Touchstone 1 - Stray

for producing even-handedness. I’ll bet he’s considered a strict but impartial sort of squad captain.
    Not that ‘strict but impartial’ is something I ever thought I’d find attractive. And not having a sense of humour should make him totally not worth it. Though I suppose that comment about my lab rat not being inapposite might have been a very dry humour, and I could appreciate that.
    He has really nice hands.
    When he was gone I went to check myself out in the mirror of the tiny en suite, and confirmed that I was the worst I’ve ever looked. After a while Maze came to visit and told me that Ghost was still in the containment field but not yet scannable. The information I’d given them about Muina is pretty major, apparently, though he doubted they were going to be able to decide exactly what to do about it any time soon.
    A weird day, altogether. I’m sick of the medical section.
    Tuesday, March 4
    Muina Debriefing
    I spent a lot of today with Isten Sel Notra, who is some kind of senior scientist. I think she’d be a variety of physicist, if physicists believed in psychic talents, spaces as well as space, and moonlight which could be converted into mist. The main thing I could tell about her is that she’s really smart, a Taren Einstein-type, and she’s kind of a cross between everyone’s favourite grandmother and the strictest headmistress in the universe. She has minions, too, who came along to fuss about her until she sent them away, and she told the medical staff to bring me some better clothes and took me to a kind of ‘meeting lounge’ so that we could both sit comfortably.
    Old age is a little hard to judge on Tare. They’re quite happy to use their nanotechnology for cosmetic purposes, and it’s really rare to see anyone with any kind of blemish or birthmark or more than fine wrinkles, though they don’t seem to have figured out how to stop their hair going white. They can get rid of, or at least reduce, most cancers, but they still get old and frail. Best I can tell, ‘retirement age’ would be between eighty and ninety, and a good lifespan would be a hundred and twenty. Their oldest person (I just looked this up) lived to be a hundred and forty seven (well, four hundred and forty-two). Isten Notra is old. Frail-old, though still able to get about, and still sharper than I’ll ever dream of being.
    Isten Notra is also interested in absolutely everything. She asked a lot about the moonfalls, of course, wanting to know what happened to the aether once it reached the amphitheatre (I think it drained away underneath – not sure) and whether it felt exactly like alcohol or just similar (kind of) and whether the aether in the Pillar space felt different from the aether on Muina (no) and whether I thought I was sick because of the first exposure to aether (no) and if I really thought the second moonfall had helped me recover from being sick (yes). Whether I ever saw the buildings glowing at other times (no). Whether the roof decorations had felt unusual or different to me other than during moonfall (um). Whether there was any unusual noise during moonfall (I think mainly I remember an absence of noise – all the animals had gone very quiet).
    Then we moved on to what I’d eaten on Muina and what I’d eaten on Earth. Things I’d seen in the village. Animals I’d seen. Animals that appeared to belong to both planets. What level of psychic talent there was on Earth, if at all. Whether there was anything resembling Muina structures on Earth, or legends about Muinan culture. The only thing I could come close to thinking of in terms of psychic legends was Atlantis, and I’m sure Mum told me once that the original stories didn’t have anything about magic or strange powers in it, that they were added later.
    Isten Notra is also the only person on this entire planet who has ever corrected my grammar and pronunciation, or made me repeat sentences until I get them right. She started our talk by giving me handy tips about ways to better manage verb-forms and sentence structure. And then went off on a huge tangent about language, and Earth’s languages and development of communication and what I would have been doing on Earth if I hadn’t ended up on Muina, and she pried out of me that I thought studying the origin of myths would be an interesting thing to do but didn’t think it would be very likely to get me a job. And all the while turning the whole discussion into examples of how to