“You do?”

“Pirius, you feel these little cadets are somehow different from you, don’t you? Not just in experience, in background—something more fundamental. And you know why? Because it’s true.”

The stock of embryos hatched out of Quin’s birthing tanks were developed from the genetic stock of the soldiers themselves. Of course: where else was it to come from? Not only that, the military planners tried to ensure that only successful soldiers got to breed. This was meant to be an incentive to make you get through your training, to fight, to survive. There were no families in this world, no parental bonds. But something deep in every human being responded even to the abstract knowledge that something of herself would survive this brief life.

Pirius knew about this, of course; it was the same on Arches. But he had never before thought through the implications.

It was selective breeding. And it had been going on, right across the Galaxy, long before the war with the Xeelee had come to full fruition. For nearly twenty thousand years mankind had been breeding itself into a race of child soldiers.

“Look at the Tilis,” murmured Burden. “They could probably crossbreed with anybody in the Galaxy, if they had the chance; we haven’t speciated yet. But their bodies are adapted to low gravity, or no gravity at all. Their bones don’t wash away in a flood of imbalanced fluids, the way our earthworm ancestors’ did when they first ventured into space. Their minds have adjusted too; they can think and work in three dimensions. The triplets don’t suffer stress from vertigo, or claustrophobia. They are even immune to radiation, relatively.

“There’s more. Here on Quin, if you survive combat, you breed, but for the genes it’s better yet not to wait, not to take that chance. So the cadets become fertile earlier and earlier, until they are producing eggs and sperm long before their bodies are developed enough to fight. Pirius, the Tilis are about sixteen, I think. But they’ve been fertile since they were ten. Infantry are an extreme case. The attrition rate is horrific; generations are very short here. But the same subtle sculpting has shaped you, Pirius. And me. Neither of us is an earthworm.”

Pirius was shocked. “Burden, I know you don’t care about the Doctrines. But why do the officers let this genetic drift go on?”

Burden shook his head. “You still don’t see it? Because it’s useful, Pirius. If you just remember that one thing, many puzzling things about life here fall into place.”

Burden spoke about himself. The boy called Quero had been born on a base inside yet another Galaxy-center cluster. He had once flown the greenships: he had been a pilot himself, in fact, and had come through one action.

But all the while his faith had been developing, he said.