“We’re going to vote now,” Hobart was saying. “Right now, and get it behind us, so we can move on to important external issues.”
The warning chimes of Vote in Progress rang through the chamber, and Brun’s screen lit with the proposals. Had Hobart really read through all of them? She struggled through the convoluted legalese, trying to figure out what they really meant. Kevil Mahoney had always said that legal language had more subtext than any fiction ever written, but she had not actually studied law. Some didn’t look that bad; the reasoning as given had a plausible ring to it. She chewed on her lip, struggling to find the hidden meanings.
Safer to vote against all of them, just in case. She hoped that was safer. She entered her votes, and sat back to watch the others. Kell, tip of his tongue just showing, was marking his votes slowly, one by one. Harlis had finished. And Hobart Conselline . . . Hobart was watching her, she realized.
Time dragged on, as they waited for others to complete their votes. Most seemed to have had their minds made up ahead of time, but a few earnest souls were bent over their desks, clearly checking every word of every proposition, and comparing it to other texts.
The outcome of the voting was less a surprise than it might have been . . . the bylaws changes passed, and the next vote confirmed Hobart Conselline as Speaker for a normal term. The speeches had been confusing; on both sides of what was clearly becoming a deep division, speakers seemed choked with outrage, incoherent. Brun kept quiet, watching carefully and making notes. Buttons, she saw, did the same.
After the meeting ended, they went back to Appledale in the same car, by mutual consent talking only of things they could see from its windows. After supper, they settled to business, and finally Brun’s big brother treated her as an equal.
“I have to say I was impressed with your performance today.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t pout, flounce, flirt, or storm. You sat there being attentive, intelligent, and menacing.”
“Menacing?”
“Didn’t you see our new Speaker watching you during the voting?”
“Yes. Made me itchy.”
“As well it should. The man’s odd, Brun. Well—Mother’s gone to Sirialis, I hear. Are you staying here?”
“For now, yes. I’d planned to be the person on site to deal with the Grand Council, unless you want to take it over.”
“Are you sure? Because if you can keep an eye on the Council, then I can concentrate on what our dear uncle was up to with the various family companies. It’s hard without Kevil—”
“I’m sorry,” Brun said.
He looked at her a long moment, and she knew that he knew what she meant—sorry for everything, for becoming the issue by which the Family lost ground, as well as the reason for their father’s assassination.
“Don’t be sorry for being yourself,” Buttons said finally. “And don’t be sorry for coming back—it’d be worse if you hadn’t.”
“I don’t see how,” Brun said.
“I can think of a dozen ways,” Buttons said. “And so can you, if you take the trouble. But that’s not what matters right now. We’ve got attacks on all fronts—where’d you put the babies, by the way? I don’t want them used as hostages against us.”
“Cecelia de Marktos took them somewhere. She’s trustworthy—”
“Well, unless she puts them in a barn and tries to turn them into racehorses,” Buttons said, with the first genuine grin she’d seen on his face. “Grooms, I wouldn’t mind, but you never know with her.”
Brun laughed aloud. “You’re right—but I don’t think she has them with her.”
“Good. As long as they aren’t going to cause us trouble—”
“Not for another ten or twelve years . . . I don’t want to think about them as teenage boys. . . .”
“If we have a Familias Regnant in ten years, we can worry about it then.” Brun glanced at him; his face had gone somber, and he looked far older than his age.
“Buttons—do you agree with Hobart about that?”
“That the Familias is in danger, yes. That it’s in danger because of lax leadership in the past, no. It’s his policies that endanger it most. This business of restricting the franchise—one way we’ve had of relieving strain between Families is that the small know they can enlarge by having more Seatholders. That’s let them take in outsiders as clients. Dad said the movement of power from one sept to another was a major factor in keeping the Familias stable. That’s why they instituted the kingship, originally.”
“Why can’t Hobart see it?” Brun asked.
“I don’t know. Back when I was a boy of maybe ten—and you were still in the nursery—I overheard some of the adults talking about how the new rejuv methods might change things politically. But of course, I was too young to follow it. I remember Dad and Uncle Harlis arguing, though. When I asked questions in school, nobody seemed to understand them, and later, when I was in the Royals, everyone talked as if the repeating rejuvenations were just a way to stay young for a normal lifespan, not an actual extension. It was—oh, the year that Lepescu came to Sirialis, I think it was—that Charlie Windetsson got drunk at a mess dinner and pointed out that if our parents never grew old, we had no reason to grow up. There was no future for us. Everyone laughed, and drank, and—I remember a sort of cold chill. I left the party early, called Sarah, and that’s when we decided to marry.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well . . . you were being wild at the time. Most of our set were, and I suddenly saw it myself. Our parents had been more grown up—working in family business in some way—by the time they finished their education. Sometimes even before. But their parents barely lived past their Centuries, and retired from Family work in their eighties. The first rejuv upset that a little, but the new one . . . I came home, and talked to Dad about it. He promised that he and Mother would resign their duties while I was still young—he transferred stock to me right after that Hunt Ball, and encouraged me to be active in Council as well as business.”
“And I thought you’d gone all stuffy . . .”
“So I had. But I didn’t want to go from childhood to childhood—rich enough to rejuv and be twenty or thirty all my life, with nothing to do. That’s no way to live—”
“But Uncle Harlis,” Brun said. She wanted information, not a lecture on lifestyle. “What about him?”
“He saw multiple rejuvs as a way of maintaining Family power. He wanted rejuv restricted to the Seated Families at first. So did some others, but the proposal didn’t pass. Then he tried an age restriction: no one under eighty should be eligible. That didn’t pass either, of course. The Ageists, who had used the biological problems with the earlier procedure to make repeated rejuvs illegal, expected his support with the new procedure, but he didn’t go along.”
“So . . . you’re saying the population grew?”
“Not just that. The birth rate in our set actually dropped, because people could wait to have children until they were fifty or sixty or older. It’s the shape of the population that really changed, and the power structure. Age always did confer an advantage of experience, and now it could do so without losing any advantage of physical strength and energy. Younger people needed to find new opportunities because the old weren’t dying—or even retiring. And of course people wanted rejuv, and especially when they found out how useful it was in some kinds of illness and injury. Everyone rich enough wanted it. And the Consellines wanted the profit.”
“Ummm . . . which meant expanding, somehow . . . like Dad’s proposal to open new colonies?”
“As a temporary measure. Some others wanted to annex adjacent territories, but Dad opposed spatial expansion, on the grounds that we couldn’t serve all we had. And why alienate neighbors when we had planets within the Familias outline which could be settled? But he wanted more support for colonies, too—he had been pushing the Colonial Office to make allowances for the less stable ecosystems of the worlds now being opened. That translates into concessions for the companies—and families—purchasing settlement licenses.”