Acorna's Rebels Part 23

"Do you? How kind," Edu said with oily smoothness, picking the stone up and cradling it in his fist. "I see no problem with that, although our primitive means of transport may not suit someone of your sophistication."

He could not quite keep enough of his mask in place to conceal his irritation that he found it necessary to go along with MacDonald's program. He apparently was not accustomed to telepaths and had not learned how to shield against them, although his innate deviousness, which she soon discovered, served him well enough. But images flashed across his mind - images he viewed with satisfaction - of laboratory test tubes changing hands between him and Macostut, of the contents being put into vermin traps that never sprang. The vermin partook of the tainted material, the cats caught the vermin, and cats began dying. The infected vermin spread, and their infected scat was scattered throughout the countryside. Soon enough, other creatures, including people, also died.

Until she came, and MacDonald. No, she would not seek his permission now.

"You might be surprised what suits me," she said, and bared her teeth at him in what he would take for a friendly smile, though among the Linyaari it was a hostile challenge.

"I'd like to find out," he said insinuatingly, stroking the stone with the pad of his thumb along the pale slash of fire in its middle.

"Well, yes, I appreciate you giving your permission. Lieutenant Commander Macostut is not so easy to deal with. Always quoting Federation rules and treaties, you know."

"Allow me to handle him and the Federation as well, Amba.s.sador Acorna. That is your given name, is it not? Acorna? It is so-exotic." He rolled the stone down his palm with his fingertips, and when he finished saying "exotic," he closed his hand over it.

She bared her teeth again. "Yes, it is, isn't it? My people even find it so." She did not explain. She didn't want to tell any of her family history to this man.

"Acorna, I was hoping - I am speaking to my subjects tomorrow morning. I wish to recognize the work you did for our guardians. It would please me if you would come. You and Nadhari as well, of course. I know Captain MacDonald will be busy with his wagons, but as soon as I have finished, you may join him. I do hope you'll come." He set the stone down long enough to take her hand in both of his. He stared for a moment at its three single-knuckled fingers, one fewer than he was used to, and appeared slightly nonplussed before he began stroking her palm seductively with his thumb. "I want my people to recognize you as their - our-new friend."

"Your wish is my command in this," she said, because it was, of course, in this instance. She gently but firmly pulled her hand away with a strength that she could tell surprised him. Behind her, she felt him smile and pick up the stone again.

She returned to her quarters, wishing she could lock the door. She was comforted when RK dropped from the ceiling onto her bed to make himself comfortable against her side.

The events of the day revolved inside her head as if they had been poured into a centrifuge and set on Spin. Tagoth and Miw-Sher, RK and the Temple cats, all of them together, Nadhari and Tagoth, Tagoth and Mulzar Kando, Becker and Kando, Mac-Donald and the Wats, Kando and Acorna herself, whirled through her mind in a soup of coppery rainforest, flat red desert, cats-eye chrysoberyl stones of many colors, and wide open steppes veined with rivers and streams. Just when she stopped recalling and started dreaming, she couldn't have said.

But all at once she realized that the reason everyone was spinning so fast was that she was flying past them, over them, and they weren't spinning at all. She was flying past the city and everything familiar to her on this world. Now there were cat-shaped Temples in the mix, poking their ears out of the trees of the rainforest, squatting beside rivers in the steppes, and reclining Sphinx-like in the desert. In fact, these Sphinx cats even had human faces. In her dream, she heard Aari's voice telling her, "Those are not Temples you see there. They are monuments to Grimalkin. Though they call him the Star Cat, these people know well that he has a human face. He brought me here to save these people, and meanwhile, he decided to increase the population and improve the gene pool in a very personal fashion. That is how they became able to shift from human to feline. I hope you will also notice that there are no people here who resemble the Linyaari. The Companion did not see fit to pa.s.s on hi) dominant characteristics to every female in the gene pool."

Acorna sped onward. When she reached the rainforest, she was suddenly looking down on the Temple, where hundreds of cats all lapped at a dish that bore the symbol of a skull and cross-bones on the side. She jumped down and tried to shoo them away before they ate, but Captain MacDonald was there, saying, "But they have to keep their strength up, honey."

Then she was flying far out over the desert again, but all of a sudden the ground split open, deep and wide, the sides of the gash multicolored, and at its end the whole thing was filled with a beautiful deep lake that seemed to come from nowhere. The Temple was different, too, but before she could quite figure out how, she saw Aari down below her waving flags and pointing to a place for her to land.

