Freedom's Scion

As they pass from mortal life, Armand and Teresza Morelon, foremost of all the residents of the wholly ungoverned world of Hope, lay a charge upon their granddaughter Althea: to break the lightspeed barrier, travel to Earth, and determine why no radio emissions from the cradle of Mankind have reached Hope since the Spoonerite Hegira. It shapes the young polymath’s life from that moment onward.

Althea spends her young adulthood playing Hope’s equities market, amassing a fortune for her mission. At 30 she falls in love with Martin Forrestal, a genius of another kind. The two are soon married.

Jacksonville is in flux. Armand Morelon had facilitated a mass relocation from the Hopeless peninsula, where Hope’s undesirables had sheltered, to the Jacksonville region. Douglas Kramnik, patriarch of one of the relocated clans, seeks payback for the long-ago diminution of his clan to outcast status. First, he seeks to marry Althea to his son and clan scion Barton. When Morelon matriarch Charisse declines the offer, his resentments swell. They culminate in an attempt to thwart Barton’s betrothal to Althea’s cousin Nora, which elicits an intervention by Althea herself.

Charisse tries but fails to dissuade Althea from going to the stars. Her failure couples to her desire for power, and she begins to scheme. Her attempts to become a local baroness are revealed through a discovery by Patrice Kramnik Morelon of irregularities in the clan’s finances. It costs Charisse her position, but doesn’t end her quest for power.

After Althea and Martin have tested Freedom’s Horizon, a ground-to-orbit spaceplane, Martin presses her with his desire for children. It proves catastrophic: the child is stillborn. The birth leaves Althea in lasting agony. She and Martin are estranged for two years. They reunite after an intervention by Barton and Nora, but the tensions between them have not been dispersed.

Hope's progress has emphasized biotechnology. Hallanson-Albermayer Corporation develops a medipod capable of healing its owner of virtually any ill. Althea and Martin become the first customers. Althea’s medipod provides her with cover for a telekinetic repair of her damaged nervous system. She’s guided by her “dead” grandfather Armand, who has taught her the use of her psi powers, as great as his own.

Althea and Martin establish an orbital lab on the Relic, the planetoid-ship that ferried the original Spoonerites to Hope. Groundside, Charisse abandons Clan Morelon and her husband Chuck without warning, and isn’t seen again for years. Althea soon discovers a way around the lightspeed limit, and a power source suitable for propelling a starship.

When Althea’s starship Liberty’s Torch is ready for its maiden voyage, she finds an unexpected ally in her desire to leave Martin safely behind: Barton Kramnik Morelon, who rose upon Charisse’s resignation to the Morelon patriarchy. Between them, they persuade Althea’s husband to remain on Hope for the three years of her journey to Eridanus cluster, signals from which hint at intelligent life.

At Eridanus, Althea is greeted by representatives of the Loioc, a humanoid race whose males have been deliberately rendered nonsentient, supposedly to put an end to violence among them. It’s their intention that Althea do the same to the men of Hope. Althea escapes their plot and destroys the space station the Loioc had used to suppress interstellar travel, but is infected with the nanites the Loioc women use to suppress the development of intelligence in men.

Althea returns to the Relic, hoping that her medipod has removed the nanites from her body, and discovers that in her absence, Hope has been visited by the supreme evil the Spoonerites fled Earth to escape: warfare.