The Touchstone Trilogy (95 page)

I love watching him sleep.

Sunday, August 10

Productivity

Today I was swapped to enhancing the Telekinetics lugging things about – assigned generally, but with Lohn and Mara being my bodyguards.

KOTIS has an assembly line of epic proportions underway to finish the handful of apartment blocks which are going to house the new guests.  Each building is inspected after it's fully formed, cleaned of any residual muck and gunk, and then the primary installations are done: power unit, water system, and the really complicated nano-waste facility.  The pipe connections are double-checked, and then they start on outer doors and windows, and the heating and air-conditioning and lights and the building's 'brain' (main node for the interface), followed by kitchen and bathroom fittings, inner doors.  Then everything's cleaned again, and furniture placed – couch, rug, mattresses, pillows, blankets, kitchen utensils, waste baskets.  There's a team for each separate stage, trailing each other from building to building, and once the ship unloading was done and I wasn't needed for enhancing I joined the furniture team and helped lay out rugs and mattresses and made beds and things in the first building cleared for them to work on.

The end result is sparse and samey, but of course that doesn't factor in the Taren interface public space.  They're still designing those, but one of the technicians showed me some of the early designs, which are based on the decorations around all the windows and doors in the old town.  It's really pretty.

While most of the buildings are exactly the same layout, they're really made different by the amount of ground which covers them – some are almost entirely aboveground, and some are almost completely buried by the rise of the land (must remember to ask why they don't get balconies opening out into the dirt for those ones).  There are one, two and three-bedroom apartments, and a small section in each building which is more communal living with individual bedrooms but shared bathrooms, kitchens and lounges.  The city layout is also very variable – they worked the placement in with the existing hill scape, rather than trying to keep to a grid structure, and the roads are rather winding.  It looks like people will mostly be expected to get about by underground rail.  There's even a huge underground warehouse near the HQ block.

Nanotechnology makes building so ridiculously easy for the Tarens.  Ninety percent of the work is in the planning, and once they've done all the designing, they use nanotech to produce the model and then nanotech to transform the model to life-size.  Whitestone is very strong and adaptable to almost every design, and if they make a mistake they can turn a section back into goo and adjust it.  Most of the construction effort and expense then comes with the fittings.

Before heading to Mesiath, Lohn, Mara and I met up with the rest of First Squad to explore an area which will be called Desza Tohl (Moon Piazza).  This is an open area designed to be the city centre, north of the science buildings, forming a crescent shape at the eastern base of the amphitheatre hill.  The whitestone paving of the piazza is patterned – someone apparently spent months designing the model segments, which represent the light of the moon streaming down from the old city.  Each radiating segment shows scenes of Muina's past and present and hoped-for future, and has incorporated the swirly floral designs which decorate Kalasa.  It's really, really huge, and the pattern is interrupted by space for banks of grass and raised gardens, and these great whitestone benches which scoop up under your legs.  There'll even be a couple of pool/fountains and a sunken performance area.  I could have spent all morning wandering about looking at the design if it wasn't still mostly covered by snow, and Maze told me that if it hasn't melted by the time of the big party, he and the other Fire talents get to hurry things along.

Two sweeping balustraded ramps have grown up the side of the hill to the amphitheatre and they dance across each other to continue the theme of the piazza.  They're going to put a 'vertical garden' and a statue in the gap in the centre (Lohn was teasing me saying it was going to be a statue of me), and there's some small buildings which will sell food and so forth tucked against the hill.  And some elevators off to one side, which go up to the top of the hill, or down into a currently extremely empty underground whitestone cavern which is going to be a hub of the subway system when it's installed.

It took me a while to work out what the buildings on the inner rim of the piazza reminded me of – this place in England called Bath.  A solid row of buildings stretching along the massive outer curve of the crescent.  The Earth version has more vertical and horizontal lines, if I remember properly, while this swirled and flowed with the stylised outlines of trees (even etched onto the glass which had just been installed on the hotel parts).  These buildings are going to be museum, hotels, some kind of theatre, galleries, shops and restaurants.  It also extends underground, and most of it is empty whitestone shell without windows, except for the hotel, which is getting close to furniture and fittings stage.

