Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras (14 page)

Lira looked amazing, as
I expected, and was very pleased about it. She also relaunched the
discussion of getting her ears pierced, once she saw my matching
earrings, and I said she could get them pierced when she was
thirteen, and thought that it was awfully early for me to have
turned into my Mum. After we'd been carefully de-dressed, we went
to a hair stylist that Chiane had recommended for us and tried out
various styles for us to wear. My hair, sadly, hasn't grown nearly
long enough for some kind of gorgeous up-do with trailing tendrils
– but then it probably never would have managed something
spectacular anyway, and eventually I decided it would probably be
best to have it trimmed shorter again. I did toy with the idea of
extensions, but decided against it in the end. The flower slides
and a bit of judicious shaping did wonders for Ys' hairstyle, and
of course Sen and Lira's gorgeous manes were perfect for
everything. Mara and Zee joined us for this part, and toyed with
different styles too, and since we'd used a closed flyer to go to
the spaceport and then a solo carriage on the subway and then back
entrances into the stores, we managed the whole trip without having
half Pandora trying to catch a glimpse of us. Kaoren and Rye went
later the same day, and came back well satisfied. In the afternoon
we walked through The Wedding Garden Rye, Lianz and Maze have been
constructing and did a kind of rehearsal to work out the getting
there and where to sit and stand parts.

The Wedding Garden was
necessary because there simply wasn't room at the house for the
number of people we want to invite, and we don't want to thin out
the trees around the house anyway. So we picked an area on the
south side of the island - the guesthouse is on the north, and
Siame's studio in between the house and the Garden, and now that
the stone path stretches all the way there the island seems much
smaller. Over Winter Maze did most of the 'big work' – cleared a
lot of the trees out of a big flat patch below the hill with only a
small window to the lake, and seeded a long ornamental whitestone
pond – a very straight, flat affair shaped a bit like one end of a
thermometer, with a kind of bridge/pagoda thing to sit above the
round pool at the end for the wedding ceremony. Instead of leaving
it as whitestone, though, he did this very clever thing of pressing
all these slices of blueish-black stone into the sides of the pond
after it had formed, and paving a border around the edge the same
way. That part took him ages, since it's a very long pond, but he
says he enjoys it and the effect was really spectacular – it's
about knee-deep the entire way (frozen solid most of Winter) and
reflects the sky beautifully.

Since then, Rye (with
Maze and Lianz's help) has been slowly encouraging it into being a
shady garden a bit like First Park, except with more ornamental
flowering bushes and garden beds. It's clearest around the pagoda,
paved with squares of stone with the cracks all filled by a tiny
flowering ground cover that reminds me a little of Australian
Native Violet. Poor Rye's been stressing incredibly over not being
able to make the plants grow any quicker, or keep up with the
weeds, and we've been trying to reassure him that we really just
need a relatively private large space, but over the next few weeks
we'll all pitch in to help him with the workload. Before Kaoren's
parents moved to Muina, I was happy with Kaoren and Maze and Rye
looking after the venue issues, but made the mistake of saying when
showing it to Teor that it would look way cool at night with
Chinese lanterns in the trees and candles floating in the pool and
we'd have to have a night party there one day. Teor had me explain
what I meant, and next time I turned around my wedding had been
moved to the late afternoon so that the reception would be in the
evening, and Teor was designing different sorts of lanterns as her
wedding present to us. The perils of an artistic family. It
will
look way cool, though.

It also occurred to us
that there was a lack of bathroom facilities, and we tossed up the
equivalent of portapotties for a while, then eventually designed
and grew a rather weird little building, which is a combination of
ground floor bathroom and half a dozen toilets, and on top of that
a lounge, kitchen and a bedroom in a little stack. It reminds me of
a lighthouse, except we tucked it back among the trees behind the
round bridge with a very shaded path to it. The view is all ferns
and bushes out the windows, with just a glimpse of the lake from
the bedroom. We're calling it another guest house for the moment,
and having it there will make getting ready on the day a bit
easier, and maybe one of the kids will want to use it eventually,
and just have a lot of extra toilets. [Sen adores it, of course,
and treats it like a particularly elaborate cubbyhouse.]

