Read Online Inheritor by C. J. Cherryh - Free Book Online

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 —
touched
by 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
close
to lines on a map, and it definitely
had
a 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
something
he 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
if
something 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