Inheritor

by C. J. Cherryh

  He just wished he hadn't hung up on Toby. Their mother's surgery was this week. And he wouldn't hear. He just wouldn't hear. He'd resigned himself to that.

  Hard on the relatives, the job he'd taken, the job Jase had volunteered for, never having been out of the reach of family and familiarity in his life.

  He sipped his fruit juice. Jase eventually remembered to drink his.

  The plane took a turn toward the west. Jase braced himself and looked at the window as if he expected to see something.

  "It's all right."

  Jase took a deep breath. "Can you see the water as we come in, nadi?"

  "We're starting descent. You should be able to see it. You should have a good view."

  He didn't know why Jase had taken the ocean as his ambition. He was only glad that Jase had taken something that easy for his goal, something he could deliver.

  He got up briefly and spoke to Banichi.

  On the paidhi's request and the local tower's willingness, the plane made a very unusual approach, swinging low and slow over the water's edge, then flew out over the sea and the large resort island of Onondisi, which sat in the bay, affording the ship-paidhi a view. Bren stood up to see, with his hand on a safety-grip, mindful of island pilots, standing and looking over Jase's shoulder at a pleasant rock-centered island with bluffs to the north and sandy beach to the south, where the resorts clustered.

  "Melted water," Jase said in a tone of awe. "All that melted water."

  Now and again Jase could utterly surprise him.

  "Melted it is."

  "Is it warm?"

  "About the temperature of a cold water tap." He reached past Jase to point at the hotels that clustered among trees on the heights of the island. "Vacation places. Hotels. You stay there and go down to the beaches."

  "Ordinary people go there?" Jase asked.

  "And lords, nadi. And whoever wants to. The ordinary consideration is security, for the lords, so usually the high lords stay on the south shore of the bay. A lot of private beaches over there, but not as fine as these."

  "Other people, they don't have to worry?"

  "No. — Except if they've made somebody very, very angry. And even then they know whether they have to worry."

  "Are they scared with this assassination going on?"

  "The Guild won't touch a common man without a Filing of Intent. Even then the Guild has to be convinced there's a strong and real grievance, so," he said, with an eye to all the tiny figures on the beaches, wading the surf, "unless someone's done something really outrageous enough to get a Filing approved — they're safe, down there."

  "But not lords?"

  "Lords have Guild in their households," Jago said, standing close. "And the Guild doesn't necessarily have to approve a greater lord moving against a lesser if right can be demonstrated later."

  "And a lesser against a greater?" Jase asked.

  "It must approve that. And with common folk, it must. And often," Jago said as an afterthought, "we mediate between common folk. Many times, a feud among folk like that doesn't draw blood. We see many, many situations that common folk think extraordinary. We can bring perspective to a matter."

  One suspected (Tano had hinted as much, and he'd observed it on the daily news) a commoner-feud usually went quite slowly indeed if the Guild suspected mediation would result. Sometimes, the paidhi strongly suspected, the Guild did absolutely nothing for a few months, expecting its phone to ring with an offer to the opposing side, once the targeted party grew anxious.

  Jago didn't volunteer such information, however; and the plane swept on over water, this time with the view of Mospheira a distant blue haze past the rolling hills.

  "That's the island, nadi. The island. Mospheira."

  The wing tipped up, hiding it, as they were obliged to veer off along the invisible boundary.

  "I didn't see it," Jase said.

  "It's just hazy out there. It was the haze."

  "I didn't see it, all the same." Jase sounded disappointed.

  "Well, I'll point it out to you when we're on the ground. I'm sure we'll be able to see it. — The hills closer to us, that was the height of Mogari-nai."

  Behind them now lay the rocky coastal bluffs that photographers loved, along with those of Elijiri which were near Geigi's estate, further inland. Mogari-nai was set, one understood, on the aiji's land, well back from the scenic areas, in a zone dedicated once to firing cannon balls intended to fall on hostile wooden ships approaching the port at Saduri Township.

  Now Mogari-nai faced a periodic barrage of electronic interference launched from Mospheira, and that opposing shore was lined with radar installations.

