Rite of Passage

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.”

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 a 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 hand-guns 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.