Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras Read Free

assisted care
place. And Nick and Alyssa have hooked up! Mum said they bonded
over being able to talk about me possibly being on another planet
(which is not a story Mum has encouraged be spread far and wide). I
think I must have been a bad friend to Alyssa to not realise that
she liked Nick.
    I couldn't maintain the
projection for much longer – looking at Earth takes way too much
out of me – but before I dropped it Mum hugged me again and said:
"Who wouldn't? Are you nuts?" and laughed in a wide-eyed way and
then was gone.
    It will be more than a
year before we can send another letter, and then it will be another
year's wait and KOTIS Command has to consider the idea of telling
people on Earth the location of an occasional gate to Muina, and
might not give me permission, and I'm going to go do a lot of
swimming in the hopes that it will stop me ping-ponging off the
walls.
     
Wednesday, January 21
    We've been in our house
three days now. It's a big adjustment not having so many people
around me, not having the constant background awareness of support
staff, and the greensuits and technicians on the floors below, and
of squads in the surrounding rooms. Plenty of small animals on
Arcadia to catch my attention, but I'm really liking the relative
quiet.
    After approval, the
seeding of the house was quick and easy – the only concern being
whether we could avoid disturbing the spring which feeds the
waterfall – but it took a fair chunk of time before all the support
systems and fittings were installed in the excessively large
chambers we'd grown underground.
    The house is on the
west side of the hill, and Pandora is to the east, so our view is
full of uninterrupted lake and will have magnificent sunsets. In
Winter when the leaves have fallen we'll probably be able to see
First Squad Island to the south and slightly west.
    Maze helped a lot with
the landscaping – scooping away the part of the hill on the
south-east side where we want a big, enclosed grassy backyard, and
shaping the face of the hill which forms a rear wall to the roof
garden. Both areas are mostly still raw dirt at the moment, though
we have marked out garden beds and planted a lot of seeds which the
botanists tell me might produce the kind of lawn I described. Maze
and Rye spent hours together in earnest discussion about which
trees to remove and which to transplant so that we have a lot of
sunlight, and selecting just the right trees for the backyard, and
finding the perfect rocks to split and turn into stepping stones
for a path. Maze thoroughly enjoyed all that, and says he's going
to study botany and design so he can build gardens. I think he's
serious.
    Since most everything
we had at the Setari building belongs to KOTIS, we had a lot of
shopping to do. Linens and kitchen equipment and chairs and tables
and curtains (which at least the Kolarens understand) and dozens of
things which we kept realising we'd need. With the industrial
sector expanding by the day, and the variations which nanotech
allows, even the few production companies which have formed offer a
surprising amount of variety. The interface made it easy to compare
options, and we held family voting sessions to pick the
designs.
    We also went on an
actual shopping trip to the mall/subway station which you can enter
through Moon Piazza, which is where most of the handcrafted items
are displayed. Amazing stuff – many of the early approved settlers
were arts and crafts type – and I bought some really nice glassware
and plates, and this incredible woollen tapestry which is deep
green with mostly white flowers arranged in intricate Art
Nouveau-ish lines inspired by the Kalasa decorations. I had the
greatest difficulty getting the man at the shop to accept payment
for any of it. We had lunch at one of the new restaurants, and I
wish I could figure a way to take the kids out without having
people showing up where we're eating, to cheer when they catch
glimpses of us. Even Sen went all shy at