Inheritor Read Online Free PDF Page B

ago.
    It was more than the pitch of the steps he watched. He walked cautiously for other reasons, moving through this crowd of black-skinned, golden-eyed gods, expressionless and implacable in manner, all with local and some with national agendas, men and women all distinguished by colors of rank, of post, of heritage and association.
    His security disliked this part of the tours. On invitation of the Director he climbed to a catwalk exposed to the view of no less than seven hundred strangers below, any one of whom — or their relatives admitted to the plant for the occasion — could turn out to be a threat to his life. Such would be unregistered and unlicensed operators, of course, of which the Assassins' Guild and the law took a dim, equally lethal view; but still there was a threat, and he chose to put it at the back of his mind.
    One of the lords constantly near him was, of course, lord Geigi, who outranked the lot, and who had already had his chance to do the paidhi harm; but there were lesser lords, and provincial elected representatives, and various secretaries and aides, all of whom had their small window of opportunity for whatever reason, including a deranged mind, to try to sabotage the atevi chance at space.
    He was (while watching the crowd, the lords, the directors, and his step) negotiating dark, unfamiliar ladders above increasingly dizzy heights, occasionally with spotlights glaring in his eyes. He kept his hand at all times on the rail and refused to be hurried until, in this largest of all assembly buildings, he had a view of the whole floor.
    He had no fear of heights. He skied. Or, well, he had skied, before the trips home had become an impossibility for him; and he lacked opportunity to reach the snowy Bergid, where atevi attempted the sport on new and chancily maintained runs. During this winter, he had grown accustomed instead to such catwalks and ladders, to echoing machine plants and clean-suited laboratories, to small spaces of structural elements that were diagrams on his desk back in the atevi capital of Shejidan.
    This —
this
was the first sight of pieces that would become a spacecraft, pieces that were real, solid, tangible, pieces bound someday for space, the dream he'd studied so long, worked so hard, hoped so much, to have happen — in the generation after him.
    The paidhi all this particular morning had been listening to the detailed problems of atevi engineers, technical matters and problems arisen from a rushed schedule and translated designs, plans and manuals and measurement standards in an alien language. That meant for several moderately pleasant hours he'd been doing the paidhi's old, original job, patching up dictionaries.
    Atevi engineers adopted or made up a word for something hitherto unknown to atevi, and the paidhi dutifully wrote it down and passed it to other engineers via the official dictionary on the computer links that went to all the plants now. Science and engineering were creating their own words for things for which atevi had had no word, no
concept
, a year ago. The atevi language as a whole had never hesitated to assume technical terms into its grammar — the word
arispesa
was a hybrid of which he was entirely innocent.
    He had his case full of reports, besides, on what worked, what didn't work well, and what the legislature, the Space Committee, or the laboratories and manufacturing plants upstream of the technological waters needed to improve. But, God, there wasn't all that much to complain of. At the beginning of last fall he'd toured mines.
    Records from the abandoned station, the library which had come along to this star with what had been intended as a colonial space-based establishment — the sort of thing the paidhi had used to turn over to the mainland a piece at a time — had in the past gone for trade goods. But now there was a new source of ideas in the skies, pouring them down for free. Primary among those gifts was the design
this
spacecraft was