Acorna's Search Part 26

"Is that what is going on?" Becker asked. "No problem. We'll have 'er fixed in a jiffy."

"What is a jiffy?" Thariinye inquired.

"Another time thing," Becker said. In an aside to Acorna, he said, "Why don't you let him fetch your lost ones back, Princess? You're handy to have around and he'd be no great loss."

"I heard that," Thariinye said, with a curious combination of indignation and dignity. "And I think it highly premature to start talking about who is useful and who is not until we have determined how this device works and how best to retrieve our missing friends."

"I have a few hypotheses, based on the data at hand," Mac said. He was applying pressure to the map rapidly and repeatedly and storing the data it presented as it changed. "You'd better be careful there, buddy, you could maybe break that thing," Becker cautioned. "It's an antique. In fact wheeheee, would you look at this place! This would be some very high cla.s.s salvage." He saw Thariinye's horrified look and Acorna's rather stricken one of disappointment in his att.i.tude toward her people's ancient secrets and said quickly, "Just kidding, guys. Honest."

"I hope so, Captain. Right now we need to concentrate on how to use this machinery, not what you could sell it for on an open market. You see there, those white lights we believe represent our people," Acorna told him, pointing them out as the shape of the map changed over and over under Mac's direction. "The maps overall represent the planet's surface at different times in its history. Mac, can you show the Captain the schematic we found earlier?"

"Yes, Kh.o.r.n.ya. It required eight presses of your hand." But as Mac attempted to do the same thing, and he came up with several different maps in which white lights appeared, he could not return them to the same one. "Hmmm," he said. "I am sure there is a pattern here if one can locate it. Perhaps you should try again, Kh.o.r.n.ya," Mac said, stepping aside before he added an unscientific comment that surprised her. "It seems to prefer you."

Maybe it did. What could she do that Mac couldn't? She was telepathic, an ability she supposedly had inherited from both sets of her ancient ancestors. This was an artifact created by those very ancestors. Maybe the map worked with telepathy could it show the viewers the time they needed to see based on what it knew of their thoughts? Telepathy, after all, was a form of energy...

She wanted to concentrate on her friends but instead she projected a thought image of the silver threads connecting this subterranean chamber and its strange device to the surface. That image appeared on the wall, still showing ragged tatters and blobs among the silver extensions as they branched out above ground.

"Hmm," Becker said.

Acorna noticed something about the map she hadn't noticed previously.

"Look at this trunk-line here running away from this room and downward," she said, tracing it with her finger. "It comes from the sea."

"Hmmm," Becker said again.

"I think I see a pattern here. Our site in the Survey was beside what used to be a great waterfall. The wii-Balakiire was investigating the terrain near a former riverbed. Aari's cave and the graves were located along the sh.o.r.eline of another one of the seas, if I remember the details correctly from the maps we had of the planet from the time period immediately pre-Khleevi. Water seems to be a thread that connects every disappearance for which we have enough data to make a surmise."

"I have an idea!" Thariinye exclaimed suddenly. "What if this supposed time force is conducted by the waters of this planet?"

Acorna had to laugh. "Thariinye, that's what I just said."

He looked puzzled. "Well, of course, Kh.o.r.n.ya. But I said it better. What do you think of my idea? "

Acorna rolled her eyes but remained silent.

"I don't quite get it yet," Becker said. "There's no water to speak of left on the surface of this planet anymore. And that's where everybody disappeared from. So how could the disappearances be triggered by water?"

"It's just a theory," Acorna admitted. "But there is plenty of water down here in this ancient city, and there was enough to grow vegetation in our Survey quadrant and so there may be more water out there than we know let me see if I can get this to return to the time just before Aari and the others disappeared. What timeframe would best suit that I know! When RK got in trouble with the carnivore plants." She visualized the cat and the plant and when the map for that time appeared with their own small white lights and the cat's showing on the screen, she imagined the diagram of the silvery energy superimposed on it.

"You may just have a point!" Becker said. "The silvery stuff is still all around, but it's just attached to random bits of water or moisture now nothing to conduct it in a reasonable way. I guess it's gone a little haywire as a consequence. Which could be why people started popping off. Looks to me like if we could get the hydraulics going again at least well enough to get the energy channeled back into its old paths, it might stabilize, and if it stabilizes, well, I'm not sure how it would help exactly but seems to me we'd be closer to some answers. And maybe closer to controlling it well enough to bring some old friends home."

"Why would anyone send time energy through water?" Thariinye asked.

"Hey, why not? How do we know what a bunch of your crazy Ancestors were thinking?" Becker asked. "You know all those songs the Ancestors sing about the rivers of time and the endless sea of life and so forth maybe some Ancestral Friend took them seriously! Actually, it seems to me that if anything could hold a lot of time, water could it's the original deal they were talking about with the saying 'what goes around comes around.' "

"I never thought of it that way, but then, Linyaari songs and poems are more about the tall stalks growing beside the water than about the water itself," Thariinye said. "Still, I fail to understand why we wouldn't know about the time-travel technology from the tales of the Ancestors. Surely, if the Hosts put so much emphasis on time transference as this room indicates, it would still be evident in the stories the Ancestors or the Linyaari tell today. I don't recall any of the Elders ever speaking of time technology among our people, not in their lifetimes nor in the days of the Ancestors. The Ancestors didn't say anything about it to you, did they, Kh.o.r.n.ya?"

"Well, I know of some references to time in the Attendants writings, actually," she said. "In the glyphs we read back in the Ancestors' cave. But they seemed cryptic to me when I read them. Now, however... yes, it's starting to make sense. A little, anyway. I think that the truth is that this technology was entirely one for the Hosts, not something our people adopted for their own at any point. Perhaps by the time our own people evolved enough to use it on their own, this city had vanished into legend and the time-travel mechanisms along with it. Perhaps as long as its normal conduits were available, the power was dormant, turned off and we never knew it was there."

