Gratuitous Epilogue

5 - April

April 10

Islands

Contact with Tare and Kolar was made only two days after the last time I wrote. It took them another few days to scan the last short section and calculate an end to end run of both routes, but after that the floodgates opened.

It takes between three and five hours to get through now, instead of just one, and there are long patches where nothing’s aligned enough to get through, but we’re actually a lot less cut off than everyone feared we’d be. They’re now trying to work their way to the Pillar where Second Squad was stranded to see what condition it’s in. And also to Channa, since there’s been people stuck at the mining installation there.

Tare and Kolar (and the Channan staff) didn’t have any convenient touchstones to let them check the condition of other planets, and so for four months could only guess what had happened. Kolar had had no warning whatsoever, and from Tare’s point of view I’d vanished and a bunch of people had gone haring off into deep-space to look for me and then all of the Ena had melted down and they could only hope it wasn’t the beginning of the end. They didn’t know if I was alive, whether the colony had survived, or whether all of Muina had been destroyed. At least the decrease in Ionoth numbers and the slacking of the tears into real-space gave them hope. Of course, once Muina’s collected four months of news had been transmitted, there was a media frenzy over the whole drama of my kidnapping by the Cruzatch, and the risky destruction of the malachite marbles, and then the short eternity of picking collapsed building off the top of me and hoping they got to me before I died.

And Lira.

I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to be in Lira’s position at her age. Used as a tool to destroy her world, trapped in a half-life, doing what she could to sabotage her captors, and then after connecting with me finding that everyone she knew was dead and she was part ways responsible, and that she might possibly not really be alive. And now a new life, a soap-bubble existence which nobody can definitively say is real.

There have been articles talking about how dangerous Lira and I are – the things we could be used for – but mostly it’s open adulation. The MBC, wanting to keep on KOTIS' good side, are careful never to be too full-on, but even they maintain a Caszandra-Watch page which is constantly updated with the latest images and stories about me and my family. And a lot of that is now about Lira, who is after all a gorgeous Lantaren who helped save them all. There’s now a couple of billion people fascinated by the idea of her.

Naturally some pretty unvarnished opinions of her have leaked out of the talent school, but these are very inconsistent. Some people claim she’s traumatised and describe her as clinging to Ys for support (Ys is still getting positive press for being so brave during my dragon day). Others say Lira’s cold and arrogant – the classic evil Lantaren. But mostly she’s seen as a true Lantaren princess and it’s almost expected and accepted that she be a bit imperious and pampered. I make sure to check the news and keep alert to what stories are going around about them. Lira finds anything about her, positive or negative, to be annoying, but doesn’t seem too caught up by it at the moment – the people immediately around her are more interesting. Rye gets embarrassed and Ys occasionally infuriated. Sen’s still a little too young to comprehend more than the fact that everyone knows who she is and they wave at her when we go into town. And then new pictures of us show up on the interface. Living on an island was a damn good idea.

For me the first news of reconnection to Tare came along with a handful of emails from Zan. They were typical of Zan’s calm formality, with just a thread of uncertainty beneath. I think in a way she must have been trying to help me by writing them, creating an expectation for me to be alive to read them. Or maybe she wanted some kind of sounding board, the same way I used to use my diaries. She needed someone to talk to.

Twelfth had been off-shift, asleep, when I fell down the Cruzatch-hole, and when KOTIS went to full alert upon Kaoren’s return they’d been stuck biting their nails for rather too long, then sent after Thirteenth and Fourteenth, who had been assigned to Maze Rotation. They were deep within the tangle of whitestone walls, working in two different locations to lower the chance of attracting roamers, and when Twelfth reached the maze space, Zan immediately ordered everyone back to Tare.

Twelfth had waited just within the maze space entrance, and when Thirteenth arrived had sent them back ahead. And then the first wave of distortion had hit. They’d felt it in the Ena of both Tare and Kolar, not to such a paralysing level as Muina, but enough to make clear that something was wrong and only getting worse.

Zan’s email covers all this in a sentence, but I’ve since watched the mission log, and listened to the conversation between her and Kin Lara, the sleepy captain of Fourteenth who I mainly remember as being a friend of Els'.

"Go ahead, Namara," he said, as Fourteenth raced around the twists and bends of the maze[4].

"We’ll wait," Zan replied. "I can move us fastest."

"Not the time to ignore protocols," Lara said, still sounding sleepy and unperturbed, almost amused, even though his squad were running for their lives. "You’re usually more sensible, Zan."

