In Arcadia

Chapter Sixteen

In the nature of careless wishes, Laura’s desire to see how Gidds dealt with stress was gratified the day before their weekend trip. She woke, not long after midnight, feeling strangely cold and oppressed and, shifting, saw Gidds sitting on the edge of the bed. In the bare light of the stars, Laura could make out no detail, so she raised the room lights to a dim partial visibility.

His back was rigid.

This was such a contrast to Gidds' usual composed calm that for a moment Laura just blinked at him. What had happened?

Thought caught up with astonishment, and Laura realised that of course he must be talking to someone over the interface. Not wanting to interrupt what was probably an important conversation, Laura rose and slipped on her robe before heading out to the kitchen to make something to drink.

She had barely poured out when Gidds came out of the bedroom, shrugging into his uniform jacket. She lifted a mug of perfectly-warmed spider milk enquiringly, and was pleased when he accepted it.

"I’m sorry for waking you, Laura," he said. "There is a situation at Liriath."

He was still…not visibly angry, but very tense, and somehow remote. Locked down.

"Is it something you can tell me about?" she asked, as he drained the mug.

"A group of children overdue at their homes, with no location trace visible through the interface. A sibling confessed that they’d discovered a cave system in the hills south of the city, and gone exploring. The caves appear to be extensive, and the children must be far enough in that the rock is blocking any signal from their interface uplink. A number of Kalrani were in Liriath for a training exercise, and their supervisor volunteered them for the retrieval." His jaw tightened. "They, too, are now non-contactable."

"Are these caves outside the Ionoth-clear zone around the settlement?" Laura asked, biting down on sudden horror. All the platform towns were kept free of Ionoth by powerful constructs called ddura, but the vast majority of Muina was still considered too dangerous for unarmed travel.

"They are on the edge of the ddura’s range. But there are also native predators, and adapted Ionoth."

Laura hesitated, for she was still negotiating an understanding of his Sights, and how much her own feelings might distract or interrupt much-needed focus. That sense of separateness that was very much a part of him was particularly to the fore just now. But then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.

"I’ll hope for the best result for the search, then."

The right decision. His arms closed around her, fierce and tight, and he let out his breath as if the contact had helped. Then he brushed her cheek with a kiss, and was halfway to the door before she even caught the faint hum of an approaching flyer.

Laura drank her spider milk slowly, activated the cleaning unit, and returned to her bedroom, but only to dress and walk down to the bottom of the hill, leaving the path to head directly to the island’s stony shore.

The dark water breathed cold, but Laura had not held back on layers, and was not troubled by the chill as she sat herself down on one of the large rocks.

Impossible not to imagine horrors. Children in caves of teeth and claw. Parents waiting with rising dread for news of the vanished, and every hour feeling like days, like months.

Laura could picture that all too well.

Nor did she wonder at the strength of Gidds' reaction. Students sent in without preparation. And civilian children who must surely bring to the forefront of his mind one terrible day long ago, when a dimensional tear had opened and death had swarmed through.

Sinuous, with bone-white claws and a ridge of razor scales, those Ionoth had been small, not much larger than cats. But their numbers and their ferocity had seen them cut effortlessly through an entire residential district of one of the beehive Taren cities. Gidds had been very young, and those things had killed his family, and…

Partially eaten.

Laura shuddered, and closed her eyes. The situation might not be as desperately bad as that. And he would have told her if Allidi or Haelin were involved. But still…

A faint rattle of stone made her stiffen, but it was followed by a small cough, and so she activated the interface proximity display. It showed Maze, making his way down to her from the path above. He, too, would have taught some of the missing Kalrani, and no doubt was itching against the constraints of guard duty.

"I’m just accepting there’s no chance of sleeping," she said, when he reached her.

"Not worth trying," he agreed. "I can watch what’s going on, but that just makes it more difficult to not order someone out to take my shift so I can go help the search. Pointless of me. They’ve deployed two full squads, both with strong Path Sight talents, so it won’t be long before they’re found."

He sat down on the rock nearest hers, and for a time they waited in silence. Then Maze said: "Have you ever been out on the lake at night?"

"In one of the boats?"

"In the canoes. It’s become a favourite indulgence for Alay and I. And is a very good distraction."

"Sounds like just the thing."

To their left, the lights of the docks came on—the conveniences of the interface were innumerable—and Laura found herself gently wafting through the air toward it, for the conveniences of Telekinesis talents were equally boundless. She almost asked Maze to forget the canoes and play Peter Pan instead, but flying took energy and concentration for him, and so she held her tongue.

