While the miners worked desperately to get the first of the planned moon bases in condition to receive children, and Delszaki Li fought Kezdet s bureaucracy to get permission to open the base, Acoma solved the problem of finding and freeing the children. They might have been taught to flee strangers, but the mystical rumors which identified Acorna with the protective saints and goddesses of the children’s manifold belief systems ensured that she alone, of all the beings on Kezdet, was accepted by all of them. Believing that the silver-haired girl with the horn on her forehead was an earthly manifestation of Lukia of the Lights, or Epona, or Sita Ram, at her call they came willingly from mines and factories and followed her without fear. With the help of Calum, Rafik, and Gill to implement plans for a working mining base on Maganos Moon, and the sometimes overenthusiastic help of Acoma to reach out to the neglected children of Kezdet, Delszaki Li had the immense gratification of seeing his plan become a reality. He also saw that he had made many implacable enemies among those formerly wealthy who were now, as a result of his machinations, merely well-to-do. But it did not appear that this fact disturbed him particularly.
By the time that Maganos Moon Base became a reality, the miners’ lives as well as Delszaki Li’s had been changed-as much by Pal Kendoro’s two sisters, Judit and Mercy, as by the implementation of the moon-base plan. Gill and Judit Kendoro had agreed to act as foster parents to the children brought to Maganos. Rafik s cousin Tapha had died in an attempt to assassinate him, and Rafik felt it was his responsibility to work with his uncle Hafiz and learn the ins and outs of the Harakamian family businesses that he was now slated to inherit. As for Calum, he was as taken with the shy, quiet Mercy as Gill was with her more outgoing sister, but he felt that with the defection of his comrades it was even more his responsibility to help Acorna in the search for her home, especially as it was his mathematical analysis of the partial results given them by Dr. Zip that had narrowed down the possible location of her home planet to a searchable sector of space.
Even Acorna was not romantically untouched; Pal Kendoro had fallen in love with her, and she was, like any young girl, flattered though distressed by his devotion … but unlike most young girls, she had to wonder whether their two species were even compatible ! In any case she felt that she could not commit herself and her life to this young human while she still did not know where, or even if, others like her might exist.
Where did she truly belong? And how much time did she have to find a suitable mate? In the three years that had elapsed since the establishment of Maganos Moon Base, she had matured from an adolescent into what appeared to be a fully adult female other kind. Knowing nothing of her origins, she had no way to guess whether
her body would stabilize or whether she would age and die as rapidly as she had matured.
Although the search for her home world was of prime importance to Acoma and almost as much to Calum, Acorna’s other friends and guardians were reluctant to see them start out on such a long and potentially perilous journey. They had become used to protecting Acorna-not only from the enemies she and Delszaki Li had made on Kezdet, but from the genuinely ill who wanted access to her healing powers and the charlatans who thought to grow wealthy by exploiting her unusual capabilities.
To protect her from wearing herself out in an attempt to heal everyone who might approach her, they had grown into the habit of shielding her from the world, screening her mail, and otherwise treating her as someone to be sheltered and hidden. Sometimes it seemed that it would take another revolution to free Acoma from her well-meaning friends, and as, Accrual Qiwf begins, just such a revolution is about to take place… .
Maganos, Unified Federation. Date 33. 05.11