The Touchstone Trilogy

by Andrea K Höst

  Wednesday, September 17

  Pricing Fame

  Kaoren is very sneaky. He'd been deliberately vague about plans for our day off because he'd managed to get permission for us to retrace my course to try and find where I'd first arrived on Muina. This was a good deal more of an undertaking than a jaunt across to our island since it could take us out of range of the Ddura's primary hunting ground (it does hunt beyond the four-day's walk range, just rather unpredictably) and we would need fliers and greensuits and rather a lot of Setari.

  And, of course, convincing KOTIS Command that no, really, Cassandra won't leap through the gate back home the instant she sees it.

  The trip itself was anti-climactically easy, since Kaoren had planned the route using the information from my diary. We whizzed off along the lakeshore until we reached the river, and then followed it to the easily-recognisable rock in the middle of the river where I'd spent a day being sick (I'm not likely to ever forget it). Kaoren used that landmark as an estimate for how fast I was travelling on foot and we zoomed along the river until the point he'd calculated would be around the area where I'd come out of the hills and then we lifted up and looked for a hillside clear of trees, the old burn-off with a stream where I'd spent the second night.

  There was one clearly obvious place, and we set the fliers down there so I could confirm that it really did look like the place I remembered. After ten months they didn't have much hope of Place Sight being able to detect any real impression of me, and so weren't surprised not to find any. Even though it looked different in Spring, I was sure it was the right place – and confirmed that by finding my muesli bar wrapper by the stream. Convenient, though I felt bizarrely guilty to be caught littering.

  It was a struggle trying to remember what direction I'd come from, but we took a guess and coasted slowly over the hills until Inisar spoke up to correct our course and guided us straight to a place which from my point of view might or might not be the spot where I first stepped on to Muina, but which everyone with Gate Sight said was the site of an unaligned natural gate.

  They couldn't say with absolute certainty how long it would take for the gate to align – Inisar said it was responding to my presence and that was very likely the reason it had opened at all, but that it did not feel even close to aligned to him, and was unlikely to stay aligned for long if it did open. Before the embarrassingly short flight back, we set up a drone which will monitor the gate, tracking fluctuations in hopes of predicting when it's ready to align.

  And that was it for the dramatic rediscovery of my way home to Earth.

  Most of my energy went into being completely clear that I have no intention of leaving. I'd love to visit Mum and Dad, but I'm not going to risk being trapped away from Kaoren, Ys, Rye and Sen. It's not even hard to make the admission. They are my life now.

  To be sure those without Sight Sight were completely clear on that, I kept talking about "sending a letter". If the gate goes to roughly the same area on Earth, I can put a letter in something waterproof and say "Please post me" on it, and the chances are at least moderately good that someone will post it. I have five stamps in my wallet, ready for intergalactic special delivery.

  That's something for the future (though I can't help but spend half my time mentally composing letters). The rest of the day we played sports with the kids – I taught them French cricket with a rather uneven bat, and teased them about being the only people in the building I had a chance of beating in handball. A fun, relaxed and mildly silly afternoon in other words, reminding me very much of family holidays back on Earth. Sen has got to be the most indulged child on the planet, and Rye's idea of heaven has become the tiny nod Kaoren gave him when he scored a lone point in their handball match. Ys is still being wordlessly polite and totally guarded – doing a good imitation of a Kalrani among superior officers – but I spotted her enjoying herself once or twice despite her best efforts.

  Maze vanished for a while during the afternoon, and when he came back took me and Kaoren aside to talk about The Hidden War. The current season had wrapped up recently, very dramatically with kitten-me vanishing after being stood on the platform at Pandora, and production was now on a break. I hadn't actually been reviewing the episodes, relying on Maze to warn me if there was anything upsetting, but now they'd reached the stage of wanting as complete a detail of everything which happened after Kalasa as I was willing to allow.

