Acorna’s Search by Anne McCaffrey Page A

delicious flowers she grows herself when she comes for stories. I’m sorry she’s missing. Wish I could think of something to help. Which of my stories did she tell you?” he asked.
    “The one about the waterfall was the first one,” Acorna said. “That was awfully interesting. It certainly shed some light on the characters of the Friends. I had no idea they ever thought of the Ancestors in that sort of way.”
    “Well, of course they did, silly girl. Otherwise, how do you suppose your kind came to be?”
    “Haarilii, don’t scandalize the poor girl. Of course it took more than that, sweetheart, there was a lot of scientific tinkering involved in getting from us and them to you. We were alien lifeforms to each other initially, after all.”
    “She also mentioned—after we found an artifact—that there were once another kind of Linyaari— sii -Linyaari, I believe she said. They lived in the oceans. She told us that they’d been gone for some time, that they vanished one day long ago.”
    “Is that what she said?” one of the Grandmothers asked in a brisk disapproving voice. “Some things she wasn’t supposed to repeat.”
    “Really?” Acorna asked. “Why not?”
    Thariinye asked eagerly, “Was it something maybe to do with breeding?”
    “Thariinye, do not be rude!” Acorna told him. It wasn’t that she thought there was anything one shouldn’t speak of regarding breeding. It was just that it seemed to be all Thariinye was thinking about. That wasn’t exactly the case—Acorna thought he was just hoping the topic the Ancestors expounded on first would be the one he found most interesting.
    She was rather surprised therefore when one of the Grandmothers said, “How did you guess?”
    Before he could answer a Grandfather continued, “It’s not about breeding in a recreational kind of way, sonny, I know what you’re thinking. It’s about the scientific kind of breeding, which supposedly takes the strengths of two species and combines them to make what should be an even stronger species. It requires some fiddling by those who are directing the process. That’s how the Friends took themselves and us and came up with you younglings. But it’s also how they came up with the sii -Linyaari.”
    “How can that be?” Acorna asked, though she could think of several reasons how it might be.
    “The way I heard it,” the plump Grandmother said confidentially, “it’s because the Friends were not all alike. Some were one kind and some were another.”
    “I’m sure they meant nothing bad by it, creating those strange creatures,” said a very old Grandfather. “They were just trying different forms out. They did that, my grandsire said. Always tinkering.”
    “Aye,” said a very old Grandmother wisely. “My Grandam hinted that the Friends had many different appearances—that even the same person took many seemings sometimes. She never came right out and said shapeshifter, but she did say—and she had actually met them, mind you—that we were not the first people they took to themselves and blended with. That they had done it elsewhere, with other races. Vhiliinyar was only one of the planets they had inhabited throughout their long history.”
    “But you’re not supposed to repeat that,” the plump Grandmother told them. “It would upset people.”
    “Yes,” Acorna said, finding herself a little stunned by the information, “I can well imagine. That would explain the existence of the sii -Linyaari, I suppose, but what about their disappearance?”
    “Tell us again what happened back on Vhiliinyar,” another Grandmother said, cocking her ears forward to show that she was listening most intently to Acorna.
    “Well—except for our friends going missing, nothing, really, which is what was so odd,” Acorna told her. “You would think, given our telepathic powers, that if something was about to capture our people or make them vanish as it did, even if the ground swallowed them up or some