Stray (27 page)

I was in 'Additional Notes'.  "Displaced person, young female, recovered from secondary site.  Uninjured, condition poor.  Stickie scan negative.  Not from known language group.  Submitted for processing."

My so momentous rescue.  The attached log was fascinating though, giving me some idea of how the Sight talents operate.  After arriving at the town, Fourth Squad started out near my wool-boiling operation, which made it obvious straight away that someone was there.  Those with Place Sight could see glowing footprints everywhere: mine and those of different animals, and even my handprints all over the bowls.  The squad split into pairs, apparently confident there was no major danger nearby.

Watching my Muinan town through Ruuel's eyes made me feel both stalker-ish and hypocritical, and really brought home to me why the Setari are so damn proper most of the time.  I expect it's a rare thing for anyone to review entire mission logs, but you sure as hell wouldn't want to spend your time checking out a squad member's butt while out on mission, or gossiping about other teams.

It was also beyond confusing seeing as Ruuel does.  Auras everywhere, and strange patterns where patterns shouldn't be: art nouveau heat hazes.  And that was only visual input.  Most of the Sights are far more than visual, so I hate to think how much information someone with six Sights is processing, and can better understand why Ruuel nearly collapsed staring at the Ddura while enhanced.  I don't think all the Sights are on all the time, though, since there were times when my Muinan town looked entirely normal.  Perhaps it's like changing channels, and he flicks through them.

I felt no nostalgia seeing my tower again, was simply glad not to be there as my trackers easily cleared away my makeshift door and passed the clutter of junk I'd kicked down the stair, then the second floor I'd been in the process of clearing.  Then they were on the third floor, Fort Cass, with my bowls of washews and red pears carefully lined up, and my pathetic collection of tools in their corner.  My bag.  My blanket.  Me.

Huddled in my stained and worn school uniform, with my hair greasy and lank, I looked bony and ill.  'Condition poor'.  Ruuel looked at me with normal sight first, then one which made me light up in dull greens and blues and reds.

"She's been here some time," said Ruuel's partner, Sonn, over the interface.

"Weeks, not days," he agreed.

"The time limit's close.  What do we do with her while we look for a gate?"  An edge of irritation had crept into Sonn's voice.  They weren't there for me.

But Ruuel didn't seem overly concerned, turning from studying the ceiling to look at me as I stirred groggily.  "Put her down at the lake's edge for the escort to collect."

I watched myself perform this magnificent recoil worthy of a scalded cat.  So scared.  Ruuel just changed whatever Sight he was using and started looking around the room again, seeing a strange overlaid image of rubble, and a few different fragmentary ghosts of me.

"Do you understand me?"  Sonn asked in Taren, then said almost the same thing, but pronounced the words differently.

"Who are you?" past me said, staring back and forth between them.

Sonn tried again.  I swapped later to watch her log, and she was carefully sounding out the same question using a "Stray Encounter Guide" which had a little stock of useful phrases from the languages of strays which had been picked up in the past.  They're all wildly varying dialects of Muinan, which is something I couldn't tell at the time.

"Nothing you're saying sounds like anything I know," past me said.

"Not getting anywhere," Sonn murmured.

"Just use gestures," Ruuel said.  "We don't have the time to waste with this."  He left to go up on the roof, telling the rest of his squad to keep scanning for gates.

The time limit for visits to Muina is strictly enforced.  Looking over the whole of the mission report, they'd started out miles away, at the ruins of a major city where a network of scanning drones had been installed both in real-space and near-space.

Robotics here are more advanced than Earth's but the AI is still nowhere near
real
AI, so there are limitations to tasks drones can perform.  The news about the Ddura had involved a complicated chain of drone messages.  They have drones seeded about the spaces near the big interplanetary rift on Muina which stay powered down most of the time, waking themselves up on a regular schedule to scan.  Another drone wakes itself up and collects the scans, and yet another drone travels back and forth between Muina and Tare with the collected scans.  A Ddura had passed by the scanning drones, and that was enough to get Fourth Squad hurriedly sent out, two days later, in the hopes that it was still about.