Maze sat on one of the benches looking very at peace and using Telekinesis to brush away the snow so I could see more of the piazza's pattern.

"You really like all this, don't you?" I said, sitting down with him after I'd peered at everything in range.  "Putting up a city."

"There's a great deal of satisfaction in making things, even if all I'm contributing is the heavy lifting.  I'll miss the sense of accomplishment once this stage is over.  Are you ready to go to Mesiath?"  He smiled when I nodded.  "You've overcome your issues with swimming."

"I guess."  I'd forgotten I had them.  "Everyone's there, so it doesn't feel the same at all.  Do you really think it's useful?  That there's something to talent training which has been missing?"

"The training I can't be sure about.  Clearing the mind, getting some physical exercise – both are worthwhile, quite aside from whether we achieve further results."  He looked wry.  "At least that's what I told our training coordinators, who consider this whole approach unscientific."

"Did you feel at all connected to anything yesterday?"

"That's hard to say.  I found myself very aware of the larger world, of the forest.  Particularly when we all quieted down.  Whether having an appreciation of my surroundings can make the slightest difference to my use of talent I don't know."

We gathered together and headed back to Mesiath – which was having a minor drama because one of the technicians had been bitten by a spider and his hand had swelled up very painfully, but Auron took him off to Pandora and everything soon calmed down.  Another nice swimming trip.  Kaoren was glad to see me, but most of his attention was caught up by puzzling out possible approaches to being 'connected', and I told him I was going to paddle about in a particular spot where everyone could see me and left to avoid distracting him.  There were these fantastic miniature weasel creatures lurking about the roots of the trees along the bank and I had a great time with Zan just watching them.  I think Earth has something like them, but I can't remember what they're called.

Tsur Selkie arrived back on Muina while we were doing this, and came and looked at all his highly-trained killers lolling about in the sun.  He doesn't seem to have objected to the experiment, though, and Kaoren is definitely planning to continue.  He says that he's having trouble compartmentalising the challenge though, and is struggling to keep focus outside the swimming trips.

All the captains are at a meeting with Selkie and some other bluesuits at the moment, and I am at least going to make sure that I don't cause any dramas.

Monday, August 11

Hunter

Ghost is here!

I was snoozing in my room after a morning testing session in the Ena (under the watchful eye of Tsur Selkie), and she woke me up with her purring and walking all over me and seems pretty damn happy to have found me.  I could hardly believe it, and was so glad to see her, and petted and played with her while I decided what to do.

Not that I really had any choice.  Kaoren would be hurt if I tried to keep her secret from him, and I had a snowflake's chance in hell of actually doing so.  Not to mention that she was sure to materialise abruptly in front of someone.  Kaoren is at Mesiath today (I slept through lunch-time swimming), while Maze is playing construction crew, but the new satellites mean I could send a channel request to both of them which said: "What's the Taren word for déjà vu – the feeling you get when you feel like you've done this before?" and streamed visual of Ghost sitting in my lap.

I think I managed to render Maze speechless.  Kaoren laughed, and told me a phrase which means the same as déjà vu.  After a bit of speculation on how she managed to get here, and double-checking that I was sure that it really is Ghost, they decided there really wasn't a great deal they could do since I wasn't willing to hand her over for experimentation ('testing').  Not that they're exactly keen, even when I pointed out that she was a great stickie detector.

Second Squad seems to be here, so I think I'll go down and introduce Ghost to them.

Filling up

After a bit of wide-eyed surprise, Second Squad (and Zee, Sefen and Eeli) proved to be a good start for Ghost.  They were careful not to be too loud (even Eeli), and followed my instructions for introducing yourself to cats, and soon she was winding her way between their legs and allowing them to gingerly pet her.  It's very weird for them, though, since she is an Ionoth and even the ones they don't kill they take good care to avoid.  Eeli was in ecstasy, of course, but I noticed that not wanting to scare Ghost meant she was well able to stop herself from being noisy.  Ghost, in turn, decided to adore Nils.  She purred herself silly and ended up sitting on his shoulder poking her nose in his ear.

