No wait…pain. Stop. Please.

Gāi sǐ, gāi sǐ, gāi sǐ…

Pain. Just pain.

No … pain…no…yes - movement … stops pain.

Movement under direction. Movement with purpose.

Movement towards - minds. All around but not the target of movement. Not the purpose, the goal.

Now move - over limb, out side left and up and down and around limbs dance pains stop yes no

Eyes they show no don't watch but know who moves and why but aware the center be still better but both to see which way move yes down side right left up up aside watch above but now the next will have to avoid the first so left-right-left down up

And down. Rest. Success. No pain. Just the janglebuzzsnapsnap of brain (mind?) inputs ongoing but.

And now ….another mind, new, not like the others, unusual, affected, like this jangledbuzzsnapped one.

It feels. It hurts. It wonders and fears.

It says … a name.

A name – not hers. A janglebuzz of numbers, multiple dimensions saying where and when and much Pain. Hers but also Not Hers. Ours, now.

A thread, a memory, a starting water like jewels dropping playing musically

It was water, clear and cold and trickling down from the rocks.

This world had been found far on the edge of the systems, which technically made it Outer. Rough lands, mostly, populated by people trying to force from the soil whatever it would give, and by scoundrels who preyed where they could. Places you went to when life gave you no other choice.

Here, though, was different. Here, the terraforming had worked wonders. It was going to be a prime colonization option. Maybe not for Old Families, like her own, who already had credits and land, places for their plans and hopes. To get twice the dwelling and ten times the land available on a more central world, though, there would be plenty willing to come here. A beautiful place like this could pull in plenty of capital, too, enable advanced positions for the colonists, a better standard of living from the start. And with luck, it being Outer would help quell stirrings on those worlds having a problem with the status quo. A rich world might make it possible to enrich those others, too, showing them directly the benefits of working with the Core. In effect, it would be an Outer world that supported - believed in - the goals of the Alliance. By example or geography, it would be a symbol of the direction the whole system could take.

Ya didn't get to name the place just because you were the first one to see it, even the first one to swim in it. Naming was a right saved for the colonists. They might need a stake in the place, roots all their own, in case the living here required additional incentive. So she called the mountain Big Mountain and the rocks Flat Rocks and this stream she swam in was just River.

Swimming from one end to the other, diving down at spots, pushing off the rocky bottom, breathing carefully but deeply. Her mentors had said knowing the planet in your bones, getting as close as it would let ya, was vital in understanding terraforming. Some moons in the 'Verse had been too hostile for such an indulgence with anything less than a pressure suit - but that was of a piece, this wisdom insisted, with the problems those 'formings had. There were variables to check, it was an engineering problem, after all, you didn't lay foundations based on a hunch - but when you could feel the dirt underfoot, smell the moisture in the air, see the ratio of granite to basalt to sandstone, a true artist could reckon the true needs.

DIdn't need all that to know what she'd helped build here. Liquid water spilling across the land, initial plant life that would expand about as the atmosphere thickened up, minerals in the soil and the hills that would react properly to the next changes humans would soon be making. The water on her skin, the air in her lungs, the shoreline and the sky - all felt proper and right. It was a textbook case.

Floating upon the crystal surface, gazing at the blue, she wondered about the colonists to come. Families, toddlers, husbands, babies. They'd cross the black and look upon what she had done. Generations would call Miranda home and love it as much as she did.

Pain?

No, no, youth and excitement, better worlds and hope crushed, longing denied and hurting, yes but oh why oh

It was coffee, pure and strong. the real stuff, bred from actual plants once brought from Earth-That-Was. Too costly to allow a single seed to one of the Outer Worlds, which had to rely on substitutes, often no better than chicory. But this cup was good. And it was going to be a good day. Finishing up analyses of the new planet which was finalizing its 'forming. She'd been asked to check on some anomalies that had shown up…

Peculiar, they were - as if someone had tried some experiment, introducing a different variable but keeping the rest balanced. That wasn't an issue, necessarily - experiments sometimes showed you exciting new ways to do things - but she wasn't sure it was feeling right, here. She didn't have time to go back, to feel it again, so all she'd be able to do was check the data.

Yes, definitely something there, a trace, much less than nitrogen, oxygen, even less than the bit of water vapor a good atmo had to keep human lungs healthy. It made her appreciate even more the wisdom of her teachers. Swimming alone in new water made certain that you knew the way, how little details made huge differences. Everything affected everything else. Gravity had to be just so, because otherwise it needed more atmospheric pressure and that meant plants might have trouble or the climate might feedback or even that humans would get ill more often. Try to reduce vulcanism (trouble enough on its own, but could muck up a stable climate) and the magnetic field could be too weak to keep out cosmic radiation. And similarly, adding something - still couldn't tell exactly what it was, pharmaceutical maybe? - could lead to by-products, unexpected interactions with what did have to be in the atmosphere or the ground or even with the water that had to evaporate up and rain down.

