So, of course, did Tabini-aiji pass warnings of his own intent to his own security, who might not be informed by their Guild—even the aiji filed Intent, as he had seen once upon a time. But lords and lunatics, as Tano had once said, didn’t always file, and defense didn’t always know in advance. If Tabini had taken lord Saigimi down, Tano and Algini might possibly know it from Tabini’s sources.
Unless it was Geigi who had done it. He was very conscious of the rather plump and pleasant ateva weighing down the seat cushion beside him, in this car that held the pleasant musky scent of atevi, the size and mass of atevi. It would certainly make sense. Geigi was not the complacent man he’d seemed, and Geigi had shifted loyalties last year awayfrom lord Saigimi’s plots against the aiji.
It made thorough sense that Geigi, with his new resources, had placed Guild members as near Saigimi as he could get them; it was an easy bet that Saigimi had done exactly the same thing in lord Geigi’s district.
So there was very good reason, in the direct involvement of lord Geigi with past events, for the paidhi’s security to be very anxious about that gesture of stopping and picking up the flowers. Sometimes, Bren thought, he had an amazing self-destructive streak.
Geigi leaving his own security to other cars, to sit beside him surrounded by Tabini’s agents, was a declaration of strong reliance on the paidhi and on the aiji in Shejidan; but it also tainted the paidhi and the aiji with collusion if Geigi had done it.
Damn. Surely not. Tabiniknew where he was and what was going on. Tabini’s security wouldn’t let him make that mistake.
Meanwhile all those reporters who had gathered to cover the plant tour were back there to report his inviting lord Geigi under his protection the length and breadth of the peninsula, not to mention reporting the gesture to all the lords of the Association.
Among them, in the Padi Valley to north, was the lady Direiso of the Kadigidi house, who truly did wish the paidhi dead, and who was alive herself only because the power vacuum her death would create could be more troublesome to the aiji than her living presence.
Direiso. Thatwas an interesting question.
3
The cars of the escort passed like toys under the right-hand wing as the private jet made the turn toward home. A bright clot of flowers, more bouquets and wreaths, showed on the concrete where the plane had stood. Now they surrounded a cluster of black car roofs.
So lord Geigi hadn’t driven off once the plane’s doors had closed, nor even during the long wait while the plane had taxied far across to the east-west runway. Geigi had waited to see it in the air.
Even now, a small number of atevi were standing beside the cars, watching the plane, extravagant gesture from a lord of the Association, in a politics in which all such gestures had meaning.
No word for love in the Ragi language, and no word for friend, even a friend of casual sort. Among the operational ironies of the language, or the atevi mind, it rendered it very hard for an ateva in lord Geigi’s situation to make his personal position clear, once there were logical reasons to suspect his associations—because associations colored everything, demanded everything, slanted everything.
Bren found himself quite—humanly speaking— touchedby the display now vanishing below his window, not doubting the plant workers and the common people of the white-plaster township that came up in his view. They were the offerers of those flowers.
But from this perspective of altitude and distance, he was no longer blindly trusting.
Not even of lord Geigi, except as Geigi’s known and unknown associations currently tended toward the same political focus as his own: toward Tabini, aiji of the Western Association, Tabini, who owned this plane, and the security, and the loyalties of lords and commons all across the continent.
Man’chi. Instinctual, not consciously chosen, loyalty. Identical man’chi made allies. There was no other meaningful reckoning.
You couldn’t say that human word ‘border,’ either, to limit off the land passing under them. An atevi map didn’t really have boundaries. It had land ownership—sort of. It had townships, but their edges were fuzzy. You said ‘province,’ and that was closeto lines on a map, and it definitely hada geographical context, but it didn’t mean what you thought it did if you were a hard-headed human official trying to force mainland terms into Mospheiran boxes. So whatever he had experienced down there, it didn’t have edges, as the land didn’t have edges, as overlapping associations didn’t have edges.
A thought like that could, if analyzed, give one solitary human a lonely longing for somethinghe touched to mean something human and ordinary and touch him back, and for something to satisfy the stirrings of affection that good actions made in a human heart.
But ifsomething did, was it real? Was affection real because one side of the transaction felt it, if the other side in responding always felt something different?
The sound of one hand clapping. Was that what he heard?
The plane leveled out to pursue its course to the northeast. Outside the window now were the hills of the southern peninsula, Talidi Province, a geographical distinction, again without firm edges. Beyond that hazy range of hills to the south sat the Marid Tasigin, the coastal communities where lord Saigimi had had greatest influence, which would be in turmoil just now as the word of their lord’s assassination spread.
Out the other window, across the working space on this modest-sized executive jet, he saw only blue sky. He knew what he would see if he got up and took a look: the same shining, wave-wrinkled sea he had seen from Geigi’s balcony, and the same haze on the horizon that was the southern shore of Mospheira.
He didn’t want to get up and look in that direction this afternoon. He’d done too much looking and too much thinking this morning, until, without even thinking about it, he’d rubbed raw a small spot in his sensibilities that he’d thought was effectively numb.
Thinking about it, like a fool, he began to think about Barb, and his mother and his brother, and wondered what the weather was like and whether his brother, ignoring the death threats for an hour or two, was tinkering with his boat again, the way he did on spring evenings.
That part of his life he just had to seal off. Let it alone, quit scratching the scab. He’d just come too close to Mospheira this leg of the trip, had it too visible to him out the plane window, had sat there on that balcony with too much time to think.
The other part, his job, his duty, whatever he wanted to call it—
Well, at least thatwas going far better than he’d hoped.
Every cheering success like that in the town and factory dropping away in jet-spanned distance behind them was another direct challenge to contrary atevi powers only uneasily restrained within the Association: if they didn’t get rid of Tabini fast, the dullest of them could see that the change they were fighting was going to become a fact of atevi life so deeply rooted in the economy it would survive Tabini. Life, even if Tabini died this minute, would never be what it would have been had Tabini never lived.
Numerous lords among the atevi were hostile to human cultural influence—hell, one could about say everylord of the Association including Tabini himself had misgivings about human culture, although even Tabini was weakening on the issue of television and lengthening the hours the stations were permitted to transmit, a relaxation the paidhi had begun to worry about.