First Warning: Acorna's Children

Chapter 7

Calla Kaczmarek ordinarily enjoyed the open plan of the bubbles on the Moonbase. However, at times it was a pain in the keister. Times, for instance, when a much-anticipated visitor finally arrived and was on the verge, some people hoped, of satisfying their curiosity about her, when she suddenly turned tail and ran away.

Which wouldn't have been so bad except that she did it where a whole cafeteria full of kids just as nosy and curious as Calla could see her do it.

She hoped that Khorii wouldn't have to pay for her small gaffe.

Her hope died when a snarling voice that Calla knew all too well emerged from the students.

"What, we aren't good enough for the kid of the great Lady Acorna?" sneered Marl Fidd. This one, Calla knew, had never been a slave, as Calla had been during her early years. At least, nobody else had enslaved the brat. He'd done a good job of tying himself up in knots, however. Like many of the newer kids on Maganos Moon-base, he'd been sent here because the authorities had no idea what else to do with him. He had been found during a raid on a rave shack, plugged into the machines and oblivious to everything around him. He wouldn't say where he was from or who his parents were; but once he got unhooked, the authorities deemed him salvageable and shipped him off to MM. Calla was not at all sure their judgment about him was correct. He was, in her opinion, a punk. A punk with a mean streak a mile wide, and a bully who liked to push around anyone who didn't have the nerve to stand up to him. He was going to cause trouble someday, Calla figured. Big trouble. She only hoped she wasn't around when it happened.

"Maybe she's just bashful," suggested six-year-old Sesseli in a voice so shy it was seldom heard unless she was called upon directly. As she said it, however, the little girl rose from her seat and started for the walkway.

"Where are you going, Sesseli?" Calla asked.

"To see if I can help. She's come a long way, and she doesn't know anybody."

"Haps with her," Calla said.

"Yes, but he's a big boy, and he talks so much, maybe he scared her. I'll go see."

"Me, too," two more voices said in unison.

"Well, I certainly don't think it's right that the poopuus get to meet her first," said Fawndra Makatia, a good friend of La Shoshisha. "I'm going to see what's up as well."

That was the beginning of a general exodus. Calla, being the lunchroom supervisor, their teacher, and their nominal leader, followed them. Since she couldn't seem to stop them, it was her next best option.

The "poopuus," as the pupils inhabiting the pool had been dubbed by the general student population, were not, despite the administration's best efforts, well integrated. They were from one of the oldest human colonies in Federation space, and had been on their watery planet for so many years that no one remembered or could find a record of when their ancestors inhabited Old Earth. The theory was that they had been island people to begin with. When their once-idyllic home became so littered with other people and industry that their own identity had all but vanished, their leaders volunteered to colonize, and that was the end of it. Presumably, at some point in its evolution there had been more land on LoiLoiKua, as they called their new homeworld, but apparently when the LoiLoiKua version of the great flood from Terran myth and folklore occurred, the land did not come back-at least most of it didn't. Well adapted to making a living from the sea, however, the new inhabitants found their new sea even more inviting and over the years spent less and less time on land until they became complete sea creatures.

That was what the scientists had decided about them, at least, and it matched some of what the elders of LoiLoiKua had told the Federation when their world joined. The world was in jeopardy now, apparently, and the elders had asked that their young be sent off-world to study and search for new habitats. Calla had not been able to get very far with the LoiLoiKuans, however. They accepted their pool and their own bubble, which was a good thing since it had been built at great expense to the foundation endowed by the late Mr. Li and House Harakamian. The poopuus seemed to enjoy their lessons, but they were not eager to mix with the others. No wonder Khorii was drawn to them. Despite her mother's role in the founding of MM, the lone Linyaari girl must feel as much of an outsider as her waterbound classmates.

Calla was still trying to decide if poopuus was a derogatory term or simply descriptive when she reached the interbubble iris.

