First Warning: Acorna's Children

Chapter 19

Across the street from the building where Aari and Acorna stood, a curtain twitched in an upstairs window. Acorna caught the movement in her peripheral vision and immediately felt the shifting of the space in that building. "Wait," she told Aari. "Someone is coming."

The someone was a small, hunched woman, who walked with a slight lurch and regarded them through squinted eyes, her mouth screwed up in concentration.

"What exactly are you?" she asked them.

"We are Linyaari-a race of healers," Acorna explained. "We've come to help you."

"We have a lot in common then," the woman said. "I am Luz Allende, but everyone calls me Abuelita. I am a curandera. Not a euro, not like these modern ones. I use old things because I am an old thing. But this is good. I am alive and the young euros are not, so evidently my medicine works better on this sickness."

"What is it that you've used successfully?" Aari asked.

She shrugged. "Symptomatic stuff. Heat for comfort, cold for swelling, blankets, food when they can take it, liquids always, flam-go for fever, sit them up when they cannot breathe. That sort of thing."

"And it works?"

"More often than anything else. And more often on people my age and the children. The others-well, they were mostly too gone by the time I reached them. The younger euros, too. The Federation health teams and epidemiology people, the hazmat teams, all are gone. It is said that many of them died also, in spite of their precautions. I do not know who would wish such a disaster upon us, but it is better for you if you go." The old woman's voice was cracked and broken, but matter of fact.

"We have special protection," Acorna told her. "We have come from many galaxies away to help, and we will. Can you take us to those who are still alive?"

"Oh yes, I can do that. First we will find my grandson. He is with many other young people, playing a game. I hope they are all still there. Our holas-communicators-no longer work, so I have not been able to reach him. But I know where it is. I will take you there."

They walked to the gymnasium where the woman knew her grandson to be. It was good that they walked, because as they passed each street, doors opened and youngsters came out to join them, sometimes assisting older people, sometimes carrying infants or toddlers.

They were all very frightened, and it seemed to Acorna that the older the children were, the more likely they were to be sick. She and Aari promptly treated everyone showing any symptoms at all and decontaminated the others so that they would not get sick. All of this was done with the aid, they said, of Linyaari medical nanotechnology. The people they treated were so ill, frightened, shocked, or grief-stricken that they probably could have pierced each person with their horn tips and claimed that cured them without causing a stir or having anyone take notice of it.

"We have no data whatever about the possibility of someone being reinfected. once they have been cured of the plague. Nor do we know how well disinfecting will correct their prior exposure," Acorna told Abuelita, which simply meant "grandmother."

The older woman shrugged. "Time will tell."

By the time the three of them reached the building where Abuelita's grandson Jalonzo was supposed to be playing in a gaming tournament, the crowd following behind them had swelled to hundreds of people. Each of these had been touched by either Acorna or Aari but no one had seemed inclined to go home.

Abuelita took a last look at them. "I believe they now look to you to feed them, as well as heal them. These are not, you understand, the vigorous and self-sufficient. All are either too old or too young to care for themselves. Something must be arranged. Have you been in touch with the government? Will they send help? At least someone to carry away the bodies and cleanse the homes so that the people will have shelter?"

"We saw no living person until we met you," Aari told her. "And we lost contact with the communications center before we landed-the officers in charge did not sound well at the time."

Approaching the gymnasium, they saw a delivery flitter moored in front of the building. A black cloud hung between it and the door. As they moved closer, they saw that it consisted of thousands of insects buzzing around the swollen corpse of a man whose shirt proclaimed mucho nacho.

"Aiyee," Abuelita said, shaking her head and almost surreptitiously making the sign of a cross in the air with her fingers. This was the remnant of an ancient religion, as the profile of Paloduro explained in the section on local customs.

Pushing past them, Aari knelt beside the fallen man and discreetly touched his horn to the man's body, dispelling the flies and the odor of death, though not, of course, reviving the corpse.

"You can no longer help him, my son," Abuelita told him.

"So I see," he said. "But we know so little about this disease, I felt I must just make sure. I've cleansed the body of the infection at least, so that our friends there"-he nodded to the masses in the street-"may pass without harm."

"Bueno," she said. She squared her shoulders and stepped around the corpse and up to the door, pulling on the handle. But it did not open.

She rapped sharply on the plasglas and peered inside. "You, chico, open this door!"

Inside, some distance up the hallway, a boy trembled and shook his head.

Abuelita looked as if she would try to kick in the door, but instead she backed away and yelled, frustrated, "Jalonzo Allende, you open this door right now!"

With a deep sigh she turned back to Aari and Acorna, who did not look at her, but stared steadily at the door, reinforcing her command by sending a mental message to the boys inside. Before Abuelita looked to the door again, it was being opened by a very tall, very large, dark-haired boy.

