Rite of Passage

We took a couple of quick turns from one street into another, and if George was following after, he was soon left behind. By that time, I had no idea of where we were. It was a street like the others we’d been in, made of rounded stones and about the width of a large hallway at home, with buildings of stone and wood, and a few of brick, on either side.

“Hold on,” I said. “I can’t run any more.”

My legs were aching and I was out of breath. It took a lot more effort to get around here than it did at home, and I had no doubt that if I fell down it would hurt more. Grainau was a planet that was what they called. “Earth-like to nine degrees,” as were all the colony planets, but that one degree of difference offered a great deal of latitude for the odd or uncomfortable, including Grainau’s slightly stronger gravity. That “slightly stronger” was enough to tire me in almost no time.

“What’s the matter?” Ralph asked.

I said, “I’m tired. Let’s just walk.”

They exchanged looks, and then Ralph said, “Oh, all right.”

The air was a little hard to catch your breath in, it seemed so thick and wami. It felt wet. Something like walking through stew, and about as pleasant as that.

“Is the air always like this?” I asked.

“Like what?” Helga asked, with the barest hint of a defensive edge in her voice.

“Well, thick.” I could have added, “and smelly, too,” since it carried an odd variety of odors I couldn’t identify, but I didn’t. They always prate about planetary fresh air, but if this was it, I didn’t like it.

“It’s just a little humid today,” Ralph said. “This breeze that’s coming up now should clear the air.”

We started that afternoon by all being a little afraid of each other, I think. But very quickly Ralph and Helga found out how silly their fear was, and pretty soon, when they didn’t think to mind their manners, the contempt that replaced the fear slipped out. It took me awhile to see what it was. All I knew was that they found a lot of what I said foolish, and made it clear that they found it foolish, and that they did a lot of exchanging of significant glances.

I found I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what time it was. I said something about the morning, something that made it clear that I thought it was morning and they both turned on me. Turned out it was after lunch here. No matter that I had stared at my breakfast just before we left.

I pointed at a building and asked what it was.

“That’s a store, silly. Haven’t you ever seen a store?”

Well, I hadn’t. I’d read about them, and that’s all. We have such a small society on the Ship that buying and selling aren’t really practicable. If you want something, you put in a requisition for it and in a little while it comes. You can live as simply or as lavishly as you want — there’s a limit as to how much you can jam into one apartment, though some people do live up to the limit. In a society where anybody can have just about anything he wants, there’s no real prestige in having things unless you use them or get some esthetic pleasure from them, so I would say the tendency in general is toward simple living.

I can think of only one regular program of exchange on the Ship. Kids under fourteen are given weekly allowance chits to draw against in the Common Room snack bars; that way none of them get a chance to ruin their health. After fourteen, they assume you know what you’re about and leave you alone.

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

Ralph shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

It was a clothing store, and most of the clothes looked very strange to me. There were even some items I couldn’t figure out.

After a minute, the man who ran the place came up to Ralph and said in a loud whisper, “What’s he dressed like that for?”

“She’s a girl,” Helga said. “And she doesn’t know any better.”

My ears went red, but I pretended I didn’t hear and just kept poking through the rack of cloaks I was looking at.

“She’s down from that Ship,” Ralph said in a whisper as good as a shout. “They don’t wear clothes up there. She probably thought that junk she has on is what we wear.”

The man sneered and quite deliberately turned away from me. I wasn’t sure why and I was puzzled, because it was obviously meant to be offensive. He only stopped short of spitting on the floor at my feet. It seemed excessive if it was only because I didn’t have the sense to dress like a proper girl in the horrible things he had to sell.

As we went out, the storekeeper muttered something about “grabbie” that I didn’t catch. Ralph and Helga didn’t seem to notice, or pretended they didn’t, and I said nothing.

We had just left the store and turned the corner, starting on a long downhill slope, when I stopped still and said, “What’s that?”

“What?”

I pointed at the dead gray mass tipped with white that stretched across the bottom of the street, blocks away downhill. “Is that water?”

They looked at each other, and then in an “any blockhead should know that much” tone of voice, Ralph said, “It’s the ocean.”