The Touchstone Trilogy (91 page)

Islen Dola and Islen Nakano (the greysuits in charge of flora and fauna research) were leading a joint expedition to Mesiath, which is the platform city in the southern hemisphere tall forest.  Mesiath is the old Muinan name for it – one of the discoveries made at Kalasa was a number of maps, and all the 'correct' place names have been adopted.  The old town at Pandora has been renamed Aversan, and the lake is Tai Medlar (tai is old Muinan for lake).

It was primarily a sampling expedition – seeking out plants and animals and bringing them back for cataloguing, tests, maybe even cultivation.  They don't bring back lots of animals – they capture them, take images and tissue samples, then let them go, unless they think it's a really interesting specimen.  A huge number of people were going – about a hundred – most of them belonging to flora and fauna, but also greensuits, a small group of archaeologists, device technicians, geology, survey.  Mesiath has been designated a primary site, which means they're likely to establish a settlement there, partly because it's on the opposite seasonal cycle to Pandora, but mainly because it has a platform, but isn't a pattern-roof village.

My job was a mild variation of 'poke Devlin at it': I was simply to let the Setari know if I saw or felt anything unusual.  And enhance if necessary.

I gave Islen Dola and Islen Nakano the couple of minutes of the
Planet Earth
documentary which I'd recorded during my last testing session since I'd worked out how to subtitle it.  The consequence of this being that I spent half an hour being minutely cross-examined about mass migration, something which a non-seasonal planet doesn't really see – at least not in the numbers shown in the documentary.  Of course, they want the entire documentary now, which I'm quite happy to do, except being something like thirteen hours long it's going to take me an age to reproduce it.

I guess this makes
me
the psychic space pirate?  No-one tell the BBC's copyright department.

Today was by no means a particularly dangerous expedition.  It was overcast, and drizzled briefly at one point, but it was a gorgeous forest and full of birdsong and little scampering animals.  Because there was a platform, the area was clear of Ionoth, and since the Ddura was one which is used to Muinans, it even shut up pretty quick.  There were still native Muinan animals which might be a danger, particularly poisonous bugs, but otherwise it was a nice outing.  I stayed with Fourth, who were helping the archaeologists hunt out significant locations.  It was a very spread-out city, with little which was undamaged.  The trees had had centuries to work on the whitestone – we were lucky the platform was intact.

First Squad was working with survey and geology – soaring up for aerial views.  Every so often the fauna group would get a Setari to come capture an animal for them – Telekinesis and Levitation make that ridiculously easy.  A complete lack of drama day, and since Mesiath is in a time zone a couple of hours behind Pandora, when we headed back in late afternoon we arrived just as sunset was fading.

The structure of the new Setari building really makes for a very social set-up, especially when everyone gets back from missions at roughly the same time and sits around the big common room to chat and eat and watch the lake.  I belatedly gave Zan the bit of music I'd recorded for her, and quite a few of us watched the latest documentary about the Muina settlement ('latest' as delivered that afternoon by the several ships which are basically on daily shuttle duty between the Muina, Tare and Kolar).

I think I might avoid the news for a while again.  My engagement is still all screaming headlines, and there was some annoying talk about undue influence and whether Kaoren was really who I would have chosen if I wasn't kept on such a tight leash by KOTIS.  And some irritating 'expert' saying getting engaged was a symptom of my isolation and loss, and that I'd no doubt fixated on Kaoren as a saviour.  That was rather balanced by a lot of people thinking it terribly romantic, and there's an increasing number of Kaoren Ruuel lust-sites.  I learned a good deal more about the Ruuel family, and saw pictures of his parents and brother.

There was also a lot of discussion about what I could do, and what I should be allowed to do.  The Kalasa projection was interesting to a lot more people than historians, and plenty of people were pointing out my potential as an industrial spy.

Devlin.  Cassandra Devlin.  Shaken, not stirred.

Kaoren fell asleep while I was reading him my diary, thanks to all the exploring after a not particularly good night with me.  I've got to figure out a way to not work myself up over things.

