The Touchstone Trilogy

by Andrea K Höst

  Yep, they're going to have all these squads here for a few days. They don't quite all fit in the Setari quarters, but along with the supplies were a bunch more mattresses and couches, so people are sharing apartments. The Pillar experiments are going to be performed in shifts because there's one gate which they aren't going to be able to hold for more than five days, and they can't tell when, if ever, it will come back. KOTIS wants to get as much information as possible before they lose the path.

  Why the Lantarens couldn't have stuck these things somewhere easier to get to I don't know.

  The Pillars team returned not long after the Litara showed up, having had to kill a fair number of roamer Ionoth, but not otherwise troubled. No Cruzatch. They'd successfully sent a drone into the Pillar and obtained bunches of useful scans, and positioned it to block the levers from moving. I don't know if the scans will really tell them anything – ancient Lantaren devices seem to me more on the level of magic than science. They certainly haven't figured out how the teleporting platforms work.

  Still, everyone's very pleased that there's been no disasters so far, and the afternoon involved more helpful unpacking and lots of chatting and, since Third is here, great bursts of Eeli excitement. Eeli is totally overjoyed by the new Setari building. A big central socialising area is her idea of heaven, and the sunset over the partially iced lake was glorious enough to brighten the eyes of even the most serious of the Setari.

  We had a big group meal, bringing down the new couches out of the apartments to fit the extra people. It was a full-on banquet – the pinksuits are having a great time experimenting with making meals out of some of the plants they've been cultivating. And there were a few different meat dishes courtesy of one of the hairy sheep. Slow-cooked mutton. Kolarens are used to meat, but the Tarens had to be careful. Their regular diet includes some seafood, but red meat is an exceptional luxury for them, like a $1000 bottle of champagne. Eeli was horrified when I told her that people from Earth usually eat the baby sheep.

  Then Zee insisted I do a 'screening' of Planet Earth with the subtitles so that she could make sense of what she'd seen during the testing session. And the channel she created to watch it kind of snowballed to all the Setari, and then our resident support greysuits and pinksuits, who told their section heads about it, which meant Zee was asked if other people could watch, and then practically everyone in Pandora was. It's pretty disconcerting to suddenly be throwing a video party for three thousand people.

  I should have expected the interest. Earth is not only an alien planet, but it's also (relatively) similar to Muina, which is the main focus of research for most of the expeditionary force. Since Zee had control of the channel, she shifted it into two groups – people who could text me questions (Setari and a few of the department heads) and people who could watch if they wanted. I tried to ignore all the extras and pretend it was just the people in the room with me.

  Eeli was fun to watch, round-eyed and delighted most of the time, though there's a scene where a wolf hunts down this baby caribou and Eeli was so upset when it caught it. And didn't much like sharks eating seals, either. The first episode is a really useful one to have done, because its subject is seasonal change, which the expeditionary force is particularly interested in. Fortunately it mostly explains itself. There's a short mini-documentary at the end of each episode, which I'd included (since I'm basically just recalling the DVD set Mum owns), and even though I'd only gotten halfway through the next episode, Zee played it too because there were a couple of bits she'd particularly wanted to ask me about – namely how freaking huge the mountains on Earth are, what was the burning red stuff (lava) and what was with all the snow knocking down trees (an avalanche).

  That caused some excitement, and I was bombarded with questions by the section heads when I ran out of subtitled recording. Earth's geologic instability is something none of their planets have, which means their mountains are more worn down (if they exist at all). Muina does have mountains, but I don't think they're at Everest level, and there's no sign of flowing lava. I fumbled my way through explanations of continental drift, the Ice Ages and dinosaurs until Isten Notra (although very interested herself) eventually called a close to my inquisition and said that the discussion could be continued at a later date, as could further helpful documentaries.

  It was, Kaoren said, a useful demonstration that no matter how much I thought I'd described Earth, it was too large a topic to ever assume a proper understanding. I hadn't properly explained dinosaurs before, apparently, and the avalanche got them all worried about the settlement at Kalasa. Both the Solarians knew about avalanches too, but hadn't mentioned it because they were very rare on Solaria (again, a fairly flat world) and nobody had asked exactly the right question.

