The place had a different set of gods, two men and a woman, another three entries into House Zolen’s pantheon. I still can’t decide if they really deliberately turned themselves into Cruzatch, or if it was some terrible error. I mean, who schemes to turn themselves into floaty burny things?
There’d been a lot of back and forth discussion about whether I should be involved at all, since it would be possible for the Cruzatch to mount a raid through the malachite marble, but they eventually decided on a brief visit after the power stone had been used to turn off the shielding.
This meant a lot of sitting about for me, slathering myself in the insect repellent which is a particular necessity for the Pelamath area, though we’ve been using it during our other exploration trips. I had a rotating series of guards, and chatted to some of the technicians I hadn’t seen since Arenrhon, who all seemed to want to tell me about some individual discovery they’d made, some piece of information about Muina’s past which had touched them particularly. These conversations are occasionally surreal, particularly when people I haven’t talked to before stammer or blush or grin madly. I’ve learned to pretend not to notice but it –
I started to write that it makes me feel as fake as wearing the Setari uniform, but realised that I no longer feel like I don’t belong in the uniform. Not since Kalasa, I think, when I was just so glad I had it on.
My involvement at the Pelamath installation was to be limited to a quick trip down to the two lowest levels just so they could record which objects were blurry, and any other random observations I had. Which was straightforward enough – and I’m getting better at handling the blurriness – but then it got confusing because the blurriness started to resolve.
I kept seeing the same place, but with all the dust and grime gone. And when they told Fourth to bring me back up to the surface, I kept getting flashes of the other floors with all the corpses gone, and people moving about in a businesslike way (most of them favouring an Egyptian kilt look). When we made it out to the canyon, the stairs looked sharp and clean. The technicians were all fascinated, and had me go back in and tour about the unsealed part of the upper floors until my old friend Pounding Headache showed up and bought me a ticket back to Pandora.
The most popular theory is that the power stones had such a strong impact that it imprinted the past on the area, allowing me to see the place before their activation. But I don’t know if that’s right, and Isten Notra pointed out that the peripheral vision world I was seeing while in near-space was similar but different.
Alternate reality? As if this wasn’t confusing enough.
I recovered quite quickly from my headache, which is an improvement, though I was still sentenced to an entire afternoon in medical for brains scans, and very annoyingly a lot of blood and tissue samples once again. Tomorrow they want to try taking me close to the Kalasa power stone, which doesn’t have any sarcophagi, to see whether it will let me have more glimpses into Kalasa’s past, since seeing without projecting is far less energy-intensive for me. Well, that’s the current plan unless someone in KOTIS Command changes their mind again – they’re so wary of using me. But all the news reports today have been about the increasing density of Ionoth in Tare and Kolaren near-space, which has led to more incidents of Ionoth reaching real-space and thus a spate of deaths. I’m guessing Kalasa will be a certainty.
Friday, September 19
Urgent Relocation
Back on Tare. I never cease to find new ways to have a crisis.
This was another dreaming problem. I’d barely gone to sleep the night before last, and was having a confusing dream about being trapped under something heavy, when Kaoren woke me up. I occasionally have dreams about being trapped under things because Kaoren has rolled on top of me, and hadn’t really felt anything different about this one other than the fact that Kaoren had woken up instead of me, but he said he was feeling extremely uneasy about me, and that my vitals monitor was showing a slower than normal heartbeat. He wanted me to go sleep in medical attached to the scanner, which I wasn’t keen about at all, but I could see he was really unsettled, so I checked all the kids were asleep then went along just to spare him the stress, and felt tremendously guilty about having to wake up Ista Mezan (this week’s primary medic) just so he could watch me go to sleep. He was very nice about it, but looked so tired.
I was pretty tired myself, so went to sleep quickly, and started having another dream about being trapped under something heavy. It didn’t exactly feel like one of my real dreams, and my head felt very vague and I just lay there until it grew clearer, not that it ever really grew clear. There was a mistiness to everything – fog – and I seemed to be in a dark place with a narrow light directly above me, making the thin tendrils of fog glow, and I could make out different pinpoints of light to either side, and some kind of pattern in the ceiling. I couldn’t move, couldn’t turn my head, couldn’t lift a finger, couldn’t speak, didn’t even really feel like I was breathing. I didn’t feel at all like myself.
And there was whispering. Lots of words on all sides of me – or on me. It felt like there were tiny incredibly heavy people sitting on top of me, whispering. I couldn’t make out what was being said, beyond that it had the zeddy noises common in Taren and the other Muinan dialects.
I didn’t like it at all – I felt so small and helpless and constrained – and started trying to wake up and couldn’t. I knew it had to be a dream, but the easy ability to wake out of my dreams seemed to be gone. I tried sitting up, and still couldn’t move, and tried creating a projection of an Ionoth Kaoren to free me, and nothing happened, and then I panicked, in a futile and unproductive way. I couldn’t even feel my heart beating.
The only thing left I could think to do was try and sense whether there was anyone nearby who might help me. I began pushing my senses out, but even that didn’t work properly, and I felt like I’d fallen down a well – or up a well – and then I snapped back to staring at the ceiling. That wasn’t a very nice sensation.
But it was the only thing I could do, and I was by that time out of my mind desperate, so I kept pushing out, pushing and pushing and falling up this well but I felt like I was a rubber band stretching too thin.
And then I was me again, trying to gasp and choking because there was a tube down my throat. And still heavy, like there was an anchor hooked to my spine. Ista Mezan said something in a high, relieved voice and then helpfully pulled the tube out (horrid sensation) and then Kaoren was in reach and I got hold of him and just gasped and shook for a minute or two. Ista Mezan did his best to get a physical assessment of me without prying me off.
Kaoren’s heart was beating really fast, and his voice was even but unusually flat as he explained that my heart rate had slowed soon after I fell asleep, and then plummeted – the time between beats increasing exponentially. So far as they could tell, I’d stopped breathing altogether, with barely a flicker of brain activity. They’d hooked me up to a machine for breathing and tried waking me with an alarm over the interface, and Inisar had tried speaking to me telepathically, and they were debating shooting me full of stimulants when I’d revived as abruptly as I’d gone. I’d been not quite dead for nearly twenty minutes.