Way Of The Clans

by Robert Thurston

  The leader watched Glynn's approach, no doubt noting that the only weapon at her disposal was a sheathed sword that bounced rhythmically against her thigh just as his pigtails had danced against his forehead. He smiled, revealing surprisingly white teeth. With the rest of his face obscured by dirt and grime, the smile seemed to exist on its own, almost as if it floated in front of his face, an eerie smile without a link to anything else.

  A few steps in front of the leader, Glynn stopped and said something to him. Her words did not carry back to the sibko, most of whose members now stood and, defying Gonn's cautioning, had begun to move toward the bandits. While not losing sight of Glynn and the bandit leader, Aidan chose one of the bandits, a surly-looking, stocky, bearded man on the right flank, as his quarry if a battle erupted.

  The bandit leader's killing move was nearly undetectable. His right hand had rested in front of a scruffy vest, quite casually, then suddenly he had drawn a knife from somewhere in his clothing and raked it across Glynn's neck. Aidan got a sense of some blood spurting as Glynn fell, but by then his rage had taken over and he rushed toward the stocky bandit he had selected. As he came close, he realized he could get a shot at the bandit with his pistol, but he also knew he did not want that. It would be too easy. For his own sense of revenge, he had to make the man suffer.

  The bandit came at him. He, too, had found a knife somewhere on his clothing and was brandishing it like a tiny sword. Knife or sword, no conventional weapon could frighten Aidan. In their hand-to-hand combat training lessons, he and the other sibko members had been well-drilled to respect a weapon but not to fear it.

  Switching the pistol to his left hand, Aidan used it to deflect the downward arc of the bandit's knife. Before his adversary could recover, he grabbed the man's wrist with hands whose muscles had been strengthened by long calisthenic drills supervised by sibparent Gonn. Aidan had squeezed resilient materials, performed a dozen types of exercise ritual, hardened the skin in martial-arts demonstrations. As a result, he—like the others in the sibko— could do wonders with just bare hands. Aidan could feel the bandit's wrist break as he snapped it backward violently. The knife fell out of the man's hand. Kneeing the stocky man in the stomach and doubling him over, Aidan quickly snatched the knife off the ground and waited patiently for the man to straighten up. It would have been too easy to plunge the knife into the bandit's back. That would have been too much like a proper Clan death, the noble demise of a warrior who, even though a member of the bandit caste, could die in battle. But if the man were to die, there must be shame attached to it, especially after the bandit leader's almost casual slaying of Glynn.

  As the bandit straightened up, he made a quick lunge at Aidan, who neatly sidestepped the man, sending him plunging forward and down, his face in the dirt. Ironically, it was Glynn who had drilled him in this very same battle-footwork.

  Aidan stepped backward. He sensed, out the corner of his eye, a movement toward him. Another bandit, a short, thick-legged woman with fire in her eyes, raced toward him. Her fighting skills were no better than those of the man on the ground, and Aidan was able to strike the side of her head with the barrel of his pistol. He could have stabbed her, but he was saving the bandit's knife for its owner. She collapsed and he saw, as the fire in her eyes went out, that she would be at least momentarily unconscious.

  Turning back to the bandit, he saw the man trying to heave his bulk upward. With no further reason to toy with him, Aidan kicked him in the side, sending him back to the ground. Assuming the look of contempt taught him by Gonn, he forced the bandit to roll over with further kicks, then stared into the man's now-frightened eyes. Aidan was revolted by the man's look of fear. Showing such emotion had no doubt contributed to this man's failure as a warrior, if indeed this particular freebirth had ever been a warrior.

  Aidan did not care to savor the act of killing. It was necessary but repulsive to him. Quickly, he brought the bandit's knife down toward his face. The man tried to turn his head sideways, but Aidan knocked it back with his pistol, then he plunged the knife into the victim's open mouth, forcing it deep. The bandit's eyes widened in pain. Blood followed the knife blade out of the man's mouth, then—watching the horror in the dying man's eyes—Aidan finished him off. With the same casual, almost indifferent motion the bandit leader had used on Glynn, Aidan slit his throat.

