Acorna’s Search Read Online Free Page A

and then a thick parrot-green jungle rising from the battered ground.
    At the edge of this jungle, Aari indicated Acorna should set down the flitter, which she did.
    “Ouch,” Maati said to RK as she tried to pry him from her lap. The cat’s ears were flat and his tail was poofed into something that looked like a massive feather duster.
    “I don’t think he likes it here,” Thariinye said.
    “But it’s beautiful,” Maati replied as she was finally able to dislodge RK and dump him onto the flitter’s deck. She followed after him, climbing out onto the scarred stone surface of Vhiliinyar. “Isn’t this wonderful? This is the first sign we have seen that the planet is finally starting to heal and grow things again.”
    “Hmmm,” Acorna said, noncommittally, “but what kind of things?” Something scuttled across the edge of the greenery, but disappeared before they could determine its nature. It might have been an errant breeze moving a plant frond, though the air here was inert and stagnant right now.
    Actually, the whole planet was, for the most part, stifling, with much of its protective ozone layer punctured by volcanic explosions and toxic chemical reactions from its unstable land masses and destroyed seas. Add to that the effect of the hazy atmosphere, which served to trap and reflect the energy from Vhiliinyar’s sun, and the planet’s climate was far hotter than it used to be and likely to get worse before it got better. Acorna suspected that the lush greenery before them was a valiant attempt on the part of this world to restore its own much-depleted atmosphere.
    A sudden, happy thought occurred to Acorna. This survey might well have positive consequences for their ravaged world. The presence of the planet’s native people might well speed its efforts to recover, even before Hafiz’s terraformation could begin. With so many Linyaari horns available to purify the waters and the air and to cleanse much of the poison inflicted upon Vhiliinyar by the Khleevi, the planet might well heal a little each day they were present, just as a wounded creature would heal with the application of the horn’s power.
    The Linyaari were superb healers, and their horns could detoxify nearly any substance that they came into contact with. The powers of their horns were not unique to the Linyaari, nor had they originated on Vhiliinyar. They were a legacy from their Ancestors, the ki-lin of long ago Terra, often called unicorns. An ancient spacefaring race the Linyaari knew only as the Ancestral Friends had saved the ki-lin from primitive and brutal humans who were hunting them to extinction on Terra, and brought them through the cosmos to Vhiliinyar, where they had thrived once again.
    Though the ki-lin still existed as a separate race, many of them had blended genes with the Ancestral Friends, and the result of that fusion was the Linyaari people. The powers were the same in the Linyaari as in the Ancestors themselves.
    But that was all ancient history—this was now, and they were in the midst of a terrible ecological disaster, one that needed all the healing power the Linyaari could muster.
    Maati frowned. The caution displayed by all of her friends, right down to RK the cat, in the presence of the lovely greenery before them confused her. Still new to thought-talk, she addressed the silence of the others with a perplexed protest. “But that forest is pretty. And alive! Why aren’t the rest of you happier that it’s growing things and—and—pretty?”
    Aari glowered at her, the first harshness he had shown to his little sister.
    Thariinye, picking up on Aari’s thoughts, pointed out, (How is she to know what is wrong? She was not born here! She has never been here before. She has nothing but some stories, a few thought-pictures, and Uncle Hafiz’s holos to compare it to.)
    (True,) Acorna agreed. To Maati she said, “You remember that place we were in within the holo-bubble, right at the beginning? With the