Andrea Höst: Gratuitous Epilogue [Touchstone: Extras]

As we grow to understand Nuran culture better, we’re beginning to see why they wanted so much to hide it – a whipping which scarred was an extreme punishment, suited for some deep and heinous crime. The scarring marked them not as victims, but as monsters. For eavesdropping on a lesson. The expression on Rye’s face when the blue bandages were taken off for the last time and they showed him an image of his back was enough to have me hiding tears, and Kaoren went incredibly quiet. He and Maze had a discussion about it afterwards, and neither of them could properly speak they were so angry. Not many people know about the scars, fortunately, and I mean to keep it that way.

My bones have knit obediently, nanotech speeding the process enough that yesterday I was finally allowed to ditch the sling. Kaoren and I took immediate advantage of that, which we’re not strictly supposed to do yet, but I’ve been not-ravishing him for way too long.

And today, at long last, we went into the Ena (four squads and Tsur Selkie) and I did visualisations of Tare and Kolar. Tsur Selkie had me project his office first, where I discovered a large whiteboard-type panel of actual physical writing. Tsur Selkie’s a forward-thinking type of guy, and set up quite a few contingencies, including this collection of details of what had happened on Tare since we blew the marbles. The same set-up had been made at the KOTIS headquarters on Kolar, except with a bunch of distinctive items in the room to make it easier for me to visualise.

News was not completely good. Fourteenth had been in the Ena when the marbles were blown, and were listed as out of commission recovering from injuries. Third is back on duty as a seven-person squad.

It was stupid of me to hope that Eeli would somehow have recovered.

With Fourteenth down, there’s only five active squads on Tare, but thankfully Ionoth numbers are significantly down on all planets, and they’ve observed the same sort of relaxing in the tension on the tears into real-space, so the Taren and Kolaren squads are coping. Having vastly more non-Setari manpower, they’ve made some progress in charting a path through deep-space, but estimates for completion are still in the months range.

Kolar’s news was unequivocally good. Their major Ionoth problem has long been middle-sized roamers, the number of which have practically dropped to nil since the disruption. They’re also making moderate progress on the complicated process of charting safe passage through the tides of deep-space. There was a Kolaren in the room with that whiteboard, and Tsur Selkie had a brief formal conversation with him which was very funny because the Kolaren realised he had to be a projection, and was so distracted by that he kept not listening to Tsur Selkie.

Then I fell asleep, of course, and woke in bed to find Kaoren curled around me, deeply asleep. I’m so glad not to be all broken and wincey any more, because there’s few things nicer than waking wrapped in Kaoren.

I’ve been reading the news while debating waking him up. All the Tarens and Kolarens on Muina have been very anxious for me to recover enough to check the situation on their home worlds, and KOTIS sent out a press release with the good news straight away. I’ve been managing otherwise to keep out of the news the last couple of weeks, for the most part by staying in and keeping my head down. I’ve been following a lot of the debates about the laws being drafted, but have gotten a bit tired of it.

Most of the other news is about who has been granted various bits of land, and the progress at Mesiath. The first New Muinan baby was born a few days ago. They called her Caszandra , and when I grimaced at that Kaoren informed me that she was hardly the first baby lumbered with my name, and certainly wouldn’t be the last. Kaoren has become a lot more popular for boys, too, apparently.

He’s looking particularly gorgeous, lying there asleep. Can’t resist…

Thursday, January 8

ET

The gate to Earth opened!

The monitoring drone gave us two days' warning of a probable alignment, sufficient for me to get completely worked up about the whole thing. I must have re-read my letter to Mum about a million times, and I swear Maze brought Nils and Zee back from the Oriath excavation just so I’d be distracted by the way they look at each other [1] They behave almost as if they’re not together, except just occasionally their eyes meet and – well, The Nils Effect triples. .

They did distract me a fair deal, and I was only a little beside myself when the drones suggested the critical time was approaching. KOTIS Command (rather warily) allowed Kaoren and I and the kids to go, with First Squad and a bunch of technicians as escort, to spend a day there waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t see any difference when it did align, and Alay was the one who tossed my (carefully wrapped and stamped and protected by a plastic wrap) parcel through. A fist-sized skitter-drone followed, just for a quick view and safely back again.

Kaoren kept his arm firmly around my waist the entire time the greysuits were taking readings, and looked a great deal more relaxed after the gate had closed. I know he didn’t think I was going to try running through it, but he may have been worried the gate would somehow reach out and snatch me away.

The thing was, it took FIVE MINUTES to close.

"I could have just turned around and gone back," I kept repeating.

"Well, I’m glad you didn’t," Mara said, amused at me.

"So am I. But still feel like an idiot." Then I went and hugged my kids, and even Ys let me.

Five minutes! It’s not just the amount of time it stays open, either. The skitter-drone had brought back some perfectly ordinary images of a Sydney footpath – no more than a few metres further along the same street I’d been walking down on my way home. And the gate realigned exactly one Muinan year (and ten minutes) after I stepped through from Earth. The implications of that, of a predictable alignment to almost the same place, just floored me.

Of course, we aren’t certain it really is predictable, and there was damn little I could do about it right away except give Kaoren a few sleepless nights with my worked-up tossing and turning. I was glad, at least, that I’d recovered enough to do some carefully rationed projection work, which meant a week later I got to go into the Ena and try and visualise Mum to see if the parcel had reached her.

I knew the answer to that straight away because she’d put the photos I’d sent in frames and set them on the bookshelf next to the TV. Pictures of me and Kaoren and our new family, right there on Earth.

Jules was playing games with one of his friends, and leaped up shouting: "I told you so! I told you so!" and then to me: "You get to do all the good stuff, Cass!"

Mum had been in the kitchen, but came out at the fuss and looked around at all the black-clad figures, then walked straight to me and hugged me hard.

"I only just finished reading them," she said. "Your handwriting is so tiny – my eyes may never recover." Then she pulled back, blinking away tears, and examined me. "No more injuries?"

"Not even a headache."

I introduced her to Kaoren again. He’d had me teach him how to say a few things in English in preparation – his accent is so cute – and Mum smiled at him and said: "I gather this is our second introduction, and so I’ll say the same thing I apparently did before: I’ll be glad to welcome you to the family when one of us isn’t a projection. But – thank you, for so much."

"Would you come here, Mum?" I asked anxiously. "If it were possible?"