Whatever this was, it hadn't shown up through their natural processes yes she knew none of this was natural don't change the subject. Breakdown products of some larger molecule, trace elements hundreds of times less common than what she had left behind. Clearly the people tasked to give a final polish had decided to change things up a touch.

In any case, it hardly seemed to be affecting the colonists. Overall mortality was perfectly normal for a new colony, birth rate a bit low, disease higher as a percent of total mortality that was a bit odd since disease itself was lower hmm. Small numbers anomaly? No, just over twenty million colonists so far, more arriving still, variety of homeworlds - Core, Border, even Rim - looks like the psycho-dynamists had limited source worlds to a few hundred thousand per, probably to keep inter-planetary politics out of the mix. Genetically diverse too - full well this was why you did it one way not another too hard to figure out these sorts of issues otherwise.

She heard herself lapsing back into that silly Outer patois, like her Colonial Government classmate. He'd start into it on the slightest provocation - "Ain't you the finest filly in the 'Verse?"- probably just to see her roll her eyes at him. He would have been a good match for this. Always wanted a world to call his own. She should check with him, see what he knew …

Whatever her report said, they probably wouldn't listen. She was fine on straight narrative but her persuasive writing needed more practice. There wasn't enough here to definitely warn Them off, except for the heuristics that were central to her training. Which training was not the same as Theirs, obviously enough, so appeal to authority would surely backfire.

The upshot, though, was that if their tweaks did what they wanted, they'd call it good enough. If additional changes were needed, they'd go ahead and make them. And even if it wasn't the sort of risk she would have taken, it might not be a problem, anyway.

She took another sip of coffee - good coffee here, at least someone knew what they were doing - and started on the report.

It was wine, a cold clear glass of aged grape juice. Her third for the night. This formal ball had been previously planned but pressed into service to celebrate the end of the war. She knew she should be glad of it, of an end to war, of the Alliance victorious.

Not a good day for any of that, though. They'd finally pieced together what had happened, using information gleaned from a ship that had made its long way out there and back. Even that had taken multiple attempts, with its own loss of life, just to know what little they did.

She had corresponded for a while with her Outer-speaking classmate, who had in fact sought after and been chosen for this world. He talked about his work, his family, the criminal element that had oddly become an issue. Already had a boy and a girl before he even arrived, thought that colony would be the place for a BIG family. It had sounded perfect for him, even as his messages slowed down and eventually stopped. Another child had been on the way, she reckoned that had been the reason, made all sorts of sense. Except, as it turned out, the whole colony had been communicating less and less. When messages dropped below a reasonable level, ships had been sent to investigate.

Those first attempts had been …. captured, was the word that was used. What they had known was that the ships came into the area, that they were attacked, then they didn't respond again. Since the ships seemed to have remained active, pirates were blamed. (Nobody seemed willing to acknowledge the conventional wisdom that piracy wasn't economical, space being big and all.) One ship had made it past the "pirates", seemed to have reached the surface, but no further comms were received. They'd finally had to send a - what was the quaint way that one engineer had put it "They seem to attack as if they can sense flesh within" - a robot ship, a drone, on a fast parabolic course that took it well outside of the usual approaches and couldn't easily be matched with. And it had shown…

She herself had taken to calling it a "deadworld" even if it wasn't technically a black rock like that usually meant. There wasn't a better term for this, though: Dead cities, dead streets, dead machinery, dead…bodies. She'd remembered that it had been twenty million people (a pang, for the man, the family) when last she'd checked. Imagery showed most of the bodies were inside. Like they were asleep.

She had been brought in on the ultimate cause, since (ultimately) it had been the fault of people like her, who made a measure of a world to try and turn it to their own use. That trace element, a case where the psycho-dynamists had thought they could make a "better" world - not enough cross-testing, no conception of a proper clean slate for the purpose, a base assumption that the drug worked in the laboratory without acknowledging how much larger this work area was.

She was past anger, past shock - although truth was she was returning to both of those often enough - currently disgust was the main emotion, all aimed at the stupid pointless mistakes made for the Alliance.

Grief was fighting through, too.

Another glass would help with that.

oh there OH [body young body old body child body child body in helicopter family two boys three girls mother father dead all dead worker dead bones lying disarticulated scavenger dead behind glass bones in clothes in street dead body dead dead dead dead dead] rivers and dread and fear pain and experiments it was too much too MUCH SHE DIDN"T DESERVE TO REMEMBER THIS NO SCREAM NOW SCREAM!

It was whiskey, clear and brown and burning as it went down.

That the plan had been successful didn't make it Good, not for many values of what the word was supposed to mean, anyway. There were ways to test the media, from electronic messages up to cross-verse broadcasts, and no indications of the planet had been found. A difficult task - making people believe narratives was simple enough, but here people had to be convinced that a narrative never occurred.

Was it ten years, already? No - thirteen since she had left that gorgeous and cursed land behind. Lucky thirteen.

