She had liked the planet well enough growing up on it. She hadn't minded the blues and grays and mauves and pinks of the sky then, or the many shades of cloud. Vida pushed herself to walk faster, down the pebbled walk, across the road, to the footpath by the lake. Far out, bright sails glinted in red and yellow against the water. One thing about planets, you could walk a long way without retracing your steps. She walked herself breathless heading east, well past the end of the Serrano estate. There had been a small cluster of shops down here at one time, where a public boat ramp gave access to the lake for those who didn't have waterfront property.

Recovering her breath while waiting in a line of noisy children for a drink and a snack-she chose tea and a cinnamon pastry, not the sweet drinks and cream buns the children were buying-she recovered her sense of humor as well. Planets were not that bad, all things considered. She settled on a bench, protected from the wind by one of the shops, and looked at the hills behind the estates across the road. She had wandered there, as a child, splashing in the creeks and exploring little hidden valleys. She had run down here, hot and thirsty, to buy the same sweet drinks. Not bad at all, planets, if you were there by choice.

She would have to find something useful to do. With that resolve, she started back to the family compound, and by the time she arrived, she was quite ready for dinner with Sabatino. They chatted about music and art-her collection of modern prints, and his of music recordings. He invited her to come hear Malachy vu Suba's new bassoon concerto in his apartment, and she spent a pleasanter evening than she'd expected, arguing about the merits of that controversial work. Vu Suba had chosen to write for the ancient instrument, not the modern one, which limited performance to those orchestras which possessed period instruments. Sabatino argued that the tonal qualities were different enough to make this worthwhile, but Vida contended that only a very few could hear the difference.

The next morning, however, he was gone and she still hadn't decided what to do. She turned her pictures face-out again, rearranged a few ornaments, checked for a third time that everything had been put away neatly. Shrieks from outside brought her to the window of the second bedroom.

The smallest Serrano children played in the garden between the houses as she had done, screaming and laughing the way children always did. Vida looked down on their playscape with its ramps and towers and bridges, and found it hard to believe she had ever been that noisy. Now that she had noticed them, the noise seemed to pierce her head with little needles.

Maybe the archives would be quieter. She went downstairs, and down again, into the underground library that housed the oldest documents the Serrano family owned.

Rows of Serrano biographies . . . Vida reread Rogier Xavier Serrano, one of her favorites (he had every attribute of a hero, including having made love to and won the heart of a beautiful heroine as brave as himself), and Millicent Serrano, born blind but gifted with extraordinary spatial

abilities. She'd always meant to read about her own great-uncle Alcandor, who had managed to get thrown out of the Fleet for smuggling a tricorn vermuge onto a ship as a prank . . . and had then been readmitted, because no one else could get it off. That story in the official biography wasn't nearly as good as she remembered from his tales on the front porch of Rest House when he was a retired commander with a gimpy leg and a strange green spot on his arm. The official biography didn't mention the vermuge's lust for coffee, for instance, or the creature's curious mating behavior.

Vida spent several days browsing the family biographies before she tired of that, and looked around for something else. Battle reports . . . she'd seen all she wanted of battle reports.

Service records, leave records, slim volumes of verse by Serranos who thought themselves poets . .

. she opened one of these and burst into laughter. Either Amory David Serrano wasn't a very good poet, or the language had changed a lot in the past two hundred years. Mercedes Esperanza, on the other hand, had written erotic verses that should, Vida thought, have ignited the whole archive .

. . but Mercedes had died young, of a typical poetic fever. What kind of space commander would she have made?

Stories, even: a few Serranos had written fiction, most of it clearly intended for children, and most of it-to Vida's taste anyway-pretty bad. Carlo and the Starship was nothing more than a child's tour of a passenger ship, with a biddable child asking obvious questions and a friendly puppy answering them. She passed by Carlo and the Power Plant, and Carlo Goes to the Mountains, glanced briefly at the illustrations for Helen Is a Good Girl (little Helen shaking hands; little Helen sitting up straight at table; little Helen offering a toy spaceship to another child with an improbably sweet smile-Serranos, even in childhood, didn't hand over ships willingly), and almost missed Long Ago on Altiplano.

Altiplano. Her grandson's fiancee's homeworld. She pried it out of the tightly-squeezed group of skinny children's books. Its pages had turned brown and brittle; the illustrations were not drawn in, but pasted on, ancient faded flatpics.

"Long ago, on Altiplano, a great Family ruled."

So they had, the family the Serranos had been bound to.

"A beautiful world, with magnificent snow-capped mountains, and great golden plains of grass. To this world, the Garcia-Macdonalds brought their people, who prospered there and spread across the fertile land. And their loyal guards and protectors, the brave Serranos, watched the sky above them, and kept their ships safe from piracy." That, too, she knew. The Serranos had been their space militia; someone else had been their ground militia.

"But treachery surrounded them. They were betrayed by those they trusted to guard them." Vida felt a chill. They hadn't been betrayed by Serranos . . .

"By their soldiers on the planet." That was better. Not Serranos at all, someone else.

