“Hmmm,” Acorna said. “I’ll have to try that.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘imagine that,’” Acorna replied. “When you were expecting just the opposite, I mean.”
While everyone worked to regain the strength they needed to make the journey home, Acorna and her aunt talked.
Acorna was almost startled to find that of everything that had happened to her, what she wanted to talk about most was Aari and what had been done to him. After her aunt’s ordeal, Acorna felt that she would understand what Aari had undergone. “Maybe you can make our people understand, help him fit in again,” Acorna said.
“Do you think that’s still necessary? ” Neeva asked. “Look. Does he seem to be having a hard time fitting in now? “
Indeed, he did not, but was grazing with the others, listening to them talk and noddrng, occasionally adding something of his own.
“He seems fine now but when we get home, when everyone’s normal, will they be so upset by memories of their own ordeal that just seeing him or me might bring back, that they will be afraid to look at-well, especially him again?”
“Khornya, we’re not all like that. You must realize that this particular crisis affected you and the people at home as well as us. We spaceborn and spacechosen are your kind, but because of circumstances, none of us stayed dirtside while you were there. You met only the most conservative element of our society. And the most fearful, because they look to the past for their strength. They have a strong aversion to change of any kind. And they don’t like anyone who is the least bit different. Don’t get me wrong. It is necessary that there be both traditional or agrarian, and progressive or technological and scientific Linyaari. The traditionalists give us our stability and sense of self and we -we give them the ability to continue to live. I don’t suppose they mentioned that it was necessary to partially reform narhiiVhiliinyar to make it habitable for our people?”
“Not in any detail,” Acorna said. “Well, it was. Thanks be to the Ancestors that Grandam was there to help you.”
“And Maati.” “And Maati,” Neeva agreed. “My point rs, you are one of us.
Aari is one of us. Nothing can change that, ever, not distance or time or even the sort of thing that has happened to Aari-and almost to all of us. Wherever you are, wherever we are, you are still ours and we are still your people.”
Except for the inclusion of the Condor, Acorna’s second homecoming was almost a reversal of her first. This time the bright Faberge egg ships bounced toward narhiiVhiliinyar rather than from it, and only one lone ship, the new one she’d seen the techoartisans working on with the clan colors of Acorna’s illustrious clan ancestress, bounced up from the planet’s surface. Thariinye beamed at them from the comscreen until Becker switched it off.
“I don’t like that guy,” he grumbled. The Linyaari band was there to greet more than one person this time, Acorna could see from the viewport of the Con2or. Grandam and Maati alone separated from the crowd and walked across the field to wait for the robolift to lower, and Acorna and Aari to join them on the surface. The vilzaar herself had extended the invitation to the welcome home fete to Becker as well, but if she had reversed her opinion of Becker, the same was not true of his opinion of her.
“Bureaucrats,” he said. “They’re all alike.”
Maati gave Acorna a brief horn touch and then held onto her brother’s waist with both arms until he picked her up in his and hugged her. Acorna touched horns with Grandam. “Perhaps we’d better leave them to catch up with us,” Grandam said.
They walked slowly and silently toward the crowd. The returnees were being given wreaths of flowers by those greeting them, and there were many tears and much laughter. Neeva was explaining to Liriili that without the good or “Linyaari barbarians” their people would never have survived the bad or “Khieevi barbarians.”
“In fact,” Neeva said loudly enough for all to hear, “we Linyaari now have a kinsman among the barbarians. Khornya’s uncle Hafiz, who fed us and helped us regain our health after our imprisonment, said that since he was Khornya’s kinsman, he felt that all of the rest of us were also members of his clan, a very wealthy and aristocratic lineage of merchant traders.”