"You can if you will," Miranda said firmly. "I want to find who murdered your father, and who is trying to dismantle the Familias Regnant, and for what purpose. I am not sure they are the same person or organization, but they might well be."

Brun watched her perfect, serene, immaculate mother with amazement. For her whole life, she had seen her mother as the icon everyone thought her. Her father was the active one, the doer and maker and shaper of events. Her mother smoothed his way by smiling and standing by.

Now she saw the real person behind the label of "mother" and "Bunny Thornbuckle's wife" . . . a woman as intelligent, tough and knowledgeable as her father had ever been. As dangerous, perhaps, as Lorenza had been. From the gleam in Miranda's eye, her mother had just noticed that recognition, and was enjoying the surprise.

"I made no mistake, picking Brun Meager for my nom de guerre," Brun said, testing her hypothesis.

Her mother smiled. "Quite so. I'm glad you recognize it. Now-are you with me?"

"Yes. If I can . . ."

"You can. Not all at once, but-let me go on here. I warned your father, after that disgraceful affair on Patchcock, to beware of his relatives doing what that Morrelline woman did. Granted, her brothers deserved it, but others could do the same with less reason. He was sure he had it taken care of, in part because old Viktor Barraclough had always been his friend and mentor. But about the time of the Xavier invasion, he and Kevil found irregularities . . . purchases of company shares they couldn't put a name to, changes in some of the boards of directors which didn't make sense. The military crisis had to come first, of course; and after that, with proof of traitors in Fleet, they were far more concerned with that, and with Grand Council business. But what it's come down to is that Harlis has enough shares, and enough votes in various boards, that he can make a plausible case that much of your father's estate was actually not his personally. I think he'd fiddled the files, but I haven't had time to work on it. And I can't do it here."

"Could you do it at Appledale?"

"Not really . . . I need to go to Sirialis; that's where we stored the backup data. Your father thought I was paranoid, sometimes, but I insisted that we take a complete readoff every half-year, and just archive it. I think that's why Harlis is so determined to get Sirialis; he suspects that the data are there somewhere."

"Then you should go to Sirialis," Brun said. "He can't keep you away, can he?"

"Not yet. But I couldn't leave you alone here-"

Brun interrupted. "You wanted my help; let me give it. Nothing's likely to happen at the next Grand Council meeting anyway; they're probably still in shock, and they'll waffle for days."

"I'm not so sure; that Conselline fellow got himself elected interim Speaker-"

"Whatever happens can't matter as much as stopping Harlis. Go on. I'll attend the Council meeting, and let you know what happens. Promise." Brun reached over and patted her mother's arm. "We aren't going to let Harlis take everything, and we aren't going to let some idiot Conselline ruin the Familias. If that's what's happening."

Her mother gave her an appraising look. "Sometimes, Brun, you are remarkably like your father."

"Sorry . . ."

"No. Don't be. All right-first we'll clear out of this-" With a wave of her arm, she indicated the entire Palace. "Then I'll go to Sirialis."

Cecelia stopped on the way to the hospital to contact her hotel, and reassure the front staff that the two young women and two children were the individuals she had authorized to register in her name. Another two bedrooms? No problem. Cecelia grinned to herself; she had been so wise to invest in a hotel here on Castle Rock, rather than depending on the hospitality of friends.

When she got to the hospital, she was told that she had just missed George. She went upstairs, and stood in the corridor outside Special Care, looking at the motionless form in the bed.

He looked wretched, she thought; she wondered if she had looked as bad. He wasn't conscious, they told her; they were still struggling to control the pressure on his brain, and he was deeply sedated except for weekly checks of neurological function. Cecelia blinked back tears, remembering herself in that drug-induced coma . . . wondering if Kevil were more conscious than they realized . . . and silently promised him she would return and get him out of there, no matter what. She found it hard to leave, but she had something even more urgent to do.

At the Laurels, she stopped at the concierge's desk to ask for assistance in leasing a yacht. The Laurels expected such requests; it took only a moment for the concierge to connect Cecelia to the booking agent for Allsystems Leasing.

Her inspiration had been her nephew Ronnie. Ronnie and Raffaele, as newlyweds, had taken off for the frontier-to Excet-24, a world newly opened to colonization. Cecelia hoped it would have a more euphonious name before it qualified for full membership in the Familias. At last report, Ronnie and Raffa had no children yet, but were "hoping." Cecelia wasn't sure who was hoping-the young people or their parents-but she remembered Raffa's problem-solving abilities, and was sure that Raffa could find the boys a good home if she didn't want them herself.

But this meant a long trip-six weeks at least. She discussed the route with the leasing agent, and ordered the Premium Platinum package of consumables. She didn't mind doing Bunny's family this service, but why should she suffer for it? She wanted fresh food again.

