Acorna’s Search by Anne McCaffrey Read Free Book Online Page B

By the time they’d all worked their way over to him—carefully—he was already in up to his waist.
    “Quit moving so much. You are just making it worse. Spread yourself out,” Acorna told him. “Try to float on your back.”
    (What do you think I was trying to do?) he asked, with an insulted feeling in the thought.
    (It is just quicksand,) Aari said, kneeling within about three yards of Thariinye’s foot.
    “What’s that?” Maati asked.
    “What he is sinking in, apparently,” Acorna replied.
    “Yes, you find these sorts of things on developing worlds,” Aari said. “The carnivorous plants, the geysers, bogs, sudden caves, quakes and volcanic eruptions. Very common. Just unsettling to see them where home used to be. But still, we’re used to challenges. We’ll get through this in the end. But for right now, we’d best get him out of there.”
    “Yes,” Maati said. “The poor planet is polluted enough.”
    Thariinye stuck out his tongue at her. It was instantly coated with grit that made him spit and sputter and thrash about and start to sink. Maati smiled at him smugly.
    “Careful,” Aari said, “Thariinye, you just keep your head and keep calm. And right now that means keeping your tongue where it belongs—in your closed mouth. I have a plan. Hold out your hands, Thariinye. Khornya, I will hold onto your knees if you can stretch forward, reach out, and pull him to us.”
    “I don’t think she can reach that far,” Maati said. “But I have an idea.”
    “What?”
    She looked up at the stalks of the carnivorous plants surrounding the pool. Very carefully, she used a fallen branch to bend one down and maneuver it toward Thariinye. The plant folded and unfolded its petals a couple of times and sent a green shoot of a tendril growing, snakelike, toward Thariinye. The green stem latched onto his hand and pulled.
    “I figured that the liquid in the sand washed off his killer plant repellent,” Maati said with rather ghoulish satisfaction. “And since the plant knows lunch when it sees it….”
    “You sadistic little brat, I’ll get you for this!” Thariinye threatened, beginning to flail again, resisting the gentle pull of the plant-predator.
    “Shush, Thariinye,” Acorna told him. “She’s right. It’s working. Don’t just stand there, Maati. Help us haul on the stalk and pull him to shore before the plant starts digesting him wholesale.”
    There was little chance of that, unless the plant had a taste for the various synthetic materials from which Thariinye’s shipsuit and gloves were manufactured. In any case, the plant never got a chance to find out whether it liked synthetics. Aari plucked the younger Linyaari from the bog and the plant’s grasp at the same time.
    Their group returned to the flitter to find RK washing his fur in the sun and looking at them, especially Thariinye, with a disdain that suggested they might need baths, too.
    They built another bonfire before following the cat’s advice. After they’d cleaned off the worst of the grunge covering them, Thariinye, covered to his calf curls in a metallic blanket, washed his shipsuit off and laid it near the fire to dry.
    “I will take watch tonight,” he said. “I might as well stay awake while my clothes and I dry off.” They left him staring moodily into the fire, while his shipsuit steamed in the cool night air.
     
     
     
    In the morning the sky was a cauldron of curdled yellow-green clouds, occasionally extruding tentacles of brownish funnel-shaped whirlwinds toward the ground.
    Despite the weather, they had a job to do, and a limited amount of time in which to accomplish it. They headed out to work on the survey, casting wary eyes at the angry sky.
    That day they saw nothing of the Harakamian vessels, staffed with Linyaari, which regularly overflew the planet on aerial mapping expeditions. They heard from them, though. Periodically these crews would ask for descriptions of the terrain at such and such coordinates