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hour’s hardship. Yet, for all of that, Lady Nora is typical of the great ladies of our time--all of them descendants of generations of warrior queens who helped their men tame not nations, but whole star systems. Pampered she might be, but she was made of stern stuff.
    She swept into the room (not meaning to, but unable to move without the grace and power of a starship of the line) and began her interrogation. “Ariane is well?” Fruitless question. She knew perfectly how well Ariane was at the moment, as well as where she was and how she was spending her leave.
    “Yes, Lady Mother,” I said. “I was thinking of joining her at Gonlanburg.”
    Nora frowned. “You want to go off-world so soon? You have barely gotten home, Kier.”
    She meant “home” to the estate, not home to Rhada. She was too tactful to mention the weeks of the military inquiry.
    “Tell me about the creature you captured, Kier,” she said, settling on a formless chair that rose to greet her.
    “I didn’t exactly ‘capture’ her, Mother,” I said cautiously.
    “I understand she was very lovely. Exotic, of course. One expects that. But physically quite--appealing.”
    I suppressed an urge to smile at that. Mother is a Great Vegan, and Vegans are notoriously prudish. The fact that the alien girl had lain naked within her life-support capsule would have already been reported to the Lady Nora, who would somehow feel this reflected discredit on whatever strange and alien culture dispatched the girl and the black starship on their incomprehensible mission.
    “Quite appealing, Lady Mother,” I said.
    “Ariane said ‘beautiful.’ Yes, I think that was the word she used.”
    Ah , I thought, the mysterious female ways of my cyborg alter-ego . Was it possible for a slip of a girl of fifteen metric tons to be jealous in the ordinary female way? Devious, she was. Of that I could be absolutely certain.
    “Well,” I said. “I suppose one might--in certain circumstances--think the girl was beautiful, Lady Mother.-’
    “Silver eyes, I am told.” Lady Nora had been told a good deal, and about things more significant than the color of an alien’s eyes.
    “Yes. Silver,” I said, remembering them with a shiver--the way she seemed to be looking at me through that liquid-filled chrysalis.
    “Unusual,” Lady Nora murmured. “But scarcely unique. There are silver-eyed blacks on Bellatrix Delta V.” My mother settled the embroidered panels of her gown about her so that she looked even more regal, very much a part of the old room in the ancient house of the Rhadan kings. “Kier,” she said, regarding me with steady, cobalt-blue eyes, “you know that there are some members of our family who consider me a domineering woman...”
    “Surely not, Mother,” I said with gentle irony
    “Oh, yes,” she went on with classic disregard of my small thrust. “Your granduncle of Aurora, for example. And all of his kin. Marfan of Xanthis, Kreon, all the Melissande connections. In fact, almost all of that side of the family--”
    “Father’s relatives,” I said.
    “Quite so. Your father’s kinfolk. All rather socialist in their leanings for nobles of the Empire, you know. Your father was a dear man, and I loved him very much, Kier. But he never lived up to his breeding, not as he should have. He was warleader and star king, after all.”
    “He was Starkahn of the Rhadan Republic, Lady Nora,” I said with a coolness of formality in my tone. I knew what was coming, more or less, and I wanted to prevent an argument if possible. The Lady Nora was a royalist to her fingertips. I could not imagine that she would ever become involved in active treason against the Republic, but one could not avoid knowing where her sympathies lay--nor could not escape her aristocratic conviction that every event, every chance, should be exploited toward a restoration of the old regime.
    “Starkahn, then,” my mother said scornfully. “We know what the title means, you and I,