We did some mild training, and grabbed a light mid-morning meal before First Squad went into rotation. Then I had weapons training, which being drained and tired really did not help with. Drake was very tolerant, which is one good thing about him having low expectations for me. After that, I went up to the roof, and admired the sheer blackness of the approaching thunderclouds while I tried to think up a way to tell Ruuel that maybe someone else should train me after all. It was hard to come up with a reason that didn't sound wildly insulting, or underline that the problem was just that I was too emotionally messed up about him. I'd rather not have to deal with him at all for a while – not until I stop waking up knowing he's not near me.
Everything I could come up with sounded so feeble, and I had just decided that I'd put off changing trainers till tomorrow when I felt someone standing to my left. The Nuran, Inisar.
"Hello again," I said, after a moment. I'm sure if anyone was paying attention to my vitals monitor they would have noticed a huge spike, but since he was just standing there, all I did was add: "Another rescue attempt, or something else this time?"
"Do you no longer choose to aid the Tarens?"
The question was so neutral I couldn't tell if he was simply curious, or was ready to cart me off through the Rift as soon as I said 'yes'. Or kill me if I didn't.
"No." I stayed sitting down, though I had to lean back a little to look up at him. "Situation hasn't gotten better. More Ionoth, more gates. Don't see how I can walk away from that. I had a – well, I have lots of questions, but I particularly wanted to ask what Cruzatch are."
"What do you think they are?" he asked. Totally unhelpful.
"Muinans become Ionoth. Trying to make themselves immortal. Or into gods. Or both. And now trying to stop Tarens because Tarens reached the point where they can move about spaces and find Pillars and turn them off. Do the Cruzatch drive massives to attack Nurans too?"
"I have been forbidden to answer questions."
That made me feel nervous, since if he wasn't here to talk, kidnapping or assassination moved up the list. "Just here to look at the scenery?"
His eyes – rather too like Ruuel's for my comfort – considered me steadily. "I am commanded to observe your development as a touchstone. While I am here I am to avoid all contact with any of the lost children of Muina."
The rules-lawyering made me smile. He wasn't quite answering my questions, and he wasn't talking to a Muinan-descendant. "Following instructions very exactly. I don't know which bits of what's happening to me are the touchstone part, but just lately I've started projecting my dreams into the Ena. If that's what being a touchstone is, would appreciate a few hints as to how not to have dreams. Or at least stop half-killing myself with them."
"Control is not a thing gained during sleep," he said, and handed me a book. I glanced down at it, very surprised, and when I looked up again he was gone.
"Straight answers not a thing gained from Nurans," I muttered, and sighed, then looked with extreme interest at the book.
It was handmade, the paper creamy and lightly textured, with firmly sewn bindings forming a thick solid edge. The covers were plain wooden boards, fine and undecorated. The whole thing looked newly made, and when I opened it the writing was dark and cleanly written. And in Old Muinan, which I have as much chance of reading and understanding as Old English. I snorted, but carefully went through it page by page, committing them to my log – and hoping for useful illustrations.
Then it was time to face the music. I'd already checked on 'my' captains, but Maze was still on rotation and Ruuel was asleep. I tossed up contacting Taarel or Grif Regan from Second Squad or even Zan, but decided to skip the preliminaries and emailed Selkie the conversation from my log, with a subject heading of "Nurans" and in the body: "Have neat handwriting." I cc'd the email to Maze, Ruuel and Isten Notra and then sat there trying to puzzle out what the damn thing was about. Not, as I'd hoped, "The Idiot's Guide to Touchstones".
I'd just decided it was some kind of history of Muina when Isten Notra sent a channel request to me with the text: "You are an endless source of amusement," making me laugh.
"Hello," I said. "Suspect 'amusement' is not word everyone will use."
"You may well be right. And how cruel of you to only send the first four pages with that log. Pass me the rest."
That was easily done – I'd already separated out the fragment for my own review. "Can you read Old Muinan, Isten Notra? This is Nuran history book?"
