Acorna's Rebels Part 12

The speech did stimulate Nadhari. She smiled one of her slow and dangerous smiles and said, "And who do you suppose could unite our planet and how, Edu, hmmmm?"

Kando reached over and took her hand, his voice practically throbbing with sincerity as he said, "I was hoping you might help me answer that question, Nadhari, now that you are home again."

Then the Mulzar started in on a narrative about Nadhari's childhood. She kept protesting what he was saying, and he lapsed into one of the Makahomian dialects, one that Macostut apparently understood, too. Occasionally one of them tried to translate the conversation, but this seemed to be an in-joke kind of session and the Mulzar's Standard wasn't up to it, especially as his wine goblet emptied more and more often while he joked.

Becker and MacDonald looked at each other and shrugged. Then MacDonald sat back in his chair and patted his uniform tunic with satisfaction. "So, Jonas," he said, "that young lady you're with, the one with the horn. I heard about someone like her back on Rus.h.i.+ma, last time I stopped over there to repair some of their tractors and give their people a few lessons. They were telling me about a tall young girl with a horn in the middle of her forehead who brought them a special tool that cleaned up their mucky water in no time flat. I looked that tool over and I couldn't find anything but a little slice of something that looks a little like this girl's horn."

Becker was nodding, grinning, as if he knew all about it, and thinking fast. If he knew Acorna, it was a slice of her horn. Since he and Aari were practically blood brothers, and Acorna sort of a blood sister-in-law, that made him practically Linyaari himself, he figured, and he had to protect their secrets.

"Oh, yeah," he said, broadening his grin and going into a riff that was very much like his spiel at the nano-bug markets where he sold some of his salvage cargo. "Aren't those slick? Linyaari nano-technology is something else. I can't believe what those people can fit into one of their little devices. The thing you saw is really just a kind of trigger for the machine. That coating on it is to make it look like the horn is their trademark. They have this whole cla.s.s of people who take things other people invented and refine them and give them a style that's all Linyaari."

"Do tell!" MacDonald said. "Well, those folks are okay with the people on Rus.h.i.+ma, I can tell you."

'Oh, yeah, they're wonderful people. And Acorna is probably the best of them all. She'll probably have all those guardian p.u.s.s.ycats healed and eating out of her hand by the time we get there."

Kando suddenly tuned into him and dropped the Makahomian to ask in Standard, "Then she really can do as she claims, the amba.s.sador?"

"Of course she can. Your p.u.s.s.ycats got nothing to worry about," Becker told him.

"Oh, yes," Nadhari said, also in Standard. "Amba.s.sador Acorna is a wonderful physician." Now it was her turn to elaborate. "Her healing techniques are being taught to the more gifted children on Maganos Moonbase. You may have heard of it, Lieutenant Commander?" The inference in her tone was that Kando, being in the Makahomian backwater, was unlikely to have heard of it. "My former employer, Mr. Li, helped Acorna rid Kezdet of child slavery."

"Why would he do such a thing? " Kando asked.

Nadhari smiled innocently at her cousin. "I forgot. Do you still practice slavery here, Edu? It's considered a very primitive practice elsewhere. I'm surprised the Federation allows it. On Kezdet it was only because the leaders of the slave industry had many low friends in high places."

Macostut sputtered and hurried to defend himself. "We try not to be ethnocentric when dealing with the inhabitants of our member worlds, Lady Nadhari."

Lady Nadhari? Becker looked from the official to his former girlfriend with surprise. Well, she was from the ruling family, after all. Maybe this gave her a rank she didn't claim or hadn't been aware of. From the look on her face it was also one that didn't impress her much.

The man continued. "We try to respect their customs, religion, and cultural mores."

"Cultural mores change in a healthy culture," Nadhari told him.

"Yes," Kando said, "they do. And should. That has been my position since I became Mulzar. If our ways do not change with the times, the culture becomes stagnant. So does a faith when it is not renewed so that the trappings no longer necessary drop away while the essence remains."

"I take it when you say 'trappings' you're not referring to the priesthood, Edu?" Nadhari said, pretending to tease. "Or to your own position?"

Becker turned to MacDonald and drew a number 1 in the air with his forefinger. "Chalk one up for Nadhari," he mouthed. MacDonald nodded sagely.

"You're joking with me now, aren't you, cousin? You always did like to keep me off balance," Kando replied. To Becker he said, "She is such a tease."

Becker began at that point to wonder if this man had any insight into Nadhari's psyche after all.

Six.

What could that possibly have been?"

RK stopped purring, laid his ears back, and opened his eyes to annoyed slits. His paws kept kneading in time to the low grumbling noise, which was now barely audible to Acorna.

(Were we going somewhere or did you just want to stand here to find out if cats can really see in the dark?) RK asked in a quite normal thought pattern.

