Acorna’s Search by Anne McCaffrey Page B

unseen bird of prey swooped away with them, at least one of them would have cried out for help. But no one remaining reports hearing anything like that, through their minds or their ears. The missing people were just gone.”
    “And you’re sure it’s not those bug things?” asked a Grandfather with a narrow-eyed half-snort toward the sky.
    “No, Grandfather. If it had been the Khleevi carrying them off, Aari would have known. He senses them, you know. Besides, the Khleevi were never good at hiding their presence or at any sort of subtlety, for that matter. Khleevi like their victims to scream, and to prolong the screaming as long as possible. They depended on terror as their primary tactic. It is what they feed on. Why would they do something so puzzling that no one can figure out whether to be afraid or not? It would serve no good purpose for them.”
    “What I’d like to know is, if something on Vhiliinyar made our folk disappear, did it make Khleevi disappear, too?” declared a Grandmother. “And if it did, why didn’t it disappear all of them? Preferably before they made such a big mess of our planets.”
    “You know, I’m beginning to remember something,” the eldest Grandmother said. “I was talking with Grandam once about our natures. You remember don’t you, Hraaya, the old stories of how fierce and smart and courageous our Terran forebears were? How the only way they survived was to be so wily and dangerous that the men of Terra could not capture them without trickery?”
    “Ho, yes, who can forget? It’s part of who we are.”
    “Yes,” she said. “But it’s not part of who they are, these younglings. The Friends, I remember Grandam saying, did not believe in fighting or killing, even when extremely provoked.” She paused, ate a mouthful of grass, and chewed thoughtfully. “And I remember asking, well then, how did they deal with people who wanted to hurt them—maybe hurt their younglings? And she said, oh, they didn’t do anything violent, but the aggressors disappeared. I wish such a thing worked on the Khleevi. It is certain those bugs were nasty enough to deserve to disappear. Perhaps your answer lies there, child. You did say you thought it might be something from the Ancients.”
    Acorna let her breath out in a deep sigh. Progress, at last. She began munching on a grass stem herself. So, once upon a time the Friends had caused aggressors to disappear. Interesting maybe, a little, but she still didn’t know how the Friends had caused it, or why it didn’t work on the Khleevi when they invaded Vhiliinyar, or why the long-gone Friends would cause people who were not aggressors, but their own descendants, to disappear now.
    Thariinye, reading her, said aloud, “Well, I think, if it is the Friends come back to haunt us, that these disappearances are a mistake. I bet they wouldn’t have let it happen if they were still around—I mean, the Friends took off a long time ago, didn’t they? So—if they left something there that started grabbing people—it probably just didn’t recognize us.”
    Acorna looked at her young male friend, who was speaking matter-of-factly and—as usual—without troubling to engage many of his higher intellectual functions, as if he had suddenly manifested genius. Which, in a way, he had.
    “Excuse me, Khornya,” said the Attendant in the lime and fuchsia silks, approaching from behind, “Thariinye, we must ask you to retire for now and leave the Ancestors to their own company. So much stimulation, especially in the wake of the disaster that recently overtook us and the enormous output of energy required to restore the Ancestral Meadows, drains their stamina and vitality. Do you see how translucent their horns are becoming, just from conversation, without even the strain of healing?”
    “Nonsense, Granddaughter, I’m as spry as I ever was!” insisted the Grandmother who seemed to be this woman’s special charge. But the woman stroked Grandmother’s