Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

  Which was a nice way of pronouncing a probable death sentence. But then Mr. Tubman wasn’t wrong—she had asked for it.

  Soon after, they held the vote. Seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three people voted to let her stay. Eighteen thousand, four hundred and one voted to expel her.

  Alicia MacReady fainted, the reaction of an hysteric. Mr. Persson and some of her friends gathered around. The other people began to file out of the great room, the business of the evening behind them.

  I got up and switched off the vid. “How would you have voted?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that much about things like this,” Zena said looking up. She’d only been half paying attention. “They don’t give her anything, a horse or weapons or a heli-pac or anything, when they put her off on a Colony planet?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, isn’t that pretty harsh?”

  “It’s like Mr. Tubman said, we’ve got rules that have to be followed. If people don’t follow the rules they can’t stay here. They were doing her a favor by even letting the Assembly vote on the question.”

  Zena looked sour and said, “What will your father do if he comes home and finds that you haven’t thrown out the dinner things?”

  “Oh, heavens,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  I’m likely to put off little bits of drudgery, even when they wouldn’t take long to settle. I had managed to put the dinner remains completely out of mind.

  As I was collecting the dishes and throwing them in the incinerator, Zena, standing by, said, “Why are you so strong on rules?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re so set on the rules that you won’t allow any mistakes at all. And that MacReady woman is going to die now.”

  I stopped stacking dishes. I looked at her. “I didn’t even vote. I had nothing to do with what was decided.”

  “That isn’t the point,” she said, but she didn’t say what the point was.

  Daddy came home about ten minutes later. I asked him if things had gone as he had expected them to, and he said yes.

  “I cleared up the dishes,” I said.

  Daddy said, “I never doubted you would for a minute.”

  At our next meeting, I asked Mr. Mbele if he’d expected the decision to go the way it had.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Your father’s point of view is widely shared in the Ship. That is why he’s Chairman.”

  Chapter 9

  IT MAY SOUND LIKE AN ANACHRONISM to speak of seasons on a Ship, but we always did: that is, July, August, and September were “summer,” as an example. This never struck me as odd until I was fifteen or sixteen when I was going into the factors responsible for planetary weather, and one day I really thought about the meaning of the terms we used so casually. It was obvious that through time they had lost their weatherly connotations and now simply referred to quarters of the year—well, for that matter, the fact that we use the Old Earth Year at all is an anachronism, but we do it anyway.

  At the time I was doing my puzzling about this, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. (Since he appears in this book several times, I won’t mention his name—he has enough burdens without being made to sound stupid here.) I said, “Do you realize that our calling November ‘fall’ means that most of the people on the Ship probably came originally from the Northern Temperate Zone on Earth?”

  He said, “Well, if you wanted to know that, all you have to do is call for the original Ship Lists from the library.”

  I said, “But don’t you think this is interesting?”

  He said, “No.”

  Perhaps stupid is not the word I intended. Perhaps contentious.

  In any case, the summer when I was twelve passed. I think of it as a busy block with a whole number of items, and I’m not sure in what exact order any of them happened. I could invent an order, but since none of them is central, I won’t. For instance, during that summer, I had my first menstrual period—that’s important insofar as I took it as a sign that I was growing up, but that’s about all you can say for it. Then there were dancing lessons. You might well wonder what we were doing with dancing lessons, but they were actually part of our Survival Class training.

  Mr. Marechal said, “This isn’t meant to be fun and it isn’t meant to be funny. It is deadly serious. You stumble over your own feet. You don’t know what to do with your hands. When you are in a position where you have to do the exact right thing in an instant, deft movement is the most important element. You want your body to work for you, not against you. Not only, by God, am I going to give you dancing lessons, but I’m going to start you on needlepoint.”

  We not only got needlepoint, dancing lessons, hand-to-hand combat training, and weapon instruction, but Mr. Marechal was our tutor in all of them. He showed us films of people drawing handguns and dropping them, of people falling off horses (I did that a couple of times myself), of people in a blue funk. The films were taken on an obstacle course where, for instance, if you didn’t watch out, the ground might suddenly fall out from underneath your feet. There might be a rope to grab, or you might simply have to land without breaking your ankle. At the end of the summer, when we moved up from Sixth Class to Fifth, we started going through obstacle courses ourselves. The primary aim was not to teach us any individual skill, but how to react smoothly and intelligently in difficult situations. We were shown how to do individual things, but that wasn’t the primary aim of the instruction.

  All of this adds up to the fact that I had been wrong in thinking it would be simply businesslike first to last. Survival Class was earnest, it was businesslike, but it was intelligent and interesting, too. What it was not was an adventure, but since I had my desire for an adventure settled very shortly it no longer bothered me that Survival Class was not an adventure.

  Survival Class gave me a whole new set of friends, and they began taking up enough of my time that I saw less of people like Zena Andrus. I did see Mary Carpentier once more, but we found that we didn’t have a great deal to say to one another and we never seemed to call each other again.

