Текст книги "Way Of The Clans"
Автор книги: Роберт Торстон
Жанры:
Боевая фантастика
,сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
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-desk 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 onlybe 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 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.
Joanna stared at him balefully for a long time, displaying contempt like her own personal banner. Then she abruptly turned and walked back to the rim, where Ellis awaited her with a bundle in his arms. Taking the bundle from him, she lay it on the ground. It was wrapped in heavy brocaded cloth whose surface depicted images of swooping falcons in bright colors and stark design. To underline the sacredness of the intriguing package, Joanna began to unwrap it with slow, deliberate motions, as if according to an ancient rite. When the corners of the cloth lay flat to the ground, Aidan still could not perceive the contents. Looking up at Ellis and receiving a nod from him, Joanna respectfully lifted two identical objects from the cloth and held them gingerly in her arms.
The rest of the sibko had left the classroom, and with Dermot hovering nervously behind them and moving around the diameter of the circle, they watched the central actions intently. Aidan spotted Marthe staring only at him, her eyes so cool that, with the empathy they shared, he could easily see her anxiety.
Joanna stood up. Approaching Aidan, she held the pair of objects over her head, yelling to the crowd, "You may have seen whips before, children, but none like these." She cracked both whips, and their sound was explosive. "These thongs are of the toughest leather and their handles are perfectly balanced. Not only that, but each is equipped with a guidance system that, like a missile, finds its target, even when your arm is so weakened that you can only flick out the whip feebly. A useful personal weapon when you are faced with survival on a backwater planet or when your 'Mech is down and the enemy is closing in on you. Like so." She leaned down close to the ground and, with no perceptible wrist or arm movement, sent the whip thong flying toward Aidan's feet. Before he could move out of its way, it had wrapped around both ankles and flipped him over. He landed on the ground with some impact, and the pain of it surged up his spine. Some of the members of the sibko laughed, but it was not mocking laughter, it was a laugh of relief at not being the victim of the demonstration. At one time or another, each one had been knocked over by some attack or other by a training officer, and they did not at all mind watching it happen to someone else. (More than once Aidan had wondered whether the tactics of their trainers were not intended to strike at the sibko's closeness, to dislodge them from long-held loyalties.)
As Aidan sat up, the whip thong still wrapped around his legs, he saw the mix of terrible emotions that had come onto the faces of his sibkin. Bret's look was scornful, a judgment on Aidan's penchant for getting into trouble. Peri's was mocking, an I-hope-you-really-get-it-this-time kind of look. Endo was smug, probably thinking that he was punished in the Circle much less than Aidan or any of the others. Orilna was more withdrawn, but she already had poised her body, as she often did, into a battle pose. She would, while standing still, imitate the bodily moves of Joanna, whom she admired beyond logic. Freda, who drew punishment almost as much as Aidan, was already grimacing, ready to absorb all the pain empathically. Only Marthe's face showed much concern for Aidan's plight. She hated Falconer Joanna almost as much as he did.
Behind the agitated group, Falconer Commander Ter Roshak stood impassively, as he usually did. He rarely participated in training but frequently observed it. Although he usually did not speak to cadets, it was said that he called in the training officers each night and gave them trenchant critical lectures laced with scorn and obscenity. Every once in a while during the training period, Aidan had looked up to see Ter Roshak staring piercingly at him, a suggestion of anger in his eyes. His strange face often seemed to take on different looks, different aspects, as mountainsides did during the changing light of day.
As Joanna pressed a button on the handle of her whip, the thongs were abruptly released from Aidan's ankles. They glided back toward Joanna, who was clearly guiding their flight. At the end of the trip, the thong straightened and slid back into the handle. "A beautiful hurting machine, eh, class? Repeat the words after me. A beautiful hurting machine."
"A BEAUTIFUL HURTING MACHINE."
"If you think kill, you will kill."
"IF WE THINK KILL, WE WILL KILL."
"If you have a boot, you crush your enemy."
"IF WE HAVE A BOOT, WE CRUSH OUR ENEMY."
"If you have a hand, you strangle your enemy."
"IF WE HAVE A HAND, WE STRANGLE OUR ENEMY."
"If you have a club, you bludgeon your attacker."
"IF WE HAVE A CLUB, WE BLUDGEON THE ATTACKER."
"If you have a knife, you stab your foe."
"IF WE HAVE A KNIFE, WE STAB OUR FOE."
"If you have a gun, you shoot it."
"IF WE HAVE A GUN, WE SHOOT IT."
"If you have a tank, you roll it over the opposing ranks"
"IF WE HAVE A TANK, WE ROLL IT OVER THE OPPOSING RANKS."
