The Touchstone Trilogy (113 page)

Ys is tying herself into knots, used to being the one who protects the others and makes the decisions, so tempted and distrustful of the life we're offering her.  She hates that Sen lavishes affection on me, and Rye's deepening fascination with Kaoren must feel like a second betrayal.  I spend all my time wanting to hug her and being careful to pretend not to notice when she's excited and enjoying herself.

I'm glad she met Isten Notra.

I'll make sure to contact them during our next mission day after tomorrow.  Of the fourteen platform towns, First and Fourth are exploring four, while most of the single squads are doing three, so two more for us – and again the next time zone over, which means sleeping in, leaving in late afternoon and not getting back till after Sen, at least, should be asleep.

It's raining at Pandora again.  Inisar says the Nuran splinter group has shelter now, but I bet they're not enjoying themselves.

Sunday, September 14

Day-Tripping

Pandora's day started out hot and sticky again – another storm on the way – and since everyone at the talent school is spending their energy trying to deal with dozens of kids with severe headaches, we took the kids off to our island after what was breakfast for us and taught them to float on their backs, and kicking.  Rye did very well at this, Ys less so – she wasn't comfortable with me holding her up while she was floating, but we took a break and tried again and though she was far from relaxed, she did better the second time.

We had Fourth with us instead of First, and Kaoren turned it into a mini training session, leaving Par and Glade (our toter-abouters who he didn't want to tire out) to sit with me on the bank while he took the rest for a short practice swim.

All three kids are highly curious about Kaoren's squad, and Fourth are eternally entertained by the idea of him in a dad role.  Glade had a huge amount of fun pretending Kaoren worked them to death and was a heartless taskmaster.  Sen was outraged and kept saying "No-o!!" in highly doubtful tones at Glade's increasingly unlikely claims, until she was sure that he was teasing her and then she started giggling madly.  Rye, who I think was for a while really furious, finally appealed to me.

"Tough but fair," I said, since my opinion of him as a captain hasn't really changed.  "Kaoren expects people to do their best, but he doesn't push them just for fun of it."  I had to grin and add.  "Admittedly, I train with First instead of Fourth."

"You – is it you are to be a Setari?" Rye asked.

"It would take years – decades – to turn me into any sort of fighter.  But the basic training comes in handy because using talents strains the user's system.  And, well, you never know when you need some urgent running or swimming.  It was definitely embarrassing when Zan – the leader of Twelfth Squad – had to levitate me because I couldn't keep up with her squad during an emergency."

Before we left I told Sen that she should choose a short story for Mara to read, if she wanted to save the current one for me, and Mara tells me that she was happy with this new arrangement.  I'm getting better at this.

Our platform town today was the border collie one, which on the old Muinan map is called Falazen.  I asked Maze if I could bring a snack along for the dogs (partially to tease him) and ended up having a rather serious conversation with one of the fauna technicians, who wanted to know more about how dogs are used on Earth.  Teasing Maze is not nearly so much fun if the end result is a meeting.

The Kolaren farmer who is in charge of the hairy sheep was also there, allowing me to demonstrate my ignorance of sheepdogs AND sheep.  To cover the gaps, I did a short projection of some collies herding as a farmer controlled them with whistles.  The technician has been conducting a study of the dogs, observing them through drones, and was full of talk about their intelligence and social set-up, and wasn't very keen on the Kolaren's suggestion that we do a bit of puppy-napping.  But they agreed that regularly bringing food gifts to the dogs was a usefully non-confrontational step toward redomestication.

So we took doggy snacks with us (well, a bag of dried chips of vat-grown protein) and laid them out on one side of the amphitheatre under the watchful eye of the two collies which were guarding the place (the technician told me that there's always at least one collie keeping an eye on the place).  The chips were gone when we returned at the end of the day, so I guess it was a suitable offering to Falazen's current owners.