But when she ran to him, an instant later in the dream, and without all of the bother of landing the craft she was flying, she saw that he was no longer a living Linyaari, but a statue of one, and she couldn't reach him because he was standing in the middle of a stream feeding into the lake.

All around him cats' eyes winked and blinked, some of them without cats behind them. "You really can't tell," someone said, "until one of them decides to move to eat or fight or have s.e.x."

At that point she awakened. She tried to move, but could not. From the sensations in her chest and arms, it seemed as if someone had restrained her during the night, possibly even tied her up. Her arms were pinned to her sides at the elbows, and her ankles wouldn't move when she tried to rise.

She heard footsteps outside her door. A voice called, "Amba.s.sador?" There was a sharp "hsst!" and the weight on her chest released as RK leaped straight up from the crouch he had a.s.sumed during the night to watch her face, apparently, for the first sign of wakefulness. He seemed almost to fly instead of jump to the catwalk, and one of the bolt-holes near the ceiling. Then he spoiled the illusion by losing a paw-hold and having to dangle his back end off the catwalk while he dug in with his front claws to force enough of him through the opening of the hole so his feet would have to follow. Pash, Haji, and Sher-Paw ran in different directions, and Acorna found her arms and legs released as well.

She'd been bound up, all right, courtesy of her cat guardians. She felt like laughing, but instead gathered her wits and composure and said, "Yes, what is it?"

"The Mulzar's address is about to begin."

"Thank you," Acorna said. "Then I'll be right along."

"But you must refresh yourself and break your fast before you go. We were not privileged to serve you yesterday morning. We were negligent and did not attend you when you awoke. Please, may we enter now?"

Acorna sighed and reluctantly gave her a.s.sent. A string of Temple women-whether priestesses or acolytes or mere servants, Acorna could not tell-entered. One carried a ewer of water, another a basin, a third bore Acorna's clothing, cleaned and pressed and devoid of the evidence of her adventures of yesterday. Yet another woman bore a basket of fruits and vegetables of various sorts.

"Thank you. You're very kind," Acorna told them, nibbling on something with a rubbery green texture. "This is nice. What is it? "

"It is called sand claw, amba.s.sador. I removed the thorns myself."

"A sort of cactus, then? It's very good."

They stood around nodding and watching her chew.

"Have any of you seen Miw-Sher yet this morning?" she asked when she'd finished the cactus.

"She was searching for Grimla the last time I saw her," one of the women said. "The Mulzar is most particular that all of the sacred guardians are in attendance when he speaks."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, Amba.s.sador. He wishes to let the people know what wonders you have performed."

"Does he?" This worried Acorna. If Kando had caused the cats to become ill, which he had if she read him correctly, then his seeming concern for displaying their healthy state was ominous.

After her erstwhile servants were convinced she was presentable, she was taken straight to the cat's mouth, which was open. On the tongue, a balcony looked out on not only the Temple courtyards but also the streets of the city, and beyond. Stale smoke colored by red dust hung over the city and the countryside beyond, intensifying the reddish cast the suns lent to the sky, giving the day an angry, stormy appearance.

People thronged the walls and courtyards of the Temple, but behind them the city streets were deserted and empty, except for whirlwinds of red dust that zipped and rolled drunkenly through the town like alien invaders searching for loot.

Although the wind stirred up these small cyclones, the day was scorchingly hot, and the breeze, when it came, was like the exhaust of some great antique flitter, spewing flames and fumes in its wake.

Throughout the crowd and surrounding it stood priests armed with what appeared to be some sort of circular, discus-like weapons as well as swords, daggers, and spears. Just because Nadhari's cousin was the Federation-acknowledged ruler of this city didn't mean everyone who lived in the city was happy about it. Acorna read the general tone of the crowd and received the impression that people were not here because they particularly wanted to receive Edu's counsel and leadership but because they had been ordered to come. Most of them seemed to dread learning what new proclamations, taxes, laws, or restrictions Kando was about to inflict upon them.

Acorna, Nadhari, and a few other privileged people were allowed to stand on the balcony with Kando "while he addressed the throng. Miw-Sher stood beside the right fang of the Temple's open mouth. When she spotted Nadhari and Acorna, the girl abandoned her toothy post to stand nearer to them.

