The play was put on in the amphitheatre where they hold Ship’s Assembly, and we actually went to it instead of watching it on the vid. It was Richard B. Sheridan’s School for Scandal and except that I got a little sweaty in the palms of my hands, something that had never happened at home and that I can only attribute to my being excited, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
I was excited all evening, too. When we got home, Jimmy took my hand and touched the palm with his finger.
“Your hand is sweaty,” he said.
I looked up at him and I nodded.
He said, “So is mine,” and he showed me, and it was.
Jimmy kissed me then. In spite of what they say, I was a little surprised. I had no idea that he wanted to, though I’d been hoping he would. It shows you what secret passions you can arouse. It was the first time anybody had ever kissed me like that and it made my heart pound and my hands sweat even more. Whatever I’ve forgotten, I’ve remembered that birthday.
It was almost as though Jimmy and I had invested something of ourselves because after that we had an unspoken understanding. Instead of carping at each other all the time, we only fought when we were mad. You can’t squabble in public with somebody you sometimes kiss privately, or at least I found I couldn’t. Of course I didn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t want them to think I was changing.
Since I was now thirteen, Trial was less than a year away, but somehow I wasn’t quite as awed by the thought as I once had been. It no longer seemed as deadly a thing as it once had—though I did know that far from everyone returned. Survival Class gave me an amazing amount of confidence. For one thing, it made what we had to face more of a known quantity, and the unknown, unnameable, might-be-anything is always more frightening than the known. Trial was beginning to look more and more like thirty days among the Mudeaters—soonest begun, soonest done—and not much more, though there were some moments when I was surer of this than others. The moments when I wasn’t quite so sure that Trial would be a waltz usually came after one of the afternoons we spent watching various white-fanged this-and-thats come charging efficiently across the projection screen to slice down some galumphing creature three times their size, wham! But Survival Class also taught us to deal with completely strange things. Many didn’t seem to have very much to do with Trial, either. Dancing, needlepoint, parachuting. The thing is that once you’ve discovered that you can do a lot of strange and demanding things, and sometimes even do them well, then coping with the unknown doesn’t seem quite as hard. When they ask you to raise a log cabin, you don’t object that you never expect the opportunity to come up during Trial. You do it. You learn that you can do it. And you even learn one or two things that might come in handy.
In December, forty-two kids who were exactly a year older than we were, were scattered across the Western Hemisphere of New Dalmatia. They were dropped one at a time with horses and packs and no clear idea of where they were or what planet they were on, then got waved goodbye to. Also in December, about one week later, thirty-one of us kids went on a three-day field trip with Mr. Marechal and an assistant named Pizarro, also to New Dalmatia. The differences, of course, were that we knew where we were going, what we would find there, how long we were going to stay, and a few other nonessentials like that.
Four horses were taken, large draft animals. All of us kids came down to the scout bay with good shoes on our feet, heavy clothing, and backpacks. We’d been issued these when we started Survival Class. I’d outgrown my shoes, however, and been issued new pairs, and I was almost ready to ask for a larger set of clothes. As we went on board, I saw Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal counting us off. They weren’t too obvious about it because there was that set idea of the voluntary nature of Survival Class and they make a point of not checking up. Still, they wanted to know how many they were taking—somebody would be bound to say something if they came back a half-dozen short.
Mr. Pizarro was our pilot. When everybody was aboard—everybody meaning all thirty-one of us, nobody missing; I happen to know that Robert Briney got out of bed with a cracked rib (his horse kicked him) to come along—they raised the ramp and took off. There was some nervous talking and joke telling. Mr. Marechal was even tolerant enough not to tell everybody to be quiet.
I picked a chair against the partition that separated the walk-around from the bullpen where we were sitting. I’ve never been at my best in groups like that—where there are only a few people that I know well I talk, but where there are crowds I fade into the background. Besides, I had something to do. Att and Jimmy did come over, though.