  Looking around him, Aidan saw that the battle was over and that they had won it. The survivors among the outlaw band were running from them, and the bodies of the less lucky were strewn about the improvised battlefield. Like Aidan, other members of the sibko were standing and surveying the damage they had done. Many of them hovered over the corpse of the bandit leader, who had more than the requisite wounds in his body to bring about an agonizing death.

  For a moment, he saw the scene as it might have looked from the viewpoint of the enemy. The bandits had lost a fight with a raging horde of children. That would damage the pride of the survivors. It was the first battle, other than planned ceremonial skirmishes, that Aidan's sibko had ever won. And the cost of it was Glynn's death.

  When Aidan arrived at the side of Glynn's corpse, where the sibko was assembling, his body was still trembling and his stomach still bouncing around inside his body from the exhilaration and disgust of his first killing. Looking at Gonn, he saw that lines of tears ran out of the corners of Gonn's eyes. Aidan could not tell whether they were angry or sad tears. No one ever could, or did, know what went on in the group leader's mind.

  Their other sibparents had seen to it that Glynn was given a proper ceremonial funeral, marked with a few rituals that normally belonged to those who had attained warrior status. After the funeral, Gonn was severely reprimanded and removed from command over the sibko for having lost control of it at a key moment, even though the sibko itself was praised for its bravery. He was demoted to menial tasks, which he did desultorily. Then, one day, Gonn drowned in a river alongside which the sibko was camped. Some wondered if he had committed suicide, although direct suicide was rare in the Clans. Few clansmen or women ever chose to kill themselves, except through recklessness in battle.

  Though Aidan had despised Gonn for his cowardice against the bandits, he nevertheless felt some grief upon hearing of the man's death. A few years earlier, a different kind of Gonn had taken Aidan under his wing—under his falcon wing, a catchphrase he used often—and helped with the training of Warhawk.

  One day Gonn had found Aidan trying to pull some broken feathers from Warhawk's wing. The falcon had been in a mysterious fight somewhere, apparently with a bird nearly as tough as she, and she had returned from the fray much the worse for wear. Many feathers were tattered, with others severely damaged and attached by only a few remaining strands of quill.

  "Silly child," Gonn had said. "Do not pull out feathers that way, no matter what shape they are in. Do you not know that when they are taken completely out, you can be sure that they will not grow again at next molting, and perhaps at no future molting?"

  "No, sir. I did not know that. I—"

  "None of your excuses. Warriors do not try to find reasons for their failures. That is not the way of the Clans." The way of the Clans, another catchphrase, was one all the sibparents used. "As you do in so many other ways, you show yourself not ready even to imagine yourself a warrior. I doubt that you will go that far, for all your fancy achievements. And you will not answer now, quineg?"

  "Neg."

  "Now here I will show you what to do. It is called imping."

  Gonn took Aidan, who held and soothed Warhawk, to his quarters, at that time in their existence a hastily put-together shack, whose sides and roof were made of the durable caldo leaf, which grew abundantly on trees in that particular part of Circe. The shack was like all the places Gonn had ever lived, cluttered and strewn with debris from his life. Using a set of needles that he kept in the kit-bag that always hung from his belt, he selected some three-sided needles of various sizes. Reaching into a box under a strange-looking work-de
sk cluttered with tools whose uses Aidan could not begin to imagine, Gonn took out a spray of falcon and hawk feathers. He told Aidan he had saved them from the molt of many of the damned birds that the sibko kept.

  Taking the first needle and holding it up to the light streaming in from the open doorway, Gonn examined it closely, then measured the old feather against it. He told Aidan they would match old feathers with Warhawk's real feathers. As Aidan clutched Warhawk firmly but gently, Gonn went to work on the bird. With the delicate strokes of a surgeon, working the knife slowly, he cut away the feather at the point where the fracture occurred, then on the remaining section he fashioned an oblique edge. Leaning away from Warhawk, he took the old feather and sliced its edge off. With nimble fingers, he checked to see that the edges of the true feather and the old feather fit together neatly and that the remade feather would be about the same length as those around it. Inserting the needle into Warhawk's real feather, he fastened the old one to it, gently pushing the false feather onto the real one until the break between them was hardly noticeable. Satisfied with his handiwork, he leaned back and said:

  "There. That will suffice until Warhawk's next molting. The needle is treated so that it will attach to the inside of each feather and hold it securely. Now, let's do some of the others."

