Freedom's Scion (Spooner Federation Saga Book 2)

by Francis Porretto

  She studied him in silence.

  Alvah had married into Clan Kramnik. It cost him nothing but a change of residence and name. His birth clan, the Freitags, were no more significant in Valhalla than the Kramniks were in Jacksonville. Eunice had been just one more Kramnik maiden, distinguished neither in appearance nor in intelligence. Yet she had possessed a sweetness that won the hearts of all who knew her. Despite the difference in their ages, she captured Alvah’s heart without even trying, and became at once the center of his existence. But they’d had less than two decades together before a raging osteosarcoma, diagnosed far too late for treatment, took her from him.

  Except for our little liaison, he’s been alone these past four years. I forgot how fresh that wound is. The Hallanson-Albermayer series might have kept them together. She didn’t have it. But Douglas did.

  “Alvah,” she said, “I’m an old woman—”

  “I know how old you are,” he rasped.

  “Please! I don’t have any aspirations left. I was surprised, even a bit reluctant, when you and the others asked me to participate in the elders’ council. The only thing I sought was a measure of comfort. The idea of participating in clan management seemed a little threatening to that aim.

  “It seems from what’s followed that I was right about that. I doubt Douglas would have expelled me otherwise. But you know,” she said with an embarrassed laugh, “I doubt he would have expelled you if not for our...relationship. Together we must have looked like too much of a threat.

  “I don’t want any more of that, Alvah. Now that I’ve had a little while to mull it over, I think Bart has the right of it. This is a better environment. If Charisse is willing to have us for the long term, I think I’ll stay. I could be happy here, if I could just find some way to contribute.”

  She descended somewhat creakily to her knees before him. His eyes widened as she took his hands in hers.

  “I think you could, too, if you could accept just being a member of a wholesome clan rather than a mover and shaker. But that’s for you to decide. I can only say that...I’d miss you, Alvah. I know I’m not Eunice, but I value what we have...whatever it is.”

  She looked directly into his eyes.

  “Would you stay here with me a little longer, please? To rest and heal? To see if we can nurture what we’ve begun into something full and lasting? Test these waters for a month or two, to see if they might just suit you better than you think?”

  She strained to express the all-important subtext with her eyes and hands.

  And given time to think and plan, we might yet be able to satisfy your need to revenge yourself...and Eunice...on Douglas. Even from here.

  Alvah looked away. His face worked in that way that speaks of a man sternly repressing tears.

  “I’d like more room for our things,” he said.

  She nodded. “I thought I might speak to Charisse about that.”

  “And her cooking is awful.”

  She grinned and nodded. “That, too.”

  With that Alvah stood, pulled her upright, and gathered her into his arms.

  * * *

  “I would have hauled stakes,” Adam Grenier said. He checked the reading on his torque wrench, nodded, put it back on its rack, and slammed shut the cowling of the ultralight. “I was already considering it before all of this. Now I’m not sure. Doug,” he said, “what if we’ve been wrong all this time?”

  Douglas Kramnik scowled. “Not possible. The damned Morelons run this community like a royal house, whether they intend it or not. Either we break them, or we resign ourselves to being their vassals in perpetuity.”

  “That’s what you want to do? Break them?” Grenier wiped the grease from his hands on a nearby rag and stuffed it into a pocket of his coveralls. He bent to pull the chock out from under the little plane’s nosewheel and tossed it aside. “Give me a hand with this, Doug?”

  Kramnik frowned, shrugged, and moved to the other side of the ultralight. Between them they rolled it smoothly out of Grenier Air’s maintenance hangar and thence to the parking area. Several other similar craft were tied down there, awaiting their owners’ return.

  “I reviewed my books a few days ago,” Grenier said as they secured the little plane to an unoccupied set of anchors. “The cargo business has been profitable, but it’s also a lot of work and responsibility. I have three big-belly planes and a courier craft to maintain, five employees to look after, a landing strip to keep groomed, and all the recordkeeping that goes along with it. I put in between thirty and forty hours a week just doing that stuff—and then there’s the repair and maintenance business.” He gestured at the ultralight he’d just repaired.

