The Touchstone Trilogy (12 page)

The woman in the blue uniform vanished, as did most of the other watchers.  The Setari squad captains, although they were probably dying to give Zan the third degree, sent their squads straight out the door and then most of them left as well, though a few stopped at the door to talk to each other.  Maze came across to me, Zan and Lohn and told me I did well.  I pointed out that I don't actually do anything, but he said at least I wasn't doing anything
consistently
and he and Lohn grinned at each other and talked about what would have happened if the enhancement hadn't worked.  First Squad is so much more human than the rest of the Setari.

And then the leader of Fourth Squad came over.  I was wondering if I should thank Fourth Squad for rescuing me, but if anything this guy was even more unsmiling than Zan is.  As an added bonus he seemed to be staring at my chest, which was really amazingly uncomfortable until he said: "Experimental animal?"

Maze thought he was being insulting, and said "Rue-el," in a warning tone, but stopped, probably because he saw my expression.

"You can read English?"  I asked – in English – completely disbelieving.

"Don't neglect the psychological aspects," the Fourth Squad captain said to Zan and turned away without another glance at me.  Though he added, "It's not inapposite," over his shoulder as he walked away to where the Third Squad captain was waiting.

"How he know what say?"  I asked Maze, who was taking his turn chest-staring.  "Earth contact after all yes?"

"You've written 'Experimental Animal' on your shirt?"  Maze asked, clearly upset.

Zan answered my question: "See Rue-el's primary talents are sight-based.  He was reading the symbol, not the words."

Psychic psychic powers, in other words.  And Zan was standing stiff and still, with her face so set that I couldn't miss that she was mortified.  Because she'd had no idea what my shirt said, and the Fourth Squad captain had dressed her down for that, even if it was just with a single sentence.

There wasn't much I could do to fix that, but I did try to explain.  "In Australia – in my culture – important able laugh at self.  I–"  I tugged at my shirt, then read out the words in English and the closest Taren translation.  "Lab Rat One.  Is true, is what am me here.  Pretend not, that stupid.  This–"  I shrugged.  "Cope mechanism.  Sarcasm.  Make me feel better wear."

"But it's not–"  Maze wasn't getting any less upset.

"I kept in box.  Take out for tests.  What else call it?"

Maze grimaced, but Lohn laughed.  "You have to admit her point.  So the people of your world think it's important to laugh at themselves?  That's an idea I could get along with.  But, Maze, no-one will be laughing if we miss that shuttle, so get a move on."

He dashed off with a wave, and since Maze obviously couldn't think of an argument he sighed.  "Let me know if you need anything, Caszandra.  Although I suppose it must seem like it, your status is not that."  He shot the picture on my shirt a grumpy look, nodded at Zan, and strode off after Lohn.

Zan just said: "I'll escort you back" and took me to my room and left me here.

Being able to record everything you see and hear certainly makes it easier to write down a conversation, though my translation of what they said – and what I was trying to say – is probably not that accurate.  I hadn't noticed before, but First Squad all call me 'Caszandra', not 'Cassandra'.  Taren is a very zeddy language.

Writing this down took hours, but it's given me plenty of translation practice and time to try and work out which of the three – Maze, Lohn or the Fourth Squad captain – that Zan likes enough to make her mind so much what happened today. 

Monday, January 28

Roof

This morning started as business as usual with training.  Zan, rather than the greensuits, has been collecting me from my room.  We get changed in a side room which has a stock of freshly laundered training outfits and then we do a lot of stepping backward and forward and now side-to-side.  Zan had gone back to being imperturbable, and I wasn't in the mood to push her, so I was really surprised when, after we'd changed back, she said: "I've been given leave to escort you around the facility, if there's any parts you wish to see."

"Can go outside?"  I asked immediately.

I could see that surprised her.  People really just don't go outside much, on this planet.  "It's night phase at the moment."

"That bad thing?"

