"Ask, always. My response will depend on the question."
"Why do you wear your hair in such difficult style? Doesn't it take a lot effort to keep up, especially when spaces flooded or rain on you?"
Taarel laughed, not offended. On Tare, no-one finds it strange at all if you suddenly smile or laugh at nothing. The voices in your head are quite real here.
"It's an exercise in Ena manipulation," she told me. My hair had been brushed out but not styled yet, and she reached over a finger and made a long strand of it curl just by touching it. "Ena manipulation is primarily used on the gates, but if we wanted to spend the time and effort we could effect the structure of the spaces themselves. More difficult is to alter that which is not of the Ena. It is possible, but takes a great deal of strength and control. Once it was beyond me to move a single strand, and to arrange my hair became not only something of a boast, but a daily practice." She looked amused, and added out loud: "Sometimes I don't style it as I normally do, and my squad does not recognise me."
"I don't recognise you now," Sefen said, and blushed bright red. He totally worships Taarel. "Nor myself," he added.
Formal clothing for guys on Tare doesn't resemble Earth's penguin suit at all. It's mostly in pale natural colours, with long narrow-leg pants, soft shoes, and a shift and coat which goes down to about knee-length. Vaguely Middle-Eastern, but no turbans that I've seen yet. Female dresses are more what I'm used to, except with a tendency for multiple layers.
I returned to the private channel and asked: "Is there anything Unara Lahanti doesn't know about, which I should not talk about?"
"The Lahanti will have been kept fully apprised," Taarel said, sounding thoughtful. "But as for other guests – it would be best to follow the Lahanti's lead. Discuss any topic she raises. Remember, if anything happens that concerns or confuses you, open a channel to me."
I spent the rest of the time asking about table manners, just as I would if I were sent to have dinner with the Queen on half a day's notice. A single-carriage train even plusher than my hotel room took us to the official residence's own station, and the Kalrani and Setari, except for the unshakeably at-ease Taarel, went extremely po-faced and upright, like they were on parade, which looked very odd when they weren't in uniform. The room we were taken to was already crowded with people, and I think I was introduced to all of them. Only my log is going to remember any of that.
The Lahanti of Unara is called Sebreth Tanay. She looked younger than I expected, in her forties, and had disconcertingly clear grey eyes, very unusual on Tare. She reminded me a little of Isten Notra, with the same incisive intelligence, though I didn't feel nearly as drawn to her or comfortable with her.
Not that the Lahanti was nasty to me or anything, and I wasn't sitting there thinking she was evil. But she wasn't interested in me so much as my effect on her world and the problems and benefits I represented. I was placed next to her for dinner and after the usual questions about my first few weeks on Muina, she interrogated me about Earth. Population, form of government, weapons capability, complete lack of verifiable psychic talents, likely reaction to Tarens showing up. Most of her questions I'd been asked before, and my answers were probably in reports she'd read, but I speak Taren better than the first time I was asked, so I suppose it wasn't a complete waste to grill me directly. The thing I had to keep emphasising was how disparate Earth was, that there would be no unified response to the Tarens, even from a single country, let alone the entire planet. I kept barely getting a chance to taste each of the courses they brought out because the Lahanti kept me struggling to answer the entire time.
The dinner seemed to be serving two purposes: to let the Lahanti and a couple of other government types get a better handle of what Earth was like, and to let the Lahanti's children talk to real live Setari. I didn't hear much of what they were chatting about, but the son was laying some full-on charm on Taarel and I think the two daughters were thinking of renaming Morel 'morsel' and having him for dinner.
I'm glad I didn't have to face today back when I could barely speak the language. I'm pretty sure most of my answers used the right words and only slightly idiotic grammar. I'm also glad that the Kalrani were so obviously tired, so we didn't have to stick it out too long.
And we can keep the dresses! I am
so
tempted to draw my lab rat on mine, just to see people's reactions, but my role has mutated enough that my lab rat doesn't really fit anymore. I'm an enhancing dousing rod now – they poke me at alien ruins and see what happens. We're flying back to KOTIS headquarters, and I'll be glad to be in my apartment again. I hope Ghost's waiting for me.