“What are you writing?” Att asked.
I put down my notebook. “Ethics notes,” I said. “I’m organizing my ideas for a paper Jimmy and I have to do for Mr. Mbele.”
Jimmy asked, “How are you doing it?”
I took his hand and ran a finger across the back of it. “I’m not asking you that. You’ll see when I’m done.”
Big Att sat down then and said, “What sort of thing does it have to be?”
Jimmy mussed my hair lightly and said, “No one particular thing. It has to be on the subject of ethics.”
I ducked my head away from Jimmy’s hand and said, “You seem nervous, Att.”
“A little, I guess,” he said. “I’ve never been down on a planet. I don’t see how you can be so calm and just sit here and write.”
“Scribble,” Jimmy said.
“It’s not so new for me,” I said. “I’ve been down before.”
“Her dad takes her when he goes,” Jimmy said.
After a few more minutes, Jimmy and Att broke out a pocket chess set and began to play and I turned to my notes. I finished off utilitarianism before we landed.
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with conduct, questions of good and evil, right and wrong. Almost every ethical system—and there are a great many of them because even people who supposedly belong to the same school don’t agree a good share of the time and have to be considered separately—can be looked at as a description and as a prescription. Is this what people actually do? Is this what people ought to do?
Skipping the history and development of utilitarianism, the most popular expression of the doctrine is “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which makes it sound like its relative, the economic philosophy communism which, in a sense, is what we live with in the Ship. The common expression of utilitarian good is “the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.”
Speaking descriptively, utilitarianism doesn’t hold true, though the utilitarian claims that it does. People do act self-destructively at times—they know the pleasureful and choose the painful instead. The only way that what people do and what utilitarianism says they do can be matched is by distorting the ordinary meanings of the words pleasure and pain. Besides, notions of what is pleasurable are subject to training and manipulation. The standard is too shifting to be a good one.
I don’t like utilitarianism as a prescription, either. Treating pleasure and pain as quantities by which good can be measured seems very mechanical and people become just another factor to adjust in the equation. Pragmatically, it seems to make sense to say, One hundred lives saved at the cost of one? Go ahead! The utilitarian would say it every time—he would have to say it. But who gave him the right to say it? What if the one doesn’t have any choice in the matter, but is blindly sacrificed for, say, one hundred Mudeaters whose very existence he is unaware of? Say the choice was between Daddy or Jimmy and a hundred Mudeaters. I wouldn’t make a utilitarian choice and I don’t think I could be easily convinced that the answer should be made by use of the number of pounds of human flesh involved. People are not objects.
* * *
We set down in a great nest of trees in bright morning sunshine. The air was clear and brisk. The season was early summer and things were in bloom. The gravity was enough less than normal that it was noticeable, but not enough less to cause discomfort. We landed in a valley by a quiet river. Our side o
f the river was gentle with great trees rising from a springy floor, but the other side of the river was a sixty-foot bluff, rough-edged, marked by protrusions of rock, ledges, and occasional bits of greenery.
I grabbed up my pack by the straps, slung it over my shoulder, and went trooping outside with everybody else, down the ramp and into the sun and the cool air. In my pack were a change of clothes, a change of shoes, manual toothbrush, hairbrush, bedroll, and some odds and ends. We had bubble tents, but we had been told not to bring them. I had a heavy shirt and a light shirt underneath, and since the pocket in the outer shirt was small and the shirt was beginning to be tight through the shoulders and across the breast, I dropped my notebook down my shirtfront. It would stay as long as I stayed buttoned and tucked. I squinted as I came into the sun.
The trees stretched serenely upwards as though nothing could ever ruffle their composure, the river moved silently past and then curved away, and the light made patches of light and dark as it cut through the trees, alleys in which dust motes could be seen swimming. The chatter of a bird was the only counterpoint to the noise we made. Most of the kids had never been on a planet before and this was a gentle, pleasant introduction. The wind blew lightly, toying with my hair and sleeve, and died again. The horses were led out after us along with harnesses, ropes, and chains.