  Kaoren wasn't absolutely exhausted tonight, only tired. It was nice to have a night when he didn't pass out.

  August

  Friday, August 1

  Cleared

  Another test day for me – I'm scheduled for every second day to avoid overstressing my system. It was only a repetition of the projections we'd already run through on Tare, and then I finished off the rest of the 'Mountains' episode of Planet Earth. Zee wouldn't let me push myself to exhaustion this time, since the idea is to get a better understanding of my powers, not churn out BBC documentaries. Still needed a long nap afterwards, though. But I'm doing well. Fewer headaches, better control, and it's just so incredibly much easier to do this in the Ena.

  The good news is that I've been stable and injury-free long enough that the bluesuits are willing to move on from David Attenborough. My next session will be a controlled attempt to look into Kalasa's past – visualising a single room.

  The Setari have divided into a morning shift and an afternoon shift to perform experiments on the Pillar, examining the inflow of the aether and trying to work out what the Pillar does with it. No sign of Cruzatch still, fortunately, although they were having real issues with deep-space Ionoth, and are debating whether it would be safer to send fewer people in the hopes of attracting less of them. A couple of minor injuries for Eleventh.

  Twelfth got to spend the entire day carting stuff about, which is what Zan gets for being the strongest Telekinetic. They've seriously stepped the construction and deliveries up a notch, and there are now four ships (the Litara, the Diodel, the Wharra and the Luim) devoted to daily ferrying of equipment. Kolar and Tare didn't have a bunch of spare interplanetary ships lying about, and couldn't simply abandon all the trade currently established, so it's taken a little time to get up to four ships devoted to Muina, and they're fast-tracking construction of more. I still love watching them land, though apparently they intend to construct some kind of airbase well inland past the industrial complex. They haven't quite finished designing that, though I'm not sure how hard it can be to design a big flat plain of whitestone.

  This afternoon after he'd recovered somewhat from his session in the Ena Kaoren and I watched the latest episode of The Hidden War, which was me being idiotic during Maze Rotation and patting Ghost. The episode continues to build the idea of Faer developing some feelings for me, but otherwise is generally accurate in terms of me looking and feeling bad.

  Saturday, August 2

  End of Winter?

  Ouch – combat training with Third this morning. And also a bit of friction between Squad Three and Eleventh Squad. I don't know the exact cause of it, just noticed the atmosphere. Since Eleventh is injured, they're not involved with the Pillars today, while Squad Three is on the afternoon shift. Endaran took the non-injured members of her squad out on a training run (it would be a training flounder, given the snow, but they've a strong Telekinetic and she had him to clear a path to the paths already cleared by machinery and they jogged around the settlement) until they were totally ragged and far too tired to even care that Squad Three existed.

  I think it might be warming up. The snow's looking a bit slushy.

  Kaoren's been having his post-Ena nap and now that I've finis
hed my day's subtitling (carefully just making the damn episode available over the interface rather than having a video party), I'm going to wake him up and ravish him.

  Monday, August 4

  Looking in the wrong place

  I was a little keyed up for my visualisation exercise yesterday. Wanting to prove myself, I guess, but trying not to show it. Eeli, part of my guard escort, was a useful distraction, and I could see Sefen of Third and Wen of Eleventh suppressing a couple of smiles in her direction. She always lifts the mood, as excited about watching my projection as she has been going to study the Pillar.

  My projection tests have all been held just a little way inside the gate to near-space (not too close or my projection might react with the gate) and Zee brings both a drone to record, and a sense-chair for me to lie on. I settle in and then Zee reads out a description of what she wants me to project.

  Yesterday it was a room in Kalasa, a small square with no windows and a single door, where the floor had cracked and dropped in the centre, and all the furniture had tumbled and jammed into it. Everything was smirched with grot and tarnish and mould, the way most of the uncleared rooms in Kalasa are, but this one was extra-damaged thanks to water leaking through the equally cracked ceiling, leaving a total rotten mess. The most obvious shape was a big, formerly solid desk, and I could make out a couple of chairs, a brazier, ornaments. Lots of books, or at least the remnants of their covers.