It was an uneventful day in terms of exploration.  The land around Falazen is very like Pandora, although with a somewhat different selection of animals, and dominated by a pale-barked tree just setting out leaf-tips.  Lovely displays of spring flowers below them, too.  Other than the mild disorientation of getting up mid-morning and travelling about until late evening, and the fact that the Telekinetics find days like this a strain, I'm still really enjoying this stretch of missions.  It was late afternoon for the kids when we stopped for lunch, and I showed them where we were, and pictures of the flowers, and the dogs.

Flying and walking about half the day isn't doing my sex life any good, though.  Kaoren usually flies himself, and the effort of that means he's very tired by the time we're ready for bed.

Monday, September 15

Where Now?

Raining a lot at Pandora today, so I spent my late morning playing games with the kids while Kaoren was off at a Captains' meeting.  There's an endless array of games available for them to play – some free, but a lot with a tiny purchase fee which either Kaoren or I have to approve – and we played through a heap of trials to decide which ones they wanted.  I won some 'Mum-cred' by being better at random games than I am at spelling in Taren, and I made sure Ys and Rye picked at least one game each which catered more toward their own age group, rather than entirely to Sen's tastes.  Ys picked what amounted to a junior adventure game, like the historical games I've been playing, so I showed them those games, and warned them they might be a little complicated but that I thought they were tremendously interesting because I'd learned so much about Taren history from them.

Then it was off to the southern hemisphere again, though this time not so far south, so we found deciduous trees all shifting into Autumn – primarily a gorgeous translucent yellow, with occasional masses of orangey-red standing out like beacons.  This town was quite close to the ruins of another, larger, settlement, and the whole landscape was quite spectacular – lots of whitestone ruins tucked among sharply up and down hills which had at one time been terraced for farming but now had been overtaken by trees, and also these massive (taller than me) bushes which were covered in a white-gold fruit.  Tiny brown and black striped pigs kept shooting out of the undergrowth, and huge flocks of birds were feeding on the fruit and seemed completely fearless, moving away only when we were within hands reach.  We brought a few samples of the fruit back for the technicians to test, but no more tangible result.

So in all of the past week, one marble.  It's not been wasted effort, of course, since our trips have basically amounted to wider surveys of the terrain about the platform towns which are almost certainly going to form the major hubs of civilisation on Muina.  But we've barely scratched the surface, and further surveys will be much harder, since they will be outside the zones reliably kept clear of Ionoth by the Ddura.  They're going to trial a low-flying drone to see if they can spot any of the grand doors which have marked two of the sites.

Needle, meet haystack.

Ninth and Sixth flew out today by ship to the site of the one marble discovered, and they're going to support the initial establishment of a research site.  Until they're able to access the platform (since there is apparently a platform in there) and call the Ddura, there's going to be a fair bit of Ionoth-clearing involved.  We have tomorrow as a break, and I'm looking forward to lazing about.

Wednesday, September 17

Pricing Fame

Kaoren is very sneaky.  He'd been deliberately vague about plans for our day off because he'd managed to get permission for us to retrace my course to try and find where I'd first arrived on Muina.  This was a good deal more of an undertaking than a jaunt across to our island since it could take us out of range of the Ddura's primary hunting ground (it does hunt beyond the four-day's walk range, just rather unpredictably) and we would need fliers and greensuits and rather a lot of Setari.

And, of course, convincing KOTIS Command that no, really, Cassandra won't leap through the gate back home the instant she sees it.

The trip itself was anti-climactically easy, since Kaoren had planned the route using the information from my diary.  We whizzed off along the lakeshore until we reached the river, and then followed it to the easily-recognisable rock in the middle of the river where I'd spent a day being sick (I'm not likely to ever forget it).  Kaoren used that landmark as an estimate for how fast I was travelling on foot and we zoomed along the river until the point he'd calculated would be around the area where I'd come out of the hills and then we lifted up and looked for a hillside clear of trees, the old burn-off with a stream where I'd spent the second night.

