Acorna's Rebels Part 1

Anne McCaffrey.

Acorna's Rebels.

One.

The mountains were still not right. Oh, the peaks soared majestically enough. Gaali, a huge crest translucent with snow and deep blue glaciers, loomed above the purple-blue cone of Zaami, which nestled between it and the rugged, sharp-edged icy summit of Kaahi, the only one of the three ma.s.sive slopes ever to have been scaled.

These peaks had an almost mystical significance to Acorna's people, the Linyaari. They were the top of the world, and Our Star's progress from one side of Gaali's peak to the other had once divided a Linyaari day as the rising of moons did on other planets. The sight of the rugged mountains against the horizon had meant home to the Linyaari - until their world was invaded by an alien race, the Khleevi. The Khleevi had destroyed everything in their path, even the highest mountains on Vhiliinyar, the native planet of the Linyaari.

Many of the Linyaari recovery teams working on their ravaged homeworld had recently seen their mountains again, beautiful and whole. Caught up in the alien machinery of a long-buried ancient city there, they had been trapped and s.n.a.t.c.hed into their planet's past. Returning time travelers brought back sketches, notes, specimens, even vids of the peaks, but Acorna could not reconcile any of their images perfectly with the holo program that would form the basis for the re-formation of the peaks.

"You've redone that range twenty times if you've done it once, Princess. Give it a rest," said Jonas Becker, CEO of Becker Interplanetary Recycling and Salvage Enterprises Ltd., and captain of the firm's flag and only s.h.i.+p, the Condor.

"It's as if every person who has seen those mountains has seen different ones, Captain," Acorna said. "No matter how we build them, someone will be disappointed or think there is something we have left out."

"We'll just put all the controversial stuff at the top of the high one, then." He shrugged. "That way if they want to nitpick they'll have to either climb it or land on it to find fault."

"Maybe. But they are already rebuilding our home more slowly than most people truly wish because of Aari and me. I want everything to be just right when each feature of old Vhiliinyar is reinstated."

"You are really something," Becker said, shaking his head. "You look like you haven't finished high school, yet you're trying to push mountain ranges around and tell forests how to grow because you also think you can tell people what to see when they look at them? Give it up, Princess. It wasn't just because of Aari that your people decided to take the more conservative approach to reterraforming Vhiliinyar. Expense entered into it, and truly owning their home, and all that other stuff Kaalmi Vroniiyi and the Ancestors talked about at the last Council meeting. It's time for you to let go a little. You have to do something besides work and hang out at the time machine in case Aari pops up."

"I do other things!" Acorna said with a little jut of her lower lip. "I go for long walks. I talk with the Ancestors and the Elders. I make notes of how the environment is trying to heal itself from the Khleevi damage."

At that moment a piece of debris flew between them on an ill-tempered breeze blowing through the ancient city. Though the breeze was nothing like the high roaring winds that plagued Vhiliinyar's barren surface these days, it carried blades of ice in it nonetheless. The debris was pounced on and subdued immediately by Becker's first mate, a Makahomian Temple cat Becker called Roadkill, or RK. Being the second in command on a salvage s.h.i.+p, RK was a highly skilled professional when it came to collecting junk. However, in this case, once he had pounced on the object, which turned out to be a crumpled list of specimens collected by aagroni Iirtyi in different eras of Vhiliinyar history, the paper's lack of resistance bored the cat.

Abandoning his prey, RK strolled over to greet Acorna, leaped onto her shoulder, and walked across her chest. Purring madly, he rubbed his face against the tablet she held. She finally released it and rubbed his chops, which had been his master plan all along, she suspected.

Becker continued his own blandishments. "Going for a walk isn't like really going anywhere. You haven't even visited MOO in over six weeks. Hafiz has summoned RK and me to visit him there, and we're about to board the Condor now. Come on with us. Mac would love to see you. Besides, if there's salvage to haul, we'll be shorthanded without Aari. We could really use your help. My back has been acting up lately." The very able-bodied veteran s.p.a.cefarer rubbed the small of his back and groaned, while watching her from slitted eyes to see if she was looking sympathetic.

She laughed. "Oh, very well, Captain. I take it that you are not employing your acting skills because you wish me to heal your 'bad back,' but because you're so flatteringly desperate for my company, such as it is these days. Let me tell Maati and the others I'm going, leave a few notes for them on how to continue my work here, get some things together, and I'll be right with you."

As soon as they were back in s.p.a.ce Acorna realized that Becker had been right to lure her away from the planet. Back on Vhiliinyar, no matter how hard she worked, she always kept one part of her focus on the people around her, secretly waiting for someone to say they'd seen him - coming out of the lake or near the time device or... somewhere.

