He asked if it would bother me if he reported the meaning, and I said "Yes," and I think he’s going to leave it at that. I’m glad he asked.
Saturday, August 9
Quadrangles
I am increasingly convinced that it’s a requirement to be in love with Maze if you’re a female Setari captain. All the squads went to Mesiath today, and had a very good time away from the main expeditionary force. Zan came, but didn’t swim, and fell asleep tucked against a rock on the bank and Maze found her still asleep and carried her back. She looked really tiny and young against his chest (and I got the impression that her squad wanted to rescue her).
Endaran, the captain of Eleventh, went really thin about the mouth and got ominously quiet. Taarel handled it better, just saying, "She’s being overworked," to Maze, and nodding when he said he’d rearrange Twelfth’s scheduling. But later on, after only Third and Fourth were left to continue assisting the sampling expedition, I saw for a moment that she looked very alone. Whether Zan woke up before Maze put her to bed, or if anyone told her, I don’t know. Maze was looking pretty damn tired at dinner tonight as well.
I’m feeling very lucky to be me today. We had a really gorgeous day. Long walks in the forest, with just a bit of side-fuss due to the swarms of greysuits which need herding. Then swimming before lunch – very easy to get rid of the arms and feet of the nanosuits and set the cloth to a thinner, finer texture. After some initial noise and splashing, we spread out in a side-branch of the lake where we’d found all these drowned and shattered whitestone buildings mostly submerged, and everyone either sunned themselves on sticking-out bits of stone or floated on their backs in the water.
The day was very warm, and floating on my back in cold water with my eyes half-closed looking at the beams of sunlight was really the best way I could imagine spending my time. I have to admit I wasn’t really trying to do any of this connecting with the world thing, just enjoying myself and trying not to distract Kaoren. Place Sight and Sight Sight make this complicated for him, but he was very thoughtful about it afterwards and said at dinner that he felt that it was a valuable exercise and one worth continuing. All the captains seem to be in agreement about that, whether because they think it a good thing for squad morale or whether they were succeeding in feeling all connected I can’t tell. None of them were yelling Eureka, anyway.
Endaran was being ever-so-slightly catty toward Zan. Channelling her inner Forel.
I ravished Kaoren most forcefully after we went back to our room – I don’t take the lead in bedroom very often, but I have great fun when I do – Kaoren seems to find it maddening and incredibly arousing at the same time and I love watching him trying to control himself. I read some more of my diary to him – all of the day I was rescued – and he’s very amused that he made so little impression on me.
I love watching him sleep.
Sunday, August 10
Productivity
Today I was swapped to enhancing the Telekinetics lugging things about – assigned generally, but with Lohn and Mara being my bodyguards.
KOTIS has an assembly line of epic proportions underway to finish the handful of apartment blocks which are going to house the new guests. Each building is inspected after it’s fully formed, cleaned of any residual muck and gunk, and then the primary installations are done: power unit, water system, and the really complicated nano-waste facility. The pipe connections are double-checked, and then they start on outer doors and windows, and the heating and air-conditioning and lights and the building’s brain (main node for the interface), followed by kitchen and bathroom fittings, inner doors. Then everything’s cleaned again, and furniture placed – couch, rug, mattresses, pillows, blankets, kitchen utensils, waste baskets. There’s a team for each separate stage, trailing each other from building to building, and once the ship unloading was done and I wasn’t needed for enhancing I joined the furniture team and helped lay out rugs and mattresses and made beds and things in the first building cleared for them to work on.
The end result is sparse and samey, but of course that doesn’t factor in the Taren interface public space. They’re still designing those, but one of the technicians showed me some of the early designs, which are based on the decorations around all the windows and doors in the old town. It’s really pretty.
While most of the buildings are exactly the same layout, they’re really made different by the amount of ground which covers them – some are almost entirely aboveground, and some are almost completely buried by the rise of the land (must remember to ask why they don’t get balconies opening out into the dirt for those ones). There are one, two and three-bedroom apartments, and a small section in each building which is more communal living with individual bedrooms but shared bathrooms, kitchens and lounges. The city layout is also very variable – they worked the placement in with the existing hill scape, rather than trying to keep to a grid structure, and the roads are rather winding. It looks like people will mostly be expected to get about by underground rail. There’s even a huge underground warehouse near the HQ block.
Nanotechnology makes building so ridiculously easy for the Tarens. Ninety percent of the work is in the planning, and once they’ve done all the designing, they use nanotech to produce the model and then nanotech to transform the model to life-size. Whitestone is very strong and adaptable to almost every design, and if they make a mistake they can turn a section back into goo and adjust it. Most of the construction effort and expense then comes with the fittings.
Before heading to Mesiath, Lohn, Mara and I met up with the rest of First Squad to explore an area which will be called Desza Tohl (Moon Piazza). This is an open area designed to be the city centre, north of the science buildings, forming a crescent shape at the eastern base of the amphitheatre hill. The whitestone paving of the piazza is patterned – someone apparently spent months designing the model segments, which represent the light of the moon streaming down from the old city. Each radiating segment shows scenes of Muina’s past and present and hoped-for future, and has incorporated the swirly floral designs which decorate Kalasa. It’s really, really huge, and the pattern is interrupted by space for banks of grass and raised gardens, and these great whitestone benches which scoop up under your legs. There’ll even be a couple of pool/fountains and a sunken performance area. I could have spent all morning wandering about looking at the design if it wasn’t still mostly covered by snow, and Maze told me that if it hasn’t melted by the time of the big party, he and the other Fire talents get to hurry things along.
Two sweeping balustraded ramps have grown up the side of the hill to the amphitheatre and they dance across each other to continue the theme of the piazza. They’re going to put a vertical garden and a statue in the gap in the centre (Lohn was teasing me saying it was going to be a statue of me), and there’s some small buildings which will sell food and so forth tucked against the hill. And some elevators off to one side, which go up to the top of the hill, or down into a currently extremely empty underground whitestone cavern which is going to be a hub of the subway system when it’s installed.