Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras (5 page)

Twelfth had waited just
within the maze space entrance, and when Thirteenth arrived had
sent them back ahead. And then the first wave of distortion had
hit. They'd felt it in the Ena of both Tare and Kolar, not to such
a paralysing level as Muina, but enough to make clear that
something was wrong and only getting worse.

Zan's email covers all
this in a sentence, but I've since watched the mission log, and
listened to the conversation between her and Kin Lara, the sleepy
captain of Fourteenth who I mainly remember as being a friend of
Els'.

"Go ahead, Namara," he
said, as Fourteenth raced around the twists and bends of the maze.
[Zee tells me that it's a very bad idea trying to fly over the top
of the walls there.]

"We'll wait," Zan
replied. "I can move us fastest."

"Not the time to ignore
protocols," Lara said, still sounding sleepy and unperturbed,
almost amused, even though his squad were running for their lives.
"You're usually more sensible, Zan."

The next wave of
distortion hit them then, underlining his point. Lenton's log shows
me Zan's face, white, expressionless. Then she says: "Hurry," and
sends her squad through the small house space which leads to the
maze space, and then into near-space, then she picks them up and
flies all-out, as fast as the strongest Telekinetic in the Setari
can manage, back to the gate-lock.

Fourteenth made it to
near-space before the storm which followed the destruction of the
malachite marbles hit. If they'd still been in the maze space they
would have been completely lost, since it's now shifted out of
alignment with Tare's near-space (this bothers me a lot because
no-one's seen Ghost since). Twelfth, waiting in real-space at the
gate-lock, couldn't do anything when the gate – usually invisible –
suddenly washed bright white and roared power at them.

The effect on
Fourteenth was a combination of a severe aether overdose combined
with the overenhancement which occurs when they touch me while I'm
expanded. The Levitation and Telekinesis talents, who were flying
as fast as possible, lost control and they tumbled to near-space's
ground. Blinded by white, bruised and with a couple of broken
bones, they used the interface to track each other and find the
gate, dragging each other toward it.

They didn't make it,
though, all of them collapsing. Zan, since her squad had been
ordered not to go back into near-space, and with no sign of the
storm subsiding, had thought to send drones, which easily homed in
on Fourteenth and brought them back.

Broken bones were
nothing compared to what the storm had done to their talents.
Hyper-enhanced, producing brain lesions when any of them tried
using anything energy-intensive. Four months later they've only
just begun to reach normal levels again. Anyone with Sights – the
talents which don't just turn off and on – has had a particularly
bad time of it. Given that Fourteenth is a Sights speciality squad,
that means all of them, but the two Place Sight talents (Lara and
Jax) have spent most of the past few months sedated because they
just couldn't handle it.

Zan, even though she
made the only possible decisions and thought to send the drones,
obviously feels somehow responsible, just as she had when I melted
down in the Pillar. On top of that, with all the spaces realigning
after the storm, the five active squads were distributed across
Tare for the first couple of weeks, until Third (without their
primary pathfinder) had managed to map out new routes. Even with
the reduced numbers of Ionoth, it's still been months of
strain.

From the last couple of
emails, it sounds as if Taarel has helped Zan through. With Maze
and Grif cut off, Taarel stepped up into the senior captain role,
and, despite the blow of Eeli's loss, held everyone
together.

The tone of Zan's
emails had improved by the last, written only a few weeks ago when
Fourteenth's talents settled back into more normal parameters, and
I wrote her back as soon as I finished reading it, touching on my
near-cooking, and then moving on to more cheerful subjects. As soon
as the route was open again, and most of Tare's Setari were back on
Tare, Twelfth and the other squads who had been holding Tare
together were given extended leave, which they definitely needed.
Hopefully they'll be posted to Muina soon.

Ys' birthday went well,
I think. The microscope we'd decided on as a present was thoroughly
approved of, fortunately, and I could tell she was relieved that
her birthday lunch was a pure family affair. But it was only when
we took her off in the afternoon to Pandora that I felt like I'd
really succeeded in making her happy. Ys is much smarter than I am.
She's smarter than Rye, than Kaoren, than any of her teachers or
the people she meets regularly. I can practically see her brain
overheating sometimes, trying to make up for lost time, and I've
been worried that – friends with Lira or not – she'll feel lonely
or isolated because she doesn't have anyone who can think like
her.

