Echoes Of Honor

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William Alexander had seen entirely too many formal dinners in his life. Unlike his older brother, he actually enjoyed social events, but formal dinners like this one were too much a part of his everyday political life even for him. Most of the time they were just business, about as exciting and enjoyable as a sprained ankle.

But this one was different. It was the first Grayson state dinner he had ever attended, and he was one of the honored guests rather than one of the anxious hosts. That would have been an enormous relief all by itself, but the Graysons’ welcome was also genuine and heartfelt. And the dinner gave him a chance to sit here and think about all he’d seen and discovered over the last two days. There was more than enough new information to make his head spin, but he was devoutly grateful that he’d come, and not just to serve as the Prime Minister’s personal spokesman when it came to explaining the delay in building up Eighth Fleet. No, he’d learned things from this trip that he could never have learned sitting home on Manticore, and that would have been ample justification for the journey all by itself.

It was odd, he reflected, how many of the Star Kingdom’s leaders—himself included, at times—tended to think of Grayson as an immature society still suffering from the barbarism of youth. His tour of the Blackbird Yard had begun undermining that perception in his own mind, but that had been only the start. The whirlwind tour of half a dozen Grayson ships High Admiral Matthews had arranged for Caparelli and himself, the tour of the brand new schools upon which Katherine Mayhew had conducted him, and his intensive conferences with Lord Prestwick and the rest of the Protector’s Council had hammered home the fact that whatever else these people were, they were neither crude nor unsophisticated. And here in the planetary capital of Austin, with its ancient stonework and narrow streets, the illusion of a 'young' society was particularly hard to sustain.

Unlike many colony worlds, the Star Kingdom had never experienced a neo-barbarian period. Its colonists had picked up exactly where they’d left off, as members of a technic society. Indeed, thanks to the farsighted investments of Roger Winton and the original leaders of the Manticoran expedition who’d set up the Manticore Colony Trust back on Old Earth, they’d actually found instructors waiting for them to bring them up to speed on all the advances humanity had made during the six hundred years of their cryogenic voyage. Not even the Plague of 1454 had seriously shaken their grip on technology—or their fundamental confidence that they were in control of their own destinies.

But Grayson had experienced neo-barbarianism. It had been smashed back to its bedrock and begun all over again, and that experience had left its people a legacy of awareness. Unlike their Manticoran allies, the Graysons’ ancestors had been forced to confront and resolve the fundamental clash between what they had thought was true and what actually was true, and in the process they had developed a mindset in which the question genuinely was the answer. And that, Alexander told himself, was scarcely the mark of 'youthful barbarism.' The Grayson answers to the questions of how to build a society had been different from those of the Star Kingdom, yet unlike Manticorans, the Graysons, by and large, were willing to go on asking and examining, and Alexander found that a humbling thought. Manticorans seldom really questioned where they were going as a culture, or why. They might argue about their course—as, for example, in the endless, bitter ideological disputes between his own Centrists and Countess New Kiev’s Liberals—but that was because both sides were already confident they knew the answers... and each was convinced the other didn’t. There was a certain smugness (and shallowness) about that narrowly focused certainty and dismissal of any opposing viewpoint, and for all the caricatures some Manticorans drew of Graysons, few of Benjamin Mayhew’s subjects could ever be called 'smug.'

That was even more surprising to Alexander when he reflected that the human civilization on this planet was twice as old as that of the Star Kingdom, and that age showed in the sense of antiquity which clung to the older portions of Benjamin’s capital. The narrow streets of the Old Quarter, built to accommodate animal-drawn carts and wagons, and the half-ruinous walls of fortifications built to resist black powder and battering rams still stood in mute testimony to the battle this planet had fought to claw its way back from the brink of extinction to where it now stood, and it had waged that epic struggle all alone. No one had even known its people were here to help—assuming anyone could have been bothered to help them anyway. No doubt that was largely what produced that impression of towering conservatism on casual observers who only skimmed the surface. This planet had found its own answers, developed its own highly distinctive identity without interacting with the interstellar template of the rest of humanity... and in a way that no one from the Star Kingdom would ever understand without coming here and seeing it, it was Grayson which was the elder partner in the Alliance.