  Ask about that interference in a protest to the Mospheiran government, and naturally the problem immediately spread to the phone lines.

  "Will one wish another pass, nandiin?" That was the co-pilot. "We have the sky to ourselves."

  "No, thank him, nadi," Bren said, and Tano, standing near the intercom, relayed that information.

  "We will land, then, nandiin. Please seat yourselves comfortably and safely."

  Bren sat down and belted in. Jase fastened the belt and drew a long breath.

  "Routine landing," Bren said, and talked Jase a second time through the process of landing, and why planes stayed in the air and how they got onto the ground.

  Jase seemed very much more relaxed, just three deep breaths as they were approaching touch-down, and a grin as they did so exactly when Bren predicted.

  "A lot better than parachutes, nadi," Jase said. They'd begun with a scared, withdrawn passenger and ended with one smiling and joking — one who'd been able to look out his window even during a steep bank, only occasionally clinging to the seats.

  This was a good idea, Bren thought, this trip was a very good idea.

  The plane taxied to the terminal of what was, for defense and seasonal tourist reasons, a fair-sized airport. The transport vans were waiting.

  "We're here, nadiin-ji!" Bren said cheerfully, and was not quite first on his feet, but close.

  Vacation, he was thinking. It wasn't quite the hoped-for chase after yellowtail, but Banichi was right: Geigi's estate, just on the south shore of Onondisi Bay, was peninsular, and going there at this precise moment might send some unwanted signal and interfere with the aiji's politics with that region.

  Taiben, the aiji's summer retreat, the other possibility — that was in the Padi Valley, and that was, again, politically sensitive right now, as well as dangerous, being in lady Direiso's own front yard.

  There'd been Malguri, which he'd most wished, but that was three hours by air into a set of provinces seething with intrigue.

  So the aiji's lands, meaning the public defense zone near Mogari-nai and the Historic Site near Saduri Township, that became the fallback. They couldn't use the public resorts. The good one got out of being an atevi lord was mostly limited to a lot of ancestral knick-knacks you didn't own, by his own observation; and the bad one got was that the more politically active you were and the more resolutely you did your job for the people you represented, the more true it became that you couldn't ride regular airlines or go into pretty public resorts like Onondisi or go into the tourist restaurants he'd dearly love to go to — if he weren't the paidhi-aiji, and a human to boot.

  But, well, rank had other privileges. Supper tonight with Ilisidi could make up for the restaurants.

  They didn't have to gather up baggage. That was another good part of being lords. They let their security handle it and the moment the ladder was in place and the moment Banichi had been down to make direct contact with Ilisidi's people, who were in charge of ground security, they could go.

  "I'm fine!" Jase announced as they went out into the brisk, sea-charged wind. Bren went down first, to meet Banichi at the bottom and to catch Jase if he tripped. But he felt the ladder shake and looked back to find Jase had seized the safety rail in his accustomed death grip and watched Jase enthusiastically and adventurously come after him wit
hout waiting for the ladder to stop rocking.

  Not to push the point by lingering in the open air, Bren went to the nearest van of the three as the driver, who was not commercial hire, but one of Ilisidi's 'young men,' as she called them, opened the door. Bren ushered Jase in, got in ahead of Banichi, and Jago brought up the rear and shut the door as she hit the seat.

  The van started up immediately and whipped around a tire-squealing one-eighty turn toward the gate.

  Like a van ride he'd taken once before to visit the dowager. He started to protest the driver's recklessness, but — they were in Ilisidi's territory now, and it was what he'd bargained for. The driver wouldn't kill them; he knew that now — having been through far worse; and Jase looked startled and apprehensive, but looked at him, too, for reassurance. So he grinned and Jase tried to mirror the expression.

  Roads across the countryside weren't approved tech, except on a local basis. There was definitely rail service to Saduri Township, he'd checked that out, but it didn't serve the old fortress, as such service didn't serve, specifically, two of the aiji's estates, he'd learned; one of those two was Malguri, and the other was Saduri. No rail went up to the big dish at Mogari-nai; and it didn't go to the Saduri Historical Site, either.

