Now we check in on Grayson.
He reached out, offering the staff, but Benjamin didn't take it. Instead, he shook his head, and Clinkscales' eyes widened. It was rare on Grayson for a steadholder to perish without leaving any heir, however indirect the line of succession. Indeed, it had only happened three times in the planet's thousand-year history—aside from the massacre of the Fifty-Three which had begun the Civil War . . . and the attainting of the Faithful which had concluded it. But the precedent was there, and Benjamin's refusal of the staff had thrown Harrington Steading's Regent completely off balance.
Traditionally if a Steadholder dies without an heir, a rare occurrence, the Protector holds and governs the land and people until such time as he sees fit to elevate a Steadholder to rule them. Such appointments remain subject to the approval of the Conclave.
"True. But the extended Harrington family is quite extensive . . . on Sphinx. She had dozens of cousins, Howard."
"But they're not Graysons," Clinkscales protested, "and only a Grayson can inherit a steadholder's key!"
"No, they're not Graysons. And that's what makes the situation complicated. Just as you discussed it with Justice Kleinmeuller, His Grace and I have discussed it with the High Court. And according to the Court, you're right: the Constitution clearly requires that the heir to any steading must be a citizen of Grayson. That, however, is largely because the Constitution never contemplated a situation in which a foreign citizen could stand in the line of succession for a steading. Or in which an off-worlder could have been made a steadholder in the first place, for that matter!"
"Lady Harrington was not an 'off-worlder'" Clinkscales said stiffly, eyes flashing with anger. "Whatever she may have been born, she—"
"My treasure had dozens of nephews and cousins, and one I must get or my heart it will break..."
Interesting that the Constitution, written over four centuries after the last contact Grayson had had with the rest of humanity would still specify that only a Grayson citizen could be a Steadholder.
"But she became a Grayson citizen when she swore her Steadholder's Oath to you."
"Of course she did. And if I choose to use that as a precedent, then what I ought to do is send for her closest heir—her cousin Devon, isn't it, Henry?—and swear him in as her successor. After all, if we could make her a Grayson, we can make him one, as well."
The moment Honor became a Grayson citizen, which may or may not set a precedent, for the moment most parties are against it. Honor's cousin Devon Harrington, a professor of history at a prestigious Mantie university, will inherit much of her estate on Manticore, but her Key? He's not a Grayson, and he'd have a hard job earning the trust and respect of Grayson the way Honor did.
"If you think you could get the hidebound faction in the Conclave to sign off on this, then all that fancy off-world schooling is getting in the way of your instincts again! By your own admission, you'd have to set a new—another new—constitutional precedent just to make it work! And whatever Mueller and his crew may have said to her face, they never really forgave her for being a foreigner, and a woman, and the spear point for your reforms. They'd never swallow another foreigner—and one who doesn't have the Star of Grayson
See? Hidebound traditionalists alive and well in even the current Grayson climate.
"But if we don't offer it to him, we may open still another Pandora's Box," Prestwick said quietly. Clinkscales looked at him, and the Chancellor shrugged. "Under our treaty with Manticore, the Protectorship and the Star Kingdom are mutually pledged to recognize the binding nature of one another's contracts and domestic law—including things like marriage and inheritance laws. And under Manticoran law, Devon Harrington is Lady Harrington's heir. He's the one who will inherit her Manticoran title as Earl Harrington."
"And?" Clinkscales prompted when Prestwick paused.
"And if he does want the Harrington Key and we don't offer it to him, he might sue to force us to surrender it to him."
"Sue the Protector and the Conclave?" Clinkscales stared at him in disbelief, and the Chancellor shrugged.
Part of the original Manticore-Grayson treaty Raoul Courvosier worked on was mutual recognition of each other's domestic laws and contracts.
Confirmation that Devon will receive Honor's asteroid fief, which I'm pretty sure is a comte, not an earldom. Unless she's gotten an off-screen upgrade.
