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

to think.
    The other part, his job, his duty, whatever he wanted to call it —
    Well, at least
that
was 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
every
lord 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.
    Other lords and representatives were amenable to human technology as far as it benefited their districts but hostile to Tabini as an overlord for historic and ethnic reasons.
    And there were a handful of atevi both lordly and common who were bitterly opposed to both.
    In all, it was an uneasy pedestal for a government that had generally kept its equilibrium only by Tabini's skill at balancing threat and reward. Geigi was a good instance: Geigi had very possibly started in the camp of the lords hostile to Tabini for reasons that had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with ethnic divisions among atevi.
    But when Geigi had gotten himself in over his head, financially, politically, and by association, Tabini had not only refrained from removing him or humiliating him, Tabini had acknowledged that the peninsula had been on the short end of government appointments and contracts for some time (no accident, counting the presence of Tabini's bitterest enemies in control of the peninsula) and agreed that Geigi, honest, honorable lord Geigi, was justified in his complaints.
    Now Geigi, who'd had the only large aircraft manufacturing plant in the world in his province, which
could
have been replaced, out-competed, even moved out of the district by order of the aiji, owed his very life and the prosperity of his local association to his joining Tabini's side.
    So now director Borujiri was firmly on Tabini's side, and so were those workers. If atevi were going to space faster than planned, it was a windfall for Patinandi Aerospace, the chance of a lifetime for Borujiri, prosperity for a locally depressed job market, and a dazzling rise to prominence for a quiet, honest lord who'd invested his money in the Tasigin Marid oilfields and lost nearly everything — no help from Saigimi, whose chiseling relatives were in charge of the platforms that failed.
    What promises Saigimi might have obtained from Geigi and then called due in the attempt last year to replace the paidhi with the paidhi-successor, he could only guess. Geigi had never alluded to that part of the story.
    And how dismayed Geigi and Saigimi alike had been when the paidhi-successor rewarded her atevi supporters by dropping information on them that had as well have been a nuclear device — all of that was likely lost in Geigi's immaculate discretion and now in Saigimi's demise. No one might ever know the whole tale of that adventure.
    And, damn, but he wished he did, for purely vulgar curiosity, if nothing else.
    But clearly the Saigimi matter had either stayed hotter longer than he would have believed that last year's assassination attempt could remain an issue with Tabini — or it had heated up again very suddenly and for reasons that he'd failed to detect in planning this trip.
    That was granting Tabini had in fact done in Saigimi.
    In the convoluted logic he'd learned to tread in atevi motivations, if Tabini
had
done it, perhaps Saigimi's assassination