"They say you're not coming home."

"Who says that?"

"People. Just people."

"I'm doing my job, Barb. Same as always." He hadn't been in the habit of lying to Barb. It was one more curtain falling. It was no worse for his mother or Toby than he'd already found out. That they hadn't come to the hospital began to make a certain amount of sense. And maybe it was a good reason and a good time to say a firm goodbye. Leave the game to those who had signed on for it. "You take care, Barb. Don't pay attention to fools. Don't tolerate them, either. If you're getting those calls, you call the police."

" I have. A lot of times you don't know about. I mean, a long time before this, Bren. A lot of times."

"Best I can do, Barb. Best I can say. I won't be calling. Hear? Don't put off the rest of your life. You made a good decision. Stick by it."

"Don't talk to me like that!"

"You know Wilson. That's my reality. It's not yours."

" Dammit, no— Bren, don't you hang up on me!"

"Don't overdramatize, Barb. It won't work. Good night, see you sometime, get it straightened out."

Herphone slammed down.

Good, he thought, and stood there a moment, aware there were servants near him. Always. Always witnesses. Atevi didn't have a single word for lonely. Just — without man 'chi.

He laid the handset in the cradle and stood there holding the aching arm against him; stood, with nowhere to go, now that he'd put paid to the account. He was hurt. He was disappointed in Barb. He'd thought Barb had things better put together. He'd thought — he didn't know. He'd thought maybe he was the one who lacked — whatever it took to form relationships. But it was one too many turnabouts, it was one too many richochets from decision to decision — and Barb expecting rescue. Barb expecting praise for living, which in his book, people just — somehow — did.

Maybe that was what he'd been for Barb. The fantasy life. The rescue from mundanity. When the real world piled up — when it rang phones and intruded on her in her life — she'd fled to Paul. When it kept after her and Paul didn't solve it — now she was mad at Paul and she loved him. Angry people on the street wasn't what Barb wanted to confront. That wasn't the fantasy she had. She just wanted the relationship to look forward to. The pie-in the-sky fix-up… when he got home— — -Always when he got home.

Not a charitable analysis. But from hurt, he was back to damned mad, and two totally disparate things fell into place: Paul and his computers. Him and his absences. It came to him that Barb didn't want engagement, didn't want day-to-day reality in a relationship. She wanted to wait. That was what she did. She'd go on waiting. No matter how he wrenched his gut to try to offend her — he couldn't. They'd fought before, and she'd find a reason to forgive him for the way he'd signed off; she'd stop being mad, she'd wait for him. She'd chatter with her friends at work, them with their on-again, off-again relationships.

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."