Cass had accumulated quite a collection of watercraft since her move to Arcadia. There was an expansive boathouse to shelter the equivalent of the family car, and multiple racks of canoes. Laura watched appreciatively as Maze wafted one of these into the water, and nodded her thanks when he held it steady so she could step in.

There had been many family trips onto the lake in the past few months, and so Laura was relatively practiced with paddling. Gliding out of the light into inky nothing was something very new, however.

"Head west—the water is usually smoothest there."

Laura followed the rhythm of his strokes, her thoughts already stolen by the sky. The lake was not so still tonight that it offered a mirror reflection, but an echo of the stars' expanse was still caught in the slight chop. Miles from the steady glow of Pandora, with only a few small points of light from the surrounding islands, Laura skimmed beneath a million suns.

But even glory could not keep frayed nerves still, so Laura sought refuge in conversation.

"They worked out Earth and Muina are in the same galaxy," she noted. "A different spiral arm, with the galactic core between us."

"Near neighbours," Maze said, and there was something in the tone of his voice that made her turn to try to see him, floating a short way behind her.

"What is it?"

"They’ve found two of the Kalrani, and one of the missing children. The boy had fallen down a shaft. His friends went for help, and most of the Kalrani went on to track them, leaving two to bring the boy to the surface. They encountered…sounds like an adapted Ionoth."

Adapted Ionoth were the result of creatures from the Ena surviving long enough on Muina to reproduce. The guardian ddura construct often did not seem to recognise these offspring as alien to the planet, and did not eradicate them during its sweeps.

"The Kalrani held it off, thankfully," Maze continued. "Some injuries."

But one predator made others likely, and the still-missing had been heading back to the entrance.

"The Kalrani do have a strong Telekinetic with the group that’s still missing," Maze said, unhappily. "But this was a Sights training trip, and multi-Sighted talents rarely have strong elementals. And three are Place Sight talents: even if they’re not physically attacked, this kind of thing is the worst kind of stimulus."

"I gather not many Place Sight talents make it through Setari training."

"Usually eliminated in the first few months of evaluation," Maze said, restively. "Only those with the most resilient core are trained to increase the strength of that talent. And even the most formidable are vulnerable in ways that other Setari simply are not."

And they had been sent into a closed-in, dread-filled ordeal. Fear and pain imprinted on stone itself.

"I’ve read a little about the Tasken Outbreak," Laura said, carefully. "How hard is this going to be for Gidds?"

Maze’s response was a long silence, until the lapping water seemed to jangle by contrast.

Finally: "He never shows it, but we all know he wears every injury, every loss. He’s gone in with the squads himself today, which is going to mean he’s hit with Place impressions directly, and then he’ll work with the Kalrani afterwards, trying to ease the impact on them."

"He’s still that central to the Setari, even though the crisis is past, and he’s being assigned to so many other things?"

That prompted the briefest cough of laughter. "Oh, yes. The reason we are here, and the reason we survived. Our first trainer, and in the early years the first to take us into the Ena. For every Setari, he is the one we have hated, just a little, and tried to impress, to live up to. Our captain of captains. That’s never going to change, no matter what he’s assigned to. Besides, he still conducts much of the Sights training."

"Hated?"

"It’s a complicated relationship. I’ve definitely had occasions where I’ve resented him for—for the standard he set, as much as anything, and at times for the simple fact of the Setari. But mostly we’ve been glad of him, because his judgment has been all that stood between us and disaster so many times. I wouldn’t quite say it’s a parental relationship, except perhaps with Kaoren, but we have burned to prove ourselves to him—and would protect him with our lives."

The words were forthright, honest, exposed. Laura was startled: she’d seen the way the Setari stood straighter around Gidds, but she’d assumed it was a parade-discipline reaction.

"Did it start out that way? He must have been quite young when you were recruited."

"He would have been, I don’t know, forty-seven, forty-eight? Certainly less than fifty. I remember we called him the boy in charge, so our impression of him was definitely not of an adult. I have some scans stored up from that time, and it’s always a shock to look and see him not even old enough for Ena missions under the current system."

Taren years. You could make your attempts on the adulthood exam from fifty, so Gidds would have been just a little older than Julian when he’d transitioned from being the first Setari to training the next generation.

"I’ve been surprised to not be featuring on the gossip channels lately," she commented.

