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.

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 couldhave 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 haddone it, perhaps Saigimi’s assassination had been timed preciselyfor the hour he was with Geigi on public view and thereby reassuring Geigi of the aiji’s good will: if the news had come in the middle of the night and on any ordinary day, Geigi might have concluded the aiji was beginning a purge of enemies.

Then Geigi might have done something disastrous, like running to lady Direiso, far more dangerous an enemy than Saigimi, and that might have led to Geigi’s death—if Geigi misread Direiso. Or, potentially, though he himself doubted it, it could have led to Direiso rallying the rest of her band of conspirators, drawing Geigi back to her man’chi, and setting him against Tabini, a realignment that would hold that ship back there hostage to all kinds of demands.

Tabini preferred not to provoke terror. In atevi terms, only a fool made his enemies nervous; and a far, far greater fool frightened his potential allies. Tabini rarely resorted to such an extreme measure as assassination, preferring to leave old and well-known problems holding power in certain places rather than elevating unknown successors who might be up to God knew what without such good and detailed reports coming back to him. That tendency to let a situation float if he had good intelligence coming back to him was a consideration which ought to disturb lady Direiso’s sleep.