So what did you do when the human part of your life started atrophying from want of exercise? Hello, Mother, hello, Toby, sorry about the phone calls, sorry you can't go to the store without the chance of being accosted, sorry about all of that, nothing I can do from here — don't know what it's like to go to the store, buy a loaf of bread, catch the bus to the office. Can't imagine taking kids to school, family bike rides, family vacations.
Wish that Mother would move to the North Shore, to a far smaller, less political environment. But one never got Mother these days to do a damned thing she hadn't done before, and Toby'd moved up there, one suspected, to put a little distance between mom and wife.
The wind shifted, that had been carrying a spatter of rain against the glass. He stood in the dark with his drink, in the new quiet. Curtains billowed out at him, white gauze in the dark, touched him, all but wrapped around him.
Childhood memory. Himself in the living room. The wind from the sea. Mom and Dad in the bedroom. When Me was perfect.
He shut the doors, and the draperies deflated.
The air was still. The whole apartment was still, nothing but the soft footsteps of servants — he never needed a thing but that someone was there. Never made a request but that servants hurried to do it. But the silence — the hush about the place tonight oppressed him.
He went back to his room, found his traveling case to put in it what he needed for the run out to the observatory — had servants hovering to see if they could help with that, but he found no need.
It was the first time, the very first time since he'd landed in Shejidan, that he'd had a chance to sit down on the bed and open the medical folder and read it.
"Dammit!" he said. And called, none too moderately, for scissors.
"Nadi?" a servant asked, confused. But he couldn't deal with gentle faces and gentle confusion at the moment.
"Just get me the damn scissors, will you?"
Then he was mad at himself and the world in general, because he'd raised his voice to the servant, and he apologized when she came running back — apologized and worked the point under the thumb-hole in the cast and started working at the layers of bandage.
Gouged his wrist for good and proper.
"Nadi!" Jago said, from the doorway, and clearly meant to stop him; but he didn't mean to be stopped. Didn't want to discuss it. He kept sawing at the bandages, with the blade inserted, his wrist not cut, and with no inclination to give up the angle he'd gotten for Jago's damned well-meaning interference.
But Jago came and caught his hand as the servants hadn't dared do.
And really it ought to be hysterically funny, the misery he'd suffered, when just reading the damn instructions would have set him free — to protect the fusion during the flight, the note said, and then important to maintain good circulationand moderate exercise, by flexing and bending and moderate activity.
Jago tried to take the scissors away, as if she thought the paidhi had completely lost his mind. And maybe he had; but she didn't apply force enough to disengage his fingers and he couldn't half breathe, and didn't want to explain. The constriction around his ribs afflicted him with temperous, claustrophobic frustration — the paidhi wasn't damned well in possession of his faculties, he wasn't damned logical, he wasn't handling the interface well at all at the moment, and he didn't want Jago's damned reasonable calm trying to tell him wait and consult anybody.
"I know what I'm doing," was all he could get out. "I know what I'm doing, dammit, Jago."
"Is there pain, Bren-ji?"
Damned right there was pain. Every breath he drew. Every move he'd made for days. The tape was cutting in, the shoulder had a fixed angle he'd not been able to relieve in days, and the damned Department shoved him overseas with painkillers too strong to take and a briefing from some damn Department-worshiping fool who hadn't told him to read the damn instructions —
He wasn't winning in his struggle with Jago. He wasn't losing either, Jago risking her fingers, his effort getting nowhere, and Jago, unstoppable in her level-headed, insistent sanity, didn't let go.
"It's supposed to come off," he found the coherency to say.
"That's very good, Bren-ji, but perhaps a doctor should do it."
"I don't need a doctor. I'm supposed to have taken the damn thing off, Jago, I don't want a doctor."
"Are you quite sure, nadi?"
"I'm not stupid, Jago." Which all evidence around him seemed to deny.
"One knows that, Bren-ji, but why now —"
"I just read the damn instructions. In the case. It's all right. It's all right, Jago, let me alone to be a fool, all right?"
"You might cut yourself."
"I can handle a damn pair of scissors." He was aware of servants watching from the door and began to be mortally embarrassed. "Just leave me alone, all right, I won't cut myself."
Jago looked in that direction, too. "It's all right, nadiin. I'll manage. Please shut the door."
They might doubt the paidhi was going to be reasonable at all. But they shut the door, then, the first time he'd been that isolated since he'd arrived in Shejidan. It was just him and Jago and the scissors, which was not, at least, a crowd.
"Let me," Jago said, and when he resisted: "Bren-ji, let me. I'll cut it. Just sit still. — You're quite sure."
"I'm quite sure. Jago, dammit, it's all right. I can read!"
"One believes so, nand' paidhi. Please. Sit still. Let me have the scissors."
Small scissors, in Jago's hand. He'd gouged his wrist enough to sting. She set a knee on the bed and worked around where she could get a good, straight cut up the back of his hand, little snips that sliced the bindings of the foam cast as far as the forearm.
"Say if I go too deep," she advised him, and then, "Bren-ji, the shirt must go."
It had to. He unfastened it and Jago laid the scissors on the bedside table and helped him take it off.
"The tape around my ribs," he said. That was the truly maddening stricture.
"Let me do this in good order, Bren-ji. Let's be sure." She'd taken from somewhere about her person a small spring-bladed knife he suspected had more lethal purpose, and delicately sliced along the bindings above the foam cast.
"I'm very sorry," he found the sanity to say, very meekly and very quietly.
"It's no difficulty at all. But are you quite sure? If we take this off —"
"I'm quite sure. I was a fool. I didn't read the things they sent me."
"Then we can do that very easily. I believe I can split the cast right up the top. Let's be sure of the shoulder before we worry about the ribs, nadi."
"Quite all right." He held his breaths to small ones, and held still as Jago sliced delicately along the cast surface, starting with the hand, splitting the foam apart between the knife and the grip of her hand.
It gave. She had to resort to the scissors again, to make the final cut of tape and free his hand from the elastic bandage.
Which ached, freed from confinement; and he could see atevi-sized fingerprints gone purple on his wrist, likewise the marks of cord on his skin, still red, when the marks on the other wrist had begun to fade.
Jago reached the bend of the elbow, and slowly gained ground, up to the chafing spot at the shoulder.
Where she hesitated. "Are you quite certain, nadi?"
"I'm certain. I'm more than certain. I want it off."
Jago put a finger under the cast at the neck and carefully cracked the last. The arm began to ache, the more widely the cast split, and then truly to hurt, as Jago kept going all the way down to the elbow, and to the wrist, by which point he was struggling to breathe easily and not to let on it hurt the way it did — he wanted no delays, and took firm resolve as Jago cracked the cast as far as it would go without cutting the tape on his ribs.