Sunday, July 27

Nature documentary

Another day in the forest.  Gloriously sunny – which in a forest that tall means incredible columns of light beaming down.  Mesiath is a very peaceful place.  There's apparently some cat-type predators busily hiding from us, but nothing else anyone's spotted which might think of actively hunting humans.

The city edges on a lake (it's pretty hard to find a city which doesn't edge on a lake on this planet), and I stayed with First and Twelfth Squad today while they did a little landscaping in preparation for 'seeding' a settlement, since even with Zan's level of Telekinesis, enhancement really helped deal with trees that tall.  Meanwhile Fourth hunted down gates and explored in near-space.

It was not at all what I'd been picturing that we'd be doing, but managed to combine practical work with a balm of wonder.  Everyone was enjoying themselves, glad to be away from the snow, and to see more of their home planet, and Alay disturbed this cluster of butterflies (rather like Monarchs, but with more red and gold) which spiralled up around her into one of the columns of light and she stood in the centre of them, lips parted and eyes bright.  I felt like I'd never seen her happy before, and the Unara crack felt like centuries ago, lost to sunlight and iridescent wings.

And then the butterflies settled down over everyone and that was a different kind of fun.  Tarens and bugs don't mix, and it was hard not to laugh at the greysuits ducking and scattering.

On a less entertaining note, much of what we were doing was being recorded for another documentary, part of the increased 'openness' demanded.  I avoided the scanners as much as possible, especially when anywhere near Kaoren.  I don't know if documentaries will lower the number of people sneakily capturing images of us, though.

Monday, July 28

Prescribed privilege

I met two other strays today, people from a planet called Solaria.  Despite the name, Solaria's apparently an icy world, snowy everywhere except at the equator, and the two Solarians – who've both been on Tare for over twenty years – had been brought in to give advice and feedback on cold climate living.  Very sensible of the Tarens, since my dim memories of a skiing holiday really haven't been very useful.

Solaria's another planet without a marked 'seasonal tilt'.  Can seasons really be that unusual among habitable planets?  The Solarians were called Denasan (a really wrinkled, white-haired man) and Purda (a woman in her thirties).  I spent quite a while chatting to them, learning about their planet, which was in the throes of industrialisation when they were displaced, and asking about their experiences after turning up on Tare.  The technological differences were of course the biggest adjustment –more so for Denasan than for Purda, since Purda was only fourteen at the time.  Interestingly, the Solarians' Muinan origin has been overtaken by a creation myth involving an ice-god.  Stories of Muina are still told, but 'Homeworlders' are persecuted by the priesthood of the ice god, and a lot of Solarians don't believe Muina exists.

Denasan really misses his home planet, and loves being on Muina because it reminds him of the region south of his home on Solaria (at least currently, while Pandora's still having buckets of snow dumped on it – Spring never comes on Solaria), and he's really struggled with living on Tare and pretty much hates it, so far as I could tell.  Purda's much more 'typical Taren' and adjusted.  She worked on the Solarian version of a farm and even though she was only a teenager when she found herself on Tare, she remembers a whole heap of agricultural information the technicians seem to be interested in.

Although Earth is a good deal closer to Tare technologically, it was pretty clear that without being a touchstone I would have faced a lot of the same issues the Solarians have struggled with, trying to make a 'normal' life as a stray on Tare.  The average Taren really does think everyone not from Tare (including, quite possibly, Kolarens) is just a bit slow.  Adjusting to a different  dialect, and all that advanced technology, makes it very hard to get out of 'Base Level' (which is a Taren term for subsistence living via social security).

There's also a 'stray network' called Tare Displaced Channel which get together for mutual support and complaining about Tarens.  Denasan and Purda gave me a formal invite to one of the get-togethers.  The Channel apparently has tried to invite me before, and Denasan was rather huffy about it.  I explained about me not getting mail from people outside KOTIS, and not being allowed to go out on my own, which I think may have changed Denasan's attitude toward me a little.  To the 'average' stray I must seem hugely pampered.

