Rite of Passage

“Well, they say you don’t grow food like we do, that you eat dirt or something.”

“No,” I said.

And: “Is it true that you kill babies who are born looking wrong?”

“Do you?”

“Well, no. But everybody says you do.”

The thing that really annoyed me about Ralph and his “water to get you clean” remark is that we on the Ship had very clear memories of how dirty the colonists had been. Ralph apparently wasn’t even able to notice the horrid odors that clung to the whole harbor, which demonstrated how defective his sense of smell was, but I still didn’t like the blithe, “of course” way he said it.

Ralph and Helga got the sail up in short order, while I watched, and then Helga came up by me, untied the bow, and sat down. Ralph untied the stern and we pushed off. He had a little stick tiller to steer with and held the boom by a line. He put the boom over and the breeze filled the sail with an audible flap.

We started from the right-hand curve of the harbor with the wind behind us, and sailed across the long width of the harbor. The chop of the waves and the spray were annoying, and the grayness of the day wasn’t very nice, but I thought I could see how, given better weather and time to get used to this sort of thing, sailing could he fun.

Uncharitably, though, I couldn’t help thinking that we handled weather much better on the Third Level than they did here. When we wanted rain, everybody knows it’s coming ahead of time. We throw a switch and it rains until we want it to stop, and then it stops. None of this thick air with its clamminess.

As we were sailing, Helga started a conversation, trying to be friendly I think. She said, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I never heard of any.”

“Well, wouldn’t you know? I mean half-brothers and half-sisters, too.”

“I don’t know for sure, but I was never told of any. My parents have been married so long that if I had a brother he’d be all grown or dead years ago.” This may seem strange, but it was an idea that I’d never entertained before. I just never thought in terms of brothers and sisters. It was an interesting notion, but I didn’t really take it seriously even now.

Helga looked at me with a slightly puzzled look. “Married? I thought you didn’t get married like regular people. I thought you just lived with anybody you wanted to.”

I said, “My parents have been married more than fifty years. That’s Earth years.”

“Fifty years? Oh, you know that isn’t so. I just saw your father and he isn’t even as old as my dad.”

“Well, how old is your dad?”

“Let’s see,” she said. She did some obvious figuring. “About fifty.”

I said, “Well, my dad is eighty-one. Earth years.”

She looked at me with an expression of total disbelief. “Oh, that’s a lie.”

“And my mother is seventy-four. Or seventy-five. I’m not sure which it is.”

Helga gave me a disgusted look and turned away.

Well, it was true, and if she didn’t want to believe it, too bad. I won’t say it’s usual for people to be married as long as fifty years. I get the impression that people tend to get tired of each other after twenty or thirty years, and split up, and there are some people who don’t want anything as permanent as marriage and just live together. And people who don’t even know each other who have children because the Ship’s Eugenist advises it. Whatever Helga had heard, it had been a garbled or twisted version of this.

My parents were a strange pair. They’d been married for fifty years, which wasn’t usual, and they hadn’t lived together for eight years. When I was four, my mother got an opportunity she had been looking forward to for the study of art under Lemuel Carpentier, and she’d moved out. I guess that if you’ve been married as long as fifty years, and apparently expect it to go on for maybe fifty years more, that a vacation of eight years or so is hardly noticeable.

To tell the truth, I didn’t know what my parents saw in each other. I liked and respected my father, but I didn’t like my mother at all. I’d like to say that it was simply that we didn’t understand each other, and that was partly true. I thought her “art” was plain bad. One of the few times I went to her apartment to visit, I looked at a sculpture she’d done and asked her about it.

“That’s called ‘The Bird,’ ” she said.

I could see that it was meant to be a bird. Mother was working directly from a picture and it looked just like it. But it was so stiff and formal that it had no feel of life at all. I said something about that, and she didn’t like the remark at all. We got into an argument, and she finally put me out.

So part of it was misunderstanding, but not all. For one thing, she made it quite clear to me that she’d had me as a duty and not because she particularly wanted to. I firmly believed that she was just waiting for me to go on Trial, and then she’d move back in with Daddy. As I say, I didn’t like her.