Acorna’s Search (23 page)

The
aagroni
didn’t seem the least bit unhappy about that, however, nor did he seem particularly surprised to find himself once more on post-Khleevi Vhiliinyar surrounded by his fellow Linyaari, Becker, and Mac.

“It’s about time you brought us back,” he told them. “I hope you can send us back to the past again soon. We’ll take proper enviroshelters for the animals and collection bags for the plants next time.”

The
aagroni
wanted to go back out again right away, but finally agreed that other lost people had to be found first. Though he didn’t like it.

A
corna was a patient person, but by now she was more frustrated than she could ever recall being. In between searching for the teams, while the equipment was being moved from site to site, she searched the time map for Aari. It hadn’t been that difficult to find a location similar to the one she had memorized in the past, the one he had left behind when he fled. But the area on the map contained no little lights of any sort, neither white nor aqua. So she concentrated as hard as she could and kept searching but she couldn’t seem to find the right time or place in the space/time continuum.

The night after the base camp team was located, however, she saw, at last, a collection of aqua lights in the sea as it had been above ground. The crews were moving the hydraulic equipment to another site and no one manned the pumps tonight. When a ship came to collect the
aagroni
and his team, Neeva and her crew had gone along, as did some of the other recently returned people. Yaniriin’s lifemate was among them, and eager to see him once more.

Becker camped with the engineering team and even Maati had returned with her parents to MOO. Acorna was glad Kaarlye and Miiri were safe but didn’t like to face them, feeling as she did, irrationally responsible that Aari was lost again.

She kept the screen where she could see the blue-green lights, and walked down to the sea. The water level was much lower now, and the buildings which had been covered were once more exposed and had resumed their proper place as dock-front real estate.

At least now, when she walked into the water, it was clean and clear.

She dove, submerging herself totally, thinking of the aqua lights and Aari. As she surfaced, she knew she was not alone.

(Sister! POP!) a horn-headed sea creature with humanoid features cried a friendly greeting that had a bubble around it. The bubble popped when the words emerged.

(Hello. I am called Khornya,) she told him—and the small ones and the females with wavy long hair who bobbed around her. (I believe you know my lifemate, Aari? Is he here? I have been searching and searching for him.)

But myriad little bubbles popped “No!” “Not here!” “No longer!” “Gone!”

“Where?” she cried. “When?” and “how long?” but the
sii-
Linyaari couldn’t say. They could only describe what had happened to them from their point of view. The waves around them rose and the waves fell. They had fetched up in a sea covered with darkness, and Aari had gone away and not returned. They, however, had been sent here, where the suns still shone and the sea was warm. Only a few people ever appeared on the shore and some sort of building was going on, but that was of no concern to them.

Where Aari had gone, they couldn’t say, but they wished him well and considered him a brother and good friend.

“If he returns, we’ll tell him you were asking for him,” the horn-headed Upp said.

A small
sii
-Linyaari swam after her. “Perhaps he went with your brothers and sisters on one of the ships, Khornya!” the
frii
said. “He liked the ships. I could tell. And several left the planet after he swam ashore.”

“Thanks, little one,” she said, and continued swimming ashore herself. The spaceport was deserted. There were no ships for her to take now, even if she knew where he had gone. Was it possible Aari had discovered a way to use a ship to return from here to their own time? Wherever he was, he knew where—and
when
—she could be found. And she knew he wanted to find her again as much as she wanted to find him. But why had he had to leave just then? Just when she was so close to finding him? If only he had waited just a little longer.

But he hadn’t. He was gone. Lost to her again. After all this effort, all this pain.

She was so good at helping people, at finding a way through their problems. Now that it really mattered so very much to her, now that she had needs of her own, she had failed. Bad timing, her uncles would say. Oh, yes! Very bad timing indeed. She felt flattened, somehow empty now.

It was so lonely without Aari beside her—more lonely than she ever had been before they came together. Intellectually, she realized she wasn’t alone. She had her friends, her adoptive human family, of course; but it wasn’t the same. They were not hers in the way that Aari was.

She pulled herself ashore and shook off a few droplets. What should she do now? Aari wasn’t here to find, and she had no other way of seeking him in this world and time. She tried to shake off the weight of bewilderment and frustration, the load of disappointment and sadness bearing down on her. She would not give into the loneliness. Would not give into grief. She had accomplished some of what she came here to do. She
knew
now that Aari was alive and uninjured. She
knew
he cared for her and longed for her as she did him. He was strong, intelligent and resourceful and had gained some knowledge of the time-travel device. He’d be fine. Really. Of course he would.

So for the moment, she simply had to trust that, since she could not find him, he would find her.