"Certainly I am. But I'm also the man trying to reform the planet, remember? And if I'm going to insist that my steadholders give up their autonomy and abide by the Constitution, then I have to abide by it, as well. And the constitutional precedent on this point is unfortunately clear. I can be sued—not in my own person, but as Protector and head of state—to compel me to comply with existing law. And under the Constitution, treaties with foreign powers have the force of law." He shrugged again. "I don't really think a suit would succeed before our own High Court, given our existing inheritance laws, but it could drag on for years, and the effect on the reforms and possibly even on the war effort could be most unfortunate. Or he could sue in a Manticoran court, in which case he might well win and leave our government at odds with the Star Kingdom's while both of us are fighting for our lives against the Peeps. Not good, Howard. Not good at all."
The Protector can be sued for breaking the law, and forced into compliance even if he is above torts as a private individual.
Anyways, plan B is to turn Harrington Steading into Clinkscales Steading, Howard absolutely rejects and refuses the idea.
"She didn't mention it to me. But she did mention that she and Lady Harrington's father have decided to remain here on Grayson for at least the next several years. She said—" the old man's smile faded a bit around the edges "—that they'd decided that the best memorial they could give the Steadholder would be to bring Harrington Steading's medical standards up to the Star Kingdom's, so they'd like to move their practices here. And, of course, she herself is deeply committed to the genome project."
Honor's parents and their way of honoring her memory.
Howard's right, he thought. That possibility never even crossed my mind, and it should have. So what if Doctor Harrington—both Doctors Harrington—are in their eighties? Physically, Honor's mother is only in her early thirties. And even if they were too old to have children "naturally," we've got all of the Star Kingdom's medical science to draw on! We could have a child tubed, assuming the Harringtons were willing. And if the child were born here on Grayson, then he'd have Grayson citizenship whatever his parents' nationality may have been.
Clinkscales realizes that through the wonders of prolong, Honor's parents are still of childbearing age despite being easily eighty.
"For that matter, there's another possibility entirely," Prestwick pointed out. Both of the others looked at him, and he shrugged. "I'm quite certain Lady Harrington's mother has samples of the Steadholder's genetic material, which means it would almost certainly be possible to produce a child of Lady Harrington's even at this date. Or even a direct clone, for that matter!"
"I think we'd better not start getting into those orbits," Benjamin cautioned. "Certainly not without consulting Reverend Sullivan and the Sacristy first, at any rate!" He shuddered at the mere thought of how the more conservative of his subjects might react to the Chancellor's musings. "Besides, a clone would probably only make matters worse. If I remember correctly—and I'm not certain I do, without looking it up—the Star Kingdom's legal code adheres to the Beowulf Life Sciences Code, just as the Solarian League's does."
"Which means?" Clinkscales asked, clearly intrigued by the notion.
"Which means, first of all, that it's completely illegal to use a dead individual's genetic material unless that individual's will or other legal declaration specifically authorized the use. And secondly, it means that a clone is a child of its donor parent or parents, with all the legal protections of any other sentient being, but it is not the same person, and posthumous cloning cannot be used to circumvent the normal laws of inheritance."
After the Final War, the Beowulf Life Sciences Code has become the universally accepted standard of medical ethics, and is enshrined in law by Manticore, Haven, the Solarian League... and this conversation will go a long way towards adding Grayson to the list.
Under the BLSC, human cloning without the explicit consent of the person being cloned is strictly forbidden, a clone is legally the child of it's genetic donor but is not the same person, cannot revoke wills and certainly cannot inherit titles over natural-born children or heirs. A posthumous clone can be created and made heir, but only if this is made explicit in the will of the deceased.
"All right, I do see that. And it probably wouldn't be a bad idea for us to quietly insert that Beowulf code into our own law, Your Grace, since we now have access to medical science which would make something like that possible. But how would that effect a child born to the Steadholder's parents after her death?"
