The Touchstone Trilogy (114 page)

"Why would I want that?" I asked, shrugging off the prospect of even more money.  "Why would KOTIS want that?"

"For KOTIS it's simple – the log doesn't tell anything more than what everyone knows, but releasing it undercuts the belief that we're not being completely open and honest about events.  Not that anything other than the more worrying theories are currently being held back, but since the destruction of Nuri suspicion has reached sky-breaking level.  There isn't a great deal of motivation for you, other than allowing people to see who you really are."

"I'm not sure all the whimpering and crying I did is how I want to present myself," I said wryly, and told him I'd have to think about releasing the log, but I could live with the other arrangement since it's obvious that a lot of people are still treating
The Hidden War
as the Gospel of Devlin.

It surprised me that the military could sell the right to broadcast its records, and asked Maze whether it would be simpler to just release the summary information direct instead of filtering it through
The Hidden War
.  And that's an option.  Kaoren is firm on this being entirely my decision.  I think he knows that in part I just don't want to look at my log for that period, because it's hour upon hour of me being scared and helpless and right now I'm avoiding scared and helpless.

I might be firm about wanting to stay, but locating the gate to Earth left me with a bad case of nostalgia, so after dinner I asked if I could do some expanded senses projection practice, and recorded some Earth video clips for the entertainment of those squads who were awake after their adventures with time zone adjustment.  Just a few songs – Mika's
Grace Kelly
and
Love Today
, and Radiohead's
Exit Music for a Film
.  It was the first time I'd projected anything in front of the kids, and they seemed very interested – Sen was particularly interested in the piano in the
Grace Kelly
clip, so I made one for her, and muzzily watched her pound it until I fell asleep, and now it's almost dawn.  We're heading out in a couple of hours to assist in the opening of the new marble location.

Mmm

Stinky hot weather during the exploration at Pelamath, worse after the violent downpour during the afternoon, which was soon after we arrived since that time zone's well ahead of Pandora's.  There wasn't room in the canyon for a camp to be set up – at least not until they eat some whitestone buildings into the canyon walls – so the base camp and ship (the
Mesara
) was on top of the plateau and the Setari did a lot of lugging people and things up and down because they're so much quicker and more efficient than the fliers, and didn't have to be loaded.

Fourth and First (and me) scouted out two other entrances to the underground structure – from initial scans it seems to be set up in much the same way as Arenrhon, just with a slightly different entrance system – and found ancient stairways built into the walls of the cliffs.  All terribly crumbly now, and one of the entrances was buried under rubble until Maze cleared it.

The technicians had had plenty of practice at Arenrhon, and had the shielding for the first door ready to be taken down by the time we'd arrived back from marking and clearing the other two.  It looks like this is going to be a repeat of Arenrhon, since the interior of the first level was basically identical.  Exploration was uneventful, just sad.  So many bodies, desiccated and nameless, and crowded again at the entrance.  I could see the echoes of their deaths settle on Kaoren with the gentle impact of an anvil – and Inisar and Halla were equally as white-lipped.

We returned to Pandora a little after lunch, since they've decided not to risk night work, and Kaoren was stressed enough to need me a great deal.  We spent a very long time in the shower, and then decided to wander over to the talent school to see what the kids were doing.

Sen was out by the lake with her age-group class of newly plugged-in Nurans, having a dance lesson.  That was fascinating to watch, because not only did each child have their own personal miniaturised instructor, but the interface was projecting robes with long, long sleeves which they could whirl about and make shapes and patterns.  It looked wonderful, and though I didn't join in the dance, I tried out  one of the robes, and discovered the wonderful world of projected fantasy clothing.  Projected clothing even feels a little like it's really there, stimulating the sense of touch, though not quite achieving real weight.  I am so going to spend hours playing with that.

The day for Ys and Rye's age group is now split a session of 'self-study', a group class, a talent class, and a sport class.  They were also in the middle of their first interactive game when we looked in, but sadly not one involving spinning about in floaty clothing.  Ys and Rye aren't at all keen on having more shared classes and likely would have preferred to have remained the only students with the interface.