"If you have an aerofighter, you bomb them."
"IF WE HAVE AN AEROFIGHTER, WE BOMB THEM."
"If you have a 'Mech, you win."
"IF WE HAVE A 'MECH, WE WIN."
"You are always the victor."
"WE ARE ALWAYS THE VICTOR."
"When the blood is spilled, the bloodname is earned."
"WHEN THE BLOOD IS SPILLED, THE BLOOD-NAME IS EARNED."
"We are the Clan."
"WE ARE THE CLAN."
At the end she held the pair of whips high over her head, harsh beams of light coming off the metal studs in her falconer gloves, and Aidan was certain that her voice made the outer walls of the school building shake. If not for his intense control over his physical body, it would certainly have made him tremble.
But he no longer feared Falconer Joanna. At first he had, but each insult, each beating, cut down fear rather than increased it. Ter Roshak, on the other hand—Ter Roshak, who had never addressed Aidan, for all the times he had stared at him—was for Aidan an object of continual fear who even terrorized his dreams.
Turning toward Aidan, who now stood, Joanna tossed him one of the whips. She purposely made the arc so that it would fall just short of Aidan's easy reach. But he was used to her devious ways and instinctively took a step forward. With an awkward lunge that almost made him lose his balance and fall, he caught the whip by its handle. Surprised by how light it felt, he quickly learned how to position his fingers, with his thumb locating the simple controls. Setting his face in a proud grimace, he pressed the button that released the thong and watched it fly upward, toward the sky, the line of it sure, its graceful arcing a pleasure to watch. Aidan felt a slight vibration in the handle and heard its quiet hum. Flicking his wrist and making the whip snap, he felt as if he had been using this weapon for ages. Yet, it was the first time he had held a whip of any kind.
"Look toward me, filth."
The haziness of the air around them, which made the sun seem to fill the sky, made Joanna indistinct. Her body had no clear outline, her features the vagueness of an unfinished portrait. But the whip she was now raising was as detailed as a technical drawing in a manual. Aidan almost expected to find lines leading away from it to outlined boxes containing sentences of technical explanatory detail.
Joanna's arm barely moved as she flicked her wrist and sent the thong of the whip flying toward him. It came so fast that he scarcely felt its physical contact as it grazed against his cheek. It stung terribly, but he used his best resources of control to keep his face from displaying any reaction. Touching his face with the back of his hand, he felt the small cut. When he looked at the hand, he saw a trace of blood along his knuckles. Bret, who hated the sight of blood, might have blanched if similarly cut, but Aidan allowed his mouth to form a pleased smile.
"You do a good imitation of a piece of animated garden statuary, filth. Will you fight or are you the classic coward portrayed by those monuments?"
Aidan shrugged. The shrug was a calculated insult, a wordless response to Joanna's words. Any hint of defiance infuriated her. She flicked out the weapon again, but this time Aidan was prepared. Acting instinctively, he brought up his whip, tabbed the button and allowed the thong to entangle with Joanna's and divert it away from its target, apparently the middle of his body. She cursed under her breath and tugged the whip backward. Because her whip was tied up with Aidan's, she was almost able to yank Aidan's whip out of his grip, but he, gaining quickly in knowledge of the whip's controls, released its contact with Joanna's and drew it back toward him. It settled about his feet in a symmetrical coil. There was no time to take another moment to learn, Aidan realized. He must attack before she did, even if he was unsure how to manipulate the weapon. Drawing up the handle so that it was virtually aimed at Joanna, he pressed the button while thrusting forward. The whip thong sailed across the gap between them. Though slightly overshot and slightly too high, it nevertheless made contact with the side of Joanna's forehead, rocking her sideways. She brought her own whip around, snapping her arm with the same fierceness as the whip's own snap. Its thong wrapped around his neck and jerked him forward. At the same time, she used her free hand to catch the thong of his whip as it descended toward her. It was an astonishing move, one Aidan could admire even while in the midst of being strangled by a narrow strip of the finest leather available to a warrior for anything other than a uniform.
Though Joanna had obviously relaxed her grip on her whip, the pressure of the thong itself did not diminish. It slowly squeezed tighter. Aidan felt his eyes begin to bulge out. Everything around him was taking on a firmer definition, a more pronounced outline. Outside the Circle, the sibko appeared to share the same frightened expression. He sensed Marthe tensing, wanting to rush into the Circle, but the sanctity of the Circle would hold her back. Ter Roshak studied the fight intently, but his gaze was cold as ever.
