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Harrington Freehold,

County Duvalier,

Duchy of Shadow Vale,

Planet Sphinx,

Manticore Binary System,

August 1853 PD.


“So, how are you and Dr. Illescue getting along, Alley?” Rebecca Harrington asked with a wicked smile, as she sliced the loaf of rye bread, still warm from the oven.

“Oh, God!” Allison looked up from stirring the clam chowder and rolled her eyes. “Did you really have to mention him just before we eat?”

“She has a low and inappropriate sense of humor,” Alexander Harrington observed to no one in particular while he set the table.

At the moment, only he and Rebecca actually lived in the Harrington freehold’s enormous house, although Richard made it a point to visit regularly. Upon occasion, however, the Harrington clan had actually needed all that space. Alexander Harrington was one of nine siblings, four of them twins. Which, according to him, was the reason he and Rebecca had stopped at five.

“Do you really want to talk about the low sense of humor of the woman who said yes when you proposed?” Rebecca shot back, and Alexander chuckled.

Alexander and Alfred could have been clones, Allison thought, whereas Richard had Rebecca’s fair hair and green eyes. He was closer to merely mortal in height, as well. Some, anyway. Sometimes—all right, usually—Allison felt like a midget around her in-laws. Alfred’s sisters favored their father more than mother, and the shortest of them was almost 178 centimeters tall. Even Rebecca was a good seven centimeters taller than her own 157 centimeters.

“All joking aside,” Rebecca laid down the bread knife and carried the sliced bread out of the kitchen, “did your . . . counseling session bear fruit?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Allison lifted the kettle carefully and carried it, too, across to the crown oak dining room table Karl Zivonik Harrington had hand-built three T-centuries ago. She’d adapted better to Sphinx’s heavier gravity than she’d really expected, but she still used her personal counter-grav a lot, and its area of effect was only 150 centimeters across. The moment when something the size of the kettle crossed the boundary into Sphinx’s normal gravity and suddenly weighed a third again more than it ought to could be tricky.

And “tricky” was not a good thing for a Harrington-sized kettle of steaming hot clam chowder to become. Even after six T-years of watching Alfred put food away, Allison was awed by the calories required to stoke a Meyerdahl-mod metabolism. The splash if she dropped it would be extreme.

But she got it situated on the warming island down the center of the table without misadventure, and felt a small stir of pleasure that neither Rebecca nor Alex had offered to carry it for her or hovered watchfully.

“He’s backed off on the stupid jokes, at least,” she continued, settling into her chair. “I think he was convinced he was actually being funny.”

“Really?” Rebecca smiled at her. “Funny. From Alfred’s description, coupled with what you had to say about his idea of ‘humor,’ I would’ve said the problem was that he was an unmitigated prick with a bruised male ego.”

Allison snorted a laugh.

“Alfred’s not the best judge of Franz’s ‘bruised male ego,’” she said. “Mind you, his ego is one reason he can convince himself he has a sense of humor. He’s undeniably envious of all those centimeters of Alfred’s, too, and the fact that I wound up with Alfred instead of him chafes. For that matter, he’s way too contemptuous of the military in general. But he also knows at least some of what happened to me, and he knows Alfred pulled me out of it.” Her eyes darkened, but she’d reached a point where she could speak about it almost—almost—as if it had happened to someone else. “I doubt he and Alfred will ever like each other, but I honestly don’t think there was any rejected ex-lover angst behind it.”

Rebecca nodded, although it was obvious she cherished a few reservations.

“Anyway,” Allison continued as Alex began ladling chowder into three bowls, “when I explained why I didn’t find his continual comparisons between Manticore and all things Beowulfan humorous, he shut them down pretty quickly. I think he truly hadn’t realized he might be putting me on the spot. He meant it as a joke and expected me to share the laugh with him and his audience. I doubt it ever occurred to him that he might cause anyone to think of me as one of those Beowulfers.”

Rebecca nodded again, this time in understanding. Manticore saw a lot of Beowulfers, given the Junction, and Allison was scarcely the first Beowulfer to marry into a Manticoran family, or vice versa. Despite which, too many citizens of Beowulf had a towering awareness of their own star nation’s antiquity and role in the Solarian League’s creation and weren’t shy about looking down their noses at the single-system polity that had the effrontery to call itself a Star Kingdom.

“You said your little talk helped with the jokes,” Alex said. “Not so much with the other part, I take it?”

“No,” Allison sighed. “Although, to be fair, I’m afraid that ship had already translated out by the time I sat him down.”

Both Harringtons grimaced in understanding. Her own department head and some of the other senior physicians had always known about Allison’s family connections. The rest of the hospital’s staff had known only that she was a Beowulfan Semmelweis University graduate who’d been named Chou before she married.

Now the secret was out, and some people inevitably assumed family connections, not ability, explained her rapid rise in the QEH Department of Genetics, which was less than helpful in her determination to be Dr. Harrington and succeed or fail on her own merits.

“Well,” she said, helping herself to a slice of bread before she passed the plate across to Alex, “if he’s the worst of my problems, I’m luckier than a lot of people. And, on a happier note, I got a letter from Alfred just before I climbed onto the shuttle!”

“You did?” Rebecca laughed. “The boy’s obviously still besotted with you.” She rolled her eyes. “We were lucky to get a letter every six T-months!”

“I don’t know about ‘besotted,’” Allison replied with a demure smile, “but I do have a few sanctions denied to a mere parent. And I told him I wouldn’t hesitate to apply them when he got home unless he wrote.”

“Good for you!” Alex said with a chuckle.

“So, how is he?” Rebecca asked, reaching for her spoon.

“I think he misses us more than he wants to admit, but he seems really happy as Scepter’s surgeon. He says it’s a little boring—as he puts it, Scepter’s basically just looming ominously while the lighter units do the actual commerce protection stuff—but I can tell he’s enjoying the assignment. It’s a lot more of a general practitioner slot than anything he had at Bassingford, but that’s good for him. And he’s so much happier to be keeping people healthy than he was as a Marine.”

“Bless the boy.” Rebecca’s eyes might have been a bit misty. Allison knew Alfred had never discussed Clematis—or, for that matter, her own rescue—as fully with his mother as he had with her, but Rebecca knew her son too well not to have guessed what he hadn’t told her.

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Allison said, smiling at her mother-in-law. “And, as if to refute your cruel and unnatural allegation that he was an irregular correspondent, he zipped his letter to me with one to you. I thought we might view mine together after dinner—I think you’ll get a laugh or two from some of it. Then you guys can view yours.”


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