Precursor (17 page)

Not
in
the hospital. “You’re
at
the hospital. Where’s
Toby
, Mother? Where’s my brother?”

“I don’t know. He got on a plane this afternoon. I think he should be home. I think he and Jill may have stopped at Louise’s to pick up the—”

“Mother,
why are you at the hospital?
”

“Bren, don’t be like that!”

“I’m not shouting, Mother. Just give me the news. Clearly. Coherently. What’s going on?”

“Barb’s in intensive care.”

“Barb.” Of all star-crossed people. Barb?

“Barb and I went shopping after we left the airport, after we put Toby on the plane, you know. We were at the Valley Center, the new closed mall, you know…”

“I know it. Did she fall?” There were escalators. There was new flooring. The place had opened this spring, huge pale building. Tall, open escalators.

“No, we just came out to go to the car, and this
bus
just came out of nowhere, Bren.”

“Bus. My God.”

“She went right under it, Bren. I fell down and I looked around as the tires came past and she never said a thing, she just… she just went under it, and packages were all over, I’d bought this new sweater…”

His mother was in shock. She was the world’s worst storyteller, but she wasn’t gathering her essential pieces at all.

“Mother,
how bad?
”

“It’s bad, Bren. She’s lying there with all these tubes in her. She’s messed up inside. She’s really bad. Bren, she wants you to come.”

He was dripping water onto the counter. His feet and hands were like ice in the air-conditioning. With the side of his finger, he smeared a set of water droplets out of existence, thinking of the new counter, the new facility. He was not at home. He was not going to be anywhere close to home, and he was trying to think what to say. He tried to choose some rational statement. “I know you’re with her, Mother. —Were
you
hurt?” Setting his mother to the first person singular was the fastest way to get his mother off the track of someone else’s woes. He’d practiced that tactic for years of smaller emergencies.

“She needs you, Bren.”

It was bad.

“Are
you
hurt, Mother?”

“Just my elbow. I scraped my elbow on the curb. Bren, she’s so bad…”

He winced and swore to himself. His hand was shaking. Jago had turned up in her bathrobe, with Banichi in the little security post, support for him. But he didn’t know who was with his mother, tonight, or how bad the damage was. Shawn’s people watched her. They always kept an eye toward her. But they’d damned well let down this time.

“Have they assessed Barb’s damage?”

“Spleen, liver, lung… right leg, left arm… they’re worried about a head injury.”

“God.” On medical matters his mother very well knew what she was talking about. She made a hobby of ailments. “Has anyone called Paul?”

“That useless piece of—”

“Mother, he’s married to her! Call him!” He tried to assemble useful thoughts and quiet his stomach. His mother was acting as gatekeeper,
hadn’t
called Barb’s husband. He hoped the hospital had.

And the time… he wasn’t sure of the time. It was well after dark now, east of Mospheira. If his mother and Barb had gone to the mall directly after leaving Toby at the airport, it couldn’t have been that late when the accident happened, and she’d only now gotten through the phone system?

He was behind a security curtain. God knew how she’d made the entire worldnet and the aijiin and captains understand she had a real emergency, and now she came unglued. She was sobbing on the phone.

“Mother. Mother, you fell down. Has anyone looked at
you?”
He was honestly, deeply worried. “Are you sure you weren’t hit?”

“Something hit me. I’m not sure.” With the intonation that said it wasn’t important, it didn’t matter to her pain.

“Have the doctors looked at you?”

“They did.” Dismissively. “Bren, Bren, you can get a plane. Tell the aiji. You have to.”

“Have you called Toby?”

“She doesn’t need Toby, dammit! She needs
you!”

“
You
need Toby, Mother. I want you to call him.”

“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! You damned well listen to me! The woman you were going to marry is lying in intensive care in there, and you don’t tell me you don’t care! You don’t tell me you’re carrying on an affair over there and you don’t care. You straighten yourself out and you get back here!”

