She’d watched Geis as he and some of his officer-cadet friends entered the party. They were in the uniform of the Alliance Navy; the ball itself was a fund-raising event for the Tax Alliance and Geis had been into space for a couple of months on an Alliance warship.

She realised then that she hadn’t really looked at Geis for a year or two; not properly looked at him.

She had never liked uniforms, but Geis looked almost hand-some in his. He moved less awkwardly; he spotted a dark, trimmed beard which quite suited him and made him look older, and he had lost the puppy fat he’d carried through his mid-teens. She had drifted close to him, unseen, early on in the evening before the ball properly started, hearing him laughing lustily with his friends and hearing them laughing at what he said, and-perhaps, she told herself later, in the spell of those gales of male laughter-had determined then not to treat Geis with her usual disdain, should he ask her for a dance. She would see what happened, she thought, walking away from the young men. She would do nothing so petty and low as try to entrap her cousin just to prove something to her foolish little half-sister, but if he really had improved so, and if he did, at some point, maybe, ask her for a dance…

He asked her for the first dance. For the rest of the evening they hardly left each other’s side between dances, or each other’s arms during them.

She watched, as she stepped and moved and was held and turned and displayed and admired on the dance floor: Breyguhn’s eyes took on a look of surprise at first; then that slowly became hurt, until that was replaced by scorn and what she must have thought was recognition; upon which her eyes filled with tears, and finally with hate.

She danced on, exulting, not caring. Geis looked as dash-ing and handsome as Breyguhn had said. He had changed, he had more to talk about, had become more like a man than a boy. Even his remaining gaucheness seemed like enthusiasm; gusto, indeed. She listened to him and looked at him and danced with him and thought about him, and decided that had she not been exactly who she was, had she been just a little more like everybody else and just a little less difficult to please, she could almost have fallen for her cousin.

Breyguhn left the ball early with their father and his mistress, in a storm of tears. A duenna was left to wait for Sharrow. She and Geis danced until they were the last couple left on the dance floor and the band were making deliberate mistakes and taking long pauses between numbers. She even let Geis kiss her-though she didn’t respond-when they went out to the dawn-lit garden for some fresh air (her chaperone coughing delicately from a nearby bower), then she’d had herself taken home.

She had seen Geis face-to-face only twice in the two years after that; she had been away at finishing school, then started at Yadayeypon University, in both places discovering the fresh, unexpected and surprising pleasures of sex, and the power her looks and her birthright (judiciously deployed) gave her over young-and not so young-men who were vastly more moodily interesting and intellectually stimulating than cousin Geis, the part-time Navy goon and geekishly successful businessman.

The following year, at her father’s funeral, they’d exchanged a few words (though she’d overheard rather more), and when she did finally agree to meet him properly-at the launch of an airship (which he had named after her! The embarrassment!)-she had been rather curt with him, claiming she had been too busy to answer his letters, and just hated talking on the phone. He had looked hurt, and she’d felt a terrible, cruel urge to laugh.

She’d seen him once more before the war, a few months later, at a New Year party he’d thrown in a villa in the Blue Hills, in Piphram.

Then the Five Per Cent War had finally broken out, and she had joined the anti-Tax forces, partly because theirs seemed the more romantic cause, partly because she considered them the more politically progressive side, and partly as a kind of revenge.

And if it had done nothing else-she thought, as she drained her glass and smiled ruefully at the great wide screen that was the window into Bencil Dornay’s party-the war had finally signalled the end of her wilfully extended and determinedly wanton girlhood.

And more, she thought, smiling sadly at the dancing, happy people on the other side of the windows, remembering that last engagement, frantic and terrible and pitiless in the cold and the silence of the dark seconds of space between Nachtel and Nachtel’s Ghost.

And more.

She made to finish her drink, but the glass was already dry.

A little later she returned to the party.

“Your grandfather was a truly great man, my lady. The great are always seen as a threat by the lesser; they can’t help it. It’s not just jealousy, though there was much of that in your grandfather’s case. It is an instinctive reaction; they know (without knowing that they know) that there is something awesome in their midst, and they must make way for it. That is cause for resentment; an ignoble and small-minded emotion, like jealousy, and just as endemic. Your grandfather was brought down by a great mass of small people, dear lady. They were worms; he was a raptor. He had the vision to look out of our furrow, and the courage to do what had to be done, but the worms fear change; they think worm thoughts, ever burrowing and recycling, never raising their heads from the loam. You know, your grandfather could have lived the life of a great duke; he could have maintained the worth of the house and made it gradually greater still, he could have encouraged science, the arts, built great buildings, endowed foundations, become a World Counsellor, helped control the Court; and no doubt have enjoyed what personal happiness was ever to be his. Instead he gambled it all; the way the truly great must if they are not to lie on their deathbed and know that they have wasted their talents, that the life they have lived has been one many a lesser man could have lived. We call what transpired fail-ure, but I tell you it cannot fail to inspire those of us who keep his memory. He lives on, in our hearts, and he will receive the respect he deserves one day, when the world and the system have changed to become a temple fit for his memory to be venerated within.”

Sharrow stood before the giant portrait of her grandfather in a private room of the overhang house. Bencil Dornay had offered to show her his personal shrine while a group of mime artists were performing in the reception room.

Gorko was depicted in the painting as a giant of a man with a huge, carved face and great bristling whiskers; his body looked exaggeratedly muscled under a tight riding tunic and the bandamyion mount beside him looked out of scale. Something like fire shone from Gorko’s staring eyes. The portrait was at one end of the narrow room, draped in plush hangings. Apart from the painting, the room was empty.

“Hmm,” Sharrow said. “Fate preserve us from greatness.”

Dornay shook his head. “Dear lady, don’t let the mean-of-spirit infect you.” He glanced at the tall portrait. “Greatness is his legacy, and our hope.”

“Do we really need greatness, Mister Dornay?” she asked him. He turned slowly and walked towards the doors at the far end of the room, and she followed him. “We must need it, my lady. It is all that leads us onward. With it we may dream. Without it, we merely subsist.”

“But so often,” she said, “the people we call great seem to lead us to destruction.”

“Their own, indeed,” Dornay said, opening the doors and ushering her into a small hallway. “And those around them, I dare say. But destruction can be a positive act, too; the clearing out of rot, the excising of diseased tissue, the brushing away of the old to make room for the new. We are all so loath to offend, to cause any pain. The great have the vision to see beyond such pettiness; do we curse the doctor for some small pain when it saves us a greater one? Does any worthwhile adult blame his parents for the occasional slap as a child?”