  So he'd understood there'd be a drive to get there; and he could have expected the driver would do what this driver was doing.

  The van left the maintenance road and whipped off on a gravel spur that led around a grassy hill, and around another, and generally up, at a ferocious pace.

  Jase looked less reassured at the sound of gravel under the wheels and at the feel of the van skidding slightly on the turns. He grabbed at the handles and the window-frame.

  "Is this dangerous?" Jase asked. "Is someone after us?"

  "Oh —" Bren began to say lightly, and settled for the truth with Jase. "This driver is having a good time. Relax."

  Banichi grinned broadly. "He's not lost a van this spring."

  Jase did know when he was being made fun of. He gave a sickly grin to that challenge to his composure and clung white-fingered to the handholds.

  "I'd have thought someone from up there," Bren finally said over the noise of the van, "would be used to motion."

  "I am!" Jase retorted. And freed a hand to gesture an erratic crooked course. "Not — this motion."

  It did make sense. Jase's body didn't know what to expect and Jase's stomach kept trying to prepare for it, to no avail.

  It was for the same reason, he supposed, that the subway made him anxious. And that the plane did. He watched Jase's facial reactions, the twitch as a swing of the road brought light onto his face and immediately after as a stand of young trees brought a ripple of shadow and a series of flinches and blinks, all exaggerated.

  So what would it be like, Bren asked himself, to live in a building all his life, and have all the light controlled, the flow of air controlled, the temperature controlled, the humidity controlled, every person you met controlled; and the whole day scheduled, the horizons curving up and movement entirely imperceptible? He had as much to learn about Jase as Jase did about the world; Jase was the book he had to read to gain knowledge about the ship — which he needed to know, and his professional instincts had turned on in that regard, to such an extent he told himself he should abandon curiosity and track on his other job, to reassure Jase.

  But Jase had reacted uncertainly to change in the apartment; he added up that maddening insistence on rising at exactly the same moment, on breakfast at the same time every morning, and reckoned that change, as an event, was not something Jase was used to meeting. He'd dealt with Jase and Yolanda both on their last exposure to the world when they were still in a state of shock from landing and when their passage under open sky to the safety of Taiben lodge had been brief, ending in the safe confines of the Bu-javid — at least Jase's had ended there.

  And now, right before his eyes, that twitchiness was back: that extreme reaction to stimuli of all sorts, even when Jase was trying to joke about it. Randomness of light and sound had become a battering series of events to senses completely unused to interpreting the nuances.

  He rated himself tolerably good at figuring out what went on in atevi, and he could make a guess, that the way a baby overreacted once it had started being startled, it must seem to Jase as if there were no order and no recognizable logic in the sensations that came at him. Jase had that look in his eyes and that grip on the edge of his seat that said here was a man waiting now for the whole world to dissolve under his feet.

  But the logic inside the man said it wouldn't, so Jase clung to his seat and kept his eyes wide open and tried with an adult and reasoning brain to make sense of it.

  And an infant's brain, not yet reasoning, might have an advantage in programming. A grown man who from infancy had never had light flashed in his face, never had a floor go bump, never been slung about from one side to the other — what was he to do? Jase came from a steady, scheduled world, one without large spaces. If he'd lived in the equivalent of a set of small rooms, God, even textures must be new.

  What had Jase said to him? The tastes, the smells, were all overwhelming to him?

  It was possible he'd never seen bright color or different pattern. The ship Jase had come from began to seem a frighteningly same kind of place.

  The beach, the waves, the rocks and hills, these things should, if Jase could meet them, be a very good cure for what ailed him. And if he could tolerate the environment, get a look at the natural processes that underlay the randomness of storm and weather that reached the capital at Shejidan, he would have far fewer fears. Jase was scared of thunder, and knew better than most now what it was, but still jumped when it thundered, and was embarrassed when the servants laughed. They thought it made him like them. He thought it made him foolish.

