Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

  When I got to our corridor, I slipped the grate out and pulled myself up and out on the floor. I reset the grate and gave a swipe to my hair to teach it to behave and lie down flat again. I inherit my hair and eyes, my straight nose, and my complexion from my Spanish and Indian ancestors on Daddy’s side of the family, and though I wear my black hair short, it will misbehave.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said as I came into our apartment. “Am I late?”

  The living room was in a real mess. Books and papers were all in piles on the floor and the furniture was all shoved to one side. Our home ordinarily had a lived-in look, but this was far worse than usual.

  Daddy was sitting in one of the chairs, sorting books. Daddy is Miles Havero. He is a small man just into middle age with a face that is hard to read, and a very sharp mind. He is mainly a mathematician, though he sits on the Ship’s Council and has for years. He and I had lived in this apartment since I left the dormitory when I was nine.

  He gave me an inquiring look. “What happened to you?”

  “I didn’t mean to be late,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m talking about your clothes.”

  I looked down. I had on a white shirt and yellow shorts. Across the front of both were streaks of dust and grime.

  The Ship is a place where it is almost impossible to get dirty. The ground in the quad yards isn’t real dirt-and-grass, for one thing. It’s a cellulose product set in a milled fiber and plastic base—when a square gets worn they rip it out and put in a new one, just like in your living room floor. The only place there is dirt in any quantity is the Third Level, where there isn’t anything else but. A certain amount of dirt does get carried out of the Third Level and spread and tracked around the Ship. Eventually it gets sucked into the collecting chutes and blown down to Engineers on the First Level, where it is used to feed the Converters to produce heat, light, and power inside the Ship. But you can see that ordinarily there isn’t much opportunity to get filthy.

  I once asked Daddy why they didn’t work out a system to keep the dirt at its only source—the Third Level—instead of going to the trouble of cleaning the Ship after it gets dirty. It wouldn’t be hard to do.

  He said, “You know what the Ship was built for, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. Everybody knows that. It was built to carry Mudeaters out to settle the Colonies—I don’t call them that in Daddy’s presence, by the way; though it may seem surprising, he doesn’t like the word.

  Daddy went on to explain. The Mudeaters—Colons, rather—were packed in at very close quarters. They weren’t clean people—try to convince a peasant to wash—and people packed in as close as they were are going to sweat and stink anyway. For that reason, mainly, the Ship was built with a very efficient cleaning and air-distribution system. The Ship is used now for a completely different purpose, so we no longer need that system.

  Daddy said my suggestion wasn’t completely out of line.

  “Why doesn’t the Council do something about it, then?” I asked.

  “Figure it out yourself, Mia,” Daddy said. He was always after me to try to figure things out myself before I looked them up or asked him for the answers.

  I did figure it out. Simply, it would be just too much trouble for too little result to scrap a complicated existing system that worked well at no present cost in favor of another system whose only virtue was its simplicity.

  I brushed at my shirt and most of the dirt went its own way.

  “I took a shortcut home,” I said.

  Daddy just nodded absently and didn’t say anything. He’s impossible to figure. I was once taken aside and pumped to find out how Daddy was going to vote on a Council Question. They weren’t very nice people, so instead of telling them politely that I didn’t have the least idea, I lied. I can’t guess what Daddy is thinking—he has to tell me what’s on his mind.

  He set down the book he had been looking at and said, “Mia, I have some good news for you. We’re going to move into a new place.”

  I gave a whoop and threw my arms around his dear neck.

  This was news I had wanted to hear. In spite of all the empty space in the Ship, we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow, after I left the dorm and moved in with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a larger one. We were too busy living in the one we had. The one thing I had disliked most when I was living in the dormitory was the lack of space—they feel they have to keep an eye on you there. Moving now meant that I would have a larger room for myself. Daddy had promised I could.

  “Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Which apartment are we going to move into?”

  The population of the Ship is about thirty thousand now, but once we had transported thirty times that many and cargo besides. The truth is that I don’t see where they had fit them all. But now, even though we’ve spread out to fill up some of the extra space, all the quads have empty apartments. If we had wanted to, we could have moved next door.

  Then Daddy said, as though it made no difference, “It’s a big place in Geo Quad,” and the bottom fell out of my elation.

  I turned away from him abruptly, feeling dizzy, and sat down. Daddy didn’t just want me to leave home. He wanted me to leave the precarious stability I had worked out for myself. Until I was nine, I had nothing, and now Daddy wanted me to give up everything I had gained since then.

  Even now, it isn’t easy for me to talk about it. If it were not important, I would skip right over it and never say a word. I was very lonely when I was nine. I was living in a dormitory with fourteen other kids, being watched and told what to do, seeing a procession of dorm mothers come and go, feeling abandoned. That’s the way it had been for me for five years, and finally there came a time when I couldn’t stay there any longer, and so I ran away. I got on the shuttle, though I don’t know quite how I knew where to go, and I went to see Daddy.

  I kept thinking about what I’d say and what he’d say and worrying about it all the distance, so that when I finally got in to see him I was crying and hiccupping and I couldn’t stop.