"Abuelita! How did you know? You're just in time. Some of the older kids are really sick."

He saw Aari and Acorna then and stared curiously at the crowd behind them. "Who are they? Neat costumes! I'm sorry, but the tournament is about over so if you've come to play . . ."

"The time for play has ended, Grandson. These people are healers from another world,"

"Take us to your stricken," Aari said.

What kind of people are those?" Jaya demanded angrily. "Because you came to try to help us, they are going to make you stay here, too? That's not fair!"

Khorii was a little relieved that the girl's anger was now aimed at Calla and the Moonbase instead of at her and Elviiz. "I know. It isn't reasonable. They do know we can make the ship safe to land. My mother has done that sort of thing lots of times, and it's her fathers who run the Moonbase."

"There is the quarantine, however," Elviiz said. "There are rules."

"They should be applied sensibly," Khorii said. She sighed. "I think all of these people must be distantly related to Liriilyi. They put rules and caution over good sense and the proof they already have of our skills. This is dangerous and silly, and a waste of time when there are dying people that we could help."

"Yes, it lacks perceptive analyses given the data; however, it is not as silly as suggesting that the teachers are related to Liriilyi. They are human, and she is Linyaari. Our species cannot mate, and therefore cannot be related by blood. She might be an adopted relative, such as those in our family through Mother. But Liriilyi does not care to meet humans when given a chance, so that is also unlikely."

Khorii rolled her eyes. "Yes, Elviiz, and that speech was ample chastisement for my little joke."

"Oh," he said, and lifted the corners of his mouth, then let them drop.

The com unit was switched off now, and she felt isolated and frustrated by the stupidity of others. These were the people who were supposed to be taking care of her and were too frightened to realize that in this situation, she was the one who could take care of everyone. Well, most of them anyway, under all of the circumstances she had seen so far. Why would otherwise intelligent people choose blindly to follow dumb regulations that should be suspended in this case?

But before Khorii could discuss it any further with Elviiz or Jaya or hail the Moonbase again to try to convince Calla she was right, she heard Sesseli calling her from far back in the corridor. "Khorii! Khorii, you have to help poor Khiindi!"

The little girl ran forward and grabbed Khorii's hand, tugging it for a while before running back to Hap, who was cradling a limp and drooling Khiindi in the crook of one arm and holding a cage containing three more cats in his other hand. Sesseli tugged a handful of Haps tunic, as if that would pull him to Khorii faster.

Khiindi was indeed a sorry-looking little beast. For the second time within a few hours, he seemed at death's door. Gently, Khorii scooped him up and buried her face in the soft hot fur of his panting side, burrowing her horn into the nape of his neck. She could almost see-could see-hundreds of small organisms deserting his body. They fled to Hap, who set down the cage of cats to scratch.

Khiindi looked up and Hap sat down, hard, on the deck. Bending to help him up, Khorii brushed his hair with her horn and the organisms fled again. That was very odd. These microscopic attackers were not large enough for her to see, they did not attack her so that she could feel them, but she nonetheless had a sense of them deserting Hap, then being-well, indecisive, if such tiny things could make decisions. They seemed trapped, unable to invade the other cats, or Sesseli, unable to transfer to Jaya or Elviiz. They shimmered in the air for a moment, then, as Khorii lifted her head, they disappeared. When they were alone, she'd have to talk to Elviiz about it. Maybe there was something in his data banks about similar phenomena.

It was interesting, though, that the organisms did not wish to attack Sesseli, Elviiz, Jaya, or the other cats. If her-well, vision, she supposed it could be called-psychic insight perhaps?-proved reliable, it might help her discover something about who was immune to the plague and how it spread.

Elviiz carried Jaya's parents and the other stricken crew members to the room containing the first two victims. Hap offered to help, but although Khorii thought that probably would be safe enough, Elviiz was less susceptible and much stronger.

Instead, Hap manned the helm while Jaya took her on a tour of the ship, so that she could cleanse it of the taint of disease. And also, as Sesseli reminded her, find cat food for the four feline crew members, two of whom were in Sesseli's lap as she sat on the deck. The kitten stood on her shoulder. Khiindi paced back and forth across the console, "assisting" Hap.

Although the ship was a large one, it was not very complex. The engine room was quite straightforward and the drives built for reliability and a modicum of speed so that the ship could make its rounds efficiently. The crew quarters were neither spartan nor luxurious, the cabins situated near the various duty stations rather than in a block. The cabins for the engineers were adjacent to the engine room, those for the captain and first mate and their daughter near the bridge, and so forth. The seven people aboard the ship when it hailed the Moonbase were the only ones required to run it. The vast majority of the vessel was taken up by a cavernous, warehouselike cargo hold that also contained three tractorlike machines used, Jaya told her, for loading, lifting, and positioning the cargo containers.

