He set the microphone back on its hook and trotted up the stairs.

Barton Morelon had begun his morning in his usual fashion: making unhurried love to Nora, rolling out of bed shortly thereafter, and getting washed, dressed, and ready for the labors of the day while conducting a leisurely game of grab-ass with his squealing, giggling wife. It occurred to him, as it sometimes did at such moments, that he was among the most blessed members of all the race of Man. He didn't let the thought disturb his routine, nor did it show except in the slightly brighter than usual glow of his smile.

When the alien voice erupted in his skull, the thunder of it drove the smile from his face and toppled him to his knees. It elicited a gasp of surprise from him and a shriek of sudden terror from Nora. She immediately descended to her knees and clutched him tightly.

"What's wrong, love? Are you hurt?"

He tried to speak, stuttered incoherently, and paused for breath. The fear in his wife's eyes redoubled. Her trembling shook his own torso.

"I'm okay...I think," he gasped out at last. "There was this really loud voice in my head. It was telling me that there's something I have to do."

"What voice? Who?"

"I don't know."

"What did it tell you to do?"

He struggled to focus and recall the substance of the command.

"I lost that last part," he said after a moment. "It was so loud that I couldn't make out the words. Something about an elders' council meeting this morning."

She frowned in puzzlement. "Are you supposed to attend?"

"No," he said. "Not...usually."

"Were you asked to attend this one?"

He breathed deeply and strove for calm as Nora rubbed his neck and shoulders.

"I think I was," he said. "Just now."

Charisse stabbed the last bite of her breakfast, sopped up as much of the peppery cheese sauce as she could with it, and popped it into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed with exaggerated pleasure.

"Does this concoction have a name, Alvah?" she said.

He turned from the sink and grinned. "Not that I know of. Call it whatever you like."

She nodded. "Eggs Alvah."

He chuckled. "That will serve, I suppose."

The rest of the clan had already broken fast and departed to address the tasks of the day. Only she, Chuck, and Alvah remained in the Morelon kitchen. The first sounds of awakened farm machinery arose from the fields beyond as she brought her dish to the sink.

"You," she said to Alvah, "are a treasure."

He grinned slyly. "Just doing my job, ma'am. Off to the elders' council?"

She glanced at him curiously. "Patrice told you about that?"

He nodded. "Indeed she did. I plan to attend."

She grew immediately wary. "You're not a member, Alvah."

"I know," he said. "I'll be there anyway."

"No, you won't," she said.

"Yes," Chuck rumbled from behind her, "he will. And so will I."

She whirled to face her husband as anger mounted within her. He gazed down at her with an expression of severity and regret.

"Time to face the music, darlin'."

The modest meeting room off the clan's management office was fuller than Charisse had ever seen it. All the members of the elders' council were present, as were Alvah, Barton, Martin, Althea, and Douglas Kramnik. The Morelon scion immediately fixed her with a glare of steel.

Charisse moved to the head of the table, seated herself, started to speak, and discovered that she could not.

She formed words with lips and tongue, as always. She propelled the sounds of the words out through her throat, as always. Yet nothing emerged but a faint hiss of air. Unable to comprehend what had rendered her speechless, she coughed, shook herself, and poured all her bodily force into the effort to speak, twisting the muscles of her face and throat to their limits. All she could produce was a wordless moan.

She rose in swiftly mounting terror. Her eyes swept over the attendees, pleading for any sort of explanation, though it was absurd that she should expect to find one among them. She would have shouted, screamed, shrieked, done anything that might have resembled an expression of dismay, if Althea hadn't chosen that moment to rise from her seat at the table and wave downward at her.

Charisse fell into her chair, all her muscles as completely and inexplicably beyond her command as her voice, as Althea spoke.

"As Alvah, Bart, Douglas, Martin, and I are not members of this council," Althea said, "you who are members are probably wondering why we're here. It's pretty simple, really. There have been some weird developments in the clan's external and financial affairs recently, and they have us worried. Actually, it's more than just the bunch standing here that's worried, but we'll do for starters. Patrice," she said as she reseated herself, "why don't you fill us in about the investment account irregularities?"

Patrice Morelon rose from her seat and cleared her throat. Though she spoke softly, she enunciated each word with care and a sense of import.