Here on the Condor, with Becker, Mac, and the cat, it was almost like the impossibly recent good old days when they had all been together. Except now there was someone definitely missing. Aari's absence was still all too painful to her.

One nice thing about the Condor was that, since Becker was continually patching it up with salvaged parts and pieces, it never actually looked the same, outside or in, two trips in a row. Something always needed to be repaired or replaced, and Becker had a particular talent for integrating the mechanical and electronic equipment of far-flung alien cultures so that it blended together into the intergalactic hash that was his vessel.

On this trip she recognized some hull modifications made with bits of salvaged Linyaari s.h.i.+ps-the gaily painted and gilded loops and flowers made the skin of the Condor resemble a patchwork quilt. Becker seemed to have had a bit of trouble with the control panel, too. A part of the current module had been salvaged from a Khleevi vessel. The Khleevi controls were designed to be manipulated by widely s.p.a.ced pincers and were sized for a very large being, instead of human or Linyaari hands. Becker had rigged sticks with pulleys that operated pincers at the ends of them for performing certain functions at the control panel. Acorna wasn't sure she wanted to know what those functions were.

As the s.h.i.+p approached MOO, she felt her anxiety rising about being so far away from Vhiliinyar and the time machine again. What if Aari returned while she was gone?

"Captain, could we hail Maati?"

"Sure, honey, but don't you think she'd have hailed us if anything had happened? Look, Acorna, I know this has to be rough for you, but Aari loves you. It doesn't matter how much it seems like the guy went out for a packet of chickweed and was gone for six months; if there's a way for him to get back, he'll be back. And you're going to be the first person he looks for. You know I'm right."

"Actually, Captain, I just wanted to see if Maati had a message for her parents. They're back on MOO now finis.h.i.+ng up some research."

Though he raised a doubting eyebrow at her, Becker did as she asked. It took some time for Maati to reach a com console and report back, but when she did, she looked more excited than Acorna had seen her look since Aari's disappearance.

"Kh.o.r.n.ya, I'm so glad to hear from you! The aagroni Iirtye is back from his latest time voyage. He's been collecting specimens again, you know, but he found out something really strange on this trip. Apparently he couldn't find any pahaantiyirs on Vhiliinyar, no matter where he looked, and he looked right up until a generation or two before the older Linyaari among us were born. Of course, he couldn't continue his search any farther because of the s.p.a.ce-time continuum problem, but he didn't find any ancestors of the pahaantiyirs on our planet at all."

Acorna was hard pressed to understand her young friend's fascination with this discovery. Maati had never seen the species the older Linyaari remembered from Vhiliinyar before the Khleevi invasion. The Linyaari Elders claimed that RK looked incredibly like those beloved feline creatures, however.

"The species must not have been indigenous to Vhiliinyar, then," Acorna said. "Probably they came from one of the trading planets."

"n.o.body remembers which one, if they did," Maati said. "It's kind of a mystery, really."

"More of a mystery to me is the fact that, if they were so highly thought of, why didn't our people bring pahaantiyirs with them from Vhiliinyar when they fled? "

"It's funny about that," Maati said. "Everybody I've talked to said they just suddenly couldn't find their furry friends when the time came to go. Like the pahaantiyirs had already disappeared. The evidence from our recent explorations seems to bear that out. At least we haven't found any feline bones in the rubble out on the surface. That's good, don't you think?"

"I suppose. Maybe the pahaantlyirs all found the secret city and have been hunting vermin down there. Maybe we'll run into their offspring, fat and happy, when we explore the city further."

"I hope so," Maati said. "But meanwhile, the aagroni would like to know if Captain Becker would ask Commander Kando if she knows anything that might connect RK's fellow Temple cats and our pahaantiyirs."

"Be glad to," Becker said. "Nadhari doesn't talk about the old homeworld much, but maybe we just need to ask her."

Acorna heard something unsettling in Becker's tone when he spoke of Nadhari Kando, the security chief for Hafiz Harakamian's Moon of Opportunity, and a very formidable woman. "Is there something wrong with Nadhari, Captain?" she asked. She could read him, of course, but that would have been a breach of good manners, and besides, Becker was very good at expressing himself verbally.

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

"Is it because you are no longer mates?"