"Well..."  She shrugged, and led me to the elevator that led to the corridor that led to the walkway that led to the quickest elevator to the roof.  It's not nearly so huge as Unara, but the KOTIS building mound is still pretty damn big.  It can't all be Setari facilities, even with all the not-yet Setari who are being trained somewhere.

It was very cold and windy on the bit of roof we ended up on.  It feels even more like being on the side of a big mountain than going to Unara's roof did.  Unara's more an endless blocky roundness, while the Institute is closer to the water and you can really see the
down
.  But you could also see up since the sky was clear for once and so I found a convenient edge and sat down and stared up looking for any constellations I recognised.  I would like to at least be able to stare in the direction of Earth.

"This is similar to your world?"  Zan asked after a while.  Even she can't just sit and not say anything forever.

"Not my part."  I supposed Scotland might look like that, if you covered it with buildings.  "Australia – big sky, red dirt, blue sea, lots beaches, huge empty inland.  Deserts and tropical forests and...harsh, thirsty country.  And then flood."  I shrugged.  "Out here because never not gone outside ever.  Walk to school.  Go to beach.  Garden.  What you do when not being Setari?"

I'd asked her before, but she'd ignored the question.  This time Zan sighed, ever-so-softly.  "If you want to talk, go inside out of this cold.  I'm supposed to be watching your health."

But, of course, as soon as we got back inside someone called her away.  And it's back to kindergarten in a box. 

Tuesday, January 29

Bored Spitless

I suck at learning languages.  Other than English, the only one I even begin to know is sign language, and even with that I spend a lot of time spelling words out because I don't know the sign.  It annoys me, because I have a good memory, but there's a difference between remembering and knowing something, I guess.

Despite having an entire dictionary in my head cheating for me when I listen to Taren, I'm struggling to 'know' the words.  I know yes and no and hello.  And new words like Muina and Setari seem to have sunk in far better than 'bed' or 'morning'.  Which is all just a whiny lead-up to saying I figured out how to trigger those interface tests and still can't pass because it takes me too long to phrase answers.  I need multiple choice answer tests!  What kind of planet gives kindergarteners tests this hard?

I can only do the tests once a day, so now I'm sitting around hoping Zan will show up and still be willing to talk.  And feeling a bit annoyed with her for not coming back yesterday.  And wondering what her other duties are beyond babying me.  It looked to me like she doesn't get on with the rest of her squad, or at least not that obnoxious blond guy.

I wonder what they'd do if I drew patterns on the walls?  Everything on this planet is so undecorated and white because they use interface 'skins' as their decoration.  I've been trying to work out if the buildings are made of the same whitestone as the buildings on Muina.  They don't look anywhere near as simple, of course, but they feel the same to touch.

*sulks*

Bleh.  Instead of training, I had medical examinations this afternoon.  More scans and blood tests and seeing how my heart is going and dull and uncomfortable as hell.

One thing, though – I don't think any of the Setari have told anyone else what my Lab Rat symbol means.  At least, Ista Tremmar didn't pay any more attention to it than last time, and wasn't giving me psych tests or anything. 

Wednesday, January 30

Tactics

Zan likes 'classical' music.  I should have guessed: it fits in with her being all serious and proper.  They call classical music 'orchestral music' (tennanam anam).  The instrument Zan plays is called a Tyu and looks and sounds to me a lot like a zither, but is larger than the zither they had in the music room at primary school – about the size of an A3 sheet of paper, but much thicker of course – and has softer strings which she plucks.  It's made of wood, which is super rare on Tare.  I think it's probably rare to have an actual musical instrument, as well, rather than playing a virtual something in a virtual space.

I was just as interested in her rooms.  I had been picturing all the Setari stuck in little boxes like mine, but Zan had a small apartment: one bedroom, but with a separate lounge-kitchen combo and a study nook thing and a larger bathroom than mine – bathtub!  I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised.  You can apply for adult rights at 50 (almost 17) here, and the Setari are a few steps above an ordinary sort of soldier.  Keeping them permanently in barracks or whatever probably wouldn't have worked.