"More than that, child. It is a copy of an account written by a Lantaren just after arrival on Nuri. It is a compilation of everything the Muinans who fled to Nuri knew of the disaster and the events leading up to it. It is–" Her voice throbbed. "It is very exciting, and I will leave you now while I devour it. You'd best get yourself to Selkie's office before he finishes reviewing your conversation."
I'd not been to Selkie's office before – it was in a part of KOTIS I think of as 'Command Central'. An area with lots of bluesuits walking about, and an excess of meeting rooms. I could tell when Selkie finished reviewing my log, because an appointment for a meeting with him appeared in my calendar, scheduled for immediately. But I guess Isten Notra had already told him I was on my way, because he simply waited for me to show.
Some offices on Tare have remnants of design from when Tarens used table-top computers, but most of them are like Selkie's – just a meeting room assigned to a particular person, with storage space for equipment, but little to do with desks or paper shuffling. Selkie's had a small rectangular coffee table thing, with four low chairs around it, and a taller café-type round table with two 'upright' chairs with high backs (like wing-back chairs). He was in one of these, and didn't look amused.
"Sit."
I put the book on the table and sat, feeling like I'd been called to the principal's office. Except it was a school I couldn't go home from at the end of the day. For psychic soldiers.
"I've spoken to you on the subject of your alert before," he said. "If I need to do so again, you will have a squad assigned to you permanently. Do you understand?"
Setting off my alert wouldn't have made any difference if the Nuran had wanted to kill me, and I'd been all prepared to say that until I saw the look in Selkie's eyes. Any argument, and he'd assign a squad to me straight away.
"Understood," I said, resigned to having to do it.
"What is the basis for your theory about the Cruzatch?"
"Arenrhon obviously about godhood or immortality. Bodies in the non-blurry sarcophagi were burnt. And Cruzatch keep showing up. Is just a guess – we don't have anything like Cruzatch on Earth. Don't think I've even heard any legends about things like that."
He didn't comment, but didn't look surprised, either. I was hardly the first to speculate on what the people at Arenrhon were trying to achieve.
"Remain here until Notra has reported on this," he said, picking up the book and leaving.
It wasn't a short book, but I'm not altogether sure if having to sit in Selkie's office for a couple of hours was supposed to be punishment, or just that Selkie wanted me somewhere he thought it hard for the Nuran to get to. I mused for a while on where the Nuran was going to sleep on a planet like Tare, where there was so little unoccupied land. Avoiding all contact with the descendants of Muina would be quite a task.
Not that he seemed to have had the least trouble finding me. If he had been sent to kill me, I'd be dead right now. I think in a way I've grown used to the idea of probably dying. That's what spending so much time in intensive care does for you.
Selkie didn't come back straight away, and I ended up playing one of the interface games I'd bought, caught up in the very curious world Tare had been before it had advanced so far technologically. Cave-dwellers, with their whitestone cities under a sky of stone, and thus with an 'outside' they would go out to, of sorts. Ionoth were present, but far less of an issue, and there was not this obsession with the yet-to-be-formed Setari. Instead the focus was on sorties into the surrounding darkness of the caves, and tunnels leading to undiscovered parts. It was Tare's 'Here Be Dragons' stage, and really quite a different world.
When First Squad came back from rotation, Maze replied to my email with: "Urth person is asking for a lecture. I'll see you shortly." But it was Ruuel, not Maze, who showed up first, walking in and sitting opposite me while I was preoccupied with a puzzle. I felt him there, and shut down the game, opening my eyes.
"The trigger technique was not successful?" he asked, presumably having spotted the huge circles under my eyes.
"Long nightmare about looking for triggers," I said, shrugging. "Will try the action variation tonight." That was where a particular action on your own part, like a hand signal, was the trigger to wake up. "Do you think Nuran was actually answering my question, or just being deeply annoying?"
