“Were-worth. Captain?” Maati asked, touching hers.
Grandam looked horrified, and Maati said, “Oh, no! You mean like in the story of the Ancestors? How the people didn’t want them, they only wanted the horns? But dead horn? Healing using dead horn doesn’t work nearly as well as healing done by a living person!”
“It works better than no horn at all, I’m afraid, honey,” Becker said. “And there are a lot of us out there in the galaxy without healing horns.”
“You say this woman knew me?” Acorna asked. “Who is she?”
“Kisia Manjan.” Becker filled her in on Kisla’s attempts to murder him and RK.
Acorna sighed. She had hoped that perhaps when Kisia learned of her own humble birth from her adopted mother, the girl might have been cured of some other arrogance, but apparently she was even worse. Becker’s thoughts were not as easily discernible now, nor were the cat’s thought patterns as clear as they had been -with the bones aboard, but from what she could tell, Kisia was more badly disturbed than ever.
“Could she have followed you here?” Acorna asked Becker. , Becker shook his head. “We lost her this time. Aari scared her away “with a Khieevi weapon.”
Grandam looked vaguely shocked but Becker said, “It simulated explosions in the earth-maybe it was a mining tool instead of a weapon to use against people-he said they used things like that to destabilize the whole planet. Anyway, it worked, and she took off. She only found us that time because of a homing device on the droid, but we got rid of that finally.”
Acorna sighed. “That’s good, then.”
“I also have an-idiosyncratic way of navigating that’s unpredictable to me as well as other ships. Besides which, I had no idea where we were going. We steered by Aari’s memory of what he had been told was the evacuation route before the invasion.”
Grandam sighed. “I think that whatever the others do, I shall bury Niciirye in the field beyond my back door. And Captain-if you-if you should recover the horns, by any chance, I wonder if there is any way you could somehow return them to us? It is a very important link between us and our dead. I don’t know why; maybe scientists would say that an extraordinary amount of DNA material is encoded in the horn and survives death. But however it is that it works, it is a connection and now-”
She looked away but Acorna felt Grandam’s pain as if it were her own, a sudden cold void, an open pit of grief she had never before sensed in Grandam.
‘t took nearly a week-a ghiirl-ghaanye-from the time the bones were unloaded from the Condor and ^handed over to their descendants for the Council to decide where the burials were to take place. During this time, the bones stayed in the homes of their respective clan members.
The presence of the dead from the past cast a pall over the living that was at least partially connected to their fears for those who were currently voyaging through space and had been out of communication for days now, completely silent.
Grandam had accompanied Aari to a Council session where he told the story of the cemetery’s unwitting desecration and how he had preserved the bones against further pilfering. He described the thought-images he had received from Becker regarding the unwholesome interest in the horns by some of Becker’s fellow humans. The Council, Grandam said, had become rather agitated after hearing that, both concerned about the possible invasion of other horn-seeking aliens and troubled that there could be some connection between the alien interest in the horns of the Linyaari dead and the lack of contact
with the spacefaring Linyaari.
Liriili had dismissed that concern (rather shrilly, Grandam noted). “These particular aliens are galaxies away. This one found us only because of Aari’s memory. And these humans had never seen one of us before Khornya.” The viizciar did not say that she wished the aliens had never seen Khornya, that she could almost wish the girl had perished with her parents rather than be the instrument of bringing such danger upon them. But Grandam heard the thought, even concealed. And worse, she knew that others on the Council shared it. The possible threat from aliens preoccupied the Council during that session to the extent that discussion of burial sites was temporarily tabled.