  Maze already had a fairly complete summary which someone had prepared of my assignments and injuries and major Setari and me-related events (lots of Cass having nightmares and having to be babied). The proposal suggested by the producers was that their writers read the summary, and come up with questions for me about more detail they'd really like, and an outline of the direction they want to take each episode, and I either give them information or object to bits I can't stand, and then they write up a proper script and the process goes through again. They're offering me huge amounts of money (even more than the Kolarens were, which is saying something). Money is so weird and abstract for me here, since I have more of it already than I've ever had in my life, and I hardly need to touch it.

  Because of the differences between the fictional story and the real story, I'm not sure it's really a good thing to feed them information. There's no way for them to properly portray my relationship with Kaoren, not with how different Lastier is from him, and so to a degree it seems pointless to me to try and help make it slightly less inaccurate. KOTIS plainly wants me to do it, but I've been hanging back on agreeing.

  And then there was the extra request. Instead of filming my Kalasa ordeal, The Hidden War's producers want to buy the mission tape from KOTIS. To take my log and simply broadcast it, right up until my rescue (or, well, until I passed out before I was rescued).

  "Why would I want that?" I asked, shrugging off the prospect of even more money. "Why would KOTIS want that?"

  "For KOTIS it's simple – the log doesn't tell anything more than what everyone knows, but releasing it undercuts the belief that we're not being completely open and honest about events. Not that anything other than the more worrying theories are currently being held back, but since the destruction of Nuri suspicion has reached sky-breaking level. There isn't a great deal of motivation for you, other than allowing people to see who you really are."

  "I'm not sure all the whimpering and crying I did is how I want to present myself," I said wryly, and told him I'd have to think about releasing the log, but I could live with the other arrangement since it's obvious that a lot of people are still treating The Hidden War as the Gospel of Devlin.

  It surprised me that the military could sell the right to broadcast its records, and asked Maze whether it would be simpler to just release the summary information direct instead of filtering it through The Hidden War. And that's an option. Kaoren is firm on this being entirely my decision. I think he knows that in part I just don't want to look at my log for that period, because it's hour upon hour of me being scared and helpless and right now I'm avoiding scared and helpless.

  I might be firm about wanting to stay, but locating the gate to Earth left me with a bad case of nostalgia, so after dinner I asked if I could do some expanded senses projection practice, and recorded some Earth video clips for the entertainment of those squads who were awake after their adventures with time zone adjustment. Just a few songs – Mika's Grace Kelly and Love Today, and Radiohead's Exit Music for a Film. It was the first time I'd projected anything in front of the kids, and they seemed very interested – Sen was particularly interested in the piano in the Grace Kelly clip, so I made one for her, and muzzily watched her pound it until I fell asleep, and now it's almost dawn. We're heading out in a couple of hours to assist in the opening of the new marble location.

  Mmm

  Stinky hot weather during the exploration at Pelamath, worse after the violent downpour during the afternoon, which was soon after we arrived since that time zone's well ahead of Pandora's. There wasn't room in the canyon f
or a camp to be set up – at least not until they eat some whitestone buildings into the canyon walls – so the base camp and ship (the Mesara) was on top of the plateau and the Setari did a lot of lugging people and things up and down because they're so much quicker and more efficient than the fliers, and didn't have to be loaded.

  Fourth and First (and me) scouted out two other entrances to the underground structure – from initial scans it seems to be set up in much the same way as Arenrhon, just with a slightly different entrance system – and found ancient stairways built into the walls of the cliffs. All terribly crumbly now, and one of the entrances was buried under rubble until Maze cleared it.

  The technicians had had plenty of practice at Arenrhon, and had the shielding for the first door ready to be taken down by the time we'd arrived back from marking and clearing the other two. It looks like this is going to be a repeat of Arenrhon, since the interior of the first level was basically identical. Exploration was uneventful, just sad. So many bodies, desiccated and nameless, and crowded again at the entrance. I could see the echoes of their deaths settle on Kaoren with the gentle impact of an anvil – and Inisar and Halla were equally as white-lipped.