"It wouldn't," Clinkscales said positively. "The precedents are clear on that point, Henry, and they go back almost to the Founding. It's unusual, of course, and I suppose that to be absolutely legal, the Key should pass to Devon Harrington until such time as Lady Harrington's parents produce a child, but then the Steading would revert to her sibling. In fact, I think there was actually an example of that from your own family history, Your Grace. Remember Thomas the Second?"
Planned succession for Harrington Steading, the most powerful men on Grayson deciding to over time adopt the BLSC.
"There's no physical reason why they couldn't, and Dr. Harrington—the Steadholder's mother, I mean—has discussed the possibility with my wives in a theoretical sense, at least. And if it would be inconvenient for them to do it, ah, the natural way, they could always tube a child. That wouldn't be a clone of Lady Harrington, so I don't see where it would be a problem."
Tubing, or uterine replicators, have been mentioned before, as one f the services the Navy provides to female officers and servicewomen. It's an old sci-fi idea, you surgically extract an embryo early in formation and carry it to term in an artificial womb that can be monitored and adjusted carefully through the duration. Spares the women most of the pains and problems of pregnancy and childbirth while removing the single greatest bottleneck in human reproduction, that a woman can only have roughly one child in one year.
Perhaps that had been her fault, she mused. She was the one from cosmopolitan (read: crowded, stratified, smug, and obsessed with stability, she thought dryly) old Beowulf, where conspicuous contributions to population growth were more than simply frowned upon. Sphinx, on the other hand, was still a relatively new planet, with a total population of under two billion. Multichild families were the rule there, not the exception, and there was certainly no stigma attached to them.
Beowulf vs. Sphinx on ideal family sizes.
Most off-worlders, impressed with Beowulf's reputation for idiosyncratic personal life styles and sexual inventiveness, never realized how conformist the planet truly was. Allison had frequently wondered if that was because the "norm" to which its citizens conformed was such a liberalized template, but the pressure not to offend the system or offend the preconceptions upon which the template rested was only too evident to a native Beowulfan. A person could be anything she wanted . . . so long as what she wanted to be came off the menu of choices approved by the planet's social—and economic—consensus, and everyone was so damned smug about how superior their "open-mindedness" was to all those other, backward planets.
Yet for all its emphasis on stability and orderliness, Beowulf had no such thing as an hereditary monarchy or aristocracy. It was a sort of representative, elective oligarchy, governed by a Board of Directors whose members were internally elected, in turn, from the memberships of an entire series of lower-level, popularly elected boards which represented professions, not geographical districts, and it had worked—more or less, and despite occasional glitches—for almost two thousand years.
Coming from that background, she'd always been mildly amused by the aristocratic Manticoran tradition. It hadn't impinged directly upon her or her yeoman husband and his family, and she'd been willing to admit that it did a better job than most of governing. Indeed, she'd heaved a huge sigh of mental relief when she realized that, aristocratic or not, the Star Kingdom's society was willing to leave people alone. She'd delighted in scandalizing her more staid Sphinxian neighbors for almost seventy years, but very few of them had ever realized that it was because she could. That however much some citizens of her adopted star nation might disapprove of her, that mind-numbing, deadly reasonable, and eternally patient Beowulfan pressure to conform to someone else's ideal and "be happy" simply did not exist there. Yet grateful as she was for that, and deeply as she had come to love her new homeland, the notion of inheriting a position of power and authority, however hedged about by the limitations of the Star Kingdom's Constitution, had always struck her as absurd.
Beowulf government and society. I'm reminded of something I heard once about Japan, that it's insanely culturally conservative but it's incredibly conservative about (and take deadly seriously) traditions that look really, really silly to outsiders (read: Westerners). People who break the mold are shunned, unless enough people do a particular thing that it becomes part of the new normal and that weird canon of culture. Well, that's what I heard, the closest I've ever been to Japan is a Hibachi restaurant.
So I see Beowulf as being highly liberal and PC, and decidedly unfriendly to those who aren't. Another parallel might be Beta Colony form the Vorkosigan books, hopefully without the Mental Hygiene Police.