Isten Notra thought my
idea for a birthday present was very funny, and was happy to be Ys'
surprise for the day. When Ys realised she was going to be given a
whole afternoon with Isten Notra, just to talk, she lit up
amazingly, and she was in a daze when Kaoren brought her back that
evening. A head full of
answers
. And Isten Notra has invited
her back for an afternoon once a month, which is far more than I
asked for, but Isten Notra says she enjoyed herself a lot, and that
she thinks it important for Ys' development. Once she'd emerged
from her daze, Ys went very quiet around me for a while, and I kept
catching her watching me in an analytical sort of way. She's
stopped that now, but this past month has been a series of positive
steps in our relationship. She doesn't resist me nearly as
much.

Having a flood of new
episodes of
The Hidden War
also produced some odd family
moments. Especially since the first new episode was my actual log
of being stuck in Kalasa. It made for a really disorienting viewer
experience, since underwater swimming isn't exactly a great visual,
and the only thing you can do to make hours and hours of swimming
more interesting is to cut most of it out. They were very clever
with the segues though – they simply made the clock display quite
large to show the amount of time passing during the scenes they
were cutting through. It was interesting how my vision hazed out
the time I barely made it through the extra-long tunnel.

The new season had
started broadcasting on Tare over two months ago, and there were a
lot of interviews with the producers and the actors about how
difficult it had been to go through with the production when they
didn't know if anyone at the settlement was still alive. And tons
of reviews talking about how immensely traumatic it was to watch my
log.

The traumatic part
posed a bit of a parenting problem for us. Fortunately we had a
day's warning, since they only transmitted news, not entertainment
programs, with the first contact. The kids read about it straight
away, and Fein (who has become fast friends with Rye) was asking
questions about it and that probably wouldn't have mattered except
that Sen got wind and wanted to watch it. That put us in a bit of a
bind, since she'd been having so many nightmares lately that we'd
been trying to keep her away from any negative stimulus. She
couldn't watch it without us giving her permission – and she didn't
actually argue with us when we first said that it would be too
scary for her – but she was very subdued and hurt by our refusal
and then had perhaps her worst set of nightmares yet. Kaoren said
that this was a Sight Sight reaction: the need to
know
,
particularly about things and people who are important to you, can
be overwhelming.

Sometimes it amazes me
that Kaoren's so sane.

We decided the best
thing to do was to make
The Hidden War
strictly full-family
viewing, and only in the mornings or early afternoons so that Sen
isn't likely to sleep immediately after. Lots of explanations and
support and then a carefully managed story time. We kept the kids
out of school that day (and skipped our training) and watched the
log-file episode. Sen actually took it pretty well – she kept
patting my arm and trying to console me – and then switched to
doing that to Kaoren, which told me pretty clearly how much he
hates watching this log.

Ys, Rye and Lira held
up well at the start, mainly impressed and disbelieving of how long
I swam about, and asking pertinent questions about whether the burn
hurt and why I'd changed direction. But when I broke down crying
after reaching the desert, they all went grimly subdued. Me crying
isn't something Ys and Rye are used to, and Lira didn't take it a
great deal better. Ys is one of the few people who recognised that
after I'd set the arrow alight, I almost lost my way walking back,
and that seemed to horrify her more than anything else.

The scenes with actors
playing out the drama of the search were a relief, and the kids
were as usual very critical of the fact that none of the characters
resemble the people they know. Though Teral Saith's Lastier has
become subtly more like Kaoren since they met, and the moment when
Lastier lets his guard down when they find me more-or-less alive
was a really powerful one, which I think impressed them all. Lira
immediately asked Kaoren whether that was really how he'd been
while I was lost.