  We returned to Pandora a little after lunch, since they've decided not to risk night work, and Kaoren was stressed enough to need me a great deal. We spent a very long time in the shower, and then decided to wander over to the talent school to see what the kids were doing.

  Sen was out by the lake with her age-group class of newly plugged-in Nurans, having a dance lesson. That was fascinating to watch, because not only did each child have their own personal miniaturised instructor, but the interface was projecting robes with long, long sleeves which they could whirl about and make shapes and patterns. It looked wonderful, and though I didn't join in the dance, I tried out one of the robes, and discovered the wonderful world of projected fantasy clothing. Projected clothing even feels a little like it's really there, stimulating the sense of touch, though not quite achieving real weight. I am so going to spend hours playing with that.

  The day for Ys and Rye's age group is now split a session of 'self-study', a group class, a talent class, and a sport class. They were also in the middle of their first interactive game when we looked in, but sadly not one involving spinning about in floaty clothing. Ys and Rye aren't at all keen on having more shared classes and likely would have preferred to have remained the only students with the interface.

  It was great to see the way Rye's face lit up when he noticed Kaoren. I do think he likes me as well as Kaoren, but he simply worships Kaoren. Ys just ignored us after a long glance. We were a fairly disruptive influence on the attention of the rest of the class, though, so it was a good thing the day's lessons were nearly over. Collecting Sen as well, we walked back via the top of the hill, where I out-squee'd everyone over the discovery of hummingbirds feeding on the tree's flowers. They were very tiny and very amazing – something I'd only seen on TV before.

  And I'm finally back for our evening routine, so I don't have to feel guilty about using Mara as a babysitter. She's itching to be shifted back to active duty, and will probably be cleared soon. It was a good evening, especially since neither of us were tired, so after Sen had gone to sleep and Ys and Rye had buried themselves once again in the interface, Kaoren and I had a lot of time to be glad to have each other. We also caught up on a chunk of diary reading, reaching the big assembly of Setari being told about me. It was the second time I'd met Kaoren. It seems like an eternity ago, when he was merely one of the huge array of new people I was dealing with, and I was just a curiosity to him.

  Thursday, September 18

  I Spy...

  Today was a poke Devlin at it day.

  We were up early again and off to Pelamath, where they'd already opened the second and third levels and were working on the difficult fourth – the idea being to work our way quickly down to the bottom and turn off the shielding – and then erect a KOTIS-approved shield in a bubble over the top of the marble, so that no Cruzatch can use it to come through.

  The place had a different set of 'gods', two men and a woman, another three entries into House Zolen's pantheon. I still can't decide if they really deliberately turned themselves into Cruzatch, or if it was some terrible error. I mean, who schemes to turn themselves into floaty burny things?

  There'd been a lot of back and forth discussion about whether I should be involved at all, since it would be possible for the Cruzatch to mount a raid through the malachite marble, but they eventually decided on a brief visit after the power stone had been used to turn off the shielding.

  This meant a lot of sitting about for me, slathering myself in the insect repellent which is a particular necessity for the Pelamath area, though we've been using it during our other exploration trips. I had a rotating series of guards, and chatted to some of the technicians I hadn't seen since Arenrhon, who all seemed to want to tell me about some individual discovery they'd made, some piece of information about Muina's past which had touched them particularly. These conversations are occasionally surreal, particularly when people I haven't talked to before stammer or blush or grin madly. I've learned to pretend not to notice but it –

  I started to write that it makes me feel as fake as wearing the Setari uniform, but realised that I no longer feel like I don't belong in the uniform. Not since Kalasa, I think, when I was just so glad I had it on.

  My involvement at the Pelamath installation was to be limited to a quick trip down to the two lowest levels just so they could record which objects were blurry, and any other random observations I had. Which was straightforward enough – and I'm getting better at handling the blurriness – but then it got confusing because the blurriness started to resolve.