Once they reached the city, they'd gone straight into near-space to get the latest information from the drones there and to try and track the Ddura.  They were able to calculate the direction it had moved and had chased off after it in their ship, finding my town as a consequence, where they'd stopped to see if they could find a gate and look for it there.  And found me instead.

Leaving me sitting on the lakeshore, Fourth Squad had located a gate a short distance south of the town and gone through.  After two days they weren't surprised that the Ddura was gone, but they'd been able to identify which gate it had gone through, though how something as big as that aurora 'goes through' those little gates I don't know.  They'd tried tracking it until the constraints of their time limit had forced them to return.

I think I'm going to have to go through the Muina files from beginning to end rather than jumping about.  Why, for instance, aren't they searching that big city for records?  Sssso much technical jargon: it's like someone gave me everything NASA has ever written.

Friday, March 7

tl;dr

I decided, before I started on my file review, to read more generally about Muina and Tare, now that I had access to more than the 'primary school' textbook version of the past.  Establishing a timeline will help.  I'll write it down in Earth years because Tare years are just too stupidly short.

@ 1500 years ago – The Lantaren caste on Muina screw up royally by creating Pillars which start tearing apart the fabric which divides real-space from the Ena.  And then they're almost completely wiped out trying to fix their screw up.  I missed this little detail before – the people who set up the Pillars died almost at the outset, leaving a serious information and leadership vacuum. 

@ 1500 years ago – Entire towns and cities begin dropping dead, and Ionoth plague the rest.  The remaining Lantaren caste frantically evacuates everyone they can to other planets by walking thousands of people through the Ena (some through the kind of spaces I've been to on rotation, and others through something called deep-space).

@ 1500 years ago – One group arrives on Tare, which is a wet rock constantly pounded by storms.  They run for the nearest cave and struggle to survive underground.  The Lantarens as a distinct caste disappear at this point, but the bloodline remains mixed into the general populace.  Plenty of minor psychics about being useful, but they're treated as a necessary evil because for centuries it was considered a bad and tainted thing to be linked to the Lantarens, who are blamed and hated for what happened to Muina. 

@ 1400 – Muinans finally start to get the upper hand on Tare, and their life becomes less of a desperate struggle for survival.  The population starts to go up instead of down.  Proper written records start being kept, or stop being lost.  Even at this point the Tarens have a kind of nanotech – all those white buildings on Muina are basically grown, not built, from a kind of 'living mud' developed by the Lantarens.  The Tarens managed to bring some with them and maintain a seed stock of this mud and have built structures with it ever since, even though they had no real understanding of how it worked until the last couple of centuries.  House-building here is ultimately bizarre: they start with a big vat of white goop which they feed with raw material to make more white goop which they then 'instruct' using little models to create big versions of the same.  So long as they kept some of the white goop 'unformed' they could always make more white goop.  Since the white goop hasn't absorbed the whole planet yet, I guess it has a mechanism to stop it spreading everywhere.

@ 900 years ago – Tare has a strong and stable civilisation at this point, and is starting to branch out from the original island, Gorra, and establish on other islands.  World exploration phase, somewhat hampered by extremely violent oceans. 

@ 300 years ago – The attitude toward psychic ability finally shifts enough that it's considered a good rather than a bad thing, and the Tarens actively try breeding for it.  Later, once they figure out how to boost it with machinery, they find that psychic talent of some sort is almost universal in the population, although they don't have anyone who can even come close to the level of the old Lantarens.

@ 200 years ago – Computer age begins. 

@ 120 years ago – Advanced nanotech age begins.  At this point they've passed Earth's current level of technology and are beginning the first roll-out of the bio-powered interface.

