“Do you think of your family as beginning the day you met Noe?” asked Kathein.

“The day I met Noe was a disaster. Whatever happened began the day I met Joesai.”

Joesai was a studious child, intolerant of the flaws in both his peers and masters. He was larger than his peers and used his extra strength to bully. Whoever crossed him ran the risk of dying at the next Trial. Joesai never exacted revenge through an intermediary but if the offender could stay out of Joesai’s way for at least a week, the slight was forgotten. He had no friends. He was a thief but no master ever caught him.

He knew his father was Tae ran-Kaiel, the Prime Predictor, and that gave him an arrogant hope that he might survive the creche. But he didn’t know who his mother was and that made him unsure of his worth.

He pestered his genetics teacher for his record. Then he learned why no one had told him about his mother. They thought he wouldn’t understand. It was puzzling. His mother was both a woman and a man and two people and the same person.

Tae ran-Kaiel had authorized an experiment in an attempt to create a predictor as powerful as himself. He had bred himself with one of the early successful predictors, a Gaieri ma-Kaiel, whose sperm had been frozen in liquid nitrogen yet never used because he was a known carrier of multiple lethal recessives.

In a technique developed by Tae’s own study group, hundreds of 23-chromosome sets from Gaieri sperm cells were infused into chromosomeless ova and triggered to yield a cell of 23 chromosomes in the dyad form — each with two chromatids and one joining centromere, similar to the stable secondary oocytes carried by women prior to ovulation. Tae’s group developed a process by which the final meiosis was inhibited, the centromeres broken and a fully homozygous 46-chromosome cell formed that when transferred to the womb of a machine mother began to grow into an embryo.

Four million homozygous female individuals — sub-clones — can be formed from one heterozygous male. One hundred eighty pregnancies were started. One hundred fifty-three of these aborted before coming to term because of doubled y-chromosomes and doubled lethal recessives. Twenty-one of the surviving twenty-seven babies were judged to be substandard and were used for medical experimentation, teaching purposes, or sold to the abattoir.

The best specimen of the final six, Joesai’s mother, was artificially matured, butchered, and her ovaries used for further experimentation. She became, in this indirect fashion, the genetic mother of nine of Tae’s children. At the time Joesai read the records, four of that batch were still alive: Sanan, Gaet, Hoemei, and Joesai. Unilaterally, he began to protect his Gaieri-derived brothers for no more reason than that he felt their kalothi was somehow tied to his own.

“We didn’t even like him,” mused Gaet to Kathein and Oelita there on the beach. “We made fun of him. We taunted him.”

“You made fun of him? And he was helping you!” said a saddened Oelita.

“Poor little boy,” said Kathein.

Gaet grinned.

At their first Trial of Strength Joesai bullied Hoemei through his failures, saving his life and teaching him the value of an alliance, but Hoemei, instead of joining forces with Joesai, made a blood oath with Gaet and Sanan. Joesai remained on the periphery of the alliance, bullying them, goading them, tormenting them — and protecting them. They reacted with scorn.

It was only later, after the death of Sanan when he saw Joesai crying, that Gaet understood the folly of their petty bickering and made the conscious decision to forge a team from the three of them. He began to mediate the disputes between his brothers. When Hoemei was trapped, he actively sought Joesai’s help and when Joesai was up for soup stock he worked out an aid program with Hoemei. It wasn’t long before they were impressed by their alliance. Gaet negotiated them out of trouble, Hoemei anticipated trouble, and Joesai fought them clear.

“What I’m trying to say,” said Gaet, “is that the ugly fight you’ve witnessed is nothing new. I know how it is going to turn out and so do my brothers. Noe and Teenae are a little frightened because the worst of our brotherly conflicts were over before women came into our lives and so our wives still don’t understand the roots of our fights. You two aren’t used to them at all. My brothers take a fight as far as it will go, and then they turn around and compromise. Probably, I don’t even need to be there anymore. I’m more worried about you two charmers.”

Kathein was watching sand slip through her fingers. “Don’t be. I’m used to heartaches.”

“Don’t say that!” said Oelita, all empathy with Kathein. She was afraid of heartache herself. “We’re in this together!”

“Yes,” said Kathein wisely, “but can we stand it?”

Gaet put on his smoothest manners. “Is it such a tragedy that life doesn’t fit the pictures we have of what life should be? That’s what makes physics exciting — when the reality-trials don’t fit the theory.”

“I’m a romantic,” replied Kathein. “I worship Stgi and Toe. Love is not like physics.”

“Did I ever tell you how we came to marry a madwoman like Noe?” Gaet laughed. “What is the Kaiel picture of a courtship? Doesn’t a single man seek a woman? Doesn’t a woman keep her eye out for that special man? The man and woman love and marry. Then don’t they look around for another man or woman or couple that they can love and, finding such, court them and marry again to increase their kalothi? So it goes.

“But we were three men. There weren’t any women we met who knew what to do with that. Noe married us for all the wrong reasons. She hated responsibility. She started something new every week and finished nothing. Her temple work gave her contact with men without any long-term responsibilities.

“I met her the night she first noticed that she was unhappy. She thought with the three of us she’d have all the advantages of marriage and none of the disadvantages.” Gaet’s amusement warmed his voice. “It was a disaster. She was a spoiled brat. She knew everything about holding a man for the first week and nothing beyond that. She was the terror of her family; very sober people. And we knew nothing about women beyond the basics of getting our wicks dipped.

“She was so impossible that Joesai beat her from time to time and Hoemei and I would sit around in the next room listening to the screams, biting our nails and saying Thank God someone was doing something about her. Then when it was over, we would ostracize Joesai and comfort and cuddle her.

“Money was never a problem. We were very successful with the coins — we had our mansion already — but our Four got worse and worse. And worse. Finally she left us.”

“She never told me that!” said Kathein.

“Of course not.”

“Did you miss her?” Oelita asked with sentimental curiosity.

“Miss her! I was never so happy in my life that she was gone. Hoemei was wiped out. It was sexual withdrawal. He moped around not saying anything. Joesai was our moralist. He always has been. He didn’t even like her but he hunted her down and brought her home against her will. I’ve never found out what happened then. I couldn’t get rid of her afterwards. I was pissing from my nose, I was so mad at Joesai for bringing her home. He remembers being very firm and gentle. But she acted like she thought he was going to kill her if she didn’t behave, that there was no escape from him. I don’t think he ever threatened her, but when you are fresh from the creche you have a certain cavalier attitude toward death that the non-creche never really want to test.”

“I think I know the man,” said Oelita.

Kathein was wistful. “I’m sure Noe returned because after she’d been away she knew she couldn’t live without you all. She was probably happy that Joesai came for her.”