Technically, the operation HAD been a success. There weren't three words in a row in any feed, paper, or signal since the war. Anyone searching for Miranda would find plausible (and true, if misleading) articles about a failed terraforming that wouldn't support colonization. There were few enough connections remaining between the colonists and anyone in the rest of the system, which meant that a few well-designed messages had been sufficient to keep anyone from digging too deep. (Colonists moving to a new world would move their whole families, root and branch. Nothing to make a fuss about, there.)

Pour another.

Drink.

That colonization was usually dangerous, especially to Outer worlds, made it easier to turn any inquiries aside. There had been a handful of people who knew about it, knew someone who had gone to Miranda and never returned - not enough to offset the Truth that was contained in the webs. It was all too little for even the most diligent investigator to dig up - and in any case, those sorts of diligent investigators already worked for the Alliance.

And every year made it more likely that this status would continue. There might have been another twenty million people who remembered the [ghosts bodies silent sleeping inside] original colonists, but every year a few thousand of them passed on, too. Fewer to wonder, to recall, to start a search for a person they hadn't seen in a decade or more, for grandchildren or cousins expected to appear.

She wouldn't say the Unification war had helped, exactly, but the chaos around it did make for useful spaces to put uncomfortable events. Terrible things happened during war. If a dozen terrible things were found, they could all fit into the outer edges of a battle or three. They'd had much more than a dozen things to fit around, but the war had ensured there was always a place to put a lost ship, an eradicated town, a dozen limbs and the dead children they'd been attached to.

Another. A sip, take the mind away, just long enough.

Peace was already making it more difficult. The Reavers were growing, becoming a hazard to more than just their small section of space. It was bad enough that there were stories, worse still that such things really happened, horrible to get periodic reports: This many ships taken, this many bodies found, these particular people … used.

That was just the work, though. And it had to be done.

It was … it didn't matter what it was, as long as it included alcohol and could be incorporated in her beverage well enough that the source wasn't obvious. She needed what she needed, she could handle herself, but it wouldn't do for a cup or glass to give off detectable fumes. She was glad she had taken care of it back earlier, this sort of excursion was usually stressful.

The white walls, that was it. That must be it.

It kept coming back at her, even when everything she had done - greatly compensated for, it was true, she wouldn't have been part of Parliament if she hadn't done so well, perhaps wouldn't be alive, there were Ways in which those who Knew Too Much could be handled. She had shown herself to be valuable here and in other ways, though, and sometimes it wasn't possible to deal with history unless you had someone Who Had Been There. Holographs and data banks could only tell you so much.

She didn't like having to be clever about it all, but that had been part of it too. The converse of hiding a narrative was making one obvious … in a subtle way. She'd planted a story or two that put her in a good light, that's what you did as a politician. It's also what you did to help people understand what might become known if anything happened to you.

She was glad, though, that her actual work was the best way to keep herself relevant and necessary. So here she was, showing that she was someone who could be trusted - of course she could, what else had she done her whole career but be trusted, solve problems, fix what was fixable wuh de tyen, ah, what in the Red Sun were they DOING in this place?

An experiment.

Of course it was.

"Weapons technology," they had said, force multipliers, apply enough power in the right location, take out a troublemaker, a security detail, a battalion. No details, of course not, nobody in charge would vote for this, not if they saw what was being done, what had been done, what they were doing. To this girl, who, she was assured, was exceptional, amazing, one-of-a-kind, beautiful and terrible.

Unstable but recovering. Dangerous but manageable. Useful and … being used.

She'd certainly heard all this before. Maybe this fact-finding excursion wasn't about confirmation. Maybe the thought was on how it could be removed, erased, never-happened. Maybe that's why she was brought, to report on options, there.

And maybe someone would say there could be a need, that was always the justification, the possibility of valuable assistance in rare-but-plausible situations. It would certainly be worth it, in that case. Of course they would say that, because of course it would be true, if put that way. So this place would stay where it was, and she would be trusted with this terrible thing, too. Another stupid, pointless, terrible experiment - all about control, wasn't it always - to keep quiet about.

It had been such a beautiful place, she remembered. Really, it still was. They'd dropped a few cameras and sensors around, feeds heavily encrypted, gathering the few data points that still mattered.

Far away from the previously populated zones, though, just in case.

Well, just for her, really, she couldn't bear to be reminded of what was behind those whitened sterile walls. Besides, she'd said, all they needed to monitor was the atmosphere and the climate and the vegetation that didn't have to care about whether it cared, that would keep giving off oxygen and taking in sunlight.

At irregular intervals a new burst would show up, summary and details and images. She had to check the results, get some idea of what was still around. Kept the secret compartmentalized, too, which was important. Every couple of years there would be springtime pictures, often simple green hills, sometimes cascades of color as flowers bloomed, showing new life beginning and cycling again and she would do her analysis but without a little…a bit…a lot of help she knew she would break down, be weeping from start to end.

But that was rare enough, and she had other tasks, important work, the Alliance was making better worlds all around them. They'd work together, make up for the terrible thing, terrible things, that had happened.

She'd seen, once, that it had snowed nearby, and the thought of the buildings shrouded in white still haunted her.

And there were, still, flowing rivers, beautiful clear water, jewels falling.