Taarel is too good a captain not to notice I'm down, but she's also smart enough not to push. She keeps an eye on me, treats me with consideration, but otherwise just gives me opportunities to talk to her. Of course, Taarel's the last person I'd tell about my feelings for Ruuel. Too humiliating if she had to gently break it to me that she's engaged to him. If Taarel and Ruuel are a couple, right now I just don't want to know.
Ghost was with me when I woke, which helped considerably. I have as much hope of smuggling her with me to Unara as I did to Muina, but I wish I could. Even though she's only the echo of a memory, she's such a normal cat: smart and mischievous, loves being scratched behind her ears, purrs and acts like she missed me. And she's mine, in a way very little is here. Petting her was the best stupid thing I ever did.
Tuesday, April 22
What would Wikipedia say?
In among the make-believe there seems to now be a handful of truth about me in the public domain. I read all about myself this morning, finding dozens of interface 'spaces' devoted to me, just like the Setari watch sites. And I have an encyclopaedia entry. No 'real' pictures of me at all, thankfully, although there's some quite accurate drawings. I wasn't surprised to see that some of Nenna's friends had recorded meeting Nenna's guest stray, but it seems that you can't record images of strays any more than you can images of Setari. Strays count as 'protected incompetents' until they've passed various tests. But they could record my voice, and the 'outline' of me, and it was squirmy awful hearing me trying to speak in Taren back then. I was so slow, and my pronunciation was dreadful and I kept using the wrong words and totally wrong grammar. It's a wonder anyone could understand me at all. I'm still not close to fluent, and wouldn't be able to speak it properly without the interface, but I'm clear enough now.
My encyclopaedia entry says:
"Kaszandra Devlin. Born approximately 15 Denn 3732, city of Oztralya, planet Urth. Passed through natural gate to Muina approximately 40 Ord 3785. Located by Setari exploratory team on 2 Arn 3785, at ruins site Goralath, and processed as displaced person. Identified as enhancement talent and assigned to assist Setari. On 32 Nayz 3786 provided identification clearance to Setari squad under attack by Ddura at Goralath, effectively unlocking the planet of Muina for resettlement."
I had a good laugh at the 'city of Oztralya' and read through the entries for 'Urth' and Pandora, which sadly did not include anything about releasing all the evils of the world. There was tons more on the less official sites. A good deal of the initial hostility toward me seems to have died down after the 'sister planet' explanation, but it's a thousand percent obvious I'm never going to have anything remotely resembling a normal life on this planet. If I were at all unclear on that point.
KOTIS has released a handful of statements about my discovery on Muina, and how I'd been working with the Setari, but what I'd been doing recently was definitely not public knowledge. In fact, there was nothing on the public networks about the Arenrhon installation at all, let alone the Nuran. I'm betting they'll keep it quiet as long as they can.
Tons on Pandora, though. The settlement has grown enormously: multiple buildings up and running, and more under construction. Even some that aren't blocky squares. Pandora's focus has become more about learning to live on the planet, rather than unlocking the secrets of its past, and they're cataloguing the plants and the animals and testing out crops. It looks utterly gorgeous, with the leaves vivid reds and golds and the lake a slate-blue colour. Everyone not too freaked out by the thought of being outside really wants to go there. There's even a competition, where the prize is getting to visit.
We're starting for Unara late this afternoon. I've been in a very non-talky mood. I need to deliver Pollyanna instead of Gloomzilla.
Into the breach
We didn't start out for Unara until quite late in my day, and it felt very much like a school outing with the Kalrani in their cream and brown uniforms lined up before the entrance of a small arrowhead-shaped tanz. Space-aged school bus. The Kalrani were, if anything, even more stiff and upright than yesterday, making Rite Orla and Tol Sefen from Third look positively laidback as they strolled up just before me. The half of Third without Combat Sight gets to go on leave, but Orla and Sefen are stuck with helping baby-sit – guarding against any Ionoth which have been missed by the sweeps and come lurching out of the gate at us. There were also a handful of greysuits and greensuits, but Taarel was most definitely in charge, and started us out with a crisp briefing about the arrangements for getting us to and from the gate-lock, and what we should do if anyone somehow gets separated. She thinks the job will take one to two weeks (twelve days).