  Most important, though, out of the thirty-one of us in the Survival Class, there drew together a nuclear group of six. This was hardly pure friendship since some of my best friends were not in it and Venie Morlock was. It was just . . . the group. We drew together originally through a non-adventure. At Jimmy’s urging, I took a group of kids up to the Sixth Level and we spent the day exploring. The six of us who went were me and Venie and Jimmy, Helen Pak, Riggy Allen, and Attila Szabody. Attila and Helen, and, I guess, Jimmy were my particular friends. Riggy was a good friend of Attila’s, and Helen and Riggy both saw something in Venie. That was the way the group hung together, and the trip to the Sixth Level—I guess it was something of an adventure for some of the others and it was fun for me—provided another bond. We usually saw each other for an hour or two after each Survival Class and sometimes on weekends. There were a few others who joined us from time to time, but they were just comers-and-goers.

  After Survival Class one day, five of us were in the snackery of the Common Room of Lev Quad on the Fifth Level. By shuttle this wasn’t really far from Entry Gate 5, and it was the most convenient central point for all of us. A few changes on the shuttle and we were all home. We didn’t know anybody in Lev Quad and we couldn’t have found our way around it very well, but still we had our place here, our regular corner, and after a little while we no longer felt so much like intruders.

  The missing number was Jimmy. He’d been hurrying off one place and another during the past week after class, mumbling and chuckling around as though he had his little business and would be damned if he’d tell it, and in the meantime was enjoying it thoroughly.

  I was doodling on a piece of paper, working out an idea I had in mind. We were sitting at the table with food and drink, but not a lot of it. We were mostly taking up table space and talking. Our regular table was this one, a red-topped affair set in a
corner on the left in the under-fourteen area.

  We were talking of a prospective soccer game to be played on Saturday morning in Attila’s home quad, Roth Quad on the Fourth Level, if we could raise the necessary players. I was thinking that I’d certainly come a long way from the time—not that long ago—when all that it took to page me was a simple call on my home-quad speaker system. I was no longer quite the stick-at-home I’d been then.

  “Will Jimmy play?” Attila asked. He was the biggest among us, but a quiet boy for all that. He generally didn’t say a lot, but would just sit back and then from time to time come out with some comment that was completely surprising, and all the more surprising because he wasn’t the person you’d pick as likely to say anything bright or clever or knowledgeable.

  “Mia can ask him,” Helen said.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll have him call you. Unless he’s too busy with this whatever-it-is of his, I think he’ll want to play. He’s a good halfback.” I turned my attention back to my scribble.

  “What is that you’re doing there?” Riggy asked, and snatched it away. Riggy is somebody I have to describe as a meatball—he was hardly my favorite person in the world. He’s one of those people who have no governor, who’ll do the first thing that pops into their heads whether or not it makes a lick of sense—and then, if necessary, be heartily sorry afterward. He wasn’t stupid, or clumsy, or incompetent—he simply had no sense of proportion at all.

  “And what’s that supposed to be?” he asked, pointing at the paper. Venie and Helen on his side of the table both looked at it, too.

  After several tries, I had drawn what was reasonably recognizable as a fist seen palm on, holding a long, clean arrow. I’m no artist and I’d had to keep sneaking looks at my own hand to get even a moderately accurate picture. The arrow I’d managed to draw without benefit of a model.

  I made a grab for it, but Riggy held it out of reach. “Uh-uh,” he said, passing it on to Venie farther down the table. She looked at it with a frown, making sure at the same time that I wasn’t able to grab it back.

  I shrugged and said, “It’s a picture with a meaning, if you must know. It’s sort of a pictorial pun.”

  “A rebus?” Attila suggested.

  “I guess it is.”

  “Let me see it,” he said, and took it from Venie.

  “I don’t get it,” Venie said. “An arrow held in a hand.”

  “A fist,” Riggy said. “The hand’s closed.”

  Tiredly I said, “It’s my name. ‘Have arrow’—Havero.”

  “Oh, no,” Venie said. “That’s pretty poor.”

  Helen said, “I don’t think it’s too bad. I think it’s a pretty clever idea.”

  “ ‘An ill-favoured thing, but mine own,’ ” I quoted tartly.

  Venie gave me a disgusted look. “You are a show-off, aren’t you? What was that supposed to be?”

  “Mia’s reading Shakespeare for her tutor,” Helen said. “That’s all. She’s been memorizing lines.”

  Riggy took the doodle back and gave it another look. “You know, this is a good idea. I wonder if I could work my name out somehow.”

  We spent some time trying, working on all our names. It didn’t come out terribly well. By stretching we got “pack,” a little knapsack for Helen—but that wasn’t truly homonymous. “Szabody” and “Allen” were pretty well unworkable.

