They worked.
At some point Alistair set down the archive materials and stretched his hands and stretched he studied Tav fully present.
"What are you afraid of?" he said.
"When?"
"In general. The thing underneath everything."
Tav studied the laptop screen.
"Repetition," he said.
"Of what?"
"Of the specific outcome where I make a decision correctly and it produces the wrong result anyway."
"I've been afraid of that since I was twenty-two. Not of being wrong — I can accept being wrong. Of being right and still losing."
Alistair was quiet.
"That's what you've been managing," he said.
"Yes."
"All of this." He looked at Tav. "The precision. The distance. The care you bring to everything that doesn't involve other people — the coffee, the methodology, the operational work. You can control those outcomes."
"Yes."
"You can't control this one."
"No," Tav said. "I can't."
Alistair studied him steadily.
"I can't either," he said. "For what it's worth." He held the look. "I've been afraid of the same thing, for different reasons. That I'll care about something and lose it. That the caring will be the liability that makes the loss possible."
"It is the liability," Tav said.
"Yes," Alistair said. "And I've decided I don't care anymore about managing the liability. The liability is the cost of the thing and the thing is worth the cost."
Tav looked at him.
"I've been arriving at the same conclusion," he said. "More slowly."
"You're thorough," Alistair said.
"Yes."
"Does the conclusion feel stable?"
Tav thought about this carefully.
"Yes," he said. "It's been stable for several weeks. I've been waiting for the analysis to find an exception and it hasn't found one."
Alistair's expression did the thing it did — the warm unguarded version.
"Good," he said.
