The old lady looked rueful. “We learn our own culture from our parents, from growing up in it. There has never before been an outsider-so there has never been any need to teach how to be Linyaari to one of our own. And truthfully, you seem fine to me. Except for that smile at the reception, I cannot tell you any particular thing you are doing wrong. If you had grown up among us, no one would criticize or complain of any of your words or actions. But you did not grow up here, you see, so even though you are Linyaari the others still see you, if not as a barbarian, at least as someone not Linyaari. And neither I nor the Ancestors can tell them differently. Ours are a very stubborn people about some things.”
“I see,” Acorna said. She did, too, and she didn’t like it. As different as she had been among the people who raised her, still, many had been willing to give her a chance, to at least find out who she was. They had not just fed and clothed and educated her, they had loved her, even when they must have found her appearance and her behavior extremely strange. They had simply worked around her differences and helped her adapt to their world. Here, where she looked so much the same, she felt different as she had never before felt in her life. Remembering Gill, Calum, Rafik, kind Mr. Li, the clever Kendoros, and wily Uncle Hafiz, she could have wept with longing for them.
She shook her head slowly. She would never have imagined that her own people, the people Neeva and the others had said could read feelings and heal wounds, as she could, would be so hard for her to reach. “It is almost as if they are afraid of me,” she told Grandam.
“Perhaps they are,” Grandam Naadiina said. “Your arrival has shown me that our people have become very skittish since our exodus from Vhiliinyar. I don’t really know what to tell you, dear, except to be patient with them.”
Acorna nodded and did her best.
When she returned for the fifth time to try to pay the dressmakers, they were closed, as they had been every time she approached. She noticed that the pavilion beside theirs was quite busy, however. Two lines of Linyaari went in and out.
One line consisted of pale-skinned, silver-maned Linyaari such as herself. They were going in.
The other line was comprised of the more colorful, and presumably younger Linyaari, spotted, brown, black, red, gray, golden, so many different colors of hair and skin colors.
Acorna decided that since she had nothing better to do and these people did not appear to be engaged in private conversation, she would, very quietly and trying hard not to think any alien thoughts, join the line.
She told herself simply to be receptive, to learn what the line was about. What she heard were remarks such as, (Brilliant! I don’t know why no one has thought of this before!) (It’s the very latest. Everyone is doing it. Except those who you know-go oat there all the time.) (And to think, remember when we were children, and everyone wanted to look like that? All colorless and bleached out? This look is so much healthier!) (I think it’s only because it is so much younger looking-perhaps because we’ve become conditioned to think of Linyaari of color as the young ones who did not endure the journey and who do not remember the home world.)
When she reached the pavilion, she began to notice that some of the multicolored Linyaari emerging were wearing the same clothing as the strictly white Linyaari who went in. So. Acorna couldn’t help smiling. Gill might say they were now horned horse people of a different color. When her turn came, she was offered a smock by an attendant wearing a horn-hat. This was interesting. Acorna had thought the horn-hats were only for formal wear but perhaps those working with the public sometimes wore them to partially shield themselves from the multitude of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes coming at them from several directions at once.