  “It occurred to me that I could sell the cargo planes, dissolve that side of my business, keep occupied and well fed on repair and maintenance jobs, and be perfectly happy. So why do I do it?”

  Kramnik merely waited.

  “I do it,” Grenier said, “because it’s what I do. What my father did before me. Because it’s there to be done. Because other people value it and are willing to pay me for it. Because they appreciate it, and sometimes they say so with more than a fistful of deka notes.

  “Yeah, Morelon corn is about sixty percent of my cargo business. Yeah, that means they could force me out of business if they ever decided to do so. And yeah, when Althea came over here with Bart in tow, and told me her clan would no longer be shipping through me, I was ready to kill myself...for about ten seconds. Then I remembered that financially, it doesn’t matter that much, and I calmed down.”

  Kramnik folded his arms over his chest. “So you’re happy to be a flunky to the Morelons, letting them do as they please, dictate terms to the rest of Jacksonville, and generally taking whatever crap they dish out? That’s quite a change in attitude from a week or two ago, Adam.”

  Grenier nodded. “I know.”

  “Well?” Kramnik cocked an eyebrow. “Do I get an explanation?”

  Grenier grinned. “Tell me about the shuttles, Doug.”

  “Hm?”

  “The new shuttles Althea engineered for your looms. Bart tells me your production is up by over a third since she installed them.”

  “Yes, it is. So?”

  “What was the price? Did she charge you anything for her work? Did Charisse?”

  Kramnik said nothing.

  “I thought as much,” Grenier said. “Charisse signed a long-term contract with you that very day, didn’t she? For items you couldn’t even dream of making before Althea and her husband retuned your looms. And I’ll bet she gave you generous terms, at that.”

  “Exactly how,” Kramnik grated, “does any of this compensate for the invasion of my property by their scion, or for losing your cargo contract with them?”

  Grenier chuckled. “It doesn’t. How could it? Althea’s raid on Kramnik House and her little visit with me came after those things.” He circled the ultralight and squatted to check the knots Kramnik had tied on the anchor rings.

  “Wrong sort of knot for this work, Doug.” He tugged gently at one end of a tie-down cord, and it unraveled at once. “For this sort of thing you want a knot that’s proof against single-point stresses.” He wove the cord into an elaborate double-reef knot through the anchor ring and finished off the ends with a square knot. “Something that will hold for as long as the owner wants it to.”

  He rose and stuck his hands in his coverall pockets.

  “Charisse was here barely two hours after Althea,” he said. “Brought Forrestal with her. Awfully impressive guy, Doug, but you probably knew that already. He explained that Althea was very upset about our little deal. I assured them that nothing of the sort was going to happen, and Charisse reinstituted the clan’s haulage contracts at once, same as before. She even threw in a sweetener: Clan Morelon will share the expense of maintaining the landing strip from now on, if they can build a hangar and have takeoff and landing privileges here.”

  “And so,” Kramnik said, “Althea Morelon can point a gun
at you, threaten to beat you to an agonizing pulp, unilaterally cancel her clan’s contracts with you, and get away with it? Because Charisse came by afterward and said sorry, didn’t really mean it?”

  “Don’t you think conspiring to destroy her cargo and strand her in Thule—”

  “Where my clan spent a millennium of exile!” Kramnik shouted.

  “—after agreeing to take her money might be some justification for her tantrum, Doug?”

  Kramnik fell silent. Grenier gazed to the southeast.

  “Yonder sits a great house,” he said, “where there lives a great family. Home to a goodly fraction of the population of Jacksonville. Been there for thirteen hundred years, I’m told. If we’re going to have a local royalty, and it looks like we are, I’d rather it be them than anyone else in the region. And I’m going to let my grudge over Althea go, now that I’ve gotten to know her husband.”

