She'd top all their crises with hers. She'd fantasize about him coining back. What she had— was always garbage. What she waited for — was always wonderful.
Far from charitable.
Damn right. But he was madder than he'd ever been in their relationship, and it went back to that not-so-chance-timed message she'd blasted him with. He was a man agencies used; transactions he understood, transactions he was used to tracking and evaluating. And he had a sense when the use had gotten outrageous, he recognized crisis-oriented timing, the phone calls timed to get your attention and leave you with no damn choices — every damn phone call she'd made was right when she damn well knew he was finishing his day and trying to get to sleep. He knew pressuring an opponent down to the limit, and a behavior that twined itself around late-evening emotionally fraught messages instead of level-headed waking-hour phone calls for an ex-lover assumed a pattern that really, really set off alarms in his gut; a pattern that argued that his subconscious had been better informed on the feelings he'd been getting than his waking brain had been for the last several years.
Tabini shoved you to the wall. The Department would.
The Department had. But you didn't have them in your bed, you didn't have them telling you they loved you: atevi didn't have the word, the Department had it flagged under restricted usage, and Barb just used it for what she currently wanted.
God, he'd learned at least some few things in semantics.
And while his mind was still in human-mode, and while he had his head momentarily clear of his own brand of wishful thinking, he picked up the handset again to deal with the other unpleasant and inevitable phone call on his own schedule, before he had to write that damned letter to Ilisidi.
"Nadi," he said to the Bu-javid operator, "ring Hanks-paidhi: this is Bren Cameron."
"Yes, nand' paidhi."
He took a breath while the phone was ringing, leaned his shoulders against the wall to ease his legs and rest a slightly aching head, waited. HopedHanks wasn't in a mood. And swore that if she was, and if she crossed him, she was going to run into a meat grinder. He wanteda fight on equal terms, near at hand, nothing long-distance. He wanted, dammit, a human conversation, on whatever terms. Hanks at least fought fair and Hanks wasn't a long-distance call.
Obsessive behaviors. Late-evening phone calls. Barb upset his sleep.
Four rings.
"This is Deana Hanks."
In atevi. In polite atevi.
"Good evening, Ms. Hanks. How's the report coming?"
" I'm working on it. Fast as I can. — On my own, Cameron. Using your information."
He dropped into Mosphei'. "A little news I thought you'd like to know. I ran out to a local observatory, talked with the astronomers there on the theory we don't have the full range of concept words we need. I got a report back. I don't know what the whole gist of it is, but I did submit the faster-than-light business to them as a paradox — and there's a gentleman who's been working on something about human origins that at least has the astronomers and the mathematicians talking. I don't know if it has the merit of solving anything — I've a lot of nervousness about it. But it's atevi. And it seems to be on the right track."
A silence. " I thought that was what youdidn't want."
"It's there. Slip or not, what you said, you can't stop it being there, not now. The atevi gentleman seems to have struggled up to a notion of a spacetime environment — a glimmer of an answer maybe waiting for the right question. It's the old speculation: atevi theory finally pulling ahead of the engineering."
Another long silence. " On FTL?"
"Other sciences, all playing catch-up to what we keep throwing at them — that's filled their time. But astronomers haven't hadour input on any scale to occupy their whole attention. Their work's all been vindication of what they missed, and why they missed it. We'vebeen their focus: where we came from. Why they didn't know. No showy engineering. Just wondering if they could trust their measurements. Asking how to know the real distances."
"That's pretty incredible, Cameron."
"And going from there to the hard questions. How old is the universe? How did a ship get here? Is there substance out there? Is there really an ether?"
"You're setting me up. Right?"
"No setup. I just thought you'd like to know what's going on." The adrenaline had run out. He let himself relax against the wall, let a breath go, actually relieved to have a sane, self-protective reaction on the other end of the line. "We can have our differences, but let's be professionals: nothing to the atevi's detriment. We both make mistakes, that's all. We're bound to. We haven't got a damn lot of Departmental help here. We could blow something up. Major. Let's please try not to."
"What's this about, Cameron? What do you really want?"
"The sound of your voice. It's been a day. The ship's still dealing with the atevi andMospheira, so you know. We still haven't got a landing site — I'm still waiting for a call."
"My sources say a lander is the vehicle. An old lander the station didn't use."
"Your sources are right."
"Graham and Mercheson?"
"Right again. Where doyou get your information?"
"Exactly where and when your people let me have it, I'm damn sure."
"Not my orders."
"The hell."
"If I could depend on you taking orders, certain atevi could get some sleep, now, couldn't they? So could we both. I'd liketo, Deana. We've got one job to do, keeping the peace. Neither of us wants it broken. We don't see eye to eye, but at least we agree on what we don't want."
"So what's the news in the great outside?"
"Committee meetings. More committee meetings. Briefings. The mathematicians are holding court." He'd slipped out of Mosphei' and into atevi without thinking, the moment he hit the schedule. "How isthe report coming, seriously? Have you got everything you need?"
" I have some detailed questions."
"Anything I can answer?"
"I need transport figures. What's the month by month availability on tanker-cars and flatcars, age, type, tonnage, that kind of thing, on the northern lines?"
"God, I can get it. I could tell you, roughly."
"Garbage in, garbage out. But it's a plug-in figure if you want me to play with it and give you far-instances."