  Let Jase see the historic origins of the atevi, let him experience the same sort of things that had opened the atevi world to his imagination. That was the plan.

  It was, though he hadn't thought so then, the best thing that had ever happened to him in terms of his understanding of the world he lived in, a textured, full of smells and colors world that could fill up his senses and appeal to him on such a basic level that something in his human heart responded to this atevi place and taught him what the species had in common.

  On the other hand, watching Jase flinch from sunlight and shadow, it might not happen to Jase. It at best might be a bit much to meet all in one day. Their spaceman was brave, but growing vastly disoriented just in the sounds and level of perceived threat constantly coming at him; fast-witted, but lost in the dataflow that had begun to wipe out the linkages in his brain and rearrange the priorities.

  It wasn't just the language now that had overwhelmed Jase with its choices. It wasn't just the same linguistic shift that overwhelmed every student that came close to fluency — it was the whole physical, natural world that came down on Jase, stripping away all his means not only of expressing himself — that was the language part — but also of interpreting the sensations that came at him. Jase was hanging on to that part of his perceptions with his fingernails.

  And that disorientation, coupled with what he guessed Ilisidi might provoke him to, would make it a very good idea to limit the breakable objects in Jase's reach.

  He began to have misgivings. Jase wasn't planet-born. There might not be that common ground he hoped to have Jase find with atevi. For the first time he began to fear he'd made a mistake in bringing Jase out here and asking this of him.

  It was a lot of input.

  But it was fractal, soothing input if Jase's brain could just figure out it did repeat, and loop, and that it didn't threaten.

  Ilisidi, however, didn't give you an inch.

  And you had to go farther into atevi territory to meet Ilisidi than she was going to come onto human ground to meet you: that was a given.

  "Pretty view," he said desperately as they rounded a turn, and it was, a glorious view into the distance of the plain. "
Taiben is that way — a fair distance, though."

  Jase faced that direction. He gave no indication his eyes even knew where to focus two seconds running or what was pretty or what he was supposed to look at.

  Bren thought of asking the driver to stop and let Jase get out and have a steady, stable look and catch his breath; but he thought then that they weren't within a security perimeter, and that they were going to such a perimeter, within which they could stand and have such a view, presumably. And Jase could calm down.

  It was a risk. Their whole lives were a risk. But you limited them where you could. It was different from the catwalk at Dalaigi.

  There was no crowd watching them.

  The trip went a good distance up and up, among rolling hills of greening grass spangled with wild-flowers in yellow and purple and white, with no structures, no building in sight until, just around a steep turn in the rolling hills, they passed through a gate in a low stone wall and then, in the next turn, caught a brief view of a stone building.

  That view steadied in the forward windows after the second turn, a pile of the local rocks with a number of high, solid walls, one slightly tumbled one, and a staff posed crazily on the battlement of a two, in places three and four floored fortification with a bright banner flying, on a staff slightly atilt, from the front arch.

  Red and black, the aiji's colors.

  The van pulled up to the door, under a sweep-edged roof, as the door opened and poured out the aiji-dowager's men, who opened the door of the van.

  Jago was first out. Bren climbed down.

  Jase stayed seated. Blocking Banichi's path to the door was never a good idea. Jase, however, was not doing so in panic. Jase was frowning darkly.

  "Where's the beach?" he asked.

  "Oh, it's here," Bren said. "Come on, Jase."

  Jase stayed put. And belted in. His arms were folded. From that position, he spared a fast, angry gesture around him. "Grass. Rock. High rock. You promised me the beach, nadi."

  Not trusting this, Bren thought. From overload to a final realization they were on a mountain. "Jasi-ji," he said reasonably, "you're preventing Banichi getting up." Not true, if Banichi weren't being polite. "There is a beach down the hill, where water tends to be and remain, as physics may tell you, and I promise you ample chance to see the ocean. One just doesn't build these kind of big houses down there. Too many people. And it's old. And it's the aiji's property. It's all right, Jasi-ji. Get down, if you please, before Banichi moves you."