Free Inheritor by C. J. Cherryh

come solo except for his long attachment to his partner. Algini had been much longer unbending and had been far more standoffish than Tano had ever been, but Algini was a quiet, good man, who could throw a knife with truly uncanny accuracy, who had gotten (Tano hinted) two very bad assignments from which he had suffered great personal distress; and who had, Tano had said, been so quiet within the Guild they'd lost track of him for two years and dropped him from the rolls as dead until Tano had pointed out he'd been voting consistently and that he could vouch for his identity — they'd been partners for two years on the same assignments — and it was the aiji's request for them as personal security that had pulled up the information that Algini was listed as dead. Algini thought it a joke quite as funny as Tano did, but the paidhi understood it was a joke that had never gotten beyond the very clandestine walls of their Guild, and it was an embarrassment to the Guild never, ever meant for public knowledge.
    It was indicative, however, of how very good Algini was at melding with the walls of a place. After nearly a year with the man, he'd finally gotten Algini to unzip his jacket, prop his feet up in complete informality, and smile, shyly so, but an approach to a grin, over one of Tano's pieces of irreverence.
    Right now Algini was on his feet, zipped up to the chin and all business, up at the forward bulkhead, talking to Tano, who was also sober, while junior staff kept their distance, all frustrating his desire for information. He supposed that his staff was trying to get accurate reports on the situation in the Marid before they told him anything, or possibly reports were coming in from various other affected places, some of which they had to route over, and one of which might even be a touchy situation in the capital. There were times to talk to one's security and there were times to stay out of their way and let them work.
    And right now he had notes to work over, a job to do. Possibly there were deaths happening. Possibly —
    Hell, no, he couldn't do anything about it. And they didn't need his advice. He'd been long enough on the mainland to know certain things intellectually, and to understand the atevi way of doing things as part of a wider fabric that actually saved lives.
    But he'd made the decision some time ago that he never wanted to get so acclimated that he didn't think about it. It still
had
to bother him. It was necessary to his job that it continue to bother him: he was supposed to translate, not transit into the culture, and no matter how emotionally he was tempted to damn Saigimi to hell for the decent people whose lives Saigimi had cost, he had to remember he
didn't
know what the reason was, not at the bone-deep and instinctual level at which atevi knew what they were doing to each other. He had to stay out of it.
    He opened his computer as the plane reached cruising altitude, and called up dictionary files that held hundreds of such distinctions as man'chi unresolved.
    Loyalty wasn't man'chi; man'chi wasn't loyalty. Man'chi responded to the order of the universe, a harmony which in some indefinable way dictated man'chi, and didn't.
    Man'chi, he had learned, was emotional. Association was logical. And to figure how some other ateva saw them, atevi were mathematicians par excellence. One constantly added the numbers of one's life, some of more traditional philosophy believing literally that the date of one's birth and the felicitous or infelicitous numbers of one's intimate associates or the flowers in a bouquet mattered to the harmony of the cosmos, and dictated the direction one moved. Logically.
    Tabini was a skeptic in such matters and regularly mocked the purists. Tabini would say, half facetiously, that Saigimi hadn't added his own numbers correctly, and had been unaware what the sum was in the aiji's mind.
    Best for a human to stay right in the guessable center of a man'chi directed to a very