He’d never heard Sal talk that way—Sal with an attack of Obligations. But, shit-all, —
That thought led down a track he didn’t want to take, something about old times, about what they’d had on helldeck, confidence that came of knowing the guy you were sharing a ship with wasn’t out to screw you—whole damn universe might be out to do that, but your partner wouldn’t, your partner had to have the same interests you did, and you just didn’t cheat on him.
You just didn’t cheat on him….
He rolled out of bed, buck naked and cold in the draft from the vents, he walked over to tile other bunk and leaned his arm against it, because if he stayed in that bed he was going to start thinking about Morrie, and he didn’t like to do that, not in the middle of the dark.
So Sal was being a fool. So Meg thought she could get the years she’d lost back again and the system wouldn’t screw them all.
Rustle from behind him. Movement. Arms came around him, and the chill myriad clips of Sal’s braids rattled against his back.
“Cold out here, Ben.”
‘’I want out of here, dammit, I’m not aptituded for combat. I got a place in Stockholm…”
Sal said, holding him tight, “What’s Stockholm?”
Chapter 7
MAINDAWN and in the office early, trying, before the mainday rush hit, to make sense of the reports from the designers and the sims check. Graff took a slow sip of vending machine coffee, keyed the next page on the desktop reader. The report writer liked passives: ‘will be effectuated,’ ‘will be seen to have incremented,’ and especially convolutions: ‘may have been cost-effective in the interim while result-negative in the long-range forecast—’
Graff keyed the dictionary for ‘forecast.’ It said something about 1) terrestrial weather patterns and, 2) prediction. The latter, he decided, but keyed it up; and found something, as he’d suspected, different than his own definition of ‘prediction.’ These were the people who designed the computers and the software that ran the sims, for God’s sake, and they were giving him messages about Old Earth weather patterns and fortune-telling?
He tried to read these reports out of Tanzer’s staff. He felt responsible in the captain’s absence. He worried about missing something. He worried about not understanding Tanzer face to face, and these were the only lessons in blue-sky usage on his regular reading list.
‘Effectuated/ he could guess from particles. And he didn’t have that small a vocabulary. He didn’t use that many semicolons in his reports; he wondered was his style out of fashion; and he wished not for the first time that he’d had at least one of the seminal languages—given the proliferation of derived meanings, that was what Saito called the problem words, cognates; and metaphor. All of which meant a connection between ‘forecast,’ planetary weather, and the Lendler Corp techs who, between working on the sims and writing reports, danced a careful and convolute set of protocols between his office and Tanzer’s—‘effectuate,’ hell. Obfuscate’ and ‘delegate’ and ‘reiterate, but nothing effectual was going to happen with that investigation except Lendler Corp gathering evidence to protect itself against lawsuits from the next of kin.
Save them the trouble. Stick to Belters. Belters didn’t sue Corporations, Belters didn’t have the money or the connections to sue Corporations.
But come into their territory—
Lendler didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to interview the Belters. Even when he had it set up.
The phone beeped. He hoped it was Saito coming on-line: he could use a linguist about now—and he could wish Legal Affairs hadn’t left their office to a junior: the Fleet needed to enlist a motherworld lawyer, was what they needed, maybe two and three of them, since they never seemed unanimous— he’d had the UDC counsel on the line last night, talking about culpabilities and wanting releases from the next-ofs—
“Lt. Graff?” Young male voice. Familiar male voice. “Col. Tanzer on the line’1
He’d never been in the habit of swearing. But association with the Belters did suggest words. He kept it to: “Put him on, Trev.”
Pop. “Lt. Graff?”
“Colonel?”
“I’m looking at the file on Paul Dekker. Just wondered if you had any last-minute additions, before we write our finish on this accident business.”