Way Of The Clans

"I suppose that would be true of all of us."

"No! No, it is not. No one here has eyes like yours."

"What about your eyes, Marthe? We look alike, they say."

"We resemble each other, true, but not in the secrets in our eyes. I have no secrets. You know that. You can see that. Come, Aidan, admit it. Look into my eyes. You see no concealment there."

He nodded. "Yes, it is true. Your eyes are what they call open."

"As am I. As are all of us, except you. I love you, Aidan."

"We all love each other. That is the way of the sibko."

"I love you beyond the way of the sibko."

"You are talking about layers again."

"I suppose I am."

"Then you have secrets, too, after all."

"I suppose I do."

He had understood her well, had bantered with her only to avoid the subject. One of his secrets, one that he trusted was not revealed in his eyes, was that he loved

Marthe in return, unreasonably, outside the way of the sibko. He dreamed of her and of them alone together. How unsib, the others in the sibko would have said. Un-sib or not, in his dreams they often no longer belonged to their sibko—or any sibko. He would never admit that to Marthe. With its implicit violation of siblaw, it might shock her too much, destroy the permissible closeness they already had.

"We can't have such feelings for one another, Marthe. The sibparents say that love, even the passing desire to be alone with onespecific person, is a freebirth feeling."

Her face darkened momentarily, as did the visages of Aidan and others in the sibko at the mere mention of the awful word, freebirth. "I know," she said. "We are not supposed to love one another. We are supposed to love all. "

"And we do. Do we not?"

"I suppose so. But the love for all is not the same as—"

"Do not even say it, Marthe."

And they stopped saying it, but the need that Aidan so often felt for Marthe's company, to the exclusion of the others, continued. He wondered if Marthe felt the same uneasiness at violating what was, after all, the way of the Clan.

3

The season had changed at least three times since they had come to Ironhold. As the cadets listened to Dermot, who was now droning on about the Exodus from the I

He longed for a larger uniform, or at least an airier one. Right now he did not know which was the worse, listening to Dermot or his uniform's chafing, a sensation just marginally more pleasant than rolling around naked on a bed of pumice.

Dermot was offering his regular catechism on Clan history, begi

The demobilization, it turned out, was not simple. Characteristics essential to warriors did not always blend in smoothly with normal society. Some warriors became yojimbos, a word whose origin was buried in past history. The yojimbo's escapades on several Clan planets became nettlesome. Many became outlaws, roaming the countryside looking for any kind of work that would make use of skills no longer really in demand. Occasionally someone might hire them to serve in a private army, and a few employers had problems that only a bit of muscle and military expertise could solve.

It was a hard time, the time of the yojimbo, a transition period between the end of the Exodus and the begi

Dermot's drone rested heavily on the oppressive air as he described how the Clan worlds were expanded into a nearby group of stars called the globular cluster. It must have been an exhilarating time for those who were there, but Aidan, at this remote distance in time, could not concentrate on the dry history of it all. He wanted stories, not a recitation of facts. Stories of heroes and yojimbos, warriors and villains.

* * *

They had been very young. It was in the time when the sibko was still full, before the first eliminations of its members through failed tests, lost trials. They were all young hawks then, nestlings at hack but not willing to fly too far away from each other, much less the sibparents. One of the cadre of sibparents in charge at that time was named Gly

Gly

Aidan sat beside Marthe. Even at that early time, barely out of the toddler stage, they were friends. The child Aidan had never seen a more beautiful face than Marthe's.

"Mifoon faced his adversaries, who were lined against him across the wide boulevard," Gly

"In the line of villains, Mifoon recognized at least four who had once been of the noble yojimbo caste." The sibko knew there had been no caste system at the time of the yojimbos, but they allowed her the fancy because she equated the wandering fighters with warriors, as if they had been precursors of the Clan system rather than aimless, out-of-work warriors, disenfranchised by Kerensky edict.