  I kept seeing the same place, but with all the dust and grime gone. And when they told Fourth to bring me back up to the surface, I kept getting flashes of the other floors with all the corpses gone, and people moving about in a businesslike way (most of them favouring an Egyptian kilt look). When we made it out to the canyon, the stairs looked sharp and clean. The technicians were all fascinated, and had me go back in and tour about the unsealed part of the upper floors until my old friend Pounding Headache showed up and bought me a ticket back to Pandora.

  The most popular theory is that the power stones had such a strong impact that it imprinted the past on the area, allowing me to see the place before their activation. But I don't know if that's right, and Isten Notra pointed out that the peripheral vision world I was seeing while in near-space was similar but different.

  Alternate reality? As if this wasn't confusing enough.

  I recovered quite quickly from my headache, which is an improvement, though I was still sentenced to an entire afternoon in medical for brains scans, and very annoyingly a lot of blood and tissue samples once again. Tomorrow they want to try taking me close to the Kalasa power stone, which doesn't have any sarcophagi, to see whether it will let me have more glimpses into Kalasa's past, since seeing without projecting is far less energy-intensive for me. Well, that's the current plan unless someone in KOTIS Command changes their mind again – they're so wary of using me. But all the news reports today have been about the increasing density of Ionoth in Tare and Kolaren near-space, which has led to more incidents of Ionoth reaching real-space and thus a spate of deaths. I'm guessing Kalasa will be a certainty.

  Friday, September 19

  Urgent Relocation

  Back on Tare. I never cease to find new ways to have a crisis.

  This was another dreaming problem. I'd barely gone to sleep the night before last, and was having a confusing dream about being trapped under something heavy, when Kaoren woke me up. I occasionally have dreams about being trapped under things because Kaoren has rolled on top of me, and hadn't really felt anything different about this one other than the fact that Kaoren had woken up instead of me, but he said he was feeling extremely uneasy about me, and that my vitals monitor was showing a slower than normal heartbeat.
He wanted me to go sleep in medical attached to the scanner, which I wasn't keen about at all, but I could see he was really unsettled, so I checked all the kids were asleep then went along just to spare him the stress, and felt tremendously guilty about having to wake up Ista Mezan (this week's primary medic) just so he could watch me go to sleep. He was very nice about it, but looked so tired.

  I was pretty tired myself, so went to sleep quickly, and started having another dream about being trapped under something heavy. It didn't exactly feel like one of my 'real' dreams, and my head felt very vague and I just lay there until it grew clearer, not that it ever really grew clear. There was a mistiness to everything – fog – and I seemed to be in a dark place with a narrow light directly above me, making the thin tendrils of fog glow, and I could make out different pinpoints of light to either side, and some kind of pattern in the ceiling. I couldn't move, couldn't turn my head, couldn't lift a finger, couldn't speak, didn't even really feel like I was breathing. I didn't feel at all like myself.

  And there was whispering. Lots of words on all sides of me – or on me. It felt like there were tiny incredibly heavy people sitting on top of me, whispering. I couldn't make out what was being said, beyond that it had the zeddy noises common in Taren and the other Muinan dialects.

  I didn't like it at all – I felt so small and helpless and constrained – and started trying to wake up and couldn't. I knew it had to be a dream, but the easy ability to wake out of my dreams seemed to be gone. I tried sitting up, and still couldn't move, and tried creating a projection of an Ionoth Kaoren to free me, and nothing happened, and then I panicked, in a futile and unproductive way. I couldn't even feel my heart beating.

  The only thing left I could think to do was try and sense whether there was anyone nearby who might help me. I began pushing my senses out, but even that didn't work properly, and I felt like I'd fallen down a well – or up a well – and then I snapped back to staring at the ceiling. That wasn't a very nice sensation.