Gratuitous Epilogue

11 - October

October 19

Grilled

Just finished being examined at the inquiry. It wasn’t fun – they had a Sight Sight talent I’ve not met before who acted in combination with a medical scanner as a lie detector. They started out by checking whether there were any missions I’d done which hadn’t been presented, and then if anyone had ever asked me to use my powers for non-mission things, and then whether I ever used my powers of my own accord for non-mission things. Which of course was yes, and then they wanted to know exactly what and when and why and spent ages trying to get me to admit to doing anything which could be seriously disapproved of. I’m so glad I resisted the temptation to peek on Nils and Zee when they went off camping. They also wanted to know if I thought I had any limits to what I could "make real". I said: "My tendency to collapse after ten seconds, and then for whatever it is to fade away." They wouldn’t just leave it at that – particularly when Lira is still non-faded. I still don’t know if I made her or not, and they weren’t tremendously satisfied at my answer to whether I thought I did: "I could barely think at all at the time. All I knew was that the roof was falling in, and so I tried to stuff us both into a corner. I’d completely forgotten she was projecting herself. I wasn’t trying to do anything more than stop bits of rock hitting us."

The questioning wasn’t hostile, just a lot of polite, clever questions to go with the lie detector, but I hated it all the same. When they’d run out of new ways to try and trip me up, they asked if I wanted to say anything, and I said: "Just that it’s very uncomfortable being treated as a potential criminal all the time."

That comment got a lot of headlines (though for all the protests, people are thoroughly enjoying all the information coming out via the inquiry, and the viewing statistics of me being questioned are pretty much 99% of the population – the other one percent being too young to watch). Kaoren says it’s lucky that I live such a blameless life, or at least am too embarrassed at the idea of being found out to spy. We talked about what would have happened if they had hit on the only things that I did want to hide, which was my theories about the creation of Muina, and the Kolaren government trying to buy me. I’d spoken very briefly to Raiten to ask him what I should answer if I was asked anything which touched on that, and he told me I should just tell the truth. I’m still glad that the subject didn’t come up, though.

There was a lot of discussion about whether Lira should be questioned, but fortunately we won that argument by pulling the too traumatised card. The nightmare worked for us in that respect, and KOTIS had mine and Lira’s main medic talk for a while about the anxiety attacks the inquiry had caused her and how her loss of conscious control of her powers could be psychosomatic given the extreme trauma associated with them. Lira was very annoyed about any of this being public, but pleased that she didn’t have to front the inquiry. It would have been damn interesting if she had – she would have given them all an imperial dressing down, because her response to upset is to attack.

It’s the submissions stage next, which should be even more annoying. I’m going to try and ignore it, but I’m not sure I’ll succeed in concentrating on other things. I’m going to have to start properly planning for my wedding, which is, gods, only five months away. It’s weird – I feel like I’m already married to Kaoren – but the idea of the wedding itself makes me nervous. I wish Mum was here. No sign of the gate to Earth becoming active again in the near future, which has disappointed me a lot – I want to send more letters. Probably January, if it really is a Muinan year between each opening.

Maze and Alay’s wedding was glorious. Early Autumn, so that the heat had dropped away, and there were berries on bushes, and birds everywhere and a kind of gauzy haze over everything. And it smelled wonderful. Snow is all very amusing and different for a Sydney girl, but it was so nice to be away from it for a day. Keer’s property is all ferns and beams of light spearing down through the canopy, and edges around a narrow bit of tea-coloured lake. Most of it hasn’t been cleared at all, except around the house. And the whole place is totally infested with different varieties of deer – some where the adults are no taller than Ys and some almost moose-sized. Mesiath is a bit more dangerous to live in than Pandora – more snakes and poisonous bugs, and there’s already been a couple of incidents of people finding the local hunting cats – daturs – stalking them or sitting uncomfortably close watching them. And there are lots of smaller hunting creatures like the martens (named for the pine martens shown in the Planet Earth documentary) and hordes of little nut-eaters, and too many birds to count. Mesiath totally seethes with wildlife. It’s always great fun watching Tarens deal with outside – they’re getting better at it, but the Setari families had some real adjustments coming from Tare to live on the islands. Mesiath is even more overwhelming for them, and there always seems to be someone shrieking about bugs or lizards.

Part of the pre-wedding preparation had been to sweep the area using Combat Sight, and relocate a couple of snakes, and Keer and Maze had been having a lot of fun finding and arranging big stones into natural seating areas, and shaping stone benches to cover enough seating for the wedding. Most of the benches they donated to other people once they were done, but before then the lot of them arranged in two rows did make it feel rather like an enormous cathedral. The ceremony was different from Lohn and Mara’s – not so strictly traditional. None of the bathing and painting the bride and groom, or the thing with the blindfolds. Still had the cake-making thing, except both the bride and the groom’s family made one (gi-normous flat brown cakes) with incredibly intricate patterns on top made of a kind of dusted sugar which were apparently luck-wishes – wealth, joy, fame, family, all that kind of thing – and there’s a great deal of interest in which pattern you get on your piece of cake when it’s shared out. Alay wore a gorgeous filmy dress in shades of violet and gold instead of the more traditional robe (somewhat Grecian with a kind of laced bodice) and simply looked fantastic. Completely radiant. Maze was so at peace, and didn’t seem able to take his eyes off her the entire time.

