"We could form our own band," Laura said, amused by the idea.
"We could."
The response came heavy with unspoken meaning. Laura felt the weight of it, but the moment to respond passed when Haelin, who had picked up a little speed, tried to stop herself and tripped, falling forward. The neatness of her landing hinted at her combat training, and she was back up on her skates almost immediately.
"Don’t use the toe pick to try to stop yourself," Alyssa instructed, gliding over to demonstrate correct technique. Haelin listened intently, and tried again, smiling when she succeeded.
"She’s a quick study.”
"Yes."
Outright pride in his mental voice, and as they continued to watch he told her of Haelin’s love of sport, and her disappointment that she was unlikely to be able to raise her Telekinesis to the point where she could participate in Tare’s most popular sport, Tairo. It was clear to Laura that he did not often speak to people about his daughters: that need to not show favouritism had gagged him.
"All right, Mum?"
Cass had noticed her abstraction. That blow to the chest sensation struck Laura all anew, to have her daughter here, being worried about her.
"Just thinking about how lucky I am," she said, squeezing Cass' hand. "And how I’ve been most considerate not mentioning the number of times you went down to the skating rink with Alyssa."
"Hey, if Nick can wriggle out of showing his beginner-level moves, I can too," Cass objected. "I never got past figure eights anyway."
This produced a lively debate that did not budge Cass in the slightest, and Laura listened with half her attention, while settling a gaming date with Gidds. He and his daughters would be in the southern hemisphere city of Meziath—a remarkable place of ruins beneath trees the size of giant redwoods—but that would be no bar to a virtual meet-up.
"Do the girls get to spend much time with their mother?" Laura asked, tentatively. She still wasn’t sure if the woman had moved to Muina.
"Allidi and Haelin have had no contact with their mother for over twenty Taren years," Gidds replied, without noticeable hesitation, but with an inordinate amount of precision to the words. "When we ended our marriage, Elezin broke legal ties with our daughters as well."
"You can…divorce your children on Tare?" Laura asked, failing to keep the shock from her mental voice.
"The laws came about following the rise of machine-assisted gestation," Gidds replied. "It is uncommon but not unknown for them to be employed during the dissolution of a marriage. And Elezin is not the only person who chose complete separation when KOTIS took their children."
He paused, and Laura was suddenly quite sure that he was searching for words, that his calm had briefly failed him.
"I am the reason the Setari program exists," Gidds went on, finally. "I disliked intensely the decision to continue the program through conscription, but I couldn’t argue against the logic. As the Setari grew in strength, my Sight suggested they would produce the results KOTIS sought. That lives would be saved. Elezin—her Sight told her that the program was a death sentence."
"Sight Sight can be that contradictory?"
"Sight Sight gives knowledge and certainty not omniscience. I can be certain your hair is brown, but this morning you brushed it and it was green. Neither colour is wrong in the correct context."
"You mean you were looking at it from different angles? But—" Laura stopped, not knowing when Gidds had met his ex-wife.
"When Allidi was six—the age mandated for conscription—the senior squads had only been venturing into the Ena for a Taren year, but were already proving very successful at preventing incursions into Taren real-space. Elezin saw in this the start of an endless cycle of attrition, of Setari sent into the Ena to fight the same Ionoth until error and ill luck finally killed them." He paused. "And that was exactly the situation we faced. The Setari, when we found Cassandra, were a dam cracking before a rising flood."
"But very handy to have around once Muina had been unlocked," Laura pointed out. Then, very carefully, she added: "This didn’t become obvious to your wife until Allidi was due to become a Kalrani?"
"Our marriage’s crisis point was my refusal to find a way for Allidi to be passed over," Gidds replied. He was fully in command of himself again, his tone only factual. "Elezin and I saw each other more clearly then. I was someone who would not find a special exemption for my own children. Elezin was someone who had expected no other possibility."
"That must have been incredibly difficult for all four of you," Laura said at last.
"It added to Allidi’s burden. Haelin does not fully remember her mother, but Allidi had rejection layered on top of separation when she started as a Kalrani. Elezin…her choice was at least in part because she knew she would not be able to hide from Allidi and Haelin’s Sight her absolute certainty that the Setari Program would kill them, but she of course could not explain that to our daughters."
"Do you—now that the crisis is over, and the Program has changed so much, do you think their mother will want to see them?"
"It’s possible. But she has not thus far."
And it had been years. Laura surprised herself by feeling intensely sorry for this unknown woman, who had chosen a clean break from her own children.
"Thank you for telling me, Gidds," Laura said, keeping her mental voice quiet and clear. "I would have hated to have said something entirely insensitive when I met them."
"They are stronger than I am on the subject," Gidds said.
In an outright change of subject, he moved to talking about taking the girls to different parts of Muina, and the progress of settlement. Laura asked questions, and watched Haelin, and thought about the parents of children conscripted into the Setari Program.
Some of the Kalrani had died. Even before becoming Setari there had been accidents, tragic and impossible to predict, and what argument about the greater good could ever change what it felt like to trace a line from your choices to a dead child? And then to set your own children on potentially the same path?
Of course, Gidds had faced first-hand the urgent need to deal with the tears into the Ena. Partially eaten. That was more than a physical fact. The Ena had eaten Gidds' life, swallowed him up. He had still been a child himself when KOTIS first sent him there to try to find solutions, and clearly held himself responsible for all that followed. What had the past couple of years been for him, with the urgency gone and the rest of his life to discover?
No point denying that he was working on fitting Laura into that future. Meeting with his daughters would be the biggest step they’d taken so far, although a virtual family outing seemed slightly less challenging than a proper meeting—not least because the girls' Sights would not be quite so large a factor.
Chances were high that Allidi and Haelin would prefer their own mother back in their life, rather than someone new and unknown. Trying to build a relationship with them would be far more challenging than playing grandma with Cass' brood.