Rite of Passage

The room was nicely-enough appointed, but very impersonal. Individuality in a room comes from personal touches, personal care, personal interest, and the more public a room is, the less individual it is bound to be. My own room at home was more personal and individual than our living room, our living room better than the sleeping quarters of this dorm — though I hadn’t seen them, I remembered well enough what dorm sleeping quarters were like — and the quarters better than this room I was sitting in. To be a stranger in an impersonal room in which there are other people who are not strangers to one another or to the place is to have the feeling of strangeness compounded.

The dorm had a living room, where I was sitting, a kitchen and study rooms out of sight, and living quarters upstairs. When I came in I looked around, and then stopped one of the small kids who obviously belonged here, a little girl of about eight.

“Is Jimmy Dentremont around?”

“Upstairs, I imagine,” she said.

Near the door there was a buzzer board for the use of people like me who didn’t live here. I looked Jimmy’s name up, then rang two longs and a short. Since it was not far out of his way, Jimmy usually stopped by for me on the way to Mr. Mbele’s, rather than me coming after him, but I had something to talk with him about today.

He came on the screen by the buzzer and said, “Oh, hello Mia.”

I said, “Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

I came to talk to you about something. Get dressed and come on down.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be down as soon as I get some clothes on.” He rang off and his image faded.

So I picked a seat and waited for him. He hadn’t been living in the dorm long, only a year or so. His birth had been a result of a suggestion by the Ship’s Eugenist — his parents had barely known one another — but his mother had wanted him and raised him. When he was eleven, however, she had decided to get married, and on Jimmy’s own suggestion he had moved into a dorm.

“I didn’t want to be underfoot,” he’d said to me. “I do go over there evenings sometimes. And I see my father, too, from time to time.”

Perhaps it was because he could move back with his mother if he wanted that he didn’t find living in the dorm painful. He seemed to view it as just a temporary situation to be lived with until he came back from Trial and could have an apartment of his own. In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.

There were kids playing a board game of some Fort and I sat in my chair. I watched the game and I watched the people watching the game, and I watched people passing, but nobody watched me at all. Jimmy came down in a few minutes and I got out of my chair, quite ready to be gone.

By way of greeting, I said, “What I really want to know is whether you want to go over with me on Friday.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean, ‘where’?”

“Mia, you know I’d go anywhere you asked. Simply name a place and lead the way.”

“You’re lucky I’m not bigger than you are. If I were bigger, I’d hit you. You don’t have to be smart.”

“Well, where is it that you’re going?”

“Don’t you know what I’m talking about?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I got out the note that had come for me yesterday and unfolded it. It said that I was to have a physical examination Wednesday, and on Friday I was to assemble with the others in my survival class at Gate 5, Third Level for our first meeting. I handed the note to Jimmy and he read it.

This first meeting of my survival class would be on Friday, June 3, 2198. My physical would be one year and six months to the day before we would be dropped on one colony planet or another to actually undergo Trial. There is no rule that says a child has to attend a survival class, but in actual practice everybody takes advantage of the training that is offered. Clear choices as to the best course to take in life are very rare, and this was one of those few. They don’t drop us simply to die. They train us for a year and a half, and then they drop us and find out how much good the training has done us.

New classes are started every three or four months, and the last one had been in March, so this note was not unexpected. Since Jimmy had been born in November, too, as he had been so quick to point out when we first met, he was bound to be in the same class with me. Frankly, I wanted company on Friday.

“I didn’t know about this,” Jimmy said. “I should have a note, too. When did this come?”

“Yesterday. I thought you’d call me this morning about it but you didn’t.”

“I’d better check this out. Hold on here.” He went off to find the dorm mother and came back in a few minutes with a note similar to mine. “It was here. I just never looked for it and she never thought to mention it.”