One of the oldest Kalrani, a girl named Pen Alaz, piped up at the end of the briefing and asked Taarel if it was true gate closure would become a regular task. I could see from the way a few of the Kalrani leaned forward that this was an important question to them. I expect, given how long they've trained to go into the Ena and fight Ionoth, the idea of a career in world-wall repairs was as dull as it sounded to me.
"It won't happen," Taarel replied, clear, crisp and serious. "Rana Junction is a useful exercise for us, but those who propose more have not fully appreciated the current situation. New gates are tearing at increased rates. Ionoth numbers are multiplying. On some rotations we're facing doubled, even tripled populations. That is a situation which is only going to get worse, and we need to throw everything we have into a solution, because if the current rate is maintained, in a five-year KOTIS will be building locks not around gates, but around the few places without gates."
"Is the increase because of the shutdown of the Pillar?" Alaz asked.
"No," Taarel said, before I could do more than mentally flinch. "If anything, turning off that Pillar appears to have bought us a minor reprieve, as well as giving us the first real evidence that the Pillars are connected to the continuing fragmentation of the wall between near-space and real-space. In all the time we've kept exact records of them, there has been a slight yearly increase in the number of new gates formed, and the widening of existing gates. Fractional amounts, but undeniable. This past five-year there's been a marked rise, accompanied by a surge in Ionoth population. Inconveniently located gates are nothing to the need to arrest this deterioration, so don't concern yourself with talk of gate-closing assignments. There isn't time for that."
Taarel doesn't pussyfoot around. Though the increase in gate and Ionoth numbers isn't a secret, and has been reported in the news outside KOTIS, this was the first time I'd heard anyone be quite so blunt in their assessment of what it meant. No wonder they're throwing everything at Muina, pouring people and resources onto a planet they wouldn't even set foot on a few months ago. KOTIS is racing disaster.
Wednesday, April 23
A bit of an audience
Taarel's talk yesterday put my he-doesn't-like-me whine into perspective, and I at least partially succeeded in throwing off my gloom. It helped that Orla and Sefen from Third are willing to chat to me while they sit around being vaguely alert for attack. The Kalrani all listened intently to our rambling conversation, but for whatever reason they haven't said a word to me other than when we were introduced.
Rana Junction went way beyond my expectations of busy. Located in the very centre of Unara, it's a mega-city's worth of Grand Central Station. If you want to get from one major segment of the city to another you travel in to Rana Junction and then out to wherever. All roads lead to Rana Junction, basically. So having a metal box the size of a two-story suburban house crowding out one of the main concourses in the Junction – where people travel from one line to another – is a complete pain in the ass for everyone involved. While their nanotech allows the Tarens to reshape sections of their city comparatively easily, changing Rana Junction would make for major headaches.
There's little private transport in Unara: it's all 'trains' and elevators and travelator walkways. Emergency and military services and a few very rich people have these zippy individual carriages which can whiz around on any of the lines in between the normal services, and shunt off into special short slots to get them out of the way. We travelled from the place we're staying – a weird 'government' hotel – in one of these solo carriages and walked fifty or so metres under an escort of Unara's police force to where the lock around the gate was waiting for us, the entrance under a little tent. They hadn't officially announced anything about Setari trying to close gates, but we were all in uniform and the reaction from the crowd was intense. Unlike the Setari's home island, most people on Unara have never had a chance to glimpse a flesh-and-blood Setari, and even on Konna it's rare to see them in uniform. Usually the only time the Setari go out in Tare's cities in uniform is when they're killing Ionoth which have reached real-space, and that involves a lot of alerts and evacuations.
