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that particular class would be adopted into the clans of their choice. The theory was that they would no longer be needed as a separate and unique class. The star-ships were not designed to make a return trip to the home planets.
        Unfortunately, the original plans for the expedition were never realized. Shipboard emergencies had struck both colony ships almost simultaneously as they prepared to approach Windarra. Huge explosions of light and energy had nearly engulfed both.
        The starships bad managed to limp down through the atmosphere and each had made barely controlled crash landings, but those landings had been on separate continents. The communication facilities and a great deal of technology had been destroyed. Many lives were lost. Each group of colonists had assumed the other group had perished in the strange explosions.
        The colonists from each ship who had lived through the crash had been faced with the task of surviving without the assistance of the social classes that had been on board the other ship. The result had been some radical changes in the original plans of the philosophers, but the basic outlines of the class and clan system still held on both continents.
        Sariana had learned, however, that those outlines had held much more firmly in the eastern provinces. In the west the social structure had shifted and changed to a major extent. The lines between clans and classes were becoming quite blurred, although the general system was still in place.
        Sariana wrinkled her nose in disapproval as she reminded herself that in the west matters had actually gotten to the point where marriages across class lines were common. Romantic liaisons and outright illicit affairs between people of different social classes were even more common. Sariana could only shake her head over the faltering social structure.
        It wasn't that her own people were so much more virtuous. They weren't. But they had the good sense and the social awareness to keep their affairs, like their marriages, within class boundaries.
        The changes in the social system on the western continent had come as quite a shock to the easterners when both groups had finally rediscovered each other a few years before.
        It was ironic that it had been a western invention, the fast, sleek windrigger sailing ships, that had made that rediscovery possible. Contact between the descendants of the original colonists was finally reestablished, but things had changed. Each group had managed to survive without the other.
        That was a lesson that would not soon be forgotten by either contingent. It was clear to the people of each continent that, contrary to the predictions of the social philosophers, they really didn't need each other. Both groups tended to be equally arrogant and regard the other group as slightly less advanced and certainly less sophisticated than itself. Trade had been established but socially there was still very little mingling. It was one thing for a member of an eastern continent clan, to trade with someone from a western clan, quite another to contemplate marriage into that clan. One had to maintain one's social standards, even if one occasionally found the clever little gadgets devised by the westerners useful or intriguing.
        It was amazing how little easterners knew about westerners, Sariana thought. Take this business of the west having created a whole new social class called Shields. It was a typical piece of western inventiveness. The original social philosophers would have been appalled.
        Sariana stared gloomily out the high arched windows that opened onto a garden of vivid flowers, wondering how she had gotten herself into such a predicament.
        She was still contemplating her fate when the door to her office swung open without any warning. Sariana didn't swivel around in her chair to see who was standing in the doorway. Her instincts already told her. A