That was not the end of the story. Events had propelled the father into a deeply complicated plot where in some ways he redeemed himself from a taint and in some other ways reconciled himself to his son's death. Whether or not the father survived, the Commander could not recall.
The Commander, however, had survived. His special talent, survival.
His Clan upbringing had long interfered with his understanding of the story and, for that matter, many other stories in many other books from among the volumes he had so long ago discovered in that Brian Cache where he had done such dreadful and enervating duty. The concept of father had initially troubled him. What was a father? Naturally, he understood the technical meaning of the word, but what did it really mean? What had it meant for the devoted father of the story?
The Commander, the offspring of genetic engineering, of genes from a sacred gene pool, had several father figures but only knowledge without awareness of his actual father. All he could fall back on was imagination to understand any concepts about natural parents in the books he had read. He had been raised with others also genetically matched, in a sibling company, a sibko. He had a fine understanding of what siblings felt, but how could he have really comprehended the sorrow of a parent over a lost son or daughter? At least back then, the concept had puzzled him. Now he understood it better. Now it was easier even to feel. Now it was his own private sorrow, not only previously unknown but forbidden to be known.
The idea of fate was easier to comprehend. The Clans had a notion of fate, though it differed from the fate portrayed in the story. A Clansman tried to control his fate, measuring it methodically against the vagaries of chance. Everything in life required a bid. If a man was good at bidding, he controlled his fate. A successful bid in warfare meant he led his warriors into battle, planned the execution of their maneuvers, planned the battle itself, reacted to chance interferences with the skill of a battle-worthy strategist, beat chance with the action of his adept-at-strategy mind, overwhelmed what fate appeared to have in store. Of course, for the other warrior, the pilot in the cockpit who saw fate rushing right at him, the outcome of the engagement, the loss, undoubtedly seemed like fate.
Clan officers met before a battle and bid for the honor of fighting it. It was an intricate and complex procedure. The first officer to bid removed one or more of his units from the battle strategy. The next bidder had to duplicate that move, then up the ante by eliminating a unit or more of his own or by replacing a strong unit with one ranked below it. A 'Mech could be substituted for an aerospace fighter or five Elementals, the Clan's genetically bred, battle-suited infantry. Bids flew back and forth until one commanding officer was left with low bid, the bid below which no fellow officer could commit personnel and materiel. But a bidder could not hold back a low bid for too long. An opponent might beat him to it, making the winning bid he had intended and leaving him back on a DropShip, watching his rival lead his forces into battle. There was no position so uncomfortable as sitting in a plush DropShip chair observing the military triumphs of the officer who had beaten you bidding.
All Clan men and women took delight in the victories of others, but no success was more satisfying than that of the warrior doing the winning. A certain regret inevitably
crept into one's praise for others. It was not envy that fueled it, nor was it loss of face. Every Clansman respected the wagering skills of a good officer, and there was no shame attached to losing a bid. But there was another kind of loss of face, a kind the Commander well understood. It was the loss of face within oneself: the realization that one had not quite made the grade. That was the true loss of face, when you gazed at yourself in the mirror of your mind and had to look away.
The Commander remembered a fellow warrior who had graduated from all levels of training spectacularly, had risen through the ranks rapidly, had become one of the youngest Star Captains in the history of Clan Jade Falcon. But he had proved to be inept in the prebattle ritual of bidding. Too often he gave away too much manpower in his desperate attempt to gain the bid. Undermanned, he fought too many losing battles or marginal victories, endangering his troops and materiel. Though one of the fiercest warriors ever to charge an enemy, the man's bidding deficiencies finally cost him his command, even lost him his 'Mech. When he finally met his death in battle, he was not a victim of fate but of destiny. The Captain's genes were not passed on in the gene pool so sacred to all warriors. But what point was there in a warrior's living and dying if his genes were not judged worthy of the gene pool?
The Commander knew that when one controlled the key aspects of his destiny, fate did not matter. There was no fear of fate among the Clans. As he had read in a Clan saga, in a passage he could not quite remember accurately: