Freedom's Scion (Spooner Federation Saga Book 2) Page 3

  Silence stretched between them. He sat unmoving. She was hovering between Let me think about it and Sure, come on aboard, and leaning ever more strongly toward the latter, when she caught a particular face at the edge of her vision.

  Barton Kramnik sat alone at a small table across the room. He was staring at her as if he hoped to wound her with the pressure of his gaze. She met his glare and smiled coolly at him, and he lowered his eyes to his plate.

  “Someone you know?” Martin’s voice was soft.

  She nodded. “Not a friend.”

  “Well, then let’s be off.” They rose, and he offered her his hand. She took it.

  She steered the two of them past Kramnik’s table and stopped them there.

  “Hello, Bart. Enjoying your lunch?”

  He glared at her again but did not reply.

  “The lady is addressing you, sir,” Martin said, “gently and courteously.” Althea’s gaze darted to his face. “A gentleman would reply in kind.”

  Althea came to full alert. The edge on her companion’s words was entirely implicit, yet she was in no doubt of it, nor of what powered it.

  The Song of the Alpha Male. Being sung over me, at that.

  Her pulse quickened.

  “Yes,” the Kramnik scion ground out at last. “I am.”

  Althea grinned. “So did we.” She looked fondly up at Martin and squeezed his hand. “Let’s go, dear.”

  When they were outside, he said, “One of your suitors?”

  She shuddered. “Please, let’s not go there. Up for a longish walk?”

  “Hm? Where to?”

  “Morelon House.” The encounter with Barton Kramnik had goosed the innate wildness that she seldom allowed free rein. She decided to give it its day. “There are a couple of things I’d like my new friend to see.”

  “Oh?” Martin’s smile turned tentative. “Not things you could show me here and now, I take it?”

  “Well, I could,” she allowed, “but it might shock the other patrons. Besides, I think my new friend has a couple of things I’d like to see.” She widened her eyes to their widest. “And feel.”

  He regarded her soberly for a long moment. “You’re quite sure you want me to be that good a friend?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it abruptly.

  —It’s called chivalry, Al.

  Hm? What are you talking about, Grandpere?

  —Comes from an old word for ‘horseman.’ It refers to the gentleman’s code. A gentleman would never encourage a woman he admires to put herself out for him, much less at risk of heartbreak, disease, or an unplanned child. Beside that, you’ve let him know that you’re rich. He wants you to have every chance to rethink your offer.

  Hm. It’s not like he twisted my arm.

  —Irrelevant. A gentleman...strike that: A good man tries to protect the women around him from anything that might endanger them, including their own flights of fancy. This appears to be a good man. Very.

  I hardly need to be protected, Grandpere.

  —But he doesn’t know that, does he?

  Ah. Gotcha. A little reassurance would be in order, then?

  —Just so. Proceed deliberately, but with confidence.

  Count on it.

  “Martin,” she murmured, “I’m not a virgin. I’ve had regular injections of Inconceivable these past thirteen years. I’ve got an immune system that can’t be beat. And if I even thought you might be trying to ‘play’ me, I wouldn’t invite you home; I’d rip off your head and drop-kick it into the river. So: yes or no?”

  He glanced at the restaurant door, looked back at Althea, and squeezed her hand. “Okay, let’s be off.”

  They were.

  * * *

  “Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer!” she gasped.

  “Oh my dear sweet God,” he gasped in reply. He started to withdraw from her body, but she tightened her arms around him, forbidding it, and he relaxed.

  “What on Hope was that?” she murmured when she’d regained some self-command.

  He took a moment to reply.

  “I don’t know, Al,” he said. “Just calling it an orgasm would demean it. What about you?”

  She pretended briefly to be lost in thought. “Well, if I go by the stories, the Chaos would come off second-best.” She flexed her pubococcygeal muscles in a rippling caress. He groaned in sweet torment as his body surrendered a last trickle of his seed.