Having hundreds of people double-take, walk slower, or just plain stop and stare made for some serious congestion. The person in charge of the set-up – a fussy, bearded guy called Marda who worked for the transport department – ushered us hurriedly into the big tent and spent a lot of time quacking to the long-suffering woman in charge of the police detachment about making sure the foot traffic kept flowing. I'm pretty sure Marda didn't believe the Setari would be able to close the gate, and thought the entire exercise just an unnecessary complication of his already complicated job.
The gate-lock was a larger version of the usual metal box with bonus scanning equipment and what I presume is weaponry, but they'd prepared for the several days we'd have to spend in it by decking it out with low, soft chairs, and tables with food and hot drinks, and even a porta-potty in one corner. It looked truly odd, arranged around the big empty patch left by the gate.
One of the first things Taarel did was have Anasi – a delicate-looking boy of fifteen – use Illusion to show the current outline of the gate. She could have just used the interface to show everyone what she was seeing with Gate Sight, but I think this may have been more effective for our observers. The gate was enormous, much larger than the one they'd closed yesterday, and was starting to break through the floor of the gate-lock, like an invisible tree root.
The fuss outside grew the entire time we were there. I kept an eye on the gossip channels and Setari-devotee channels, and almost immediately had outside views of the tent entrance and its guards. We hadn't been there more than ten minutes before the transit authority switched the entire concourse to a no loitering zone, which meant that if you stayed in the area they wanted kept clear for more than five minutes without special clearance, or kept coming back to the area, a deterrent noise would start playing through your interface, growing in volume the longer you hung about. The rare few who could stand that were flagged personal escort out of the area.
There were a couple of cafés on the far side of the concourse which didn't fall into the keep-clear area and they abruptly became the busiest cafés on the planet, eventually needing police assistance to control their customer volume. The news channels began reporting the story within five minutes of our arrival, and managed to wring an official statement from the transit authority about the gate-closing (which didn't mention me, but speculation about me being here immediately reached the point of unofficially confirmed – people have a very good idea of the limits of the Setari's strength, and obviously they've never been known to close gates before). Some people were excited by the idea of seeing me, but most were far more interested in the Setari. And I think the Kalrani were considered even more exciting. There's no recorded sightings of them outside KOTIS in uniform.
Taarel, totally unconcerned by the fuss outside, kept today's session to one and a half kasse, dropping out the younger Kalrani after the first kasse. When she called a stop, and had Anasi display the current size of the gate, it was maybe a little more than a fifth gone.
"Another four sessions," she said to Marda, who was staring up at the revised gate outline as if he'd only just decided that this might work.
There was a delay while they made arrangements for us to leave: moving our carriage so that it could zip out and slot behind whatever train was arriving at the nearby platform, and having the police set up this very handy containment wall involving a double row of seven-foot sticks on stands which produced a blurring shield. This, of course, totally gave away our imminent departure and abruptly absolute thousands of people started to flood onto the concourse. The news channels later said that they'd been waiting in surrounding 'streets'. The noise was incredible, this echoing excited chatter. The police had been given plenty of opportunity to assess the potential fuss, and we were in no danger of being overrun, but I feel sorry for them handling the security headache this is causing.
The crowd roared and cheered when we emerged. Taarel responded with a brief smile and nod in the general direction of the masses, but then kept us moving the short distance to the platform and through the door to the private section. She kept her attention on the Kalrani, making sure they weren't too overwhelmed and didn't lag, while Orla and Sefen bracketed me. It seemed a much longer walk than it had on the way in.
Everyone except Orla and Sefen was exhausted. I managed not to fall asleep on the train back, but as soon as I reached my hotel room I dropped and slept for four hours – as I expect all the Ena manipulation talents did, except Taarel, who paid the price of being captain and had to talk to people first. Fortunately, it's not just us along: with a half-dozen KOTIS support staff we've plenty of people to keep things running through the frequent napping. There's an evening meal scheduled half an hour from now, and then medical exams, bleh.