Trust these two, and leave Geigi, who owed him his intercession and thereby his survival? Absolutely. Tano’s and Algini’s man’chi was to Tabini, and if Tabini ever wanted him dead, these were the very ones who would see to it. If Tabini wanted him alive, these were the ones who would fling their bodies between him and a bullet without a second thought. Man’chi was very simple until one approached the hazy ground between households, which was where Geigi’s grew too indistinct to trust in a crisis like this. Man’chi went upward to the leader but not downfrom him. It was instinct. It was mathematics as atevi added matters. And these two advised him to move quickly and not to divert to any other destination.
So he simply began to fold up his work and to shut down his computer as Tano got up again to order something regarding their landing.
The plane banked sharply and dived, sending dignified atevi careening against the seats and up. Bren clamped his fingers to hold onto his precious computer as the smooth plastic case slid inexorably through his grip, aimed by centrifugal force at the window.
Fruit juice had hit the same window and wall and stood in orange beads.
The plane leveled out.
“ Nand’ paidhi,” the copilot said over the speakers, “ forgive us. That was a plane in our path.”
Tano and Algini and the rest of the staff were sorting themselves out. The juniormost, Audiri, came immediately with a towel, retrieved the glass, which had not broken, and mopped the fruit juice off various surfaces.
He had not let the computer escape his grasp. His fingers felt bruised. His heart hadn’t had time to speed up. Now, belatedly, it wondered whether it might have license to do that, but the conscious brain advised it to forget it, it was much too late.
“Nadiin,” Algini was saying to the crew via the intercom, “kindly determine origin and advise air traffic control that the aiji’s staff requests names and identifications of the aircraft in this matter.”
“Probably it’s nothing,” Bren muttered, allowing Tano custody of the precious computer. The air traffic control system was relatively new. Planes were not. Certain individuals considered themselves immune to ATC regulations.
If on a given day, and by their numerology, certain individuals of the Absolutist persuasion considered the system gave them infelicitous numbers, they would changethose numbers on their own and change their course, their altitude, or their arrival time so as to have their important business in the capital blessed by better fortune.
And the assassination to the south had changedthe numbers.
Tabini and the ATC authority had fought that battle for years, particularly trying to impress the facts of physics on lords used to being immune to lawsuit. There were laws. There were ATC regulations. There was the aiji’s express displeasure at such violations, and there was the outstanding example of the Weinathi Bridge disaster for a cautionary tale.
Security today had been very careful to move the aiji’s private plane onto a flight path usually followed by slower-moving commercial air… for the paidhi’s safety.
His security was understandably worried about the incident. But whatever the closeness of the other aircraft had been, the emergency was over. The plane did some small maneuvering as the nose pitched gently down and it resumed its landing approach.
Tano and Algini came to sit opposite him for the landing, and belted in.
“Likely it was someone elseworried by the Saigimi business,” Bren said. “And likewise taking precautions about their routing. Or their numbers. I doubt it was intentional.”
“The aiji will not take chances with you, nadi Bren,” Tano said.
“I’m sure not, Tano.”
The Bergid snowed in the window, hazy mountains, still white with winter, the continental divide.
Forest showed, blue-green and likewise hazed—but that haze was pollen and spores, as a lowland spring broke into bloom and the endless forests of atevi hunting preserves, like the creatures that lived within that haze, reproduced themselves with wild abandon.
The fields came clear, the little agricultural land that developers had left around burgeoning Shejidan. And there were the stubbornly held garden plots clinging to hillsides—always the gardens: the Ragi atevi were keen diggers and planters, even the aristocrats among them. Gardens, but no livestock for food: atevi considered it cruel and uncivilized to eat tame animals.
Came then the geometries of tiled roofs, marching in numerically significant orders up and down the hills—little roofs, bigger roofs, and the cluster of hotels and modern buildings that snuggled as close as possible to the governmental center, the ancient Bu-javid, the aiji’s residence. It was daylight. One saw no neon lights.
The plane banked and turned and leveled again, swooping in over the flat roofs of industry that had grown up around the airport.
Patinandi Aerospace was one: that large building he well knew was a maintenance facility. The aiji had spread the bounty of space industry wide throughout the provinces, and the push to get into space had wrought changes this year that wouldn’t be stopped. Ever.
There was a new computer manufacturing plant, and atevi designers were fully capable of making critical adjustments in what humans had long regarded as one of the final secrets, the one that would adjust atevi society into a more and more comprehensible mold.
Not necessarily so.
Faster and faster the pavement rushed under the wings.
Wheels touched dry pavement, squealed arrival.
The paidhi-aiji was as close to home as he was likely to come. This was it. Shejidan.
And hearing the wheels thump and roll and hearing the engines brake and feeling the reality of ground under him again, he let go a freer breath and knew, first, he was in the safest place in the world for him, and second, that he was among the people in the world most interested in his welfare. Delusion, perhaps, but he’d grown to rely on it.
4
The van transfer to the subway in the airport terminal was thankfully without extravagant welcome, media, or official inquiry. The paidhi-aiji was home. The paidhi-aiji andhis luggage, this time together and without misdirection, actually reached the appropriate subway car, and without incident the car set into motion on its trip toward the Bu-javid, on its lofty and historic hill on the edge of Shejidan.
Then, while he leaned back in comfort and velvet splendor, there arrived, via his security’s com link, a radioed communication from the airport authorities requesting an interview with the aiji’s pilot and copilot, and reporting the identity of the pilot of the strayed prop plane: the son of the lord of the island of Dur, one Rejiri of the Niliini of Dur-wajran, whose affiliations Tano and Algini were ordering researched by grim and secret agencies which, God help them, the lords of Dur-wajran had probably never encountered in their wildest imaginations.
Figure that the owner of such a private plane was affluent. Figure that on the small island of Dur opposing traffic wasn’t a problem the pilot, possibly of the only plane on the island of Dur, had ever met.
But as an accident, or near accident, it wasn’t the paidhi’s business to investigate or to deal with. Someone else had to explain the air traffic regulations to the lord’s son. He sat back in the soft red seats of Tabini’s private subway car and had a glass of fruit juice, confident his second try at a drink would stay in the glass. He timed the last sip nicely for the arrival at the station.