He sat back in his chair and sipped iced tea while he looked around the huge formal setting of the Old Palace’s Great Hall. Iced tea was uncommon in the Star Kingdom, where the beverage was usually served hot, but it was a Grayson staple, and he found the flavor added by the sugar and twist of lemon intriguing. It had serious potential as a summer drink back home, he decided, and made a mental note to introduce it at his next political dinner.

But the note was an absent one, and he felt the antiquity of Grayson yet again as he let his eyes wander up the banners hanging from the ceiling. The Great Hall lay at the very heart of the Old Palace, a sprawling stone structure dating from just after the Civil War, built for a warrior king named Benjamin IV. The Civil War had been fought with the weapons of an industrial age, however crude and primitive the tanks and napalm and first- generation nukes of the time might seem by modern standards, but the Old Palace had followed the architectural traditions of an earlier age. In no small part, Alexander suspected, that had stemmed from Benjamin the Great’s determination to drive home the lesson that the Sword now ruled—and no longer as first among equals. Like his new Constitution, his palace had been intended to make the Sword’s primacy crystal clear, and so he had built a huge, brooding pile of stone whose grim face reflected the iron power of his rule and whose sheer size overwhelmed anything a 'mere' steadholder might call home.

He’d overdone it just a bit, Alexander mused. In fairness, expecting a man who had already demonstrated his genius as a warrior, a strategist, a politician, a theologian, and a law-giver to also be a genius in matters architectural would probably have been a bit much, but this hulking stone maze must have been an eye-catching archaism even when it was brand new. And that had been six hundred years ago.

Is it possible Benjamin and Gustav Anderman were both just a little confused about which age they really lived in? he wondered. After all, Anderman thought he was what’s-his-name—Frederick the Great, reincarnated—didn’t he? I wonder who Benjamin thought he was?

But whoever or whenever Benjamin had thought he was, or the fact that his palace had been modernized several times in the last six centuries—and despite the fact that the Mayhew family had moved delightedly to the much younger Protector’s Palace next door sixty years ago—the Old Palace was still older than the entire Star Kingdom of Manticore... and its harsh fortress skeleton still showed unyieldingly. The banquet hall’s roof towered three stories above the marble-flagged floor, with square-cut rafters a meter on a side and blackened with time. Some of the banners which hung from those rafters were all but impossible to identify, their bright embroidery smoothed away and obliterated by time, but he knew the one which hung directly over Benjamin IX’s high seat. Its device was hard to make out, yet it hardly mattered. Benjamin the Great had personally ordered the standard of the vanished Steading of Bancroft hung over his chair here in the Great Hall, and there the trophy had stayed for six hundred T-years.

Yet for all its age, the Great Hall was also strangely modern, with state-of-the-art lighting, central heat (and air conditioning), and air filtration systems which would have done any space habitat proud. And the people sitting at the tables presented an equally odd mixture of the ancient and the modern. The women looked right at home in the Great Hall—like something out of a historical documentary in their elaborately embroidered, tabard-like vests, floor-length gowns, and elaborately coiffured hair—and the men in formal Grayson attire looked almost equally archaic. Alexander had no idea why any society would preserve the 'neckties' the men wore (he understood they had gone out of fashion several times over the planet’s history; what he didn’t understand was why in Heaven’s name they’d ever come back into fashion again), but it certainly made the Manticorans and other off-worlders scattered through the crowd stand out. Yet here and there among the Graysons were islands which appeared less anachronistic to his Manticoran eyes. Many of the women, including both of the Protector’s wives, wore far simpler gowns which Alexander’s well-trained fashion sense realized were modeled on those Honor Harrington had introduced. And some of the men had abandoned Grayson attire for more modern garb, as well.