I hadn't really thought about the impact of the opening of Muina on other strays.  Suddenly skills which were completely irrelevant on Tare are becoming valuable, and Denasan and Purda aren't the only strays being recruited.

Tuesday, July 29

Urban Design

KOTIS is seriously gearing up settlement preparation.  Today we skipped Mesiath and instead all five Setari squads spent the day assisting in the seeding of entire suburbs for Pandora, deep into the hills east of the old city and then along the lake to the north.  Five squads of highly-trained killers clearing snow and lugging vats of whitestone 'seed' and computer-constructed models and bits of equipment and chasing off hungry native wildlife.

I was along for enhancement, and learned all these details of urban planning and design which I'd never really thought about.  It's not just a matter of plonking houses and streets down.  For the past five months, ever since they worked out that people could survive here, a fleet of technicians back on Tare and Kolar have been designing the city layout in terms of water and power and food production and drainage and waste and hospital services and fires and police and schools and transport and industry and shops and entertainment and defence and – my head just starts reeling when I try and think through the whole process.  They're preparing initial infrastructure for fifty thousand people, and have expansion plans for long into the future.  I just can't get over the idea of fifty thousand people living here.

Before the snows came the survey and geologist types had had a pretty thorough go at mapping the topography of Pandora's surroundings.  They selected sites for factories (an industrial hub inland along a river which lets out north of here) and the residential sections will checkerboard with farmland, which in the very long run will probably become parkland.  The bit north where all the sheep live is going to be a particularly farmy area since it also brushes along the northern river – the sheep are being 'redomesticated' and already have their personal set of highly technological shepherds – lots of Kolarens involved there, since Kolar deals with animals far more than Tare does.  The old city (Aversan) is going to be part historical site and part working gardens.  They don't want to pull it down or alter it greatly, but it is a biggish chunk of land, so they're going to use all the gardens either for produce, botanical research, or as a wildlife habitat for animals that they want to study.  The plaza/piazza areas will be used as exactly that by the inhabitants of the wider area, and certain selected buildings will be converted to functioning use, particularly around the amphitheatre.

I'm very impressed by their plans.  I would never have expected the Tarens, with their closed-off and blockish cities, to switch so immediately to creating a sprawling park with balconies.  Given the pictures I've seen of Kolar, the Kolarens have definitely been a big influence – because of the heat, Kolarens sink their buildings, and only have parts of them out in the sun.  Like the Tarens, Kolarens lived in caves when they first evacuated from Muina, at least in part because water on Kolar either drains underground or evaporates very quickly.

The Setari building is a prototype of what the buildings of this phase will be like, though most of them will be larger, built to accommodate dozens of families.  No individual houses at this stage, just half-buried apartment blocks.  The Kolarens and the Tarens have had to work together a great deal on this, both to avoid the Kolarens feeling excluded again, and because neither of their planets really fit the Muinan environment.

Back on Tare and Kolar they're having huge arguments ('discussions') about who gets to move in to all these buildings we've just planted – they've been having them for months, struggling over the big questions raised by two distinct cultures trying to settle the same home world.  Is Tare or Kolar in control?  Is KOTIS the right group to be leading the settlement?  Will there be separate Taren and Kolaren settlements?  A unified planetary government?  Whose laws will be used?  Which dialect?  Whose technology?  Do they build for complete interface integration, or actually step back in terms of technology?  If all settlers have to have the interface, will it be the interface on Tare's terms?

There are plenty of people on Kolar not keen to have the 'internal policeman' which the Taren interface represents, and they find many of their laws horrifying.  Of course, Tarens don't think much of some of Kolar's laws either.

Tare is winning a lot of the arguments, though.  Nanotechnology is a difficult advance for Kolar to turn down, and it at least sounds like the Tarens are getting rather less anal about sharing their technology now that Muina can offer them the resources they're currently dependant on Kolar to provide.  Part of what they're deciding will be temporary, just an initial structure so that they can get moving.