Grimla was in her arms and the guardian cat's tail tickled the back of Acorna's hand.

Kando held up his hands and the crowd grew quiet. "People of Hissim, I call you together to speak to you concerning the sickness that has plagued our sacred guardians and has claimed the life of many domestic beasts and some of your own kinfolk. This scourge killed, among others, Sacred Phador, Sacred Nadia, the Sacred Kits One through Forty-Two, as yet and now forever unnamed. We have reason to believe that this plague is part of a plot perpetrated on our city, our Temple, and our rule by our enemies, who will stop at nothing to overthrow us. Heretofore, no matter how desperate the battle, Temple guardians have always been exempt from retaliation, but now it has been suggested to me by my wise friends and allies of the Federation that our sacred ones were poisoned! Also spies have been sent among us, and a priest has been murdered in a brutal, ritualistic fashion. Still another priest has been abducted. All evidence points to the involvement of the secretive Aridimi sect from the deep desert, your own relations. We must redress these crimes. We will invade their lands and avenge ourselves, taking into our Temple their own sacred ones to replace those of ours that they have slain." Edu finally stopped to take a deep breath.

"But, Your Reverence!" protested a large prosperous-looking man who wore soft white lightweight clothing and a wealth of red metal and gemstones on any part of his body that could be girded with ornamentation. "We have heard that the sacred ones are sick and dying on all parts of the planet."

"Ahhh," Kando said, "I too have heard the lies. It has even been suggested that this scourge is not a covert form of warfare, but the work of a fanatical cult that seeks to destroy all who follow the path the Star Cat chose for us. If so, they have been foiled, deprived of four of their victims, again through the intercession of my contacts in the Federation.

"However, we believe this cult idea is a fantasy, a fiction concocted by those who fear another war. In truth, it has been my greatest wish to lead you into an era of peace -or so I had hoped to, until this evil befell our Temple. Now I see that the only way to bring peace to this world is for all of it to be under a single rule. Until we find out who visited this blasphemous attack on our guardians, I believe it is for the good of all guardians that we conquer Hissim's enemies and deliver their sacred animals from servitude to people who have loosed a plague upon us. Since we know not which state is guilty, we must a.s.sume they all are, and act accordingly."

But why would they kill their own guardians or their own food beasts?" the prosperous man asked. "Surely we will be able to tell who poisoned our animals by how many of their own animals survive."

"Ah, but would they tell us? Would they let it be known? When our holy ones first became ill, and I heard that the other states were likewise afflicted, so deep was my grief and so aroused was my compa.s.sion that I chose slaves from each area and sent them back to their peoples bearing medicines and food. Perhaps it was my quick action that saved the others, or perhaps it was merely that we were the ones most directly attacked. I have heard that all other states were as badly stricken as we were, but what others have not heard is that of all of the Temples whose guardians fell prey to the disease, ours alone were s.n.a.t.c.hed from the brink of death. This happened, we must believe, because the righteousness of our hegemony over the beings on our planet is manifest. Thus we were granted a miraculous gift and blessed with the alien doctor who healed our guardians as a sign attesting to that righteousness."

"I heard all the guardians had died," someone shouted.

"Three days ago, it seemed that would be true, but now the acolytes and handmaidens will show you that through divine grace, four of our guardians have been restored to health." At his signal Miw-Sher and her fellow cat attendants brought forth Grimla, Pash, Haji, and Sher-Paw, all sleek of fur, bright of eye, and pink of nose and pads. "Of course, this miracle, this blessing of the G.o.ds was made manifest when my Federation contacts put me in touch with the Linyaari amba.s.sador, Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li, whose advanced medical knowledge was able to save these last precious four guardians."

Acorna, as she understood what Kando was claiming, grew furious. Her gift of healing to the Temple cats was being perverted into a cause for war, and into something for which Kando could claim credit. She could read him as easily as if he were made of gla.s.s. He had downplayed her role in the Temple cats' recovery, being shrewd enough to realize she wanted it that way, but he'd used her actions to justify his own schemes. If he was not very specific about the nature of the help the cats received, he might even get the credit for curing them.

The people listening were pleased about the cats, she could read that, but they remained mistrustful of Kando. They quite rightly feared that they were being manipulated into something.

Acorna was thoroughly disgusted.