"I wouldn't be too impressed," Acorna replied with a smile. "This fellow is probably not the captain. Nor does it appear to be Linyaari, so it can hardly be your brother."

 

Thariinye and the other young males stroked the animal, too, as did Liriili.

 

"It's so soft," Maati said blissfully. "Since they sent the lift down, perhaps they mean for us to board," Acorna said.

 

"It could be a trap," Thariinye said.

 

"I've only heard of cats practicing mind control when they are looking for homes or a meal," Acorna said. "I very much doubt this one is a spy. I would like to see who inside the ship. Perhaps they have news of my friends."

 

"You're not going up there without me," Thariinye said. "Unless-uh-unless you think it best."

 

"I think it best," Liriili said. Firmly putting her hands behind her to stop petting the cat. "It is why you were sent for. And you two-go with them."

 

"Yes, Viizaar," the two young males said in tandem. "I want to go see if there are more of these-kaaats?" Maati said.

 

"Mrow? " the creature said. "You must stay here until we know if it is safe," Liriili said.

 

"But you said my brother ..." "Someone who claims to be, yes. It is best that Khornya and Thariinye handle first contact."

 

Acorna stepped onto the platform and was followed by the males. The cat leaped from Maati's arms and sat on the platform with them.

 

The platform rose through the tube until it was level with one of the decks. A stocky, barrel-cheated, curly-haired man with a bristling mustache watched their arrival, then reached forward to help Acorna off the platform. "Hi, there, ma'am, boys," he greeted them in a deep and slightly gravelly voice. "I don't know which line to use-'We've come in peace' or 'Take me to your leader.' Aari tells me you folks aren't used to visitors."

 

The cat jumped from the platform and onto the man's shoulder, to curl around his neck. "I see you've already met our leader, or the self-appointed glad-handing committee anyway."

 

The funny thing was that he was using all of these Standard idiomatic expressions, but in the Linyaari tongue. Acorna understood him but she could also understand the puzzled expressions on the faces of the other three Linyaari.

 

"My name's Jonas Becker," the man continued, as the males joined them on deck. "I am captain of the Condor here, and Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of the Board, and-until recently Chief Cook and Bottle Washer of Decker Interplanetary Salvage and Recycling Enterprises, Limited. It was going to be Becker and Sons but my dad didn't get around to changing the sign before he died so there's still only one Becker. And you folks are?"

 

Acorna was grinning again, enjoying the fact that Becker, whom she liked at once and from whom she was sensing very positive energy, would know that she was being friendly while the other three Linyaari would probably be under the impression she was fearlessly baring her teeth at the "alien." This man reminded her a great deal of her beloved uncles. The same brand of individualistic and independent intelligence, curiosity, and kindness radiated from him. "I was named Acorna by my foster parents," she told him. "In Linyaari-our language-1 am known as Khornya."

 

"Bingo!" he said. "I mean, no kidding? I've been hearing about you all over the place, Lady Acorna, nothing but good things, and here you're the first person I meet when I get here. Pleased to meet you, ma'am, and I mean that sincerely. I used to be a farm slave on Kezdet when I was a kid and what you did for those children was wonderful, from what I hear. I know your daddies, too. Good men."

 

Thariinye cleared his throat in a gruff, manly sort of way. "We are told you were permitted to land because you claim to have a Linyaari aboard?"

 

Becker's demeanor altered subtly to be as gruff as Thaarinyes and twice as threatening. "I didn't claim it, no, sir. Aari himself did."

 

Acorna touched Becker's arm lightly. "My people are unused to visitors. They have had some bad experiences, especially recently. Please do not take offense. May I present Ambassador Thariinye, who was among the party that came to Manganos to bring me back to narhii-Vhiliinyar, and these fellows are"-she caught their thoughts-"liryn and Yiirl."

 

Becker nodded, a short and wary and not nearly so friendly gesture. "Boys," he said in acknowledgement. "Well, Aari got a little shy all of a sudden when he saw you coming and he's back in the holds sorting out the graveyard. I guess if we each take a few loads of bones down we'll have it dirtside soon enough."

 

Thariinye and the other two males looked, if anything, whiter at the mention of bones. Becker examined their faces for a moment, and then seemed to be looking them over in general, and Acorna as well, then he said, "Make yourselves at home. I'm going to go check on KEN and see what's keeping Aari. He's probably working so hard back there he didn't hear you board."

 

(That is very strange behavior for one gone so long from us,) liryn said.

 

(Well, he is very old, from back before the evacuation,)

 

Yiirl replied. (Perhaps he grows forgetful.)

 

(You were certainly friendly to that Becker person,)

 

Thariinye said.

 

(He's a good man,) Acorna replied. (Could you not feel it?) (Hmph, No. He didn't have the same energy -with me that he did with you. He is very hostile and suspicious and, I would say, can be violent.)

 

(We shouldn't judge him without knowing him,) Acorna said.

 

(Not much chance of that, fortunately) Thariinye said.

 

(You realize, of course, he and this ship must leave immediately after refueling. Their presence contaminates and endangers all of us.)

 

(I hardly see how,) Acorna was thinking when Becker, looking extremely troubled, reappeared and crooked his finger at her. Thariinye started forward and Becker said, "Hold it, sport. Just the Lady Acorna for now, please." He started up the ladder connecting the decks.

 

"Very well," Thariinye said. "But do not try any unacceptable behaviors with her or I will cause you to be remorseful that you did."

 

(Why, Thariinye,) Acorna shot at him in passing, (that sounded hostile and aggressive and maybe even violent.)

 

She climbed to the upper deck where Becker waited for her.

 

"Aari's in a bad way, to tell you the truth. Lady Acorna," Becker said. "I met him when I was hurt worse than he is, and I hadn't met any regular people like you then-but looking at you-well, let me prepare you. Those Khieevis messed him up pretty bad. He's missing his horn, that's the most obvious thing, but from the looks of you people, there's other stuff that hasn't healed right either. The way he explained it to me was that he was all busted up when he collapsed in the cemetery and the power in all those old horns healed him, except the Khieevi had done to him something that kept the healing from proceeding normally. Without someone who knew what they were doing to guide the healing, his bones just knit together wherever one end touched the other. I guess now that he's almost safe back home again and doesn't have to be on alert all the time, the impact of everything he's been through is starting to hit him. I found him curled up in a corner sobbing his eyes out. I thought maybe if you came back alone with me and talked to him, told him it would be okay, that his folks are looking forward to having him back, it would be better."

 

"I'll do what I can," Acorna said, grateful to the man for his thoughtfulness on behalf of the former captive.

 

They clanked across open metal grating on their way back to some of what would have been cargo holds and crew's quarters on a standard vessel. Following Becker into one of the holds, Acorna heard the clatter of bone on bone. Then a monster arose before them.

 

Even as hunched up and crooked as he was, Aari towered over Becker and was taller than Acorna. But his joints did not articulate properly and there was a huge hump on his back. His legs bent incorrectly and his head was at an odd angle-and then there was the stomach-churning sight of that sunken-in forehead.

 

She tried to take this all in only on a physical, visual level and not think about it, not react to it at all. The expression in his deeply haunted eyes showed that he could read her before she sent or he received a thought.

 

She extended her hand to him-horn touching would be inappropriate in this instance with no other horn to meet it. "I am called Khornya. I was born in space after the evacuation and have only just arrived here myself. But welcome home."

 

He dipped his head, and though he was trying to sound composed, his voice trembled as he replied, "I was Aari. I thank you."

 

And then, from behind her, she heard the clatter of hard soled feet on metal grating. The three males entered the hold behind them, and made gasping noises.

 

(What is it?)

 

(I think I'm going to be sick!)

 

(They really made a mess out of you, didn't they?) from Thariinye.

 

Acorna closed the distance between them before Aari could retreat farther back into the hold. She took his hand with hers and this time did lean her horn against his cheek, for healing, for calming. (They are young and stupid and know nothing of anything outside this world,) she told him. (I'm sure the physicians here can put you right in no time.)

 

Thariinye, who was thoughtless but not intentionally unkind, realized his error at once and crossed to them as well, also, with only slight reluctance, laying his horn against the newcomer. (Khornya is right. I was rude and cruel. The physicians will be sent for at once.)

 

"Maybe before we unload the Ancestors' bones, you people would want to take Aari to some kind of hospital or clinic with you?" Becker asked, and Acorna realized that he, too, had a definite, if somewhat limited, ability to read thoughts.

 

"I will go below and discuss the matter with the viizaar. But, my brother," Thariinye said to Aari, "would you not be happier if we brought physicians to you before you meet your little sister and old friends again?"

 

Aari gave him a glance full of bitterness. "You mean so that I don't frighten them? You are very thoughtful, my brother."

 

"Okay, that's it," Becker said. "I think we'll just stow the moving of the bones until your docs see what they can do for Aari, here or there, I don't care. Just get off my ship for now, all you guys. Lady Acorna is welcome any time she wants to come, but the rest of you do me a favor and wait for an engraved invitation, huh? Tell your leader lady that I still need fuel and I hope they got a long hose on the gas pump at the spaceport to bring the fuel to me since I can't get to it."

 

(Very hostile and aggressive,) Thariinye told Acorna in passing.

 

"I heard that!" Becker said.

 

"I think I should go, too," Acorna said. "You will need someone to speak for you. Not that my opinion is much valued by the vuzaar, but if Grandam Naadiina, the elder, backs me, they will have to listen."

 

Aari almost smiled at her. "Is Grandam still with us, then?" "Very much so," Acorna said.

 

"I would like to see her. She will not be frightened of me, though she may be sad. Grandam was always kind to Laarye and me when we were small."

 

"She has taken care of your little sister since your parents" Pain spasmed over his face and she realized that if his parents had been lost before they reached Vhiliinyar, he would not have known he wouldn't be reunited with them here. "Oh, I'm sorry. You shouldn't have found out that way," she said.

 

His broken hand rested on her shoulder, comfortingly. "I knew they could no longer be alive or they would have been here to meet me. It was my choice to remain behind, not theirs to abandon me. You only confirmed what I knew already."

 

Acorna hurried to catch up with the others and Becker lowered the robolift once more. This time the cat stayed firmly onboard, sitting protectively between Aari's feet.

 

"I'm happy to report. Count Edacki, that the experimental station is now fully operational and the testing has begun." General Ikwaskwan gave the news to his employer on his private and secure channel. "Our technicians are going over the computers of the captured Linyaari ships, trying to find a way to open the navigation programs and decode the course to the home world. It seems there is an autodestruct device on such programs, but we are unsure as to how it can be reconstructed when thecreatures-wish to return to their home world."

 

"Perhaps you can cajole our guests into providing you with the information verbally," Ganoosh suggested.

 

"Well, there's a little problem with that, sir. Except for three of the captives, the ones who came for the Acorna girl a few months ago, none of these creatures speak anything resembling Standard. We tried forcing the ones who do understand to translate, but they refuse and there is no budging them. Torture doesn't work. They don't say anything, even though they feel it. They pretty well heal immediately. Or die. We've almost lost the ambassador-whatsername-the one who is Acorna's aunt. At least that's who she said she was. It's hard to tell. They all look alike. It's hard to tell the men from the women even.

 

"Hmmm-are they being recalcitrant about using their other powers?"

 

"Oh, no siree. We've got that under control. Put one or two of them in a gas chamber and the air is sweet as springtime when you let them out. Poison one of them with drain cleaner and it's crystal clear water before you know it. That's well documented. You can feel free to dump toxic waste, pollute anything you want, and what we have here is a cure-all. Of course, I'm not sure how well they'll perform outside a controlled environment."

 

"It's not like you to mince words. General." Ganoosh smiled. "You mean outside of captivity. Well, there are some other little tests I want you to run. I have had my ward divert her course, but soon she will be arriving with a very important guest, I hope, and possibly some information regarding the location of the central nesting place of our fine horned friends.

 

She will also have with her some horns which have been removed from their original owners. I would like you to do some testing to determine the qualitative difference in the performance of the horn on a live animal, as opposed to one that's detached. If it is not great, well, then "

 

"I understand perfectly, Count Edacki. I wish also to report, by the way, that I have myself devised an interesting and entertaining way of testing the horns' healing powers."

 

"How is that?" Ganoosh asked.

 

"By reviving the idea of the Roman amphitheater and gladiator contests. You'll recall my associate, Nadhari Kando?" the general asked.

 

"You haven't made her privy to our little secret, have you? The woman was in league with that bleeding-heart Delszaki Li," the count said with some disgust.

 

"We seem to have solved the problem of Nadhari's tender heart with liberal infusions of drugs that produce hostility and aggression. They seem to overcome her natural inhibitions to violence, which were never all that strong anyway." Ikwaskwan's smile was feral.