  Kramnik smirked. “Because he could crush you like a worm?”

  Grenier shook his head. “No, Doug. Althea could do that herself. She proved it on our date. Because he’s a gentleman. Because his generosity, competence, and manners put you and me both to shame. And because he was more concerned about my well-being than anything else about this contretemps.”

  Kramnik started to speak, stopped himself.

  “That’s the sort of man that marries into Clan Morelon, Doug. Give that a few moments’ thought next time you start moping over the loss of your heir—the heir that you would have kept prisoner for the rest of his life, rather than permit such an alliance.”

  Grenier waved Kramnik farewell and headed back to his shop.

  ====

  Chapter 11 : Sexember 14, 1303 A.H.

  Althea staggered into Morelon House feeling as if she were carrying the Relic on her shoulders. As she passed the archway into the hearthroom, two of her cousins noticed her exhausted demeanor and started toward her. She waved them away and trudged up the front staircase to the bedroom level.

  Grandpere, this can’t be right.

  —Patience, Al. It will pass.

  Will it be this way every time?

  —(humor) Not at all. You just made the very first use of your powers. Activating that portion of your nervous system took a tremendous amount of energy, nearly everything your body had in reserve. If you need a comparison, imagine a lifelong paraplegic getting out of his wheelchair and trying to run a ten-mile sprint.

  Good. I don’t want to feel this way ever again in my life.

  —(humor) Well, I can’t guarantee you against that. But next time, if there is a next time, at least the reason will be different.

  Her bedroom was perfectly neat. Martin-quality neat: everything exactly where it belonged and not a speck of dust anywhere. Apparently he’d taken the time to straighten up before going to his workshop for the morning.

  She fought off her reluctance to disturb the perfectly made bed and flung herself down upon it fully clothed.

  No more work today, I’d say.

  —A good decision, Al. Give yourself time to recover. It might take more than just today. My transition was rugged, but yours looks an order of magnitude rougher.

  This is some gift, Grandpere. It makes me feel kinda bad.

  —Why, dear? You aren’t in pain, are you?

  No, it’s just that...

  —Hm?

  I didn’t get you anything!

  —(snort) I owe you for that one, youngster.

  (giggle)

  She let her eyes close and willed herself into a condition of semi-somnolence. Her ability to concentrate seemed greater then than in a condition of full, wakeful attention to reality. She’d done quite a bit of financial analysis in exactly that state. On this occasion, her thoughts were fixed on physical law.

  Conservation of mass-energy is just a generalization of the patterns we see at the macro level. Quantum physics violates it routinely. Just not enough to show at the level of human perception...until today.

  If a human body and brain can do what I did today, what else can it do—and what physical laws is it exploiting to do it?

  What could I build a machine to do?

  —Careful, Al.

  Hm? Careful about what, Grandpere?

  —A machine is not a mind. Machines don’t possess intelligence or sentience. A living mind has qualities found nowhere else in reality.

  Oh, come on. The mind is just a machine we haven’t yet learned how to replicate.

  —Dearest granddaughter Althea, most beloved of all my descendants, that is most definitely not the case.

  The surge in intensity jolted Althea’s eyes open.

  You never said anything about this before, Grandpere.

  —Because I hoped you’d stumble upon it yourself.

  But why?

  There was a long pause in the exchange. Althea braced herself, intuitively certain that she was about to receive a revelation of great import.

  —The nature of your psyche, Al. When you learn something from an external source, you accept it only tentatively, no matter how authoritative that source is generally deemed. When you reach a conclusion on your own, using nothing but your accumulated knowledge and the power of your intellect, you commit to it far more intensely.

  Just me, Grandpere? Or is that true of everybody?

  —Everyone, dear. The degree of your confidence in your intellect determines the magnitude of the difference.

  And you wanted me to...commit to this.

  —Yes.

  Why?

  There was another long pause.

  —Because it’s the single most important fact in all of reality.

  Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer.

  —Hm?