"First we should see how the other animals are doing," Jaya told her.

"There are others? Besides the cats?"

"Oh yes, we transport livestock, companion animals, service animals, and breeding stock from time to time as well as foodstuffs, building materials, tools, machinery, and whatever else the various worlds cannot or do not manufacture themselves," Jaya told her with some pride. "They are always very glad to see us."

"I can imagine. I don't know how the Moonbase plans to get along without your supplies. That worries me more than our own situation right now. Food supplies there are extremely low, and who knows how long this plague will last? Speaking of which, have you a 'ponies garden or some seeds and soil where I might start one? If we're going to be on your ship for a while, I would like to be able to grow my own food. My people are vegetarian and grazers."

While Jaya located the supplies Khorii would need, Khorii, under the guise of curiosity, poked her head and horn into everything she could reach as she went about the work of cleaning the hold and its cargo of contamination.

"What are you doing?" Jaya asked, descending from the lifter, at the foot of which was a neat stack of various seed sacks, fertilizers, and other gardening supplies.

"Decontaminating the ship," she said.

"I heard you say you could do that, and I wondered what you meant exactly," Jaya said. "How do you know how to do that?"

"How do you know how to run that equipment?" she asked in return. "It's what my people do."

"What? Be like some sort of sentient two-legged Lysol?"

"What's Lysol?"

"It decontaminates things, too, "Jaya replied. "And stinks to high heaven-not that you do because, you know, you don't. You smell good, actually."

"Thank you," Khorii said, sincerely appreciating the compliment from the so far rather thorny girl. "You do not stink, either."

Jaya grimaced. "Thanks. So, do you ever think you might want to do something else? I mean, something your people don't do?"

"I do not understand. My people do many things. Do yours not?"

"Well, sure. Hobbies, like. Or at least, things that didn't turn out to be what they did for a living. Mom was a scholar before she met Dad. And Dad had wanted to play nine-dimensional chess professionally but when my grandpa died, he took over the business instead. He still plays though-" Her voice shrank to a whisper as she corrected herself. "Played."

Khorii, who had continued prowling the containers as they talked, turned back to Jaya and reached out her hand. "I am so sorry."

Jaya blinked hard. "Me, too. Me, too. It's still not real, you know? And-I'm sorry if I made it sound like it was your fault for not being faster. I mean, I know it takes a certain amount of time to get someplace, I just . . . well, I'm sorry, okay?"

"Of course." She cast around for something else to talk about. Grief was not an emotion familiar to her, and seeing Jaya's made her feel helpless. It was good to know that her own mother and father were saving other parents so their children would not be left alone like Jaya. Like most of the kids on the Moonbase. "Do you know what you will do now? I mean, after the plague is over? Will you continue working for the Krishna-Murti Company or is there something else you'd like to do?"

"I'm a musician," she said, sounding as if she were trying on the term for the first time. "I would like to work at that. Maybe go to school for it."

"Do you-play an instrument?"

"Yes, sitar sometimes and drum, but also I sing and dance. I learned the traditional dances from the vids Mom brought for studying cultural history. She says I am very good. Said." Again, the reluctant correction.

"Maybe you would show us sometime? I know this is not a good time now, but perhaps while we are waiting for the quarantine to lift?"

"No, I would like to do it. I would do it in my mom and dad's honor."

"I understand that my people also sing when someone leaves this life."

"If you know the songs, I think my parents would like that too . . ."

"I do not know them, but Elviiz does. I will have him teach me. He sings very badly."

"Which one is Elviiz? The cute white-haired boy with the cats and the little girl or the one with the funny screw-looking horn?"

"The one with the horn. Elviiz is my foster brother, made by his father to be my companion. His father is a very good friend of my parents."

"Oh? I thought he was a droid."

"He is, and so is his father. That is why Elviiz did not need to have a mother. But he considers my mother to be his parent as well. He lives with us instead of with his father Maak, so his own father is more like an uncle to him, whereas my father is like his own."

"They must have more advanced droid technology where you come from, "Jaya said. "Nobody I know would ever consider a droid to be a relative, like a real person."

"Elviiz is a real person. He simply has some electronic and mechanical components in his physical and intellectual makeup. At times his extensive knowledge is very annoying, but at others I confess it is helpful."

"How about the white-haired boy?"

"That is Hap Hellstrom. He has befriended us since we arrived at Maganos Moonbase. He is not an android, but he is a highly intelligent boy and seems to have many practical skills as well."

"Good," Jaya said simply. "Because I have a feeling we'll need all the help we can get."