The next wave of distortion hit them then, underlining his point. Lenton’s log shows me Zan’s face, white, expressionless. Then she says: "Hurry," and sends her squad through the small house space which leads to the maze space, and then into near-space, then she picks them up and flies all-out, as fast as the strongest Telekinetic in the Setari can manage, back to the gate-lock.

Fourteenth made it to near-space before the storm which followed the destruction of the malachite marbles hit. If they’d still been in the maze space they would have been completely lost, since it’s now shifted out of alignment with Tare’s near-space (this bothers me a lot because no-one’s seen Ghost since). Twelfth, waiting in real-space at the gate-lock, couldn’t do anything when the gate – usually invisible – suddenly washed bright white and roared power at them.

The effect on Fourteenth was a combination of a severe aether overdose combined with the overenhancement which occurs when they touch me while I’m expanded. The Levitation and Telekinesis talents, who were flying as fast as possible, lost control and they tumbled to near-space’s ground. Blinded by white, bruised and with a couple of broken bones, they used the interface to track each other and find the gate, dragging each other toward it.

They didn’t make it, though, all of them collapsing. Zan, since her squad had been ordered not to go back into near-space, and with no sign of the storm subsiding, had thought to send drones, which easily homed in on Fourteenth and brought them back.

Broken bones were nothing compared to what the storm had done to their talents. Hyper-enhanced, producing brain lesions when any of them tried using anything energy-intensive. Four months later they’ve only just begun to reach normal levels again. Anyone with Sights – the talents which don’t just turn off and on – has had a particularly bad time of it. Given that Fourteenth is a Sights speciality squad, that means all of them, but the two Place Sight talents (Lara and Jax) have spent most of the past few months sedated because they just couldn’t handle it.

Zan, even though she made the only possible decisions and thought to send the drones, obviously feels somehow responsible, just as she had when I melted down in the Pillar. On top of that, with all the spaces realigning after the storm, the five active squads were distributed across Tare for the first couple of weeks, until Third (without their primary pathfinder) had managed to map out new routes. Even with the reduced numbers of Ionoth, it’s still been months of strain.

From the last couple of emails, it sounds as if Taarel has helped Zan through. With Maze and Grif cut off, Taarel stepped up into the senior captain role, and, despite the blow of Eeli’s loss, held everyone together.

The tone of Zan’s emails had improved by the last, written only a few weeks ago when Fourteenth’s talents settled back into more normal parameters, and I wrote her back as soon as I finished reading it, touching on my near-cooking, and then moving on to more cheerful subjects. As soon as the route was open again, and most of Tare’s Setari were back on Tare, Twelfth and the other squads who had been holding Tare together were given extended leave, which they definitely needed. Hopefully they’ll be posted to Muina soon.

Ys' birthday went well, I think. The microscope we’d decided on as a present was thoroughly approved of, fortunately, and I could tell she was relieved that her birthday lunch was a pure family affair. But it was only when we took her off in the afternoon to Pandora that I felt like I’d really succeeded in making her happy. Ys is much smarter than I am. She’s smarter than Rye, than Kaoren, than any of her teachers or the people she meets regularly. I can practically see her brain overheating sometimes, trying to make up for lost time, and I’ve been worried that – friends with Lira or not – she’ll feel lonely or isolated because she doesn’t have anyone who can think like her.

Isten Notra thought my idea for a birthday present was very funny, and was happy to be Ys' surprise for the day. When Ys realised she was going to be given a whole afternoon with Isten Notra, just to talk, she lit up amazingly, and she was in a daze when Kaoren brought her back that evening. A head full of answers. And Isten Notra has invited her back for an afternoon once a month, which is far more than I asked for, but Isten Notra says she enjoyed herself a lot, and that she thinks it important for Ys' development. Once she’d emerged from her daze, Ys went very quiet around me for a while, and I kept catching her watching me in an analytical sort of way. She’s stopped that now, but this past month has been a series of positive steps in our relationship. She doesn’t resist me nearly as much.

Having a flood of new episodes of The Hidden War also produced some odd family moments. Especially since the first new episode was my actual log of being stuck in Kalasa. It made for a really disorienting viewer experience, since underwater swimming isn’t exactly a great visual, and the only thing you can do to make hours and hours of swimming more interesting is to cut most of it out. They were very clever with the segues though – they simply made the clock display quite large to show the amount of time passing during the scenes they were cutting through. It was interesting how my vision hazed out the time I barely made it through the extra-long tunnel.

The new season had started broadcasting on Tare over two months ago, and there were a lot of interviews with the producers and the actors about how difficult it had been to go through with the production when they didn’t know if anyone at the settlement was still alive. And tons of reviews talking about how immensely traumatic it was to watch my log.