  The projection was no more difficult than any other I've been doing in the Ena, and after Sefen and Wen confirmed I was projecting a single building rather than the whole of the Kalasa Valley, Zee said:

  "We're starting with this room because the Place Sight talents marked it as important and worth investigating. Now that we've confirmed the energy cost of projecting it, we'll try to reconstruct it as it was before the Breaking."

  "How?" I asked. I hadn't made any effort to look into the past last time, and had been asleep, which is when weirder stuff always seems to happen to me.

  "I'm going to redescribe the room as we believe it looked before it was destroyed. It's very important that you try to confine the visualisation to this room, or at least this building."

  I shrugged, willing to give it a shot, but not entirely convinced it would work. It seemed more likely that what I'd produce was a fiction of the past, since they were making up the details.

  Zee began describing the room again, and I closed my eyes and tried to picture what she was talking about, although the image of what I knew the room looked like now kept creeping in and it was a long time before I got any result at all. Zee ran out of her pre-prepared script, but just started again and on the repetition I managed to focus and could properly see what the room looked like, and felt the extra energy cost kick in. Not too bad, but it was obviously taking more out of me than the current-time projection.

  When I opened my eyes the room was crisply real, with bonus people. A guy in robes just in the act of spreading out this big piece of paper and weighting each corner. He was looking very worried, and having a discussion I couldn't make sense of with another robed guy. The most I could figure out of the Old Muinan was something had gone wrong, and things were unbalanced. The language experts have provided a translation, though, and it seems he was talking about the tearing of the gates into real-space and the incursion of Ionoth and how it didn't make sense and that there had to be some extra factor they hadn't calculated for, something which was pulling everything out of alignment.

  Zee stayed by me, keeping an eye on my vitals, but gestured my escort guard forward to get a better view of the piece of paper. Eeli and Sefen were both practically leaning over the table to get a full look at it, and the two Lantarens were kind of noticing their shadows and being startled.

  I was already starting to tire, and when Sefen and Wen picked up a couple of the books on the desk and flipped rapidly through them, recording the contents, I noticed another jump in my energy output. The Lantarens looked thoroughly freaked out, but still couldn't quite properly see us.

  And then – it's really hard to describe, but I felt suddenly like my brain was being pulled out of the back of my head, and it was as if there was a really bright light somewhere nearby – I think the best analogy I could have for it is a neighbouring sun had gone supernova and was turning into a black hole. The two Lantarens – and Sefen – also reacted as if something major was going on. The nearest Lantaren ran to the door and threw it open, yelling something about madness. Zee was yelling too, telling me to stop, shaking me. And then she slapped me.

  I did some face and chest clutching then. Face because Zee hadn't held back – my eye's still a bit swollen – and chest because it felt like my heart was trying to kick its way out. I gasped and shuddered, convinced I was having a heart attack, and Zee kept telling me to take deep breaths, which reminded me of Kaoren and the last time I'd nearly killed myself. It was pretty close, I gather – my system had gone far beyond its tolerances and I was shaking and dizzy and had a horrendous headache, but Zee had snapped me out of the projection before I'd done any real damage. I'm not allowed to do any strenuous exercise for a few days, just as a precaution, but at last I've managed to come through one of my dramas without any major injury.

  It wasn't till Zee was ready to move me that I noticed that Wen, Sefen and Eeli were all clutching books. I'd made them tangible, though not nearly as well as the origami cranes, since they started fading even before we were back to the gate, and there was a pause while the three Setari madly skimmed through them, capturing visuals of the pages to be translated later. Two of the books weren't related (one was a book of poetry), but the one Sefen had picked up was the latest volume in a meticulous set of observations regarding the activation of the Pillars.

  The greysuits are most excited about the piece of paper, though, since it was some kind of hugely complex metaphysical map of the placement of the Pillars. I don't even begin to understand what they're talking about when they start foaming over it – it sounds as comprehendible as the Fifth and Sixth Dimension to me (perhaps quite literally?). This and the journal have produced some ecstatic reactions.

