"Um." Benjamin rubbed his chin. "I remember the details now, and I can see some problems with it now that I look back at it. That predated the Constitution by over two hundred years, and it was pretty obviously an act of political expediency to avoid a war of succession. Still, I imagine we could make the precedent stand up if we asserted it with a straight face. And if we get Reverend Sullivan to sign off on it. But this all assumes Lady Harrington's parents would be willing to cooperate with our plans. Would they?"

"I believe so," Clinkscales said with an edge of caution. "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."

"We'd still be on slippery ground if either of them were dead," Benjamin said thoughtfully, "but let's not go there. They're both alive, both physically able to conceive and bear children, and both on Grayson." He thought a moment longer, then nodded decisively. "I think this could be an excellent idea, Howard. If they agree, the child would be a Grayson citizen from birth because he was born here. Would you stay on as Regent in that case?"

"You mean as a caretaker until the child's birth if they agree?"

"Well, yes. And also as Regent for the child after he was born, as well."

"Assuming I last that long, yes, I suppose," Clinkscales said after a few seconds of consideration. "I doubt I'd make it to the child's majority even with Manty medical support, though."

He said it calmly, with the serenity of a man who'd lived a life fuller than the vast majority of other people's. Benjamin looked at him and wondered if he would feel as calm as Clinkscales when it was his turn. Or would the fact that people no more than five or six years younger than he could expect to live two or three centuries longer make him bitter and envious? He hoped it wouldn't, but—

He shook the thought off and nodded.

"All right, gentlemen, I think we have a plan here. There's just one little point about it which still bothers me."

"There is, Your Grace?" Prestwick furrowed his brow. "I confess that I don't see one. It seems to me that Howard has solved most of our problems quite neatly."

"Oh, he has!" Benjamin agreed. "But in the process, he's created a fresh one."

"Indeed, Your Grace?"

"Oh, yes indeed!" Both of Benjamin's advisors looked at him blankly, and he grinned wickedly. "Well, I'm not going to be the one to discuss the birds and the bees with Lady Harrington's mother, gentlemen!"

Chapter Five

"You want me to what? "

Allison Harrington shoved herself back in her chair, astonished almondine eyes wide, and Howard Clinkscales blushed as he had not in years. It was the first time since the INS broadcast of the execution that something had driven the quiet, lingering edge of sorrow fully out of Dr. Harrington's eyes, but he would have felt much better about that if he'd been even a little bit less embarrassed. This wasn't the sort of thing a properly raised Grayson male discussed with someone else's wife, and he'd done his best to evade the responsibility. But Benjamin had insisted that he'd thought it up, so it was up to him to enlist the Harringtons' cooperation.

"I realize it must sound impertinent of me to even bring the matter up, My Lady," he said now, his voice gruff, "but it seems the only way to avoid a probable political crisis. And it would be a way to keep the Key in her direct line."

"But—" Allison stopped herself and drew a stylus from her pocket. She shoved it into her mouth, nibbling on it with small, white teeth in a bad habit that went clear back to her hospital residency days on Beowulf, and made herself consider the—request? offer? plea?—as calmly as possible.

It was amazing, she decided, how complex her own reaction was. She and Alfred were finally managing to come to grips with their daughter's death—she better than he, she suspected, but still to come to grips with it. It hurt, and one of her own regrets had been that the two of them had deferred having a second child for so long. 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.

And I always meant to have more children of my own, now didn't I? Of course I did! That was one of the things that attracted me to Sphinx in the first place, when Alfred proposed. It was just... There were so many other things I needed to do, and it wasn't like there was any rush. My "biological clock" won't run down for another century or more yet!

But if they'd gone ahead, had those other children sooner, perhaps the savage blow of losing Honor wouldn't have—

She cut that thought off... again. What might have happened couldn't change what had happened, and even if it could have, producing more children simply as some sort of emotional insurance policy—a way to protect themselves from emotional trauma if one of their brood should die—would have been contemptible. And wouldn't have worked anyway.

Yet now that Clinkscales had brought the idea up—and explained his reasons for it—she felt... uncomfortable. Part of it was probably that bone-deep, instinctive reaction of hers which made her dig in her heels whenever anyone tried to tell her she "had" to do something. She'd made a habit of setting herself harder, more challenging goals than anyone else would have dreamed of demanding of her, but let someone—anyone—tell her that she "had" to do something, that something was "expected of her," or her "duty," and her back went up in instant defiance. She felt quite certain that most of it stemmed from her childhood sense that Beowulf's entire population had been out to pressure her into conforming to its expectations. Which was silly, of course. She'd realized that decades ago and worked on overcoming the spinal-reflex reaction ever since, yet it was still there, and she felt it stirring now.

But stronger than that, there was the vague feeling that if she and Alfred decided to have another child now, specifically to inherit Honor's steading, it would somehow be a betrayal of the daughter they'd lost. It would be as if... as if she'd been nothing more than a glob of plastic, squeezed out by a robotic assembly line, which could be replaced by any other glob from the same line. It was a ridiculous and illogical way to feel, but that didn't make the emotion any less powerful.

And then there's my own attitude towards inherited titles, isn't there? she asked herself after a moment, and snorted wryly while she nibbled harder on the stylus.

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.