I'm being very focused
and exercisey on my training days, primarily so I can look good in
my dress, and otherwise I've been feeling a touch overworked,
reading a lot of Taren novels, and pressing slowly onward with
doing Taren school lessons, just so I can avoid my kids graduating
before me.

The other major event
of the month was my second letter home.

This was a complicated
letter to write, since I needed to get it approved not only by
KOTIS Command, but by the governments of a couple of planets. In
its way, it was a first step in interplanetary relations between
Earth and Muina. KOTIS Command would prefer this happened via the
deep-space gate rather than the natural gate, but I suspect also
thinks it would be convenient to have a handful more Earth people
as a sample group – mainly about whether all Earth people have
security access to Muina. There are a lot of potential consequences
to writing a letter which explains precisely when and where a gate
to another planet would open.

It's pretty rough when
your letter home to Mum requires a Tri-Council sanction.

I tucked an image of us
at the dress fitting in which was entirely unsanctioned and
unapproved, but also unobjectionable, and the gate opened right
when we expected it to – it seems to shift about ten minutes and
four metres each year, which takes us to the beginning of March
next year and thankfully I've already been able to confirm that the
letter got through to Mum.

Another March

Katen

Maze and Alay's baby
arrived yesterday, and they called her Katen just as Sen wanted,
and she is very tiny and perfect and shows absolutely no signs of
ill effects from umbilical cords. We went on a visit this morning
and I'm maybe looking forward a little more to adding to our child
collection, though I expect I'll be sick of all the crying and
pooping soon enough. Sen was very much in danger of absconding to
spend the day with the baby, and I suspect that inviting Alay over
for a long visit will be the only way to keep Sen's baby longings
in check.

After much discussion
Kaoren and I decided that it would work out best for us to do all
our child-raising relatively close together, and so I've had my
contraception cancelled. I can just imagine some of the awkward and
no doubt embarrassingly public conversations I'll be having in the
future if I don't get pregnant in the first couple of months of
trying – Sen is adamant that I have to provide "all" her little
baby brothers and sisters without further delay.

Can't say I'm looking
forward to periods.

It's been a month of
mixed ups and downs, with Katen being the biggest 'up'. The biggest
down was Eeli's funeral (or remembrance ceremony). Her parents had
accepted the judgment of the medics, and asked for the life support
to be switched off. Taarel brought her ashes out and scattered them
on Lenecki (the island where she's taken her land grant). Taarel is
for the moment remaining as Senior Captain on Tare, but her family
is going to move to Lenecki, and eventually Taarel will probably be
an islander too.

The Muinans believed –
and Tarens and Kolarens sort of believe – that your spirit returns
to the world's heart when you die, and so dead people are not
floating about as individuals, but are 'transfigured' so that it's
like the planet itself briefly remembers being Eeli. During the
remembrance ceremony, one of the things we did was find a quiet
place and 'talk to Muina' which would in its way mean talking to
Eeli.

Whether or not that's
at all true – and on Muina who knows? – I liked the idea of talking
to Eeli, and sat myself under a shady tree and told the wind about
the way Inisar looked at Taarel, and how I couldn't tell what she
thinks about him in return, and how she's very inconveniently
spending most of her time on Tare. And I told her all about what my
wedding will be like, and then I cried rather a lot. I couldn't
tell if the wind cared.

