Then it was time to face the music. I’d already checked on my captains, but Maze was still on rotation and Ruuel was asleep. I tossed up contacting Taarel or Grif Regan from Second Squad or even Zan, but decided to skip the preliminaries and emailed Selkie the conversation from my log, with a subject heading of "Nurans" and in the body: "Have neat handwriting." I cc’d the email to Maze, Ruuel and Isten Notra and then sat there trying to puzzle out what the damn thing was about. Not, as I’d hoped, "The Idiot’s Guide to Touchstones".
I’d just decided it was some kind of history of Muina when Isten Notra sent a channel request to me with the text: "You are an endless source of amusement," making me laugh.
"Hello," I said. "Suspect amusement is not word everyone will use."
"You may well be right. And how cruel of you to only send the first four pages with that log. Pass me the rest."
That was easily done – I’d already separated out the fragment for my own review. "Can you read Old Muinan, Isten Notra? This is Nuran history book?"
"More than that, child. It is a copy of an account written by a Lantaren just after arrival on Nuri. It is a compilation of everything the Muinans who fled to Nuri knew of the disaster and the events leading up to it. It is–" Her voice throbbed. "It is very exciting, and I will leave you now while I devour it. You’d best get yourself to Selkie’s office before he finishes reviewing your conversation."
I’d not been to Selkie’s office before – it was in a part of KOTIS I think of as Command Central. An area with lots of bluesuits walking about, and an excess of meeting rooms. I could tell when Selkie finished reviewing my log, because an appointment for a meeting with him appeared in my calendar, scheduled for immediately. But I guess Isten Notra had already told him I was on my way, because he simply waited for me to show.
Some offices on Tare have remnants of design from when Tarens used table-top computers, but most of them are like Selkie’s – just a meeting room assigned to a particular person, with storage space for equipment, but little to do with desks or paper shuffling. Selkie’s had a small rectangular coffee table thing, with four low chairs around it, and a taller café-type round table with two upright chairs with high backs (like wing-back chairs). He was in one of these, and didn’t look amused.
"Sit."
I put the book on the table and sat, feeling like I’d been called to the principal’s office. Except it was a school I couldn’t go home from at the end of the day. For psychic soldiers.
"I’ve spoken to you on the subject of your alert before," he said. "If I need to do so again, you will have a squad assigned to you permanently. Do you understand?"
Setting off my alert wouldn’t have made any difference if the Nuran had wanted to kill me, and I’d been all prepared to say that until I saw the look in Selkie’s eyes. Any argument, and he’d assign a squad to me straight away.
"Understood," I said, resigned to having to do it.
"What is the basis for your theory about the Cruzatch?"
"Arenrhon obviously about godhood or immortality. Bodies in the non-blurry sarcophagi were burnt. And Cruzatch keep showing up. Is just a guess – we don’t have anything like Cruzatch on Earth. Don’t think I’ve even heard any legends about things like that."
He didn’t comment, but didn’t look surprised, either. I was hardly the first to speculate on what the people at Arenrhon were trying to achieve.
"Remain here until Notra has reported on this," he said, picking up the book and leaving.
It wasn’t a short book, but I’m not altogether sure if having to sit in Selkie’s office for a couple of hours was supposed to be punishment, or just that Selkie wanted me somewhere he thought it hard for the Nuran to get to. I mused for a while on where the Nuran was going to sleep on a planet like Tare, where there was so little unoccupied land. Avoiding all contact with the descendants of Muina would be quite a task.
Not that he seemed to have had the least trouble finding me. If he had been sent to kill me, I’d be dead right now. I think in a way I’ve grown used to the idea of probably dying. That’s what spending so much time in intensive care does for you.
Selkie didn’t come back straight away, and I ended up playing one of the interface games I’d bought, caught up in the very curious world Tare had been before it had advanced so far technologically. Cave-dwellers, with their whitestone cities under a sky of stone, and thus with an outside they would go out to, of sorts. Ionoth were present, but far less of an issue, and there was not this obsession with the yet-to-be-formed Setari. Instead the focus was on sorties into the surrounding darkness of the caves, and tunnels leading to undiscovered parts. It was Tare’s Here Be Dragons stage, and really quite a different world.
When First Squad came back from rotation, Maze replied to my email with: "Urth person is asking for a lecture. I’ll see you shortly." But it was Ruuel, not Maze, who showed up first, walking in and sitting opposite me while I was preoccupied with a puzzle. I felt him there, and shut down the game, opening my eyes.
"The trigger technique was not successful?" he asked, presumably having spotted the huge circles under my eyes.
"Long nightmare about looking for triggers," I said, shrugging. "Will try the action variation tonight." That was where a particular action on your own part, like a hand signal, was the trigger to wake up. "Do you think Nuran was actually answering my question, or just being deeply annoying?"
He tilted his head slightly. "It is possible that your abilities are triggering during your dreams purely because you have no control over them waking. Have you been practicing sensing the location of those around you?"
I nodded, though it was not so much practising as I increasingly happened to know people were on the far sides of walls.
"When the Cruzatch first attacked you in Kalasa, did you sense it before you saw it?"
That was hard to answer. "Don’t really know. Don’t think I heard it, but something made me look up."
"We’ll try a visualisation exercise until Isten Notra is ready. Close your eyes."
I gave him a rather wry look, which he didn’t react to, and after a moment I obediently shut my eyes, despite knowing my face had gone red. And I was stupidly happy. It’s the feeling that I’m an annoyance to him – and the idea that he and Taarel are together – that bothers me. I’m still not pleased that he went along with upsetting me for the purposes of testing, but – yeah, I can’t pretend that that or even the high probability that he’s in love with Taarel cured me of wanting him.
For the visualisation exercise he described a room. High ceiling, Pillars, some low cushioned benches, and a whole bunch of square display cases with different things in them – old weapons and jars and jewellery. I had to hold a picture of what he was describing in my mind, and repeat it back to him with every thing he added. One of those memory games. I was surprised at how easy I found it. Ruuel describes things very vividly, and I could really see the room, so had no trouble repeating back the contents, but started to struggle with an increasing headache.
"This is making my head hurt," I said eventually, opened my eyes and then flinched because everything around me was blurry and seeing that felt like a needle going into my brain. Just faintly, I glimpsed the room he’d described, superimposed on Selkie’s office, but then I had to close my eyes and do rather a lot of head-clutching. Ruuel, after a little pause, moved me to another room and called a medic up to drug me to the point where the pain was pushed behind a wall, but didn’t really go away. I was very wan and shaky when Maze and Selkie arrived, but at least could open my eyes.