It was great to see the way Rye's face lit up when he noticed Kaoren.  I do think he likes me as well as Kaoren, but he simply worships Kaoren.  Ys just ignored us after a long glance.  We were a fairly disruptive influence on the attention of the rest of the class, though, so it was a good thing the day's lessons were nearly over.  Collecting Sen as well, we walked back via the top of the hill, where I out-squee'd everyone over the discovery of hummingbirds feeding on the tree's flowers.  They were very tiny and very amazing – something I'd only seen on TV before.

And I'm finally back for our evening routine, so I don't have to feel guilty about using Mara as a babysitter.  She's itching to be shifted back to active duty, and will probably be cleared soon.  It was a good evening, especially since neither of us were tired, so after Sen had gone to sleep and Ys and Rye had buried themselves once again in the interface, Kaoren and I had a lot of time to be glad to have each other.  We also caught up on a chunk of diary reading, reaching the big assembly of Setari being told about me.  It was the second time I'd met Kaoren.  It seems like an eternity ago, when he was merely one of the huge array of new people I was dealing with, and I was just a curiosity to him.

Thursday, September 18

I Spy... 

Today was a poke Devlin at it day.

We were up early again and off to Pelamath, where they'd already opened the second and third levels and were working on the difficult fourth – the idea being to work our way quickly down to the bottom and turn off the shielding – and then erect a KOTIS-approved shield in a bubble over the top of the marble, so that no Cruzatch can use it to come through.

The place had a different set of 'gods', two men and a woman, another three entries into House Zolen's pantheon.  I still can't decide if they really deliberately turned themselves into Cruzatch, or if it was some terrible error.  I  mean, who schemes to turn themselves into floaty burny things?

There'd been a lot of back and forth discussion about whether I should be involved at all, since it would be possible for the Cruzatch to mount a raid through the malachite marble, but they eventually decided on a brief visit after the power stone had been used to turn off the shielding.

This meant a lot of sitting about for me, slathering myself in the insect repellent which is a particular necessity for the Pelamath area, though we've been using it during our other exploration trips.  I had a rotating series of guards, and chatted to some of the technicians I hadn't seen since Arenrhon, who all seemed to want to tell me about some individual discovery they'd made, some piece of information about Muina's past which had touched them particularly.  These conversations are occasionally surreal, particularly when people I haven't talked to before stammer or blush or grin madly.  I've learned to pretend not to notice but it –

I started to write that it makes me feel as fake as wearing the Setari uniform, but realised that I no longer feel like I don't belong in the uniform.  Not since Kalasa, I think, when I was just so glad I had it on.

My involvement at the Pelamath installation was to be limited to a quick trip down to the two lowest levels just so they could record which objects were blurry, and any other random observations I had.  Which was straightforward enough – and I'm getting better at handling the blurriness – but then it got confusing because the blurriness started to
resolve
.

I kept seeing the same place, but with all the dust and grime gone.  And when they told Fourth to bring me back up to the surface, I kept getting flashes of the other floors with all the corpses gone, and people moving about in a businesslike way (most of them favouring an Egyptian kilt look).  When we made it out to the canyon, the stairs looked sharp and clean.  The technicians were all fascinated, and had me go back in and tour about the unsealed part of the upper floors until my old friend Pounding Headache showed up and bought me a ticket back to Pandora.

The most popular theory is that the power stones had such a strong impact that it imprinted the past on the area, allowing me to see the place before their activation.  But I don't know if that's right, and Isten Notra pointed out that the peripheral vision world I was seeing while in near-space was similar but different.

Alternate reality?  As if this wasn't confusing enough.