The traumatic part posed a bit of a parenting problem for us. Fortunately we had a day’s warning, since they only transmitted news, not entertainment programs, with the first contact. The kids read about it straight away, and Fein (who has become fast friends with Rye) was asking questions about it and that probably wouldn’t have mattered except that Sen got wind and wanted to watch it. That put us in a bit of a bind, since she’d been having so many nightmares lately that we’d been trying to keep her away from any negative stimulus. She couldn’t watch it without us giving her permission – and she didn’t actually argue with us when we first said that it would be too scary for her – but she was very subdued and hurt by our refusal and then had perhaps her worst set of nightmares yet. Kaoren said that this was a Sight Sight reaction: the need to know, particularly about things and people who are important to you, can be overwhelming.

Sometimes it amazes me that Kaoren’s so sane.

We decided the best thing to do was to make The Hidden War strictly full-family viewing, and only in the mornings or early afternoons so that Sen isn’t likely to sleep immediately after. Lots of explanations and support and then a carefully managed story time. We kept the kids out of school that day (and skipped our training) and watched the log-file episode. Sen actually took it pretty well – she kept patting my arm and trying to console me – and then switched to doing that to Kaoren, which told me pretty clearly how much he hates watching this log.

Ys, Rye and Lira held up well at the start, mainly impressed and disbelieving of how long I swam about, and asking pertinent questions about whether the burn hurt and why I’d changed direction. But when I broke down crying after reaching the desert, they all went grimly subdued. Me crying isn’t something Ys and Rye are used to, and Lira didn’t take it a great deal better. Ys is one of the few people who recognised that after I’d set the arrow alight, I almost lost my way walking back, and that seemed to horrify her more than anything else.

The scenes with actors playing out the drama of the search were a relief, and the kids were as usual very critical of the fact that none of the characters resemble the people they know. Though Teral Saith’s Lastier has become subtly more like Kaoren since they met, and the moment when Lastier lets his guard down when they find me more-or-less alive was a really powerful one, which I think impressed them all. Lira immediately asked Kaoren whether that was really how he’d been while I was lost.

He shook his head. "I was angry, the entire time," he said. "None of us read those platforms correctly – they serve so many purposes, but it was mass blindness not to see this one. And to run those tests without a single Setari to observe was one of the poorest decisions made during the entire settlement." He smiled, a faint, wry expression. "And I composed many lectures for Cassandra, for letting herself be stood on that platform, and then for being where I couldn’t find her, and I think I was angrier with her than anyone else. But I thought the arrow was a very good idea, so I forgave her." Then he pulled me over to his lap and squeezed me really tightly and Sen patted us both.

When we were less emotional we had a highly entertaining discussion of how Kaoren and I fell in love, and so now the kids know more about our romance than anyone else, and Sen was happily diverted into the question of our upcoming wedding and different wedding customs and the idea of flower girls.

I’ve been getting more hugs since then. Not from Ys, but she leans against me sometimes, and sits close during story time. Sen was probably the least impacted out of all of us, and slept peacefully that night. Everyone else had nightmares. We’ve watched the rest of the episodes which have been released, and none have been half as distressing, though we made a decision to censor parts of the Velcro massive episode, and just told Sen very generally what we were taking out. The very annoying consequence of the log file episode is that tons of people now want to have all my mission logs released. I’ll resist that one for all I’m worth.

The feel of the settlements has changed a lot, now that we’re three planets again. Everyone had been quietly getting on with it in the last few months, but while they did seed plenty of new buildings, and prepare infrastructure for new settlers, it was more an atmosphere of consolidation and settling in. These past few weeks have really geared things back up again, even beyond the level of those frantic post-signing days. After a few confirmation trips to make sure the route could be travelled safely in larger ships, we’ve seen an enormous influx of settlers. Tare and Kolar spent the cut-off time processing settler applications, preparing the core components for a bunch of nanofactories, and finishing up the large deep-space passenger transports they’d been preparing. When you’ve got ships capable of bringing two thousand people in at once, it doesn’t take long for the population to surge, though processing security passes for two thousand people at once is a bit of a pain. At least the subway is up and running, so they can quickly get from the spaceport to the platform.