Aidan found himself consciously trying to force his tongue backward as though, in some mysterious way, it could intrude itself into his slowly closing throat and somehow reverse the impending strangulation.
As Joanna walked toward him, her grip on the whip loose except for the tight hold her thumb kept on the control button, her eyes were icy. The offer of death was in them, with no promise of mourning. And why should she mourn? She had often said she could see a cadet die in a trial or combat within the Circle of Equals without caring one iota about the corpse's former skills, potential, or training achievements. It only took one loss, one mistake, one flaw, one irritable, murderous training officer to mark the end of a cadet or at least flush him or her out.
Aidan was surprised by how coolly he was perceiving his situation, even as the bright sun above him seemed to be slowly going out. He tried to find some air someplace, but there was none.
"Stop this, Joanna!" someone cried. Her eyes became fierce and it was apparent she would happily arrange the speaker's demise next. Aidan had enough presence of mind to look down at the whip handle, where she still held onto the button. The flesh around her thumbnail was very white so that the natural color of the skin around it was like a dark frame.
At that moment, the world seemed about to blink out as Aidan began to lose his sight.
Then the pressure stopped and he felt the thong recoil off his shoulder as it fell away. Eyes closed now, he felt his knees buckle and an overwhelming need to fall came over him. He resisted it. He could not fall at Falconer Joanna's feet. That would please her too much. Somehow, straining leg muscles, overtaxing back muscles, obtaining some strength from the sheer fantasy of the effort, he remained standing.
As he gradually opened his eyes, he heard the speaker again and recognized the voice as Falconer Ellis': "You kill too easily, Joanna. It is not right, not for this one. This one will surpass us all."
Ellis now stood beside Joanna, his hand on her wrist. The whip, apparently forced out of her hands by him, lay like a docile snake at his feet. It was a surprising move on his part, a violation of Circle procedure and Clan protocol. Nobody was allowed to enter the Circle during a battle, except for Falconer Commander Ter Roshak.
The two training officers seemed to go out of focus for Aidan. He could barely concentrate on them. But he had to. If he looked away, he might lose consciousness and wind up on the ground, his body coiled as ignominiously as the fallen whip.
Suddenly someone grabbed his arm. His head turned sideways laboriously, as if his neck muscles had gone rusty. He looked into the badly sculptured face of Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. Glancing down, Aidan saw that his arm was being clutched by Ter Roshak's false hand. That might explain the pain that was now surging through his arm, unless of course it was simple weakness that would have suffered from the least grip. In a way, Aidan was glad it was Ter Roshak's prosthetic hand that held him. He would have had to try to wriggle out of anyone else's grip; with Ter Roshak, it was a clear impossibility so Aidan could relax in his bondage and merely wait to see what would happen next.
What happened next was that Joanna wheeled upon Ellis, in her eyes and voice a hatred so intense that even Aidan, groggy as he was, could see that the emotion was not born at just this moment. It had been building up for some time.
"An honor duel then, Falconer Ellis?" Joanna said. "It does not have to be."
Ellis' response was mere ritual, the offer of an opportunity to settle a dispute without conflict. This allowed a warrior who was either under the influence of an overwhelming emotion, a bad substance, or a mistaken notion to withdraw honorably from the issue of the duel. Warriors, however, rarely took a step back, and Joanna had always made it clear that a weak act of honor was to her an act of dishonor, whatever the Clan codes said.
"An honor duel then?" she said.
"Honor duel," Ellis responded, nodding.
"Mechs fully armed."
"No. The woods, a single weapon, your choice."
"No. No weapons. Just you and me. Here. Now. To the death."
There was a slight hesitation on Ellis' part before he said, in a voice louder and firmer than hers, "To the death."
"Well bargained and done."
"Well bargained and done."
Aidan had never heard the bidding process spoken so rapidly, concluded so easily. There had been no sense of strategy, just offers from instinct.
"See what you have done, cadet?" Ter Roshak whispered. "Fate allows fools like you to precipitate events that end in futile catastrophe."
Aidan wanted to protest that he had not precipitated anything, that Joanna had wrenched him out of a classroom for her sport. But it would be his head to address the Falconer Commander, especially when Ter Roshak was in such a foul mood.
"Fool!" Ter Roshak cried. He tightened his grasp of Aidan's arm, then lifted him off the ground and hurled him away, over the line of the Circle of Equals, into the midst of his fellow sibkin, who now backed away from him as if he were suddenly diseased. Even Marthe kept her distance, her feet shuffling nervously as though she could not decide whether to direct them toward Aidan or away from him. He hated that. Before, she would never have considered away.