  “That’s all I’ve got for you, Al.” He propped himself on his elbows and gazed into her eyes. “I felt like my whole body was emptying itself into you.” He grinned. “What a mess that would have made, eh?”

  She laughed and pulled him back down, savoring his weight and the warmth of his flesh against her.

  “You’ve got a point there,” she said. “I’m not sure I could hold that much.” She squeezed him gently, and felt his mouth curve against her cheek.

  The mansion was nearly silent around them. No one had seen Althea bring her new friend into Morelon House. She contemplated the probable range of Charisse’s, Elyse’s, Chuck’s, and Teodor’s reactions to him, and decided to present him as a new neighbor and a dinner guest. Anything more personal could surely wait.

  −Smart girl.

  Grandpere! This is not a good time.

  −No? It looked like a really good time from here. You and Martin were rocking the seismographs on Sulla.

  Grandpere...

  −Yes, dear?

  Are you always listening in?

  −Not always, no. But there’s no need to be embarrassed. Despite the prevailing myths, we old folks are well acquainted with sex. Teresza and I probably made love more times in a single month than you have in your life to date. There wasn’t much else to do in Defiance, you know.

  It pricked a laugh out of her.

  “Hm?” Martin stirred against her.

  “Nothing, love. Just thinking how absurd this lightning romance is.” She stroked his back and shoulders, and he relaxed.

  −This looks serious, Al.

  I think it is, Grandpere. I plan to take it...

  −Where, dear?

  Wherever it ought to go!

  A wave of approval washed over her.

  −Well put. Explore him thoroughly, Al. Body, mind, and soul. Be positive but deliberate. No need to hide it from him. If he’s as good a man as he seems, he’ll appreciate the necessity.

  Gotcha. And the family?

  −No need to worry. They’re pretty smart, too.

  “Al?”

  “Hm?”

  “Did you really mean to say ‘love’ a moment ago?”

  She started to demur, forced herself to think it over.

  “Yes, Martin, I did. Did I scare you?”

  A peal of laughter burst from him as he reared back to look at her.

  “Not in the slightest, love. Got any obligations for the rest of the afternoon?”

  She searched his face. “I was going to go back to my office and get a little more work done, but that was...before all this. Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “some coffee and what they call ‘serious conversation’ would seem to come next. Now that you’ve wrung me out completely, that is.”

  She cocked a satiric eyebrow.

  “Completely, you say?”

  “Completely and absolutely, Al. I’m just barely able to get up from here.”

  “But Martin,” she said, “I’m a scientist. And among scientists, a claim such as that demands peer review.”

  With a single brisk flexure, she rolled him onto his back. His eyes went incredulously wide and his erection returned at full force as she gyrated against him.

  ====

  Chapter 2: Quintember 7, 1303 A.H.

  “Al?”

  “Hm?” Althea looked up from her monitor. Her husband was standing in her office doorway looking unusually somber. “What’s up, love?”

  The cords in Martin Forrestal’s neck were visibly tight. “We might have a problem about the lab site.”


  Althea waved him into her office and came out from behind her desk. “Go on.” She took his hands in hers. “What kind of problem?”

  “A competing claim.”

  She frowned. “We verified that the tract was unregistered before we staked it off. How can there be a competing claim?”

  He plucked a multiply folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to her without comment. She unfolded it and read in a crescendo of disbelief.

  “What on Hope do they mean by the ‘Jacksonville city limits?’ Jacksonville’s just a handy way to refer to the neighborhood. And what business is it of anyone’s what we do with a tract of unused land that’s more than a mile from any existing structure or registration?”

  He said nothing.

  “There’s no name on this thing except for mine,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

  He grimaced. “There was a knock at the front doors while I was making coffee. I found this there, and saw a little boy trotting down the path toward the commercial strip.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  She nodded and nudged him toward the office door. “Then let’s have some of that coffee.”