  “I’ve got one,” Riggy said, after some moments of concentration during which he wouldn’t show anybody what he was doing. Triumphantly he held up a sheet with a series of locks drawn on it. “ ‘More-lock,’ ” he said. “Get it?”

  We got it, but we didn’t like it. He had covered the whole sheet with his drawings, which is hardly what you’d call concise.

  I’d been working on the same name myself. I came up with a fair-to-middling troglodyte.

  “What’s that?” Attila asked.

  “It’s Morlock again.”

  Venie didn’t look pleased, and Riggy immediately challenged, “How do you get Morlock out of that thing?”

  “It’s from an old novel called The Time Machine. There’s a group of underground monsters in it called Morlocks.”

  “You’re making that up,” Venie said.

  “I’m not either,” I said. “You can look the book up for yourself. I read it when I was in Alfing, so all you have to do is call for the facsimile.”

  Venie looked at the drawing again. Then she said, “All right, I’ll look it up. I may even use it.”

  I almost liked her for saying that, since I hadn’t been very kind in bringing the subject up. If my name had been Morlock, I might have used the troglodyte idea myself, but I hadn’t really expected Venie to stomach the idea. It took more . . . not quite objectivity—but detachment from herself—than I thought she had.

  Just then Attila said, “Here comes Jim.”

  Jimmy Dentremont came between the tables, snaked up a free chair from the next table over, and plunked it down beside me.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Where have you been?” Helen asked for all of us. Helen is a very striking girl. She has blonde hair and oriental eyes—eyes with an epicanthic fold—and it’s a wild combination.

  Jimmy just shrugged and pointed at our various little doodles. “What’s all this?”

  We explained it to him.

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s easy. I can get one for me with no trouble.” He picked up a pencil and sketched two mountains, and then put a little stick figure man between them.

  I looked blankly at him and so did the others.

  “My name means ‘between mountains,’ ” he explained.

  “It does?” Riggy asked.

  “In French.”

  “I didn’t know you knew French,” I said.

  “I don’t. I just looked my name up because I knew it was originally French.”

  “How about that?” Attila said. “I wonder if my name means something in Hungarian.”

  Jimmy cleared his throat, looked around at us, and then said to me, “Mia, do you remember our bet about my finding an adventure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ve found one. That’s what I’ve been working on the past few days.”

  Helen immediately asked for an explanation of what we were talking about, and I had to wait to ask Jimmy just what it was that I was in for until he had finished explaining.

  “If this was a bet, what were the stakes involved?” Riggy asked.

  Jimmy looked at me questioningly. Then he said, “I don’t think we settled that. I assumed it was that if I found an adventure, Mia would have to go along.”

  Everybody looked at me, and I said, “All right. I guess so.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said. “This is it: We’re going to go outside the Ship. On the outside of the Ship.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Helen asked.

  “It’s an adventure,” Jimmy said. “Adventures are supposed to have an element of danger, be fraught with peril, and all that.”

  “Is it dangerous outside the Ship?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t know what it’s like out there. I couldn’t find out. I did try. Finding out should be part of the fun. Besides, even if that’s easy, there are some hard parts. We’ve got to have suits to go outside, and we’ve got to get ourselves outside. Neither of those will be easy.”

  “I want to go, too,” Riggy said.

  Jimmy shook his head. “This is just Mia and me. We are going to need help, though, and if you want to help us you’re welcome.”

  The kids looked at each other around the table, and then they all nodded. We were a group, after all, and this was just too good to miss.

  The six of us walked in a body through a corridor on the First Level. Jimmy walked a step or two ahead of us, leading the way. There is something to being a part of a group, busy on purposes of its own, something exciting. Even if it is melodramatic, even if it is ninety percent hokum, it is fun. I w
as enjoying myself, and so were the others. I could hardly restrain myself from practicing surreptitious glances behind us, simply because they seemed in keeping with the part we were playing.

  Jimmy turned half around and pointed ahead and to the left. “It’s around here.”

  There was a little foyer there a couple of feet deep, and then a blank black door, completely featureless. In our world that is unusual—people ordinarily lavish considerable care in making their surroundings lively and personal. Consequently, the Ship is quite a colorful place to live in. A black door like this with neither design nor decoration was obviously meant to say “Stay Out” to anybody who came by.

  “The airlock to the outside is in the room behind the door there,” Jimmy said.

  The door had no obvious button, knob, slide, latch, or handle, only a single hole for an electronic key—this sort of key when inserted would emit an irregular signal of an established frequency and the door would open.

  Attila and Jimmy were the two of us that knew something about electronics and they looked the door over carefully together.

  After a moment Attila said, “It’s just a token lock.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. We were standing in a half-circle around the two boys and the door.

  He said, “This lock is just to keep the door closed and to let people know the door is supposed to be closed, and that’s about all. I’ll have to work on it a couple of times and I can get through.”

  Jimmy said, “Can you be through by next Saturday—a week from tomorrow?”