Tuesday, April 29
Here and There
My schedule for the next week has been set: I'm flying back to Muina tomorrow, as are Third Squad. Third Squad are going to Arenrhon to relieve Fourth, who've been on continuous duty for a very long time now. Third is dropping me off at Pandora on the way, to take part in an intensive investigation of the platform there and how it works as a communicator. Which means lots of headaches for me, which I can't say I'm at all pleased about.
I spent a big chunk of my day curled up in bed, having Ghost purr for me and thinking about a life scheduled and arranged by committee. The only person who has offered me a choice since the Nuran is a reporter I ended up getting arrested. If I pushed, could I get more say in what I do and where I go?
Must keep in mind that obediently standing where I'm put is still far better than independent and starving on Muina.
Wednesday, April 30
Now and Then
Eeli is so funny. She's been home visiting her family (Kalrani and Setari do get proper holidays and to visit their families and so forth – KOTIS is like a big strict military boarding school, not a prison) and was in a fever of joy about seeing her younger brother and sister. But she was so chagrined that she missed out on playing dress-ups, and seeing half her squad in fancy clothes, that she could barely manage two sentences without looking at the log images again and wishing she'd been there and saying how wonderful everyone looked.
I was given a little present before the
Litara
started out – Euka had finished my Earth clock and calendar program and it's all installed. He told me that I should make comparisons with the clock on my phone to make sure he had everything right, and to let him know if there were any adjustments. He'd mimicked the look of my phone's clock and calendar very exactly, although using Tare-characters instead of Earth-characters. Hard to believe it's the end of April already. More than five months, now.
I'm a different person. Yet I'm still me. A lot of the things I used to think were interesting seem so stupid in retrospect. All that time wasted watching reality TV. I still miss Earth music, though I'm getting a little more into Taren songs now that the language isn't such a chore. I miss my favourite books, and I wish I knew what happened next on a lot of TV shows and web comics, and there were a few movies coming up that I wanted to see. I'm feeling more and more disconnected from my own world, and yet still in no way Taren.
It bugs me that I'm basically swapping planets with Fourth Squad. Not just because of Ruuel. I'm still dreaming about Ruuel every night, but I'm hoping that a long patch of not seeing him will cure me. The problem is Fourth is the squad I've connected with the most outside of First. Particularly Mori, who I think I was becoming a sort of friend. But between shifts, and assignments on different planets, and assignments to different squads, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to overcome the barrier that second level monitoring already raises.
Thinking about that, and wishing I could send Alyssa a letter asking how she's going, prompted me to write to Nenna again, even though she didn't answer me last time. We're about to arrive at Pandora, so she won't get it till tomorrow at the earliest, but I hope she writes back. The Lents were so nice to me, and it'll never stop bothering me that I ended up hurting them.
Time to go be poked at mysterious alien installations. Hopefully they won't expect me to stand about getting headaches for too long.
May
Saturday, May 3
Two Steps Forward, Ten Steps Back
New resolutions:
1. Always carry full Setari equipment.
2. Find a lighter.
3. Be careful what I wish for.
Monday, May 5
Extended dodging and swimming practice
It was just on dawn at Pandora when I arrived with Third Squad. My labrattery session wasn't for a couple of hours, so Taarel handed me over to two greensuits who were to be my primary babysitters: Esem and Hetz. They were a younger and older guy, polite, but super po-faced, making me sorry that Third Squad left almost immediately with the
Litara.
I would have loved to listen to Eeli's reaction to Pandora's changes. It's grown so big, I could hardly believe it: still plenty of tents, but dozens of buildings in varying stages of growth and fit-out. My greensuits showed me to a room in the main building, just a bed and a shelf, but with a window looking over the lake. I left my things, ate a little lunch/breakfast, and asked if I could go for a walk along the lake since I wanted to visit my otters, to make sure their stream was undisturbed. Esem nixed that idea – I'd have to schedule any departure from Pandora – but was quite amenable to taking me to look at my old tower while we were waiting for my first appointment.