 

"I recall that from another conversation we had," Ganoosh said.

 

"We lucked upon a ship full of children, enemies of your late associate, the Piper, I might add. They had hoped, I understand, to enlist Nadhari to teach them the art of war. So I am accommodating them. Have a peek," he said.

 

The general switched the view on the comscreen so that Ganoosh saw an amphitheater constructed by building bleachers up the sides of a biosphere bubble. The soldiers in the bleachers were protected from the combatants by walls of reinforced plascrete. In the center of the ring, tethered by the neck and foot to a pillar, was Nadhari Kando, the lithe and dangerous-looking female Ganoosh had seen previously in Ikwaskwan's company. She was armed with daggers and whips. And a tall, rather lovely teenaged girl, dressed in what was apparently Ikwaskwan's scanty idealized version of a Roman toga, was forced into her path by soldiers carrying laser prods. The girl had only a dagger and a net.

 

An anguished cry rose from somewhere in the background.

 

"'Ziana! No!"

 

"Is that her name?" Ganoosh asked.

 

"Yes, sir. She is Adreziana Starborne, the captain of the Starfarer children I spoke of. How touching. She is trying to talk to Nadhari through the drugs, you see? But Nadhari is no more likely to listen to her than the lions once did the Christians,"

 

"And the male voice I heard just now crying her name in such a tender fashion?"

 

"That would be Pal Kendoro, Count Edacki. Like Nadhari herself, a former lackey of Delszaki Li. A friend of Nadhari's, actually. The old Nadhari, that is, not this new, improved model."

 

"It is unfair and unchivalrous of you to send that sweet child out there to face the madwoman on her own, General. May I suggest a refinement?" "Yes, sir, of course."

 

"Bind the lovers together. Two love birds with one stoned warrior woman." He began to giggle. "Oh, that tickles my fancy! Yes it does! I shall have to come out there immediately to view it in person. Save that spectacle for me, will you?"

 

"No need. Count. No matter how badly Nadhari hurts them or, if they are lucky, one of them hurts her, the Linyaari will certainly cooperate to heal such innocent hides. We can recycle both Nadhari and the children indefinitely, if the healing powers work as well as we've been led to believe." if.:      "Splendid, General, splendid! How I have missed these little entertainments-the sort the Didis used to dream up to interest me back in the old days before the unicorn girl showed up. How very fitting that her own species should make such pleasures feasible and cost effective again."

 

 

^vL /fasLti "wanted to know where her brother was ^  / \/1 anc^ ^^y ^e ^^ not come out with the others.

 

"He was hurt, Maati," Liriili told her when the child refused to leave. "The aliens we fled when your parents came here hurt him very badly. He does not want you to see him until we can heal him."

 

All of the adults were now trying to project calm and patience like crazy but Maati had learned a thing or two as a government page.

 

"You didn't want him to come!" she said. "You were scared of him. But he wouldn't hurt me. He's the only family I have and I'm the only family he has. I want to see him."

 

Acorna said, "You will, Maati. You will. But he was hurt by the way people look at him and he doesn't want to be pitied. He wants you to look up to him, not feel sony for him. So we have to go get the physicians now and bring them right back here to heal him."

 

"I want to be there," Maati said firmly. "We are family and I want to help him. If I was hurt and he knew it, I bet he would be there. My parents would have been, wouldn't they, Grandam?"

 

"Yes, Maati. And I see no reason why you shouldn't come, .   if too. Thariinye sent the adults in the group a somewhat distorted mental picture, in Acorna's opinion, of Aari and Becker. Grandam gasped and Acorna, who had been trying hard not to project, snapped at him.

 

(Well, Grandam said she didn't see why,) Thariinye declared in his own defense.

 

The other two males had scurried off immediately, looking distinctly unwell.

 

"Thariinye," Liriili said. "Please ask the communications duty officer to contact the physicians' college and have Baaksi Bidiila and Baaksi M'kaarin come here at once with their staff and any necessary equipment."

 

"Yes, Viizaar Liriili," Thariinye said, relieved to be away from there for even a moment. "At once."

 

When he had gone, Liriili confronted Acorna and Grandam. "It is not helpful that you two judge him or me or the others for reacting in this way to One who has been so badly maimed," she said. "The Khieevi sent the vids of our people under torture to us in order to deliberately terrorize us. As you can see, it works. Our people are not cowards, but we are peaceful. We're healers. We would never do anything so dreadful to other living creatures. It is horrifying to us in the extreme. To see what can be done to us while we still live and breathe and walk-well, that would be far too upsetting for most of our people to be able to continue functioning. Such a sight would upset the balance and harmony we have achieved since coming here. Besides, it is in the best interests of Aari himself that he be healed before he rejoins us."

 

"How bad is it?" Maati wanted to know. "I'm his sister. You shouldn't all try to keep this from me."

 

Before Liriili could tell her what she'd seen in Thariinye's image, Acorna described Aari's wounds herself, focusing on the pain in his eyes. Maati started to cry, big grieving tears rolling down her cheeks. "Nooo! Why did they do such a thing? Poor Aari! I want to help him."

 

Grandam patted her shoulder. "You shall, child, you shall. Liriili, I feel it would be a good idea if Acorna, Maati, and I went to the communications shed and asked to be allowed to speak with Aari."

 

"I really discourage any further communication with those aliens until we can bring Aari back among us," Liriili said.

 

"Child, I do understand your objections and your responsibility to the rest of our people, but in this case, our responsibility to Maati must come first-if she feels she can handle this, then we must not stand in her way. Aari is her family, almost all the family she has left. Hasn't she lost enough? Hasn't her brother? We left him behind once for the sake of us all; isn't it his turn to come first, now that he's back among us?"

 

"I will bow to your wisdom, Grandam. But I still feel that the sight of Aari would be unnecessarily frightening to the public. The images projected by liryn and Yiirl alone will be giving many of our people nightmares."

 

"In that case, Viizaar," Grandam said, "perhaps if you feel so strongly about that, it must be your immediate priority to return to the city and give our people the correct and actually and we seem to have overlooked this-quite joyous news that one we all believed was lost has not only returned, but is the first person to have survived capture and torture by the Khieevi; that he is in the process of having his wounds healed, and should soon be among his friends and loved ones once more. Meanwhile, since according to Thariinye, Acorna is the only one of us capable of reasoning with the belligerent Captain Becker, she, Maati as next of kin, and I as a friend and elder from the boy's youth, should remain to help the physicians with their work and provide moral support." Grandam's words were clearly an order to the flustered viizaar.

 

"As you wish, Grandam." Liriili withdrew and headed back to the city. The rest of them walked to the communications shed.

 

The communications officer gladly ceded his seat to them and watched as Acorna hailed the Condor.

 

"Well, Lady Acorna, fancy seeing you there. What's on your mind, hon?" The honest face of Jonas Becker reflected pleasure at the sight of her in his viewscreen.

 

 

"Captain Becker, Grandam Naadiina, 'whom you heard Aari say he knew and was fond of, is here, and she would like to speak to him. Aari's younger sister, Maati, who is Grandams ward, is here as well. Maati has been informed of the nature of Aari's wounds but she wants very much to speak to him and well, I think it would be best if she could speak for herself."

 

"Right. If you think it's best, then I'll try to get him in here. But those jerks who were here with you are not welcome aboard this vessel again. I hope everybody understands that."

 

Acorna smiled. "I believe you made yourself abundantly clear on that issue, Captain." She looked around. "Thariinye doesn't seem to be here now, but Liriili asked him to send for the physicians. They should be arriving soon. We three would like to return to your ship with them, with your permission."

 

"Granted, with pleasure," he said. "Wait a minute and I'll see if Aari will come out to talk to his sister."

 

"I'm not entirely sure this contact is authorized," the communications officer said.

 

"No?" Grandam said. "Well, it is. Liriili appointed Khornya and me as her liaisons in this affair. Khornya is already showing great talent as an alien ambassador, don't you think?"

 

"Yes, Grandam," the officer said meekly.

 

"That's a good lad," Grandam said with an indulgent smile.

 

A moment later Becker appeared back on screen. Behind him loomed a tall figure with a cat wound around his neck. Maati had her jaw thrust forward and set. As Aari's ruined face appeared on the screen, she blinked twice but that was all. Aari also blinked, so perhaps he didn't see her, first instinctive reaction. Acorna thought he was trying not to weep again.

 

"Welcome home, elder brother," the little girl said, sounding less like a little girl than Acorna had ever heard her. "I am Maati, born here on narhii-Vhiliinyar to our parents before they returned to search for you and our brother. They-they never found you?" She had tried, Acorna knew, not to make it a question but could not quite keep the note of hope from her voice.

 

"To my sorrow, no. It is also my great sorrow to tell you that our brother has passed this life, but it gives me more joy than I have known in all of these ghaanye to see you and to hear your voice, younger sister. I am Aari, born many ghaanye and a world before you, but I am your kinsman and I love you already."

 

"And I you," Maati said. "Aari, when the doctors come, tell your friend I will come, too. I'll lay my horn upon you and keep you from any pain and speed your healing."

 

Tears did fall from Aari's eyes as she spoke. "My gratitude, Maati," he said, but his response was almost drowned out as both Acorna and Grandam said, "And I will do the same," in response to Maati's declaration.

 

"My gratitude, Grandam Naadiina, and to Khornya, who has already-my gratitude."

 

"Okay," Becker said. "But if you ladies are coming you'd better step on it. I see a bunch of people coming up the road right now. I'll send down the robolift for you so you'll be on board when they arrive."

 

"Thanks, Captain Becker," Acorna said.

 

"Thank you, lady. You, too, ladies."

 

The physicians were those most skilled in the healing arts, much more than the average Linyaari. Many of them, Grandam told Acorna, had studied off-planet, where there were more ills to be healed. Most Linyaari were never ill or hurt for more than a few moments, or at least not until they found the next Linyaari. In fact, being a physician on narhii-Vhiliinyar was largely an intellectual rather than a practical profession. The physicians didn't gasp when they saw Aari, but they shook their heads, regarded him with clinical interest, tried a few applications of their own horns with little effect, and then turned to look with interest at the piles of bones in the holds beyond their patient.

 

"So you say, Aari, that after you were injured you dragged yourself to the burial place and the power of the horns of our departed forebears healed you of your injuries-at least to a degree? As much as the lasting damage done to you by the Khieevi would allow?"

 

"Yes."

 

The physicians looked uncomfortably at each other. "Unfortunately, given the special nature of the tortures inflicted by the Khieevi, the horns' healing power only knit that which was broken-it did not straighten anything into proper position first. Khieevi take special pains when working with Linyaari to try and short-circuit the healing processes."

 

"I had suspected as much," Aari said dryly, regarding his own misshapen arm.

 

"But now that your arm is healed this way, there is little we can do. The tissue is not injured, as far as our abilities are concerned. As for your horn-well, a transplant might be possible when Maati is older, if she could spare a piece of her horn. But she and it are too immature to risk that at this time. And such a procedure has never been tried, you know. No one has-ever survived such an injury in the past."

 

"Oh, do try!" Maati cried. "I don't care if it hurts. It can't hurt anything like Aari has hurt. Please, can't you do something for him?"

 

One of the doctors, a female, Bidiila, knelt beside Maati and took her hand. "We wish we could, youngling," she said, and Acorna could see she was close to tears herself. "But he has suffered great harm at the hands of our enemies. Some will see his wounds and blame him for receiving them, as irrational as that may be, but some will be as wise as you and know that he is living proof of Linyaari courage and fortitude. You must be very proud of him."

 

"I am," Maati said, taking the doctors hand and trying to put it in Aari's, "but he hurts so terribly-am I the only one who feels it? Can nobody help him?"

 

Aari gathered her up and stroked her hair with his broken hand, shushing her. "I am used to it now, little sister. Please don't weep for me. Did you not hear what they said? Later, perhaps, when they know more, they can do more."

 "But there must be something they can do now," the child insisted.

 

"Well, actually, there is," Becker said. "We could break the old injuries, one at a time, and you could reheal them. That should work." He looked at the doctors and cocked an eyebrow. Acorna translated.

 

"We do not do such things, Captain. Even in a therapeutic way, and to heal. Injuring any living creature is an act of violence and not our way."

 

When Acorna gave Becker the doctor's reply, he shrugged and asked, "They don't mind finishing the job if I do the dirty work though, do they?"

 

Acorna translated. "They have no objection."

 

Acorna asked Becker, "What do you have in mind? "

 

"Well, first, I just want to make certain of something. The way Aari healed me and RK when we were hurt, you can do that for him? I mean, make it so he gets patched up completely almost at the same time he's hurt so he doesn't feel anything for more than say, a split second?"

