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father looked at me again, and I pulled out my shirt and showed the burn streak on my left side, now bright red and painful. It was a certain relief to have this known, for I had had to keep myself from flinching when I moved my arm.
    He sighed. “I suppose it was bound to happen. Faith is too pretty.”
    Faith blushed more deeply, chagrined for her liability of beauty. She was the lightest-skinned among us, strongly showing that portion of our ancestry that was Caucasian, and which accounted in part for her pulchritude. I never understood why beauty should not be considered equal according to every race of man, and every admixture of races, but somehow fairness was the ideal. Spirit's developing features of face and body were almost as good as Faith's, but her darker skin and hair would prevent her from ever being called beautiful.
    I was perversely glad to see the tension relieved. “You're not angry?”
    “Certainly I'm angry!” my father exploded. "I am infuriated with the whole corrupt system! But we are victims, not perpetrators. I only wish you had found some more anonymous way to defend your sister.
    We are about to pay a hideous price for this mishap."
    I felt the rebuke keenly. How could I have saved Faith without antagonizing the scion? I didn't know, and now it was too late to correct the matter, but I knew I would be pondering it until I came up with a satisfactory, or at least viable, answer. Actually, “hideous price” turned out to be an understatement, but none of us had any hint of that then.
    “Now I must explain our situation,” my father said. My mother had quietly joined us as we returned to our house, our forfeited house, and now she sat beside Faith and took her hand comfortingly.
    My mother's given name was Charity, and it was an apt designation, though it did not match the normal run of names any more than the rest of ours did. We were a family somewhat set apart, being, I think, more intelligent and motivated than most, and it showed in our names. Our surname, Hubris, meant, literally, the arrogance of pride; it was a point of considerable curiosity to me how we had come by it, but I also had a certain arrogant pride in it, for it did lend us distinction.
    My mother, Charity, was not, and had never been, as pretty as Faith was now, but she was a fine and generous and supportive mother who, though I should blush to say it, still possessed more than a modicum of sex appeal. She was not a creature any man would be ashamed to have at his elbow. We three children were as different from our parents and each other as it was feasible to be; yet Charity's charity encompassed all our needs. She had a very special quality of understanding, an aspect of which I believe I inherited; but her use of it was always positive, in contrast to mine. Seeing her now, her dark hair tied back under a conservative kerchief, her delicate hands folded sedately in her lap—Faith inherited those hands!—her rather plain features composed—yet should she ever take the trouble to enhance herself the way Faith did, that plainness would vanish—I felt an overflowing of love that lacked, at the moment, any proper avenue of expression. She was my mother, a great and good woman though a peasant, and I sorely regretted bringing this affliction to her. Had I only known—yet of course I should have known! How could I have thought we could humiliate a scion with impunity, here in a dome on class-ridden, stratified Callisto?
    “Colonel Guillaume has offered us a place in the plantation dome,” my father said. “We must consider this offer on its merits, which are mixed. We must move from the dome of Maraud; the charge against our family can only be abated that way.” He held his hand aloft again, forestalling Spirit's impetuous interjection. “Yes, dear, I'm sure the incident was not as the scion states it, and theoretically in a court of law both sides should be heard. But our republic of Halfcal—” Callisto, I must