Anyway, I thought Zan’s apartment was wonderful. She’s decorated it in muted shades of green and blue (the public space, that is) with curling patterns which look a bit like ferns that shift and wind about. And she has a cat! A cat like that screensaver cat that drops down from the top of your screen and wanders about, except this one wanders about Zan’s entire apartment, and is blue-green to blend in with the walls. You can sort of pat it, even, because your interface will pretend like you’re touching something. I asked if there were real cats on Tare and she said a few brought from a planet called Kolar. Only the really rich can possibly have actual pets.
I’m not under any illusion that Zan suddenly wants to be friends. She’s been given me as an assignment, and she still acts exactly like I’m an assignment, just that the assignment has been expanded to my mental health as well as physical fitness and dodging. I don’t know whether I like her or not, beyond that she’s the only person on this freaking planet that I see on a near-daily basis. I can’t remember hanging out with any super-serious girls in the past, let alone someone who is part of the military and kills for a living. She makes me curious though.
After this we went and had another stepping session, and I waited till she was escorting me back to my room before I asked her again: "Setari competitive why?" And when she paused, since this was definitely not the sort of question she was likely to answer, I added: "Your squad, why unhappy, holiday?"
"The Setari don’t compete directly," Zan said eventually. "But how we perform effects privileges, which assignments we are given, and even whether we remain on active duty. Fighting in the Ena is greatly preferred to the more basic duty which is usual on Tare, and not simply because being in the Ena makes us feel…twice as alive. Twelfth Squad had only just been activated for Ena assignments, but were transferred to training routines, and are very disappointed."
"Mostly fight Ena, not planet?"
"The whole concept of the Setari is to prevent anything from the Ena reaching this world. And to find a way to fix the fractures which have made it so easy for the walls around this world to be crossed." She looked even more than ordinarily serious. "The numbers increase every year and the fractures are widening. Working on Tare, it’s just clean-up unless there’s a major outbreak. The war is beyond this world."
That was a good deal more dramatic than I’d been expecting. Where I’m going to be placed in this war is something too large to think about.
Thursday, January 31
A proper history lesson
I passed the stupid interface test! Only just – I still didn’t finish a lot of the questions, but I got almost all the ones I did answer right. So I now have a new year of school to plough through. Still no entertainment channels or anything, but a small library of children’s textbooks, which is good. I much prefer being able to freely read the books than to sit through the pre-set lessons and their snippets of information. A thorough browse has given me a lot more background and a better explanation of just what happened on Muina and what the situation on Tare is now.
So, whatever it was happened on Muina happened thousands of Taren years ago. They’re pretty imprecise about exactly how long ago it was, because they went through a really rough and chaotic first few decades on Tare, so don’t have a very good written record. Kolar is the other main planet which properly remembers being from Muina, but its early records are no better than Tare’s. The best I can make out, the evacuation from Muina was between 1500 and 2000 Earth years ago. So ha! to the idea of Earth having been populated by people from Muina – the Egyptian pyramids are over 3000 years old and that barely scratches the surface of Earth’s archaeological and fossil record. I guess it is possible that some Muinans came to Earth long before that, but we definitely weren’t part of the evacuation dispersal. I never believed that, no matter how similar I am to them genetically. It still makes vastly more sense to me for the Muinans to have originally come from Earth, especially because Tare’s population also reflects some of Earth’s races.
Lantar doesn’t refer to the entire population of Muina, either, but to a psychic ruling caste which caused the disaster that made Muina uninhabitable. Back then the Ionoth monsters were only an issue for these ruling Lantar (Lantarens?) when they travelled between planets. It’s not clear why they were travelling between planets, but it was common enough that they started a huge planet-wide project to make it easier: creating a little network of permanently aligned wormholes. The result of this was like if you decided to stop earthquakes in California by nailing the tectonic plates together: everything started to rip apart around the nails.
The tearing allowed things from the Ena to more easily get to Muina, where they liked to throw themselves on people and eat them. The Lantarens couldn’t immediately undo what they’d done because the places where they’d constructed the main supports of their interplanetary superhighway had been flooded with too many Ionoth. So they built these things called Ddura – the massives the Setari are so interested in investigating – which are artificial Ionoth whose job was to clear out Ionoth from the supports and from Muina. But they immediately lost control of the Ddura, and the situation on Muina began spiralling into chaos: whole villages and cities of people inexplicably dropping dead, and more and more Ionoth coming through and eating people.
All the Lantarens on Muina had a big teleconference (hehe!) and decided they had to leave Muina. They couldn’t all manage to go to the same place, and it doesn’t sound like they wanted to either. There were some who stayed behind on Muina, but no-one’s ever found any trace of them, so they were probably killed.
If you stay too long on Muina, something comes and eats you, or you drop dead. I’m glad I didn’t know all this while I was busy boiling wool.
Stepping it up
The medics have decided I’m more or less recovered, so Zan says we’ll have two sessions of training tomorrow. So funny to be excited about exercising. I wonder if the Setari have to earn TV privileges as well.
I asked Zan what the Ena looked like, and she said that it’s incredibly varied, but that the nearest space looked just like Tare, except without the people. It’s a shadow of this world. Now that’s freaky.
February
Friday, February 1
Frabjous
This morning was routine. Though my lessons with Zan are getting a bit more complex, it’s still repeating a set of movements over and over again.
But Zan didn’t deliver me back to my room afterwards. Instead we went to lunch in a smallish canteen. It seems to be a Setari-specific place, though I think the kitchen handles more than just this one room.
It’s funny how your aspirations change after being locked in a room for – how long has it been? – nearly a month since Nenna was hurt. It makes small things like eating in a very plain canteen so exciting. Being able to pick from a couple of options for my meal instead of having food delivered by a pinksuit under guard made me feel almost human again. The illusion of choice.