He tilted his head slightly. "It is possible that your abilities are triggering during your dreams purely because you have no control over them waking. Have you been practicing sensing the location of those around you?"
I nodded, though it was not so much practising as I increasingly happened to know people were on the far sides of walls.
"When the Cruzatch first attacked you in Kalasa, did you sense it before you saw it?"
That was hard to answer. "Don't really know. Don't think I heard it, but something made me look up."
"We'll try a visualisation exercise until Isten Notra is ready. Close your eyes."
I gave him a rather wry look, which he didn't react to, and after a moment I obediently shut my eyes, despite knowing my face had gone red. And I was stupidly happy. It's the feeling that I'm an annoyance to him – and the idea that he and Taarel are together – that bothers me. I'm still not pleased that he went along with upsetting me for the purposes of testing, but – yeah, I can't pretend that that or even the high probability that he's in love with Taarel cured me of wanting him.
For the visualisation exercise he described a room. High ceiling, Pillars, some low cushioned benches, and a whole bunch of square display cases with different things in them – old weapons and jars and jewellery. I had to hold a picture of what he was describing in my mind, and repeat it back to him with every thing he added. One of those memory games. I was surprised at how easy I found it. Ruuel describes things very vividly, and I could really see the room, so had no trouble repeating back the contents, but started to struggle with an increasing headache.
"This is making my head hurt," I said eventually, opened my eyes and then flinched because everything around me was blurry and seeing that felt like a needle going into my brain. Just faintly, I glimpsed the room he'd described, superimposed on Selkie's office, but then I had to close my eyes and do rather a lot of head-clutching. Ruuel, after a little pause, moved me to another room and called a medic up to drug me to the point where the pain was pushed behind a wall, but didn't really go away. I was very wan and shaky when Maze and Selkie arrived, but at least could open my eyes.
They'd ordered food, and eating did help me a little, but I mainly wanted a dark place to curl up in, and only half paid attention to Ruuel describing the results of the visualisation – not looking at the log file he shared at all – until he started pointing out details in the ghostly image overlaid on Selkie's office which he hadn't mentioned but which were in the museum he'd been describing. And something which he didn't remember being there. Not to mention that the things he
had
described were exactly correct.
"We will obtain a current log of the museum for comparison," Selkie said. He paused a beat, then added to me: "Attempting to use this ability to see your own world would be crass stupidity."
Guess I'd been looking too obviously delighted. "Probably," I agreed, reluctantly. "Will stay away from trying to visualise Earth until have better idea of limits. Dream visualisation I had night before last of sheep was set on Muina though. And one with origami cranes was Earth building. Possibly all the energy isn't in the looking but the reproducing."
"Either way, you will limit visualisations to controlled experiments until further notice. Knowledge of the expansion of these abilities remains restricted to the assigned squads. For the short term, the other events of today are wholly restricted, even within your squads."
He brought Isten Notra into channel with us then, and she gave us a very cheerful run-down of the content of the Nuran history.
"What this book primarily gives us is confirmation of certain assumptions, and a timeline, but also a few discoveries," she said. "The author was not directly involved in the creation of the Pillars, but details her memories of the project from the time it was first proposed by a group called House Dayen. The major revelation is that stabilising travel through deep-space was only a fortuitous additional benefit, while their primary goal was the aether, which was intended to power what is termed as 'great devices'. There was considerable debate between the controlling houses regarding the risks, and it was the unexpected support of a House Zolen which saw the project move forward. The author notes that during the period of construction, House Zolen also built a number of 'insufferably proud' underground dwellings, which is almost certainly a reference to the Arenrhon installation.
"The Pillars project was considered a resounding success until gates began to tear between real-space and near-space. Ionoth became an immediate issue, and after numerous attacks House Dayen created the Ddura using one of these 'great devices'. The disaster followed only five days later. First, news of an attack by unknowns on House Dayen, swiftly followed by loss of contact with Kalasa. And reports were received from those within sight that a wound had appeared on 'Daman', which is one of the names for the Muinan moon.