I recovered quite quickly from my headache, which is an improvement, though I was still sentenced to an entire afternoon in medical for brains scans, and very annoyingly a lot of blood and tissue samples once again.  Tomorrow they want to try taking me close to the Kalasa power stone, which doesn't have any sarcophagi, to see whether it will let me have more glimpses into Kalasa's past, since seeing without projecting is far less energy-intensive for me.  Well, that's the current plan unless someone in KOTIS Command changes their mind again – they're so wary of using me.  But all the news reports today have been about the increasing density of Ionoth in Tare and Kolaren near-space, which has led to more incidents of Ionoth reaching real-space and thus a spate of deaths.  I'm guessing Kalasa will be a certainty.

Friday, September 19

Urgent Relocation

Back on Tare.  I never cease to find new ways to have a crisis.

This was another dreaming problem.  I'd barely gone to sleep the night before last, and was having a confusing dream about being trapped under something heavy, when Kaoren woke me up.  I occasionally have dreams about being trapped under things because Kaoren has rolled on top of me, and hadn't really felt anything different about this one other than the fact that Kaoren had woken up instead of me, but he said he was feeling extremely uneasy about me, and that my vitals monitor was showing a slower than normal heartbeat.  He wanted me to go sleep in medical attached to the scanner, which I wasn't keen about at all, but I could see he was really unsettled, so I checked all the kids were asleep then went along just to spare him the stress, and felt tremendously guilty about having to wake up Ista Mezan (this week's primary medic) just so he could watch
me
go to sleep.  He was very nice about it, but looked so tired.

I was pretty tired myself, so went to sleep quickly, and started having another dream about being trapped under something heavy.  It didn't exactly feel like one of my 'real' dreams, and my head felt very vague and I just lay there until it grew clearer, not that it ever really grew clear.  There was a mistiness to everything – fog – and I seemed to be in a dark place with a narrow light directly above me, making the thin tendrils of fog glow, and I could make out different pinpoints of light to either side, and some kind of pattern in the ceiling.  I couldn't move, couldn't turn my head, couldn't lift a finger, couldn't speak, didn't even really feel like I was breathing.  I didn't feel at all like myself.

And there was whispering.  Lots of words on all sides of me – or
on
me.  It felt like there were tiny incredibly heavy people sitting on top of me, whispering.  I couldn't make out what was being said, beyond that it had the zeddy noises common in Taren and the other Muinan dialects.

I didn't like it at all – I felt so small and helpless and constrained – and started trying to wake up and couldn't.  I knew it had to be a dream, but the easy ability to wake out of my dreams seemed to be gone.  I tried sitting up, and still couldn't move, and tried creating a projection of an Ionoth Kaoren to free me, and nothing happened, and then I panicked, in a futile and unproductive way.  I couldn't even feel my heart beating.

The only thing left I could think to do was try and sense whether there was anyone nearby who might help me.  I began pushing my senses out, but even that didn't work properly, and I felt like I'd fallen down a well – or up a well – and then I snapped back to staring at the ceiling.  That wasn't a very nice sensation.

But it was the only thing I could do, and I was by that time out of my mind desperate, so I kept pushing out, pushing and pushing and falling up this well but I felt like I was a rubber band stretching too thin.

And then I was me again, trying to gasp and choking because there was a tube down my throat.  And still heavy, like there was an anchor hooked to my spine.  Ista Mezan said something in a high, relieved voice and then helpfully pulled the tube out (horrid sensation) and then Kaoren was in reach and I got hold of him and just gasped and shook for a minute or two.  Ista Mezan did his best to get a physical assessment of me without prying me off.

Kaoren's heart was beating really fast, and his voice was even but unusually flat as he explained that my heart rate had slowed soon after I fell asleep, and then plummeted – the time between beats increasing exponentially.  So far as they could tell, I'd stopped breathing altogether, with barely a flicker of brain activity.  They'd hooked me up to a machine for breathing and tried waking me with an alarm over the interface, and Inisar had tried speaking to me telepathically, and they were debating shooting me full of stimulants when I'd revived as abruptly as I'd gone.  I'd been not quite dead for nearly twenty minutes.