When we were less emotional we had a highly entertaining discussion of how Kaoren and I fell in love, and so now the kids know more about our romance than anyone else, and Sen was happily diverted into the question of our upcoming wedding and different wedding customs and the idea of flower girls.
I’ve been getting more hugs since then. Not from Ys, but she leans against me sometimes, and sits close during story time. Sen was probably the least impacted out of all of us, and slept peacefully that night. Everyone else had nightmares. We’ve watched the rest of the episodes which have been released, and none have been half as distressing, though we made a decision to censor parts of the Velcro massive episode, and just told Sen very generally what we were taking out. The very annoying consequence of the log file episode is that tons of people now want to have all my mission logs released. I’ll resist that one for all I’m worth.
The feel of the settlements has changed a lot, now that we’re three planets again. Everyone had been quietly getting on with it in the last few months, but while they did seed plenty of new buildings, and prepare infrastructure for new settlers, it was more an atmosphere of consolidation and settling in. These past few weeks have really geared things back up again, even beyond the level of those frantic post-signing days. After a few confirmation trips to make sure the route could be travelled safely in larger ships, we’ve seen an enormous influx of settlers. Tare and Kolar spent the cut-off time processing settler applications, preparing the core components for a bunch of nanofactories, and finishing up the large deep-space passenger transports they’d been preparing. When you’ve got ships capable of bringing two thousand people in at once, it doesn’t take long for the population to surge, though processing security passes for two thousand people at once is a bit of a pain. At least the subway is up and running, so they can quickly get from the spaceport to the platform.
Mesiath is already impressively large, and quite lovely. They’ve thinned out the trees in the new city area, but not removed them all, so that the centre of the city is still a bit foresty, and opens out to the south where there’ll be farmland. We went on a day-trip there, and the look on Rye’s face walking beneath those massive trees was great fun. Kaoren and I are thinking about using his land grant to have a few summer houses dotted across Muina, which makes me feel awesomely rich and self-indulgent, but I think would make Rye ecstatic. Maybe in a couple of years. Now that Mesiath is well advanced they’ll be seeding another two major settlements, and the provisional council pushed for the location to be chosen by the settlers rather than just dictated by the bluesuits and so there’s full-on debate about where they’ll be. KOTIS' only requirement was that they be around platform towns, one northern hemisphere and one southern hemisphere, and they created little tourist videos about each site and people get to vote on their favourite for each hemisphere. The desert one is coming total last, unsurprisingly.
Some of the Nuran faction haven’t been very happy with the new developments. While we were cut off, they represented a solid percentage of the population, and since everyone was in Pandora they could remain relatively close-knit. Now that Taren and Kolaren settlers are pouring in, and adoptions are sky-rocketing (KOTIS prioritized people who showed a genuine interest and capacity for adopting children), they’re not only being outnumbered, they’re being fragmented. KOTIS is obligingly ensuring each settlement will have a cultural representative, and is capturing as much information as possible about Nuran customs and language, and even decided suddenly to assist in setting up infrastructure for Nurenor (basically turning it into a Nuran-run farming settlement and sneakily supporting a more reasonable person to be in charge of it) but when it boils down to it, the Nurans are absolutely going to be only a tiny part of Muina’s whole. Of the two billion-plus people living on Tare and Kolar, more than half have indicated they want to relocate to Muina at some point in the next ten Muinan years (an idea which completely boggles my mind). Of the fraction of eventual Muinans who have a Nuran background, most will have been absorbed into Taren and Kolaren families. The adult Nurans I’ve spoken to are either sad about this, or angry. Fortunately the angry ones are a relative minority, but I can’t really blame them for being upset.
When all the squads which had been stationed on Muina before we were cut off went back to Tare or Kolar, even the rest of Fourth Squad went, and Lohn, Mara, Jeh, Grif and Ketzaren, who wanted to take their kids to meet their families (and see if Deal and Enna’s nightmares could be addressed by a less traumatic journey through deep-space). When KOTIS swaps in new squads there’ll be times when I have bodyguards not drawn from First, Second or Fourth, which is something to think about. Of course First and Second, who have all served their minimum time, have opted for Muina transfer rather than retirement, and so will be posted here pretty much permanently. There’s a possibility that Fourth will still occasionally work on Tare, but not for a while, which is good because I don’t particularly want to planet-hop at the moment.
Lohn and Mara (and, indeed, almost all of First and Second Squad) are expecting masses of family soon – families of KOTIS staff get settlement preference, and Lohn and Mara used a bit of Setari leverage to be able to include a few friends as wedding guests as well. Their wedding is only nine days away and is really turning into a bit of an event – word of it inevitably leaked out and the Setari-Watch pages are full of endless speculation and delight. Fortunately there’s no private airships yet, so they don’t have to worry about people flying over taking photos the way they do for outdoor celebrity weddings on Earth. The park on First Squad Island has shaped up nicely – the grass a bit patchy in spots and with lots of shrubs and weeds, but it still looks very attractive, and Maze and Rye have been having great fun with it (Maze really is really serious about becoming a garden designer). The trees everywhere around Pandora have started their shift into Autumn colours, and the islands are all gold-tinged with hints of orange. Should be spectacular.
We’re facing our own relative-influx. Kaoren (who wrote emails to Siame every week during the cut-off so that she got a flood once channels were open) decided to bite the bullet and invite his parents and his brother to come visit. He’s doing it because he wants Siame to come back here because he thinks that’s the best chance for her to work out the issues she has about me saving her, or me taking Kaoren’s attention away from her. And, really, it would be strange to marry Kaoren without meeting any of his family except Siame.
None of us are looking forward to the visit. Kaoren’s not actually on argumentative terms with his parents, but he has as little to do with them as possible, and since they’re both Sight Sight talents they’re perfectly aware of his feelings. He’s heading to Tare tomorrow to pack up all our stuff at the Tare Setari headquarters, and will return with his family in three days[5]. We considered making it another family trip, but we think it best to not take Sen through deep-space at the moment. We could sedate her for the trip, but that won’t stop her Place and Sight Sight from operating, and it might be painful for her. We also – in theory anyway – want to see how we cope with being away from each other for a few days.
We both know we’re going to have nightmares the entire time, and stress out about being cut off from each other, but I guess I’ll feel less of a wimp if I prove to myself that I won’t fall into a heap if Kaoren’s not within reach.
5
Kaoren really doesn’t want anyone else handling the objects which mean a lot to him because of how they feel through Place Sight.