A small silence. Again. " The hell," she said. At least that was the Barb he knew. At least she took care of herself.
Always depend on that. Self-sufficiency — that had been an asset in Barb — took a bent toward self-protection. Against him.
"Good night, Barb."
" Good night," she said. Then: " Bren, I'll look in on your mother. I'll take the bus. All right?"
"Thanks, Barb."
He hung up. There was a lonely feeling in the small office, as if somebody who'd been there with him had gone away. Stupid feeling. But he felt drained by the effort, listless as if he'd landed on some foreign beach, no features around him, no landmarks, nothing that said, This way, Bren.
Nothing he'd care to explore.
The thunder rumbled, a constant complaint above the rooftops, and he walked out of the office and ordered the inevitable within-hail servant that the paidhi wanted —
Not tea. A drink. Which the servant hastened to obtain for him, shibei, dark and bitter, but safe for him. The servant — her name was Caminidi: he was learning them, one by one, and made a point of asking — was one of the number usually in the offices area, the ones who made spent teapots vanish and whisked wafer crumbs off the tables, as happened when a man blinked. Like the magic castle of fairy tales, it was. Things just were. Things just appeared and vanished. There were doors and halls a little less ornate than the ones the residents used, ways by which the likes of Caminidi arrived in one place and transited to another — but the guest didn't use them, no, hardly proper.
Atevi manners. Atevi ways. Atevi didn't go at you on an emotional pitch. Not — without expecting consequences.
He walked, drink in hand, to the more pleasant venue of the breakfast room — a servant appeared out of nowhere and started to put on the lights, but, deprived of a spare hand to signal, he said, "No, nadi, one enjoys the storm tonight."
He had work to do. He was scheduled to fly tomorrow — ordinarily, he'd pack, but it was a day trip, out and back. He ought to read the Industry Committee report, answering his query about companies currently manufacturing components on a long list he'd bet Jase Graham was going to ask about earliest.
One didn't want to tool up and train workers for a one-shot with no follow-up. It wasn't going to be that, if the paidhi had his way. Their strangers from space weren't going to get a gold-plated vehicle to leap from ground to starflight with beverage and dinner service even if they had one in their plans. They were going to get a reliable, no-frills creature well-integrated into the atevi economy. A workhorse. Lift cargo, lift passengers, and bring it back again with no extravagance of industrial development. If it took space-made exotics, make damn certain that atevi were up there on the station doing the manufacture: no dependencies, no humans at the top of the technological food chain and atevi at the bottom.
Not in this paidhi's administration.
He only wished he had a better background in engineering. He had to cultivate both atevi and humans who did have, and ask the right questions and get honest answers from people with nothing to gain politically, provincially, or parochially.
Meaning people who knew real things about real substances.
Meaning a lot more plane flights, now that the barriers seemed down and the paidhi had, for the first time in history, permission to move around the map instead of sit receiving information in Shejidan, behind the walls of the Bu-javid.
It didn't bid to be a life that would let him go back to Mospheira that often. If he wasn't in Shejidan, he might need to be God knew where, looking at plant output figures and talking to plant managers and line workers.
He'd told Barb, dammit, he'd told her from the outset she couldn't make plans around his comings and goings; and now she expected him to fly in, run around with another man's wife, and flit out again while Barb went back to her suburbs and her husband — if Barb thought it was going to be sequins and satin and nightclubs every few months, if Barb had married dull, computer-fixed Paul, as the high-income guy who'd be so immersed in his little world he just wouldn't notice, or care —
No way in hell, Barb.
The upset came back. Anger crept up on him before he knew what he was feeling, and then decided it wasn't fair to feel it. Barb had given him years of waiting around — he'd not cared — well, not asked — who else she spent her time with; it hadn't been his business. And maybe it had been Paul, but he didn't think so. Maybe he ought rationally to ask, at this point, how long that had been going on.
But he sure as hell wasn't going to drop into town, sleep with Paul's wife, and leave again. Even if there weren't kids involved, there might be, someday; at very least it left Paul having to deal with the gossip, no illusions that people wouldn't find out or that Paul wouldn't, and Paul was a wounded sort, the way a human being got to be from too much intellect and not a soul to talk to on any regular basis —
God, didn't that sound familiar?
But he, thank God, wasn't Paul. Yet.
Maybe he didn't remotely want a real life with Barb. He wasn't sure, wasn't likely to find out — though he was missing the ideaof Barb enough to have a lump in his throat and evidently a lot — a lot— of anger; she'd told him at the outset that marriage and the settled life weren't ever going to be an issue for her, and if that had changed, dammit, the least she could have done was tell him.
Which left him running curious comparisons with what he thought human beings were supposed to feel about a breakup, and the cooler, more analytical emotions he felt when he wasn't actually on the phone with Barb.
Odd how the feelings had just beenthere, on the edge of out-of-control, as long as he was talking to her — emotion had gotten in the way of any sane communication; now that he'd had a moment to calm down, the atevi world closed in again, the sights, the smells, the sounds of his alternate reality. Barb's world grew fainter and farther again, safely fainter and farther.
He supposed part of it was that he'd made an investment in Barb, an investment of energy, and time — and youth. And innocence, in a way. In Malguri, a short week ago, when he'd found himself afraid he'd die, he'd found himself at such a remove from humanity he couldn't reach any regret for the human people he'd leave —
And he couldn't gather it up now. Then it had scared him. Now — now maybe his real fear was not having the free years left to connect with someone else, With all that investment, with no more sense of love, whatever that meant — he wasn't sure, on this interface of atevi and humans, what normal humans felt, who didn't have to analyze what they felt, thought, wanted, did and didn't do. But he did. He had to. He'd become a damn walking laboratory of emotions.
And maybe if you preserved it in acrylic and set it on a shelf, love didn't look quite as colorful or lively or attractive as it did flitting across mountain meadows. Maybe you killed it trying to understand it, attribute it, classify it.
Hell of a way human beings functioned. At least the ones he knew. His mother. Barb. Toby. One could say the paidhiin had generally had trouble with their personal lives. Wilson, God knew, had been a dried-up, tuned-out, turned-off personality, monofocused in his last years on the job. As good as dead when hisaiji died. Say good morning to the man and the face didn't react, the eyes didn't react. Not just atevi-like. Dead.