Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras Read online

  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 to
ns 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.

  When all the squads which had been stationed on Muina before we were cut off went back to Tare or Kolar, even the rest of Fourth Squad went, and Lohn, Mara, Jeh, Grif and Ketzaren, who wanted to take their kids to meet their families (and see if Deal and Enna's nightmares could be addressed by a less traumatic journey through deep-space). When KOTIS swaps in new squads there'll be times when I have bodyguards not drawn from First, Second or Fourth, which is something to think about. Of course First and Second, who have all served their minimum time, have opted for 'Muina transfer' rather than retirement, and so will be posted here pretty much permanently. There's a possibility that Fourth will still occasionally work on Tare, but not for a while, which is good because I don't particularly want to planet-hop at the moment.

  Lohn and Mara (and, indeed, almost all of First and Second Squad) are expecting masses of family soon – families of KOTIS staff get settlement preference, and Lohn and Mara used a bit of Setari leverage to be able to include a few friends as wedding guests as well. Their wedding is only nine days away and is really turning into a bit of an event – word of it inevitably leaked out and the Setari-Watch pages are full of endless speculation and delight. Fortunately there's no private airships yet, so they don't have to worry about people flying over taking photos the way they do for outdoor celebrity weddings on Earth. The park on First Squad Island has shaped up nicely – the grass a bit patchy in spots and with lots of shrubs and weeds, but it still looks very attractive, and Maze and Rye have been having great fun with it (Maze really is really serious about becoming a garden designer). The trees everywhere around Pandora have started their shift into Autumn colours, and the islands are all gold-tinged with hints of orange. Should be spectacular.

  We're facing our own relative-influx. Kaoren (who wrote emails to Siame every week during the cut-off so that she got a flood once channels were open) decided to bite the bullet and invite his parents and his brother to come visit. He's doing it because he wants Siame to come back here because he thinks that's the best chance for her to work out the issues she has about me saving her, or me taking Kaoren's attention away from her. And, really, it would be strange to marry Kaoren without meeting any of his family except Siame.

  None of us are looking forward to the visit. Kaoren's not actually on argumentative terms with his parents, but he has as little to do with them as possible, and since they're both Sight Sight talents they're perfectly aware of his feelings. He's heading to Tare tomorrow to pack up all our stuff at the Tare Setari headquarters, and will return with his family in three days. [Kaoren really doesn't want anyone else handling the objects which mean a lot to him because of how they feel through Place Sight.] We considered making it another family trip, but we think it best to not take Sen through deep-space at the moment. We could sedate her for the trip, but that won't stop her Place and Sight Sight from operating, and it might be painful for her. We also – in theory anyway – want to see how we cope with being away from each other for a few days.

  We both know we're going to have nightmares the entire time, and stress out about being cut off from each other, but I guess I'll feel less of a wimp if I prove to myself that I won't fall into a heap if Kaoren's not within reach.

  Chapter 6

  May

  May 10

  Autumn Bride

  The wedding was so much fun. I embarrassed myself by crying during the ceremony, but it was an amazing day.

  The week leading up to it was remarkably hectic, starting with Kaoren returning from Tare with his family. Meeting Kaoren's family went mostly well – Sen set the tone by shrieking "Seemee!" and hurling herself on Siame, and then going all shy (or pretending to) and hiding behind Siame's leg to peek at Kaoren's parents and brother. Siame ended up performing introductions, and then was dragged off by Sen who wanted to show her her bedroom. Siame didn't stand a chance against a full-on Sentarestel charm offensive.

  Overall, I didn't dislike Kaoren's parents, or his brother, but I'm still glad that they've gone back to Tare. Kaoren's mother, Teor, is very grand and witty, and didn't act at all hostile or nasty to me, Kaoren or any of the kids. His father, Paran, is quiet and abstract, and obviously adores his wife but is absorbed by his own work. But they're both very definite people, with very strong views, and the force of Teor's personality particularly is so strong. The first day she was there, Teor told me she knew I'd be able to influence Kaoren to not be so foolishly self-sacrificial and to stop feeling obliged to be a Setari. She just doesn't believe Kaoren could possibly like being a Setari, especially not more than drawing, which he'd been devoted to befor
e being drafted for the Setari program. And she so firmly believed this, and was so convincing, I almost found myself composing arguments to get Kaoren to retire. Since she's a Sight Sight talent, it does tell me just how much Kaoren's decision to devote himself to the Setari program cost him, because Sight Sight talents are not certain about things without reason. But obviously not always right, either.

  They were very positive and admiring about all the kids, particularly Rye, who has such a passion for what he's doing. Loving what you're doing and doing it well are the things they consider perhaps the most important. But they also have firm opinions on how you should go about it. Kaoren's mother's an arranger. I didn't mind too much that she organised years of practical botany courses for Rye, since he already wanted to do that and we can always rearrange it, but Ys and Lira are both still discovering things they might possibly want to do. Ys, I think, wants to study literally everything and refuses to accept that she will never have enough time, while Lira is simply enjoying being alive.

  Lira came to me very incensed on the day before the wedding and treated me to a barrage about how we were all stupid and blind, and once I unravelled all this I found that Teor had decided that Lira needed to learn music, had chosen which instruments would best suit her, and added music lessons to Tsana Dura's program schedule. With Ys she'd asked her about her reading habits, and given her a reading list, and worked out the ideal maths/science program. It's not that Ys doesn't like maths and science – any more than Lira actually dislikes possibly learning a musical instrument – but Ys also currently wants to devour every book in this rather old Taren schoolgirl series (something like The Baby-Sitters Club) but is pretending that she doesn't have any interest in that sort of thing at all, so got extremely grumpy at the idea of admitting that she didn't care if they were frivolous. And they both loathe choices being made for them.