"No. I mean, it's not just me. Seem to me like she's shutting down emotionally-and with everybody. At first I thought maybe it was just me, because she was mad at me and wanted to be with that Federation soldier, but then she dumped him after a couple of months. And she doesn't mind that I was seeing Andina. She likes her, says she's better for me than she was. That's not like Nadhari-trust me. Nadhari and me-well, we're still friendly, and yeah, I still care about her. But something smells funny to me-though we haven't had a real conversation since I came back from collecting the salvage on narhii-Vhiliinyar, so I'm not exactly sure what's on her mind."

"But you have an idea?" Acorna prompted.

He nodded, eyes down, lips compressed, shoulders hunched forward a little. "Yeah. I think she's still stirred up inside about what happened to her when Edacki Ganoosh and General Ikwaskwan doped her up and turned her into a torture machine to use against your people."

"But surely she knows that was not her fault," Acorna said. "And my people, as soon as they were able, healed her of her wounds, both physical and psychic. Didn't they?"

Suddenly she felt guilty. She had been so preoccupied with her own problems-her lifemate Aari's disappearance, initially due to a temporal accident caused by Vhiliinyar's systematic destruction by the Khleevi, and later exacerbated by her own attempts to find him and bring him back-that her worries had caused her to shut down in a way. She'd somehow forgotten that other people had problems, too, problems they might not want to share with her for fear of adding to her burden. But the truth was that it was a relief to think of someone else's troubles now. For the time being, she had gone as far as she could with her own.

Becker shrugged. "Sure, they forgave her for the harm she did to them, and healed her of the drugs and her wounds, but did she forgive herself? For someone like Nadhari, someone used to being in charge of her own destiny, to being the meanest, baddest, toughest thing walking-what those guys did to her must have messed with her spirit in a real fundamental way. I think she distracted herself for a while with MOO, the Harakamians, me, the Federation guy, but I don't think she's over it. I don't think anyone else can cure someone of something like that. I think she has to figure it out for herself, and she just isn't doing it. Instead, she's cutting herself off from everybody who cares about her. The only one she really seems to be normal with is RK, but she doesn't want me to leave him with her. I offered. h.e.l.l, he offered,

but it's like she doesn't trust herself not to hurt him or something.

"Oh, Captain, I had no idea. I am very sorry for her pain. Do you want me to try to read her? To see if I can do some deeper healing? It sounds to me as if her... condition is somewhat similar to Aari's."

"Yeah, it is. Except, I think, Aari wasn't forced to do anything against his own nature. Even though he was tortured and everything, he stayed a Linyaari. The Khleevi took his horn and broke his bones and nearly killed him, but they didn't make him hurt anyone else. He endured pain, but he didn't inflict it. Ganoosh and Ikwaskwan turned Nadhari inside out, let loose that bad dog she always keeps on a tight leash, and turned her into what she hates the most. She has that monster side to her and she knows it, but she controls it rigidly because at heart she's a protector, Princess. A natural-born hero, a defender of the weak. And Ganoosh and his goons doped her up and turned her loose on the weak to maim and destroy them. Think what that must have been like for her-to get turned against her 'will into the very monster she's always fought against. It's no wonder she's a little messed up right now. She needs something, but she doesn't know 'what it is, and I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's anything you Linyaari can supply that you haven't already."

Unable to say anything to help, Acorna fell silent for most of the remainder of the short hop to MOO. She and Becker each thought their respective thoughts 'while RK lay between them on the console, his tail waving lazily back and forth.

Hafiz Harakamian, a wily, wealthy intergalactic businessman and her adopted uncle, greeted Acorna warmly when they arrived on the Moon Of Opportunity, but he kept a sympathetic reserve. Acorna could see many unasked questions in his eyes. Just as well he didn't ask. No, Aari had not shown up or been located. Everyone in the galaxy would know when he turned up - she would be so happy she'd broadcast that far and wide.

For Becker, Hafiz had a mission in mind.

"I am told you can communicate with these persons," Hafiz said, gesturing grandly toward the perpetually suspicious and usually filthy forms of Wat and Wat, the Terran unicorn hunters who had accidentally been transported from ancient times to Vhiliinyar along with the Ancestors. The nearest anyone could figure, Wat and Wat, once their presence was discovered by the Ancestral Hosts, had been sent to an ancient period in Vhiliinyar's history where they could do no harm to sentients. However, when the ruination of Vhiliinyar's surface caused fractures in the time apparatus, the two hirsute Earthmen had suddenly reappeared and began hunting Linyaari as if no interruption in their activities had ever occurred.

"No one else can make themselves understood to these ruffians," Hafiz said. "They annoy my guests and they have the deportment of goats. They speak to you; therefore they are your responsibility." Hafiz crossed his wide brocade sleeves across his chest. He had spoken.