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 Inner Sphere, the hot, humid air was difficult to breathe. This oppressiveness, in turn, made concentrating on Dermot's dull lecture nearly impossible. Aidan felt sweat accumulating under his training uniform, a jumpsuit of rough cloth that chafed against his hot, damp skin every time he moved. He believed that the uniform, which had been issued to everyone in sizes either too small or too large, was intended as just one more adversity on the list of many calculated discomforts of warrior training. His uniform, too small when he got it, now seemed even more so. Not only had he grown a few centimeters, but had been adding muscle on muscle from the intensive physical training, long, seemingly pointless marches and drilling, and hard, demeaning labor that were part of the military routine for the cadets. The material of the uniform was being stretched thin.
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, beginning with General Aleksandr Kerensky's carefully planned Exodus from the corrupt and quarreling star empires of the Inner Sphere. Unable to restore the Star League as a political entity, he had led his people to this new sector of the galaxy where, after overcoming many hardships and uprisings, he had set up his new government on the planets of Arcadia, Babylon, Circe, Dagda, and Eden. (Aidan had been hearing this ancient history from, it seemed, his cradle days, and perhaps even since the canister, the sibko's slang term for the artificial womb from which he and all his siblings had been born.) After the Exodus, it had been necessary to conduct a shakedown of the forces. Societies did not survive on the skills of warriors alone, so it became necessary to relocate three-quarters of the Regular Army and Navy personnel. Eventually this demobilization led to the formation of the castes, as new skills had to be learned and new duties assumed by the warriors without portfolio who had been judged not quite good enough to remain in the general's service.
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 beginning of the Clans. Restlessness and rootlessness, disorientation caused by the hardships of the new worlds and the yearning for the old worlds, led to individualism. If not for for the wisdom of Nicholas Kerensky, this dangerous trend could have created political divisions among the settlement worlds that would have been as destructive and violent as those that had disintegrated the Star League into the quibbling and chaotic dominions of the Inner Sphere.
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 Glynn. She was a tall woman, one against whom Aidan and Marthe were later to measure their own considerable height. They would become taller than Glynn, but not until they were well into their adolescence. By then, Glynn, too soon dead, was no longer around to be measured against.
Glynn had wanted to be a warrior but had failed in the middle training stages. Everyone in the sibko adored her and thought her the loveliest person ever created. Later they saw that she was not beautiful, but merely pleasant-looking, with a bland face that was too gaunt and wonderful yellow hair that was too stringy. They made up stories in which she defeated formidable, firebreathing monsters and slaughtered hordes of barbarians.
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," Glynn was saying. This story was one of the many she knew about the legendary yojimbos. Whatever the tale, the protagonist always had the strange, almost absurd name of Mifoon.
"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.
"With his right hand holding the whip the Ice Queen had given him and brandishing Toshiro with the other"— Toshiro was the name of Mifoon's magical sword, awarded him for valor by General Kerensky, who had ordered him to rid the land of the new villainy—"Mifoon screamed the falcon cry and rushed down the boulevard toward his antagonists who, in turn, were speeding toward him." (Glynn also gave Mifoon characteristics suggesting he was a precursor of the Jade Falcons, and therefore someone extra special.)