"On the whole," she said, "the investments are doing well. The investment council has selected a fairly wide range of equities for our capital. A few are speculative and growth-oriented, while the rest are longer and better established, and emphasize a regular dividend. For those of you who've never looked into the equities market, our sort of distribution would be considered modestly aggressive. It attempts to safeguard the bulk of the clan's funds while still playing for a possible large gain."

She glanced down at her notes, then over at Althea. The scion nodded in a plain indication that she should continue.

"My concern, which Douglas shares, is that we can't make the numbers add up. We know which stocks have paid us dividends, and in what amounts. We know what purchases and sales we've made, and the net to the account from those transactions. The sum of those numbers, plus the cash balance carried forward from last year, should equal the current cash balance in the account...but it doesn't." Her expression morphed from the blandness of a comptroller's report to the pain of an auditor with questions she could not answer.

"There's a lot more cash in the account than we can explain," she said. "Over two hundred thousand dekas more." A gasp circled the table. "Maybe I'm being foolish in looking at that as a problem, but it worries me nonetheless. I want to know why these numbers don't balance. Where's the mistake in our records? What did we fail to account for when we totted everything up? Did something fall off the back of the stove without our noticing-some payment or transaction large enough to account for nearly a quarter million dekas? And if so, haven't we failed our duties to the clan?

"Doug was first to notice," she said. "He's more alert to things like that than Chuck and I. He thought that there'd been a transfer from the farm's operating account that wasn't properly recorded. But Bart's records show no such transaction." She turned to look at Charisse. "Besides, Charisse would have told us about a transfer of that sort."

Charisse's anxieties spiked near to fainting intensity.

"So we're here," Patrice said, "as persons with a responsibility to the rest of the clan, and as representatives of the dozens who have yet to hear about any of this, in hope of an explanation. Doug, Chuck, and I are reluctant to continue in that responsibility until we can figure out what happened."

Patrice turned to Althea, who nodded.

"Thank you, Patrice. Now would you tell us about the last elders' council meeting, please?"

Patrice nodded and turned back to the main body of the gathering.

"Those of you who don't normally attend those meetings probably don't know that we've been reviewing the clan's external commitments, at least the new ones. At the last one, Charisse submitted a three-way agreement with the Dunbartons and the Luchins. She told us it had already been negotiated to finality, and expected that we would sign off on it without any discussion.

"It didn't look right. Clan Morelon was contracting to buy a considerable quantity of Dunbarton tools unrelated to farm operations, and a significant quantity of Luchin pastries, regularly each quarter. The contract said nothing about what Clan Morelon might be doing with those items, and no one else around this table had any other information about the interaction. So we tried to get Charisse to elaborate on the matter. She took it very badly. This morning's meeting was supposed to continue the last meeting's discussions, but I can't for the life of me see what there is to discuss."

Althea rose once more. "That's the money part of things," she said. "Now for the part that involves Martin and me. It's no secret that we've been at work on a spaceplane these last couple of years, though we haven't exactly kept the rest of the clan up on our progress. Well, as of a few days ago, the development work is complete. We have a craft ready for testing." Murmurs of excited interest arose, and Althea smiled. "We've named it Freedom's Horizon. This wasn't how we'd planned to announce any of that, though. We were hoping to make the first flight into a gala. A festival of triumph for Man on Hope, hopefully soon to be Man on other worlds as well.

"We've been using the Morelon hangar over at Grenier Aircraft for our work. I figured it would be okay, since it's a clan asset and wasn't being used for anything else. I was wrong. Hearing about it made Charisse very upset. She's tried several times to put a halt to the project. But it wasn't until a week ago today that I found out how far she's willing to go. She threatened me with the loss of scion status if we continue on. Her tone suggested that she might have other measures in mind if that one failed to bend me."

Althea's gaze hardened as she turned to look at Charisse.

"Grandaunt," she said, "it's time you explained yourself to the council-and the rest of us."

Althea crossed her arms over her breasts. Every eye in the room turned to fix on Charisse.

Charisse Morelon had been the focus of innumerable pairs of eyes in her short century of power. She had arranged challenging stares into a taxonomy that few others on Hope would ever have a reason to assemble. She had never seen anything to compare to the implacability of Althea's stare. Without words, it confronted, examined, and dismissed every imaginable evasion, tangent, and concealment Charisse might have thought to offer for the activities she'd thought she'd so adroitly disguised.

The time had come. Some of the truth would have to come out.

