The Touchstone Trilogy (92 page)

I just realised that all this rush and hurry mightn't be down to population pressures or being so keen to embrace their home world.  Tare and Kolar might be thinking of Muina as an ark.  Because the Ddura will protect the platform towns even from massives, and a gate in the wrong place on Muina won't bring a city tumbling down.

At least, not unless the gates get bigger than cities.

If that
is
the reason, they're not saying it out loud.  All the news stories about Muina are extremely cheerful and upbeat, and so are the KOTIS staff concentrating on getting whitestone seeded and design models placed.  Over the next few weeks, with only a bit of monitoring from the technicians (who need to be sure the growing buildings don't run out of readily-available 'food'), a small city will quietly be reproduced.  Lacking all the glass and fittings and furniture and energy generators, but with the bulk of the work done.  Whitestone even extrudes certain metals and minerals, rather than absorb them.  They don't even have to dig to lay the connecting pipes.  They're going to grow a subway system.

I definitely chose the right name for the settlement.  This isn't a box I can close.  I think all the Setari assisting were overwhelmed as well.  Happy, though.  Maze, particularly, really loves doing positive things rather than endlessly killing Ionoth, and it showed in everything he did.

Kaoren's getting his way about returning to our main mission though.  Tomorrow First and Fourth will take me into the Ena for a combination of me doing more testing and them trying to find Pillars.  The fact that we can settle this world, that the Ddura will protect the sites, hasn't removed the need to fix the tearing of the spaces, or found the reason why the Ddura started killing Muinans, and what exactly the Cruzatch have to do with it all.

The fact that they're intending to go ahead with the settlement without answering the question about the Ddura scares the hell out of me.

Wednesday, July 30

Back on Track

Kaoren's very pleased.  First and Fourth took me on the Ena mission he wanted (having stolen Fourteenth's strongest path finder, Sanya, as well) and they all enhanced and immediately detected a Pillar.

Since they were under strict orders not to take me into combat, but also had the advantage of the immediate near-space and connecting spaces being wiped clear by the Ddura, they could take me along partway, tracking through two gates before they encountered a space which was populated.  They then sent me back to wait by the gate with Zee, Halla and Mori as escort, and I got to do tests while the squads pushed on.

A very simple test today – Zee told me to project remembered music or television until I could project no more, and they would measure how much that cost me.  I recorded another piece of classical music for Zan (this rather pretty thing done with recorders, slow and spiralling, no idea who it's by), and then a song for me, and then I did an episode and a half of
Planet Earth
which I now get to subtitle.  I couldn't do all that in one go – I have to rest every few minutes – but it's nothing like so difficult a task as doing it in real-space.  I stopped when I was totally wiped, and spent much of the afternoon asleep, carefully doing a visualisation exercise before going to bed.  Zee stayed in the living room of my apartment, but I managed to not have a nightmare.

When I woke up it was late afternoon, and Kaoren still wasn't back, but I was determined to stay drama-free and asked Zan and Dess if we could go for a walk along the lake.  That wasn't bad: we chatted about parts of Muina we've visited, and then built snow sculptures on the very top of the Setari building/hill until, finally, First and Fourth came back, exhausted but whole.

They'd had to travel ten spaces to get to the Pillar, and had run up against a few tough battles which made them glad they were dual-squadding, especially since the Ena manipulation talents had had to stabilise an awful lot of gates.  Par was levitating Sonn, who'd passed out.  They sent Squad Three and Fourteenth out to place a couple of drones, and put some extra stabilisation on the gates, and they made it there and back in about an hour and a half.  Kaoren and Maze both waited until the other squads were safely back before getting some rest themselves – working their way through dinner and getting a start on their reports.  Kaoren pretty much fell into bed once we got back to our room.

I like these bed nooks.  The beds themselves are ever so slightly cup-shaped and the nanomaterial mattress makes sleeping on rock a lot more comfortable than you'd expect.  Need more pillows, but the walls are great for propping yourself against.

