Inheritor by C. J. Cherryh

"And likewise taking precautions about their routing. Or their numbers. I doubt it was intentional."
    "The aiji will not take chances with you, nadi Bren," Tano said.
    "I'm sure not, Tano."
    The Bergid snowed in the window, hazy mountains, still white with winter, the continental divide.
    Forest showed, blue-green and likewise hazed — but that haze was pollen and spores, as a lowland spring broke into bloom and the endless forests of atevi hunting preserves, like the creatures that lived within that haze, reproduced themselves with wild abandon.
    The fields came clear, the little agricultural land that developers had left around burgeoning Shejidan. And there were the stubbornly held garden plots clinging to hillsides — always the gardens: the Ragi atevi were keen diggers and planters, even the aristocrats among them. Gardens, but no livestock for food: atevi considered it cruel and uncivilized to eat tame animals.
    Came then the geometries of tiled roofs, marching in numerically significant orders up and down the hills — little roofs, bigger roofs, and the cluster of hotels and modern buildings that snuggled as close as possible to the governmental center, the ancient Bu-javid, the aiji's residence. It was daylight. One saw no neon lights.
    The plane banked and turned and leveled again, swooping in over the flat roofs of industry that had grown up around the airport.
    Patinandi Aerospace was one: that large building he well knew was a maintenance facility. The aiji had spread the bounty of space industry wide throughout the provinces, and the push to get into space had wrought changes this year that wouldn't be stopped. Ever.
    There was a new computer manufacturing plant, and atevi designers were fully capable of making critical adjustments in what humans had long regarded as one of the final secrets, the one that would adjust atevi society into a more and more comprehensible mold.
    Not necessarily so.
    Faster and faster the pavement rushed under the wings.
    Wheels touched dry pavement, squealed arrival.
    The paidhi-aiji was as close to home as he was likely to come. This was it. Shejidan.
    And hearing the wheels thump and roll and hearing the engines brake and feeling the reality of ground under him again, he let go a freer breath and knew, first, he was in the safest place in the world for him, and second, that he was among the people in the world most interested in his welfare. Delusion, perhaps, but he'd grown to rely on it.
    ----

CHAPTER 4
    « ^ »
    T he van transfer to the subway in the airport terminal was thankfully without extravagant welcome, media, or official inquiry. The paidhi-aiji was home. The paidhi-aiji
and
his luggage, this time together and without misdirection, actually reached the appropriate subway car, and without incident the car set into motion on its trip toward the Bu-javid, on its lofty and historic hill on the edge of Shejidan.
    Then, while he leaned back in comfort and velvet splendor, there arrived, via his security's com link, a radioed communication from the airport authorities requesting an interview with the aiji's pilot and copilot, and reporting the identity of the pilot of the strayed prop plane: the son of the lord of the island of Dur, one Rejiri of the Niliini of Dur-wajran, whose affiliations Tano and Algini were ordering researched by grim and secret agencies which, God help them, the lords of Dur-wajran had probably never encountered in their wildest imaginations.
    Figure that the owner of such a private plane was affluent. Figure that on the small island of Dur opposing traffic wasn't a problem the pilot, possibly of the only plane on the island of Dur, had ever met.
    But as an accident, or near accident, it wasn't the paidhi's business to investigate or to deal with. Someone else had to explain the air traffic regulations to the lord's son. He sat back in the soft red seats of Tabini's private subway car and had a glass of fruit juice, confident his second try at a drink