 

The others looked dubious, but Acorna, who had had considerable experience with the healing properties of her own horn, nodded. "Yes. Probably even more effectively than Aari healed you since he had to use the dead horns to accomplish the healing."

 

"Well then, all we have to do is rebreak the places that have set wrong and heal them again. I hate to put Aari through it, but it's the only solution," Becker said. "Your docs may have principles against it, but I don't."

 

Bidiila said, "I personally have never encountered old fractures such as these. Few of us have. When one can heal almost any wound immediately, one seldom sees old wounds, and even then, usually they have received some sort of attention prior to ours that keeps them from being in such sad shape as Aari's."

 

"I understand, doc. You people don't want to do it because the way you see it, hurting people is the opposite of healing. Me, I don't have any problem with breaking a few bones, especially in a good cause." He touched Aari's shoulder. "How about it, buddy?" he asked Aari. "You willing to let me bust you up a little so your medics can heal you right this time? I can't do much about the horn, but I got me a crowbar that will do a good job with a few surgical strikes. They promise it'll only hurt for a little while."

 

Aari only glanced at the doctors, who, except for Bidiila, had backed off slightly. "I can bear pain at the hand of a friend," he said. "Part of the pain of the torture was knowing that my captors intended their cruelty and delighted in my pain. They even amplified it. I know that you will be sharing it and helping me bear it."

 

"Maybe Maati and you other ladies should leave now," Becker told Acorna.

 

Acorna didn't need to translate. Maati was shaking her head, and clinging to Aari. Grandam said simply, in clear thought-speak, without hesitation or question so that even Becker could understand her, (Your concern for our sensitivities does you credit, Captain, but Aari will need our support more than ever. We will stay in contact with him as you perform your task. In that way, he may feel far less pain.)

 

Becker nodded. The other doctors were all protesting but Bidiila spoke to them sharply and, although they looked away as Becker fetched his crowbar, they remained close. Aari reclined on a table and Grandam, Acorna, and Maati stayed close by his head, their horns touching his face and neck, and their hands on his arms and shoulders. Becker, without fear or squeamishness, and with the efficiency he might give to hammering some bent object into shape, brought the heavy tool down sharply on the misshapen part of Aari's leg. Aari let his breath out in a huff and a high-pitched whistle, and by then the doctors were closing in, applying their horns to the fresh wound as they manipulated the leg so that it would set correctly.

 

"You okay, buddy? " Becker asked Aari gently. With great effort, Aari said, "Yes." And in a moment, after several deep breaths, added, "My left foot now, please, Joh."

 

Maati had buried her face against his mane and Acorna felt that he was more concerned about her reaction than about the pain, which was dulled by their contact and quite brief compared to what he had endured walking around with misaligned bones, twisted tendons, and atrophied, overly strained muscles. Each break and healing found him breathing easier, though all of them, especially Aari and Becker, had sweat running from every pore. Worse yet was that the sound of Aari's crunching bones was drowned out only by the high, eerie keening of the Makahomian Temple Cat, who cowered beneath the table.

 

The process took hours and Acorna was very weary, as was Grandam. Acorna could see that Grandam's horn and those of the doctors were all becoming translucent, as hers had when she had cured the wounded following the battle between Rushima and the Khieevi.

 

Aari opened his eyes only after he had healed from the last break. Becker, )SLW set, functioned like a machine but his voice was always controlled, and always gentle and concerned when speaking to Aari or any of them. He knew that he was hurting to help the healing and had to keep a firm grip on himself so that each blow did not cause him almost as much pain as it did Aari.

 

When at last they were done and Aari sat up, straight and five inches taller, Acorna went to Becker and laid her horn against his forehead.

 

"Thank you, Khornya," Aari said. "I wish I was able to do that, too. You are spent."

 

"We are all spent," Grandam said.

 

The cat shot from beneath the table. Maati caught and held him, soothing him with a touch of her horn that soon had the beast purring.

 

Bidiila said, "We have been thinking about your horn, Aari. It is a new problem, as I said, but did you not say your brother perished on Vhiliinyar and that you have brought his bones back for reburial? Do you feel that his spirit would be offended if we took a small piece from his horn, which would have similar DNA to yours and therefore be less likely to be rejected, and tried to coax it to grow on the root of your own horn?" This was done, with Aari's and Maati's agreement. "Now you can come back with us," Maati told her brother. He put his hand up to the bandaged place where the horn implant had been. "I don't think so. I'll still be an outcast."

 

Acorna said, "Maybe you could wear a prosthetic hidden by a horn-hat."

 

"A what?" Becker and Aari asked together. Acorna explained and Becker said, "Yeah, we could give you a fake horn inside to stiffen it. Nobody would know if you didn't want them to."

 

"Aside from the people all over the planet who already do, thanks to those who were here earlier," Aari said.

 

"Never mind them. You want to see your old friends, and what this new world is like, or not?"

 

Acorna thought it was a good thing Becker didn't really wait for an answer.

 

The com unit came on again and the officer on the other end said, "Captain Becker, the people have gathered to rebury the bones of our dead."

 

"Okay. We'll get them onto the robolift and send them down load by load."

 

"I will need to supervise," Aari said. "I am the only one who still knows who was buried where and remembers the clan designations of each body. Where would I find a-horn-hat?"

 

Bidiila reached into her lab coat pocket. "Take mine," she said. "I have several others. They come in handy when you spend the day listening to minor complaints from patients who should have had the sense not to overgraze."

 

Becker had gone to work with a torch and hammer on a piece of lightweight alloy and in no time fashioned it into the semblance of a horn. A slot on either side held a band that slid beneath Aari's mane to hold it in place. With Bidiila's horn-hat, it was difficult to tell him from another Linyaari.

 

The three women stayed aboard the ship and helped Aari and Becker load the robolift time after time. Then Becker remembered something and came back with what looked like another man, albeit one somewhat scarred and with a peculiar skin tint. This, Acorna learned, was a KEN unit, an android, and he was able to work five times faster, if not more accurately, than any of them. Aari had to indicate to Becker whose bones were whose before riding down with each load and supervising its disposition. The road to the spaceport was lined with Linyaari of all clans, all come to claim the bones of their dead.

 

"How did they find out so fast?" Becker asked.

 

"Thought transference is a very swift form of communication when used correctly," Grandam said. "I suspect Liriili set up a relay of some sort to inform the clans."

 

"Will you look at that guy? " Becker asked, nodding toward Aari. "I was the pounder and he was the poundee and he is working rings around me. You'd think he'd been sitting around watching the stars go by all morning instead of getting every bone in his body rebroken and mended."

 

"He is a very determined young man," Grandam said. "He had to be or he would not have survived all that he has."

 

When Aari returned for the last time, he carried a single skeleton, this one carefully wrapped in the thermal blanket Becker had given Aari to sleep with.

 

"Grandam, I was very careful with Grandsire Niciirye but I brought him back to you. I do not wish you to be concerned, but Grandsire's horn is missing from his remains."

 

"His horn?" Grandam asked, and Acorna saw that she was trying to picture her lifemate as Aari was now. "Not the Khieevi?"

 

"Captain Becker will explain," Aari said. "I must go below now.

 

"Thanks a lot, buddy," Becker said.

 

Aari allowed himself a small grim smile. "You have nothing to worry about, Joh, even if I had not already hidden your surgical instrument. We are a nonviolent people. Grandam will not cause you much physical damage for desecrating the remains of her lifemate. I do not know if that will be true for the others whose kin are missing their horns. Those bones I have left in the hold for now, but Grandsire's at least I can return."

 

His voice contained elements of black humor, but his emotions were hollow and cold with grief, as they came to Acorna. His thoughts had been harder and harder to detect as the bones and horns left the ship and it came to Acorna that he might be lonely without them.

 

She turned back to Becker and to Grandam, who was watching the salvage man with a curious mixture of pain and reproach. "You are a grave robber. Captain?" she asked.

 

"I take full responsibility, ma'am," Becker said, and pointed at RK, washing on top of the control console. "It was the cat's fault. Your old planet is a mess. We landed there looking for salvage. Some of your people's horns were laying around on the ground. It was night, the light was poor, and I thought since the cat liked them I'd pick up a few and see what they were. Well, honest, they really were just laying around."

 

"So you took them?" she asked, the reproach still there.

 

"I'm a salvage expert, for pity's sake!" he said. "I pick up stuff nobody claims-and it sure didn't look like there was a living soul there at the time. I didn't even know what they were till we got back to Kezdet and a couple of people thought they belonged to the Lady Acorna or her shipmates."

 

Acorna was a little startled at the idea at first but it made sense. She and then her aunt and the others were the only Linyaari the people of Kezdet and Manganos had met.

 

"One fellow was ready to turn me over to the cops for murder, and one nasty little-female individual, an old enemy of Acorna's-tried to kill me more than once to take the horns. Then she followed us to your old planet and took the horns I had with me. If she hadn't I swear I would have returned them, I don't care how much they were worth."

 

"Were-worth. Captain?" Maati asked, touching hers.

 

Grandam looked horrified, and Maati said, "Oh, no! You mean like in the story of the Ancestors? How the people didn't want them, they only wanted the horns? But dead horn? Healing using dead horn doesn't work nearly as well as healing done by a living person!"

 

"It works better than no horn at all, I'm afraid, honey," Becker said. "And there are a lot of us out there in the galaxy without healing horns."

 

"You say this woman knew me?" Acorna asked. "Who is she?"

 

"Kisia Manjan." Becker filled her in on Kisla's attempts to murder him and RK.

 

Acorna sighed. She had hoped that perhaps when Kisia learned of her own humble birth from her adopted mother, the girl might have been cured of some other arrogance, but apparently she was even worse. Becker's thoughts were not as easily discernible now, nor were the cat's thought patterns as clear as they had been with the bones aboard, but from what she could tell, Kisia was more badly disturbed than ever.

 

"Could she have followed you here?" Acorna asked Becker. Becker shook his head. "We lost her this time. Aari scared her away with a Khieevi weapon."

 

Grandam looked vaguely shocked but Becker said, "It simulated explosions in the earth-maybe it was a mining tool instead of a weapon to use against people-he said they used things like that to destabilize the whole planet. Anyway, it worked, and she took off. She only found us that time because of a homing device on the droid, but we got rid of that finally."

 

Acorna sighed. "That's good, then."

 

"I also have an-idiosyncratic way of navigating that's unpredictable to me as well as other ships. Besides which, I had no idea where we were going. We steered by Aari's memory of what he had been told was the evacuation route before the invasion."

 

Grandam sighed. "I think that whatever the others do, I shall bury Niciirye in the field beyond my back door. And Captain-if you-if you should recover the horns, by any chance, I wonder if there is any way you could somehow return them to us? It is a very important link between us and our dead. I don't know why; maybe scientists would say that an extraordinary amount of DNA material is encoded in the horn and survives death. But however it is that it works, it is a connection and now-"

 

She looked away but Acorna felt Grandam's pain as if it were her own, a sudden cold void, an open pit of grief she had never before sensed in Grandam.

 

It took nearly a week-a ghiirl-ghaanye-from the time the bones were unloaded from the Condor and ^handed over to their descendants for the Council to decide where the burials were to take place. During this time, the bones stayed in the homes of their respective clan members.

 

The presence of the dead from the past cast a pall over the living that was at least partially connected to their fears for those who were currently voyaging through space and had been out of communication for days now, completely silent.

 

Grandam had accompanied Aari to a Council session where he told the story of the cemetery's unwitting desecration and how he had preserved the bones against further pilfering. He described the thought-images he had received from Becker regarding the unwholesome interest in the horns by some of Becker's fellow humans. The Council, Grandam said, had become rather agitated after hearing that, both concerned about the possible invasion of other horn-seeking aliens and troubled that there could be some connection between the alien interest in the horns of the Linyaari dead and the lack of contact with the space-faring Linyaari.

 

Liriili had dismissed that concern (rather shrilly, Grandam noted). "These particular aliens are galaxies away. This one found us only because of Aari's memory. And these humans had never seen one of us before Khornya." The viizciar did not say that she wished the aliens had never seen Khornya, that she could almost wish the girl had perished with her parents rather than be the instrument of bringing such danger upon them. But Grandam heard the thought, even concealed. And worse, she knew that others on the Council shared it. The possible threat from aliens preoccupied the Council during that session to the extent that discussion of burial sites was temporarily tabled.

 

Later, Aan told Grandam, "I hope they will put the burial ground somewhere protected, where the graves will not be disturbed again. A cave would be good. Like the one I hid them in on Vhiliinyar. The bones were easy to guard there, and the cave could always be collapsed upon them if outsiders came to disturb them again."