  “What’s the matter?” Daddy kept asking me, but I couldn’t answer.

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped my face, and he finally got me calmed down enough to find out what I was trying to tell him. It took a while, but finally I was finished and had stopped crying, and was only hiccupping occasionally.

  “I’m truly sorry, Mia,” he said gravely. “I hadn’t really understood how things were. I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be better off in a dormitory with other children than living here alone with me.”

  “No,” I said. “I want to live with you, Daddy.” He looked thoughtful for a long moment, and then he gave a little nod and said, “All right. I’ll call up the dorm and let them know so they won’t think you’re lost.”

  Alfing Quad then became one of the two certain things in my life. You can’t count on a dorm or a dorm mother, but a quad and a father are sure. But now Daddy wanted us to leave one of my two sureties. And Geo Quad wasn’t even on the Fourth Level—it was on the Fifth.

  The Ship is divided into five separate levels. First Level is mainly Technical—Engineers, Salvage, Drive, Conversion, and so on. Second is mainly Administration. Third has dirt and hills, real trees and grass, sand, animals, and weeds—it’s where they instruct us kids before they drop us on a planet to live or die. Fourth and Fifth are Residential, where we all live. Of these five, the Fifth is the last. All of us kids knew that if you lived way out on the Fifth Level you weren’t much better than a Mudeater. If you lived on the Fifth Level you were giving up one of your claims to being human.

  I sat in my chair thinking for a long time, trying to recover myself. “You can’t be serious about moving to the Fifth Level?” I asked, hoping Daddy might be joking—not really hoping; more just trying to keep from facing the situation for a moment longer.

  “Certainly I am,” he said, as though it were nothing. “
I had to hunt for a long time before I found this apartment. I’ve already started getting us ready to move. You’ll like it there, I think. I understand there’s a boy your age in the school there who’s somewhat ahead of you. It will give you a chance to scratch for a while, instead of coasting along with no competition the way you do here.”

  I was afraid, and so I started to argue desperately, naming all the places we could move into inside Alfing. I even cried—and I didn’t do that often anymore—but Daddy was unshakable. Finally I dragged my sleeve across my face to dry my eyes and folded my arms and said, “I’m not going to go.”

  That wasn’t the right tack to take with Daddy. It just convinced him that I was being stubborn, but it wasn’t stubbornness now. I was truly frightened. I was sure that if we moved things would never be the same for me again. They couldn’t be.

  But I couldn’t say that to Daddy. I couldn’t admit to him that I was afraid.

  He came to the chair where I was sitting defiantly with my arms crossed and fresh tears lurking in the corners of my eyes, and he put both of his hands on my shoulders.

  “Mia,” he said. “I realize that it isn’t easy for you, but in less than two years you will be your own master and then you can live where you please and do as you like. If you can’t take an unpleasant decision now, what kind of an adult will you make then? Right now—no arguments—I am moving. You have a choice. Move with me, or move into the dormitory here in Alfing Quad.”

  I’d lived in a dormitory and I had no desire ever to go back. I did want to stay with Daddy, but it was still a hard decision for me to make. It was a question of which of my two certainties I wanted to give up. In the end, I made my decision.

  After I wiped my eyes once again with the lower edge of my shirt, I walked slowly back down to the quad yard. When I got there, both soccer games had broken up and the whole yard was a turning kaleidoscope of colored shirts and shorts. I didn’t see Venie Morlock anywhere in the mass of playing kids, so I asked a boy I knew if he had seen her.

  He pointed, “She’s right over there.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I got her down. I rubbed her nose in the ground. Then I made her beg to be let up. I got a black eye for my trouble, but it was worth it to make her remember who was who, even if I did live on the Fifth Level now.

  After that, Daddy and I moved.

  Chapter 2

  THE PEOPLE WHO RUN OUR SCHOOLS are very conservative—that probably holds true just about everywhere, not just on our Ship. In any case, usually once you get assigned to a tutor you don’t change to another for years. In fact, I knew a boy in Alfing Quad who hated his tutor and got along so badly with him that they could both show scars, and it took him three years to change to another.

  Compared to that, anything less has to seem frivolous.

  Monday morning, two days after we moved, I reported to my new school supervisor in Geo Quad. He was thin, officious, prim, and exact, and his name was Mr. Quince. He looked at me standing in front of his desk, raised his eyebrows as he took in my black eye, finished examining me, and said, “Sit down.”

  The supervisor is in charge of all the school’s administrative work—he assigns tutors, handles class movements, programs the teaching machines, breaks up fights if there are any, and so on. It’s a job with only a minimum of appeal for most people so they don’t make anybody stay with it for longer than three years.

  After looking through all my papers with pursed lips, and making a painstaking entry in a file, Mr. Quince said, “Mr. Wickersham.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, puzzled.

  “Mr. Wickersham will be your tutor. He lives at Geo C/15/37. You’re to meet him at his home at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, and thereafter three times a week at your mutual convenience. And please, let’s not be late on Wednesday. Now come along and I’ll show you your room for first hour.”

