Touchstone 1 - Stray

it with Symbol Sight, but was satisfied with a promise to recite it on the trip back. Given I was having trouble remembering my own name, multi-stanza poetry in any language just wasn’t going to happen. But Lohn and Mara rescued me from further enthusiasm and took me onto the ship, which was called the Litara , only to deliver me up as a sacrifice to Ista Tremmar.
    I don’t mind Ista Tremmar. She’s pretty strict, but nice enough, and not one of the people who had been doing experiments on me. Not lately anyway. She gave me a quick, thorough exam, asking lots of questions about how much I’d been sleeping and when, and what I’d been eating and doing and whether I dreamed after passing out during the aether experiments or felt strange or bothered on days when there wasn’t aether experiments.
    When Maze arrived I was saying, maybe a bit shortly, that no I didn’t think I was addicted to aether.
    “Not for want of opportunity it seems,” he said. “What’s your verdict, Ista?”
    “Beyond straightforward exhaustion, and perhaps some mild anaemia, I’ve found nothing of note. The best I can suggest from Harl and Luar’s early results, is that the aether is acting as a stimulant.” She turned back to me. “When you lose consciousness under the influence of the aether, your brain activity monitor doesn’t show any of the patterns of sleep. Better considered a type of paralysis, perhaps, and though I don’t see any record of an energy expenditure analysis being performed, I’d be willing to bet it’s more than an ‘at rest’ state. In the previous tests, you’ve had the rest of the day for the aether to wear off, and have slept normally. Yesterday would have represented a massive overdose of stimulant, on top of several days of steady exposure. Your system, although not apparently negatively affected by aether, needed to rid itself of the aether’s effect before you could sleep, and then of course you crashed quite severely.” She switched back to Maze. “I don’t see any reason not to go ahead. I’ll re-examine her after she’s rested, but consider her cleared for duty.”
    “And even on schedule,” Maze said and when Ista Tremmar left looked at me a long moment, then said: “This won’t be allowed to happen again, but I will ask that you speak to one of us if you’re being pushed unreasonably.” He didn’t give me a chance to respond, just started walking, gesturing for me to follow. “The only thing I had meant to check, before this happened, was to confirm that you had seen an entrance below the central amphitheatre, but hadn’t ventured into it.”
    “Too dark,” I said, shrugging.
    “Did you have any sense of threat from it, or the amphitheatre in particular?”
    “Amphitheatre where all cats live,” I said, pausing in the entrance of a room with the tiered pod-seat things I remembered from my first trip. First and Third Squad were sitting about sideways on the seats with the covers up. “Super feral unfriendly cats. Don’t have to worry about petting them.”
    “I know,” Maze said, and gave me one of his awesome smiles. “You won’t make the same mistake twice. Get some rest now.”
    There were only the two chairs still empty, in the corner on our left. I picked the upper tier one, smiling at Zee across the way, and then squirming as the chair began moulding itself around me. I was too tired to care much about anything else, not even that Taarel was watching from the opposite corner. Maze closed the cover of my seat as soon as I lay down, and I pretty much passed out instantly.
    Zee woke me up with another override channel request. “Human yet?”
    “Maybe half.” I started to sit up and almost whacked my head on the seat cover, then finished the movement as Zee opened it.
    “Back to medical. I know you’re looking forward to that.”
    “Zee’s turn be comedian.” I did feel better, though. Groggy, but no longer like I was being sucked down into a black pit. Ista Tremmar looked me over, told me I had to eat a high-energy, high-protein diet until further notice, and pointed the way to the nearest bathroom. Washing my face helped, and Zee nodded approval when I came out.
    “Next stop, a little food. We’ll be landing in about twelve joden. Read Maze’s mission outline first, and let me know if you have any questions.”
    There’s a hundred joden in a kasse, so that was a little over twenty minutes. I just nodded. I was feeling placid, really wanting