 

Grandam told Acorna about it later, when Aari had returned to the Condor with food for Becker. "I got the strongest impression that what he intends to do the rest of his life is guard the burial ground."

 

Acorna could not suppress a shudder. "I suppose that's what the Khieevi did to him that none of our horns can touch."

 

"Yes, well, perhaps. But it's nonsense. That is a brilliant young man. He excelled at every aspect of our culture and had already traveled to other worlds as an ambassador and educator. He is like a shell, from which the little creature within has been stolen. No-I exaggerate. Perhaps his essence is only hidden, but hidden from himself as well as from others."

 

Later, when the Council decided that each clan would be responsible for burying its own dead in separate burial places, Aari insisted on attending all reinterments. The clans whose dead were not returned to them with the rest of the bones did not mention the missing remains, which Acorna found odd. However, the entire city of Kubiilikhan was actively, prematurely, mourning the ones now believed to be lost in the cosmos and so a few absent dead from the past mattered less than the burial of the many bones reclaimed.

 

Acorna accompanied Aari as he attended the first reinterment.

 

The sky looked like an open wound that day, yellow, with huge red and burgundy clouds boiling in the west, split now and then by the green lightning she remembered from before. The pavilions creaked, extruding and retracting their ramps like snakes' tongues, raising and lowering their floors as the breezes and dampness shifted.

 

Aari was very quiet and Acorna felt from him confusion and grief, and sensed this might be coming from the Council's decision to have no central burial place, so that even the tenuous position he had found for himself as guardian of the dead was now lost to him.

 

This was confirmed when she noticed that when a few people addressed him, he ignored them.

 

"Aari," she said softly, "Techno-artisan Maarye just greeted you."

 

Aari looked genuinely startled. "Oh. I'm sorry. That was real then?" He passed his hand over his face. Healed and wearing the prosthetic horn Becker had devised for him, he seemed a handsome, stalwart example of Linyaari manhood.

 

"Of course it was real," she said. "You looked right through him."

 

"I'm sorry. I should apologize. I've kept company with phantoms for a long time, Khornya. They don't generally expect manners, or even answers."

 

Thunder cracked just then and the rain drenched everyone within a single moment. No one ran for cover, however. This was a solemn moment. All of Kubiilikhan and most of the rest of narhii-Vhiliinyar was here. All of the clans had at least sent representatives, gathered up in the shuttle belonging to the new ship being assembled by the techno-artisans. Only one communications officer remained on duty at the spaceport, and even that officer was frequently relieved so that everyone could attend the appropriate burials.

 

The rain was welcome, even fitting. It made the new ground softer for burial of the old bones. The Ancestors were in attendance, and that alone kept the procession from speeding its slow, mournful pace.

 

This was the burial ceremony of Clan Neeyeereeya, the clan with the most members to be interred, and the most above ground, though many of the latter were far too young to remember those buried on the world they had never known.

 

And yet, the atmosphere was as heavy with sorrow as the sky was with clouds. Clansmen with heads bowed against the torrential rain carried the burial baskets containing the remains of their kinfolk to dark holes in the long blue grass. Acorna had sorely missed her dear, departed Mr. Li, but though her loss had been new while these losses were old ones, she had not previously experienced the raw expression of grief she felt from the other Linyaari. Unlike the grief of men, this feeling carried no morbidity about it, no consciousness of the flesh rotting or ghoulish fascination with death. There was no threat or anger here, only a kind of wounded wonder at the mystery of how a loved one who had walked, slept, and eaten beside you could be rendered to a few calcified fragments.

 

She picked up the clearest image of bones, not these bones wrapped for this burial, but of the bones of the Linyaari missing in space, as their relatives and loved ones imagined burying them. The grief for the long-dead kin was only part of the loss being mourned here. The planetbound Linyaari cried for future as well as past deaths, grief joined with fear for the safety of the missing husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Acorna suddenly felt tremendously protective of her own people, and wished she could do something, anything, to help.

 

Aari stood perfectly still as horns touched in silent remembrance, and then, startlingly, clearly even to him, a keening began inside him, low at first, then rising and falling, until it turned into a melody and Acorna realized he was singing. As the first chorus began, other voices rose to join his, those of the older Linyaari, and then, more tentatively, a few of the younger ones, singing their lament for those missing as well as the dead.

 

Where do you graze now that you've gone away? I no longer see you; we no longer play together at sunrise, together at night, Gone is your laughter and gone your eye's light.

 

Your horn now is Pull, it cannot ease my heart, It cannot cade my pain now that we are apart. I deck you in silence, I deck you in crowd, I look for your face in the shape of the cloud.

 

Is that your laughter in the voice of the dream Where we drank together when our world was green? My colors are dark now that you've gone away and I cannot hear words that you used to day.

 

They tell me you live in my thoughts and my dreams, Someday you'll return in a newborn youngling. But my tears keep on falling till someday you do, And they'll make anew river I'll name after you.

 

The song continued throughout the burial and on to the next and the next until the dead of all of the clans were buried. The procession ended at last at Grandam's pavilion, where she and Maati stood beside the burial baskets of Grandsire Niciirye and Aari's and Maati's brother, Laarye. Grandam joined in the song, and Maati, too, their tears indistinguishable from the rain washing down their faces as the baskets were gently put in the ground.

 

Acorna had sung with her people as the verses were repeated over and over again, to no music but the beat of the hard Linyaari feet pawing the soaked ground and throwing mud back over the baskets.

 

She was crying, too, for the parents she had known so short a time, for Delszaki Li, for all of the children she had not been able to save, but most of all she was finally feeling what had made this place so cold and strange and distant, how the heart had been cut out of her people when they left behind the continuity of their own lines, when they left behind their home. Acorna cried for little Maati, who was left alone except for Grandam and her strange, sad brother. But it was for Aari himself that she cried hardest, Aari who had suffered as no other Linyaan had ever suffered, and lived, who had been abandoned and who had lost everything he had ever held dear, including a vital part of himself. And yet, when he had the chance to save himself, he had thought mostly of saving from pillage the bones of his people. Acorna had the distinct impression that he might never have returned except for that mission.

 

As the last strains of the song drained into the ground with the rain, Acorna noticed that people were standing closer together, males and females touching horns, arms around each other's backs and waists, -walking away side by side, gazing into each others' eyes. No one was wearing horn-hats today except Aari, and increasingly the thoughts being projected were unmistakably amorous.

 

Acorna felt a rather embarrassing warmth flooding through herself as well, and Grandam, wiping her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her garment, smiled at her. "It's a natural reaction, child. During these hard years our population has fallen off and as the song says, our loved ones will only return with future generations'-so our bodies tell us it is time to start making babies."

 

Before Acorna could reply, she saw Thariinye coming toward her and warm feeling or no, she stepped behind Aari, back into the shelter of Grandam's pavilion. This did not seem to be the smart thing to do either as other people, couples, were disappearing into the nearest pavilions with an urgency that left no doubt that they were taking care of needs far more interesting than a wish to escape the rain.

 

Acorna turned away from the dispersing crowd.

 

Suddenly, the front flap of Grandam's pavilion burst open and Captain Becker ran into the middle of the room, panting, the uniformed communications officer close on his heels.

 

He was shouting. "Okay, okay, I know I'm not allowed but this is an emergency! I need to find Aari and Lady AcorKhornya. Now! Where are they?" he demanded of Acorna, evidently not able to see her in the dim interior of the pavilion, darkened both by rain and out of respect for the ceremony.

 

"I'm here. Captain Becker. It's me, Acorna. What's the matter?"

 

Aari ducked inside behind her. "Joh?"

 

"I just got a Mayday on my remotest remote scanner. It's from a ship called Shahrazad, Lady Acorna, registered on a planet called Laboue to the House of Harakamian."

 

"Uncle Hafiz!"

 

"Yeah, that's right, Hafiz Harakamian. They're under attack."

 

"This is nonsense!" the communications officer sputtered as Becker's arrival began drawing a crowd, including Liriili. "We picked up no such communication!"

 

"No, well, maybe that's because you people don't want anybody to know you're here so you don't look very hard," Becker said. "But I have equipment that lets me pick up signals two galaxies away. Can you get somebody to sell me the damn fuel so I can go help them?"

 

"I will come, too, Joh," Aari said. "My work here is done and Grandam is taking good care of my sister."

 

"Me too," Acorna said. She thought someone would protest but Liriili actually looked relieved.

 

"I will also come," Thariinye said.

 

"No way," Becker told him. "You make a crowd all by yourself, buddy. Unless you Linyaari happen to maintain a cavalry, which, since you're pacifists, I'm inclined to doubt, all I want from the rest of you is refueling and we're outta here."

 

"Make it so," Liriili said with great relief to the communications officer and to the spaceport personnel among the crowd. She didn't bother to hide her thoughts, and Acorna and everyone else could read her clearly. Liriili was more than a little pleased to see the backs of the contentious Becker, and the troublesome Khornya. And Aari's presence was, as she had predicted, upsetting to many of the inhabitants. He didn't truly belong among normal Linyaari any more. Yes, off-planet was a very good place for them all, as far as Liriili was concerned, as far out into outer space as they could possibly go.

 

Acorna turned as she heard feet galloping up beside her. Maati called out to her to wait. She did so-there was no immediate need for haste. The Condor -was being refueled with one of the several mixtures that would power it.

 

"I like diversity, in case you didn't notice," Becker said to the world at large since Aari was already back in the ship and Acorna had turned to meet Maati. The Linyaari fueling the ship did so quickly and efficiently but paid the human no undue attention. "The hatch is the Mytherian toxic waste chute, got the robolift off a Pachean tanker, and the nose cone is from a Nupiak asteroid breaker. It can take any one of a dozen different fuels and runs good on all of them or a mix."

 

Maati's demands drowned out Becker's voice to Acorna. "I want to go with you!" she cried. "How can he leave again when I just got him?"

 

Grandam, panting a little, caught up with them.

 

"Maati, we're answering a distress call. It will be dangerous. Your brother is going to help Captain Becker and I'm going in case someone needs healing," Acorna said.

 

"I can heal, too!" Maati said. "I helped Aari. I did! He said I was the most help of everybody. I want to go into space, too, and be star-clad like he is and you are, Khornya. Make them take me along."

 

Grandam put her hand on Maati's shoulder. "Maybe next time, child. This time I need you here. We have lost too many already."

 

"Well, then, he should stay, too," Maati said stubbornly. "He only just got here. Captain Becker hasn't had him always. He can do things by himself or with the cat or-Khornya can help him."

 

"Being traded in, am I?" Acorna asked, chiding just a little. She squatted on her heels and said, "Maati, I don't think Aari can stay right now."

 

"Why not? We healed him. All but his horn."

 

"The thing is, we didn't. Not entirely. He is not used to being with people any more."

 

"I will tell you a state secret, child," Grandam said. "Do you know why the Council decided that the graves should be spread out according to clan?"

 

"I don't care about that!" Maati said.

 

"No, but Aari does. Do you know that if we had buried them all together, all he wanted to do here was what he has done these last few ghaanyl and made himself guardian of the graves'

 

"You felt that, too?" Acorna asked.

 

"He broadcasts quite well, even without a horn," Grandam said. "I-rather think he believes he belongs with the dead, no matter how much the living may care for him."

 

"That's Khieevi!" Maati declared. "Why would he think that?"

 

"That's just it, Maati," Acorna said. "He spent a long time with the Khieevi, You saw some of what they did to his body could you feel what they did to him inside?" "Yes," Maati said. "Yes, but he'll get better." "Yes, he will," Acorna said. "But he needs time to get used to being alive. If he stays among our people now, they will never forget how he is now, and it will be much harder for him to grow into his life and become again the man he once was or could have been. Captain Becker may be a little Khieevi around the edges, but he is a good man and he does not let Aari go into himself too much. I will go and make as sure as I can that he comes to no harm and comes back to you. Then, when you're a little older, you can come into space with us if you like."

 

"Into space-with you? Aren't you coming back, Khornya?" "I'm not sure," she said. "But my adopted uncle is out there in trouble."

 

"So is your aunt, don't forget, child," Grandam said, taking Maati by the shoulders. The girl was only partially mollified and later, as Acorna, Aari, and Becker watched the ground from the comscreen, they saw her looking after them as the ship lifted off.

 

Twenty-One

 

The Shahrazad was still transmitting her distress signal when she was boarded. Hafiz had taken the helm after the captain was hit by falling debris from the first volley fired against the ship. It had come from nowhere, before the Shahrazad was able to deploy her shields. Their attacker was cloaked.

