"Martin..."

"Yes, love?"

"Can you cook?"

He grimaced. "Only under the most generous possible interpretation of the word. I don't think you'd care for the result." He glanced ruefully at his half-eaten dinner. "My nutrition actually improved substantially when I moved in with you."

"Never mind."

Chapter 4: Quintember 11, 1303 A.H.

"So we're isolated," Alvah Kramnik said.

Douglas Kramnik nodded. "Morelon and Forrestal outflanked us. I wouldn't have guessed the sons of bitches had it in them. They're complete patsies about everything else." He looked about the conference room. "Does anyone have any ideas at all?"

A glum silence reigned among the Kramnik elders. Their patriarch nodded in resignation. "I expected as much. That lab will be built, and the mass driver as well, and like as not we'll be the one and only clan dealt out of the advantages."

Leo Kramnik frowned down the length of the table. "Forrestal said they weren't going to use that parcel."

Douglas waved it aside. "They will. This was a play for bribes. They're waiting for the other big clans to approach them with expressions of support, tenders of financial backing, guarantees of preferences on materials, labor, and easements, and so forth." He shook his head in disgust. "They'll get them, too. And as we have nothing to offer them, we can say good-bye to any possibility of shipping our textiles via that mass driver. They're not known to forget a slight."

"I doubt that, Doug." Patrice Kramnik's soft voice was still sharp enough to carry from the far end of the table. "The Morelons have a reputation for fair dealing. They're not likely to undercut it by holding your foray into petty vengeance against the rest of us. At least," she said, "I don't think they will."

Douglas Kramnik scowled angrily. His son Barton looked down at the table in silence. The other Kramnik elders' gazes oscillated between the patriarch and his scion, as if the import of their actions had just become clear.

"What I'd really like to know," Patrice continued, "is why you thought it was in the clan's interests to try to salve your boy's ego this way. Or were you sincere about fearing toxic chemical runoffs and devastating levels of noise?"

"We," Douglas grated, "are one of the poorest and weakest clans in northeastern Alta. Our sheets and towels are barely keeping us above water, and they won't do so if the Terrells make further significant advances with their spiders. We have Teodor Chistyakowsky to thank for that particular worry, and it looms larger with each passing day. If we want stature, we're going to have to scratch for it: either by innovating our own craft faster than the Terrells and any others can advance theirs, or by acquiring some sort of leverage over a more powerful clan that we can use to force our way into other lines. Do you find that to be an accurate statement of Clan Kramnik's interests, Patrice? Do the rest of you?"

No one spoke.

"I thought you might. Frankly, mechanical knitting and weaving were ancient long before the Hegira. No one's had a new idea in that direction in years...at least, no one here. So I went looking for leverage. I thought I had found some-with the bonus of a vigorous slap across the chops for Charisse Morelon's rejection of Bart's suit."

He swept the conference with his gaze.

"It didn't work out. So be it. We need another direction. I'm still looking for one. I hope the rest of you give it some thought from time to time. But I refuse to accept any odium for at least trying to get Clan Kramnik a little edge that might have been useful in advancing our fortunes."

"An edge," Alvah snorted, "is only useful when it cuts in your chosen direction. Martin Forrestal turned this one into a slash across our belly. I can only pray that it wasn't fatal. And," he said directly to the patriarch, "I hope you put some thought into what Hope is supposed to be about-why the Spoonerites fled here, and what they were looking to build. Just a little thought, Doug. Not just before Sacrifice Day dinners."

Douglas Kramnik felt his blood rising to his face. He fought to restrain the words that wanted to blast from his lips.

Your turn in this chair will come, Alvah. When I relinquish it to you, and not before. Learn patience before I decide to teach it to you with my own hands.

"Does anyone have a further comment?" he growled. "If not, let's go back to our usual routines."

The other elders rose and silently filed from the room. Douglas Kramnik waited until the last of them had departed, resumed his seat and covered his face with his hands.

I was so close. Most of them were with me. I could feel it.

It would have been the first government ever formed south of the peninsula, and I would have been its head.

My time will come. The damned Morelons can't last forever.

That doesn't mean they won't outlast me.

Maybe it's time for some fence-mending.

"Patrice."

Clan Kramnik's only spinster turned from the door to her suite to find her cousin Alvah striding up behind her.

"What is it, Alvah? I have a fair amount to get done before day's end."

"Just a thought for you, dear." Alvah Kramnik was the only male member of the clan who was both unmarried and older than Patrice herself. Though no two adult Kramniks exhibited a greater affinity, in council the two of them were at odds more often than not. Yet they tended to think alike. Whether that dampened or inflamed the sparks they struck from one another when among the other clan elders was a question on which Patrice was undecided.

She folded her arms and waited. He smiled enigmatically and gestured at her door. She opened it and ushered him in, and they seated themselves in her modest parlor.

After a moment's silence, she said "It's your party, Alvah. What's on your mind?"

He made a show of precisely arranging his limbs in the spindly chair. She waited with carefully husbanded patience.

Presently he said "Douglas does have a point about our economic precariousness, you know."

She shrugged. "Of course he does. We all know it. But he addressed two incompatible missions with one highly irregular method, and one that was all too likely to fail right from the outset, at that."

Alvah nodded. "Agreed."

Her eyebrows rose. "Do you agree that he ought to have known?"

"Oh, beyond all question," Alvah said. "But this is part of the downside of having one of our younger men as head of the clan. Douglas's assets of energy and commitment are partly offset by his regrettable rashness and his tendency to place personal matters before clan priorities."

Patrice smirked. "And his imbecile of a son."

