There were people who came along as part of the room, though they hadn’t been in Ruuel’s description at all. Very grand and noble sorts, who didn’t seem able to measure their clothes, which were all hanging sleeves and trains and twice as much fabric as necessary. When Ruuel touched the wind chime, they all looked at him, which startled me enough that I stopped concentrating on maintaining the image – which was good because I really felt myself stop that time. Though I could have lived without the headache afterwards. It felt like someone had smacked a huge gong right behind my eyes, and I had to lie still until Ista Chemie’s medicking had taken the edge off.
"The scans are showing four distinct areas of brain activity," Ista Chemie said, while I was sipping one of the horrible restorative drinks she insists on giving me. "One only activates when you open your eyes while the others are in effect. Can you describe what you experience then?"
"Pain."
Ruuel gave me a captain-look, so I shrugged and added: "Two images overlaid, and a sense of…dissonance? It wasn’t too bad this time until you touched the wind-chime and they all looked at you."
Ruuel frowned, then said: "Reviewing log."
I’ll never get used to someone accessing the world through my eyes. Ruuel didn’t give much away, just stared into the distance abstractly for a minute, then said calmly: "The people weren’t visible to us. You’re seeing both the image in this world, and the one in the Ena. The drone set at this location in near-space should confirm that."
I got a bit quiet after that, thinking things over. On the trip back Ruuel told me that tomorrow we’d start attempting to find a way for me to separate the talents and gain some measure of conscious control of them. If I had been feeling particularly daring I would have asked him if he had had a lot of difficulty untangling six different sights, but I was busy feeling headachy and worried. I never did get around to telling him I thought I should swap teachers. Even though I get all sad and repressed around him at times, I feel reassured knowing that he has no trouble seeing right through me. Right now I need all those Sights to keep me going off the rails. And I figure I can feel sad about him and Taarel, but see him every day, or feel sad about him and Taarel, and miserable because I don’t get to see him at all.
Which is not what I’m worried about right now, but a useful distraction. I wish I wasn’t so tired, but don’t think I can keep myself awake any longer.
Sunday, June 8
Overwrought
I was getting ready for bed after yesterday’s session when Mori sent me a channel request. "Feel like some company?" she asked, when I opened the channel. "I’ve been given a firm suggestion that I might want to sleep on your couch tonight."
My first reaction was to resent the babysitting, to hate being thought of as this weak-ass neurotic liable to fall apart without hand-holding. I almost told Mori that I was fine, but the problem was that I wasn’t, so after an overlong silence I told her: "I think I’d be glad if you did."
"I’ll be down in a moment, then." She sounded pleased, so at least I didn’t have to feel she found being told to sleep on my couch annoying. And she was smart enough not to pretend that the idea was anything but an order, which is one of the things I like about Mori.
She brought a big, cushiony eiderdown with her, and was wearing a singlet, short-shorts and slippers – I’d love to know if anyone saw her in the elevator.
"You had a bad day, huh?" she said, plunking the eider on one of my couches. "I thought the testing was going well."
"I guess it is." I shifted from my window seat to the opposite couch, feeling embarrassed but stupidly relieved someone would be with me when I slept. "I just started thinking things through properly. The tests have been about places, rooms. Even though there was that whole horrible dream about the massive, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could make Ionoth that might attack Setari in near-space."
"Really? It’s the first thing I thought of. So you’re worried you’ll summon up something nasty?"
"Earth has some pretty scary stories." I could tell she didn’t understand, that she thought I was scared for myself. "It’s very annoying, because the more I tell myself not to worry, the more stressed I get about it. I never used to be like this."
I dimmed the lights back down, and told Mori about slumber parties. She told me about what it had been like for her when, at six, she was brought to Konna to be a Kalrani. During the early days, they’d been allowed to talk to their families as much as they wanted over the interface, and the training had focused mainly on physical education. Only the expansion of the interface network had been particularly distressing. After that, interface rights had slowly been pared back, and the training focused more on their talents.
Mori is glad that she became a Setari. She loves being in Fourth Squad, which is a very tight team, and really enjoys the exploration role, of being the first squad to go into a space. She’s excited by everything they’ve done on Muina, and is looking forward to getting into Kalasa. She fell asleep trying to explain how she felt.
It took me a while longer, carefully doing my visualisations – sheep again, because I find that safest. I don’t think I dreamed of sheep at all, dreamed instead of sleeping on the couch, comfortably aware of Mori curled up across from me. Right up until Mori suddenly leapt to her feet and sent a small bolt of lightning arcing across the room. She’s only a minor electricity talent, and while the thing she hit squealed and jerked, it didn’t go down. Lacking her nanosuit, she hoisted up my coffee table, swung it like an abortive hammer-toss, and threw it at the thing as it came at us.
Struggling out of my couch, I saw movement, started to yell a warning, but too late. A cat-sized purple-black bug hit her in the chest and she staggered backward as it hooked spindly legs around her arms and shoulders and stung her over and over. The first one hadn’t been stopped by the table and came toward us as Mori went down. I fixated on another bug climbing over the back of the couch I’d been sleeping on, but I knew that I was sleeping, that I’d made it happen, and reached frantically for the bit of my head I’d felt in the wind chime room.
And woke up, Mori standing over me, a hand on my shoulder. "I’m not sure I want to know what you were dreaming," she said.
There were fading red welts on her chin and throat. I stared at them, feeling sick, then said: "Let’s go to medical."
Mori was willing to go along with that, waiting for me to dress, then taking me with her up to her rooms so she could put on something over her bed-clothes. I could barely speak I was so upset, wanting to scream at her to hurry. When we finally got to medical and I insisted that she get scanned, telling the greysuits to look for a parasite in her chest, she was watching me with open concern, but told the greysuits to do as I said. And there was nothing, and I fainted.
I woke up in a scan-chair with three of the greysuits fussing over me trying to figure out why I’d passed out, and deciding eventually that it really was just relief. I’d only been unconscious a few minutes, but that had been enough time for one of the Setari to duck out into near-space to download the data recorded by my drone. After making certain I was no more than embarrassed, Mori brought me into a channel with Maze, Ruuel and Isten Notra.