She did know. She guessed. On one of her visits, somehow someone had slipped… the tightest security in the world, and she knew.

“I can’t. I can’t, Mother.” Barb’s kiss in the hangar, Barb running, whole and healthy, across the concrete, and a bus, for God’s sake… there was a sense of dark, malign comedy about it, a grotesque sense of the impossible, and he didn’t catch half the awful details his mother spilled to him, except that there were fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding.

And knowing Barb… knowing Barb who’d been his on-island lover and sometime contact point for relaying dangerous messages from before their breakup… it was entirely possible Barb had shoved his mother for that curb and
that
was how Barb had gotten hit, and
that
was what drove his mother’s grief.

Barb would. Grant all their failure to be a couple, Barb would. “What are her chances?” he asked, dreading to know. “What’s the damage?”

“They’re going to do a bone replacement and a brain scan.” His mother drew a breath and grew calmer in a list of specifics. “She’s conscious. When the ambulance was coming, she said, ‘Tell Bren this really wasn’t a scheme to get him back here.’ And when they were putting her in the ambulance, she said, ‘I need him.’ Bren, she does. She really needs you. I had a feeling you shouldn’t fly back today.”

She hadn’t seen the damned bus coming, but that wouldn’t convince his mother she didn’t have premonitions.

He’d done all he could. The personal phone wouldn’t have helped her at all, once he’d gone through the security curtain that surrounded Tabini’s intentions. Hours of trying to reach him.

And what did he say, after she’d worked a miracle to reach him?

“Mother, I absolutely can’t come.”

“Bren, don’t you tell me that! Bren, you have to come, that’s all there is! You’re so damned important to Tabini, you get him to get you a plane, right now. I want you here!”

He had the receiver against his ear for privacy—thank God. “Mother, I’m involved in something I can’t leave. I can’t tell you. But this is important. I’m sorry. Tell Barb I’m terribly sorry. —Don’t you dare tell her I love her. Don’t you do that, Mother.”

“You listen to me, Bren. You listen. This job is killing you. It’s killing the son I knew. It’s killing any happiness you’re going to have. You don’t decide when you’re sixty that you ought to have gotten married, you don’t wait till the end of your life to regret you didn’t have children…”

“Mother…”

“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! I know what’s going on with you and that atevi woman! It’s not right!”

“Mother, where are you?” He was appalled that she knew, but more appalled to think she might be in a hallway, at a public phone. “Don’t say that out loud. Don’t raise your voice.”

“Are you ashamed? Does it worry you?”

“It worries me when my mother might be saying things in a public corridor. It worries me for her safety if the extremists get themselves stirred up again because some damned rumor gets started—talk like that won’t help Durant, either. Hush! Be still. Listen to me…”

“You really don’t want to hear it, do you? You know Barb always loved you. She married that fool Paul because you broke her heart. You hurt her, Bren, and she was sorry, and oh, no, you were too self-righteous, too damned important with your fancy estate to take her back.”

“I never promised to marry her.
I don’t love her
, Mother! I’m sorry to say it under these circumstances, but I don’t love her. I never loved her, she didn’t love me; we slept together. That was the end of it. I tried to have something else, and she was the one who wanted something different.”

“You don’t
know
what she felt! You weren’t here! You were traipsing about the continent acting as if you were some atevi lord! She decided to marry. To
marry
, respectably, as sensible people do when they want to have normal lives.”

“I don’t have a normal life.”

“She was scared, Bren, she was scared and she was hurt— personally hurt, by the things you’d done. If you asked her to divorce Paul, she’d be there in a moment.”

Dealing with his mother was like running a course under fire… and he feared his mother would tell Barb there was hope of having him back, wreck Barb’s marriage, drive Paul off when Barb needed him, and hurt Barb more than she’d been. Most of all, he couldn’t hold that out to Barb… because he wouldn’t
be
back and Barb, all she valued and all she wanted to be, her fashion, her nightclub glamour, all the things she loved… didn’t exist on this side of the sea.

