..... 6
FROM birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann’s age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before.
And then you were Of Age.
Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry—after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority, which carried with it all offices and all power.
It meant freedom.
As a bare beginning, it meant the freedom to command any number of juniors or scholars. On Ross’s last punitive day in the dye vats, a happy ancient commandeered the entire staff to help set shrubs in his front lawn—a