  Grandpere, when you decide to drop a bomb, you go straight for the planet-busters.

  —(humor) Well, yes.

  Grandpere...

  —Yes, dear?

  I accept it. I do. Completely and unconditionally. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do with it.

  —Then may I make a suggestion?

  Of course.

  She braced herself again.

  —It’s time you read Teresza’s book.

  It had the force and lineaments of a command.

  Okay. I guess I’ve put that off long enough.

  She started to rise.

  —Not now, Al. After you’ve recovered. For now, sleep.

  She lost consciousness upon the instant.

  * * *

  As Charisse entered the Morelon kitchen to prepare the clan’s dinner, her gaze fell upon an unprecedented intrusion, and she jerked to a stop.

  “Alvah,” she said as levelly as she could, “exactly what do you think you’re doing?”

  The Kramnik clansman glanced back over his shoulder and grinned.

  “Good to see you, Charisse.” He moved a little aside and waved a hand at the huge casserole dish over which he labored. “It’s a recipe for chicken stew that’s popular over at Kramnik House. Would you care to taste it?”

  She stepped forward and peered down at the unfamiliar concoction, and he offered her a ladle. She spooned up a large bite of the stew and poured it hesitantly into her mouth. A piquant blend of tomato and herb flavors swiftly suffused her palate. She chewed and swallowed with pleasure.

  “It’s quite good,” she said. Better than anything I know how to make. “But I don’t think there’s enough for the whole clan.”

  Alvah shrugged. “There’s an equal amount of shepherd’s pie in the large oven, ready to be warmed to serving temperature.”

  “Well, that should do it, then.” She handed him back the ladle. “But...why?”

  Alvah shrugged. “I thought you might like the evening off from your kitchen labors, and I wanted to speak with you.”

  She peered at him uncertainly. “You can talk with me whenever you like, Alvah. You don’t have to make a sacrificial offering first.”

  He nodded. “It’s not that way at Kramnik House.” He turned back to the casserol
e dish and stirred it slowly.

  “Patrice and I have talked at length,” he said. “We’re inexpressibly grateful for the sanctuary you’ve granted us. It was rather bold of us to come here, considering the frosty relations between our clans. It was Patrice’s idea to approach you, and it surprised me when you agreed to shelter us. We discussed what each of us could contribute in return, in the hope that you might consider making the arrangement permanent.”

  The second surprise was more than equal to the first. Charisse found herself momentarily without words. Alvah’s expression became pained.

  “Does the idea offend you, Charisse? We certainly don’t want to do that.”

  “No,” she said. “Not at all. It’s just...no one has ever asked to join the clan, except by marrying into it. You really want to become Morelons? Both of you?”

  He nodded. “If we can make ourselves useful here.”

  She sidled toward the table and gingerly seated herself. Dorothy and Cecile appeared in the archway and stopped short. She shooed them away, and they retreated at once.

  Alvah gave the stew a final stir, set the ladle on a nearby spoon rest, and joined her at the table.

  “We do have to settle somewhere,” he said, “but it’s about more than not being welcome at Kramnik House. Jacksonville society is completely clan-oriented. Patrice and I would never be more than hangers-on if we were to set up independent housekeeping somewhere. We’re unable to do so out of our own resources, anyway. So we have to make an alliance with some established clan. You’ve welcomed us so generously, and Bart has spoken so glowingly about Clan Morelon that we’d be fools not to want to join you...if you’ll have us.”

  She nodded. “I understand. It’s just that I’m not sure how to go about it.” And that bit about not wanting to be hangers-on has a weird flavor. “What would we be doing, adopting you?”

  Alvah grinned. “I suppose that’s one way of approaching it. But the important thing is that we be welcome. Real, functioning Morelons, rather than objects of charity.” He nodded toward the stew. “So I decided it was time to show you what we’re—what I’m good for. Not that it’s all that impressive, but I’m sure you have enough duties that you wouldn’t mind being relieved of this one.”