Tuesday, June 3
One Thousand Cranes
It occurred to me before going to bed last night that trying to dream about home was probably not a good idea. I really don’t want to end up in Earth’s near-space needing to be rescued. The otters really are the ideal safe place visualisation for me, but I either have to disassociate it with Ruuel, or fully get over being upset with him before I use it again.
I decided to go with the think of making something example, and went to sleep remembering Noriko Yamada teaching me how to make origami cranes. She was making a thousand of them, which she sewed onto long strings and was going to give as a present to her grandmother. I didn’t make that many, but I remember the pattern well, and so I curled up in my window seat and thought through the steps of making origami cranes, and I had a dream about the day I met Noriko in the library at school, and made cranes over lunch.
After a while, Mori and Ruuel came and stood down by the far end of the table, but then Ruuel went away again almost immediately. I made cranes and listened to Noriko telling me about how the strings of cranes would be strung up in her grandmother’s garden and as they fell to pieces they’d take the wish she made for her grandmother on the wind.
Then Ruuel and Taarel came in together, standing by my chair. "Do you want me to show you how to make one?" I asked Ruuel, handing him the crane I’d just made.
He held it up for Taarel to look at, and she touched a wing and said: "Impressive. Caszandra, do you know where you are?"
"The library?" I looked around, but started to think at the same time and said: "Oh, I’m dreaming," and woke up, still curled on my window seat. The lights were on, about three-quarter strength, and Mori was standing watching me. "But it wasn’t a nightmare," I said.
"No. You were pouring out energy at an excessive rate, and that triggered the alert." She perched on one arm of one my couches. "What were you dreaming about?"
"Doing one of the sleeping exercises, making things." I sat up and looked around the room, surprised Ruuel and Taarel weren’t there, because they’d felt very real to me. "Kind of have a headache," I said, finding that movement didn’t agree with me much.
"We’ll head down to medical in a minute. Just waiting on the captains to return."
"Ruuel and Taarel were here then?" I actually found their absence very disorienting, and my head pounded more as I tried to reconcile them talking to me and then not being there.
She smiled. "They went into the Ena, to this point in near-space, to follow a theory. They shouldn’t be long."
I went and dressed, since even though I’d added long pyjama pants to my nightwear after my excursion to Earth, I still felt at a disadvantage dressed for bed when people came to talk to me, or when I had to go to medical.
Mori was watching the rain pounding steadily down outside the window. "What was the theory?" I asked her, but she said it would probably save repetition to wait till the captains were back, and instead we chatted about the last The Hidden War episode, and I found myself explaining a little about how I felt about hurting Nenna. Mori was in great agreement with this, and said that the main fear of practically every Setari was letting their squad down and getting them killed. Then Taarel brought me and Mori into a channel with her, Ruuel, Selkie and (to my mild pleasure) Isten Notra.
"This is the location in near-space," Ruuel said, and gave us a fragment of his own log, a rapid ascent up the outer wall of the KOTIS facility, Taarel just visible in peripheral vision, and then something very odd ahead – a swirling blurriness centred around the outlines of a building apparently poking out the whitestone wall. I recognised it immediately. My school library building.
It didn’t have the sketchy quality of near-space – there were no holes in the walls – but there was a soap-bubble intangibility about it, like it was a mirage which would pop if you touched it. Still, Ruuel and Taarel had to push open the heavy swing door to get inside. There was a suggestion of a library assistant behind the front counter, but she didn’t seem to see them, and they turned right and went past long rows of shelves to the tables at the back of the main room, where a ghost of me was sitting with a ghost of Noriko, folding origami cranes.
There were two me’s. One sitting there folding cranes, and a glowing outline of me in roughly the same spot, curled up in my window seat. Ruuel and Taarel had to detour slightly to get inside the Taren near-space room as well as the library room, and Ruuel did a lot of Sight-switching, which really didn’t help my headache.
"Do you want me to show you how to make one?" the ghost me asked Ruuel, handing him one of the cranes.
He switched through his Sights again, and held it up for Taarel to look at, and she touched a wing and said: "Impressive. Caszandra, do you know where you are?"
"The library?" The ghost me looked around, then said: "Oh, I’m dreaming," and then the whole thing vanished and Ruuel and Taarel were standing alone in the near-space version of my apartment, looking at a faint afterimage of the sleeping me fading away, and a dozen origami cranes scattered across the floor.
The log extract ended and I opened my eyes to find Taarel and Ruuel had arrived, each holding a handful of cranes of all different colours, some patterned like the fancy paper Noriko had been using.
"What do the paper birds represent?" Isten Notra asked.
"A wish of good luck," I said, closing my eyes again because my head was pounding. "Noriko, the girl who was with me, is from a part of Earth called Japan. They have an art form there called origami: making things out of folded paper. The bird is called a crane, which is considered a kind of magical beast in Japan. Japanese tradition to fold a thousand origami cranes, as a luck-wish." I opened my eyes again, and since Taarel was within reach I leaned forward and took one of the cranes she was holding, and unfolded it. "It feels like ordinary paper," I said.
"Analysis will tell us more on that level," Isten Notra said. "Caszandra, we’re going to place a drone in near-space at the location of your room to monitor the development of your dreams on the Ena." Before I could be more than totally horrified she went on: "The visual component will be locked to my viewing only, unless I deem there to be some critical value in releasing it further, and otherwise deleted after my review. Is that acceptable to you?"
I couldn’t hide the DO NOT WANT on my face, and there was a long, painful pause before I could say: "I guess," sounding anything but happy about it. The idea of anyone watching my dreams is beyond awful. But that it would be Isten Notra made it just, just bearable, so I added: "Yes."
"Good girl."
"Medical now," Ruuel said, and I was dropped out of the channel. He gave Mori his handful of origami cranes, and waited to see whether I was going to walk myself or needed to be carted about. I managed to walk, just a bit slow and wobbly, but getting to medical mainly involves elevators anyway.
"Do you sleep there because of the window, or because you’re frightened of the other room?" Ruuel asked, just before we reached my home away from home.
"Both," I said shortly, knowing it would be useless to lie to him. "Getting better about going into the bedroom though." I no longer had to nerve myself up to fetch my clothes, at least.
He didn’t comment. Ruuel’s good at knowing when to shut up, and he left me to the familiar routine of having my brain scanned and mapped to the last neuron.