Way Of The Clans

Dermot was describing the controlled breeding program, telling how the exalted Nicholas had seen the need to go beyond the normal birthrate to quickly create a race of the finest warriors. All the strife had severely depopulated the Clan worlds, and drastic action was necessary. Therefore, Nicholas had created the systematic eugenics program by which the 800 warriors in the Clans donated genetic materials to a type of baby factory that the scientists euphemistically called "Homes." These Homes specialized in combining the best traits from individual genes in the sperm and ova to make children who, it was hoped, would become warriors with the skills of their donors and without the negative characteristics that had caused so much strife and rebellion among the early settlers of the Clan planets. Raised in artificial wombs, each generation would, with the process of testing and retesting, become even freer of defects and more able than the generation before it.

With each Clan raising children assigned to sibling companies, or sibkos, the population growth that Nicholas envisioned began occurring quickly and in exponential fashion. Though not everyone in a sibko actually made it through the years of grueling tests to become a warrior, and some died trying, those who were assigned elsewhere made important contributions to the rest of society. As strong leaders and superintelligent citizens, they tended to take control of other castes. It was axiomatic that a trueborn was more likely to succeed in Clan society than a freeborn.

Aidan could barely keep up with the chanting responses that Dermot required. He was thinking of the trueborn-freeborn conflicts throughout society on the various settled planets. Out there, he had heard, where the life was nonwarrior and nonsibko, there had been some blemishes on the visage of Nicholas Kerensky's idealized society. For the most part, the basic divisions of society, trueborn/freeborn, the hierarchy of castes, service castes/worker castes, scientist caste/all other castes except warrior, warrior and everybody else, were maintained. Some planets were run so well that, it was said, very little trouble occurred. Critics of the social structure, and there were many, especially among the educated class who stayed on at universities, complained about the urge toward conformity that the caste system seemed to foster routinely and the lack of freedom for the individual. However, nobody ever listened to anyone in the teacher class, and so their ideas were merely additions to the clash of theories and philosophies that interested no one but the academics.

Dermot's current drone was on the subject of the codex, the meticulous record of a warrior's life from his first successful test to the day he died in a cockpit or in some other useful social role. It was in the analysis of the codex that scientists found genetic histories so worthwhile that the individual warrior's genetic materials might be retained for the gene pools.

"That is your goal," Dermot was saying, as he had said so often before, "the achievement of the ultimate honor. Imagine your deeds living on in history—that is, like a book, and like a book, fading with time. But being passed on genetically to the next generation. That is a taste of eternity, your line forever in the great Jade Falcon a

Aidan wanted to ask what in the name of the venerable Nicholas were the Jade Falcon a

Dermot was begi

Suddenly a hand grabbed him by the back of his neck. He did not need to squirm around to see whose. Only Falconer Joa

5

I see you are not listening," Joa

"Aff," Aidan just barely squeaked out, his throat suddenly contracting to its smallest possible dimensions. "Come with me."

Her hand still tightly on his neck, Joa

Releasing her grip on his neck, Joa

He was supposed to feel terror, he knew. But in eight months of training, Joa

In the Circle a cadet could hit back at a falconer, could even speak to the officer. However, the cadet had to be prepared to accept the consequences of any utterance. Aidan, in all the times he had been there, with all the beatings he had endured from people who were, after all, more skilled in all phases of combat than he, had never spoken a word to the aggressor. He would not give Joa

For warriors, each battle in the Circle was considered to be an "honor duel," a fight similar to a Trial of Position, the major ritual by which warriors won blood-names and cadets made their final test to graduate to warrior status. Yet, in the training environment, the name Circle of Equals seemed a misnomer, a cruel joke. No cadet in Aidan's sibko had gone into the circle as an equal. Instead they were victims, the targets of old warriors who desperately needed to keep their aggressive skills honed.

He was certain Joa

It had rained the night before and his boots seemed to sink into the muddy ground, as though it were a quicksand ready to swallow him up after he suffered the ignominy of defeat at Joa