(Yes,) Acorna said. (Let's go. You can explain what that was all about when we're out of here.)

Whoever or whatever was within the wall, it continued its noise on a very low level but no longer sent emotional messages. Acorna felt like rapping on the wall and asking, "Excuse me, is everything all right in there? We couldn't help noticing you roared."

However, RK squirmed out of her arms and dropped to the ground, then scratched impatiently at something just ahead of them.

She would question both the cat and Miw-Sher more thoroughly later. She walked two more steps and caught up with RK, touching his flank with her foot.

He did not have to thought-speak to tell her he was at the door she was supposed to open. Standard cat/biped nonverbal communication was eloquent enough. She had to give the door a hard shove that nearly spilled her into a dark s.p.a.ce where dust tickled her nose and cobwebs brushed her face, snagged on her horn, and dangled before her eyes to further confuse what little vision she retained in the dark surroundings.

By the time she reached the street, she wouldn't need the scarf, she thought. She "would look like a woman-shaped coc.o.o.n, totally wrapped in silken webbing.

"I wish Mac was here with the flashlight attachment in his arm," she whispered to the cat.

(Why?) RK, apparently feeling sociable again, asked in thought-talk. (I can see perfectly well. My eyes are much better than yours, but there's not much to see. I'll bet the mice around here are starving. This place is empty. If I weren't convalescing from my recent illness I'd jump down and chase some of those sa.s.sy spiders.)

(I'd much rather you'd find us another door - preferably one that doesn't open right onto the street,) she told him.

(On your left. Just reach out with those long arms and clever fingers of yours. Although I am, of course, the perfect life form just as I am, I rather wish I could have come with those as optional attachments. I could open anything!)

(You'd lose out on the fun of getting others to do it for you,) Acorna told the cat, grasping the door latch and pulling. Hot air a.s.sailed her nostrils. A lash of a breeze blew fresh oxygen into her face. She closed the door, which led into an alleyway between the building and the one adjacent to it.

Through the crack between the buildings she saw the moons quite distinctly. She drew the scarf over her head. RK climbed up on her shoulders and said, (Now cover the kitty. That's a good girl.) He purred to give her positive reinforcement for doing as she was told. Not that she hadn't intended to anyway. His desires were distinct enough without the verbalizations. Being privy to the specific meaning of opinions the cat had formerly expressed by body language would take some getting used to.

Once they were in the street, RK leaped down from her shoulders and streaked ahead of her, sprinting from shadow to shadow.

With her scarf draped low over her forehead to cover her horn, Acorna aroused no interest in the locals. Indeed, there was no one to be interested. The streets were lined with low, flat-roofed dwellings, each with a single small window near the door. Otherwise, they were occupied only by a pungent haze of smoke. She supposed the lack of windows in the thick red-clay walls served to keep the heat as well as the light out. However, this night was cool, and may have even felt chilly to people accustomed to a semidesert climate. She vaguely remembered, on her sprint from s.p.a.ceport to Temple, seeing a few people sitting on their rooftops, watching the last of the suns setting in the west while waiting for the first glimmer of the first of the moons to rise in the east. Both moons were up now, crescent shapes floating through the night sky.

She supposed people might sleep up on the roofs sometimes, but no one appeared to be doing so tonight. The rooftops were inhabited only by shadows, or so she thought until suddenly RK halted directly in front of her, growling, tail las.h.i.+ng, staring at something above him on the far side of the street. She followed his gaze and saw it, just briefly.

At first she thought it was a person, for it moved more like a biped running in a stooped position than a true quadruped. But she glimpsed ears rotating back to catch RK's growl, saw the claws and muzzle silhouetted in the moonlight and what appeared to be a clubbed tail, las.h.i.+ng like RK's.

It leaped and was gone as if it had been no more than a cat fancy, one of those things that cats alone can see. Acorna had seen it, however. Perhaps because she was linked to RK's consciousness, but more likely because it had been there.

At any rate, RK's fur smoothed down, his ears went up, his tail quieted, and he sat for a moment was.h.i.+ng his paw.

(What was that?) Acorna asked. (Did it have something to do with whatever was happening inside the wall?)

RK tapped his tail twice on the pavement. (I don't know, but maybe. I never saw one like it before. Nadhari might know. Maybe it was a ritual dancer imitating one of us G.o.d-like Temple guardians. I'd chase it if I didn't have you to protect.)

(Sorry to be such a burden,) she apologized with some amus.e.m.e.nt. (I will ask Nadhari when we see her, but are you sure you wouldn't like to share with me what exactly happened before?)

RK considered. (It's a cat thing, Acorna. You wouldn't understand.)

(How so a cat thing? I am sure I heard a human voice.)