Mr. Marechal called for us to gather around.
“The first fifteen of you will be with Mr. Pizarro,” he said. “That’s through Mathur. From Morlock on you’ll be with me. We’re going to build cabins today, and tomorrow, too, if it takes that long. Mr. Pizarro thinks that his group can build a cabin faster than my group can. We’re going to see about that.”
That was an obvious sort of appeal, but it sounded like fun, so I didn’t even giggle. Jimmy, Riggy, Robert Briney, that Farmer boy, and the Herskovitz boy were all in my group. Venie and Helen and Att were in Mr. Marechal’s group. Jimmy yanked at my sleeve and we followed Mr. Pizarro away from Mr. Marechal to a place of our own. He sat down on a rock and motioned us to take places on the springy ground around him. Mr. Pizarro was a young man with a narrow face and a brushy red moustache.
“All right,” he said. “What we are going to build is a log cabin, fifteen by twenty feet. We’re going to need about sixty logs. I want all of you kids to get some experience in felling trees, but the boys will do most of it. This is what the cabin will look like.”
He sketched in the dirt with a stick. “This is going to be as good a cabin as we can make in this short a time. We’re going to have floors, and doors, and windows. But this isn’t going to be as good a cabin as it might be—any guesses why?”
Somebody raised his hand and Mr. Pizarro called on him. “Well, if we cut them down, the logs are going to be green. They won’t dry evenly, and the walls will let air in.”
“Right,” Mr. Pizarro said. “We’ll chink the walls as best we can now.”
After we had discussed the cabin for a few more minutes, Mr. Pizarro led the way down the hill to a level place near the river. Here the cabin outlines had already been marked, and two saw pits had been dug in the ground. Mr. Marechal’s group was already down here.
Mr. Pizarro said, “Mr. Marechal and I came down here last Saturday to mark our spots, blaze our trees, and make the saw pits. This is just to make the work faster. When you cut a tree, try to decide why we picked it rather than some of the others around.”
Then he assigned us to jobs: tree-felling, horse-handling and log-hauling, log-peeling, and so on. Jack Fernandez-Fragoso and I were put on sill-laying and lunch. Mr. Pizarro gave us a quick sketch of what we were to do and then took the rest of the people off to get them started on their jobs. Mr. Marechal left two people like us behind on the other cabin, and we took a look at them already at work, and started on our own job.
The side base logs, the long base of the cabin, are the most important because the cabin rests on them. They have to be solidly fitted. The best way to do this is to half-sink them into the ground.
Jack and I got shovels and started digging shallow trenches down the long sides of the cabin outlines. We had pegs and string to keep our trenches straight, level, and the same depth. The physical part wasn’t too bad, since we had been using hand tools for several months in practice and our hands were not as blister-prone as they once had been. It was somewhat painstaking, involving a good bit of measuring to keep things even. When we were done, we leveled the interior floor of the cabin. As we worked, we could hear axes ringing in the woods, voices, and sometimes the fall of a tree.
Before we had finished the floor, Mr. Pizarro, the two horses, and the two base logs were all present. The logs were dragged in along the riverbank. We came out almost in a tie with the peeling of the logs. Then Jack and I watched as the top quarters of the ends of the logs were cut off. Across these ends would be laid the similarly cut tenons of the base logs of the cabin’s short walls, these logs lying on the ground. After that, logs would be laid in alternate rows—long sides of the cabin then short sides, the tenons allowing the logs to rest on those just below them.
Jack and I went off to gather wood, then, and start lunch. By the time lunch was ready, all four base logs were in place, the long ones sitting half in the ground, the short ones standing higher, and a number of other logs had been brought up by the saw pit. Mr. Marechal’s people had done about the same amount here, but I had no idea how much had been done out in the woods.