  In the kitchen, they poured mugsful of coffee for themselves and took seats at the long oaken trestle table that had graced the room since well before Althea was born. She spread the flyer out between them and regarded it a second time.

  “This ‘meeting’ stuff is what really troubles me,” Martin said. “Someone is trying to galvanize local opinion against the lab, to prevent it being built. Has this happened here before?”

  “Not in my experience,” she said. “Maybe Charisse or Chuck would know of a precedent.”

  “Should I fetch one of them?”

  She snorted. “Not just yet. I want to know whose idea this is and what he hopes to get out of it. Maybe if we’re quick and clever we can head off a conflict, though why there should be a conflict over a tract of unused land or our as yet unbuilt lab still puzzles me.”

  “Well,” he said, “who stands to gain from stopping you?”

  “No one I can think of.”

  “Then is there anyone who has it in for you or our clan?”

  She looked into his eyes and found herself smiling.

  I still get that little thrill every time he says ‘our clan.’

  “If there is,” she said, “it hasn’t come out into the open.”

  He leveled a compellingly solemn look at her. “What about my predecessors?”

  “Your what?”

  “Your suitors before me, Al.” Martin’s expression became pained. “It’s not mature, but some men do react to rejection by becoming vindictive.” He peered at her from under lowered brows. “You didn’t mock or demean them in turning them away, did you?”

  She started to expostulate, halted herself.

  “Not...most of them.” She winced. “Not any of the ones I actually dated.”

  He waited, gaze steady upon her.

  I have to tell him. Now that he’s a Morelon, he needs to know.

  “I don’t know about other communities,” she said, “but among the clans in this area a marriage suit normally begins in a certain way. The suitor’s patriarch approaches the intended’s matriarch to inquire about whether the intended might be interested. If the matriarch dismisses the possibility, the suitor is expected to accept the verdict. He’s not supposed to approach his intended to press his attentions on her. Usually it never goes any further.”

  Martin nodded. “Usually?”

  She nodded. “You and I sort of short-circuited the usual procedure.”

  “So whose suit did Charisse dismiss without needing to consult you?”

  She swallowed and looked away.

  “Al?”

  “Bart Kramnik.”

  “Oh.”

  * * *

  “Given what you’d said about him on other occasions,” Charisse said between sips of coffee, “I wasn’t about to suggest that he approach you.” She flipped a hand at the flyer lying on the table between them. “Do you really think that’s what this is all about?”

  “I don’t know, Grandaunt.” Althea glanced sideways at Martin, who shrugged delicately. “Can you name anyone else who’s got a reason to resent me, or the clan? Because I can’t.”

  Charisse grinned wryly. “And in the Kramniks,” she said, “we have people who resent both. The clan for refusing to endorse their re-entry into Jacksonville society, you for declining the hand of their scion.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Through me, of course. But that’s immaterial. You were the intended, therefore you are regarded as having delivered the rejection.”

  Althea started to speak, clamped her lips together and nodded.

  “Charisse,” Martin said, “I’ve never heard anything about the Kramniks as a clan. What’s their story? I knew about your dismissal of Bart’s suit, but what’s this business about ‘re-entry into Jacksonville society?’ Did they pull something seriously dishonorable on someone in the area?”

  Charisse’s facial muscles tightened. She rose, one hand raised in a wait-for-it gesture, refilled her mug from the urn, and reseated herself at the table. Althea curled her fingers around her husband’s. He smiled and squeezed her hand.

  I’ve never known the whole story. I wonder if I’m going to hear it now, so many years after the fact.

  “A very long time ago,” Charisse said as if muttering to herself, “there was an agricultural catastrophe of sorts. A clan that’s not around here any more, the Prossers, went badly wrong with its soil chemistry. It was a misplaced decimal point error, the sort of thing we’d all have laughed at if it had been discovered before it was acted on. But no one in Clan Prosser noticed it in time, and their hired hands spread ten times the proper amount of potassium hydroxide over their fields. I’m sure you can imagine what that did to their crop.

