“I’ve never seen such large ships used by the Linyaari,” Acorna said. “What are those for? Are they here for repair? Is that why they aren’t up at the port?”
Naarye shook his head. “Now those are a piece of Linyaari history, Lady. It mst happens that right now they’re a piece nobody -wants to look at. They’re the two big evacuation transports that brought the people of our fair city from Vhiliinyar to Kubnhkhan. The port was built after we arrived, and they’re too big to fit up there; besides, nobody much wants to look at them. It takes a crew of at least twenty people fully trained and checked out on that particular model to fly them and far more fuel than we could scrape together at a moment s notice.”
Acorna could only imagine that the monster ships would need to escape the planet’s gravity well.
“We could have them operational again if we absolutely had to, but it would take time and plenty of muscle to tune up the drives, fuel the vessels, and get them out of here, especially if we hope to leave both them and the pavilion intact. We keep them here because it gives our people a little sense of security knowing they’re available, but at the same time, the people don’t want to be reminded they might need them again.”
Naarye was being more than polite to her but he, too, was clearly affected by giving the transport ships too much attention, so Acorna returned his courtesy by changing the subject.
“I’m fascinated by the decorations on the ship you’re working on and the others I’ve seen. The BaLikilre’s pattern, for instance, was quite different. Do you determine the designs personally?” she asked. The craft in front of them was being adorned with multicolored panels forming a sort of flame pattern, outlined in what appeared to be gilt.
Naarye beamed and waved his hand in a lordly way toward the spacecraft. “Handsome, isn’t it? It is the pennant pattern of Clan Haarilnyah, the oldest clan extant among us. In answer to your question, we”-and here he said a word in Linyaari which was unpronounceable to Acorna, even though she was becoming more facile with Linyaari every day. She understood it to mean outer hull embellishment specialists “adapt the designs for the hulls from the pennants of a clan or an individual distinguished enough to have a personal banner. We are doing it in rotation according to both their geographical and astrological position on Vhiliinyar in relation to the moons and also according to historical date, in inverse order. We keep very strict records. No one must be offended.”
“Of course not,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t yet have enough of a grasp on how your-our-society works to understand the importance of the order you mention, but I’m sure it’s very fair.”
“Actually,” Naarye said with a twinkle, “it’s entirely arbitrary and meant to sound as complicated as possible so that if anyone takes offense because their pennant has not yet been represented, we can make a baffling enough excuse that they will get off our backs, grateful not to have to hear the explanation of how a geographical and astrological position can be plotted according to moons we can no longer observe and translated to some sort of time order sequence. This lets us do whichever design strikes us as prettiest and most appropriate for the ship at hand.”
She chuckled.
Naarye, pleased at the reaction to his wit, gave Acorna a frankly curious glance. “So you are still learning our ways, then, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I saw you at the reception last night but didn’t get a chance to say hello,” he told her. “Before the evacuation I worked with your father on the development of some defensive weapons against the Khieevi. Unfortunately, your family disappeared and the invasion struck before we could test them. He and your mother were fine people, though.”
“Thank you,” Acorna said.
“Did you know that your great-grandmother was responsible for the design of our ships?”
“She was?” Acorna asked, and found she was eager for more information about her family. “What was her name? Did she travel offplanet to study, too? Did she have many children? And what would her pennant have been like?”