Second Squad found this hilarious, and teased him about being irresistible, but he just smiled and set Ghost on his lap and played with her until the other squads started drifting back and she went off and hid in one of the unoccupied bedrooms.  Nils is still being unusually serious and subdued, but doesn't seem unhappy or anything.  Totally non-flirty, though, which is probably a good thing given that the two Kalrani assigned to Second, Nala and Joen, are taking turns going bright red or drooling whenever he's anywhere near them.  They seem like okay people despite that – even when Nils is being mild and polite he just oozes smex in a way which is hard to ignore, so I can hardly blame them for being flustered.

I wonder if Nils and Zee have had some kind of huge argument? They weren't ignoring each other or anything, but just didn't have much to do with each other.  I'm very curious, but don't dare ask anyone.  Zee's made it clear that I should stay out of her private life.

I did an entire episode of
Planet Earth
during testing – Tsur Selkie ran me through a simple visualisation and then had me tire myself out making TV – but because I spent so long sleeping and chatting and playing with Ghost I didn't get any subtitling done.  I also did some random requests – dinosaurs (excerpts from
Jurassic Park
, mainly) and more populous bits of Earth (I did that ad for Qantas where all these kids are singing
I Still Call Australia Home
in different places, and then just random fragments of bits of movies which show famous buildings).

We sat around in the evening talking about the signing ceremony.  Just one week away, with people starting to arrive from two days before.  It's an insane timetable, even with Setari doing the heavy lifting and a thousand or so people (greensuits, pinksuits, greysuits) working on the actual fitting out of the buildings.  All the main Telekinetic and Levitation talents are going to be devoted to construction and construction alone from now until then, although they're still allowed to go swimming at Mesiath or back to their rooms to rest at lunch, since a long day of heavy talent-based lifting is really bad for their health.  Their bodies can't keep up with the energy output.  The rest of the Setari will be doing what I was doing – helping out with whatever.

They're planning to cycle all the active squads through Pandora again to make sure all the extra members have their security clearance.  Eleventh will head back in a couple of days, and then they'll have three staggered cycles of squads coming through, each staying a week.  [Which means Fifth will be here soon, but I guess I'll survive.  Twelfth will go just after the signing ceremony and be replaced by Sixth, and then Third will be replaced by Seventh, Second by Eighth and so on.  First and Fourth are the long-term Muinan assignment for the moment, mainly for the cause of keeping me somewhere it seems the Nurans can't go.]

I asked what would happen to the agreement if the Nurans changed their minds about wanting to have nothing to do with us, or some other Muina-descended group showed up and wanted to live on Muina.  Which of course is something no-one can answer, since it all depends on circumstances.  The Nurans still have knowledge KOTIS wants and although Inisar's history book showed they don't have any more idea than we do on what went wrong, they might be useful with suggestions on how to fix it.  But nothing Tare's done has convinced them to even talk about it.  Tare made another attempt to send a diplomatic vessel through the rift to Nuri, and again some of Nuri's strong psychic talents showed up almost immediately and made them turn around, and wouldn't say anything to them except variations on "Leave now or be destroyed".

People from other Muinan-descended planets are something no-one really wants to see right now.  Of course, the Ddura would try and kill them all, so the Tare-Kolar alliance is pretty safe in that regard.  But saying "No, we were here first, go away" is an attitude which opens up an ethical minefield.  Muina itself is so enormous and fertile and welcoming that they can't really argue that there's no room for other groups of descendants.  Hell, if you transplanted the entire population of Tare, Kolar, Channa and Nuri to Muina, it would still be mostly empty.  Channa only has about one million people (drifting about in nomadic tribes, suffering more and more from Ionoth attacks) while Nuri's this tiny moon with maybe between two and four hundred thousand people.  You could move all of
Earth
here and there'd still be room.