"The reason for telling you, Your Grace, is that my research and mapping suggest quite conclusively to me that this portion of the genetic code of your people—" she jabbed an index finger at the cursor in the holo image "—was deliberately altered almost a thousand years ago."
-snip-
"As nearly as I can reconstruct what must have happened, Your Grace, at least one person, and possibly several, in your original colonial medical team must have been real crackerjack geneticists, especially given the limitations of the technology then available. As you may be aware, they were still using viruses for genetic insertions rather than the precisely engineered nanotech we use today, and given the crudity of such hack and slash methodologies, his—or their—achievements are truly remarkable."
"I am less surprised to hear that than you might think, My Lady," Sullivan interposed. "The original followers of Saint Austin were opposed to the way technology had, as they saw it, divorced men from the lives God wished them to lead. But they recognized the advances in the life sciences as the gift of a loving Father to His children, and their intention from the beginning was to transplant as much of that gift to Grayson as they could. And that was certainly as well for all of us when our ancestors discovered what sort of world they had come to."
"I believe that probably constitutes at least a one or two thousand percent understatement, Your Grace," Allison said wryly. "One of the things which has puzzled those of us who have studied the situation has been how your colony could possibly have survived for more than a generation or two amid such lethal concentrations of heavy metals. Obviously, some sort of adaptive change had to have occurred, but none of us could understand how it happened quickly enough to save the colony. Now, I think, I know."
She took a sip of tea and crossed her own legs, leaning back in her chair and cradling the tissue-thin porcelain cup between her hands.
"Heavy metals enter the body via the respiratory and digestive tracts, Your Grace, hence your air filtration systems and the constant battle to decontaminate your farm soil. Apparently, whoever was responsible for this—" she jutted her chin at the holo image once again "—intended to build a filtration system into your bodies as well, by modifying the mucosal barriers in your lungs and digestive tract. Your secretory proteins are substantially different from, say, my own. They bind the metals—or a large proportion of them, at any rate—which allows them to be cleared from the body in sputum and other wastes, rather than being absorbed wholesale into the tissues. They don't do a perfect job, of course, but they're the reason your tolerance for heavy metals is so much higher than my own. Up until two or three months ago, the assumption, particularly in light of your ancestors' limited technological resources and, um, attitude towards the resources they did have, was that this must represent a natural facet of adaptive evolution, even if we had no idea how it had happened so quickly."
The grand secret Allison Chou Harrington uncovered, Graysons were genetically engineered to resist heavy metal poisoning. Sadly, due to the relative crudity of the tools and methods available, this also resulted in the high Grayson infant mortality rate. Nanotech used for contemporary genetic tinkering, while the Grayson geneticist(s?) used a modified rhinovirus. Possibly to do the work in total secrecy.
"I suppose it's possible, even probable, that Father Church's servants have suppressed . . . unpleasant information from time to time in our history, but if so, they did it without Father Church's approval. Or the Tester's." Her eyebrows rose against her will, and he chuckled again. "My Lady, we believe God calls us to the Test of Life, which requires us to test both ourselves and our beliefs and our assumptions as we grow and mature in His love. How could we do that, and what validity would our Tests have, if Father Church itself distorted the data which forms the basis upon which we are to make them?"
"I . . . hadn't thought of it that way, Your Grace," Allison said slowly, and this time Sullivan laughed out loud.
"No, My Lady, but you've been rather more polite about it than some off-worlders have. We are a people of custom, and one which has traditionally embraced a highly consensual Faith and way of life, yet our Faith is also one of individual conscience in which no one—neither a man's Steadholder, nor his Protector, nor even the Reverend or the Sacristy—may dictate to him on matters of the spirit. That is the central dynamic of our beliefs, and maintaining it has never been easy. Which is fair enough, for God never promised us the Test would be easy. But it means that, for all our consensuality, we have experienced many periods of intense, even bitter debate and doctrinal combat. I believe that has ultimately strengthened us, but memories of those periods make some of us uneasy about embracing changes in our Church and society. To be perfectly honest, I myself harbor some personal reservations about at least some of the changes—or, perhaps, about the rate of change—which I see around me. Yet not even the priests of Father Church, or perhaps especially not the priests of Father Church, may dictate to the consciences of our flock. Nor may we properly decide that this or that bit of knowledge, however unpleasant we may fear its consequences will be, should be restricted or concealed. So continue with your explanation, please. I may not fully understand it, and it may yet shock or concern me, but as a child of the Tester and of Father Church, it is my duty to hear and at least try to understand . . . and not to blame the bearer of the news for its content."