She was easier to locate than he was, after all.
She
wasn’t lost in time and space. Even if she was not on-planet when he came looking for her, someone on Vhiliinyar would always know where she was. He knew who and where and when to ask about her. He’d find her, now that he’d found a way to start looking for her.

And, he could just keep looking for a while, she supposed. After all, that’s what she had done. A little flash of anger ran through her when she thought about his absence from this place after all she’d gone through to get here. It gave her the power go on, to climb the hill, to return to the machine, to reset it for her own time.

She would use the water still clinging to her body to return.

Aari was an adult male. He had been in far more threatening situations than this one and had escaped without her. She had no way to continue after him from here, and she had the needs of others to consider. She did not, after all, wish to bring the
sii
-Linyaari forward to shallow seas and darkness again.

But then, as she activated the machine, she realized that perhaps she wouldn’t be so easy to find after all. When the terraforming of the old home world began, everyone would have to leave. If Aari returned to Vhiliinyar to look for her then, he would arrive on the rapidly mutating surface of the deserted planet—and that could be deadly.

The wall of reason and good sense she had just finished building to sustain herself crashed down upon her, crushing her spirit with the sheer weight of it, and leaving her with the sense she and Aari could be truly lost to each other, perhaps for all time, and nothing she had done or could do right now would make any difference.

Arriving back in her own time, she found her feet and eyelids as heavy as her spirit. What she really should do was sit for a moment and try to think this through one more time. But sitting turned into laying down on the cold floor of the building, and her thought turned into a deep disturbing dream.

She had been under the impression that all of the Ancestors had returned to narhii-Vhiliinyar, but when she opened her eyes in her own time, she was surrounded by unicorns.

“You are very troubled, Great-Granddaughter,” said the lime and fuchsia Grandmother.

“Of course she’s troubled, old girl. She misses her lifemate and doesn’t know where the boy’s gone off to.”

“It’s not just that,” Acorna said. While the two speakers were standing, many of the Ancestors lay on the floor, as if searching for something to graze upon. Acorna opened the pockets on her shipsuit and pulled out all of the food she had to offer.

“That is not necessary, Great-Granddaughter. Our Attendants fear we will take harm from this journey and so overfeed us to the point of bursting to counter any ill-effects. You were saying it was not just that you missed the boy. If it is not that, then what makes you so sad?”

“It’s the terraforming. As soon as all of the teams have been located, we will all be leaving the planet while it is terraformed to restore the mountains and other contours, to replant and replenish the water, to restore the atmospheric layers.”

“Yes, so that Vhiliinyar that was will be again!” one of the Grandfathers crowed. “I am looking forward to that!” Then his enthusiasm faltered. “But you are not, are you?”

“Not any longer. Because when they do that, it will utterly change everything, the city will be destroyed and so will the time map. In fact, even if we tried to move it to MOO, it would do Aari no good. He will not be able to find his way back here again if the time device is gone. Or, at least, that is what I fear. And I cannot find him. The
sii
-Linyaari say he is not with them, that he may have gone off planet with our people of the pre-Khleevi past, before the city was buried. Without his light on the map of this planet, I cannot search for him. I cannot hope to find him, and he will be unable to find his way home again.”

“My dear,” the lime-and-fuchsia-draped Granddame said. “He is a grown man. When the
sii
-Linyaari last saw him, he saw them to safety, then walked away on his own two feet. Since you cannot find him in time, it is probable that he is in space.”

“But what if he’s not? Or even if he is, he will not be able to return when he’s ready!”

“Not the way he left, anyway,” a Grandfather said. “But perhaps there are other ways, ways you don’t know. Or at least not yet. Calm yourself, child. Maad, what is that song you used to sing the Younglings? This one needs sleep. And good dreams.”

When she awoke, the Ancestors were gone and Becker had the next team ready for her to find. Two more teams after that, and the shuttles came for them. She wanted to slip away, to return to the machine, but perhaps Becker knew what was on her mind. He kept a close eye on her and made sure she boarded the
Condor
ahead of him. RK stayed very close to her. She returned to the quarters she had shared with Aari and found the coverings they had used, taking comfort in his scent lingering on them. Snuggling into them, she didn’t feel quite so alone.

“N
ever in the history of our people have we held a high council meeting of such importance, and certainly never have we held a council of importance elsewhere than our own world, and with folk other than our own kind in attendance.”

The temporary council head, one Kaalmi Vroniiyi, had a strong and sonorous voice that filled the ballroom of Hafiz’s palace.

“However, here with us tonight are those who have involved themselves in our causes and our welfare, who have endangered themselves and their own livelihoods to help us when we were set upon by enemies. We have decisions to make in some cases, only because they have made choices possible where previously acceptance of disaster would have been our only course.