Alvah chuckled. "Well, yes, that too." He sat back, folded his hands across his middle, and regarded her in silence.

The old bastard must have a ploy in mind.

"I can't be certain why," she said, "but I have an uncanny suspicion."

"Oh? About what?"

She grinned wickedly. "About you, you schemer. That you have an idea about how to recover something from the wreck of Douglas's gambit. That it's complex, and devious, and not entirely savory, and that you'll need my support at the minimum to ram it through the elders' council."

His eyes widened as he mimed innocence. "Why Patrice, how could you imagine senile old me, barely able to get out of bed unassisted, capable of vermiculations of such involute intricacy?"

"Senile old you?" Patrice cackled. "The one and only man on Alta these past twenty years to get my pants off?"

"Ah, so you remembered!"

"Vaguely. A week is such a long time."

"I seem to recall that we enjoyed ourselves, cousin."

"One of us surely did."

He laughed, and she joined him.

"So," Patrice said, "what's your idea?"

Alvah tented his trousers over his knees and hunched toward her.

"Forrestal's counterpunch included both a carrot and a stick," he said. "The stick was obvious enough: the imputation that the good people of Jacksonville were about to act like a State, in defiance of all Hope precedent, at the urging of a man with a personal grudge to settle. The carrot was the mass driver: a device that doesn't yet exist, might not exist any time soon, and even if it does, will require expensive, high-tech collaboration with other communities to put it to commercial use. Which of these would you say was more persuasive?"

She gave it a moment's thought.

"The mass driver," she said, "even though it's as notional and contingent as you said. No one is sincerely terrified that the most prestigious clan on Alta would poison his children or keep him up at night with engine noise. The community would have been satisfied with firm assurances, especially since Althea Morelon stated her intentions candidly at the registry office. Douglas was a fool even to suggest such things."

Alvah nodded. "We agree. But might there be anyone in the environs who would regard that notional, contingent carrot as more like a stick?"

She peered at him, and he smiled.

"Grenier Air Transport?" she said.

He nodded again. "My thoughts exactly. Would you care to join me for dinner?"

"Certainly, cousin. And afterward?"

Alvah Kramnik's eyebrows rose. "So you do remember the encounter, then?"

She smiled. "I suppose so. At least, I think it was you. My eyes are no longer what they were, you know."

He grinned. "Perhaps so, but the rest of you remains excellent."

"Are you agreeable, then?"

He rose and offered her his arm. She rose and took it. "My dear cousin, " he said, "you hardly need to ask."

"I tried to get him to leave it alone," Barton Kramnik said.

Adam Grenier remained silent. He continued to tweak the injector assembly of Kramnik's ultralight.

The Kramnik scion finished his apple juice, swallowed audibly, and let the empty carton fall to the floor of the hangar. "He was insistent. Sometimes I think the rejection meant more to him than it did to me."

Grenier nodded. He yanked the throttle cable to trigger a jet of fuel, listened for the whistle that would testify to an excess of air in the stream, and heard nothing.

"I think there's a coalition forming to pull Dad out of the power seat," Kramnik continued. "You could see around the table that the others thought his play was ill-advised. If it costs the clan anything at all, like as not they'll vote him out when the elders meet next."

"I think that will do it," Grenier said. He pulled the cover down over the ultralight's engine, fastened it closed, and wiped his hands free of fuel residue on the rag that hung from his toolbelt. "Just keep an eye on your fuel consumption on the way home."

"Adam," Kramnik said, "don't you have anything to say about all this?"

Grenier shook his head. "Why should I?"

"Because..." Kramnik swallowed through a dry mouth. "Because you're my friend."

Grenier said nothing. He bent to pick up Kramnik's discarded juice box, tossed it accurately at a nearby trash receptacle, and started toward his little office.

"Adam!"

Grenier halted and frowned. "What now, Bart? I fixed your plane. I listened to your story. I can't offer you any advice about how to cope with your father, or the Morelons, or your viper's nest of a family. Frankly, I'd rather not have heard about any of it. I have troubles enough of my own."

Kramnik's brow furrowed. "Huh?"

"You heard about the mass driver, didn't you?"

"Well, yeah."

Grenier regarded him as one might view a tragically slow child, so completely bereft of a rational faculty as to require the supervision of competent others all the way to the grave. "D'you really think a manned aircraft ferry will be able to compete economically with a ballistic delivery service?"

"But-"

"It can't, Bart. A mass driver can fire loads at its targets as fast as it can rack them up and recharge its capacitors. Its only expense is power. I've got three planes and five trained pilots. The planes have to be maintained and the pilots have to be paid. Time off. Vacations. The occasional bonus for above-and-beyond. That contraption will ruin me." He kicked savagely at an empty compressed-air tank, caught it off-center, and watched it skitter away. "All I can hope is to get out of this business cleanly before it's ready for action."

Kramnik gaped at him.

"Frankly," Grenier said, "I wish your father had pulled it off. I was there, toward the back of the crowd. If he'd been more persuasive, I'd have backed him however he wanted. The damned Morelons have run roughshod over this community for far too long already."

"Is that so?"

Both heads swerved to find Althea Morelon leaning against the hangar entrance, arms crossed over her breasts.

She straightened, smiled pleasantly at each of them, and ambled forward. Kramnik instinctively backed away; Grenier sidled toward his rack of heavy-duty wrenches.

"Adam! No sidearm?" Althea tsked. "Such a shame. Because if you move any closer to that rack, I'm afraid I'll have to tear off your arm and beat you to death with it."

Grenier stopped.