“I can’t marry her. End of statement. It’s not a time to debate it.”

“How can you be like this? You’d come home. You’d show up on a weekend, ask Barb to drop all her plans and go running off to some hotel, with the news people all trying to find you, and then you’d be gone, and then the news people
would
find where you’d been and Barb would have to duck out and lock herself in her apartment for weeks, Bren, sometimes in fear of her life!”

“I know that.” It was true, Barb had played international intrigue as part of the shining, glittering game, until it turned bloody; and now his mother was working herself back into tears. He tried to get his point through while there was still rational thought to hear it. “But I can’t help that. I can’t
help
that, Mother; listen to me! The president’s guard does look out for you. If there are spies at the hospital now, they’re official. They probably are at the hospital right now. I want you to call Shawn Tyers. You know how.”

“Don’t you hang up on me!”

“Mother, you know I love you. That’s the way things are. Call Shawn. Call Paul… I know you don’t want to, but do it! Then go home, get some rest.

“Mother, what was between us is still
her
business and my business. Give me credit that I know Barb, I know her damned well, and I can’t help her by getting involved in her life and ripping that up a second time.”

“Bren, don’t be like this.”

“I’m sorry as hell for what happened. It makes me sick to think of it. But I can’t fix it, and don’t you dare tell her I love her, don’t you dare tell her there’s any hope of my coming now. There isn’t. You’ll just hurt her. Do you hear me, Mother? Go home! I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“Promise to call Barb.”

“I will
not
promise to call Barb. I’ve got to go now.”

“Bren, call her.”

“Mother, go
home
. Good night. I love you.”

He hung up. He was aware of Jago in the doorway of the security station, aware of the fact some words were in her understanding and Banichi’s, at least of his side of the conversation.

“Barb’s had an accident,” he said. “A bus hit her. My mother fell down and hurt herself. Barb’s in the hospital. There’s nothing I can do from here.” They didn’t understand love, they didn’t understand the intricate details of failed human relationships, but they knew attachment persisted. Most of all they knew loyalty, and the urge to go to the scene of trouble. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Banichi said solemnly. “The aiji can request action of the President of Mospheira, and Shawn-nandi. Shall we do that?”

Tabini could do so much; and so damned little. “Not for this. Toby’s not home yet. Patch me through to his house, Banichi-ji. I’ll leave a message.”

Banichi pushed buttons. The communications interface was a great deal easier than it had been, with security codes that automatically engaged when the messages crossed the straits. Even at this hour, the Mospheiran system produced an operator, better than in prior days, and the call went on its way to the north coast, where Toby’s answering system cut in.

Bren was in some part relieved. It was easier to unburden the matter to a machine. He was sure their mother had put one of those nerve-jarring
Call me’s
on Toby’s system, and he hoped his message might at least advise Toby what the matter was, if their mother fell out of contact before Toby ran off into the night trying to hire a plane.

“Mother seems fine” he began his message, experienced in years of long-distance crises. “Scrapes and bruises, as I gather. Barb’s in the hospital, Mother’s with her. A pretty bad accident with a bus, and Mother saw it, might have been in front of it. She wants some comfort. Toby, I know you just got home, I hate like hell to drop this on you, but I’m behind a security wall at the moment and I absolutely can’t get back there. I don’t think you need to fly back, just give Mother a call at…” Professional coolness wavered. “I don’t know what hospital.” Their mother was probably one of the few people outside the government who didn’t have forwarding on their calls: security precaution. And she was one of the very few, inside or out, who wasn’t completely aware of all the security arrangements that surrounded them. He couldn’t call her security and ask where she was. He hoped to God they knew and that his mother and Barb hadn’t gotten whisked away out of security’s sight. “She didn’t tell me what hospital.” He covered the microphone. “Banichi-ji. Get the origination on that call from my mother.”