Текст книги "Way Of The Clans"

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."

"Well, I want that, too."

"Do you? Do you really?"

"Yes!"

His response sounded overdramatic, forced, even to him.

"I cannot believe you, Aidan. If you wished that, you would not be trying to convince me the sibko must be preserved."

"But . . ."

"Please. There is no reason to continue this conversation."

He tried to force her back, push her against the wall. She pushed back just as hard and knocked him off balance. In all their time in the sibko, they had never fought physically, except in the team tussle and other play. With her forearm, she hit him in the throat, just below his Adam's apple. He was angry enough to strike back at anyone else, but not Marthe. She waited for him to finish his coughing fit, then walked away.

In the ensuing week Aidan also tried to persuade the other members of the sibko that they should restore their former group feeling, that they should not let training officers divide them. Bret did not even understand Aidan's argument. He said he thought the sibko was as close as ever. Peri claimed there had never been a feeling of closeness in the sibko, not for her at least. She had, she said, always wanted something else. Rena would not even talk to Aidan, while Tymm merely looked as dazed about the subject of the sibko as he generally did during training.

* * *

Tymm, in fact flushed out a few days later. His scores had always been the lowest of the six survivors. Aidan never knew exactly why Tymm was found unworthy, but he suspected that Tymm's tendency to get his training 'Mech's feet entangled in undergrowth and his slowness in employing his weaponry must definitely have contributed to the young man's failure. Like many of the other sibko members who were gone, Tymm did not even say goodbye. One morning the sibko survivors awoke to find Tymm's bunk empty, its bedclothes properly rolled up and secured. That was always the sign. Soon a pair of orderlies entered the barracks and took the bunk and bedclothes away. Tymm's bunk had been at the end of a row, and now only a large gap remained.

The barracks, which had once seemed so crowded, suddenly seemed cavernous. The winds of Ironhold came through old cracks in the building and created uncomfortable draughts. Aidan caught another cold, as did Rena. Issued only a rough piece of gray cloth to handle such an illness, Rena annoyed Aidan by telling him not to steal her cloth to wipe his nose. That made him furious, because his own pronounced sense of personal hygiene made him careful to use only his own little gray swatch.

Marthe became more silent than ever. Two days after Tymm's departure, she moved her bed into the gap, thus isolating herself from the other four cadets. Bret, Rena, and Peri did not mind her withdrawal as much as Aidan did. After their last conversation, however, he could no longer find a reason to speak to her himself.

"We do not have enough people left to form a team tussle," Bret said out of the blue one night.

"You will always be a child, you stupid freebirth," Rena muttered.

Hearing the reviled epithet, Bret jumped on Rena and wrestled her to the barracks floor. His eyes seemed inflamed with anger. Aidan rushed to the grappling pair and tried to lift Bret off Rena's body. Peri, reacting just as quickly, pulled Aidan away.

"Let them fight. It is too exciting to miss."

"You call fighting among ourselves exciting?"

"The way things have been lately."

She nodded her head toward Marthe, who was merely sitting on her bunk and viewing the fight as if it were an entertainment.

"This is what I tried to tell you, Peri—about the sibko and-"

"Let it rest, Aidan. It is a lost cause. What we have to do is get through it."

Bret and Rena's brawl was getting vicious. She had poked him in the eye to get him off her, then kicked him between the legs. That would have finished off most persons, but Bret, his tenacity intact, managed to plunge forward and butt Rena hard in the abdomen. As headbutts go, it did not look like much, but it had its effect on Rena, whose face contorted in pain. She doubled over.

It was a ridiculous sight, each of them bent at the waist and trying to suppress moans of pain. (That was another contribution of Falconer Joanna, the requirement not to show pain. "Think of it, eyasses. You hurt and your enemy can see it. What confidence, what an edge you are giving away.") Peri put her arm around Bret, said some soothing words, while Aidan attended to Rena. Rena's eyes were glazed.

Glancing up, it seemed to Aidan that, for the first time in a long time, the four of them were grouped together in a way reminiscent of old sibko days. He reached out and took Peri's hand, thus linking the quartet together.

From the other side of the room came a loud laugh. Marthe was amused.

"Fools," she said, her intonation mimicking, it seemed, Joanna's.

Marthe walked to the group and knelt down across from Aidan. She put her hand on Bret's shoulder and gripped Rena's arm. She smiled at Aidan. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed to him like the old smile. It certainly reminded him of the two of them together before warrior training began.

"Fools," she said again and shook her head slowly from side to side.

The sibko broke up in a few minutes, and the wounds of both battlers were attended to.

That night, another sleepless one for Aidan, he wondered if they had restored the sibko's old camaraderie. It would be miraculous if it were so.

The next day showed that was not to be. Bret went back to being argumentative, Rena sullen, Peri enigmatic. And Marthe stayed in her corner of the massive barracks, aloof, uninterested in anything her fellow sibkin might do.

There was never another moment when sibko feelings reemerged. They were separate forever. It did not matter. It was not long before only three of them were left, at the edge of a broad meadow, awaiting with cadets from other sibkos their opportunity to prove themselves in a Trial of Position and become warriors of the Jade Falcon Clan.