 

Fortunately, the Shahrazcad was as spacious vertically as the villa on Laboue was horizontally. And there was only one entrance, on the lower levels, and in between, the ship had a labyrinth of defenses.

 

Karina watched, with a sort of horrified fascination, as pressure-suited individuals entered the main air lock, brandishing large, gleaming, fearsome-looking weapons. The leader, a small person, shucked off her garment to reveal a form-fitting silver garment much like the ones worn by ancient film starlets in vintage Asian space operas. The invader fluffed her hair and demanded of the ship at large, "Hafiz Harakamian, your guests have arrived. Surrender now and save yourself a great deal of pain later."

 

Hafiz smiled and said softly to the computer, "The baths."

 

Dr. Hoa, standing nearby, nodded, and pressed the control buttons for the little bubble of weather he was not averse to using as a weapon under these circumstances.

 

Kisia and her phalanx of soldiers blasted open the air lock from the inside, as Hafiz had known they surely would do, disrespectful as they were of his investment in the finest, smoothest, and most aesthetic possible technology. The blast caused the onion-domed portal to the air lock to disassemble into a waterfall of beads which then tinkled away to a mere shimmer of energy as they were penetrated.

 

Once outside the lock, the invaders were quickly lost in a miasma of swirling steam. The last Karina saw of Kisia or her soldiers for quite some time was the sight of Kisia pulling frantically at the neck of her silvery garment. The invaders mopped sweat out of their eyes and tore off whatever bits of clothing they could spare. They were desperate to keep themselves from broiling in the 135 degree steam heat of the artificial Turkish bath generated by a combination of Hoa's weather wizardry and Hafiz's design for another homey little luxury he had planned to add to the Shahrazad.

 

After a bit, though, the invaders flashed their weapons again, and another of Hafiz's elegant portals was blown open. "The camels, please," Hafiz told the computer.

 

"What will those do, Hafiz?" Karina asked. "Where have you been hiding camels?"

 

"They are holograms, my beloved," Hafiz said. "Only holograms, but we have arranged for them to appear to spit great boluses of the most noisome and slimy mixture ever to spoil the high tone of a caravan. Sadly, we did not mix the stuff with acid or poison or something a bit more lethal for fear of harming my own people. These are delaying tactics only, you understand, but perhaps this spawn of scum-born scorpions will find it sufficiently distracting that we will buy time until assistance may arrive. Meanwhile, the navigation officer is deleting our course from the ship's computer."

 

"Won't Yasmin have warned them about these things?"

 

Karina asked. "You did say she knew all of your security precautions."

 

Hafiz smiled sweetly. "Not these. The good doctor Hoa and I have been amusing ourselves with these little diversions only since we left Rushima-while you were involved in your spiritual activities, o pot of passion."

 

The camel charge was a sight to behold and it certainly did have the element of surprise. If only Hafiz and Dr. Hoa could have made the camels spit something as deadly as it was disgusting, Karina thought, so that these miscreants could be sent back to their creator to have their spirits adjusted and be refitted for their next lives as lizards, snakes, and insects of various species.

 

The girl pirate's head was encased almost immediately in a blob of green goo. Soon enough, all the invaders were wiping their eyes, coughing from the fumes, and otherwise displaying their displeasure at the welcome they were receiving from the Shahrazcu). They realized quickly enough that the camels were holograms, of course, but that did not stop them from slipping and falling on the pseudospit, causing their weapons to discharge accidentally. Two of the invaders were wounded in the struggle.

 

The ship's computer tracked their progress on the diagram of the hull's interior and showed that the next portal they blasted open led them through a maze of halls that caused them to actually go back the way they had come, though not through the Turkish bath.

 

Instead, the hologram this time was of a vast and endless desert and the walkway designed to help load the ship before takeoff was looped to operate treadmill fashion. The invaders walked, then ran, then walked, but never escaped the desert hologram, nor its arid climate, also courtesy of Dr. Hoa and the ship's computer. By the time someone had the presence of mind to shoot into the simulated rolling sand dunes beneath their feet, the tongues of all of the invaders, at least the human ones, were hanging out, and they were looking parched dry and burned from the sunlamps, fixtures from the ship's spa, that augmented the artificial climate.

 

The desert disappeared, the portal opened, and the very hot and weary invaders stumbled through to the desert oasis.

 

"Dancing girls," Hafiz said. The diagram showed that the invaders had climbed through the desert up to the next level. The oasis looked as inviting as it was supposed to, and featured a hologram of Hafiz's favorite garden with a fifteen-layer cascading fountain looking like a waterfall. At this point, Karina noticed that all of the crew except for themselves, Dr. Hoa, and the fallen captain had disappeared. "Where?" she began.

 

"Watch," Hafiz said. "In deference to the pacifistic nature of our dear Acorna's people, we brought no deadly weapons but this does not mean my crew has suffered a lapse of their very fine training that makes them the most skilled of warriors in all manner of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat. See you, my blossom, this is what the intruders will behold." And a squad of improbably endowed and incredibly agile and flexible dancing girls-well, persons, as Hafiz had added a pair of dancing boys to the troop, all muscles and flashing dark eyes, with skills to match those of the women. Clad, but not very, in peekaboo veils of glowing, translucent silk in emerald, sapphire, garnet, raspberry, saffron, all were likewise adorned with jingling coins of purest gold fluttering from between lush breasts, cascading over rippling abdominal muscles, twinkling with the twitching of hips, sliding over sinuous arms and necks, and flirting from between brows and just under the lower eyelashes where coy veilings began. Two dancers for each invader, Karina saw, and the invaders, who surely knew this must be a hologram also, could not quite bring themselves to shoot. In fact, as the dancers kicked up little sprays of water from the quite-real fountain, quite-real water touched the parched, would-be conquerors, who disregarded their weapons long enough to drink, to wash their hot faces, to reach for proffered flesh.

 

Meanwhile, the crew members, clad in blue from head to toe, including transparent facemasks, were concealed by the dancing holograms. They snatched up weapons and disabled the invading troops before any of them knew what was happening.

 

Kisia Manjari squealed as the dancing boys disappeared and she found herself hoisted aloft by two blue clad crewmen.

 

"Oh, Hafiz, you are wonderful!" Karina cried. "You've saved us! Was it your ancient Hadathian spirit guides who told you how to do all of this?"

 

"Very close, o luscious lemon drop, it was the strategy of an ancestor portrayed in one of my collections of rare and venerable vids. The occasion was an athletic contest but the principles were much the same except we had to employ holograms and our own humble resources instead of the living creatures at the disposal of my ancestor."

 

"The invaders have been taken prisoner and the ship secured, my Lord," one of the blue-clad crewmen said across the ship's computer's com system. "What shall we do with them now"

 

"I haven't decided," Hafiz said. "The crocodile pit or being staked out in the desert. What do you think, my darling?"

 

"Oh, Hafiz, that's so very unevolved. Besides, the crocodiles would probably give Ms. Manjari professional courtesy, or perhaps die of indigestion. Why not just confine them to the ship's dungeons until such time as they may attain enlightenment?"

 

"Yes, my angel, but I am very cross with them. Because of them we may not continue our journey. Perhaps we should teach them the joys of spacial liberation?"

 

"It's a thought," Karina conceded. But they had delayed a bit too long.

 

Kisia Manjari broke loose from her dancing boys and pushed a button on her inconsequential left breast. "MQtU, send over the second, third, and fourth phalanxes! And watch out for the biohazards and the dancing girls!"

 

Her former captors recaptured her, menacing her with her own weapon. She simpered at them, "You wouldn't blast a girl for making a little call, would you?"

 

Karina looked at her husband hopefully but he shook his head. "Alas, we have no second line of defense."

 

"Shahrazad, this is the Condor. You still in one piece?"

 

"Condor," Hafiz said. "We are just barely. We are about to be boarded a second time."

 

"They're probably coming through that piece of oversized tubing linking their ship to yours, right?" the voice asked.

 

"That seems a safe assumption," Hafiz said.

 

"None of your people coming through, right?"

 

"No one but pirates."

 

"Okay, we're on the case, but Shahrazad"

 

"Yes, Condor?"

 

"Dibs on what's left of the tubing afterward. We're a salvage ship."

 

"With my compliments. Condor."

 

"Okay, then. Brace yourselves. You may get a little shook up."

 

Acorna had not realized quite the extent of the adventure she was in for merely by becoming part of the Condor's growing crew. "How close are they, Captain Becker?" she had asked.

 

"Only a wormhole away," he replied. "Looks stable, and it should let us out within striking range of the target. Hold onto your horn-hats, boys and girls, here we go." He had taken what he said was the unprecedented move of strapping the cat in, too, a procedure which caused RK's ears to flatten against his head. RK's tail would have lashed as well but it had no place to go. "Sorry about this, shipmate, but we gotta make up some time here."

 

He called back to the rest of them as he plunged the Condor into the first hole, "Salvage and recyclings usually a more leisurely kind of business, you understand."

 

Acorna smiled. He reminded her so much of her uncles. And Aari, for the first time since she had seen him, seemed to be actively enjoying himself. Or maybe not. He was baring his teeth. Was that hostile or had he just been around Becker too long? No, she thought he was happy, tie felt happy to her.

 

The ship jolted as it surged out of the wormhole and through the first of the two "pleats" as Becker called them. "Little speed bump there, ladies and gentlemen. Black water, as my daddy used to call it. Space rapids. Yahoo!"

 

One more of those and suddenly they were no longer in empty space. They were making visual contact with two similar ships, both posh spaceliners, connected by a long white umbilical cord.

 

Becker hailed the Shahrazca. Acorna nearly wept with relief to hear her uncle Hafiz's voice apprising them of the situation.

 

She was about to ask to speak to him when Becker declared he had dibs on the tubing and accelerated, aiming the Condor's nose between the two liners.

 

The tubing was no impediment at all for the Nupiak asteroid breaker nose cone. Space-suited bodies tumbled like corpuscles on a microscope slide of a broken capillary. Gravity boots were locking onto hulls and gloves grasping the gloves of spinning crewmates. Acorna was glad to see that most of them were managing to save themselves but even gladder to see that in order to do so, they had to let their weapons twirl out into the blackness of space.

 

Acorna and Aari watched for a moment, and Acoma thought again how terribly lonely it would be to go drifting in space till you died. She glanced at Becker, and at the pressure suits on the wall. Becker looked completely serious for one moment, then got up, threw pressure suits and jet packs at them and said, "Okay, boys and girls, salvage time. You too, KEN-bo, but you won't need a suit, right? When that little -female individual was kicking the stuffing out of me, some of her boys stopped her from making it worse so I guess I owe them. Besides, I want that tubing! And then we'll make a house call on your uncle. Lady."

 

Acorna was well used to maneuvering in jets and pressure suits from her childhood mining asteroids with her uncles, and Aari also had used them before his captivity on Vhiliinyar. Fortunately, Acorna's horn was not so long that it required a special helmet. Maneuvering in space was a lot like swimming, using the jets as fins, grabbing the drifting crewmen and bringing them back to the Shahrazad and shoving them through an airlock before going after the next one.

 

They managed to pluck two off the hull of their own ship where they clung like barnacles before that ship took off. As soon as they shoved the last one aboard Becker said, "Lady, you may want to visit the Shahrazad and make sure your uncle is okay. Aari and KEN, unless you like family reunions, come on back to the Condor and we'll eat our humble din-din of plant seeds and cat food and hope Acorna brings us back some highclass chow from her rich relative."

 

Acorna waved and climbed through the airlock. The previous hitchhikers had been taken into custody by the Shahrazad's crew but once she drew off her helmet, Hafiz himself was there to embrace her and welcome her aboard. As they repaired to the ship's lounge, she felt it suddenly lurch, and saw a bolt of light zipping across the view screen from the Shahrazcad to the departing Mu)a<f. The Mu)cu exploded in a ball of flame.

 

From the corn set, she heard Becker yelling, "Yahoo! Instant karma for coming to the rescue, Aari, my man! Lookit the salvage! See ya later, Lady!" and the Condor with a wee waggle of its chassis zoomed off to retrieve its prizes.

 

"No!" cried Kisia Manjari, bound hand and foot to a chair in the corner of the lounge. "It's not fair! That junk man can't have the nice new ship my uncle gave me. Daddy, do something really nasty to him and his horrible cat."

 

Acorna saw that Kisia's eyes were turned up in her head so only white showed through her lids.

 

"As you see, dear Acorna, we are playing host, somewhat unwillingly, to an old schoolmate of yours."

 

Acorna rose and crossed the room, kneeling beside Kisia and looking into her face. She started to touch the girl's head with her horn but Kisia jerked away, batting at her with manacled hands.

