Gratuitous Epilogue

14 - January

January 15

Close Call

Sight Sight talents are tremendously useful.

Since Maze and Alay adopted, Alay hasn’t been scheduled to be one of my minders, but we do see her quite regularly. She’ll drop in to chat (to me or to my minders), or we’ll see her when we go visit to view the latest things Maze, Rye and Lianz have done to Maze’s garden, or during one of the school runs or at someone else’s house. Still, it had been a few weeks since I’d seen her – she’s been travelling about a bit less now that she’s getting toward the awkward end of her pregnancy. The weather’s been tremendously hot and sunny lately, and our shady pool is excellent for swimming on these really sunny days, and the waterfall is always a favourite, so I invited Mara, Alay, Ketz and Jeh to bring their kids over for a small swimming party while Fourth and the combined non-pregnant bits of First/Second were due to be off an on Ena mission. Sen of course leapt on Mara and Alay to say hello to their babies. Babies are definitely her favourite thing in the whole world (and she’s literally counting the days till our wedding and is expecting Kaoren and I to produce one immediately).

Kaoren has been giving Sen a lot of Sights training the past couple of months while she struggles with Place, and also teaching her the ethics and social conventions which have grown up around talents who can see things people might wish to keep private. Sen, while a very joyful little girl, is well-versed in harsh realities. I’m willing to bet she was in no doubt about the enjoyment Kimirenar got from his treatment of Ys and Rye, and Sight Sight can reveal all sorts of infections and fatal diseases and cancers and things. Kaoren says he’s seen pregnant women and known that the child wasn’t viable and there would be a miscarriage, and it was obvious that Sen had seen much the same thing. We’ve been giving her lots of tips about what she should do when she sees personal information about someone – particularly how to keep calm about exciting pregnancies, or what to do if someone’s sick or ill. Dragging someone into your bathroom to ask if their secret is a secret is not the best way to go about it. In the end, since anything Sen could see would probably be obvious to Kaoren or Siame as well, we told her if her Sight showed her something she wanted to talk about, she should check with one of them before doing or saying anything.

Sen still isn’t much of an actress yet, though, so when Lohn, Mara and Alay arrived with their horde, I knew that something was up by the way she behaved after her usual greeting-the-babies hugs. She wasn’t totally obvious about it, just getting rather subdued, but it was enough to have Ys and Rye, who know Sen backward and forward, trying to work out why she was hiding being upset. I simply opened a channel to all my kids, and asked Sen if this was one of those Sight issues we’d been talking about, then was all approving about the fact that Sen had sent for Siame. I could see Mara had picked up on the atmosphere too, and after a sharp glance at Sen and then me, she tidied everyone down to the pool, making sure Lohn was along as supervisor, then came back. I did my part by keeping Alay distracted, and giving Sen a hug to make her feel better.

Siame was in her studio, which we’d built her on the sunniest side of the hill – south, and kind of around the corner of the hill from the house on the way to The Wedding Garden[15]. Rye (with Maze and Kaoren’s help) worked out the course of pathways between our house and the two new buildings, and laid stone paving and even steps in a few places, so they’re both connected but quite separate from our house. That Siame, still mildly paint-daubed, suddenly dropped out of the air on our patio rather than walking told me that Sen must have sounded quite urgent in her summons.

This was one time I really appreciated how in-command and self-assured Siame is. Completely unfussed, she sat down beside Alay, asked if she minded her checking something, and then when Alay shook her head, bent down and rested her cheek against Alay’s stomach. Then she said in exactly the same unhurried tone: "No immediate danger, but the umbilical cord is wrapped around her throat. You’d best visit the medics."

Alay had gone completely white, of course, but Siame being so calm and businesslike helped and Mara very practically said that she’d borrow our sled and take her straight away. Jeh, Ketz and Lohn could stay to watch the kids, and of course I would be there and so were my guards for the day (two from Twelfth Squad) so there were no problems leaving them. Siame enhanced and levitated herself and Alay down to our boathouse, and Mara turned and gave Sen a sudden, fierce hug, squeezing her tightly, then trotted off after them. Sen waited till we were safely alone and then burst into tears and told me that the baby was unhappy, as I suppose an unborn baby might be if something was twisting around her throat.