Jack and I ate before everybody else and then served. I went over and sat with Jimmy and Riggy while they ate. Jimmy had been felling trees, Riggy cutting poles, and they and I were both pleased to have the free hour after lunch that Mr. Pizarro allowed us. There is nothing like doing physical labor to give you reason to think, if only to pass the time, so I had more thoughts for my ethics paper on the subject of stoicism. I got out my notebook and wrote them down. Jimmy and Riggy just rested.
The trouble with stoicism, it seems to me, is that it is a soporific. It affirms the status quo and thereby puts an end to all ambition, all change. It says, as Christianity did a thousand years ago, that kings should be kings and slaves should be slaves, and it seems to me that that is a philosophy infinitely more attractive to the king than to the slave.
It is much the same as the question of determination and free will. Whether or not your actions are determined, you have to act on the assumption that you have free will. If you are determined, your attempt at free will loses you nothing. However, if you are not determined and you act on the assumption that you are, you will never attempt anything. You will simply be a passive blob that things happen to.
I am not a passive blob. I have changed and I think at least some of it is my own doing. As long as I have any hope, I could not possibly be a stoic.
* * *
In the afternoon, I walked with Jimmy behind Mr. Pizarro to chop down my tree. We followed the skid marks of previous logs along the edge of the riverbank. The sun was bright and the air a little warmer now. I couldn’t help thinking that this was very pleasant, although it was nothing like home. After a few hundred yards we cut away from the river and up a ridge line. The underbrush was very thin and there was a rust-brown carpet of shed tree leaves over the ground.
The boys who had been chopping trees before went back to work. There were several trees down and cut into logs waiting to be dragged away. Mr. Pizarro pointed at a gray tree trunk with a white mark on it.
“That’s your tree,” he said, as the cling of axes and the whirr-whirr of saws started around us.
I walked around the tree and looked up at it. Finally, just as we had been told and shown, I picked the direction I wanted it to fall. I didn’t want it to fall on anybody, and I wanted it to fall where it could be cut and hauled away.
Then I braced my feet, lifted my axe, and started my undercut. This is a small cut in the tree on the side you wish it to fall. The axe struck the tree and made a gash. Once again, and a big chip flew. When I had my undercut, I stopped to rest
; “Very good,” Mr. Pizarro said. “When you are done, send Sonja up here. You know what you are doing this afternoon, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded and walked away then. He was overseeing all the different jobs that we were doing, plus doing a good bit of the heaviest work himself. You could expect him to be at your elbow one minute and then gone the next—he had come and tasted a spoonful of the soup while I was making it that morning. As he walked away, somebody yelled, “Stand clear,” and we all looked up.
One of the trees was ready to fall. There was a ravine between us and both of our trees were aimed to fall there, this one about thirty feet closer to the river than mine. Mr. Pizarro moved up the hill away from it. The boy, seeing everyone clear, pushed the tree and stepped back. It wasn’t cut completely through, but the undercut projected beneath the major cut and the push was enough to break through the bit of wood between. The tree wavered and then with majestic slowness toppled forward. In the silence left by the quieted axes, there was the sound of wood breaking, of branches crashing, and then a great splintering rack as it smashed against the ground, raising dirt. Then the axes started again.
I moved around to the uphill side of my tree and started my major cut. I stopped from time to time to catch my breath and kick damp aromatic chips. At last it was beginning to waver and I knew it was ready to fall.
I yelled, “Everybody stand clear,” and checked to see that everybody was.
Then I pushed the tree and stepped back. My foot skidded on a chip and I sat down hard, looking up at the tree. At first I thought I was wrong and it wasn’t going to fall at all, but then it slowly tottered away from me. It fell and when it hit the ground, the butt, snapped clean from the stump, leapt high and then smacked back against the ground only a few feet away. The treetop that had been high over my head was now fifty feet below me in the gully. The tree, landing on the slope, slid forward a few feet and then came to a stop.
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