Mesiath is already impressively large, and quite lovely. They’ve thinned out the trees in the new city area, but not removed them all, so that the centre of the city is still a bit foresty, and opens out to the south where there’ll be farmland. We went on a day-trip there, and the look on Rye’s face walking beneath those massive trees was great fun. Kaoren and I are thinking about using his land grant to have a few summer houses dotted across Muina, which makes me feel awesomely rich and self-indulgent, but I think would make Rye ecstatic. Maybe in a couple of years. Now that Mesiath is well advanced they’ll be seeding another two major settlements, and the provisional council pushed for the location to be chosen by the settlers rather than just dictated by the bluesuits and so there’s full-on debate about where they’ll be. KOTIS' only requirement was that they be around platform towns, one northern hemisphere and one southern hemisphere, and they created little tourist videos about each site and people get to vote on their favourite for each hemisphere. The desert one is coming total last, unsurprisingly.

Some of the Nuran faction haven’t been very happy with the new developments. While we were cut off, they represented a solid percentage of the population, and since everyone was in Pandora they could remain relatively close-knit. Now that Taren and Kolaren settlers are pouring in, and adoptions are sky-rocketing (KOTIS prioritized people who showed a genuine interest and capacity for adopting children), they’re not only being outnumbered, they’re being fragmented. KOTIS is obligingly ensuring each settlement will have a cultural representative, and is capturing as much information as possible about Nuran customs and language, and even decided suddenly to assist in setting up infrastructure for Nurenor (basically turning it into a Nuran-run farming settlement and sneakily supporting a more reasonable person to be in charge of it) but when it boils down to it, the Nurans are absolutely going to be only a tiny part of Muina’s whole. Of the two billion-plus people living on Tare and Kolar, more than half have indicated they want to relocate to Muina at some point in the next ten Muinan years (an idea which completely boggles my mind). Of the fraction of eventual Muinans who have a Nuran background, most will have been absorbed into Taren and Kolaren families. The adult Nurans I’ve spoken to are either sad about this, or angry. Fortunately the angry ones are a relative minority, but I can’t really blame them for being upset.

When all the squads which had been stationed on Muina before we were cut off went back to Tare or Kolar, even the rest of Fourth Squad went, and Lohn, Mara, Jeh, Grif and Ketzaren, who wanted to take their kids to meet their families (and see if Deal and Enna’s nightmares could be addressed by a less traumatic journey through deep-space). When KOTIS swaps in new squads there’ll be times when I have bodyguards not drawn from First, Second or Fourth, which is something to think about. Of course First and Second, who have all served their minimum time, have opted for Muina transfer rather than retirement, and so will be posted here pretty much permanently. There’s a possibility that Fourth will still occasionally work on Tare, but not for a while, which is good because I don’t particularly want to planet-hop at the moment.

Lohn and Mara (and, indeed, almost all of First and Second Squad) are expecting masses of family soon – families of KOTIS staff get settlement preference, and Lohn and Mara used a bit of Setari leverage to be able to include a few friends as wedding guests as well. Their wedding is only nine days away and is really turning into a bit of an event – word of it inevitably leaked out and the Setari-Watch pages are full of endless speculation and delight. Fortunately there’s no private airships yet, so they don’t have to worry about people flying over taking photos the way they do for outdoor celebrity weddings on Earth. The park on First Squad Island has shaped up nicely – the grass a bit patchy in spots and with lots of shrubs and weeds, but it still looks very attractive, and Maze and Rye have been having great fun with it (Maze really is really serious about becoming a garden designer). The trees everywhere around Pandora have started their shift into Autumn colours, and the islands are all gold-tinged with hints of orange. Should be spectacular.

We’re facing our own relative-influx. Kaoren (who wrote emails to Siame every week during the cut-off so that she got a flood once channels were open) decided to bite the bullet and invite his parents and his brother to come visit. He’s doing it because he wants Siame to come back here because he thinks that’s the best chance for her to work out the issues she has about me saving her, or me taking Kaoren’s attention away from her. And, really, it would be strange to marry Kaoren without meeting any of his family except Siame.

None of us are looking forward to the visit. Kaoren’s not actually on argumentative terms with his parents, but he has as little to do with them as possible, and since they’re both Sight Sight talents they’re perfectly aware of his feelings. He’s heading to Tare tomorrow to pack up all our stuff at the Tare Setari headquarters, and will return with his family in three days[5]. We considered making it another family trip, but we think it best to not take Sen through deep-space at the moment. We could sedate her for the trip, but that won’t stop her Place and Sight Sight from operating, and it might be painful for her. We also – in theory anyway – want to see how we cope with being away from each other for a few days.

We both know we’re going to have nightmares the entire time, and stress out about being cut off from each other, but I guess I’ll feel less of a wimp if I prove to myself that I won’t fall into a heap if Kaoren’s not within reach.