The three women stayed aboard the ship and helped Aari and Becker load the robolift time after time. Then Becker remembered something and came back with what looked like another man, albeit one somewhat scarred and with a peculiar skin tint. This, Acorna learned, was a KEN unit, an android, and he was able to work five times faster, if not more accurately, than any of them. Aari had to indicate to Becker whose bones were whose before riding down with each load and supervising its disposition. The road to the spaceport was lined with Linyaari of all clans, all come to claim the bones of their dead.
“How did they find out so fast?” Becker asked.
“Thought transference is a very swift form of communication when used correctly,” Grandam said. “I suspect Liriili set up a relay of some sort to inform the clans.”
“Will you look at that guy? ” Becker asked, nodding toward Aari. “I was the pounder and he was the poundee and he is working rings around me. You’d think he’d been sitting around watching the stars go by all morning instead of getting every bone in his body rebroken and mended.”
“He is a very determined young man,” Grandam said. “He had to be or he would not have survived all that he has.”
When Aari returned for the last time, he carried a single skeleton, this one carefully wrapped in the thermal blanket Becker had given Aari to sleep with.
“Grandam, I was very careful with Grandsire Niciirye but I brought him back to you. I do not wish you to be concerned, but Grandsire’s horn is missing from his remains.”
“His horn?” Grandam asked, and Acorna saw that she was trying to picture her lifemate as Aari was now. “Not the
Khieevi?”
“Captain Becker will explain,” Aari said. “I must go below now.
“Thanks a lot, buddy,” Becker said.
Aari allowed himself a small grim smile. “You have nothing to worry about, Joh, even if I had not already hidden your surgical instrument. We are a nonviolent people. Grandam will not cause you much physical damage for desecrating the remains of her lifemate. I do not know if that will be true for the others whose kin are missing their horns. Those bones I have left in the hold for now, but Grandsire’s at least I can return.”
His voice contained elements of black humor, but his emotions were hollow and cold with grief, as they came to Acorna. His thoughts had been harder and harder to detect as the bones and horns left the ship and it came to Acorna that he might be lonely without them.
She turned back to Becker and to Grandam, who was watching the salvage man with a curious mixture of pain and reproach. “You are a grave robber. Captain?” she asked.
“I take full responsibility, ma’am,” Becker said, and pointed at RK, washing on top of the control console. “It was the cat’s fault. Your old planet is a mess. We landed there looking for salvage. Some of your people’s horns were laying around on the ground. It was night, the light was poor, and I thought since the cat liked them I’d pick up a few and see what they were. Well, honest, they really were just laying around.”
“So you took them?” she asked, the reproach still there.
“I’m a salvage expert, for pity’s sake!” he said. “I pick up stuff nobody claims-and it sure didn’t look like there was a living soul there at the time. I didn’t even know what they -were till we got back to Kezdet and a couple of people thought they belonged to the Lady Acorna or her shipmates.”
Acorna was a little startled at the idea at first but it made sense. She and then her aunt and the others were the only Linyaari the people of Kezdet and Manganos had met.
“One fellow was ready to turn me over to>the cops for murder, and one nasty little-female individual, an old enemy of Acorna s-tried to kill me more than once to take the horns. Then she followed us to your old planet and took the horns I had with me. If she hadn’t I swear I would have returned them, I don’t care how much they were worth.”