On Miranda's advice, Cecelia hired three more nursemaids. One wanted to emigrate, and was glad to accept a colony share in lieu of salary. She brought along her own children, a two- and a four- year-old. Five people to care for four children might be overdoing it, Cecelia thought, but she herself didn't intend to wash a single diaper or wipe a single drippy nose.

By midnight, Cecelia had arranged everything. The yacht would not be ready immediately, of course; even with the assurance of large sums of money, it took time to prepare a large spaceship for a luxury voyage. But Cecelia had arranged for one of the nursemaids from Miranda's to take the boys to a park with the newly hired maid and her children, leaving the suite clear for at least some hours of the days. No one had seen pictures of them for months; no one, Cecelia was sure, would notice two more young women with children in a park full of young women with children. She had discussed with the nursemaids what clothes would be needed for the voyage and for six months afterward; she didn't know how easy it would be to find childrens' clothes on a colony world. She set up credit lines so that purchases by the nursemaids would not be traceable to her or to Miranda.

Then she fell into bed with a glow of conscious virtue. When the twins woke, bawling, at two in the morning, she pulled a pillow over her head and went back to sleep. That part of it was someone else's problem.

By the time they boosted from Rockhouse Major, Cecelia felt sure that no one had suspected anything. As far as anyone outside the Palace knew, the twins were still there. The news media had

shown no more than normal interest in her doings, and seemed to accept her offhand comment that she had leased the big yacht because she was tired of doing all the work in her little one, and wanted someone else along to cook and clean.

The two boys thoroughly enjoyed the company of other children; Cecelia pored over their medical records in her stateroom, and came to the same conclusion as the doctors and psychologists. Normal children, who could expect to have normal lives. The real question was . . . should she tell Raffaele and Ronnie who they really were? In her own mind, the boys should not know-that they were adopted, yes, but not that their fathers had raped their mother and kept her captive. Of course they must have access to their medical records someday; advances in therapy might make it possible to finish cleaning up their genome.

She saw moral and emotional shoals in either direction.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Excet Colony 24 looked, from space, like a paradise, sapphire

seas and emerald forests, tawny drylands and olive savannas, all spatched and streaked with white water-vapor clouds. It had been seeded two hundred years before with the usual package of invader species, and closely monitored thereafter. Originally, colonization had been planned for a century later, when the introduced ecosystem would be more stable, but oxygen levels had never fallen dangerously low; the original system here had already been oxy-carbon.

The colony spaceport, in contrast, was a dirty little dump, in Cecelia's view. Her chartered yacht had its own shuttle, whose wide viewscreen gave a clear view of the mess. Discarded cargo containers lay scattered near either end of the runway. The single runway. The spaceport buildings were ugly piles, too much like the Patchcock port. The white plumes of cement factories, the lime kilns where limestone and shale were converted to cement for construction, lay gently on a background of rich green forest in the near distance.

Customs consisted of a harried young woman with a nearly impenetrable accent, whose only concern was whether the new arrivals had colony shares.

"I don't need a colony share," Cecelia said. "I'm not staying; I'm just here to visit-"

The young woman glared, took Cecelia's IDs, and inserted them in a machine. After a moment, she turned to give Cecelia a long look.

"Yer not stain."

"I'm not staying, no. I'm here to visit my nephew and his wife. Ronald Vandormer."

"Aow! Rownnie! Whyntcha sai so?"

"I tried," Cecelia said.

"He's at th' office, about naow," the woman said. "Ya kin gover." She pointed out the "office," a two-story cube of concrete.

Like most colonies, this one had been given a head start by its investors: the spaceport town had a small grid of paved streets and a larger grid of gravelled ones. The first hundred or so buildings had been put up of substantial materials-in this case concrete blocks. Beyond that were rickety constructions that Cecelia could only call shacks-crudely built of raw timber. Cecelia noticed, as she walked along, the number of people who were carrying things by hand . . . the absence of hand trucks, let alone vehicles.

The two-story building had a low wall enclosing a courtyard to one side, where a group of men were working on some piece of machinery she didn't understand. She started to speak up and ask them about Ronnie, when one of the faces in the group suddenly looked familiar. Ronnie? She blinked in the brilliant sunlight, and it still was . . . in face. The glossy young aristocrat, who had always been just one hair from a dandy-and that only because his friend George had been born with creases and a shine, as they said-stood there in tan workshirt and pants, with smears of mud or

grease on both. She couldn't even tell what color his boots had been. But it was Ronnie-as handsome as ever, or more so.

Before she could call out, he turned and went inside; the men went back to doing something with machinery and wood. She followed him inside, to a rough-walled room with a concrete floor, and found him jotting something down on a deskcomp.

"Ronnie-"

He looked up, then his eyes widened. "Aunt Cecelia!"

"I sent word," Cecelia said.

"We never got it." He shrugged. "It's probably in the batch somewhere but everyone's been too busy . . ." He looked out the window at the bustle in the courtyard.