At least a third of his mission to Yeltsin’s Star was as much diplomatic as military. He was the older brother of the Cromarty Governments second ranking minister, and he'd served as Third Space Lord, an appointment with almost as many political as military implications, for three T-years during the Duke of Cromarty’s immediately previous stint as Prime Minister. As such, he found himself required to interact with Grayson political circles at the highest level, and since so much of politics was conducted under the guise of social activities, that meant he had to spend most of his theoretically "free" evenings at some party or another. Musical tastes aside, the rapidly changing mores of Grayson society could make that particularly wearing for someone from the Star Kingdom, where the notion that anyone could possibly consider men and women as anything but equals was as bizarre as the idea of treating a fever by bleeding, and tonight that persistent background sense of tension was only exacerbated by the professional concerns the latest dispatches from home had awakened in his mind.
Things would have been simpler, he mused, tipping even further back and resting his heels on the counter beside his dress sword, if Grayson society had simply stayed frozen where it had been before the planet joined the Alliance. In that case, he could have written its people off as a batch of backward barbarians, admirable in many ways, but still barbarians, and fitted himself into the proper role for interacting with them like an actor in a historical holo-drama. It wouldn't have been necessary to actually understand them; all he would have required was the right set of social cues to pretend he did.
Unfortunately, these days Grayson's social elite were as confused about what constituted proper behavior as any outsider. They were trying. White Haven had to give them that, and he rather admired how much they'd achieved in such a short period, but there was an underlying air of uncertainty. Some of society's grande dames resented the changes in the rules they'd learned as girls even more than the unreconstructed male conservatives resented their loss of privilege. Those groups formed a sort of natural alliance that clustered somewhere just beyond the reception line and radiated a prickly intensity as they clung grimly to the old rules and forms... which, of course, brought them into direct collision with their (mainly) younger counterparts who had embraced the notion of female equality with militant fervor.
Personally, White Haven found the more enthusiastic reformers more wearing than the reactionaries. He couldn't fault their motives, but the fact was that Benjamin IX had imposed a top-down revolution on his home world. He was remaking what had been, whatever its faults, a stable social order which had changed only slowly and incrementally over the last six or seven hundred years. With a very few exceptions, that social order's current members had only the vaguest notion of where they were headed, and many of the reformers seemed to believe stridency could substitute for direction. The earl was confident that most of them would get over it, they'd only been at it for a few years, and they were bound to figure some of it out with time, but at the moment, their main function at social gatherings seemed to be to make everyone else uncomfortable by aggressively demonstrating their rejection of the old order.
And, of course, the conflict between the old guard and the new put White Haven and other Manticorans squarely in a crossfire. The reactionaries regarded the foreigners as the sources of the infection which had attacked all they knew and held dear, while the reformers took it for granted that the Manticorans must agree with them... even though it was painfully obvious that all the reformers didn't agree with one another! Walking that sort of tightrope without giving offense, or, at least, further offense, to someone was almost as exhausting as it was irritating, and White Haven was heartily tired of it.
To be fair, the situation was better here. Harrington Steading had attracted the most open-minded citizens from Grayson’s other steadings from the outset, for only people like that had been willing to relocate themselves and their families in order to live under the personal rule of the first female steadholder in their planets history. More than that, the people at the party he'd just escaped had been given ample opportunity to see their Steadholder in action in political and social terms, as well as military ones. Whether she realized it or not, her status as their liege lady made her the ultimate arbiter of custom in her steading, and her steaders had watched her carefully and adapted their etiquette to fit her reactions to it. All of that left White Haven feeling far more at ease in Harrington than in most of Grayson’s other steadings, and he'd actually enjoyed at least the early phases of tonight’s ball to welcome Lady Harrington home. His need to escape it was more a matter of cumulative fatigue than anything else.
Besides, he had a lot on his mind after scanning the orders and briefing documents Lady Harrington had brought with her. He'd been pleased to learn that she would be assigned to Eighth Fleet, but some of the Office of Naval Intelligence’s reports made for disquieting reading, and he was supposed to brief High Admiral Matthews and Command Central on them as soon as possible. That was one of the main reasons for sneaking away from the party early. He needed to think about the data and fit the pieces together. And, he confessed, he had to decide how he felt about other aspects of the total package, for grim as some of ONI's analyses of the Peeps' activities might be, the notes on the RMN’s own Weapons Development Boards recommendations actually worried him even more.
The notion of making far-reaching and fundamental changes in the Fleets weapons mix at a time when the Star Kingdom was fighting for its very life struck him as highly questionable. He'd waged a bitter, decades-long prewar battle against the efforts of the material strategists of the jeune ecole to introduce half-baked weapon systems before they were fully tested. At times the battle of ideas had spilled over into venomous personal exchanges, and he deeply regretted the vicious feuds which those had spawned between some within the RMN's senior ranks, but he'd never dared let that affect his resistance. The jeune ecole was so in love with the idea of developing decisive advantages out of new technological departures that they seemed to believe any new idea was good simply because it was new, regardless of its actual tactical virtues or vices. Nothing he'd seen lately convinced him that they'd learned a thing from the present war, which meant...
His half-drifting thoughts broke off as someone else's heels clicked on the library floor. He snatched his feet off the console and let the chair snap upright, spinning it to face the door, then paused. He'd acquired far too much polish over the years to let consternation show, but it was harder to conceal than usual as he realized his hostess had caught him hiding from her party.
She stood just inside the doorway, tall and slender in the deceptively simple white gown and jade-green vest which had, for all intents and purposes, become her civilian "uniform," with Andrew LaFollet standing at her shoulder. Her brown hair spilled far down her back, in sharp contrast to the short-clipped fuzz she'd favored the first time White Haven saw her, and the golden Harrington Key and equally golden Star of Grayson glittered on her breast. She made a striking picture, he thought, and rose respectfully to greet her.
Honor watched the earl stand and smiled at his surprised expression. Of course, she told herself, stepping towards him to extend her hand, he didn't know that Harrington House's security systems had kept her advised of his location all evening long.
He bent over her hand, kissing it in proper Grayson fashion, then straightened, still holding it in a light clasp. White Haven was a tall, broad shouldered man, yet he and Honor stood virtually eye to eye, and she felt Nimitz's interested examination of the earl as the 'cat rose a bit higher on her shoulder.