My job was a mild variation of poke Devlin at it: I was simply to let the Setari know if I saw or felt anything unusual. And enhance if necessary.
I gave Islen Dola and Islen Nakano the couple of minutes of the Planet Earth documentary which I’d recorded during my last testing session since I’d worked out how to subtitle it. The consequence of this being that I spent half an hour being minutely cross-examined about mass migration, something which a non-seasonal planet doesn’t really see – at least not in the numbers shown in the documentary. Of course, they want the entire documentary now, which I’m quite happy to do, except being something like thirteen hours long it’s going to take me an age to reproduce it.
I guess this makes me the psychic space pirate? No-one tell the BBC’s copyright department.
Today was by no means a particularly dangerous expedition. It was overcast, and drizzled briefly at one point, but it was a gorgeous forest and full of birdsong and little scampering animals. Because there was a platform, the area was clear of Ionoth, and since the Ddura was one which is used to Muinans, it even shut up pretty quick. There were still native Muinan animals which might be a danger, particularly poisonous bugs, but otherwise it was a nice outing. I stayed with Fourth, who were helping the archaeologists hunt out significant locations. It was a very spread-out city, with little which was undamaged. The trees had had centuries to work on the whitestone – we were lucky the platform was intact.
First Squad was working with survey and geology – soaring up for aerial views. Every so often the fauna group would get a Setari to come capture an animal for them – Telekinesis and Levitation make that ridiculously easy. A complete lack of drama day, and since Mesiath is in a time zone a couple of hours behind Pandora, when we headed back in late afternoon we arrived just as sunset was fading.
The structure of the new Setari building really makes for a very social set-up, especially when everyone gets back from missions at roughly the same time and sits around the big common room to chat and eat and watch the lake. I belatedly gave Zan the bit of music I’d recorded for her, and quite a few of us watched the latest documentary about the Muina settlement (latest as delivered that afternoon by the several ships which are basically on daily shuttle duty between the Muina, Tare and Kolar).
I think I might avoid the news for a while again. My engagement is still all screaming headlines, and there was some annoying talk about undue influence and whether Kaoren was really who I would have chosen if I wasn’t kept on such a tight leash by KOTIS. And some irritating expert saying getting engaged was a symptom of my isolation and loss, and that I’d no doubt fixated on Kaoren as a saviour. That was rather balanced by a lot of people thinking it terribly romantic, and there’s an increasing number of Kaoren Ruuel lust-sites. I learned a good deal more about the Ruuel family, and saw pictures of his parents and brother.
There was also a lot of discussion about what I could do, and what I should be allowed to do. The Kalasa projection was interesting to a lot more people than historians, and plenty of people were pointing out my potential as an industrial spy.
Devlin. Cassandra Devlin. Shaken, not stirred.
Kaoren fell asleep while I was reading him my diary, thanks to all the exploring after a not particularly good night with me. I’ve got to figure out a way to not work myself up over things.
Sunday, July 27
Nature documentary
Another day in the forest. Gloriously sunny – which in a forest that tall means incredible columns of light beaming down. Mesiath is a very peaceful place. There’s apparently some cat-type predators busily hiding from us, but nothing else anyone’s spotted which might think of actively hunting humans.
The city edges on a lake (it’s pretty hard to find a city which doesn’t edge on a lake on this planet), and I stayed with First and Twelfth Squad today while they did a little landscaping in preparation for seeding a settlement, since even with Zan’s level of Telekinesis, enhancement really helped deal with trees that tall. Meanwhile Fourth hunted down gates and explored in near-space.
It was not at all what I’d been picturing that we’d be doing, but managed to combine practical work with a balm of wonder. Everyone was enjoying themselves, glad to be away from the snow, and to see more of their home planet, and Alay disturbed this cluster of butterflies (rather like Monarchs, but with more red and gold) which spiralled up around her into one of the columns of light and she stood in the centre of them, lips parted and eyes bright. I felt like I’d never seen her happy before, and the Unara crack felt like centuries ago, lost to sunlight and iridescent wings.
And then the butterflies settled down over everyone and that was a different kind of fun. Tarens and bugs don’t mix, and it was hard not to laugh at the greysuits ducking and scattering.
On a less entertaining note, much of what we were doing was being recorded for another documentary, part of the increased openness demanded. I avoided the scanners as much as possible, especially when anywhere near Kaoren. I don’t know if documentaries will lower the number of people sneakily capturing images of us, though.
Monday, July 28
Prescribed privilege
I met two other strays today, people from a planet called Solaria. Despite the name, Solaria’s apparently an icy world, snowy everywhere except at the equator, and the two Solarians – who’ve both been on Tare for over twenty years – had been brought in to give advice and feedback on cold climate living. Very sensible of the Tarens, since my dim memories of a skiing holiday really haven’t been very useful.
Solaria’s another planet without a marked seasonal tilt. Can seasons really be that unusual among habitable planets? The Solarians were called Denasan (a really wrinkled, white-haired man) and Purda (a woman in her thirties). I spent quite a while chatting to them, learning about their planet, which was in the throes of industrialisation when they were displaced, and asking about their experiences after turning up on Tare. The technological differences were of course the biggest adjustment –more so for Denasan than for Purda, since Purda was only fourteen at the time. Interestingly, the Solarians' Muinan origin has been overtaken by a creation myth involving an ice-god. Stories of Muina are still told, but Homeworlders are persecuted by the priesthood of the ice god, and a lot of Solarians don’t believe Muina exists.
Denasan really misses his home planet, and loves being on Muina because it reminds him of the region south of his home on Solaria (at least currently, while Pandora’s still having buckets of snow dumped on it – Spring never comes on Solaria), and he’s really struggled with living on Tare and pretty much hates it, so far as I could tell. Purda’s much more typical Taren and adjusted. She worked on the Solarian version of a farm and even though she was only a teenager when she found herself on Tare, she remembers a whole heap of agricultural information the technicians seem to be interested in.
Although Earth is a good deal closer to Tare technologically, it was pretty clear that without being a touchstone I would have faced a lot of the same issues the Solarians have struggled with, trying to make a normal life as a stray on Tare. The average Taren really does think everyone not from Tare (including, quite possibly, Kolarens) is just a bit slow. Adjusting to a different dialect, and all that advanced technology, makes it very hard to get out of Base Level (which is a Taren term for subsistence living via social security).