 

"She's had some sort of psychotic break," Acorna said, recoiling slightly from the ugly chaos of the girl's mind. "She followed Captain Becker and took away the horns of the Ancestors he had gathered. She tried to kill him to make him tell where the Linyaari home world is."

 

"And no doubt it was for the same reason that she pursued us," Hafiz said with a heavy sigh.

 

"I wonder if she knows anything about the disappearance of my people," Acorna mused.

 

Before she or anyone else could pursue that line of inquiry, a familiar voice penetrated the room. "Shahrazad, this is the Haven. We received your Mayday. Shahrazcad, come in. For the love of all the moons of Mithra, Shahrazad, don't tell us we're too late and that explosion was you! Please come in, Hafiz, you old camel molester, you."

 

"Mr. Greene," Hafiz said to the room at large. "There are ladies present, if you please. And no, quite happily, the explosion was that of a ship called the Mu)<u registered to Count Edacki Ganoosh. The MQcu attacked us and launched a boarding party. We managed to capture most of the party, and then we blew up the ship, once it uncloaked, in order to forestall future difficulty."

 

The sound of youthful cheering and squealing and one shrill celebratory whistle overcame Greene's transmission for a moment.

 

"Johnny, it's Acorna," she said. "What are you and the Haven doing out here?"

 

"We originally came thinking to give safe escort to the Shahrazad, Acorna, but things have gotten a little complicated. What are you, doing there?"

 

"That also is complicated, Johnny," Acorna said.

 

"Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages," Becker's voice crackled in on top of the others, "I think it's time we all had a little real-time interfacing here. What say we pop over to the nearest dirt, set our respective vessels on their tails, and climb aboard Shahrazad so Mr. Harakamian can entertain us in the style to which it would be nice to become accustomed while we tell our respective war stories, hmm?"

 

"A very sound suggestion. Captain Becker," Hafiz said. "Please, bring your excellent crew."

 

"Bring the kitty, too. Captain," a young voice piped up.

 

"That request was brought to you by Ms. Turi Reamer, jeweler at large, Becker," Johnny Greene said.

 

"'Course it was," Becker replied. "I'da known Turi's voice anywhere, Greene. You best not be coming between me and my lady friends now, John, you hear?"

 

"Lordee, I can tell you are on a salvage high, Joe. Get much from the wreck?"

 

"I did not. It's in a bazillion teeny pieces all moving rapidly away at warp speed. Not really worth my while."

 

"Gentlemen, when you have finished your bonding ritual, perhaps we might agree upon a place to meet?"

 

"There's a puny little planetoid not far from here that doesn't seem to have any life or want any," Becker said. "Let's set down there."

 

This they did. As Becker, Aari, RK, and the KEN unit boarded, Acorna and the Harakamians greeted them.

 

"What a splendid specimen of a Makahomian Temple Cat you have on your shoulder, Mr. Becker!" Karina said, clapping her hands. "I understand they are among the most enlightened of all creatures. It is said that when the Makahomian elders and priests begin to consider their next incarnations, the most favored of all possible fates is to be born again as a Temple Cat."

 

RK licked his paw, swiped it across his whiskers, narrowed his eyes, and purred appreciatively.

 

Becker was more single-minded. "I'd like to have a look at the human space salvage you and Aari retrieved, Acorna, if your uncle doesn't mind," he said. "Like I said, a couple of those guys who were with Manjari were not half bad. I'm sort of hoping they were among the survivors."

 

Acorna was pleased that he had dropped the "Lady" part now. It meant that he was starting to consider her a friend, instead of some legendary character he had heard about on Earth, which had been how he had regarded her before.

 

Uncle Hafiz waved his hand graciously. "Please consider my dungeon as your dungeon," he said.

 

Becker strolled up to the force field where Hafiz had confined the miscreants. The hologram behind them showed a Crusades-style dungeon, complete with sound effects of someone being dismembered in the background. Acorna was very glad it was just a hologram.

 

Becker said, "I like the ambience, sir. Amnesty Interplanetary would be less enthused, I'm sure, but if they ever come aboard because someone who deserves this has the brass to complain, there will be nothing anyone can put a finger on in the way of cruel or unusual punishment." Kisia Manjari was by now confined in a separate cell. Karina Harakamian kept sending troubled glances in the deranged girl's direction.

 

"Can you wall off her cell from visual or auditory contact for a little while, please, Mr. Harakamian?"

 

"My dear Becker, we are fellow entrepreneurs, businessmen, and adventurers. Do call me Hafiz, my friend, and I shall call you ..."

 

"Becker's okay, but Aari here calls me Joe." "Joh," Aari said, and looked challengingly at Uncle Hafiz. Acorna was pleased to note that either Aari's appearance was so much improved by his surgery, prosthesis, and horn-hat that the Harakamians noticed nothing unusual, or else Aari's wounds had only been particularly repugnant to Linyaan. Hafiz smiled and said, "And you too, my dear fellow, must call me Hafiz. Our beloved Acorna calls me uncle. I practically raised her, you know. Why, I am all but a kinsman to your people!"

 

Acorna stifled a giggle and Aari gave Hafiz a slow baring of his teeth, rather like Decker's more wolfish grins. "I am Aari, Uncle Hafiz. I have lost much of my own family and will happily adopt you, since you wish it."

 

Oops. She wished she and Aari could thought-speak as easily as they had been able to among the horns of the dead. She could have warned him. Uncle Hafiz was a very nice man in many respects but he was not exactly to be trusted-not even by members of his blood kin.

 

"Splendid, splendid." Hafiz erected a hologramatic wall in front of Kisla's cell, adding some decorative manacles with a skeleton dangling from them on the outside, a burning brazier with implements of torture heating in it, and, as a finishing touch, a dish of greenish gruel crawling with virtual maggots. It matched the decor of the interior of her cell nicely, though that now was wholly blocked by a slimy looking stone wall. Had Acorna not witnessed some of the conditions in the child labor camps of Kisia Manjari's adoptive father, the Piper, she would never have believed human beings could incarcerate each other in such dreadful nonhologramatic conditions.

 

RK sat with lashing tail and narrowed eyes watching as Becker paced with his hands clasped behind him, studying the faces of the men Acorna and Aari had rescued. They were all men, which did not surprise Acorna. Kisia Manjari would have no other women in her entourage. Her ego was such that she would see any other woman as competition.

 

"I think I recognize a couple of you fellows," Becker said. "Pardon me if I don't quite remember your faces. I was dying at the time. But you failed to kick me when I was down and I like that in an enemy, fortunately for you. Now then, I'm wondering if any of you, being the lickspittles of Kisia Manjari and her uncle as you must be to find yourselves in this charming accommodation, would care to redeem yourselves a little further and fill us in about your employers' plans. You understand we're wondering why we have been singled out for the honor and distinction of being Kisia and Ganoosh's enemies."

 

Acorna saw them hesitate, and quite without shame she used some of the new skills she had acquired on narhiiVhiliinyar to give her wily old uncle a small psychic push in the right direction.

 

"I can assure you," Uncle Hafiz said suddenly, an inner smile lighting his eyes as if the brilliant idea he had just had was his very own, which, for all Acorna knew, it may have been. Perhaps her push was merely giving him the sort of cue an actor needed to speak his lines at the proper time. "That the man who proves to be of the most assistance to us will no longer need be in anyone's employ,

 

"So grateful for his services shall the House of Harakamian be that it shall reward him so that he will believe he has found the universe's most generous djinn in the most secluded and luxuriously appointed bottle in the universe. Should he be kissing his own mother on the lips, his identity would yet be a mystery to her when our physicians have concluded his transformation and yet, so handsome a-what is that idiomatic expression you so charmingly employ, o incomparable jewel among jewels, when referring to my personal physique and sexual prowess?"

 

"Studmuffin, Lord and Master," Karina replied with a demure lowering of her lashes and a coy curtsey.

 

"So handsome a studmuffin shall he be that all women will desire him and all men admire him. A far more attractive retirement program than being left adrift in space, would you not say, gentlemen?"

 

There was only a moment of silence before one of the men Acorna had rescued, one whose face wore a careworn expression that was perhaps the result of a troubled conscience, spoke up. "I'd do it for a new job and protection for my family, Mr. Harakamian. I understood that I was being employed to pilot an executive liner to take VIPs to business appointments. This kidnapping and torture stuff and posing as Federation Forces was not in my contract."

 

Acorna did not stay for the bidding war that ensued, each prisoner vying to give the most accurate details to which he was privy concerning Ganoosh's operation and plans. For at that moment, Johnny Greene and what remained for the crew of the Haven were boarding the Shahrazm). Acorna ran to greet them. It was so good to see her old friends again! She could hardly wait to see Pal Kendoro and 'Ziana. She wondered if 'Ziana realized yet how much Pal cared for her. And if Markel and Johnny Greene would be there.

 

Markel and Johnny were there, it was true, and Khetala, who stepped forward and hugged Acorna in an embrace that quickly degenerated into sobs. Acorna wondered what could be upsetting her so until she realized that here were Johnny, Markel, Khetala, red-haired Annella, a tall red-haired man with two children of the same coloring, and a passel of very young children. And that was all.

 

"Kheti, where are the others?" Acorna asked. "Johnny? They're not on the Haven, are they? What happened?"

 

Johnny took a deep breath. Becker and Hafiz had by that time noted that something else was amiss and joined Acorna and Karina.

 

"Well, honey, there's good news and bad news," Johnny said. "The bad news is. General Ikwaskwan is working for the bad guys. He and a bunch of his fake Federation Forces troops came home to roost about the time the Starfarers arrived to pick up Nadhari Kando for combat lessons. Ikwaskwan gassed Nadhari and our ship and took most of the Starfarers prisoner. If it hadn't been for Markel knowing how to use the vents and suggesting them as a safe space, we, too, would be guests of the general."

 

"Was that last part the good news?" Acorna asked.

 

Johnny shook his head. "No, the good news-though it's also kind of mixed-is that we know the course the general's ships took when they returned to their lair. We followed, and we know exactly where it is, but we couldn't take them on with only kiddy power to draw on. While we were trying to decide what our next move was, we picked up the Mayday from the Shahrazad."

 

When that and all of the other information had been shared and a plan requiring Acorna and Aari to be in two places at once had been formed, Hafiz Harakamian demonstrated the skill upon which his first fortune had been founded.

 

"My enemies have told many lies about me," Hafiz said. "Among them is the tale that my earliest enterprises involved the sale of addictive substances, with hints that these were illegal drugs. As any of my people can tell you, I am a devout man and am guided by the Three Books and the Three Prophets. I would never consider such a thing. However, in one way, my enemies are correct. My fortune was founded on items that many find addictive. You will have noticed some of my specialty work here aboard the Shahrazad. Mr. Greene, I believe, will recall when I fulfilled my family obligation to make a profitable business of my own before I was named heir by running my business from a storefront on Todo Street."

 

Johnny snapped his fingers. "Harakamian Hologramatics! Fondest Fantasies Fulfilled! I remember it! I loved the holo of the music session in the Dublin pub."

 

"I think Dad mentioned your company a time or two, too, now that I think about it," Becker said.

 

"Why, Uncle Hafiz!" Acorna said. "I knew you had wonderful taste, but I had no idea you were an artist as well."

 

"Oh, yes, my dearest, and now, with your help and Aan's, I will create the vision of a lifetime. Meanwhile, the rest of you get to work."

 

"We're on it, Hafiz," Becker said. "C'mon, folks," he said, and the KEN unit as well as the crew of the Haven followed him to first the Condor and then, laden with various tools and spare parts, back to the Haven.

 

 

 

 

Day after day and hour after hour the tortured bodies of the children -were dragged into the  bubble-badly bruised, broken, and cut; some with ruptured organs and splintered bone. The Linyaari on the healing rotation did their best for them, working until the healers were past the point of total exhaustion.

 

And all night long another team worked on Nadhari Kando, healing her flesh and bone, cleansing her spirit of the drugs which caused the disciplined woman warrior to behave in a way her sense of honor otherwise would not have allowed. The Linyaari were reaching their limits and feared they would soon become too exhausted to help.

 

It would have been different if the Linyaari had been given time to rest between rotations but they were not. Ikwaskwan's pet scientists were deliberately pushing the unicorn people to the limits.

 

Melireenya had often been taken to her ship and interrogated again about the computer system. Every Linyaari underwent this, usually in the middle of the night or before a long-delayed mealtime. Not that the meals were in any way adequate. Bales of old hay were all that Ikwaskwan provided for food for the Lmyaan.

 

After the interrogation, Melireenya had been shoved into the gas chamber. She had needed healing herself afterwards. So depleted had her horn become from the interrogation, it took much longer to purify the air than usual, and she absorbed some of the toxins before her system could purify them. Then it was on to the dismal swamp known among the inmates as "the pool." It took her hours of lying on her belly with her face almost submerged in scummy, stinking sewage to clear this water.