Anyway, I thought Zan's apartment was wonderful.  She's decorated it in muted shades of green and blue (the public space, that is) with curling patterns which look a bit like ferns that shift and wind about.  And she has a cat!  A cat like that screensaver cat that drops down from the top of your screen and wanders about, except this one wanders about Zan's entire apartment, and is blue-green to blend in with the walls.  You can sort of pat it, even, because your interface will pretend like you're touching something.  I asked if there were real cats on Tare and she said a few brought from a planet called Kolar.  Only the really rich can possibly have actual pets.

I'm not under any illusion that Zan suddenly wants to be friends.  She's been given me as an assignment, and she still acts exactly like I'm an assignment, just that the assignment has been expanded to my mental health as well as physical fitness and dodging.  I don't know whether I like her or not, beyond that she's the only person on this freaking planet that I see on a near-daily basis.  I can't remember hanging out with any super-serious girls in the past, let alone someone who is part of the military and kills for a living.  She makes me curious though.

After this we went and had another stepping session, and I waited till she was escorting me back to my room before I asked her again: "Setari competitive why?"  And when she paused, since this was definitely not the sort of question she was likely to answer, I added: "Your squad, why unhappy, holiday?"

"The Setari don't compete directly," Zan said eventually.  "But how we perform effects privileges, which assignments we are given, and even whether we remain on active duty.  Fighting in the Ena is greatly preferred to the more basic duty which is usual on Tare, and not simply because being in the Ena makes us feel…twice as alive.  Twelfth Squad had only just been activated for Ena assignments, but were transferred to training routines, and are very disappointed."

"Mostly fight Ena, not planet?"

"The whole concept of the Setari is to prevent anything from the Ena reaching this world.  And to find a way to fix the fractures which have made it so easy for the walls around this world to be crossed."  She looked even more than ordinarily serious.  "The numbers increase every year and the fractures are widening.  Working on Tare, it's just clean-up unless there's a major outbreak.  The war is beyond this world."

That was a good deal more dramatic than I'd been expecting.  Where I'm going to be placed in this war is something too large to think about. 

Thursday, January 31

A proper history lesson

I passed the stupid interface test!  Only just – I still didn't finish a lot of the questions, but I got almost all the ones I did answer right.  So I now have a new year of school to plough through.  Still no entertainment channels or anything, but a small library of children's 'textbooks', which is good.  I much prefer being able to freely read the books than to sit through the pre-set lessons and their snippets of information.  A thorough browse has given me a lot more background and a better explanation of just what happened on Muina and what the situation on Tare is now.

So, whatever it was happened on Muina happened thousands of
Taren
years ago.  They're pretty imprecise about exactly how long ago it was, because they went through a really rough and chaotic first few decades on Tare, so don't have a very good written record.  Kolar is the other main planet which properly remembers being from Muina, but its early records are no better than Tare's.  The best I can make out, the evacuation from Muina was between 1500 and 2000 Earth years ago.  So ha! to the idea of Earth having been populated by people from Muina – the Egyptian pyramids are over 3000 years old and that barely scratches the surface of Earth's archaeological and fossil record.  I guess it is possible that some Muinans came to Earth long before that, but we definitely weren't part of the evacuation dispersal.  I never believed that, no matter how similar I am to them genetically.  It still makes
vastly
more sense to me for the Muinans to have originally come from Earth, especially because Tare's population also reflects some of Earth's races.

'Lantar' doesn't refer to the entire population of Muina, either, but to a psychic ruling caste which caused the disaster that made Muina uninhabitable.  Back then the Ionoth monsters were only an issue for these ruling Lantar (Lantarens?) when they travelled between planets.  It's not clear why they were travelling between planets, but it was common enough that they started a huge planet-wide project to make it easier: creating a little network of permanently aligned wormholes.  The result of this was like if you decided to stop earthquakes in California by nailing the tectonic plates together: everything started to rip apart around the nails.