisible.

  “Where is Joh?”

  “Broken,” Maak said.

  Acorna was now fully awake. Neither of their horns had returned to full opacity yet, but she felt a little better. “Who is on the bridge, Maak?”

  “Brokennn,” he repeated, his already slowed voice deteriorating further into unintelligible noises.

  “I’ll go, Aari. Here, give me RK.”

  “He’s very—” Aari started to say, but when Acorna felt the cat’s body she gasped in alarm.

  “His life is nearly gone!” she said, and immediately lowered her horn into the cat’s fur while she carried him to the bridge.

  To her chagrin, RK didn’t immediately rally as she had expected, though he did give a miserable mew and coughed. His eyes were crusted shut with discharge, and the fur of his tail and hindquarters was matted and filthy.

  How long had she and Aari slept anyway? The last time they’d seen RK he was his usual boisterous, bouncing, and bossy self. His sickness looked like a feline version of the plague, but how could that be? She and Aari had thoroughly decontaminated the ship before they left. All of the Condor’s crew had been in good health then.
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  Her horn was not functioning fully yet. She could smell the foulness of RK’s illness, and it was growing stronger rather than weaker. She saw the side of Captain Becker’s head and his arm in the command chair.

  “Captain, RK is very ill and Maak appears to be malfunctioning. He said the Condor was also malfunctioning. I came to help. We are so sorry we’ve rested for so long when you needed us. You should have awakened us.”

  But there was no reply from Becker. She laid RK in the copilot’s seat and knelt beside the captain. His head lolled, and the hand she had thought was merely relaxed actually flopped back and forth when she raised it.

  The smell had been coming from him, not RK.

  “Oh, Captain Becker, Joh, why did you not call us?” she asked, still reeling from her weariness.

  Laying her horn alongside Becker’s face did no good. It did not even take away the smell of illness. Unzipping the neck of his soiled shipsuit, she laid her ear against his chest and felt it rise a little and fall back as if taking in oxygen was too much effort, each slight breath he took wheezing through his clogged passages as he exhaled. His heartbeat was loud but quite irregular, as if it was beating any way it could to try to pump his blood, but had to make an extremely difficult effort to do so.

  She looked away from him long enough to see that he had set the Condor on autopilot, but that their fuel was low.

  Aari came out. “I shut Maak down,” he said. “I am giving him a fresh energy charge until we can solve what is wrong with his organic components. Where is RK?”

  She nodded to the very quiet cat in the copilot’s seat.

  “Joh, too? Yes,” he said, wrinkling his nose. Automatically, he lowered his horn to his friend’s head, but shook his own head when he received no response. “You tried your horn already, also?”

  “Yes, but we are not yet recovered enough to be able to cure even RK. We must take them to the captain’s cabin and clean them and try to make them comfortable as we saw Jalonzo and Abuelita do with the victims who were waiting for us to treat them.”

  “Fine. I will clean the captain while you clean RK and monitor the Condor’s instruments.”

  “When you have finished cleaning him, try to sleep again so that your horn will regain its strength, my love. Otherwise I fear…” She did not finish saying it, because she could not bear to, and although she tried to hold it back, a single tear welled in her eye.

  “Yes,” he said briskly. She knew he ached for their friends, but his eyes held the same steely glint and his jaw the same stubborn set as they might have shown when the Khleevi had tortured him so long ago. In some ways, this had to be worse, for there was no enemy here to be spotted and fought against, only an insidious invader that seemed to threaten them time after time.

  “I cannot sleep. Right now I feel about as helpless as I have ever felt in my life. We cannot even pilot the ship back to Vhiliinyar so that other Linyaari could heal them. I do not know what humans do to help each other in these situations. Without horns, they have to rely on other methods, and I have never learned what those are. If I can make Joh somewhat comfortable, I will ransack his library and try to find a way to help him and Riidkiiyi.”

  “That is a very useful idea, but we still must continue to rest, yaazi, so our horns will recover their power. Nothing humans have done for the plague so far seems to work very well. I don’t know if they’ve ever had to deal with such a disease before. There have been other plagues, but never one so widespread. I fear what those books can tell you may be of limited use. Rest…”

  “We must keep them alive until we recover enough to heal them though, mustn’t we?” he said. “I do not know how to do that. Joh saved me from a slow death by starvation after I escaped the Khleevi. Because of him, we were able to defeat the Khleevi and rebuild our world. We must do everything possible to save him now.”

  “Yes, of course we must. Find the books and when you can rest, give them to me, and I will research, too. Human medicine is imprecise, but surely there is something that will help.”

  The com unit beeped for Acorna’s attention. It had been so long since anyone had been on the other end, it startled her. “Acorna and Aari, are you okay? Oh, this is Jalonzo.” He waved from the vid screen. “Hola. I was just wondering because you’re still up there, aren’t you, and I thought you were going to go to the other planets.”

