The line spat, one of those damnable static events that happened when the atevi network with its intensive security linked up by radio with the Mospheiran network. He clenched the receiver as if he could hang onto the line.
“… at the hospital!”
“In what city, Mother? Where’s Toby? Can you hear me?”
“I’m in the city!” That meant the capital, in ordinary usage. “I’m at the hospital! Can you hear me? Oh, damnthis line!”
Not inthe hospital. “You’re atthe 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 busjust 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 youhurt?” 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 youhurt, 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’tcalled 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!”
“ Youneed 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 thatwas how Barb had gotten hit, and thatwas 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…”