"Ah, well, most of the upper command chain in KOTIS is very strict on privacy. Personal arrangements definitely are not considered general release reports. And I’m the one who organises Arcadia’s security detail. You might have noticed it’s always the senior squads here lately. Watching wide-eyed."

Laura laughed, and felt faintly reassured. The gossip would come, of course, especially if they did progress to the point of making things official. First stages were long past. Gone was the simplicity of feeling flustered, of exploring a mutual attraction, of scratching an itch. There was nothing light about the way she felt when thinking about Gidds, the awareness of his absence, the comfort of his presence. They were starting to knit together, to consolidate attraction into belonging. And, yes, the deeper the strands of their lives intertwined, the more the potential for hurt grew. Not simply that his interest could wane, but the kind of pain she felt now, born out of her inability to shield him from his past, and from the weight of a thousand duties.

"They have the rest," Maze said then, and his voice was a mix of relief and dismay. "Some injuries among the Kalrani, but not serious. One of the missing children is dead, the other two critical."

At almost the same moment, a text appeared in her interface.

Gidds: All Kalrani recovered. One fatality among the explorers. I will be some time, Laura.

Laura: Come back here when you need to sleep, whatever time of day.

Because he would have nightmares. She knew he would have nightmares—she would have nightmares, and she stood only at the very fringe of events.

Gidds: I will.

Bare text could not truly carry emotion, so it was Laura’s imagination that supplied a thousand layers to two simple words. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, then tipped her head back to gaze at the universe.

Laura hadn’t meant to go to sleep, but her mind slipped away during a visit to one of her most reliable comfort reads, and when it swam to the surface the day had jumped from mid-morning to early afternoon.

Gidds was with her. She turned, working not to wake him, and saw exhaustion writ as clearly as bruises on his sleeping face.

If he was having a nightmare, Laura could not tell. She couldn’t remember any of her own, and as her eyes drooped again she hoped they would stay away, but her subconscious was not so kind, and the second time she woke it was necessary to struggle from a tangled morass involving Cass and Julian and caves. This time she was alone.

Hoping her dreams hadn’t cut short Gidds' rest, Laura washed her face and tidied impressively tangled hair while checking her messages and then the proximity display. Gidds and Julian were together: an unusual development. Whenever Gidds was in the house, Julian had shown a marked increase in his tendency to only come down for meals. Curious, she went in search of them, following Gidds' measured, beautiful voice out to the pool. Julian said something in response, then looked around at her step.

Sunset, slanting over Braid Meadow, bathed the back patio with light, but that could not be the reason her son’s cheeks were so pink.

He didn’t seem upset, however, merely saying: "I’m doing dinner, Mum. Won’t be long."

"Fondue again?"

"You know you love it."

He took himself off to the kitchen, which was not very far away, but proceeded to make sufficient noise to cover any conversation. Amused, Laura smiled at Gidds, who was in full uniform, and managed to look as impeccably crisp as ever, despite the shadows still sketched in blue beneath his eyes.

"You need to head back already?" she asked, snugging herself into his side.

"I’ve been and returned," he said, drawing her down to sit on the cup-shaped whitestone bench she’d recently had grown. "I’ll spend some more time with several of the Kalrani tomorrow morning, before we head to Areziath. Just visualisation exercises, but they help a great deal." He glanced toward the kitchen, and a lighter note entered his voice as he added: "In all manner of situations."

Laura blinked at the idea of Julian doing anything as meditative as Sight talent visualisation exercises, but then realised that Gidds would be perhaps the best person to ask about trying to avoid embarrassing Sight and Place Sight revelations.

She leaned against his shoulder. "How useful of you. Perhaps he’ll stop vanishing whenever Siame visits the island."

"Many people can never be comfortable around Sight talents," he said, serious once more. "The diminished privacy, the broken nights, the need to seek places of quiet: it grows wearisome."

"You’re the one who looks tired," she pointed out, curling fingers through his. "Does—does it help you at all to talk?"

"Offer you descriptive words about the instructor who thought missing children a useful training exercise?" He lifted their linked hands, regarding them gravely. "But you mean Tasken. In truth, I don’t fully remember it. I was only eight—around three in your years. I dream about it on bad days, which I’m used to managing. It helped me a great deal to be able to come here. Arcadia is very calming in Place, and you draw my thoughts away from old wounds."

"Do my nightmares bother you?"

"They wake me. I watch them sometimes." He reached across to stroke a few strands off her cheek, then shared a log of her, asleep, the space above her full of jagged tracery.