She felt a moment of anxiety. One other thing they didn't actually know about the students from LoiLoiKua was how they might react, unsupervised, to unwanted company. Their culture was a simple one, even primitive-well, regressed at least. Their reactions might be rather basic.

The anxiety heightened when she saw the pool roiling with poopuus but no sign of Khorii in the pool or out.

Then suddenly the child she was looking for bobbed to the surface, looked startled to see the audience alongside the pool, then gave a small tight-lipped smile and waved.

Smiling, Calla wedged a path for herself among the staring students. "Khorii, I see you're making friends already, but now the rest of the students would like to welcome you as well. Please come and join us."

Hap, who she now saw was sitting on the edge of the pool beside the android child, jumped up and picked up her abandoned clothing lying beside the water. As Khorii swam to the poolside, he handed it to her. Crumpling the garment in one hand, Khorii gave a hop and popped gracefully-and nakedly-onto the side of the pool, then began donning the shipsuit as another student might dry off.

Snickers, embarrassed giggles, a wolf whistle and one call of, "All right, horny girl!" greeted her, and the girl looked puzzled. In truth, she was still flat on top, and her lower half was actually covered with some of the same short curly hair as that which feathered down her spine and calves to feet that were surprisingly like cloven hooves.

Calla had never had the honor of meeting Khorii's illustrious mother, and the descriptions she had of her, while they mentioned her two-knuckled three-fingered hands, her curly silver white mane, and, of course, the horn, hadn't really gone into detail about these aspects.

Khorii stood, fully dressed, and said something to the poopuus that seemed to be in their own language. They didn't surface to say good-bye to her, but Calla noticed that as soon as Khorii joined the other students and their backs were to the pool, a fish flipped up onto the side. The Linyaari girl's cat pounced on it.

It seemed that in at least one of the school's populations, Khorii and Khiindi had made some new friends.

The banner that popped up on every screen in the computer lab said "70,000 believed stricken, 40,000 presumed dead on palo-duro."

"thousands of new infections strike twi osiam."

"250 cases diagnosed on kezdet believed imported by federation communications crew."

"many federation relay stations fall silent as personnel FALL ILL, STATIONS QUARANTINED."

"quarantine restrictions tighten. food and water shortages in planetary colonies go unrelieved. all commercial interplanetary travel severely curtailed."

There followed an alarming list of cities, continents, space stations, moons, and planets believed to be infected with the disease, along with numbers of reported cases and deaths.

Khorii felt much as she did when sitting inside their pavilion on Vhiliinyar while a thunderstorm raged outside. Inside the weatherproof fabric of the pavilion they were so safe and dry that the wind hardly buffeted them, and the driving rain was only something that glistened in the darkness outside. It was almost imaginary. The plague seemed that way here among all of these healthy young people. Still, her parents were out there in the middle of whatever those statistics really meant, and it worried her. A lot. A whole lot. She knew her mother had done wonders in her lifetime and had seen other emergencies, many of them far worse, in the galaxy, and had coped with them. Her father, too, had battled monstrous Khleevi invaders and lived-the only one of their kind to be tortured by the buglike aliens and survive. But they were her parents-and they were so OLD! She'd found the problem first, after all-the bodies floating in a derelict spaceship. She felt like she should be out there with her parents, where she could protect them.

It took a great deal of effort for Khorii to ignore the escalating fatality figures and concentrate on the simple lessons at hand. Her mind's eye saw space full of ships like the Blanca, telescoping inside the hulls where blank-faced people performed an endless macabre ballet in zero G.

Khiindi did not help. He seemed to be as worried as she was. He sat with ears erect, staring at the screen as if he could read it, mewed once, and collapsed across her thighs with a huff of exhaled breath. His face scrunched up in an expression of feline concern- which lasted only until the cat fell over in her lap and went to sleep.

That would have been fine except that he then proceeded to snore, then to twitch, run in place, and rake her shipsuit's legs with his back claws while clutching at it with his front claws.

It was as though he were trying to save the universe in his sleep.

