I had lunch/dinner with Maze, who confirmed the reason why the Nuran’s book is so secret is not wanting to give away that he’d helped us. He doesn’t know how long it will be kept from the squads. Apparently Drake has given me a good report for overall improvement, and Maze wants me to focus on getting comfortable with the practice, to try and make shooting an automatic thing.
"Why didn’t you share your theories about the Cruzatch?" he asked toward the end of lunch.
I shrugged. "They nothing new. Couple people at Arenrhon saying almost same thing, and no way to confirm it. Don’t like it when total guesses mine given weight just because I say it. Asked Nuran because hoping he knew answer. Do you think that what they are?"
"My guess isn’t any better than yours," Maze said, and looked sad. Maze knows he’s not exactly impartial where Cruzatch are concerned, which is another reason I wasn’t keen to start making guesses.
I left to go meet Ruuel, intending to be early but miscalculating how long it would take to get there. Instead of a testing room, we were supposed to meet at Transport Platform 15, which turned out to be a train station deep underneath the island. Ruuel and Ista Chemie were waiting for me, and he started out with his usual terse briefing as we all boarded a lone train carriage.
"We’re travelling to Keszen Point, where we’ll be conducting testing for this week. For the next two days we’ll concentrate on similar visualisations to yesterday – testing whether you will react to a description of a place that is unknown to the person describing it, and how much detail you require. Two talents seem to be in play – the ability to see the place, and then reconstructing it using the Ena – but don’t concern yourself with separating the two immediately."
"Testing there because I might damage things?" I asked, and he nodded as the train started off. It was a very zippy one – I think the line might be used to shift freight swiftly around the underneath of the island. I looked Keszen Point up, and found it was an outlying rock off one side of Konna. A big boxy warehouse, with a few side rooms. It was cold and echoey, smelled of ocean and something acrid, and they had rearranged countless packing crates to the edges so that the entire centre was empty except for a couple of tables and chairs, and a scanning chair for me. There was another greysuit waiting – a gadgets type – and a man called Far Dara who I gathered was the person in charge of the warehouse, who I bet just loved having to turn it into a test facility for a week, but who hid his opinion well and was formally polite, showing us the few amenities of the place.
"Is it possible to go outside?" I asked, which seemed a simple request, but involved a lot of blank looks as to why I’d want to, and then checking the weather. But Tsa Dara was willing to show me, and Ruuel didn’t object. I had to talk Ista Chemie into coming: she was typically Taren about going outside and maybe she was justified in that given we had to put on a harness with attached safety ropes. Then it was a double-airlock kind of arrangement before we were out and attaching our safety ropes to a railing/fence thing which ran around the edge of the small bit of rock which wasn’t building.
It was the final hours of Tare’s long dusk and you couldn’t see much more than the outlines of the rocks we were standing on, and the shifting of the great waves almost to our height. But you could look up, and that was well worth it. High, black vertical rock, and then white city. I’d already known from my roof-visits that the whitestone wasn’t lit, except in one or two points, but it still caught what light there was. And it was so high, so monumental, so unlike Earth that it really reminded me that I was living on an alien planet.
I leaned over the railing and pressed my hand on the top of a waist-high rock, cold and slimy. "I’ve been on this planet for half an Earth year and this is the first time I’ve touched it," I said, discovering some furry green moss-like stuff on one slope of the rock. "But best I can tell, most Tarens haven’t even done this much. Is so strange for me to understand."
"Would the people of your world be so different?" Ista Chemie asked. I think being outside and looking up at Konna was a big thing for her – her voice was really strange.
"Hard to say how they’d be if they’d come to Tare like Muinans did. But if you transplanted population of Australia to Konna, every time the weather eased up enough not to be fatal, the roofs would be covered with people having picnics, and flying kites and hang-gliding and a few insane people base-jumping." I’d had to use English words, and laughed at how incomprehensible I must be. "In Australia, there’s a job called surf life-saver. Spend all day at the beach watching for drowning people."
This was really good timing for one of the waves smacking the rocks below to be extra-large, and to break over the ground we were standing on. It wasn’t enough to make any of us fall over, but Ruuel was abruptly a few millimetres away from me, a stabilising hand on my arm. He only said: "We’d best get started," and gestured for us to go back inside, but he hadn’t moved away before he spoke, and I stopped being all chatty and started hoping I could get my mind off those few moments of him being so close, of how I’d felt his voice as well as heard it. I really didn’t want to be projecting anything that was on my mind at that moment, and concentrated on thinking through the Taren alphabet backwards and things like that.
Ista Chemie was distracted by having shoes full of seawater, and Tsa Dara took her off to dry them. Nanosuits are so much better. I sat on the scan chair, and was glad of the other greysuit, who wanted to check the scanner’s calibration. From there it was all business, with Ruuel reading out piece by piece details of an indoor garden with fountains and stony artwork. The description wasn’t as well-done as when Ruuel used his own words, but it worked the same – and gave me another massive headache. Ruuel didn’t let me open my eyes as quickly this time, which meant the headache was worse and I was completely limp and exhausted afterwards. I managed to stay awake for the trip back, though, and ended up sleeping it off in medical because Ista Chemie wanted to monitor me more. No nightmares. Maybe, just maybe, these exercises are exactly the right thing to do to stop me having them.
But I woke from my post-testing nap really knowing Ruuel wasn’t there, and lay remembering his hand on my arm, the warmth of him, his breath just faintly stirring my hair.
I’m not succeeding at all in this getting over Ruuel thing.
Saturday, June 7
Echo of a wind chime
Since knowing Ruuel isn’t there is still my dominant sensation on waking, I’ve taken to lying in bed for a while each morning trying to sense his location. My range is expanding, but the Setari quarters – including my own – all have various levels of shielding on them, and till now I’ve only be able to feel people if they’re in the corridor on this or the next level up. This morning I knew Lohn was in his room, though, so it is possible for me to sense through their shielding.
And I can tell when Ghost is in my room, even when she’s invisible. Something I’ve no intention of admitting.
Today’s test was a fictional place, a magnificent underground hall with intricate and gorgeous murals on the walls and an incredible puzzle-pattern floor. Ruuel didn’t tell me it was fiction beforehand, and it took longer for me to get any kind of mental image of it, but it still worked, producing a lot more detail than Ruuel had read from the novel the test was based on. I didn’t get so immediate and overwhelming a headache the instant I opened my eyes this time, though the world went very blurry – two images overlaid on each other. The hall had an immense floor to ceiling wind chime, but no wind to blow it. Ruuel went over and touched it and it actually shifted in response.