Some of the central tenets of the Church of Humanity Unchained.
"And is there anything which can be done about this, My Lady?"
"It's really too early for me to say yes or no to that one, at least with any degree of confidence. I've isolated two or three possible approaches, but the site of the problem may well make things difficult, because the mutated gene on the X is near the zinc-finger X protein gene. That's a key gene in sex determination, and it's at the Xp22.2—" She paused as his expression began to indicate that he was lost once more.
"It's at a locus where changes can involve literally dozens of disease states, Your Grace," she simplified. "Many of those diseases are lethal, and others can cause disorders of sex determination. We know a lot more about sex differentiation than whoever whipped up your survival modification did, but we still dislike meddling with it, and particularly in this area. There's a lot of room for small errors to have large consequences, and even if we avoid the more dangerous disease states, the Beowulf Code specifically prohibits genetic manipulation in order to predetermine the sex of a child." She grimaced. "There were some very unpleasant—and shameful—episodes relating to that in the first and second centuries Ante Diaspora, and I'm afraid they've been repeated from time to time on some of the more backward colony worlds since. Nonetheless, I think I could probably at least ameliorate the situation. But whatever I do, it will take time to perfect the methodology . . . and probably result in at least some decreased fertility among your planet's male population."
Years, likely decades of work ahead if they're going to fix the infant mortality rate, at least now they know why it's so gender-skewed. And they know the cause, which is a lot more than they had a few weeks ago. the BLSC forbids genetic tinkering to predetermine gender, I imagine there are some interesting stories in how and why.
"Good. And if I may offer one bit of advice—or, perhaps, make a request?"
"Certainly you may, Your Grace," Allison said. Of course, I don't have to follow the advice if it violates my own professional oaths, she thought, bracing herself for some last-minute swerve towards suppression of her findings.
"This information must be made public, and the sooner the better," he said firmly, "yet it would be wiser, I think, to allow the Sword to make the announcement."
Reverend Sullivan surprises Allison again.
"Actually," Katherine said with a wicked smile, "we're all rather hoping some of the other Keys decide to follow your example, Allison. Tester knows half the wives out there are hovering on the brink of death from pure envy over your 'social coup' right now!" Allison's eyebrows rose, and Katherine chuckled warmly. "Of course they are! You're the first hostess outside the immediate Mayhew Clan or one of its core septs who's had the sheer nerve to simply invite the Protector and his family over for a friendly family dinner in over two hundred T-years!"
Apparently you don't just invite the Protector and family over for supper, not in the last two centuries anyway.
"We both grew up on Grayson, of course, but I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced it from the inside can really understand just how . . . entrenched the protocol at Protector's Palace really is. Not deep down inside."
"We've had a thousand years to make it ironclad," Benjamin said with a shrug. "It's like an unwritten constitution no one would dream of violating . . . except, thank God, for foreigners who don't know any better. That's one reason Honor was such a breath of fresh-filtered air."
Sometimes I just love the little touches, like Graysons tending to be agoraphobic when they can't see a ceiling or dome, or sayings like "a breath of fresh-filtered air."
"I imagine you've heard at least a few people muttering about how 'proper' Grayson women don't work?"
"Well, yes. I have," Allison admitted.