The after-wedding party was fun – Maze’s mother is a musician, and played nice music with a couple of friends, and there was some light-hearted dancing – Zee and Nils did an aerial slow dance and then everyone who could manage to get themselves in the air followed suit and that was pretty awesome to watch. Kaoren and I didn’t dance because Sen had been playing with Ketzaren’s hair – she loves trying to do everyone’s hair – and Deal had run up and pushed her over and she’d jammed her elbow. Deal used to get on quite well with Sen, but as he’s grown attached to his new parents, he’s become very jealous of them. And Sen’s tendency to treat all the Senior Setari as adored favourites, clambering all over them, makes him particularly upset.

Sen was mainly just shocked to start with, but then found that her arm really hurt when she moved it and burst into tears. And Ys zoomed down from the top patio – literally: she levitated – and snatched her up and I (a little too far away to have done any snatching) fully expected her to turn a total basilisk glare on Deal, but instead she just said sternly: "They’re not going to stop wanting you, no matter what anyone else does. Stop being so afraid," and lifted herself and Sen over to me and Kaoren.

We did some hugging and found a numbing salve to put on Sen’s elbow, and then we had an interesting talk with Ys about the fact that her levitation talent isn’t strong enough for her to lift herself, let alone herself and Sen. Seems Ys worked out how to expand her connection to the Ena shortly after touching me when I had my senses fully extended, but decided not to mention it in case we expected her to spend more time training her talents – or trying to train other people to expand their connections – which would cut down on her reading time. She’d tried teaching Rye, and since he hadn’t managed it, had kept quiet about it. "Rye is too interested in bits and pieces of what’s nearby," she said, shrugging. "It stops him from looking at it all at once."

This was a very interesting development from the Setari’s point of view, because Ys is the only person without a strong Sight talent who has managed to make the expansion, and she can also obviously do it very quickly, which is what the Taren and Kolaren Setari who have achieved it have been working on. We held off on interrogating her too much during the party, but she got to have a long conversation with Kaoren, Tsur Selkie and Maze a few days later. I was actually more interested in what she’d said to Deal and told her quietly, after Ketz had brought Deal to apologise, and Kaoren had taken Sen off to fly up to the very tops of the trees, that she had reminded me of Isten Notra. This is a huge compliment to Ys, so of course she didn’t believe me, but I explained that while she’d said it a lot more bluntly than Isten Notra might have, it was the same sort of clear-sighted response. Then I threw her further off-balance by telling her how much I envied her for being able to levitate.

Maze and Alay’s house wasn’t quite ready in time for the wedding, but they’ll be moving in soon. It’s on the top of one of the small hills on Siriath, and Maze has endless plans for a kind of rock garden and lawn and all sorts of trees and things made of stone. I showed him some pictures of Mount Tomah, back near Sydney, and he was very pleased and inspired by that, and has stolen some idea from it for The Wedding Garden as well.

It feels strange not working while the inquiry is on. I was used to the routine of it all. I still get physical training, and the kids get to train with me now, instead of at the school, but it’s a different kind of routine, and I feel very shut in at times. Fortunately it’s warming up, and the drifts are melting, and the early flowers should be poking through soon. I’ve been burying myself in subtitling the last few days. Ages back now I projected a TV and DVD-player and a bunch of DVDs and did my best to make them last a long while, and the technicians have been trying to untangle the DVD coding ever since. We could make the machines run easily enough, but what we wanted was, instead of me spending hours projecting Earth documentaries really slowly, that I just project a DVD and we copy the data off it and then voila! And that meant not just being able to get to the data on the DVD (apparently not too hard – Tarens went through a similar technology stage) but translating the DVD coding. That’s taken an age, but they finally did it. I projected and copied Blue Planet and The Life of Mammals and that sort of thing to start with, and then a whole bunch of DVDs for my own entertainment – so nice to watch some of my favourite movies again. I’m slowly going to subtitle these for the kids' benefit, but aren’t really planning to turn myself into a film industry, so I’m setting them so they can’t be spread about.

I’ve been working on Spirited Away first, running it in Japanese, with English subtitles, and adding Taren subtitles underneath that. I chose it partly because Ys is still pushing through on learning English (but very annoyed at how illogical it is) and also because the lead character is called Sen. Sen will love it when I’m done, no matter how little she understands.

I’ve also realised I can project DVDs of movies I haven’t even seen, which will be pretty cool.

Twelfth is finally going to be posted here soon. It’s been so long. Zan and I write occasionally, and she seems okay, but I want to see her to be sure.