  When we went through the gate (Wen was levitating me) absolutely everything in real-space was blurry, which produced the usual needle-to-the-brain sensation. I spent a while barely able to pay attention to anything until my first dose of painkiller, which is when I realised that the settlement had been in an extreme flap when we returned. Zee was staying with me, and told me sternly to calm down when I realised that she'd sent the second shift of Setari to check on those at the Pillar. But she let me clutch her hand until everyone had returned safely.

  I'd started projecting the event which wiped out the majority of Muina's Lantarens. And when that happened, every platform in real-space reacted with a huge power surge, as did the Pillar. I hadn't killed anyone, thankfully, or caused the Ddura to stop recognising people as Muinan, and very interestingly the drones stationed with the two malachite marbles detected a power surge from them as well, suggesting that they're somehow linked. I'd given the settlement a big scare, though, for all that the greysuits are overjoyed at the information recorded from the projection. Even the power surge is considered overall a good thing, because it's a clue to what happened, and they got lots of interesting readings from it.

  Kaoren was very quiet when he got back, and though I had my eyes shielded at the time, I could hear the way he was being remote and super-polite to people when he did talk at all. Zee apologised to us both for not seeing the implications of the test, which I found embarrassing, and I wish I'd thought it through more myself, because it seems obvious in retrospect that the room as it appeared just before the disaster wasn't a very safe thing to try and project. It took me a while to work out that Kaoren was angry at himself, and when I finally talked everyone into letting me rest in my own room and got a chance to ask him why, he said it was because he hadn't read more than the outline of my test, that he'd let himself be distracted by the investigation of the Pill
ar.

  It didn't help at all that for the rest of the day I couldn't open my eyes without seeing a completely blurry world and getting insta-crushed by the headache from hell. I completely refused to let them hold open my eyelids and shine lights at my pupils after the first bout, thank you very much. Maze told them to tape shut and bind my eyes, and to hold off further examination till today and fortunately this morning they were back to normal, with just very occasionally the faintest quiver out of the corners of my eyes.

  Kaoren had Fourth shifted to babysitting duty for the day, and is making me sit somewhere he can see me while he trains his squad mercilessly into the ground – combat training where he actually fights each of them. He's not beating them up or anything, but he's forcing them to look deeply at any of their combat weaknesses and really strain to correct them. He's trying to regain his focus. He had nightmares all last night, and kissed me madly when I woke up this morning and could see properly again. And then went and had a cold shower, heh.

  I shouldn't laugh. Worrying about me could get him killed.

  Tuesday, August 5

  Sturdily fragile

  This will be the final day of Pillar investigation. One of the gates won't last beyond tomorrow. I spent much of the morning over at the sciences building, answering questions about cheese-making and tidal waves (and sealing wax and string?) and then I had lunch with Isten Notra and Shon (and Sefen and Chise from Third). Isten Notra tried to explain what she thought the Pillars were doing, which took a bit of work since the terms she was using kept going into the 'does not compute' box. But eventually I sort of got where she was coming from. Because they're called Pillars, and look like towers, I'd been thinking of them as columns propping up the 'roof' of deep-space. But they're more like segments of a single long needle piercing a series of folds in the Ena. Not an artificial wormhole. The Pillars stop deep-space from moving about completely freely.

  So it's not so much that the Pillars are holding deep-space open, as that they're holding it in a certain alignment. Deep-space itself sounds terribly complicated: a space shaped like a huge drifting fishing net of teleporting portals. The Pillars make it relatively easy to cross because although there's still a lot of shift further away, in the more 'central' areas around the Pillars everything wobbles only slightly. It's funny: I've been picturing the crossing of the rift as involving a short, straight flight, but really the crew of the Litara and Diodel have been following this precise and complicated course around all these 'reefs' of gates. And figuring out what's through the gates involves going through them. Wormhole lucky dip. No wonder they have little real hope of finding Earth, especially since it's away from this central 'line' and thus everything moves and shifts about, just as the spaces do.