Inheritor

It hadn’t afforded Jase much time to learn about the world. And Jase had been disoriented and more focused on the fact that he and Yolanda weren’t going to find communication free or easy. Possibly they hadn’t known it would be that way.

Possibly Deana Hanks, sitting near them on the plane, saying that he’d be a prisoner in Shejidan and that they’d deceive him, had set Jase up for far too much suspicion. He’d toldJase that Deana was a liar. But Jase might not have believed him that day.

And as he explained the full extent of what Deana had done and why, Jase’s comment had been, Neither one of us will have it easy, either, will we?

Half a year ago.

Just about half a year ago. Yolanda had gone away in a van along with Deana, bound for a plane nearby; Jase had gone with him and Banichi and Jago in another one, bound for the subway, and that had been it, last contact, except the phone calls.

Jase had been so scared in those first days, so very scared—of the staff, of security, of the devices that guarded the doorway. Of the simple fact they found it necessary to lock the doors of the apartment.

Of the simpler fact of thunder crashing above the roof. He remembered.

The plane rushed down the runway, lifted, and a moment later Jase was trying to improve the plane’s angle by leaning as it banked for the west.

Bren kept himself deadpan and didn’t say a word about what was probably an instinctive reaction. One would think a man from weightless space would have overcome such tendencies. But Jase said his ship made itself gravity the same way the station did, so Bren supposed Jase wasn’t used to being without it.

The plane retracted the trailing edge flaps. Jase was still white-knuckled and had looked askance thus far at every noise of the hydraulics working, from the wheels coming up to the slats coming back. This was the man who’d boarded a capsule and let a crew shove him into space in free fall toward a parachute drop into the planetary atmosphere.

On the other hand… Jase said very little about that trip down. Jase had waked now and again with nightmares, startling the staff, and he had once remarked that the parachute drop had perturbed him. He hoped the trip back into space once they had the ship, Jase had said to him very early on, would be a good deal more like the airplane ride to Shejidan.

“You know,” he remarked to Jase, who, after ten minutes at least and almost up to cruising altitude, hadn’t let go the seat arm, “planes don’t often fall out of the sky. They tend to stay up. Airfoil. Remember?”

Jase took several deep breaths. “I’m fine,” he said, in the ma

Jase stared straight ahead. There was a lovely view of clouds out the window, but he didn’t look, evidently not trusting the plane would stay level without his encouragement. Jase didn’t look at him, either, and didn’t seem inclined to think about anything but the plane.

Well, there was work he could do while Jase was helping the pilot.

He could unpack the computer. Or he could sit and worry about the situation on Mospheira with the State Department and its windows.

Or the situation in the capital, where shockwaves of the peninsular affair and Tatiseigi’s apparent realignment were still ringing through the court and lords marginally aligned with Direiso were reconsidering their positions—disturbing thought, to have a continent-spa

The ship and probably the man beside him were completely unaware of the struggle except insofar as Jase had had to deal with Tatiseigi.

Well, the island wouldbecome aware of it. With the illegal radio traffic going on, bet that Deana Hanks would become aware of it.

If she could translate assassinationwithout mistaking it for pregnant calendar.

Banichi and Jago were meanwhile taking great care to have him apprised of what was going on, after, presumably, some shaking at high levels had gone on in the Messengers’ Guild. The information delivered with their supper last evening had been an intercepted radio message on the north coast, up by Wiigin, where they were notgoing, a message which—laughably under less grim circumstances—purported to be between atevi, when clearly only one side was atevi even by the timbre of the voice, let alone the vocabulary and syntax errors.

The fluent side of the transmission had discussed at great length the situation with the assassination of lord Saigimi. It had claimed lord Tatiseigi had made the television interview under extreme threat and it claimed that only fear that the Atageini would be taken over by the aiji had weakened Tatiseigi’s former—the message called it— strong stand for traditional values.

He knew why Tabini hadlet that radio traffic, ostensibly between small aircraft flying near the Association-Mospheiran boundary and a tower controller on the atevi mainland, go on without protest: it was deliberate provocation on someone’s part on the mainland to be doing what they were doing, bold as brass on the airwaves. That they continued had nothing to do with rights of expression as they defined free speech on Mospheira. By the Treaty no Mospheiran had the right to use a radio to communicate across the strait. By allowing those radio messages to continue, Tabini was simply, in human parlance, giving the perpetrators enough rope to hang themselves and draw in others before he cracked down, definitely on Direiso, possibly on the perpetrators of the messages, and diplomatically on Hanks.

But the area where that was going on was (he had checked) well north of the area where they were going.

And, while he would be involved in the crisis those messages were bound to engender when the crackdown came, it wasn’t his problem now. His job right now was simply making sure that Jase got his chance to relax and reach some sort of internal peace with the land and the people. He had great faith that a little exposure to problems more basic and more natural than living pent up in the pressured Bu-javid environment would help Jase immensely. And he, himself—

He needed to rest. He finally admitted that. He’d reached the stage when there just wasn’t any more reserve. No more nerves, no more sense, no more flexibility of wit.

He’d had his last real leave—oh, much too long ago.

He’d stood on a ski slope, on Mt. Allen Thomas, in the very heart of the island, getting sunburn on his nose, coated in snow from a header. (He’d gotten a little slower, a little more cautious in his breakneck skiing.)

But, oh, the view from up there was glorious, when the sun turned the snow gold and the evergreens black in the evenings.

When the mists came up off the blue shadows and the wind whispered across the frozen surface in the morning—then he was alive.

It would have terrified Jase.

Ah, well, he said to himself, and propped one ankle on the other and asked junior security for a fruit juice.

“Would you care for one, Jasi-ji?”

“Yes, nadi, please,” Jase said.

Definitely better.

The fruit juice arrived. “Pretty clouds,” Bren remarked, and Jase looked and agreed with relative calm that they were that.

Vacation would do them all good, he said to himself.

Because… he had a sip of fruit juice and stared at the empty seat across from him, the one Jago usually occupied… he was definitely reaching the fracture point himself, and seeing conspiracy under every porcelain lily petal.

Conspiracy that linked the various shattered major pieces of the last several days, from whatever had necessitated the assassination of Saigimi, to whatever Hanks had pursued, to Direiso, to a couple of radio operators up by Wiigin, and even to the paint flung at his mother’s apartment building.