“We stand with feet on two worlds. Our dear friend and adopted kinsman, Uncle Hafiz, who has given us his home for this meeting, who has succored us during our disasters and grief, who has aided in the rescue of those of our number when in danger, has offered us his help in restoring both of our homes. One for our private spiritual use and one for public trade. While there is some long-range benefit to Uncle Hafiz’s firm, in the meantime he has had to strip his beautiful and delicious gardens to help rescue some of us from timetraps caused by the Khleevi occupation of our beloved Vhiliinyar.

“He has offered to restore Vhiliinyar to its former pastoral and sylvan glory in return for a loan that our descendants will still be repaying his descendants many
ghaanyi
from now.

“And yet, recently, some of us have had, thanks to the Khleevi, unusual experiences which have shown us that things change. Even our beloved Vhiliinyar has not always been as many of us remember it. Sleeping, at its heart, for instance, is an ancient but in some ways very modern city. It waits for us to awaken it and use it. Within this city is an enormously powerful and dangerous instrument, that can be used to destroy the fabric of existence or, potentially, to mend the tears in that same fabric and bring continuity and harmony.

“The Khleevi, and I am happy to say the
late unlamented Khleevi
, thanks to the valor of some of our people and to our non-Linyaari friends such as Captain Becker, Uncle Hafiz, Colonel Nadhari Kando, and others, have been perhaps our greatest challenge, but at the same time they have been our greatest teachers.

“These lessons have not been easy ones. One of our sons, our brothers, was so horribly mistreated by them that he bears scars still despite reunion with his family and the love of an extraordinary daughter of the people. And we have lost many others of our people to their terrible tortures.

“And we, who feel we always do the best thing, are always good and always kind, left these people behind. Furthermore, when Aari came out alive, we were not all accepting of his return.

“Though unwilling to wage war ourselves, we allowed our friends and allies to wage it on our behalf. Now that both our planets have suffered from the conflict, we have professed ourselves to be willing to allow them to rebuild for us, to heal our worlds as instantly as we would heal a small cut, with no effort on our part.

“But will this truly be healing? Some of us think not. Some of us feel that allowing Uncle Hafiz to beggar himself on our account is bad for us all. We feel that a more gradual rebuilding of both planets is called for, a pay-as-we-go process in which we interact with and learn from those who contribute their skills to our homes’ rebirth.

“Uncle Hafiz has ordered much that is needed to terraform our planet but we are here to decide the fate of that process. Do we want instant terraformation or do we, perhaps, wish to rebuild a mountain here, rededicate a stream there, allow Dr. Hoa to improve our climate so that the seas refill, the rivers run, the meadows flourish in a gentle fashion? Meanwhile, thanks to the genius of our Ancestral Hosts, we have found a way to reclaim some of our lost species. As habitat becomes available for them, we may reintroduce them to the present time.

“One other factor enters into this equation before you, the Linyaari people, give the council the benefit of your wisdom. That same son so injured by the Khleevi has become lost in time and of all our lost people, he is one who cannot be found. He leaves behind a mother and father who also were lost, a little sister who has only just come to know her sibling, and a lifemate who is our own dear Khornya, from and through whom we have gained the help we needed to survive our late catastrophes. Aari is only one male, you may say, just one Linyaari when many are needing their homes. So, shall we abandon him again? What say you?”

Before anyone else could answer, the ballroom was stunned into silence by the pounding of hooves, 1-2, 3,4. 1-2, 3, 4. 1-2, 3,4. As the Ancestors, the best kept secret of the Linyaari people, marched in synchronized formation into the room and with one voice brayed, “Nay. We say nay. We will not lose him again as long as there is hope he may survive. We will never again willingly sacrifice the life of any of our people—or our friends—as long as there is hope they may survive. For the needless death or abandonment or even mistreatment of any one of us causes a plague of grief, pain, and anger beyond the power of the horn to heal, a poison to the waters of our souls. Be it known that this is the advice and the vote of we, your many times great granddames and grandsires, collectively known as the Ancestors.”

The vote was taken. Acorna shakily voted nay with the entire hall.

As the Ancestors marched back out again, the lime-and-fuchsia-clad Grandam stopped before her for a moment and Acorna threw her arms around the Ancestress’s neck, thanking her profusely.

“Oh, nonsense child. We have always had plenty of time for truly worthwhile people. And now you and the other Younglings will have time and space to move mountains, cry yourselves rivers, and generally grow into the present. I suggest that you enjoy it, while you leave being relics of the past to us. We have a lot of experience at it.”

And with that, they marched from the room.