'Hanged? With a rope?' Liberty's eyes widened in shock. One murder was bad enough, but following it with another? She shook her head. Alexander might have perfected his legal career in his dream, but the law that he'd dreamt up seemed very far from perfection.
'What an awful thing to imagine! I hope you weren't the one to kill him.' It was just a dream, she reminded herself. Alexander could murder hundreds in a dream and it wouldn't make him actually guilty of anything. He was talking about it so seriously, though, that it was hard not to be drawn in and do the same. She shook her head. 'I liked the other part of the dream better. Where you save the innocent people.'
What could she tell him about home that he didn't already know? Over the course of their discussions, she'd told him plenty about Rican politics, about how their meetings worked, and why the first generation had left Earth. What else? She thought for a moment, and then smiled. 'I never did tell you how I got the vote, did I? I'd been attending meetings since I was too young to know what was happening, but I got to be ten, and decided it wasn't right that everyone but me got to vote. I didn't count the babies, because you couldn't talk to them about it. So I asked, and you know what they said, don't you? No, Liberty, you're a child. But I'd been in meetings since forever and I knew that wasn't a good reason. I told them it was the same as people back on corrupt Earth saying someone had no vote just because they were female or had a bad government score or something.'
She spoke quickly, and paused only briefly for breath. 'And I got up in meeting and made my case, and I said that we had two kinds of votes. The first kind was whether something broke Charter, and I could recite the whole Charter back to front by then, I knew what broke it. The second was on resource allocation, and I said that claiming my mother could speak for me on that was faulty logic because I had my own set of interests, separate from hers, and by that time I worked on machine repairs that actually contributed to the colony and weren't just made for teaching me, and if I contributed why shouldn't I have my say? And-' she couldn't help a little grin here, at the memory, 'that's how I got my voting right.'