Kaoren gets restless if I'm not in contact with him.  I probably shouldn't be pleased about that.  I probably shouldn't keep experimenting to see how he reacts when I move my leg away.

We've only been together two and a bit weeks.  It was a shock to flip back through my diary and realise that.  I've stopped being so wary of doing or saying the wrong thing.

Thursday, July 31

At the movies

All of the Muina-stationed Setari, except for Kiste and Halla who are babysitting me, are back in the Ena today trying to do the tests which had been planned for the last Pillar.  The mood was mixed when everyone left: they've been wanting to properly study a Pillar for so long, but given what happened last time, no-one was exactly cheerful.  And, even though the aether isn't fatal to them any more, it does make them drunk, which is not a good state to be in any part of the Ena, let alone areas frequented by far too many deep-space roamers.  So today's a serious day.

It's the Cruzatch which are the biggest concern.  It's all too possible they might try to sabotage the mission again, so the squads plan to use a drone to lock the outlet levers before they venture close to the Pillar themselves.

At least Kiste and Halla are in the exact same boat as me, worrying about their squads.  Though interestingly calling each other Tahl and Charan when they think I'm not listening.  Kiste's elbow is almost fully healed now, but he says he's facing a lot of training to get it back to former strength.

It was a nice day outside, so I decided to see how tolerant they'd be of me wandering about.  There'd been a big dump of snow the previous night, but the skies had cleared, and there was no wind.  Snow drifts did make it a little hard-going in spots, but I figured this could count as me getting some exercise, and tramped my way all the way in to the old town, up to my old tower, only to find I couldn't get in.  They really have preserved it as a historical site, fitting shields over the windows and doorways.

Annoyed by this, I headed back to Setari quarters and told Kiste and Halla that I was going to spend the rest of the day working on subtitling.  So I'm in my bedroom being sore from forging through snowdrifts, and taking a break from translating David Attenborough.

Hm, the
Litara
just arrived with another massive supplies delivery, and also Third, Eleventh and Thirteenth.  More squads here than on Tare at the moment.  I guess this is because of the Pillar.

--

Yep, they're going to have all these squads here for a few days.  They don't quite all fit in the Setari quarters, but along with the supplies were a bunch more mattresses and couches, so people are sharing apartments.  The Pillar experiments are going to be performed in shifts because there's one gate which they aren't going to be able to hold for more than five days, and they can't tell when, if ever, it will come back.  KOTIS wants to get as much information as possible before they lose the path.

Why the Lantarens couldn't have stuck these things somewhere easier to get to I don't know.

The Pillars team returned not long after the
Litara
showed up, having had to kill a fair number of roamer Ionoth, but not otherwise troubled.  No Cruzatch.  They'd successfully sent a drone into the Pillar and obtained bunches of useful scans, and positioned it to block the levers from moving.  I don't know if the scans will really tell them anything – ancient Lantaren devices seem to me more on the level of magic than science.  They certainly haven't figured out how the teleporting platforms work.

Still, everyone's very pleased that there's been no disasters so far, and the afternoon involved more helpful unpacking and lots of chatting and, since Third is here, great bursts of Eeli excitement.  Eeli is totally overjoyed by the new Setari building.  A big central socialising area is her idea of heaven, and the sunset over the partially iced lake was glorious enough to brighten the eyes of even the most serious of the Setari.

We had a big group meal, bringing down the new couches out of the apartments to fit the extra people.  It was a full-on banquet – the pinksuits are having a great time experimenting with making meals out of some of the plants they've been cultivating.  And there were a few different meat dishes courtesy of one of the hairy sheep.  Slow-cooked mutton.  Kolarens are used to meat, but the Tarens had to be careful.  Their regular diet includes some seafood, but red meat is an exceptional luxury for them, like a $1000 bottle of champagne.  Eeli was horrified when I told her that people from Earth usually eat the baby sheep.

Then Zee insisted I do a 'screening' of
Planet Earth
with the subtitles so that she could make sense of what she'd seen during the testing session.  And the channel she created to watch it kind of snowballed to all the Setari, and then our resident support greysuits and pinksuits, who told their section heads about it, which meant Zee was asked if other people could watch, and then practically everyone in Pandora was.  It's pretty disconcerting to suddenly be throwing a video party for three thousand people.