He shook his head. "I
was angry, the entire time," he said. "None of us read those
platforms correctly – they serve so many purposes, but it was mass
blindness not to see this one. And to run those tests without a
single Setari to observe was one of the poorest decisions made
during the entire settlement." He smiled, a faint, wry expression.
"And I composed many lectures for Cassandra, for letting herself be
stood on that platform, and then for being where I couldn't find
her, and I think I was angrier with her than anyone else. But I
thought the arrow was a very good idea, so I forgave her." Then he
pulled me over to his lap and squeezed me really tightly and Sen
patted us both.

When we were less
emotional we had a highly entertaining discussion of how Kaoren and
I fell in love, and so now the kids know more about our romance
than anyone else, and Sen was happily diverted into the question of
our upcoming wedding and different wedding customs and the idea of
flower girls.

I've been getting more
hugs since then. Not from Ys, but she leans against me sometimes,
and sits close during story time. Sen was probably the least
impacted out of all of us, and slept peacefully that night.
Everyone else had nightmares. We've watched the rest of the
episodes which have been released, and none have been half as
distressing, though we made a decision to censor parts of the
Velcro massive episode, and just told Sen very generally what we
were taking out. The very annoying consequence of the log file
episode is that tons of people now want to have
all
my
mission logs released. I'll resist that one for all I'm
worth.

The feel of the
settlements has changed a lot, now that we're three planets again.
Everyone had been quietly getting on with it in the last few
months, but while they did seed plenty of new buildings, and
prepare infrastructure for new settlers, it was more an atmosphere
of consolidation and settling in. These past few weeks have really
geared things back up again, even beyond the level of those frantic
post-signing days. After a few confirmation trips to make sure the
route could be travelled safely in larger ships, we've seen an
enormous influx of settlers. Tare and Kolar spent the cut-off time
processing settler applications, preparing the core components for
a bunch of nanofactories, and finishing up the large deep-space
passenger transports they'd been preparing. When you've got ships
capable of bringing two thousand people in at once, it doesn't take
long for the population to surge, though processing 'security
passes' for two thousand people at once is a bit of a pain. At
least the subway is up and running, so they can quickly get from
the spaceport to the platform.

Mesiath is already
impressively large, and quite lovely. They've thinned out the trees
in the new city area, but not removed them all, so that the centre
of the city is still a bit foresty, and opens out to the south
where there'll be farmland. We went on a day-trip there, and the
look on Rye's face walking beneath those massive trees was great
fun. Kaoren and I are thinking about using his land grant to have a
few 'summer houses' dotted across Muina, which makes me feel
awesomely rich and self-indulgent, but I think would make Rye
ecstatic. Maybe in a couple of years. Now that Mesiath is well
advanced they'll be seeding another two 'major' settlements, and
the provisional council pushed for the location to be chosen by the
settlers rather than just dictated by the bluesuits and so there's
full-on debate about where they'll be. KOTIS' only requirement was
that they be around platform towns, one northern hemisphere and one
southern hemisphere, and they created little 'tourist videos' about
each site and people get to vote on their favourite for each
hemisphere. The desert one is coming total last,
unsurprisingly.

Some of the Nuran
'faction' haven't been very happy with the new developments. While
we were cut off, they represented a solid percentage of the
population, and since everyone was in Pandora they could remain
relatively close-knit. Now that Taren and Kolaren settlers are
pouring in, and adoptions are sky-rocketing (KOTIS prioritized
people who showed a genuine interest and capacity for adopting
children), they're not only being outnumbered, they're being
fragmented. KOTIS is obligingly ensuring each settlement will have
a cultural representative, and is capturing as much information as
possible about Nuran customs and language, and even decided
suddenly to assist in setting up infrastructure for Nurenor
(basically turning it into a Nuran-run farming settlement and
sneakily supporting a more reasonable person to be in charge of it)
but when it boils down to it, the Nurans are absolutely going to be
only a tiny part of Muina's whole. Of the two billion-plus people
living on Tare and Kolar, more than half have indicated they want
to relocate to Muina at some point in the next ten Muinan years (an
idea which completely boggles my mind). Of the fraction of eventual
Muinans who have a Nuran background, most will have been absorbed
into Taren and Kolaren families. The adult Nurans I've spoken to
are either sad about this, or angry. Fortunately the angry ones are
a relative minority, but I can't really blame them for being
upset.