Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras (4 page)

Lohn got amazingly
stressed about adopting. He wasn't the only one keyed up, but Lohn
especially just hated that there would be all these kids that they
didn't choose. And that those kids would know it, and feel
rejected. During their dual housewarming Mara, Jeh and Ketzaren
asked me whether I felt like I was Sen, Ys, Rye and Lira's mother.
Which is yes and no, really. I don't think any of them – even Sen –
think of me as their mother. Sen might one day. To Ys, Rye and
Lira, I think we might be too close to their ages for them to
consider us Mum and Dad, even after we formally adopt them. But
Guardians, elder siblings, whatever. We're family now, and I love
them all.

Mara, Ketzaren and Jeh
had a very interesting discussion – more with each other than with
me – about the children they liked most among those they'd been
working with at the talent school. And once again I was just so
utterly glad I didn't have to do any picking. They were talking
about whether it was better to adopt children who you simply liked
the most, or if it was kinder to take those who needed you more.
One of the medics working with the Setari and the talent school had
already adopted, and she'd chosen a very traumatised and isolated
girl around Sen's age who had lost everyone she knew, and who
wasn't coping at all well with the 'boarding school' living
arrangements. She wasn't a very appealing kid, inclined to snivel,
but it really helped her to 'belong' to someone. And yet, as Jeh
pointed out, holding stoic resilience against children who were
coping better didn't seem fair.

Moving to their new
houses had been the decision point they'd set, and three days after
the housewarming party five children came home for the first
time.

Which kids were chosen
mattered a lot to me – Mara and Lohn are so important to me that I
stress about things coming between us. I made sure not to offer
opinions on any of the residents of the talent school, though Lira
hasn't been shy about sharing her thoughts on them with me, so I've
more of an idea of the major personalities. I would have found it
awkward if any of those chosen were ones who didn't seem able to
see Ys and Rye as anything but servants. I didn't even talk about
this to Kaoren, but he could tell as usual when I'm stressing,
effortlessly worked out why, and pointed out that Lohn and Mara
care about Ys and Rye too, and were likely to have taken them into
account.

Lohn didn't succeed in
talking Mara into taking four, so they stuck with their original
plan of two. Both of them boys. Feinaren's eleven, and a real imp –
spends all his time swarming up trees. Sharalentelasker (Shar) is
thirteen and it's a bit hard to tell what he's like since he likes
to watch more than talk, at least when I'm about. A strong Sight
talent, with everything except Combat and Gate Sight, and inclined
to behave with the typical slight distance that a Place Sight
talent cultivates. Sen – who is my early-warning system for suspect
people – doesn't object to him, so I know he can't be too bad, but
I had to ask Mara what had drawn her to him. Fein I can understand
– he and Lohn are a lot alike – but Shar seems very self-contained
and able to handle himself and not someone I would have expected
them to feel parental about.

"We wanted to get him
away from Nuran politics," Mara told me, looking wry. "He's one of
two who could arguably be Nuri's heir if they were going by their
rules of succession." She laughed at my expression. "Not that
that's any reason for me to want to play parent. He's far from
incapable, and has been involved in quashing a few disputes within
the school. If he was Kalrani he'd be on the captain track. Which
is a good thing, but we also noticed that he was terribly tired
every morning. That's the impact of the politics – he has a lively
night life thanks to being drawn into the Nuran power struggles.
They bring disputes to him to settle, just as they do with
Inisar."

"And you got all
protective." I understood it then. "A bit like me and Ys – Ys is so
much better at looking after Sen than I am, and I keep having to
find ways to ensure she no longer automatically puts Sen above
herself. Because I want Ys to have time to be Ys."

Mara nodded. "It's a
very odd feeling. We had been planning on taking two younger
children, because someone as old as Shar will never truly regard us
as parents. And he doesn't
need
us. But I wanted him to have
a quiet night."