  “They came to us for help.” Charisse’s lips twitched. “Clan Morelon was already known for agricultural skill, so it was a logical recourse. But we couldn’t conceive of anything to be done about it. Neither could any of the other local clans. The overload of potash burned their fields sterile of life and free of nutrients to a depth of nearly nine inches. To save their fields, they would have had to scrape all the ruined soil off them and hope that the subsoil would still support life. The sole alternative remedy was time: to let the rain and the wind scour off the dust cover and generate new, fertile topsoil. But Clan Prosser didn’t have resources enough to wait; they were near to the edge as it was. The error ruined them as farmers.

  “But that’s not the heart of the thing. Glenn Kramnik, the clan patriarch at that time, knew about the error. One of his sons had glanced at the Prossers’ planning books—before the potash was spread. But the two clans were at odds—their leaderships were embroiled in several commercial disputes—so he ordered the boy not to say anything about it. He wanted the Prossers ruined. And ruined they most certainly were.

  “The truth came out because of an offhand remark from Glenn Kramnik. The whole community was appalled, and the news spread like a wild virus. No one for a hundred miles around would have anything to do with Clan Kramnik after that. No one would buy from them. Local retailers and vendors wouldn’t sell to them. They were completely ostracized, socially and commercially. After about a year and a half of that, the clan hauled stakes and relocated what remained of its people and assets to the Hopeless peninsula.”

  Charisse drained her mug and looked briefly away. Althea sat transfixed. Martin stared at Charisse like a toddler told a particularly convincing horror story.

  “Did Grandpere Armand know?” Althea murmured.

  Charisse nodded. “The outline, at least.”

  “But he must have helped—”

  “Oh, he did,” Charisse said. “From the start of the evacuation to the very end, he wouldn’t hear of anything but absolute evenhandedness. No favoritism or scorn
toward any of the evacuees, no matter who he was, where he’d taken refuge, or what he might have done. He personally supervised the airlift from Thule, so the Kramniks had to have known who their benefactor was. But once anyone from the peninsula was properly dug in down here, Armand’s generosity came to an end. He was absolute about that: no charity beyond the necessary. You’re back among civilized men, now, on an equal footing with everyone else, so root, hog, or die.

  “Not long after the evacuation was complete, Douglas Kramnik came to me very quietly. He wanted my help in rehabilitating his clan’s reputation. He knew it had been badly stained by his ancestor’s viciousness, and he didn’t want his siblings or children to suffer for it. So he asked me for Clan Morelon’s assistance in promoting his clan as an upstanding, productive, trustworthy element in Jacksonville life.

  “I declined. I knew nothing about Clan Kramnik, past or present, except for the story I just told you. I wasn’t about to stake our clan’s reputation on theirs. After all, they’d been ensconced among criminals and antisocials for nearly a whole millennium. How could I know what they’d become over that spell—and how could I ask any of my kindred to take them on faith, much less sing their praises to the entire community?”

  Charisse slumped toward the table, arresting her descent with her forearms.

  “That’s the story, Althea. I suppose it didn’t help much when Doug returned with a proposal of marriage between you and Bart, and I shooed him away. But the damage had already been done, ninety percent of it at least.”

  “Dear God,” Martin said. Althea sat dumbfounded.

  Charisse forced herself upright, surveyed their faces, and grinned wanly. “More coffee, anyone?”

  * * *

  “What I don’t grasp,” Charisse said, “is this ‘community interest’ business. No one’s tried that since well before I was born.”

  “Here,” Martin murmured. Althea and Charisse immediately turned to face him.

  “There was an attempt like this in Sun Tzu,” he said. “A couple of years before I moved here. You know about the garden society there?”

  Charisse nodded. “Their commons girdle is about the prettiest on Alta,” Charisse said. “Have you seen it, Al?”