Touchstone 1 - Stray

outer walls. There’s a hole in each wall, painted a different colour, and a bunch of poles at different heights – a lot like canary perches. Add four teams playing a kind of extreme handball with three balls at once. Then make the players totally Spiderman Jr, able to bounce up the walls and off the poles and leap and twist and somersault – and fly.
    Psychic powers, just like the blacksuits. Psychic powers are connected to this Ena in some way, and apparently almost everyone on Tare can use the Ena to some mild degree, though things like flying is elite athlete stuff.
    Or, possibly, the Ena or the interface enhances natural psychic abilities. Nenna’s explanation was way too confusing.
    Anyway, the Tairo match was great fun to watch. I could feel the players thud off the walls right in front of me, and they do things which would make Cirque d’Soleil green. And we had a really nice meal, and Nenna’s mother talked to me after about, well, girl-things and how it all works here. The birth control means I won’t have periods, for a start, which is a big bonus. And she gave me a cream which is some kind of super hair remover. Use it once or twice a year and no stubble. Deodorant comes in waxy sticks. She gave me a few tips on polite behaviour, and then made me cry because she reminded me so much of Mum, all dry and calm and comfortable, and she held me while I made an idiot of myself and told me I didn’t have to pretend not to be homesick and frightened.

January
    Tuesday, January 1
    Triple the New Years!
    Happy New Year! I wish I was watching fireworks right now. I wonder if New Year is half as big a thing here, since it happens every four months? Nenna’s older sister Liane is going to come over today and we’re going to go to the Roof. I can tell Nenna’s not really comfortable with the excursion: the outside on this planet is basically cold and stormy or cold and windy, and most people simply never go outside. I tried describing Australia to Nenna, and I think even Sydney Harbour would freak her out, let alone somewhere like the Outback. Tarens are severe indoor types. I’m not exactly bush savvy, but, wow, I hope Nenna never gets zapped to Muina.
    Whoosh
    As Taren days go, I gather this was a good one. Not raining, only lightly overcast, and winds that you could stand upright in. The sea was seriously far down, and looked like the kind you see in those paintings of sailing ships almost standing on their ends. But even the sea was nothing compared to the overwhelming hugeness of this city. The largest land mass on their planet, and almost all of it one whitestone block, like an unsymmetrical step pyramid that just goes on and on.
    There was plenty of outdoor activity, but mostly confined to tanz (airships) arriving and leaving in the distance. But I did spot a few other people standing out on the vast whiteness. Maintenance workers, Liane said.
    Nenna’s sister is more serious and not quite as nice as Nenna. Not nasty, but she wasn’t too good at hiding how impatient my slow, stupid-sounding speech made her.
    Thursday, January 3
    Fruit of the Sea
    Much of the food on Tare is grown underwater. I thought some of the vegetables were like seaweed, but I didn’t realise how many were water plants. And then there’s plants grown in the big atriums and inside ‘parkland’, and vats of algae and hydroponic installations. There are a few bits of land which aren’t covered by city, but it sounds like they’re mostly wind-blasted nature reserves. They farm fish in ocean ‘arrays’, and red meat is an incredibly expensive delicacy.
    Today was spent mainly on interface training while Nenna was at school. Well, it’s not really interface training any more, just kiddie school. Lessons designed for six year-olds are still hard for me to follow, and very dull. At times I’m just tempted to watch the entertainment channels instead, but after stumbling into a show which I afterwards discovered was labelled “in-skin”, I decided I needed more language skills before randomly sampling the entertainment here. “In-skin” isn’t a euphemism for porn, though I bet it’s used for that. It means that every sense that the interface is able to record is transmitted to the audience. Sight, hearing, smell, and touch. I never entirely lost track of me, sitting on a couch, but someone else’s experience was layered over the top of that and I could only cope with a few minutes of that before I had to stop. Then I