She stood up, finished with the dewrinkling device. Her long hair, as it usually did, miraculously fell into place, as if there had been some sort of device to iron out its irregularities.

"I see the hatred in your eyes. Good. I want that from you. This is the last time we will be together here. I will not summon you again. From now on, we will talk only under formal conditions. Leave now, without saying anything. I hope you fail. It would fulfill the curse I have put on you."

Aidan was happy to escape from her quarters. Her words had made him hate the place even more, hate her even more.

He spent the next few hours wondering why she had spoken to him in the way she did. Dawn came and went, but he still had no solution for it. All he knew was that he had to prove to Joanna that he could become a warrior. And on that day, the day he succeeded at the final trial, he would spit on her highly polished boots.

11

In rare, light-hearted moments, Aidan thought of the quickly passing days as so many fusillades from an autocannon, with him the target. They moved too fast for him to dodge the time-projectiles and they got him dead-center every time. Later, had he been challenged to write down an accurate time sequence of events, he would have failed.

From the day after Joanna had talked to him so openly, everything that happened seemed to separate him even further from others. From the sibko, from Marthe, even from himself. What Joanna had said about him needing to be a machine became true, at least partially. He deliberately concealed any feeling, performed training exercises by the book, snapped to when spoken to—in short, became the ideal cadet. The more he accomplished, the more Joanna berated him in front of the others. In the past her derisive criticisms might have angered him, because he had cared how the others in the sibko regarded him. Now that mattered no longer.

In his bunk at night, exhausted or not, he could not get much sleep. He almost welcomed guard duty, because it gave him something to do with his wakefulness.

One night on duty, he saw the rare sight: a figure out walking on the parade ground. As no one was allowed there overnight, he challenged the stroller.

Only then did Aidan recognize that he was questioning Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. He had heard that Ter Roshak often wandered around the facility at night. Briefly, Aidan wondered if he was making a mistake in confronting the commanding officer, but guard-duty rules stated that anyone, no matter what rank, must explain his presence to the guard if challenged.

Ter Roshak had been deep in thought. When he looked up, he squinted and said blearily, "Ramon? Is that you?"

Aidan challenged him again, and the commander appeared to clear his mind of whatever debris had made him speak so strangely.

"Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. Sibko training supervisor. Very good, cadet. I had forgotten the time. I have been out inspecting various sibkos. I was about to visit your barracks. Would you accompany me? Respond."

"Permission to leave my post, sir."

"Permission granted."

In the barracks, Roshak carried through one of his classic, surprise night inspections, and Aidan had to stand by and watch. The commander kicked Bret out of bed and gave him a hard knock to the side of his head with the artificial arm before telling him that his foot locker was scarred and needed repainting. He held Rena up in the air with the prosthetic limb while informing her that her last session in the training 'Mech was an embarrassment not just to her sibko but to his whole training Cluster. Tymm and Peri were treated similarly, one chewed out for his clothing deficiencies, the other for what Roshak called the set of her sullen mouth. Only Marthe was spared real punishment. Instead, he turned to the others and told them that they should emulate her. Aidan saw a glint in his eye that seemed to indicate a satiric element to his praise. Marthe was the highest scorer of the group, and by pointing this out, Roshak was planting the seeds of little jealousies and resentments into the psyches of the surviving members of the sibko.

Aidan vowed he would not react to Roshak's strategy. He would, instead, provide countermeasures to it, do everything he could to reunite the sibko.

Outside, after the commander ordered Aidan back to guard duty, he eyed him strangely, then said, "You. You are the worst in the bunch. You think too much of yourself, I can see that. You think you can beat the system. You cannot. Respond."

"I have no response, sir."

"I cannot fight you here, not while you are on duty.

Report to my quarters when you come off duty this morning. Respond."

"Yes, sir."

However, when Aidan arrived at the commander's quarters, the man was asleep. Without permission to address him, Aidan could not wake him. He waited at the entrance until reveille, but Roshak did not wake up. Nor did he mention the order again.

* * *

Aidan cornered Marthe after midday meal, backing her up against the barracks wall.

"The sibko is collapsing. We cannot allow it," he said.

For a moment the hint of derision in her eyes made her resemble Falconer Joanna, then she frowned. "Why are you saying this to me?"

"Because we were once . . . close."

"You have listened too much to the myths. Our closeness, as you call it, was part of the play of children. We are not children now."

"What are we then? Warriors?"

"You need not be sarcastic. It is a bad trait of yours. How often has Falconer Joanna said—"

"I do not give a damn what she has said. She wants the sibko destroyed."

"If you are telling the truth, then no doubt the sibko should be destroyed."

"Then what has it meant, all of our times together? I do not mean you and me, I mean all of us. Those who have survived and those who have died and those who have been reassigned to other castes."

"It meansthat we have developed properly, that we have first joined together to find the warriors among us, that we have awaited our own fates, each of us, that we—"

"But that is only what they want us to think."

"They?"

"Joanna. The others. Our sibparents. The training officers. All of them who have steered us, educated us. made us think the way they wanted us to think, influenced—"

"Really, Aidan, you have shut down mentally. You know the way of the Clan as well as any—"

"I am not speaking against the way of the Clan. I do not know about the Clan. Neither do you. Our world has been circumscribed by our sibko ever since we—"

"And is not that an argument against what you originally said?"

"I do not understand."

"You say the sibko must be preserved. Now you add that it is the sibko that has limited us. Therefore, the dissolution of the sibko is a necessary phase of our development as warriors. Therefore, the sibko is created so that it may be gradually phased out."

Aidan wanted to shake her.

"That is nonsense, just recital of lessons. You sound like Falconer Dermot when you—"

"Not so. If I sounded like Dermot, then you would be asleep."

The humor of the remark, plus the gentle way she spoke it, disconcerted Aidan. It reminded him of how she used to be, when they were still youths in the still-intact sibko. What bothered him even more was that he wanted her to speak to him like that all the time, and he knew that was not possible.

"Aidan," she said, the kindness still in her voice. "I miss those old days, too. Some of them, anyway. But I like now just as well. More. I wantto be a warrior and I am willing to make any change, personal or otherwise, to achieve that."