She had never once considered leaving her feline friend behind when she left Vhiliinyar, but she soon began to feel as if that indicated a lack of foresight on her part.

He did give her a reason to attend meals with the other students, however. Not to be outdone in cat bribes by the poopuus, at suppertime Hap, a little girl called Sesseli, and other students insisted that Khorii join them so they could offer Khiindi choice tidbits from their plates.

Khorii happily agreed and brought a selection of grasses and vegetables from the 'ponies garden so she could nibble along, thus blending in more satisfactorily.

This worked well, with Khorii happily chewing between answers to the questions of others, or nodding and asking her own questions regarding some of what they shared-excessively, in some cases-about themselves. Meanwhile one of the boys was foolish enough to voice a question about an astrophysics lesson earlier in the day and was treated to more than he could have possibly grasped in one sitting about the subject by Elviiz, in his most annoyingly superior tutorial tone.

Khiindi ingratiated himself for the sake of future handouts, sitting on first this lap, then that one, walking from knee to knee around the tables and pausing for a wash and brush-up on the lap of Sesseli. He did not even chide the girl when she interrupted his grooming session by stroking his head. Instead, he rubbed his nose and jaw against her hand, then carefully licked his paws and used them to scrub clean the area her touch had tainted.

One set of knees, however, Khiindi avoided. When Khorii noticed this, she glanced at the student being bypassed and caught glares of hostility following her harmless little friend. What could possibly make anyone react that way to a cat? Everyone on Vhiliinyar was extremely fond of cats. The Makahomian Temple Cats presented to her and to her people by the Makahomians reminded the older Linyaari of pahaantiyiirs, a feline species many had kept as companions before the Khleevi invasion. Even the rather grouchy Liriilyi had had a pahaantiyiir she doted on and had softened considerably when Mother and Father had insisted she be given one of the Makahomian kittens to raise.

An older boy, quite handsome by human standards, reacted the most negatively to Khiindi's adventures in progressive grazing. His glowering heavy eyebrows knitted together over dark eyes that seemed to be trying to turn into lasers to burn her poor little cat to a cinder if only he had the power.

Khiindi passed by him with seeming unconcern but returned to Khorii's lap rather quickly and resumed washing. Casting a slit-pupiled eye in the boy's direction, Khiindi raised a leg and proceeded to clean himself under his tail.

A moment later Elviiz said, "I feel a message arriving from Dad on the Condor."

Khorii was afraid he'd unfasten the top of his shipsuit then and there and show everyone the receiver screen attachment with which he and Maak both had augmented their chests. Calla had already taken her aside and told her that it went against the school's custom for students to disrobe in front of students of the opposite sex. Khorii had expressed confusion. She had naturally assumed that since all of the poopuus swam without clothing, it was the custom, when among them, to be similarly unclad. Calla said well, yes, but that was among the LoiLoiKuans and it was not the custom for the rest of the students. Khorii asked if this had something to do with mating. Calla said that yes, for the most part, it did. Khorii could not see the relevance since she was a different species from humans and not ready to mate anyway. Neither were most of the other kids, judging from their stages of development.

However, Elviiz had his own sense of what was correct. Communications took place in the computer lab. Therefore, they would receive the Condors transmission in the computer lab, which was empty now since the students were all grazing-er-dining, Khorii corrected herself.

Furthermore, Elviiz had another idea about propriety, having overheard Calla's admonition earlier in the day. "One moment, Khorii, and we will both view the transmission on one of these screens. Anyone passing by watching you staring intently at my upper torso might be puzzled and possibly alarmed. Unlike Captain Becker, or even Uncle Hafiz, these humanoids appear to be somewhat skittish." Thus saying he apparently took his own pulse, but with the result that one of the larger computer screens suddenly lit with the faces of Mother, Father, Uncles Joh and Maak, and RK. Khiindi hopped up onto the table in front of the screen and sat there, his lithe silvery body obscuring RK's brindled gray furriness. Khorii lifted him off the table and held him, scratching his belly so that he forgot to be jealous and overly curious, abandoning himself to blissful purrs.

