Though he raised a doubting eyebrow at her, Becker did as she asked. It took some time for Maati to reach a com console and report back, but when she did, she looked more excited than Acorna had seen her look since Aari's disappearance.
"Khornya, I'm so glad to hear from you! The aagroni Iirtye is back from his latest time voyage. He's been collecting specimens again, you know, but he found out something really strange on this trip. Apparently he couldn't find any pahaantiyirs on Vhiliinyar, no matter where he looked, and he looked right up until a generation or two before the older Linyaari among us were born. Of course, he couldn't continue his search any farther because of the space-time continuum problem, but he didn't find any ancestors of the pahaantiyirs on our planet at all."
Acorna was hard pressed to understand her young friend's fascination with this discovery. Maati had never seen the species the older Linyaari remembered from Vhiliinyar before the Khleevi invasion. The Linyaari Elders claimed that RK looked incredibly like those beloved feline creatures, however.
"The species must not have been indigenous to Vhiliinyar, then," Acorna said. "Probably they came from one of the trading planets."
"Nobody remembers which one, if they did," Maati said. "It's kind of a mystery, really."
"More of a mystery to me is the fact that, if they were so highly thought of, why didn't our people bring pahaantiyirs with them from Vhiliinyar when they fled?"
"It's funny about that," Maati said. "Everybody I've talked to said they just suddenly couldn't find their furry friends when the time came to go. Like the pahaantiyirs had already disappeared. The evidence from our recent explorations seems to bear that out. At least we haven't found any feline bones in the rubble out on the surface. That's good, don't you think?"
"I suppose. Maybe the pahaantiyirs all found the secret city and have been hunting vermin down there. Maybe we'll run into their offspring, fat and happy, when we explore the city further."
"I hope so," Maati said. "But meanwhile, the aagroni would like to know if Captain Becker would ask Commander Kando if she knows anything that might connect RK's fellow Temple cats and our pahaantiyirs."
"Be glad to," Becker said. "Nadhari doesn't talk about the old homeworld much, but maybe we just need to ask her."
Acorna heard something unsettling in Becker's tone when he spoke of Nadhari Kando, the security chief for Hafiz Harakamian's Moon of Opportunity, and a very formidable woman. "Is there something wrong with Nadhari, Captain?" she asked. She could read him, of course, but that would have been a breach of good manners, and besides, Becker was very good at expressing himself verbally.
"Yeah," he said. "I think so."
"Is it because you are no longer mates?"
"No. I mean, it's not just me. Seem to me like she's shutting down emotionally-and with everybody. At first I thought maybe it was just me, because she was mad at me and wanted to be with that Federation soldier, but then she dumped him after a couple of months. And she doesn't mind that I was seeing Andina. She likes her, says she's better for me than she was. That's not like Nadhari-trust me. Nadhari and me-well, we're still friendly, and yeah, I still care about her. But something smells funny to me - though we haven't had a real conversation since I came back from collecting the salvage on narhii-Vhiliinyar, so I'm not exactly sure what's on her mind."
"But you have an idea?" Acorna prompted.
He nodded, eyes down, lips compressed, shoulders hunched forward a little. "Yeah. I think she's still stirred up inside about what happened to her when Edacki Ganoosh and General Ikwaskwan doped her up and turned her into a torture machine to use against your people."
"But surely she knows that was not her fault," Acorna said. "And my people, as soon as they were able, healed her of her wounds, both physical and psychic. Didn't they?"
Suddenly she felt guilty. She had been so preoccupied with her own problems - her lifemate Aari's disappearance, initially due to a temporal accident caused by Vhiliinyar's systematic destruction by the Khleevi, and later exacerbated by her own attempts to find him and bring him back-that her worries had caused her to shut down in a way. She'd somehow forgotten that other people had problems, too, problems they might not want to share with her for fear of adding to her burden. But the truth was that it was a relief to think of someone else's troubles now. For the time being, she had gone as far as she could with her own.
Becker shrugged. "Sure, they forgave her for the harm she did to them, and healed her of the drugs and her wounds, but did she forgive herself? For someone like Nadhari, someone used to being in charge of her own destiny, to being the meanest, baddest, toughest thing walking-what those guys did to her must have messed with her spirit in a real fundamental way. I think she distracted herself for a while with MOO, the Harakamians, me, the Federation guy, but I don't think she's over it. I don't think anyone else can cure someone of something like that. I think she has to figure it out for herself, and she just isn't doing it. Instead, she's cutting herself off from everybody who cares about her. The only one she really seems to be normal with is RK, but she doesn't want me to leave him with her. I offered. Hell, he offered, but it's like she doesn't trust herself not to hurt him or something."
"Oh, Captain, I had no idea. I am very sorry for her pain. Do you want me to try to read her? To see if I can do some deeper healing? It sounds to me as if her… condition is somewhat similar to Aari's."
"Yeah, it is. Except, I think, Aari wasn't forced to do anything against his own nature. Even though he was tortured and everything, he stayed a Linyaari. The Khleevi took his horn and broke his bones and nearly killed him, but they didn't make him hurt anyone else. He endured pain, but he didn't inflict it. Ganoosh and Ikwaskwan turned Nadhari inside out, let loose that bad dog she always keeps on a tight leash, and turned her into what she hates the most. She has that monster side to her and she knows it, but she controls it rigidly because at heart she's a protector, Princess. A natural-born hero, a defender of the weak. And Ganoosh and his goons doped her up and turned her loose on the weak to maim and destroy them. Think what that must have been like for her-to get turned against her will into the very monster she's always fought against. It's no wonder she's a little messed up right now. She needs something, but she doesn't know what it is, and I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's anything you Linyaari can supply that you haven't already."
Unable to say anything to help, Acorna fell silent for most of the remainder of the short hop to MOO. She and Becker each thought their respective thoughts while RK lay between them on the console, his tail waving lazily back and forth.
Hafiz Harakamian, a wily, wealthy intergalactic businessman and her adopted uncle, greeted Acorna warmly when they arrived on the Moon Of Opportunity, but he kept a sympathetic reserve. Acorna could see many unasked questions in his eyes. Just as well he didn't ask. No, Aari had not shown up or been located. Everyone in the galaxy would know when he turned up - she would be so happy she'd broadcast that far and wide.
For Becker, Hafiz had a mission in mind.
"I am told you can communicate with these persons," Hafiz said, gesturing grandly toward the perpetually suspicious and usually filthy forms of Wat and Wat, the Terran unicorn hunters who had accidentally been transported from ancient times to Vhiliinyar along with the Ancestors. The nearest anyone could figure, Wat and Wat, once their presence was discovered by the Ancestral Hosts, had been sent to an ancient period in Vhiliinyar's history where they could do no harm to sentients. However, when the ruination of Vhiliinyar's surface caused fractures in the time apparatus, the two hirsute Earthmen had suddenly reappeared and began hunting Linyaari as if no interruption in their activities had ever occurred.