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 Joanna 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.

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 Joanna's hands. No, he thought, it was not right to think that way. It was not the Clan way to envision defeatin any battle. Perhaps, though, it was the cadet way. From the time they fell out of their bunks in the morning until the time they were pushed back into the barracks late at night, cadets were made to feel low and inferior. Joanna and the others continually harped on the fact that only a few of them would make it to the final test, the Trial of Position that could win them promotion to warrior status and earn them a specific rank according to how successful their trial was.