He shifted, looking thoughtful. "In any case, it’s highly unlikely we will re-establish contact in the next year – Taren year – so these will be the arrangements until such time as that occurs. Most significantly, for day-to-day assignments the squads will be broken apart. Although we will nominally keep our squad designations, current squad make-up is designed for Ena work, and that will be the minority of our duties.
"They believe the platform system is recovering, so bringing Mesiath up to a self-supporting level is to be our first task. The bulk of our work will be assisting in settlement – land clearance, seeding and feeding whitestone, survey and collection work, but also work on the recovery of information at Kalasa and the Oriath site. Expect to be working in groups of two to four. There will be opportunities to apply for extended leave, should you wish it. The provisional council has also established a land grant for all serving Setari, in recognition of the role we have played in making settlement possible. The grant is very generous, and I’ll post details of the process as soon as it’s finalised."
After shooting me an amused glance in exchange for my pleased smile, he went on more seriously: "Construction work is not what we spent so many years training for, and I know that many of you will prefer using your talents more fully. We have a little leeway with the assignments, and we will require more traditional rotation work at Kalasa and the Oriath site, and once it’s deemed safe, with escorting the survey ship attempting to remap the path to Tare and Kolar. Feel free to message me with any preferences, or other concerns. This is a new phase for the Setari program, but it is something we have achieved, and should be proud of. There is a ceremony of thanksgiving scheduled in two days, and then our new assignments will begin."
We ending up having a big picnic lunch on the top of the building – all the squads, even most of Fifth and the Nurans – and everyone talked about parts of Muina they’d seen and liked, and the prospect of owning land or building houses there. The estimate of it being months before there’s any real likelihood for re-establishing contact with the other worlds was actually reasonably comforting to most people, because they’d been worried about it being permanent.
Sen had a wonderful time, as usual, and Rye is blossoming more in social events. Ys and Lira stuck together as if glued, and were very polite to everyone who said anything to them, but I also had a stern message from Ys that I had to arrange for Lira to have the interface installed Straight Away because it wasn’t fair on her.
It was a really nice time until someone noticed that the "Setari party" was being featured on the news and that we were being live-streamed via long-range lenses (and quite a few members of the talent school had taken up nearby vantage points and were watching in fascination). Nils said that islands sounded like a good idea to him too, and we all went inside.
It was the first time any images of me post-squishing had leaked, and there was plenty of discussion about how terrible I looked. It was also the first time Lira had been publicly seen, and I have my doubts about how she’ll take all this discussion about how beautiful and mysterious she is. Fortunately, what little information KOTIS has released about her has made absolutely clear that she spied on the Cruzatch for us, and saved my life, and deserves a lot of credit for any of us still being here.
Obedient to Ys' edict, I checked with Isten Notra, then took Lira down to medical and described to her how completely horrible she was going to feel over the next few days while the technicians gave her a medical exam and then a shot to the temple. It’s unlikely they’ll ever expand the interface for her as they did with me, though they do have a theory about why mine keeps going strange – the language injection they gave me, to jump-start me in learning Taren, is basically a pared-back impression of someone else’s mind, and they think that’s what’s creating the conflict. Since Lira doesn’t need the language injection, they’re more confident about giving her the interface.
Ista Tremmar wanted to keep Lira in medical for observation, which she was extremely unkeen about, and eventually I talked them into putting a medical sense-chair up in our apartment so they’d know if she was having a crisis overnight. I want to keep her close because, even though there’s times when she seems like she is taking naturally to her strange rebirth, I often catch her with a lost and lonely expression. She’s not only survived a great deal of trauma, but I think she’s well aware of the fading away possibility.
I’m never going to forget the sound of her crying, and the way her whole body shuddered while I held her. I’d like to think that I’ve done more than give her a new form of half-life, that she’ll be able to live normally, but since I have no way of knowing, all I can do is offer her as much welcome as she’ll accept.
My throat was pretty worn by the time it was dinnertime, and both Lira and I were feeling very off, so we had a quiet meal, and Kaoren read the evening’s bedtime story. We dimmed the lights in our lounge and put Lira’s medical bed there, instead of in the kids' lounge, where it had been originally. I fell asleep before everyone but Sen, and woke a few hours later with an extreme need to take my pain meds.
Kaoren still can barely talk to me about how he felt while I was trapped. He’s been holding me and watching me write for this entire entry, and I think he’s going to be like that for quite some time. He’s worried now about having a nightmare and hurting me thrashing about, but I told him to just sleep on my unbroken side and we should be fine.
Thursday, November 6
Arcadian
Lira had very little sleep last night, and looked fantastically depressed all day. She spent more of her time in Siame’s room with the lights off. Sen, when she wasn’t making a huge mess in the lounge, was tremendously sweet, running down to the kitchens every couple of hours and getting ice which she would wrap in a towel and then sneak into Lira’s room and silently give it to her and take away the old towel.
I still made her clean up the mess.
Kaoren and I stayed in all day, rarely out of sight of each other, and along with spending time with the kids, managed to talk about not being dead, and what we would be doing next, and whether to change the timing of our wedding, and how to not have to keep relying on other people to take care of our children for us (this mainly involves me not being injured all the time so he and I can better balance the time we spend with them). They’ll be going back to talent school quite soon, but we want Lira especially to have more time to adjust and no longer feel so uncertain about me.
We’re not going to bring our wedding forward, even though the provisional laws they’ve written up for Muina don’t have anything close to the time delay requirement of Tare. We’d been considering it because it would make formally adopting the kids easier, but Kaoren very much wants Siame to be there, and I still have hopes of contacting my family. We won’t think about having more kids until after the wedding, which I think should give the ones we currently have enough time to feel that they really belong.