"Well, that's one of the stupider social fables around," Katherine said roundly. "Traditionally, women haven't been paid for working, but believe me, running a Grayson home requires more than someone to bear and raise children. Of course, most of us were never allowed the formal training men got—Benjamin was dreadfully unconventional in that regard—but you try tearing down an air filtration plant, or monitoring the metals levels in the vegetables you're planning on cooking for supper, or managing the reclamation plant, or setting the toxicity alarms in the nursery, or any one of a thousand and one other 'household' chores without at least a practical education in biology, chemistry, hydraulics—!"
Grayson women's on-the-job education and working lives.
Inwardly, she wondered which off-worlder had been stupid enough to step on Katherine Mayhew's toes . . . and to hope it hadn't been a Manticoran. She didn't think it would have been. For the most part, the Star Kingdom refused to tolerate intolerance, although it was less self-congratulatory about it than Beowulf, but she could call to mind one or two Sphinxians who might have been prudish enough to offend. Given the enormous disparity between male and female births, Grayson attitudes towards homosexuality and bisexuality were inevitable, and Sphinx was by far the most straitlaced of the Star Kingdom's planets. For a horrible moment, Allison wondered if somehow Honor could have—? But no. Her daughter might have been more sexually repressed than Allison would have preferred, but she'd never been a prude or a bigot. And even if she had been, Katherine Mayhew certainly wasn't the kind of person to bring it up to hurt Allison now that Honor was gone.
Maybe not all Grayson social mores are staunchly conservative. But enough of that, it's time for Honor's will, or the bare-bones basics anyway.
"First of all, I was quite astounded to discover just how large an estate Honor left. Excluding her feudal holdings here on Grayson as Steadholder Harrington, but including the value of her private interest in Sky Domes and your new Blackbird Shipyard, her net financial worth at the time of her death was just under seventeen-point-four billion Manticoran dollars." Despite himself, Benjamin pursed his lips and whistled silently, and Allison nodded.
"Alfred and I had no idea the estate had grown to anything that size," she went on matter-of-factly, with only the pressure of her grip on her husband's hand to show how dearly bought her outer calm was. "For that matter, I'm not at all certain she realized it, especially since over a quarter of the entire total was generated out of the Blackbird Yard in the last three years. But Willard had things superbly organized for her, as usual, and he seems to have managed to execute her wishes completely.
As of her "death" Honor was worth 17.4 billion Manticoran. Aside from Grayson Sky Domes, she invested heavily in a privately-owned yard on Blackbird building ships for the GSN and apparently saw massive returns in the last couple of years.
"The biggest part of what she wanted done was her instruction to merge all of her personal holdings and funds in the Star Kingdom—exclusive of a few special bequests—and fold them over into Grayson Sky Domes. Lord Clinkscales will continue as CEO, and Sky Domes will be held in trust for the next Steadholder Harrington with the proviso that all future financial operations will be based here, on Grayson, and that a majority of the members of the Sky Domes board of directors must be citizens of Harrington Steading. Our understanding is that Willard will be relocating to Grayson to serve full-time as Sky Domes' chief financial officer and manager."
"That was very generous of her," Benjamin said quietly. "That much capital investment in Harrington and Grayson—and in our tax base—will have a major impact."
"Which was what she wanted," Alfred agreed. "There are, however, those special bequests Alley mentioned. Aside from a very generous one to us, she's also establishing a trust fund of sixty-five million dollars for the treecats here on Grayson, adding another hundred million to the endowment for the clinic, and donating fifty million to the Sword Museum of Art in Austin City. In addition, she's going to establish a trust fund for the families of her personal armsmen in the amount of another hundred million and—" he looked at MacGuiness "—she's bequeathed forty million dollars to you, Mac."
Taking care of Sky Domes, Mac and the treecat colony. Plus her mom's genetics clinic and a substantial donation to an art museum, and trust funds for the families of her armsmen.
"Of course she didn't 'have to,' Mac. She wanted to. Just as she wanted to leave Miranda twenty million."
Honor's maid, LaFollet's sister and the first Grayson to bond with a treecat becomes independently wealthy.
Oh, and one of the Mayhew daughters, little Rachel gets adopted by a treecat. Yay.
? 
