But stronger than that, there was the vague feeling that if she and Alfred decided to have another child now, specifically to inherit Honor’s steading, it would somehow be a betrayal of the daughter they’d lost. It would be as if… as if she’d been nothing more than a glob of plastic, squeezed out by a robotic assembly line, which could be replaced by any other glob from the same line. It was a ridiculous and illogical way to feel, but that didn’t make the emotion any less powerful.

And then there’s my own attitude towards inherited titles, isn’t there? she asked herself after a moment, and snorted wryly while she nibbled harder on the stylus.

Most off-worlders, impressed with Beowulf’s reputation for idiosyncratic personal life styles and sexual inventiveness, never realized how conformist the planet truly was. Allison had frequently wondered if that was because the “norm” to which its citizens conformed was such a liberalized template, but the pressure not to offend the system or offend the preconceptions upon which the template rested was only too evident to a native Beowulfan. A person could be anything she wanted… so long as what she wanted to be came off the menu of choices approved by the planet’s social—and economic—consensus, and everyone was so damned smug about how superior their “open-mindedness” was to all those other, backward planets.

Yet for all its emphasis on stability and orderliness, Beowulf had no such thing as a hereditary monarchy or aristocracy. It was a sort of representative, elective oligarchy, governed by a Board of Directors whose members were internally elected, in turn, from the memberships of an entire series of lower-level, popularly elected boards which represented professions, not geographical districts, and it had worked—more or less, and despite occasional glitches—for almost two thousand years.

Coming from that background, she’d always been mildly amused by the aristocratic Manticoran tradition. It hadn’t impinged directly upon her or her yeoman husband and his family, and she’d been willing to admit that it did a better job than most of governing. Indeed, she’d heaved a huge sigh of mental relief when she realized that, aristocratic or not, the Star Kingdom’s society was willing to leave people alone. She’d delighted in scandalizing her more staid Sphinxian neighbors for almost seventy years, but very few of them had ever realized that it was because she could. That however much some citizens of her adopted star nation might disapprove of her, that mind-numbing, deadly reasonable, and eternally patient Beowulfan pressure to conform to someone else’s ideal and “be happy” simply did not exist there. Yet grateful as she was for that, and deeply as she had come to love her new homeland, the notion of inheriting a position of power and authority, however hedged about by the limitations of the Star Kingdom’s Constitution, had always struck her as absurd.

Maybe it’s the geneticist in me. After all, I know how much accident goes into anyone’s genetic makeup!

But that absurd notion had become something much less amusing the day Honor became Steadholder Harrington. The notion that her Honor had somehow transmuted into a great feudal lady had taken some getting used to. In fact, she never had gotten used to it—not really—before Honor’s murder. But she’d seen the changes in her daughter, recognized the way that something deep inside her answered to the challenge of her new duties. And one thing Honor would never knowingly have done was leave her Harringtons—or her adoptive planet—with a political crisis like the one Clinkscales had just described.