“It was dying when -we left the ship,” Aari said. “I came to get you to heal it.”
“Did you harm it?”
“No-no, we did not have to harm it. It seemed to … believe we were harming it, though, and we let it think so,” Aari said.
“We really were going to let you heal it up, honest,” Becker said. “As soon as -we got all the information we needed. Figured maybe the scientists could study the thing-” He tried to sound innocent. Acorna knew? that Becker had just thought of the scientists studying the Khieevi. He had been very much against healing its wounds. “Maybe it was hurt worse in the crash than we figured. It told us what we wanted to know and then-really, pretty conveniently-it keeled over. Aari was coming to get you to see if you could maybe heal it or something.”
Both men looked very uncomfortable. Acorna looked from one to the other. “I don’t think it was the injuries in the crash that killed that prisoner-and I suspect this one was mortally wounded from the moment Aari jumped on him.”
“You jumped that thing, buddy?” Becker asked Aari, clapping him on the back. “Way to go. I didn’t think you had it in you. Not bad for a pacifist.”
“You miss the point, Joh. Khornya just said I killed the Khieevi. How did I do that, Khornya?”
“The sap on your shipsuit,” Acorna told him.
“Ye-es,” Aari said. “Yes. That makes sense. I remember the first time we saw the sap. It killed small insects preying upon the vines in the homeworld.”
“Yeah, the plants thought -we were a bug, too,” Becker said. “They slimed the Condor, trying to get through its shell. Lucky us, it didn’t work.”
“The sap probably only destroys selected organic sub stances. Judging by the results, I would guess that the polysaccharides in the Khieevi’s chitin carapaces are susceptible to it, Joh,” Aari said.
“Good. Anything that eats up Khieevi shells is fine by me,” Becker rejoined.
Acorna glanced over and saw Maati and her parents were helping Thariinye stand. His clothing was still bloody, but he was moving the fingers of his formerly injured hand, and all of the gashes and gouges were cleaned up. His horn, however, remained shorter than it had been.
Aari deliberately turned his back on the Linyaari quartet as he, Becker, and Mac began pulling another of the titanium cargo nets around the dead Khieevi. Acorna, panting and catching her breath, stared at his back, and shook her head. He was clearly not going to fall on the necks of his long-lost parents and rejoice at their presence. In fact, it looked like he was going to avoid dealing with them at all, if he could.
Miiri-Maati and Aari’s mother-was the first to discover the rash on Aari’s hands. While Aari’s palms -were now mostly cleaned of sap, they were red and itching, swelling in places. He kept pausing in the journey to rub his palms on the legs of his shipsuit. His mother, who had been trying to run along beside him to talk to him, noticed.
Aari tried to ignore his mother but Acorna stopped him, turning to rest a hand on his arm, raised his palm and examined it. I had an itchy red place like this on my finger just now, from where I examined the sap on the edge of the Khieevi’s wound, but I put it up to my horn and it healed. Let me see if I can help you,” she said, lowering her horn to Aari’s palms and touching them lightly, first one hand and then the other.
The pain he was in was all too evident in his rigid posture and the look in his eyes. Finally he let out a sigh of relief and gave her a look half of irritation, half of gratitude.
“That sap, which eats into the Khieevi shells and kills them in short order, apparently merely causes an allergic reaction in our species,” Acorna said. “It’s irritating, but the sap doesn’t appear to be lethal to us.”
“Mac,” Becker said, “-when we get back to the ship, priority one is for you to scrape all that sap off the robolift and collect it, then stow it in one of the unpressurized cargo bays. I want samples of it analyzed as soon as possible. This stuff could be useful.”