It hadn’t pulled too tight, thankfully, but was apparently on the more dangerous end of occurrences. I’m not sure what the solution would have been on Earth – an emergency Caesarean? – but Taren technology plus psychics meant that a telekinetic medical technician was able to carefully untangle everything within a short time and, though they kept Alay in medical overnight just to be sure, she and the baby seem to be fine. Not fun for Maze to come back from an Ena mission to find Alay under observation in medical, and no more fun for Mara or Ketz or Jeh, all of whom are just starting to show, and all of whom really really don’t want to think about all the things which can go wrong with babies. Lianz and Kara had spent a pretty terrible afternoon as well, since they’d immediately noticed that Alay had left, and no matter how reassuring you try to be, you can’t make kids not worry when you explain things like that.

It was really good to see how supportive all the kids were of each other. Of course, they all really like and care about Maze and Alay, but when the day stopped being a swimming frolic and became a long and tense wait around the pool, I could see that a lot of the divisions which had originally existed had at least relaxed a little, and that Ys and Rye treated two children which they’d had such huge walls erected against with a good deal of sympathy and compassion. And no suggestion from Lianz or Kara that mere servants didn’t know their place or anything like that. Ys and Kara actually had a little private conversation together, and I suspect that Kara has come to value Ys' ability to get information out of the interface.

By mostly living on the same island, the senior Setari have made sure that they have a convenient support network set up for themselves – just as the junior Setari who have reserved all the land on the other islands will if and when they can take up a permanent Muina residency. Once we’d had the good news about the detangling, Lohn took Lianz and Kara over to his and Mara’s house for a sleep-over, and Maze’s parents brought them a change of clothes and so forth. It’s a very large extended family.

Maze dropped over, after he’d reassured himself that Alay was all right, and swept Sen up in the hugest hug and thanked her and ended up taking her on a quick visit to Alay so that Sen could be sure that the baby wasn’t unhappy any more. And her cheerfulness after seeing that was so in turn reassured Maze and Alay a great deal. She still had tremendous nightmares for the next couple of days, but Kaoren said to expect this because of the amount of fear of could have been everyone was dealing with. He had a nightmare too, and wouldn’t talk about it, but it’s pretty easy to guess what it was about.

After all that, the announcement of the laws the various governments had decided upon to deal with touchstones was a bit of a non-event. Especially since, other than having an oversight committee and being stricter and more transparent about what mission assignments I (and eventually perhaps Lira) am given, they aren’t really changing a great deal from the way I’m treated now. They’ve made "touchstones screwing with people with their powers" illegal in a vague kind of way, but haven’t made it illegal for me to conjure up hot chocolate or videos. When it boils down to it, they want to leave flexibility, and don’t want to risk ending up being forced to prosecute me for doing something like conjuring a dragon to fight off a Cruzatch attack. It’s all pretty much what Kaoren and Maze said we’d probably end up with, back when the whole issue was raised, but it’s nice to have it over.

My workload at the moment has been ramped up, because KOTIS knows that I won’t be doing any visualisations or projections at all if I can help it, if I get pregnant. Since they’re extremely interested to know if I have little baby touchstones, they’re quite happy for me to get married and have kids, but they’re trying to cram heaps of visualisation projects in beforehand. Not taking me anywhere near any of the powerstones, or doing things they consider really risky, but they’re keen to reproduce the teleportation platforms and the process of creating aether, and though they think they’re beginning to understand, they’d love to have some extremely confusing points cleared up. Unfortunately they haven’t found any convenient books in the Kalasa library explaining any of this, and have been working on the office I visualised once before, and other rooms like that.

Going for a fitting for my wedding dress tomorrow, and Kaoren and the kids' outfits. I had to ask Kaoren whether his sights would drive him insane if he didn’t get to see what my wedding dress looked like beforehand, and he thinks it will be okay, especially if I tell him about it generally. After the fitting we’re going to talk the kids through what we’ve decided on for the ceremony, and explain how it’s going to be more than just a wedding, and talk over issues like surnames. Sen is tremendously excited to see the dresses. So am I.