 

There were several different gas chambers and several different pools, actually, so that many Linyaari could undergo the same ordeals at once.

 

Melireenya's joy at seeing Hrronye, her lifemate, again was quickly dampened when others told her in whispers of thoughtspeak that they had been separated from their own families and told they would not see them again until they gave the soldiers the information they demanded. Nobody did, of course. The location of the Linyaari home world and the secrets of the horn were as locked into Linyaari psyches as their own DNA codes. Those who traveled from the planet learned from their superiors how to navigate from memory, and it became a part of them along with their newly white skins and silvery manes.

 

But she seldom saw Hrronye now, and wished she had dared embrace him, as they were kept apart anyway on the tedious deadly treadmill of torture called the "duty roster."

 

By far the worst part of it all was the healing. At first, it was not so bad. The average Linyaari in good physical condition could heal a deep -wound within moments. And there were many Linyaari in the compound. Only four were assigned to heal at the same time, and this was after their resources had been depleted by the other "duties," lack of sleep, and increasingly, by malnutrition.

 

Neeva had tried to reason with Ikwaskwan. "This is hardly a fair representation of our skills that you are seeing, General," she said in her best diplomat's manner. "We could show you so much more were we properly fed and rested."

 

He had actually reached out and run his hand down her horn, a violation of privacy that ran very deep among their people. Neeva had tried to pretend it did not distress her but of course it did. "And we could feed you so much better, dear ambassador, if you would tell us the location of the place where we might find your native grasses and other foods. If you continue to refuse to satisfy our very reasonable curiosity, why then ..." He stroked her horn with his fingers again and when she winced away from him, she was forced to stand still by two of the soldiers, and he repeated his repugnant gesture several more times. "The horns will survive all of you, I'm told. Perhaps they alter to their translucent and less useful state because, while on a living member of your species, they are less stable-having to self-heal as it were. It may be that detached horns, having fewer frivolous demands made on their powers, will be of more use to us. I understand these things have aphrodisiac properties. Is that true?"

 

"How would I know?" Neeva asked, undiplomatically. He retaliated by grabbing her horn with his fist and yanking on it so that she sobbed with pain and humiliation. "One way or another, dear ambassador, I will have yours for myself."

 

This had been too much for her lifemate, who, like other Linyaari present at the pond where she approached the general, was listening.

 

"Leave her alone!" Virii demanded, stepping forward, only to be grabbed by two more of the soldiers. He had spoken in Linyaari, of course, but his meaning was taken by Ikwaskwan, who wagged a scolding finger at him. "I'll have yours, too, stud. I wonder-are they a pair? How interesting." He had nodded at the pond. "Let's see how long it takes these two to purify that. Make sure it's good and foul."

 

The soldiers had eliminated in the pond and then forced the heads of both Neeva and Virii into the filth, not bothering to make sure their noses and mouths were clear of the water. No one else had been allowed to help. It was horrible. In the shape they were in it took both of them almost ten minutes to purify the water and by the end of it both had nearly drowned. Thereafter they underwent a joint interrogation session. Melireenya and the others had not so much as dared to whisper while the interrogation was broadcast throughout the compound.

 

Today it was rumored something even worse would happen. The architect of this horror, the one who had retained the services of Ikwaskwan and his mercenaries, had arrived during the night. Ikwaskwan told everyone he had special entertainments planned for their distinguished guest.

 

(They almost make you miss the Khieevi, don't they?) Khaari asked sadly. (At least with the Khieevi, we were never sure if they understood what they were doing to us or not. The calculation of this is repulsive.)

 

The tournament was about to begin and during it, Melireenya had been specifically chosen for healing duty. Her horn was translucent, difficult to see now in some light, and it had even begun to droop. It was awful enough to think of its powers failing while she was up to her ears in fouled water or breathing poisoned air or enduring the mistreatment of the interrogators-but worst of all for her was the thought that it, and she, would fail in the middle of trying to heal a massively wounded child.

 

So far this had not happened but it now took all the Linyaari on duty many many long moments to heal each and every wound. All the time the victims were in terrible pain.

 

Now the soldiers and their masters had assembled in the stadium, and this time all of the Linyaari and all of the children of the Haven were being forced to watch as well. The lovely young captain 'Ziana of the Haven was bound at the wrist and ankle to that young man who would someday, if they lived through this, surely be her lifemate.

 

Poor Nadhari was healed once more of all but the massive amounts of drugs Ikwaskwan had injected into her system. The last three nights she had seen patients still undergoing healing. Once the drugs were leeched from her system, she had begged them to kill her, or to at least let her die so she could no longer be used in this fashion. But of course, no Linyaari could do such a thing.

 

The soldiers were using their prods to push the young couple out to Nadhari when a soldier came running through the crowd and bounded up to the box where Ikwaskwan and Ganoosh sat waiting for the maiming to begin. The soldier saluted and said something to Ikwaskwan, who looked very pleased, which was not at all good, and nodded to him, then held his hand up to the soldiers below to desist for a moment. The first soldier bounded down the steps and out of the stadium bubble. He was headed in the direction of the bubble where the captured Linyaari ships were stored and the interrogations took place.

 

A moment or two passed, and Melireenya was wondering, along with the other Linyaari linked in thought-speak, what fresh horror was about to be visited upon them. Then the light shifted and the top of the bubble was filled with oversize faces and forms of richly dressed Linyaari people standing in front of colorful pavilions with a stately hill in the background cradling more egg ships than could possibly be left on narhiiVhiliinyar.

 

"Dearest ambassadors, tradesmen, students, and scientists, this is your vilzaar speaking," said the woman, who was not the viizaar at all, not unless Khornya had rapidly risen to power. She was speaking in her rather broken version of Linyaari, so Melireenya was inclined to doubt she had become the planet's administrator already. Beside her was a fellow who was vaguely familiar, and yet, different somehow. Melireenya was far too weary to try to place him. "Dr. Vaanye" Khornya indicated the man beside her who was hardly old enough to be the Dr. Vaanye who was her late father-"has finally succeeded in widening the band of our broadcast so it can reach to the various planets upon which you should now be posted. We have had no word of you in a long while. Have you lost your way home? Have you forgotten how to contact your loved ones? In case such a disaster is happening, we will rebroadcast our coordinates on this band only."

 

Ikwaskwan was impatiently gesturing to a soldier who dragged Neeva and Virii, bound at wrist and ankle like the young Starfarer couple, out into the arena.

 

"Well, Ambassador? What's the message?"

 

Neeva raised her filthy face, her mane matted and chunks of it torn loose in parts, her horn barely visible.

 

She spat.

 

Ikwaskwan roared. "Let Nadhari have them both and bring me their horns when she's done with them!"

 

Melireenya and Khaari passed a signal between them and Melireenya sprang up and cried, "No! General, please don't hurt them any more! I'll tell you what it says! I know it will harm the rest of my people but I simply can't take it any more! Please let Neeva and Virii go and I'll tell you anything you want to."

 

Khaari ran into the arena after her and tried to pull her back. "Melireenya, you don't know what you're saying. You mustn't betray all of us for one person, not even Neeva."

 

Perhaps the general would not notice in the heat of the moment that they were both speaking Standard, for his benefit.

 

The message overhead was in a loop, repeating over and over again. Melireenya, babbling, stumbling over her words, forgetting the Standard that she had learned from Khornya's people what seemed like ghaanyi and ghaanyl ago, told Ikwaskwan what the transmission said. She hesitated over the coordinates until he threatened Neeva and Virii again, and then she allowed herself to cave in under the weight of his cruelty, as she had wanted to do for days. She lay in the dirt of this strange moon beside her poor tortured friends and wept and wept and wept until she thought her weeping would never cease. When at long last someone, Khaari, thought-touched her and she looked up, everything around her had changed. The most drastic change was that the bleachers were empty, with most of the soldiers, Ikwaskwan and Ganoosh, gone. Although the broadcast was still playing and replaying overhead, it was infused with far more light, and Melireenya realized that this was because there were no longer the shadows being cast by the towering fence of bullet-shaped troop ships that had surrounded the biosphere bubbles. All of these ships were also gone, and the atmosphere outside the bubbles was clouded only by settling dust and debris. The bubbles still resounded with the roaring of the troop ship drives as they lifted off.

 

That roaring seemed to continue for an awfully long time, Melireenya thought. With the games over, Nadhari was netted, sedated, and Melireenya and the other three on her shift -went to work healing her. This day there were no wounds except the psychic ones from the drugs and the shame she suffered to be so badly misused. So far this day she had maimed no one.

 

The lone sentry left to guard the Linyaari ship bubble was surprised to see two troop ships land so soon after the others had left. He thought he understood when he saw the cadre of uniformed Federation Forces men and women pushing one of the corns in front of them. This one was lipping off to them in her own horsey-sounding babble.

 

"Got another live one for the general," the short, barrelchested master sergeant said. "He's gonna want to interrogate this one personally."

 

"Well, he'll have to do it when he gets back from the Linyaari home world then," the sentry smirked.

 

"What?" "Didn't you get the message? The stupid corns broadcast to all of their ships, which we intercepted, of course, the coordinates to their planet. The general and the boss have taken off with most of the personnel to check it out."

 

"No kiddin'? Well, we'll just park her with the others then. What'd they have in the mess hall tonight?"

 

The sentry told him while the rest of the cadre marched the corn past him, and past the ships, into the biosphere where most of her kind were kept.

 

"Where'd you find her?"

 

"Pleasure house on Rahab Three."

 

"No kidding? You mean somebody wanted to do it -with one of..." The sentry didn't finish his sentence. Something banged against the backs of his knees, knocking him into the sergeant. The last thing he saw was the sergeant's belt buckle as the newcomer raised both fists and brought them down hard on the back of the sentry's skull.

 

Acorna heard the thump when the sentry hit the ground and saw only a brief flash of movement as Aari penetrated the biosphere. He had an uncanny talent for taking on the coloring of his surroundings, she saw. It was augmented by smearing himself with soil, but it was more in the way he became whatever was around him, though she would have said if asked previously that it was impossible for anyone to blend with a plastic bubble.

 

Khetala was giving the next trooper they encountered the same story Becker had about Acorna being a special prisoner they'd found in a pleasure house. Meanwhile Reamer guided her to the bubble where many other Linyaari were crammed into a place far too small for them. They were very subdued. At first she thought they all wore horn-hats to mute their thoughts, but then she saw that their horns were in very bad condition that they were emaciated and filthy, their bones protruding and their postures drooping.

 

She began to pick out the ones who looked the strongest and ablest and used her horn judiciously on them, meanwhile broadcasting in thought-speak, (We have come to take you home. Please be ready. Do as you are directed and with any luck, we will all leave here safely.)

 

(Khornya?) Her name spoken in her aunt's thought-speak sounded as if Neeva was seeing her as a ghost. Acorna waded through her people until she found an adjoining bubble where four Linyaari were laying horns on Neeva and a male Linyaari, and also on someone who vaguely resembled the Red Bracelet who had once been Delszaki Li's chief of security, Nadhari Kando.

 

(Neeva!)

 

(We are doing what we can for her, Khornya, but she and Virii have been badly abused.)

 

(Melireenya! Khaari, I am so glad to have found you. Stand aside a moment-no, wait.) She laid her horn on all of them and in a few moments, except for looking very thin, they had recovered to the point that they once more resembled her old shipmates and her aunt.

 

(Oh, Khornya! You see how low we have fallen. Thanks be that your horn is still fresh. Can you help Nadhari? They have almost killed her with their wicked drugs that make her do terrible things to us all.)

 

Nadhari was feverish, and her eyes were staring, the blood vessels in her neck and upper chest standing out like those of her arms, seemingly in spasm. Acorna laid her horn against them and Nadhari relaxed.

 

Becker poked his head in. "Khetala, Reamer, Markel, and Hafiz's people have taken care of the guards. You got enough pilots for the Linyaari vessels?"

 

"Yes. But none of them are very strong."

 

"That's okay. They don't have to fly far. I swept all the ships for homing devices. Learned that lesson once already. Let's go, then."

 

"It is a fortunate thing that all of my gardens are not of the illusory variety," Hafiz said as he, Acorna, and Aari watched the Linyaari former prisoners stripping his hydroponics gardens like locusts in a field. The gardens in the Linyaari ships, which could have fed the prisoners, had been deliberately killed by Ikwaskwan's men or allowed to die.

 

"Very good," Acorna agreed. "Our people are looking much improved. But we need to get them home -where they can graze and rest and have the wounds to their spirits salved."