"You keep a lot of scans," Laura said, not discomforted since she had taken a few of her own, when Gidds had been asleep.

"Because my Sights are often used for evidentiary matters, my role requires me to retain full logs. It is not quite as formal as the level of monitoring Cassandra suffers, but is similar."

"Does it bother you?" Cass absolutely hated the mandatory log kept of every single thing she did, for all it could only be accessed under the strictest protocols.

"There have been occasions when it has been used as a tool against me," he said. "And times when I have been so glad to have one of my life’s spare, precious moment preserved." He showed her a day, not so very long ago, and then kissed the fingers of their joined hands.

That led to more kissing, nicely filling the short time before Julian called them in for fondue, and a discussion of the public response to the Liriath incident.

"Increasing the amount of active monitoring might prevent other deaths," Gidds said in response to Julian’s questions, "but I doubt that the proposed changes will go through. The Kolaren contingent barely accepts the invasive aspects of the interface at the most basic level of monitoring."

"What’s the most basic level?" Julian asked, twining strings of cheese.

"The system reports if an exclusion boundary is crossed, or physical condition requires intervention."

"They’d have to be tracking you and checking on your physical condition to be able to tell that’s changed, wouldn’t they?"

"Yes. It is not actively observed, and no records are kept, however. Today’s incident triggered no alerts because the settlement boundary was not crossed, and no medical crisis occurred before the signal was blocked. The at-minimum change proposed is that signal loss triggers an alert."

"What’s so bad about that?"

"The argument is against an incremental slide to active monitoring. There are many who passionately believe the Taren system of monitoring has already been taken too far."

"Can you really get programs that shut your interface off?"

"Location masks. Primarily used to cover romantic assignations, from my observation."

"What? How boring." Julian waved his fondue fork at his own face. "I’m on the next step up from basic monitoring, right? What would happen if I activated a location mask?"

"A security detail would be despatched to your last known location, acting on the assumption that a kidnap attempt was underway," Gidds said. "All available scanners would be used in an attempt to image-match for your face. Depending on distance and response time, it is possible all active transport would be temporarily suspended."

"Cool."

"Not quite the appropriate reaction, Julian," Laura said, but with a helpless smile.

"Once you had been located, attention would turn toward whoever had supplied you with the mask," Gidds went on, unperturbed. "They would likely suffer penalties."

"Take the fun out of it, why don’t you?" Julian asked, but without rancour. "Hey, Tsur Selkie, how come you don’t wear a nanosuit? If you were one of the first Setari?"

"Those weren’t developed until the senior squads were due to become active. I do wear one when I’m leading Ena training sessions." His smile made its momentary appearance. "The unformed suits remind me of the duct cleaner, and I find myself curiously disinclined to be in contact with it."

Since the viscous sludge that crawled out of the air-conditioning ducts to absorb dust was widely referred to as 'yanner'—'snot'—Laura could understand a reluctance to wear the stuff.

"Does nanite goop retain Place impressions?" she asked.

"I’ve rarely encountered that. Clothing often does, but the process of being reformed and repurposed appears to disrupt Place."

They wandered into a comparison of Place Sight and what was called psychometry on Earth, trying to decide whether psychometry could be very weak Place Sight.

"It sucks that no-one except Cass got to be psychic or a Touchstone or whatever," Julian said. "They scanned all our brains and said that we’ve got the same synaptic structures as people here, but none of us have been able to do anything fun."

"Except visit multiple planets, and play in virtual worlds," Laura noted.

Julian grinned. "Yeah, I guess. And Nils takes me flying sometimes, which is way cool." He paused, glancing sidelong at Gidds, then saying to Laura: "Next weekend maybe I will go to that café to meet some of my band from Red Exchange. I’ve been working on not sounding Australian when I talk."

"I wonder if they’ll think you’re someone trying to pretend to be you?" Laura mused. "Your friends seemed to be good players." And, in Laura’s estimation, relatively young. A meet-up—especially with some guards in the background—shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

"Tzatch and Corezzy have applied to join the same bit of KOTIS that Nick and Alyssa were going to sign up for," Julian said, with another glance at Gidds. "Apparently it’s hard to get in."

"Very competitive," Gidds agreed neutrally.

Julian paused, then shrugged and began collecting plates. "You all should join our band, because it would totally be the best laugh, one day years from now, to tell Tzatch who she kept ordering around."