  Aidan and Gonn worked together for several hours. It was the only time when Gonn had seemed even remotely human to Aidan. His grave lay somewhere in the graveyard, but Aidan and Marthe refused to visit it.

  For three years afterward, Aidan dreamed of the man he had killed in battle. Variations on the act made the dreams even more frightening than the actual experience.

  In some dreams, the victim fought better and was not so easily killed. In the ones from which Aidan woke up in a cold sweat, the victim was about to win.

  The other graves he and Marthe searched for and found that day were of the sibko's dead, the ones who had died in trials or been the victims of disease or accident. These were few, however. Most of the now-absent members of the sibko had simply failed tests and been sent to other areas where they were integrated into other castes. No one ever really lost face in Clan society. Any momentary shame was made up for by assuming a useful life in another caste.

  Now there would be shame, Aidan thought, as he tuned back in to Dermot again. It is a bad thing to have to leave a sibko before training, but it was a lifelong embarrassment to be dismissed from warrior training. True, one could join a new caste like the earlier flush-outs from sibko training, but the knowledge would always remain that one had been on the verge of becoming a warrior, the highest caste of all. People who talked to you, however cheerfully and respectfully, would never quite be able to forget that you had suffered the ultimate ignominy, the removal from warrior status. The few failed warriors whom Aidan had met while growing up had seemed to be exoskeletons covering no body, as if the inability to be warriors on the outside had dried up the inner self and turned it to dust. These individuals performed their caste roles well enough, even admirably, but something was always missing. Aidan did not want that kind of life. He could only be a warrior.

  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 annals."

  Aidan wanted to ask what in the name of the venerable Nicholas were the Jade Falcon annals. He had never seen any. There were no texts that bore that title. He wanted to ask Dermot that question and many others, but he would be punished for asking any question directly. Even when one used the proper channels, writing a set of questions at the end of written work, the instructors usually accused them of overwhelming stupidity.

  Dermot was beginning to rub his hands together, usually a sign that he was close to the end of his lecture. Aidan's body tensed, ready to leave the stuffy classroom and get to some physical training. He did not like to sit still for so long.

  Suddenly a hand grabbed him by the back of his neck. He did not need to squirm around to see whose. Only Falconer Joanna ever seized a neck like that and squeezed so hard with the tips of her fingers, and usually she did it to Aidan. Why she had taken such a dislike to him, he was not sure, but at times he would have preferred to crawl under and be crushed by the giant foot of a 'Mech than have anything to do with her.

  5

  I see you are not listening," Joanna said, her voice a hissing whisper. "You pretend, but your mind is elsewhere. You may speak to me on this, eyas. I am right, quiaff?"

  "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, Joanna led him out of the classroom. His sibkin watched passively, as they had to. General orders decreed that they must show neither approval nor disapproval of any disciplinary action from a training officer. As Dermot had explained in one of his few plain-spoken observations, in the middle of a battle there was little point in registering emotion because a warrior already had enough to do. Aidan did not have to look back to know that Dermot would nod at the class and they would follow Joa
nna and Aidan outside. They were all going to the "Circle of Equals," the place where falconers settled disputes among themselves and distributed in-camp punishment to their charges.

  Releasing her grip on his neck, Joanna shoved him violently over the row of stakes that marked the rim of the circle, then—her stride long and graceful—she walked in after him.

  He was supposed to feel terror, he knew. But in eight months of training, Joanna, Ellis, and the specialist-falconers had all had their shot at him and, for that matter, everyone in the sibko. Any mistake, however trivial, was worth a blow to the midsection. Any talking out of turn was excuse for a cuff to the back of the head. Any major stupidity or minor rebellion was worth a thrashing in the Circle of Equals.

  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 Joanna and her fellow officers that satisfaction.

  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 Joanna was not in the least disturbed about classroom inattention. She had seized him as an excuse to take out some fierce inner rage on someone. Unfortunately, Aidan was her most frequent choice for that job. Ever since he had defied her that first day, she had kept at him, haranguing him, rousting him out of bed at night to perform irrelevant guard duty, finding a new insult for him every day, calling him the worst names, singling him out for punishment at the slightest and sometimes imagined infraction, favoring him with her favorite insult, calling him "filth." Though anyone might draw the name from her lips, Aidan was awarded it on a regular basis.