"But by the time the Khleevi finished tras.h.i.+ng the planet, the damage they did to the water table which made up the circuitry for the time force kinda shorted it out," Becker said. He gave a half shrug and a grimace. "I think it's worth a try to see if we're right. Y'know, it makes as much sense as wormholes as a way to move through time and s.p.a.ce. We know those old Hosts really got around the galaxy. Maybe this is how they did it."

Acorna said, "If we are right, I am worried about the consequences of it. It could take us months, even years, to reestablish the waterways on Vhiliinyar in their proper places, and Aari is in trouble now. I heard him, Captain, and I know. Something is very wrong with him, wherever he is."

"You heard him?" Becker asked. "Across time and all? Are you sure what am I saying? Of course you're sure. But, do you think maybe it's just that he's lost and missing you?"

No," she said. "He was afraid. He was in trouble. If he is in danger, then it is fair to a.s.sume the others are, too. We need a solution that will work now."

Now, huh?" Becker snapped his fingers. "I know. Why should we wait for terraforming? We can run water lines from this lake here to the surface right this instant. I've even got a salvaged pump that would be just the ticket somewhere on the MOO, and I bet Hafiz could rustle up a drilling rig."

There's not enough water here to restore the entire planet's former river systems, Captain," Mac pointed out.

Maati shrieked as she plummeted into the water and felt long, twisty tentacles pulling her down. When she opened her eyes, she tried to shriek again, and swallowed water instead. The sii-Linyaari were certainly not a race she'd ever be tempted to crossbreed with. Not that that was an issue if she drowned out here.

(No one has asked you to crossbreed, frii, have they?) said someone very scaly, with a head full of small but lethal-looking horns. His thought in her head appeared in a bubble and sounded deep as the ocean.

(It's very rude to eavesdrop on someone's thoughts without their permission!) Maati shot back, since if she was going to drown, she didn't want to be insulted while she was doing it. (You have only yourself to blame if you don't like what you hear.)

(Look, Ma, they have legs!) said another one of the strange creatures, this one smaller and floating just below Maati.

(And just one horn, like your grandparents,) observed another, floating on the surface and touching Yiitir's horn. Maati could not see her well, but judged the being to be female by the thought-forms. Though she was beginning to worry a lot more about breathing than she was about what the strange creatures around her looked like!

(No need to get personal!) Yiitir said.

(Please.) Maarni said to the creatures crowding around her. (You don't have to drown us to see what we're like. We need to breathe to survive. We'll be happy to sit on the bank of that island over there so you can examine the differences between yourselves and us. We want to see you just as much as you want to see us. There's no need to be angry or hostile. We came to see you because we have heard of you and we wish to know more about you.)

(How can that be?) the h.o.r.n.y-headed one asked, but as he asked for Maati felt surely the creature had to be male-he backed away and let her bob to the surface. Once she surfaced, she found a shelf of land beneath her feet and was able to walk ash.o.r.e. Maarni and Yiitir followed easily behind her. (How can you have heard of us? We have been alive but a single generation from our making. I was the firstborn, followed by others, some siblings, some of different parenting, so that we might breed. That was their intent. They thought better of it when they saw me.) he thought irritably.

Maati, safely on the sh.o.r.e now, lay on the beach on her stomach so she was staring face-first into the water. It seemed only polite to be on the same level with these beings. And now that she was, she saw that the h.o.r.n.y-headed one was the most hideous of the lot. Two obviously female sii-Linyaari, aqua blue of skin and silver of horn, with only small b.u.mps along the spine and top of the head, were actually quite beautiful. Their cranial b.u.mps were surrounded with long thick strands of silvery hair floating away from their faces.

Maarni was thrilled. (Now you can see how the legends of the foam being the hair of the sii-Linyaari began. Aren't they fabulous?)

Maati found it easier to agree now that they had stopped trying to drown her. And while the one child in this grouping had seemed ugly to her, with his scalp full of vestigial horns instead of hair, his brother, who had the same feature, was much more attractive, perhaps because his eyes were a bit less prominent, and because he had hair like that of the females. Not that her opinion of their appearance mattered in any way. She was sure that, like all beings, they had their own ways of judging each other's attractiveness.

Seated a little farther away, Maarni was getting to work collecting data. She was nothing if not single-minded, and as soon as she had beached herself asked the group peering up from the water, (So, if your people have only recently been created, I suppose you have no legends or stories to share with me?)

(I wouldn't go so far as to say that.) the horn-headed male replied, allowing himself to wallow in the shallows and blowing a spume of water to fountain up and fall back down to the surface. (But I've a thing or two to ask you before we say any more.)

(What?) Maati, Maarni, and Yiitir all said at once.

(Just this. You.) and he nodded toward Maati, (you are a youngling, barely more than a frii, whereas you two are older than me, I'd judge, and I am the eldest among my kind. Yet we have never seen your kind before, and presume you must be the latest attempts. Is this true and if so, how did they manage to vary your ages so?)

Maati immediately saw the difficulty Aari had been talking about, with possibly changing the course of history with their presence, but Yiitir, who had expressed some reservations about it, too, blithely answered the sii being.

(We are not newly created. In our own time, we're already a race well established on the planet. Your race is no longer there, however, and we have been wondering what happened to you.)

(Couldn't tell you that since as you can see, we are here.) the male replied. (But we're few and sp.a.w.ning is not easy. Also, there are large predators in these waters and we are easy prey. And the water we live in, as you may have observed, is unclean...)

(No, it isn't.) Maarni said. (Look at it.)