"I think the plan is to form our own band," Laura said. "But perhaps we can meet up for another event some time."

"Spoilsport," Julian said, piling plates on the cleaning unit and starting for the stairs. "See you, Tsur Selkie."

"Remember you’re getting up early," Laura said.

"Tell that to Aunt Sue!" Julian called, and crashed up the stairs.

Gidds didn’t seem to be bothered by Julian’s ideas for amusing revelations. "You said he had been bullied after Cassandra’s disappearance?"

Laura nodded. "The worst were a couple of boys he thought were the best of his friends. Being able step back and devote himself to games has been a good break for him, but I’m glad he’s starting to want to meet people around his own age."

"Did you also regret not having a strong talent?"

She laughed. "Doesn’t everyone think it would be wonderful to be able to fly? Can you fly? I don’t even know your full talent set."

"Low level Telekinesis," he said, making his glass lift briefly from the table. "Place, Combat and Sight Sight, and Speed." He rubbed a hand across his eyes, then added: "I would have enjoyed flying, but hit my limit very early."

He looked like he was close to hitting a more ordinary limit, and she told him so.

Gidds nodded. "I have a meeting—interface-only—in a few joden, so I’m trying to stay awake. Then, I fear, I will make a very boring guest for you."

"Perhaps I’ll watch you dream," she said, with a faint smile. Then, longing to do something to help lift some of the shadows from his face, she stood and held out her hand. "Before your meeting, maybe you could show me what my workroom looks like in Place?"

Making Gidds Selkie catch his breath had become a main source of Laura’s spare, precious moments. And this time she’d even remembered to start a log so that, during times when she needed a captive fragment of joy, she could watch him go still, so completely focused on her.

"I would be glad to," he said, and his beautiful voice was husky.

He took her hand, and she led the way, reflecting wryly that it said something about her that showing Gidds her workroom felt more momentous than the sex.

"I’ve been guessing that the door probably signals private," she said, as they reached her room.

In response, he shared her the feed of his vision, and the plain white door was suddenly stitched over with silver tracery. Not quite bars, or chains, or ghostly boards, but a mass that held something of all these things, and which quite clearly warned intruders away.

Laura laughed, almost embarrassed by how truly she’d spoken. "My art supplies are the one thing I’m very organised about, and I was always having to lock the kids and the cat out, or find everything in chaos. And, when we were children ourselves, Sue and Bet would take positive joy in creeping up behind me. So I’m in the habit of keeping the door shut."

She opened it, and watched Gidds' face rather than his feed as he caught his breath for the second time in a handful of minutes.

Her own eyes showed only two stools side-by-side before an empty workbench, and a window looking out onto grey evening. Laura was very particular about wrapping and storing current projects, and putting her tools away, so there was nothing else of note from this angle. But Gidds' feed showed her a room filled with a riot of whorls and spirals, scrolls and arabesques.

For a moment Laura could only blink, overwhelmed by layer upon layer, but then sorted out two distinct sets of patterns. One, the blue of a twilight sky, covered the whole of the room, though concentrated most around Laura’s favourite spot at the bench. The other was less widespread, but darker, stronger: vivid threads woven through the larger skein.

"We’ve rather painted the room in silver and gold, haven’t we?" Laura said, awed and delighted. "Does everyone make different colours?"

Gidds shook his head. "Liranadestar has been spending time here? It looks like she has been using her abilities."

"We’ve been making models of our characters from Red Exchange," Laura explained. "Do…do you mean that Lira might have been making a version of her character in the Ena, as well?"

"Creative activities have been shown to leave a more marked imprint," Gidds said. "But it is not something we have tested in any depth with Cassandra." He took a step into the room. "There is a great sense of belonging here. Both yours and Liranadestar’s."

Laura flushed, shaken by a strange mixture of pride and tenderness. She had had numerous thoughts about abruptly becoming Unna Laura to so many children, but foremost among them had been a desire to live up to the role.

"I find myself desperately wanting to protect people from the things that have already happened to them," she said.

The time until Gidds' meeting was conveniently filled by a demonstration of the interesting patterns produced during extended bouts of kissing. And then, after a meeting and a shower, she did watch him sleep for a while, and replayed the log of the patterns they had made together, in her workroom.

For all the pain Place Sight brought him, it filled Gidds' life with wonder. And she was fitting into that, less clumsily than she had feared.

When the opportunity presented, who would not want to live such an extraordinary life? Like learning to fly, it was something Laura could not help but embrace.