@ 100 years ago – Tarens build 'spaceships' which will allow them to travel through the interplanetary gate again.  This gate (or rift) goes to deep-space and is thick with aether and doesn't seem to be like either the gates I've travelled with First, or the gate which took me from Earth to Muina.  The Tarens start hunting for habitable planets/Muina, which is by no means easy.  They send off and lose a lot of drones.

@ 90 years ago – A planet called Channa is located, which has an ex-Muinan population.  It's a rocky, arid world and not very attractive as a colonisation prospect, so the Tarens set up some mines on an unsettled continent, and indulge in long ethical debates about what to do about the ex-Muinans who are living a harsh, nomadic hunter-gatherer life.  Instead of stepping in and trying to take over, the Tarens disguised themselves, learned the dialect, and have been feeding them small technological advances, turning them into a more agrarian culture.  Since Channa's Ionoth infestation was relatively minor, they've left it at that until recent years when, like all the other known planets, Channa started to suffer from much increased Ionoth numbers.  Now there's a huge argument about whether Tare should lend more outright assistance or even try to remove several million Channans from the planet. 

@ 80 years ago – Located Nuri, a moon-sized planet with a small but stable population (tech level probably equal to the Romans).  The Nurans seem to consider Taren technology a contaminant, and though there's been some diplomatic exchanges, the Nurans really don't want to have anything to do with the Tarens, and won't share information.  They also seem inclined to hold the Tarens at fault for the recent increase in Ionoth infestation.  The Nurans have the strongest 'natural' psychic powers of the known planets, and have been able to handle Ionoth up till now, but are thought to be struggling with the increase. 

@ 60 years ago – Located Dyess, which has the remains of Muinan-type habitation, but it seems Dyess was overwhelmed by Ionoth long ago.  It's a watery world with a string of tropical islands crawling with things that consider humans tasty with ketchup.  There's been quite a few expeditions there focused on collecting useful plant life, but the slivers of land mass are not considered worth colonisation.

@ 50 years ago – Located Kolar, which is a dry but reasonably habitable world where ex-Muinans have been busy having wars with Ionoth and occasionally themselves.  It's the most advanced technologically of those Tare has encountered and though they would have been more primitive than Earth at time of contact, they're now a little more advanced thanks to Tare's help.  The Tarens and the Kolarens don't have a very warm relationship.  The Kolarens really want the Tarens to share more of their technological secrets, while Tare likes Kolaren resources but not the prospect of them standing on an equal footing.  Kolar has an internet, but the Tarens won't give anyone except the Kolaren Setari the interface.  Of course, large portions of Kolar don't
want
the interface, and loathe all the potential violations of privacy it would bring.

@ 30 years ago – Muina rediscovered.  Much rejoicing till entire expeditionary force wiped out in an explosion.  Repeated expeditionary attempts invariably wiped out, although in different ways. 

@ 30 years ago – KOTIS formed: theoretically a joint venture between Tare and Kolar, but in truth mainly Tare.  This was in response to a noticeable increase in Ionoth presence across the known worlds, and also wanting to 'fix' Muina.  Both Tarens and Kolarens consider Muina 'home' and there's this grand ambition to move back there.

@ 18 years ago – Tare is suffering from more and more Ionoth coming through to real-space and has to devote a lot of time and manpower to fighting them.  They begin a big push to increase the strength of psychic talents, formulating the Setari program in the hopes of moving the battle out of the cities.  Which has been very effective, but in no way fixes the larger problem.

So that's the interplanetary situation.  I can see why Ruuel doesn't think there's much chance of them finding Earth, since it took them so long to find their own home world.  Thanks to the strays which have shown up on Tare and Kolar, they know there's at least three other inhabited planets of Muina-descendents, and they haven't even been able to find them.

Thirty years ago when they found Muina, the Tarens didn't know very much about why they'd had to leave Muina in the first place other than "everyone's dying, run away!".  Why the Lantarens felt interplanetary travel was so important is a mystery, and so is how the Pillars were created.  Not a single one of the 'core' group of people involved in setting any of this up on Muina made it to any of the known worlds.