  “We’ve had a problem, Jalonzo,” Acorna said. “We can’t go anywhere just now.”

  “Well, if you’re not, would it be possible for you to come back down here and fix the lab so I can start my research? I have some good ideas about this, and one of the elders is a biologist who is going to help me with some experiments, but I need somewhere to work.”

  “No, I’m sorry. We haven’t recovered our strength yet.” She thought about mentioning Becker’s and RK’s illness, but decided against it. It might alarm Jalonzo and everyone else to know that the Linyaaris’ own human crew was sick.

  “Too bad. As soon as you’re better, would you do this before you go, please? I really think I can help.”

  “Let’s see how things progress, Jalonzo. We have some complications here.”

  “Oh. Well, okay. Good-bye then. Uh. Jalonzo out.”

  RK coughed and coughed, but produced no hairballs. She wished that was his problem. He was so weak afterward, and his breathing was very fast and shallow. She laid her face and horn in his fur again. It felt hot, spiky, and damp. Feeling helpless, she stroked him until he stopped writhing and lay motionless in her lap.

  The intercom from Becker’s cabin made a scratchy noise. She jumped at the sound, then flipped the toggle, almost afraid of what Aari might want to tell her. “Acorna, yaazi, I have bad news,” he said.

  “Worse than it is already?”

  “I am afraid so. I have been reading about plagues in these books. I believe that we have both become what was once called a Typhoid Mary.”

  “What?” She wondered if Aari was succumbing to the fever himself.

  “Typhoid Mary,” he said, and began to read, “In the early part of the twentieth century on the part of the Earth known as New York City, an Irish cook named Mary Mallon was identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. Although she claimed never to have had typhoid herself, outbreaks of the fever followed Mary from job to job. The health department found typhoid bacilli in her blood and stool. Many people became very ill from her contagion and three died. Eventually she was isolated on a tiny island for the rest of her life.”

  “You think we brought the plague back onto the ship to Joh and RK, even to Mac’s organic parts?” she asked.

  “Yes. I think in our weakened condition, our resistance to disease was down and the plague attacked us. It could not make us sick because we are Linyaari, and we don’t get sick, even if our horns are not functioning normally. But we brought it with us to Joh and the others, and even worse, I don’t know how we are going to save them.”

  Khorii waited her turn for the sonic showers. Hap, who had been in the engine room, went first. Elviiz, whose nonorganic components could be adversely affected by the shower’s sonics, sought privacy to initiate his self-cleansing routine and change his clothing.

  When Hap emerged, Khorii stripped off her shipsuit and shook it. Linyaari shipsuits were extremely resistant to dirt and body soil and could be worn continually for months if necessary with nothing more than an occasional good shaking. A piece of paper fluttered from one of the deep pockets down onto the deck. Khorii picked it up.

  It was a page from the passenger manifest to the Blanca. She must have missed it when she gave the rest of the list to her mother. Tucking it inside her shipsuit, she showered, came back out, and dressed. The list could go back in her pocket until later.

  Then Elviiz, his toilette completed, returned to the bathing area.

  “Look what I found,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “The hard copy of the passenger manifest. You do not really need it though, you know. I downloade
d all of that information from the ship’s computer while searching the Blanca’s bridge.”

  “You’ve been holding out on me,” she accused.

  “Not really. I have never taken the time to collate the data other than by general categories.”

  “We have time now. What general categories did you download?”

  “Passenger manifest, crew roster and schedules, personnel files, captain’s log…”

  “You found the captain’s log? Why didn’t you say so? That’s one of the things I was looking for.”

  “Why did you not say so?”

  “I’m saying so now. Please upload it to the Mana’s system so I can read it.”

  “I could recite it for you,” he said.

  “Actually, I hate it when you do that,” she told him.

  “Have it your way then.”

  That was one of the good things about Elviiz’s being an android. Unless she wanted to do something that would cause her immediate injury or death, he usually agreed to almost any scheme she came up with, and was more than ready to provide any information she wanted. The only thing he wasn’t very good at was taking the blame if something went wrong. Her parents always looked straight at her. Being a Linyaari child definitely had its drawbacks. Adults could read your mind, and you couldn’t read theirs. But she was working on that…

  Once Elviiz has finished uploading the information, Khorii settled down at a screen and started from the beginning.

  “Captain’s log Day 1:

  Shipped out of Dinero Grande with a passenger roster of dignitaries, ambassadors, corporate heads, royalty, and Federation and local government officials. Most arrived in their own shuttles now docked in our bay. We carry a cargo of the best the Solojo system has to offer, including the finest new vintages of Rio Boca Rojo, the distinctive wine of that world that is much better fresh than aged.

  Day 2: The ship’s surgeon reports four cases of fever and respiratory distress among the cargo handlers. The supply officer is also ill. Fortunately, they have time to recover before we need to off-load the cargo to the Stella Nuevo at Santa Catrina Station.