"For several years, now," she said, "the heads of...lesser clans have been bringing their problems to me. Some just want advice. Others want me to help them with their relations with other clans. I provide what help I can, when I can. But I don't give it away. I charge a fee. Sometimes, my solution has to take account of...adjustments to arrangements that have already been made. Now and then, those adjustments involve Clan Morelon. The fee is set accordingly.

"I've made it my habit to put the fee into the investments account." Charisse paused and fought for resolve. "I've always regarded it as revenue for Clan Morelon, since no one would have come to me if I were merely a private party. I just...haven't been informing the investment council about the deposits. That's why there's an overage."

She scanned the faces of the attendees for some hint of understanding. There was some. Not enough.

"As for Althea and Martin's project, I was just worried," she said. "Althea is the most impressive of all our progeny for many generations, and Martin has made her an equally worthy consort." She grimaced. "I don't want to lose kin that valuable. The whole clan would feel the loss. So I've been trying to discourage them from an adventure that strikes me as pointless, profitless, and unjustifiably risky." She raised her chin. "If you consider it outside my purview as matriarch to threaten Althea with loss of her status as Morelon clan scion, I can offer you no defense but this: I believed I was protecting the clan's interests."

There followed a protracted silence. Charisse looked from face to face, straining to discover whether she would somehow be held to have transgressed the ancient moral rules that Alain Morelon had laid down for his kindred's conduct...that all his proxies had honored without daring to quibble with the smallest detail.

When a voice at last pierced the silence, it was one she had not imagined she would hear.

"Charisse," Chuck Feigner rumbled, "if the council shall so direct, this giving of advice to other patriarchs and matriarchs shall henceforward be a gift of the heart." The sonorous phrase rang unpleasantly in her head. "You are, of course, free to discontinue your involvement in such activities. No one would dare to suggest that you owe your counsel to anyone beyond these walls. But there will be no more assessment of fees for whatever advice you care to render to any such supplicants. Neither will you commit the clan contractually as part of such advice." He looked around the room. "Are we agreed, councilors?"

The murmurs of assent went unpolluted by any demurrer. Chuck nodded and turned at once to Althea.

"For my part," Althea said, "I've regarded my designation as scion as more a burden and an obligation than an honor. I don't have any taste for the sort of work Charisse does, and I doubt I'll acquire any in the future." She drew herself up into a formal stance. "Therefore, I hereby renounce my scion status..."

Althea paused and looked briefly into the distance, as if she were receiving advice from some unseen source.

"...with the hope that the council will nominate as my replacement..."

The attendees turned unanimously toward her.

"...the familiar, worthy, and eminently deserving person of Barton Kramnik Morelon."

Uproar.

Chapter 18: Quartember 7, 1307 A.H., 1600 hours.

Althea settled herself into the pilot's seat, pulled the restraint harness over her head and latched it, and turned to her husband.

"Last chance to back out."

Martin shook his head. "Whither thou goest, love."

She nodded, released the brake, and engaged the ground transmission.

Freedom's Horizon, though slenderer and lighter than any previous manned spacecraft, was still a considerable mass. The rear wheels groaned audibly as the modest kerosene-fueled ground drive struggled to turn them. It took several minutes for the plane to roll out of the Morelon hangar and down to the beginning of the Grenier Air runway. Althea jockeyed it carefully into position, such that the exhaust from the main engine would fall onto the massive flexosteel exhaust baffle, twenty feet square and six inches thick, that she'd had mounted there for the purpose.

She set the brake and glanced out to the port side. As he'd promised, Adam Grenier watched from afar. Despite his considerable distance from the runway, the tension in his face and bearing was evident.

Mustn't ruin the nice man's airstrip.

"Carefully, carefully," Martin muttered.

"Hm?"

"Just don't get carried away," he said. "Six percent power on takeoff, no more. If you firewall the engine, that plate will be found on Sulla."

She scowled. "I'm not an idiot, Martin."

"No, you're not. You're something almost as dangerous."

"Huh? What?"

"The invincible, indestructible, utterly unstoppable Althea MacLachlan Morelon." He smirked. "Just remember that there's an ordinary mortal in the seat next to you."

Despite the lightness of his tone, the comment sobered her.

Grandpere?

-Yes, dear?

Am I being too headlong about this?

-That's not a fair question, Althea.

Hm? Why not?