The girl looked extremely disappointed, and for a moment Acorna thought it might be the sort of bloodthirstiness she knew from the children on Kezdet.
“I’m sorry to have got it wrong,” the girl said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was hoping that you haS been captured. I mean, not that I wish you ill, but especially when I saw that you looked so unharmed, I was hoping you had been through the torture and survived it because… . Oh well, it’s not important right now. You didn’t endure it, and I’m glad you’re all right. My name is Maati, by the way. I know that you’re Khornya.”
“In your-our language-yes. At home I was called Acorna,” Acorna said, allowing the subject to change since the girl was evidently too flustered by her mistake to make a great deal of sense. Acorna did not find the child easy to read and wondered if this was because Linyaari children lacked psychic ability. It was clear from this youngling that the lack meant that the children not only lacked the ability to receive thoughts but also to transmit them nonverbally, consciously or unconsciously.
“Acorna? That’s an odd name,” Maati said. “So is Khornya, for that matter. I mean, the word means ‘one horn.’ All of us have one horn and nobody has more than one, so what’s the big deal?”
“No one else where I was living had a horn,” Acorna told her.
“They didn’t? How did they heal things when they got hurt or sick? And what if the water was muddy in the stream where they were, or there was a fire and the air was smoky? How did they fix it? “
“Sometimes they didn’t. If they were hurt or sick, and I wasn’t handy, they went to medics who fixed them with all sorts of tools and tonics and pills. As best they could, anyway. And if the water was muddy, they drank muddy water or went thirsty. If the air was smoky, they breathed it or moved to where there was cleaner air. Again, unless I was handy.”
“I’m surprised they let you come home if they’re that backward and you were that useful to them,” Maati said stoutly.
Acorna sighed and refrained from trying to explain any more about human society.
They were walking across the edge of the field now. The sky was a clear cloudless turquoise. Acorna saw the road from the city to the spaceport just ahead of them. Standing on the road were several men in elaborately decorated uniforms, each uniform a different color. Standing beside them, decked out in beribboned and bejeweled blankets that matched their attendants’ uniforms, were animals that looked something like horses-except that they had horns, just like the Linyaari.
“Madam,” one of the men said, though he said it in Linyaari, of course, “our Ancestors will now convey you to the home of the vazaar.”
“Ride? TheArtc&^to/v?” Neeva sounded shocked. “When did we start using the Ancestors as transportation?”
“Ancestors?” Acorna asked, intrigued. She reached out her hand and touched the velvet nose of one of the gorgeously blanketed creatures. Up close, though they mostly looked like Uncle Hafiz’s horses, they also looked a tiny bit like goats, with little beards on their chins. They were somewhat more slightly built than the horses she’d seen in Hafiz’s stables. But they were entirely identifiable as something else she’d been associated with by her human companions all her life. “These are Mr. Li’s ki-Lin!” she said. She looked at Neeva. “You didn’t tell me about them.”
“Well, no,” Neeva said. “One doesn’t speak of the Ancestors off the home world, not even among one’s closest companions. They do not care for oftworlders, no matter how Linyaari, knowing about them. In the past, they have had great reason to be frightened of other species. Not of Linyaari, of course. The Linyaari have, since the Ancestor’s great tragedy and rescue by the Ancestral Hosts, evolved from them, but their kind are long-lived and adaptable. These are descendents from the original species. Most are far older than any of us. Their species, all of the Ancestors, remain as they always were, unchanged since those long-distant days before our kind had yet to be born.”