"And they were all killed, the mothers and fathers and all the little children, because of the wickedness of the rebels and traitors. And that is why when we say our prayers, we do not ask for blessing upon the people of Altiplano."

What an odd book for a child! It was more like a diatribe, like a memoir. She looked on the other side of the gap in the row, but found only Carlo Visits the Observatory and Helen Starts School, followed by Three Little Serranos Visit the Seashore. Nothing else with the same faded brown binding.

Vida took her find over to the table, and paged back through it. Very, very odd. Hand-printed, of course, and the flatpics glued on with something that had bled through. They were all blurry and faded, but one appeared to show a house, and another a face. The rest might have been landscapes.

The pasted-in pictures made the book fatter than its spine suggested-no wonder the whole row had been wedged tight.

Vida flipped every page, looking for any identifying mark. One of the flatpics fell off, and the paper folded behind it with it. She looked at it . . . thin, almost translucent, brown on the folds . . . it had been there for a very, very long time. Perhaps she should get the family

librarian; she might damage it by unfolding it

But she couldn't resist peeking.

CHAPTER TEN.

CASTLE ROCK.

Back at Castle Rock, Cecelia was surprised to find that Miranda had left not just the Palace but the planet. She checked the net and found that Brun was the only family member onplanet. Brun had moved to Appledale, the Thornbuckle family estates on Castle Rock. Cecelia had always liked Appledale, with its pleasant view of rolling fields and orchards. She called and, as she'd expected, Brun invited her out to stay.

Brun met her at the front door, quickly directed the staff to take her luggage upstairs, and then-even on the way to the handsome downstairs morning room-frothed over with indignation about Hobart Conselline, who had gotten himself elected Speaker of the Table of Ministers.

"Hobart?" Cecela blinked. "He's not that bad, is he? He was always polite to me. I never had that much to do with him, but-"

"Hobart is a raging bully," Brun said grimly. She waved Cecelia to a comfortable chintz-covered chair and threw herself into another. "Just wait until you hear-" She took off at a conversational gallop, surprising Cecelia with her grasp of Family relationships. Had the girl been listening behind doors and actually paying attention when she seemed just a young fluffhead? It was always possible-this was, after all, the same Brun who had engineered her escape from the nursing home.

"I wouldn't have believed it," Cecelia said at last. "Are you sure . . . I mean, he's always been a bit pigheaded, but most of us are, from time to time." A maid had brought in trays of pastries and sliced fruits, and pots of coffee and tea. Cecelia filled a little plate with apple slices and munched. They were just as crisp and flavorful as she remembered.

"He slapped down Great-Uncle Viktor in the meeting. Viktor! And Stefan didn't say a word. He's found excuses to get rid of most of the Ministers, replacing them with his own people-and now that he has the votes, it doesn't really matter if a few of Dad's are left." Brun was ignoring the food so far, but Cecelia took one of the ginger curls as well.

"What about Harlis?"

"He's bought Harlis, I suspect with the help of his new Minister of Judicial Affairs, Norm Radsin.

You know how helpful or unhelpful the courts can be in estate cases-"

"Indeed I do." The old anger washed over her.

"Well, it's amazing how many rulings have changed in Harlis's favor since Norm took over that ministry. Without Kevil Mahoney, or access to his private files-and nobody, not even George, knows the access codes to Kevil's files-"

She did. Cecelia thought back to their last conversation, when they had discussed her own tangled legal problems in the wake of being declared incompetent. Kevil had trusted her with the voice codes for just this sort of situation.

"Has anyone tried to have Kevil declared incompetent?" she asked.

"Not that I know of. George certainly hasn't. Why?"

Why not, she thought, if Kevil was still incapacitated and unable to access his own files? Had no one in his offices tried to get access?

"I mean," Brun went on, "we could use the information, but we're not going to press for that-not after what happened to you."

"Is he conscious?"

"Yes, but he can't seem to remember much, or concentrate. His doctors don't advise rejuvenation because of the extent of the neurological damage, and the recent discoveries of what went wrong with Fleet rejuvenations." Brun finally poured herself a cup of tea, and took a pastry.

"I hadn't heard about that."

"No, it came out after you left. Some of the senior NCOs, the chiefs, started going senile-I actually saw one like that, back on Copper Mountain, before I . . . before I left and all the rest happened. Memory loss, irrational thought processes. I mentioned it to Esmay, in fact, but then we had that fight. Anyway, there were more of them, a lot more, and when they did some research they found flaws in the process. They've put about half the flag officers on indefinite leave, because they were rejuved, just in case. None of them had shown symptoms yet, unless you count Lepescu."

Cecelia frowned. "Flaws in the process, or in the drugs themselves? Remember what happened on Patchcock . . ."

"That's what I thought of first, just a bad batch of drugs. I raised a formal Question in Council-the second meeting, that is, not the first-but Hobart claimed I was just trying to embarrass him, use it as an excuse for family rivalry, and one of his bootlickers got up and spouted a whole involved line about genetic susceptibility and the inbred genome of Fleet families."

"What did Venezia Morrelline say?"