“Please enter the mmipavihon, remove your clothing, don the smock if you wish, and ring for your personal colorist,” the attendant told her. Acorna was moving away as she heard the attendant repeat herself four different times. That would be a good job for a robot instead of a sentient being! Or a shelf full of smocks and a recording!
But Acorna went inside, took off the dress and the beautiful belt, put on the smock, and rang for her “personal colorist.”
The colorist was of a reddish brown color, with her mane golden streaked with white. “What do you recall as being the skin of your birthright?” the colorist asked.
From the friendly way she spoke, the colorist no doubt had failed to recognize Acorna as the pariah of the planet. Acorna said, “I was born in space and so I have always been this color.”
“A shipborn and you want to try color? “
“Yes. Is-is that forbidden or somehow against custom?” she asked, fearing she was making another social faux pas.
“Oh, no, my dear. Simply very daring. The starclad and the space-going caste have always been, shall we say-vain-of their lack of coloring up until the great transference. Now, with most of us having been bleached out by the journey-” The colorist’s golden eyes were rueful as she spread her arms and shrugged.
“You, too-you used to be the same color as me?” “Still am, darling, under the cosmetics and dye. Tomorrow I could be black if I liked, or roan. But today, this is the real me. Now then, what, do you suppose, is the real you?” “I hardly know. Are there-rules about color?” “Not really. Of course, your paints tend to breed paints and that sort of thing, but we Linyaari have been very open about that for generations. You can be anything you like at all. I myself am not exactly au naturel.” She tossed her head so that the fringe above her golden horn flipped in a saucy way. “I call this look aural sorrel. None of us were ever born this way but so what? It is my art to improve upon nature. So, sweetie, how about you? What’ll it be?”
Acorna was tired of trying to blend. “Stripes,” she said. “Zebra stripes.”
“Zebra?”
Acorna projected a mind picture of the beast she had viewed vids of while still a child aboard the mining ship. The colorist giggled and began working on her.
“You’ll stand out for sure in these,” she said. “I must say, it’s rather an attractive look.”
“I seem to stand out whether or not I wish to,” Acorna said. She had made herself conspicuous, to some extent out of rebellion against being isolated from her fellows, but her unusual appearance had the opposite effect, at least on some of the younger Linyaari. They commented favorably on the stripes and asked about them, then invited her to a ring-toss tournament.
Watching the boys and girls catching circlets of flowers on their horns and tossing them back and forth, keeping them away from the opposite teams, made her feel unusually young and giddy again, a feeling that continued until a loud crack of thunder heralded sheets and spears of red and green lightning splitting the sky as an earthquake might split the ground, and torrents of rain poured down on everyone, washing all of the colorful paint jobs down into the grass, beating the flowers into the mud and making footing so slippery that many people stumbled and fell running for shelter.
A great wind came up, so forceful that Acorna fully expected to see the pavilions tumbling along the ground like wheels, but of course, the structures only gave the appearance of being fabric and poles. They were actually quite sturdy. In fact, the storm gave her an opportunity to observe another feature of the buildings. As the ground flooded, the floors of the pavilions rose, extruding ramps leading up from the ground to the raised floor. The central poles pulled in, too, so as not to attract the lightning. In fact, other poles suddenly appeared on the outskirts of the compound, specifically raised to attract the lightning.
“Power collectors,” a very wet Grandam Naadiina told her.