They didn't really need him to blur the screen anyway, as the reception was unusually poor. The Condor had the very best communications equipment the wreckage of the galaxies had to offer and that Maak and Captain Becker could modify to meet their needs. Even so, its range was largely dependent on the booster relays set up by the Federation within its territories and by Uncle Hafiz to connect House Harakamian and the Moon of Opportunity. Since MOO, Vhiliinyar, and narhii-Vhiliinyar were not yet officially Federation members, and at any rate would not fall within the heavily traveled spaceways regulated by it, Hafiz would have been cut off from his supply lines without his own network. The Condor operated on both Federation and House Harakamian frequencies, but judging from the snowiness of the video and the static in the sound, both had been affected by the current crisis. Either the personnel who manned or maintained the relay stations were themselves ill or somehow incapacitated by the side effects of it-such as having staff members quarantined away from their duty stations, or needing to attend to family members, perhaps. Khorii couldn't quite imagine all of the reasons involved. After all, this was her first plague. She hoped it would be her last.

"Greetings, younglings," Uncle Maak said.

"Greetings, Father," Elviiz said. "What is your current position?"

Maak gave the coordinates, which placed them a bit less than halfway to the point Uncle Joh had indicated on the star charts. "There is not actually much to report, but we missed you and communications are becoming increasingly unsatisfactory, as you must perceive."

"The plague sounds very deadly and extremely widespread," Khorii said. "I do not see how you can cure it, just the two of you."

"We can't, of course," Mother said. "But by healing a few of the cases, we may be able to determine the etiology and make other observations that will help the physicians of this area-those who have not succumbed to the illness-in finding a specific cure that does not involve the use of our horns."

"We've been hearing most disturbing reports," Khorii told her. "It sounds as if it's spreading and spreading."

"You can't take all of those reports to heart, honey," Uncle Joh said. "It's probably just a slow news day for the Com Channels, and they're blowing it out of proportion. One relief ship became infected and before they discovered that they'd contacted the disease, they infected some of the personnel on the relay stations-it made it all a lot more visible than it would be ordinarily. I'm sure it's bad, but I doubt it's anything your mom and dad can't handle. And, hey, if they can't, we'll go for reinforcements."

"The disease, from the data we have gathered," Maak told them, "has an erratic gestation period of between one and seven Standard sleep cycles. It appears to have a long life away from its host and is probably transmitted by droplets, as it appears to be highly communicable."

"We are much needed, Khorii," Father said. His face was as gentle and loving as always when he looked at her, but strain showed around his eyes and the edges of his mouth. "The health-care providers have apparently been affected worse than any other sector of the population, and there is no one to care for the ill, especially where the disease has hit hardest, like Paloduro. We are glad you are safe on Maganos Moonbase, which is naturally isolated and has a lower probability of becoming an infection site."

"What if they find a cure, and because communications are so poor, you don't hear about it?" she asked. And then, since everyone was being so open about answering their questions, she asked the one that was really bothering her. "What if you get this disease?"

"Now, honey, don't get all panicky," Uncle Joh said. "Your folks will be fine. Maak and the cat and I will see to it. I guess you haven't been out and about enough to know this yet, but you Linyaari don't get sick."

Khorii nodded, but her worry must have shown on her face, since Mother leaned closer to the screen and touched it with her horn, as if she could transmit her feelings of safety and comfort across the many light-years separating her from her daughter. "Dear one, please do not worry about us. We've certainly been in more difficult spots than this, and I'm sure that as we work with the Federation's resources at our disposal, we'll be able to bring this crisis to an end very soon."

The transmission began breaking up then, and Khorii and Elviiz barely had time to say their good-bye before the friendly faces were lost in a sea of static.

"Don't worry, Khorii," Elviiz said. "They'll figure out how to stop this plague soon enough."

Khorii nodded, but she couldn't help nibbling on her lower lip and wondering, but what if they can't?