I have invited
countless wedding guests. Of the squads, mainly those who are
primarily assigned to me (First, Second, Third, Fourth, Eighth,
Twelfth, and Squad One). All of them with 'and guests' so they can
bring along any family or friends that they want, which more than
doubled the numbers. And Kaoren's family, and Isten Notra and her
family, and Inisar, and a few of the medics and other technicians
who I've grown a little closer to. And I invited Tsa Lents and his
wife and Nenna and her sister, and was glad when they accepted.
Tsur Selkie is actually going to officiate at the ceremony, which I
find hugely amusing, but Kaoren's rather close to him – all that
Sight Sight training I guess. Tsur Selkie has two kids who are
Kalrani, which I didn't know at all. I'm curious to see if they're
his own little Mini-Me's.

He's been mostly on
Tare since the gates re-opened, and I gather that – just as he was
the main architect of KOTIS' method of training Setari – he's the
one behind the announcements just made about the future of the
program.

They're not cancelling
the Setari program, but they are changing it, easing back on it in
some ways, so that it's more like it was when the senior squads
first started: a day school, or weekly boarding. They're going to
expand it in other ways, though, bringing it into line with
Pandora's talent school to train strong psychics more
generally.

The idea's been very
well received, for the most part. It's still going to be a
disciplined edging on harsh childhood for those in the Setari
channel, especially because KOTIS wants to explore Nuran methods of
focusing the bond with the Ena, but they won't be so cut off from
home.

Ys' thirteenth birthday
coming up (I'm giving her a diary bound in gorgeous tooled
leather).

Another April

All Official

Cassandra Eloise Ruuel
Devlin. And Kaoren Devlin Ruuel. Not to mention Ys, Liranadestar
and Sentarestel Ruuel Devlin, and Rye Devlin Ruuel. I'm fairly sure
that this is a naming tradition used on Earth, but I can't remember
which country, or if we've followed quite the same rules. It was
the solution which we liked most, though I did find all the
possible name combinations we came up with very funny. Ruulin or
Devel. Too silly.

The week before the
ceremony was very busy and hectic, with us doing a lot of work on
the Wedding Garden, and Kaoren's parents, brother and grandparents
arriving, and also Nenna and her family – all of whom were to be
guests on Arcadia. I was very relieved that things weren't as
awkward with the Lents as they could have been – Nenna's enthusiasm
(and her sister's shrieking over bugs) smoothed over a lot, and Sen
thought Nenna great fun.

Arden brought along the
most impossible girl as his guest. A model he's using for something
he's working on at the moment, who is gob-smackingly gorgeous and
totally awful – obsessed with herself and tremendously bitchy, like
she's trying to be a caricature of all the bad things people say
about models. Ellema. I couldn't work out how Arden could stand
being near her, no matter how good-looking, given his Sights, but
in the end the whole thing made me understand him a little better –
he was kind of torturing himself to get a certain result in his
art, and also amusing himself at Ellema's expense. The main piece
he's working on is something called "Hollow" which about says all
of his opinion of Ellema.

She spent her time
annoying the hell out of me, cross-examining me on my guest list
and being obviously disappointed that it was mainly Setari, no-one
'important', and wanting to know why I hadn't invited this or that
celebrity, acting like the cats were a rodent infestation, and
being generally infuriating to everyone. Plus she tried to seduce
Nils practically in front of Zee – and then stormed off when Nils
murmured something he says would be impolite to repeat in her ear.
In the end I mostly just made sure to keep her away from the kids –
and wasn't quite able to resist calling her "The Llama" every so
often and had the greatest difficulty stopping Lira from calling
her that to her face.

I think maybe Arden was
trying to annoy Kaoren with her as well. They have a difficult
relationship – they care a lot about each other, but they're kind
of at odds.

I was feeling more than
a little stressed the day before the wedding, and wished I could
just abandon all my guests, and that everything would be over and
done with – and seriously not looking forward to another dinner
keeping an eye out for simmering arguments.

Just on sunset, as I
was working on putting dinner together, Zee and Nils sent me off to
have a shower, taking over the cooking duties, and when I was
unenthusiastically getting dressed to go down, Kaoren sent me a
message to come up to my eyrie.