The cars of the escort passed like toys under the right-hand wing as the private jet made the turn toward home.  A bright clot of flowers, more bouquets and wreaths, showed on the concrete where the plane had stood.  Now they surrounded a cluster of black car roofs.

So lord Geigi hadn't driven off once the plane's doors had closed, nor even during the long wait while the plane had taxied far across to the east-west runway.  Geigi had waited to see it in the air.

Even now, a small number of atevi were standing beside the cars, watching the plane, extravagant gesture from a lord of the Association, in a politics in which all such gestures had meaning.

No word for love in the Ragi language, and no word for friend, even a friend of casual sort.  Among the operational ironies of the language, or the atevi mind, it rendered it very hard for an ateva in lord Geigi's situation to make his personal position clear, once there were logical reasons to suspect his associations - because associations colored everything, demanded everything, slanted everything.

Bren found himself quite - humanly speaking - touched by the display now vanishing below his window, not doubting the plant workers and the common people of the white-plaster township that came up in his view.  They were the offerers of those flowers.

But from this perspective of altitude and distance, he was no longer blindly trusting.

Not even of lord Geigi, except as Geigi's known and unknown associations currently tended toward the same political focus as his own: toward Tabini, aiji of the Western Association, Tabini, who owned this plane, and the security, and the loyalties of lords and commons all across the continent.

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 close to lines on a map, and it definitely had a 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 something he 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 if something 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.