It gave me a very eerie feeling to explore the old village, to check out how far the cleaning-up project has advanced. They've been concentrating on the buildings around the central amphitheatre section, removing encroaching plants and encrusting dirt, cataloguing the objects but leaving all but the most fragile in place. I kept peering through the windows expecting to see people who belong here, instead of greysuits and greensuits. They're even planning to restore the gardens, because the whole town is going to be a museum site. So is my tower, but as Fort Cass, part of the history of the stray who unlocked the world. That spun me out, and I'm still not sure whether to be upset or amused that they're turning a piece of me into a tourist site. My blanket, mats and pots look incredibly pathetic.
Far too soon, Esem and Hetz herded me to the amphitheatre, where I was introduced to the small group of technicians who were going to give me headaches. They were all eager to start work: it seems they've been waiting for some considerable time to get their hands on me. The cats have all moved out, off to a part of the town which isn't being worked on yet. But I'd noticed two or three in Pandora: kittens kidnapped and adopted, and one or two slightly less feral adults on the look-out for food.
The technicians explained that they were investigating how the platform operated and where the aether went when it flowed down to it. Since I could hear the Ddura, they were hoping that they'd be able to get clearer or different reading of the platform's operation when I was in contact with it.
"Simply try to communicate with the Ddura as you have previously," said Jelan Scal, the geeky guy in charge. "I know that the volume of the Ddura is painful for you, so we'll keep the sessions as short as possible. What we want is quality, not quantity. We've found that we take much clearer readings from subjects standing on the platform, so we'll monitor the platform's reactions with you there until the Ddura arrives, and then we'll keep you for only a brief exchange. Ready?"
I nodded, and walked up the stair onto the platform, betting that the 'brief exchange' would end up much longer and hoping that the Ddura was by now so used to there being Muinans again that it would listen to me when I told it to shut up. I turned to Jelan Scal, who looked pleased and started to say something, and then he disappeared.
For a moment I really thought that Scal – and everyone else in the room and all the machinery – had just vanished. But of course it was the other way around, as glowing walls and the big hole in the back of the room made obvious. It was a different platform room, broken and split, with a chunk of floor and back wall missing so I could see I was perched beside a drop to a big flooded chamber. I walked to the edge of the platform, peering down, and could see what looked like some kind of cistern system, the water quite clear, with low outlet tunnels.
Not inviting. I shook my head and tried to work out how to leave. Just wanting to go didn't work. I walked back into the centre of the platform and wanted very hard, and that didn't work either. And then I looked up, feeling uncomfortable, and there was a Cruzatch crawling along the ceiling toward me.
Wanting really, really a lot to leave didn't help either.
The Cruzatch was moving quickly, completely upside-down: Spiderman with a burning Cheshire Cat grin. I didn't have a whole lot of choices. I sure as hell wasn't going to fight it. I didn't seem able to conveniently teleport back to Pandora. So I turned and dived into the water.
It was a long drop, and the water shockingly cold, but I entered clean, angling toward one of rectangular outlets. They were a fair distance and I knew I wouldn't be able to reach them, let alone swim through one, without surfacing for air. I paused, floating underwater as I peered upward, and couldn't see anything behind or above me. The ceiling and the wall above the outlet was empty of grinning black shapes and so I swam hastily upward, surfaced just long enough to take a huge breath, then dove again.
I felt a jolt on my heel, then a grip on my ankle, and I was hauled backward out of the water, straight upward. The Cruzatch didn't need to cling to the ceiling or wall, flying easily, and its hold was both painfully tight and so hot it felt like even my very resistant nanoliquid suit was having trouble. Coughing because water had gone up my nose, I kicked upward with my free foot, connecting twice but not seeming to bother it much until I made a nanoliquid spike extend out the bottom of my boot to spear into its arm. It let go, white light spurting.