There was one clearly obvious place, and we set the fliers down there so I could confirm that it really did look like the place I remembered.  After ten months they didn't have much hope of Place Sight being able to detect any real impression of me, and so weren't surprised not to find any.  Even though it looked different in Spring, I was sure it was the right place – and confirmed that by finding my muesli bar wrapper by the stream.  Convenient, though I felt bizarrely guilty to be caught littering.

It was a struggle trying to remember what direction I'd come from, but we took a guess and coasted slowly over the hills until Inisar spoke up to correct our course and guided us straight to a place which from my point of view might or might not be the spot where I first stepped on to Muina, but which everyone with Gate Sight said was the site of an unaligned natural gate.

They couldn't say with absolute certainty how long it would take for the gate to align – Inisar said it was responding to my presence and that was very likely the reason it had opened at all, but that it did not feel even close to aligned to him, and was unlikely to stay aligned for long if it did open.  Before the embarrassingly short flight back, we set up a drone which will monitor the gate, tracking fluctuations in hopes of predicting when it's ready to align.

And that was it for the dramatic rediscovery of my way home to Earth.

Most of my energy went into being completely clear that I have no intention of leaving.  I'd love to visit Mum and Dad, but I'm not going to risk being trapped away from Kaoren, Ys, Rye and Sen.  It's not even hard to make the admission.  They are my life now.

To be sure those without Sight Sight were completely clear on that, I kept talking about "sending a letter".  If the gate goes to roughly the same area on Earth, I can put a letter in something waterproof and say "Please post me" on it, and the chances are at least moderately good that someone will post it.  I have five stamps in my wallet, ready for intergalactic special delivery.

That's something for the future (though I can't help but spend half my time mentally composing letters).  The rest of the day we played sports with the kids – I taught them French cricket with a rather uneven bat, and teased them about being the only people in the building I had a chance of beating in handball.  A fun, relaxed and mildly silly afternoon in other words, reminding me very much of family holidays back on Earth.  Sen has got to be the most indulged child on the planet, and Rye's idea of heaven has become the tiny nod Kaoren gave him when he scored a lone point in their handball match.  Ys is still being wordlessly polite and totally guarded – doing a good imitation of a Kalrani among superior officers – but I spotted her enjoying herself once or twice despite her best efforts.

Maze vanished for a while during the afternoon, and when he came back took me and Kaoren aside to talk about
The Hidden War
.  The current season had wrapped up recently, very dramatically with kitten-me vanishing after being stood on the platform at Pandora, and production was now on a break.  I hadn't actually been reviewing the episodes, relying on Maze to warn me if there was anything upsetting, but now they'd reached the stage of wanting as complete a detail of everything which happened after Kalasa as I was willing to allow.

Maze already had a fairly complete summary which someone had prepared of my assignments and injuries and major Setari and me-related events (lots of Cass having nightmares and having to be babied).  The proposal suggested by the producers was that their writers read the summary, and come up with questions for me about more detail they'd really like, and an outline of the direction they want to take each episode, and I either give them information or object to bits I can't stand, and then they write up a proper script and the process goes through again.  They're offering me huge amounts of money (even more than the Kolarens were, which is saying something).  Money is so weird and abstract for me here, since I have more of it already than I've ever had in my life, and I hardly need to touch it.

Because of the differences between the fictional story and the real story, I'm not sure it's really a good thing to feed them information.  There's no way for them to properly portray my relationship with Kaoren, not with how different Lastier is from him, and so to a degree it seems pointless to me to try and help make it slightly less inaccurate.  KOTIS plainly wants me to do it, but I've been hanging back on agreeing.

And then there was the extra request.  Instead of filming my Kalasa ordeal,
The Hidden War's
producers want to buy the mission tape from KOTIS.  To take my log and simply broadcast it, right up until my rescue (or, well, until I passed out before I was rescued).