“Is no trouble,” Mr. Li whispered, so that humans as well as Linyaari could understand them. “We have learned much from our beloved Acorna. Now we hope to learn more from you. Origin of Acorna is still mystery. Gill, you will tell of finding her?”
Gill cleared his throat and briefly recounted their discovery of Acorna, asleep in what they had later deduced was an escape pod, drifting close to an asteroid he and Calum and Rafik had been mining. He downplayed the work the three of them had put into raising the foundling, not to mention the fact that they had lost their jobs and almost lost their ship, to protect her from becoming the ward of Amalgamated Mining and subject to whatever experiments their Linguistics and Psych department could dream up, but his affection for Acorna came through underlying every word and moved the Linyaari envoys deeply. He skipped the tangled tale of her adventures on Kezdet and ended by explaining that Calum had come up with an ingenious theory for locating Acorna’s home world and that he and Acorna had just taken off in search of it-unfortunately without filing a navigation plan.
(One chance in mitanyaakhi!) Neeva silently exclaimed. (Vaanye could not possibly have foreseen that the explosion would not only transport Acorna out of danger but would bring her to another populated sector of the galaxy … and into the hands of these good Linyaari who raised her as one of their own.)
(Calm down, Neeva. Good they may be, perhaps even linyarii to a degree, but they are not Linyaari, and I for one am not sure how far we may trust them.)
(You are too cynical! Can’t you feel the truth and love in this large red one’s mind?)
(I agree with Neeva. This one at least is linyarii, if not technically Linyaari. We should tell them the truth of our mission.)
(We don’t know that all of them are good people. From this man Ghiil’s story alone it is clear that some, at least, of this race think nothing of experimenting on other sapient beings. Such behavior strikes me as more khievii than linyarii. Let us go slowly here.)
“So,” Gill finished, “that’s what we know about Acorna. And what we’re all curious to find out is, exactly how did one of your younglings come to be floating in our sector, in a pod that couldn’t have kept her alive many more hours, with no signal to alert anyone to her existence? You folks seem mighty concerned for her now; strikes me you’ve come a long way to retrieve somebody who seems to’ve been thrown out with the trash in the first place.” He rested his big, heavy-knuckled hands on his knees and looked from one of the envoys to another, his bright blue eyes challenging them to account for the plight in which they had found Acorna.
(Neeva?)