  School is for kids between the ages of four and fifteen. After fourteen, if you survive, they let you give up all the nonsensical parts. You simply work with a tutor or a craft master and follow your interests toward some goal.

  I was due to make a decision on that in about two years. The trouble is that except for math and reading old novels I had a completely different set of interest than I had had a year before, and since I didn’t really have a solid talent for math and reading old novels isn’t much use for anything, I had to find something definite. I didn’t really want to specialize. I wanted to be a synthesist, knowing a little about everything and seeing enough to put the pieces together. It’s a job that had appeal for me, but I never talked about wanting it because I suspected I wasn’t smart enough to handle it and I wanted room to back down in if I had to.

  At my moments of depression I thought I might well wind up as a dorm mother or something equally daring.

  At some point between fourteen and twenty everybody finishes his normal training. You pick something you like and start doing it. Later, after twenty, if you’re not already in research, you may apply for educational leave and work on a project of some sort. That’s what my mother keeps herself busy with.

  I followed Mr. Quince to the room I was scheduled to be in first hour. I wasn’t anxious to be there at all and I was half-scared and half-belligerent with no way of knowing which part would dominate at any given moment. When we arrived, there was a lot of sudden moving around. When the people unsorted themselves, I saw there were four kids in the room, two boys and two girls.

  Mr. Quince said, “What’s going on here?”

  Nobody said anything—nobody ever does to a supervisor if they can avoid it.

  He said, “You, Dentremont. What are you up to?” The boy was redheaded and even smaller than I, with very prominent ears. He looked very young, though he couldn’t have been since he was in the same class as I.

  He said, “Nothing, sir.”

  After a moment of sharp gazing around, Mr. Quince accepted that and unbent sufficiently to introduce me. He didn’t introduce anybody else, apparently assuming I could catch on to the names soon enough on my own. The buzzer for the first hour sounded then and he said, “All right. Let’s set to work.”

  When he left, the redheaded boy went behind one of the teaching machines and busied himself in tightening down the back plate.

  The girl nearest me said, “One of these days Mr. Quince is going to catch you, Jimmy, and then there really will be trouble.”

  “I’m just curious,” Jimmy said.

  Everybody more or less ignored me, probably no more knowing how to take me than I knew how to take them. They did watch me and I have no doubt they took their first opportunity to tell everyone their idea of what that new girl from the Fourth Level was like. It was soon clear to me that they eyed us as suspiciously as we on the Fourth Level regarded them, with the added note that in our case it was justified while in theirs it was not. I took no pleasure in having girls look at me and then put their heads together and whisper and giggle, and if I had been a little more sure of myself I would have challenged them. As it was, I just dug into my work and pretended I didn’t notice.

  After first hour, three of the kids left. Jimmy Dentremont stayed where he was, and since my schedule card called for me to stay here second hour, I didn’t move either. He looked closer at me than I could like. I didn’t know quite what to say. But then people had been staring and prying and even prodding from the moment we arrived in Geo Quad.

  Our furniture had been moved over on Saturday morning—the pieces we wanted to keep—and Daddy and I came up on Saturday afternoon bringing everything else that we owned. I had four cartons full of boxes, clothes, and my personal things. I also had a pennywhistle that I’d salvaged. It was about eight inches long and had brass ends and finger holes. It turned up when we were going through our things, in some old box of Daddy’s, and he had put it on his “to throw” pile, from which I immediately rescued it. Sometimes I don’t understand my father at all.

  The cartons went in my new room, w
hich was larger than my old one. Larger, plus having more bookshelves, which pleased me because I like my books out where I can use them, not piled away for lack of space.

  I stood looking at the cartons, and not having the courage to attack them immediately, I began experimenting to see what sounds I could get out of the pennywhistle. Three minutes—that was the time we had in peace before the door rang.

  First it was our neighbors. They crowded in and said “Oh, Mr. Havero, it’s such a thrill to have you here on our corridor, we hope you love it here as much as we do,” and “Some of us men get together once in a while, you know, for a little evening, keep it in mind,” and “Oh, so that’s your daughter, she’s sweet, she’s adorable, Mr. Havero, I mean that, I really do, and you know Havero, there are some things I’ve been meaning to talk over with our rep on the Council, but now that you’re here, well, I might as well say it right to you, go right to the top, so to speak . . .”

  After that came the sightseers and the favor askers. A lot of favor askers. I could tell them from the neighbors because they tried to butter me up, as well as Daddy. The neighbors just buttered up Daddy.

  I don’t know why it is, but in a case like this, the very people you’d enjoy meeting are the ones who have the good taste to stay home and not bother you. I think it may be an unsolvable problem.

  Within minutes, Daddy retreated to his office and the people took over our living room while they waited to talk to him. The new apartment had two wings with the living room in between like the meat in a sandwich. One wing had three bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen-dining room. The other had a study for Daddy and an office. Adjoining the office on the far side was another smaller, empty apartment. Eventually, this was supposed to be a waiting room, but it wasn’t ready yet and so the people were camping themselves inside our house.