Ketzaren, Jeh and Grif
ended up doing something similar. One of the children they chose,
Zaranar, is sixteen. She has a five year-old brother, Dealanar, who
is very traumatized and withdrawn – they lost their parents and
several other siblings, including Deal's twin – and Ketzaren says
they wanted to both give Deal the care he needed, and also make
sure Zar had a chance to look to her own future as well as Deal's.
Zar's really interesting – she's not some angelic, self-sacrificing
type, but full of curiosity and with an excellent sardonic sense of
humour which matches Ketzaren's. I'd like to get to know her
better, but Deal pretty much stays attached to her leg, and doesn't
like her talking to anyone else – getting him to separate into age
groups at the school has been pretty difficult, and over the months
he's actually been getting more clingy, not less. Ketzaren says it
will be a slow process teaching Deal to feel safe with anyone else,
but she seems determined to succeed.

Their third adoptee is
Ennanal, a ten year-old girl. Enna likes to dance about – she
reminds me of Sen when Sen's happy – and she also shares Sen's
tendency for terrible nightmares, though these are because she lost
her family, and because she found the journey through deep-space
particularly terrifying, not because of any Sights.

After they'd had a few
days to settle in, we invited them and the rest of First and Second
over for a barbeque, having had a discussion with our four
beforehand to make sure they weren't too uncomfortable with the
idea of these children coming onto 'their territory'. They knew
them all already, of course, since they go to the same school,
though Zar and Shar are in the elder 'grade' and they don't have
much to do with them. Fortunately Fein is someone Rye already
seemed to think was okay, and he was quite keen to show off his
garden and parts of the island to him. Lira and Ys made it clear
that so long as no-one was allowed to go into their rooms, they
didn't care who we chose to have over, but they ended up politely
taking Enna around and keeping her entertained. They're not going
to leap into friendship with her, but they didn't freeze her out,
and I made sure they knew I was pleased with them for being
nice.

Sen was having one of
her bad days, and ended up in my lap most of the time – which at
least made her match Deal and gave me a chance to chat with Zar.
Shar started out more like a visiting dignitary than a child – all
formal and polite and detached – but then we went down to the docks
so they could try out the canoes and he enjoyed that, and was
positively approving of the idea of canoes for Siriath after
everyone's passed basic swimming. It was fun noticing how pleased
Mara was by that. We're going to get a larger boat/flyer so we can
'carpool' the kids to school. Canoes and flying and the simple
six-person sleds are all dandy in sunny Summer weather, but won't
be much fun in the middle of Winter.

Except for Zar, who has
a medium strength level, all the kids are extremely strong talents,
which of course is why they were in the talent school in the first
place. They're not on par with the Setari (Nuran or Taren/Kolaren)
because they haven't been pushed in the same way, and don't have
the expanded interface or ability to focus their connection to the
Ena. There's been endless discussions recently about teaching new
Setari the methods the Nurans use to become aware of the Ena link
versus cheating using me. More and more of the Taren and Kolaren
Setari are becoming able to enhance themselves, but many of them
still can't.

Inisar described how
the Nuran Setari gain their strength, which sounds to me much like
a cross between Native American Spirit journeys and sensory
deprivation. When they were vetting apprentice Setari, the Nurans
started them off at around five years old, gave them mental
exercises about thinking about the world around them for nearly
eight months, and then put them through five more months of
'ordeals' where they try and focus their own connection, and if
they don't succeed by then they're finished as an apprentice and go
back to their former lives. It's a terribly young age to be doing
things like that. The Nurans believed that if you didn't learn very
young you would be incapable of learning, and they're not sure if
my enhancement means they're wrong, or if learning when older is
only possible when a touchstone is involved.

There won't be any more
Setari adoptions for a while. Plenty of the Setari are in
relationships (mostly with other Setari) but not ready for kids.
Nils and Zee are very much in a relationship now, but they've no
immediate plans to move out of barracks, and keep going off
together on their weekends. They're both really really private
people and they want time alone together.

Sometimes I envy them
all that time alone, but only sometimes.

April

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.