Still no sign of Ghost.
Friday, July 18
Pressed
Mara spotted me heading for dinner last night, and brought me back to her apartment to eat with her and Lohn. Lohn was very funny, teasing me about "coming up for air", but also a bit pink and embarrassed about it all. He and Maze are used to thinking of me as a child to be looked after.
We’d barely settled down to eat when Maze brought all of First into channel, along with Kaoren, to warn us that my Kalasa projection and details of the platforms were about to be made public. Again KOTIS was pre-empting leaks from Kolar, and were a few minutes from a press conference.
"It will be a very full disclosure," Maze said. "All the scans of the projection barring that from the drone stationed at your test point, scans of the Chamber of Passage, and some less complete information regarding your injuries and what it is you’re able to do. Setari images are not being blocked. There’ll be a half kasse delay before the transmissions from Kolar are released, and they are the reason there is no point blocking Setari images. We are reaching the point where the image bar, at least while in uniform, is becoming pointless."
"Is – are they going to talk about the Cruzatch?" I asked.
"Yes. It’s inescapable – the building they fled through is sealed, guarded, and it’s no secret among the expeditionary force why. There has been some considerable debate as to how to handle the release of information about what it is becoming difficult to regard as anything but a direct enemy. There has always been a certain comfort derived from Ionoth being essentially unorganised. The Cruzatch not only pose an intelligent threat, but their appearance in Kalasa and use of the green stone lends itself to explanations no-one likes to credit. It’s been settled that we will disclose almost everything we know of them, barring only the trap apparently laid for you. Half-truths on this point aren’t likely to improve the situation."
"We may see another response from Nuri," Kaoren said, and the upshot of that is I’m now not allowed to go up to the roof by myself. Super annoying.
Press conferences on Tare are just mass channels with three tiers of participants – watchers, talkers, and the moderator who controlled who got to speak. Tarmian, the husky-voiced woman who’d been handling the Nuran’s visit, was acting as KOTIS' spokesperson. The reporters could barely decide which questions they wanted to ask her, they’d been flooded with so much new information.
The discussion about the Cruzatch was the thing that interested me most, and the first thing the reporters latched onto, asking if Muina’s initial disaster may have been due to them, rather than the Lantarens – that it may have been an attempted invasion from the Ena. Tarmian wouldn’t be drawn into speculating, repeating that KOTIS was continuing to search for answers in both the Ena and in the written records found in Kalasa. She happily announced that they continued to uncover references to the construction of the Pillars, along with a wealth of information about the Lantarens and their philosophies. She even looked a little teary about that, adding that over the coming months Muina and Kolar could expect to access translations of these documents, to at last start reclaiming their cultural heritage.
That switched them on to me, of course, and the projection of the Lantaren ceremony. Taren histories flip-flop about Lantarens. They were a ruling class, incredibly powerful psychics, and they not only broke the planet, they brought Ionoth down on every planet in this area of space. So they’re usually depicted as foolish, or greedy, or outright evil. Images of Kalasa at its height, and all those kids with flowers, messed with the way people were used to thinking about Lantarens.
"Is this a true glimpse of the past?" asked one reporter.
"As best as any of our experts can judge, yes," Tarmian replied. "We of course cannot say with absolute certainty the ceremony occurred, but examination of the fallen structure of the bridge, for instance, has verified that it once functioned as a waterfall – a thing certainly not obvious from a simple survey of Kalasa in its current state. We’ve cleared the central pool, which was completely covered by fallen stone and tarnish, and found the mosaic pattern visible in the projection."
"Then doesn’t KOTIS now have the key to revealing the truth about the Breaking? Have you other visions of Muina’s past?"
Tarmian shook her head. "This projection, of less than a joden, left Caszandra Devlin in a coma for two days. The exact nature of her talent set is still being discovered, and even if we come to understand it, and she to control it, the energy cost is dangerous in the extreme."
"What exactly does KOTIS mean by a tangible illusion? Is it true Caszandra previously injured herself?" Most of the media here dropped my surname pretty quickly – I’m Caszandra unless they’re feeling formal.
"Illusionists create images. Caszandra Devlin can create projections with not only a visual and auditory component, but substance. If Tsa Devlin creates a projection involving heat, it can burn her, as we unfortunately discovered. She is undergoing an intensive training course to strengthen her health and her control over her abilities. No decision can be made on whether we can risk her until she is completely recovered."
They stuck with talking about me for a while, since the nearly full story of my security pass and how it had finally been transferred to everyone else took a fair bit of discussion and explanation, even with the press release laying it out in nice, sequential order. The whole thing made me sound like a really persistent weed, cropping up everywhere no matter how hard you tried to kill it.
Kaoren arrived in the middle of this, and though we stayed in-channel, we went back to my rooms for the rest, settling into my window seat to enjoy the slow shift to dawn. Kaoren’s sister’s opinion of me was a good deal more interesting to me than the press conference, so I asked him: "What do you and Siame do when you go into the city?"
"Visit exhibitions usually, then shopping and dinner. Siame is torn between our parents' belief that the most important thing any person can do is create, to express, and the role her talents have brought her."
"Isn’t it possible to do both?" Zan had managed to find time to learn how to play a musical instrument, after all.
"Do, yes. Do well?" He shrugged. "Our energy is divided enough as it is."
"Did she decide I’m a threat?"
"You are. I will spend less time and thought on Siame because of you. The question is more whether what I gain is worth what it costs her, and she can’t judge that yet." He was giving me one of those half-lidded surveys, as if he was trying to decide himself, looking very serious. "She does not want anyone to be more important to me than she is, and she will hate you because of that, perhaps for years. But she will recover."
I didn’t know what to say to that, but Kaoren curled his fingers through mine, and that made me feel a lot better.
"The Kolaren transmissions are being released now," Maze said over the interface, as the press conference began to wind down. "They don’t add anything in regards to information – simply images."
We said goodnight to First Squad, then dropped out of channel. I had great fun undressing Kaoren, rather than him simply telling his nanosuit to go away, and he was being particularly intense. I waited till we were ready to go to sleep to record some more music for Zan, since I knew that would knock me out completely, and didn’t even bother to look at the Kolaren images until today. Lots of pictures of Kalasa, and tons of the Setari. Very few of me, for which I’m glad, though I could have lived without the little movie someone had made of a greensuit being given the duty of carrying me when they were rushing me back to Pandora after the projection. Not flattering.