I should have expected the interest.  Earth is not only an alien planet, but it's also (relatively) similar to Muina, which is the main focus of research for most of the expeditionary force.  Since Zee had control of the channel, she shifted it into two groups – people who could text me questions (Setari and a few of the department heads) and people who could watch if they wanted.  I tried to ignore all the extras and pretend it was just the people in the room with me.

Eeli was fun to watch, round-eyed and delighted most of the time, though there's a scene where a wolf hunts down this baby caribou and Eeli was so upset when it caught it.  And didn't much like sharks eating seals, either.  The first episode is a really useful one to have done, because its subject is seasonal change, which the expeditionary force is particularly interested in.  Fortunately it mostly explains itself.  There's a short mini-documentary at the end of each episode, which I'd included (since I'm basically just recalling the DVD set Mum owns), and even though I'd only gotten halfway through the next episode, Zee played it too because there were a couple of bits she'd particularly wanted to ask me about – namely how freaking huge the mountains on Earth are, what was the burning red stuff (lava) and what was with all the snow knocking down trees (an avalanche).

That caused some excitement, and I was bombarded with questions by the section heads when I ran out of subtitled recording.  Earth's geologic instability is something none of their planets have, which means their mountains are more worn down (if they exist at all).  Muina does have mountains, but I don't think they're at Everest level, and there's no sign of flowing lava.  I fumbled my way through explanations of continental drift, the Ice Ages and dinosaurs until Isten Notra (although very interested herself) eventually called a close to my inquisition and said that the discussion could be continued at a later date, as could further helpful documentaries.

It was, Kaoren said, a useful demonstration that no matter how much I thought I'd described Earth, it was too large a topic to ever assume a proper understanding.  I hadn't properly explained dinosaurs before, apparently, and the avalanche got them all worried about the settlement at Kalasa.  Both the Solarians knew about avalanches too, but hadn't mentioned it because they were very rare on Solaria (again, a fairly flat world) and nobody had asked exactly the right question.

Kaoren wasn't absolutely exhausted tonight, only tired.  It was nice to have a night when he didn't pass out.

August

Friday, August 1

Cleared

Another test day for me – I'm scheduled for every second day to avoid overstressing my system.  It was only a repetition of the projections we'd already run through on Tare, and then I finished off the rest of the 'Mountains' episode of
Planet Earth
.  Zee wouldn't let me push myself to exhaustion this time, since the idea is to get a better understanding of my powers, not churn out BBC documentaries.  Still needed a long nap afterwards, though.  But I'm doing well.  Fewer headaches, better control, and it's just so incredibly much easier to do this in the Ena.

The good news is that I've been stable and injury-free long enough that the bluesuits are willing to move on from David Attenborough.  My next session will be a controlled attempt to look into Kalasa's past – visualising a single room.

The Setari have divided into a morning shift and an afternoon shift to perform experiments on the Pillar, examining the inflow of the aether and trying to work out what the Pillar does with it.  No sign of Cruzatch still, fortunately, although they were having real issues with deep-space Ionoth, and are debating whether it would be safer to send fewer people in the hopes of attracting less of them.  A couple of minor injuries for Eleventh.

Twelfth got to spend the entire day carting stuff about, which is what Zan gets for being the strongest Telekinetic.  They've seriously stepped the construction and deliveries up a notch, and there are now four ships (the
Litara
, the
Diodel
, the
Wharra
and the
Luim
) devoted to daily ferrying of equipment.  Kolar and Tare didn't have a bunch of spare interplanetary ships lying about, and couldn't simply abandon all the trade currently established, so it's taken a little time to get up to four ships devoted to Muina, and they're fast-tracking construction of more.  I still love watching them land, though apparently they intend to construct some kind of airbase well inland past the industrial complex.  They haven't quite finished designing that, though I'm not sure how hard it can be to design a big flat plain of whitestone.