 

"I hope," Aari said in a voice so tight that it came out rather high, "that their families will not fear them, too."

 

Acorna laid her horn against his shoulder. "Your family did not fear you. Maati was very put out we didn't bring her along, in fact."

 

In the lounge and on the mess deck, the Starfarers were putting all of the gourmet selections in the Shahrazad's replicators to the test, while Karina and the staff busied themselves at other replicators on other parts of the ship, fixing food for the youngsters to take on their journey home.

 

Becker stuck his head through the onion-domed port, nodded to Aari and Acorna, and said, "Saddle up, crew. Time to go back in the sky now."

 

So they left Hafiz and the Haven in charge of the former prisoners, both human and Linyaari, and boarded the Condor once more, setting off for the coordinates that the hologram had given as those of narhii-Vhiliinyar.

 

Acorna was a little surprised to see Nadhari Kando, Neeva and Virii, and 'Ziana and Pal already aboard. "I'm amazed Johnny Greene isn't here, too," she said.

 

"He's still back on the Shahrazcad generating those messages with the coordinates, sending out fresh holovids every little once in a while just to keep Ganoosh and Ikwaskwan interested," Becker told her. "I figure they've been traveling maybe forty-eight hours by now, but using my special navigational methods, we'll be there several hours before them."

 

He was correct as, Acorna was learning, was usual. The Condor arrived at the Federation outpost well before the mercenary fleet. When the post commander heard the stories of the Linyaari ambassador, the legendary Nadhari Kando, and the young Starfarers, he was at first hesitant until Acorna said, "I can only bring you the words of my uncle, whom the Linyaari people regard as a sort of honorary kinsman and who considers all of my people to be under his protection while they are outside their own territory."

 

"Yes, ma'am," the Federation commander said. "And your uncle, can you give me a name?"

 

"Hatiz Harakamian," she said. "You may have heard of him. Patron Emeritus of the House of Harakamian? My other uncle Rafik Nadezda is the current patron and he naturally shares Uncle Hafiz s concern. In fact, Mr. Kendoro and Ms. Kando are close personal friends of Uncle Rafik's as well as mine."

 

The commander's demeanor changed. "You're Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li! At the behest of Mr. Rafik Nadezda, the Federation has been investigating certain crimes against it and unaffiliated races."

 

Acorna nodded.

 

"And-uh-two other uncles-your parents seem to have had a lot of brothers, ma'am." Acorna nodded. "Two other uncles were so insistent that we send Federation troops that there is a detachment on the way already. I'm afraid your uncles were so upset that they had to be forcibly detained to keep them from coming along. No civilians on troop ships, ma'am. I'm sure you understand."

 

"If you could just send them word that you've spoken with me and I am" she started to say fine but then amended it to, "I have survived, Mr. Harakamian is safe, and we are among friends, I would appreciate it."

 

"Roger that, ma'am." Within a few hours real Federation ships began arriving from outposts all over nearby quadrants, creating a formidable welcoming committee for Ikwaskwan's fake ships.

 

When Ikwaskwan's troops arrived, bristling with weapons but speaking words of peace to what they fondly supposed to be the Linyaari home world, they were flanked by the real Federation ships, locked into tractor beams, and escorted to the outpost, after a brief skirmish ending in the Federation's favor and providing so much salvage for Becker that he had to put it on the tractor beam to tow behind the Condor.

 

"Now then, Aari, here's something my daddy taught me about towing salvage. You always tow it at a thirty degree angle from your flight pattern. You know why that is?"

 

"Perhaps so it does not hit your ship if you must suddenly cease acceleration or reverse course?" Aari asked.

 

Becker looked disappointed, Acorna thought. He loved to lecture. "Very good. But that's not all. You know what else?"

 

"No, Joh," Aari said.

 

"Well, it's the ions we leave behind in our wake, see. They discolor some of the metals, pock others, can completely ruin a good load of salvage so it's not worth jack. This way, you tow it at an angle, you don't get hit in the butt or ruin your cargo. Only problem is, we can't tow through the worms and pleats so we gotta go the long way."

 

"Joh," Aari said. "The scanners."

 

The scanners had picked up the cloaked vessel ahead of them, now uncloaking to turn on them. The comscreen never brightened. It didn't have to.

 

"Ahh," Nadhari said in a hoarse and cracked voice. She had spent hours giving her deposition. "Ikky's flagship."

 

Becker bared his teeth at her in the grin Aari had learned to mimic. "So, Nadhari, I heard about what this old boyfriend of yours did to you. How about we send him a little love letter?"

 

Nadhari returned the grin with the first one of hers Acorna had seen since they left the biospheres. "Oh, Becker, sweetie, can we."

 

"For you, no sacrifice is too much," Becker said. "It's a good place to die--for them. We got black water behind us-everybody strap down."

 

Acorna reached for RK to secure the cat, as well, but he had made other plans. He lay inside the same harness that held the unhealthily thin form of Nadhari Kando.

 

Becker said, "Nadhari? Pretty name. Makahomian, isn't it?"

 

A bolt of light snapped toward them.

 

She nodded just before he said, "Okay, here it comes, three-two-one, reverse thrusters!"

 

Acorna didn't quite take it all in. One moment the ship loomed large on their screens and the Condor seemed to be standing still. The next moment, Nadhari's smile turned down, everyone unstrapped themselves and Aari unpointed at the comscreen. And in the midst of it all, several tons of wreckage were slingshot from the tractor beam on their starboard side.

 

After a moment or two the Condor slowed, and all movement reversed once more for a forward thrust. They reemerged from the "black water" just as the first red ball of light was dimming and the pieces of Ikwaskwan's flagship were making that part of space a dangerous place to be.

 

Nadhari Kando laughed and Becker winked at her. "Sending them a frag-load of salvage ricocheted their shot right back at them." He shook his head regretfully. "Just like the sick sucker to explode in too many pieces to make it worthwhile to collect."

 

"I appreciate your sacrifice, Becker," Nadhari said.

 

"Then it was worth it," he said, with grim satisfaction.

 

Karina was the one who thought of the brilliant idea of taking some of each of the grasses favored by the Linyaari and putting them in the replicator. And belatedly, Becker and Aari remembered the sacks of seed that had been blocking the crew quarters before the KEN unit cleared them out to make room for the bones. With these resources, the Linyaari were soon restored to relative health.

 

Karina again offered her services and Hafiz's to Acorna for her spiritual training. Neeva, who overheard the offer, thoughtspoke to Acorna, (Ask her to tell you how she manages to shield her thoughts so well, Khornya. When we first met her, just about the time we thought we had made contact, her mind became a complete blank.)

 

"Karina, you were the first contact for my people when they came to fetch me," Acorna said. "You learned thought-speech before I did, I'm told."

 

"Oh, yes," Karina said, "And thanks to my heightened level of enlightenment, I was able instantly to communicate with your species."

 

"Didn't you find it difficult at all? I certainly did-I have had so much trouble sorting out the thoughts of those around me from each other and not broadcasting every little notion."

 

"I had just the opposite problem, to tell you the truth," Karina said confidentially. "I would start receiving them and, knowing they were trying to reach me, I naturally made my mind completely open and blank to receive their thoughtsand then I could hear nothing at all."

 

"Hmmm," Acorna said. "I'll have to try that."

 

"What?"

 

"I said, 'imagine that,'" Acorna replied. "When you were expecting just the opposite, I mean."

 

While everyone worked to regain the strength they needed to make the journey home, Acorna and her aunt talked.

 

Acorna was almost startled to find that of everything that had happened to her, what she wanted to talk about most was Aari and what had been done to him. After her aunt's ordeal, Acorna felt that she would understand what Aari had undergone. "Maybe you can make our people understand, help him fit in again," Acorna said.

 

"Do you think that's still necessary?" Neeva asked. "Look. Does he seem to be having a hard time fitting in now? "

 

Indeed, he did not, but was grazing with the others, listening to them talk and noddrng, occasionally adding something of his own.

 

"He seems fine now but when we get home, when everyone's normal, will they be so upset by memories of their own ordeal that just seeing him or me might bring back, that they will be afraid to look at-well, especially him again?"

 

"Khornya, we're not all like that. You must realize that this particular crisis affected you and the people at home as well as us. We spaceborn and spacechosen are your kind, but because of circumstances, none of us stayed dirtside while you were there. You met only the most conservative element of our society. And the most fearful, because they look to the past for their strength. They have a strong aversion to change of any kind. And they don't like anyone who is the least bit different. Don't get me wrong. It is necessary that there be both traditional or agrarian, and progressive or technological and scientific Linyaari. The traditionalists give us our stability and sense of self and we -we give them the ability to continue to live. I don't suppose they mentioned that it was necessary to partially reform narhii-Vhiliinyar to make it habitable for our people?"

 

"Not in any detail," Acorna said. "Well, it was. Thanks be to the Ancestors that Grandam was there to help you."

 

"And Maati." "And Maati," Neeva agreed. "My point is, you are one of us. Aari is one of us. Nothing can change that, ever, not distance or time or even the sort of thing that has happened to Aari-and almost to all of us. Wherever you are, wherever we are, you are still ours and we are still your people."

 

Except for the inclusion of the Condor, Acorna's second homecoming was almost a reversal of her first. This time the bright Faberge egg ships bounced toward narhii-Vhiliinyar rather than from it, and only one lone ship, the new one she'd seen the techoartisans working on with the clan colors of Acorna's illustrious clan ancestress, bounced up from the planet's surface. Thariinye beamed at them from the comscreen until Becker switched it off.

 

"I don't like that guy," he grumbled. The Linyaari band was there to greet more than one person this time, Acorna could see from the viewport of the Condor. Grandam and Maati alone separated from the crowd and walked across the field to wait for the robolift to lower, and Acorna and Aari to join them on the surface. The vilzaar herself had extended the invitation to the welcome home fete to Becker as well, but if she had reversed her opinion of Becker, the same was not true of his opinion of her.

 

"Bureaucrats," he said. "They're all alike."

 

Maati gave Acorna a brief horn touch and then held onto her brother's waist with both arms until he picked her up in his and hugged her. Acorna touched horns with Grandam. "Perhaps we'd better leave them to catch up with us," Grandam said.

 

They walked slowly and silently toward the crowd. The returnees were being given wreaths of flowers by those greeting them, and there were many tears and much laughter. Neeva was explaining to Liriili that without the good or "Linyaari barbarians" their people would never have survived the bad or "Khieevi barbarians."

 

"In fact," Neeva said loudly enough for all to hear, "we Linyaari now have a kinsman among the barbarians. Khornya's uncle Hafiz, who fed us and helped us regain our health after our imprisonment, said that since he was Khornya's kinsman, he felt that all of the rest of us were also members of his clan, a very wealthy and aristocratic lineage of merchant traders."

 

"Hmmm," Liriili said, "It is wise to keep one's assets in the family. Perhaps we should send emissaries back to this new uncle of our people to discuss a favored trade agreement."

 

"I believe that would please him a great deal," Neeva said. "Some of us who spend much time off-world learning and bringing back technologies and trade items need to spend more time at home for a while, as we recover. This Harakamian is a genius at making holograms. Perhaps he could be persuaded to produce some hologramatic learning programs for the various guilds?"

 

Liriili gave Acorna a guilty, but still slightly frosty smile. "Perhaps. Perhaps Khornya would care to discuss it with him on our behalf? Now that she has spent time among us, in my estimation she is ready to assume her own mantle as videShaanye."

 

"Perhaps," Neeva said.

 

"But surely she will want to stay home and rest for a time, too," Grandam said.  At that moment, Acorna looked across the field and saw Maati walking slowly toward them, alone. Acorna fought her way through the crowd to the comscreen and hailed the ConSor.

 

"There you are, Acorna. If you can tear yourself away from that mob down there, you might want to join me and Aari and the cat again. The board here is lit up like a pinball machine all of a sudden. We have us some serious salvage opportunities and they won't wait forever. Stay there or come along. What's your pleasure?"

 

Acorna, Grandam, and Neeva exchanged looks and thoughts. They were her people, it was true, but so were Uncle Hafiz, Rafik, Gil, Calum, the Kendoros, and so many others.

 

On the comscreen, over Decker's shoulder, she saw Aari's face, regrets and sorrow mixing with anticipation of rejection and-just a little-hope.

 

Grandam's eyes twinkled. Acorna turned back to the Condor and then swung back toface Liriili again. "I'm honored by the ambassadorship, of course, but for right now, there is still something I must try to"-she glanced once more at the comscreen, the cat's impatiently flicking tail, Becker's welcoming expression and most of all, Aari, and said aloud, in answer to Becker-"salvage."

 

End of Acorna's People