We left our bedroom door open in case they panicked in the night, and when I woke around dawn, hours before anyone else seems inclined to get up, both Kaoren and the flower girl were sleeping on top of me. I had to wriggle out from beneath them for some quality time with my diary.
I don’t know what to do about her. Why does she keep coming to find me?
She’s sweet, in an imperious little princess kind of way, but the most I can do is make sure that she’s "flagged for monitoring". With my hospitalisation rate, it would be stupid to try and keep some kind of connection with her, or her frowny sister and brother.
Assimilation
When Kaoren woke this morning, yesterday caught up with us in a big way, and we locked ourselves in the bathroom for an extra-long while. Kaoren is struggling with all that his Sights are battering him with, and I don’t even want to think, let alone talk about the suggestion that it was a touchstone who was responsible for the disaster on Muina.
Three pairs of eyes greeted us when we emerged: one curious, one embarrassed, and one scornful, but at least we were primly dressed in our nanosuits. And then my flower girl presented herself, arms uplifted commandingly. I had to laugh.
"Sweetheart, you’re going have to tell me your name if you want me carry you about all the time," I said, picking her up obediently.
"What sweetart?" she asked, wriggling about to see my face.
I still drop the occasional English word into speech unconsciously, so translated, pleased to have proof she was capable of speaking, though her shadows reacted with stifled shock and displeasure.
Kaoren handed each of the shadows a mug of juice, and stood considering them. "Not siblings," he said. Which was news to me. All three of them – like the majority of Tarens and Nurans – had black hair and brown-black eyes and though they were by no means identical it hadn’t occurred to me that they weren’t family, since they so obviously came as a set.
"Ys and Rye," my flower girl said helpfully.
"And you?"
"Sweehart?"
"Sentarestel." The boy said it, pink and unhappy. He’s proving more a blusher than a glarer.
"Someone got all the syllables. I call you Sen, okay? Name of girl in one of my favourite ever stories. You three can call me Cass." I put Sen down on the couch, and noticed the girl (Ys) immediately helped steady the mug of juice Kaoren handed the younger girl. Relative or not, she was very used to playing Sen’s minder.
I was debating little speeches to make to them when I heard a familiar "Hhhiiiiii" and stiffened. "Ddura is hunting," I told Kaoren urgently.
He immediately started speaking to someone over the interface, while those three pairs of eyes watched us curiously, widening in astonishment when Ghost came tearing out of nowhere and leapt into my arms. I’m relieved about that in retrospect – I’d forgotten I’d left her on the Litara.
"Not Ghost it’s hunting," I said, feeling sick when the cry continued. "They missed someone security clearance." But just then the Ddura made the query noise, then stopped. "Gone."
"Signalled to a different platform. Someone will be posted to keep calling it there, but you need to report immediately if you hear it again." He gave Ys, Rye and Sen another evaluating look. "There will be a general assembly of all of Nuri at the middle of the day. Until then, you will stay with the group in this building. Do you understand?" All three of them nodded, though I won’t guarantee they had more than a vague idea of what he’d told them.
After they’d dressed, we took them down to the common room, where a communal breakfast had been arranged, and asked two of the Setari who were helping out to keep a special eye on them since Kaoren and I had to go off to a meeting of the senior bluesuits.
It was a big meeting – not just bluesuits, but Isten Notra, the senior Taren and Kolaren Setari, and all nine of the surviving Nuran Setari, along with a half-dozen Nuran adults who had been suggested as representatives. We met in the fancy hotel, and the first person I saw was Inisar – obviously ill, but rested and clean and dressed in what looked like part of a greensuit uniform. I was very glad to have it confirmed that he was alive, and he gave me one of his ultra-formal nods in response to my relieved smile.
It was a breakfast meeting, and Tsaile Staben had everyone collect food from a buffet arrangement, then gave a short speech about what KOTIS had been doing on Muina in terms of settling and trying to uncover a solution for the tearing spaces. Korinal translated this for the Nurans, and I got enough of the gist of what she was saying to be fairly relaxed about talking to Nurans without a translator – it’s not as if every word of Nuran is completely different to the Taren version, though there’s going to be a lot of guesswork for a while.
After that, Tsaile Staben introduced her side of the table very briefly (including me as "Caszandra Devlin of the world known as Urth or Gaia) and Korinal introduced the Nuran side of the table. Two of the Nuran representatives were landholders (so far as I could tell this is a particular type of moderately wealthy farmer), one was a scholar, one a smith, one a cook and one what I’d call a (very young) priestess if Muinan planet-reverence used the word.
There probably wasn’t a single one among them who hadn’t lost almost everyone and everything they cared about, but only their red-rimmed eyes gave it away as they listened intently.
After introductions, Tsaile Staben said: "Both Tare and Kolar are of course willing to aid you as much as possible. But it is from you we need to know which direction to take. We need a decision, for your people, whether to remain as a group on Muina and become part of the colony at Pandora, or to be sent to Tare and Kolar to be housed with host families."
That got an immediate and very definite answer: Muina was their home world and it would now be their home, and there could be no question of splitting up the survivors of Nuri between other worlds. But one of the landholders, equally as definitely, objected to the idea of Pandora.
He wasn’t nasty about it – he actually came across as one of the nicest people there – but he spoke really eloquently about the differences between the Nuran and Taren/Kolaren ways of life, and how becoming part of the Taren/Kolaren settlement would mean abandoning being Nuran, as well as risking becoming a lesser, subservient underclass. That though they would be grateful, of course, for temporary shelter, the best thing for them to do was choose a relatively safe part of Muina and create a settlement of their own.
Even though I don’t think the bluesuits liked the idea of a Nuran-only settlement at all, Tsaile Staben simply nodded and asked the other representatives if they agreed. And it was clear all the Nurans were far from keen on living with Tarens, and wanted nothing more than to go somewhere Tarens weren’t. But the idea fell in a heap when they even began to think over the practicalities of eight thousand children and six hundred adults trying to build a settlement, no matter how much outside assistance they received.
The cook, a woman named Eran, let the others talk back and forth, then summed it up by saying: "No matter what we want, how fair is it on them? Even if we treated the oldest as adults, we would be raising ten youngsters each. And they would be the ones doing most of the work." Then, after Korinal had translated, she turned to Inisar and said she wanted the Setari’s view.