Rite of Passage

In Alfing Quad I had had my friends, but I had almost never brought them home. These days, having people around the place, particularly Jimmy, who lived in Geo Quad, was a regular thing. Daddy has his own patterns of living — in some ways he lives in a private world — and you would have thought that he would object to having strange kids permanently underfoot. I’m sure his life was disturbed but he never objected. In fact he even went out of his way to make it clear that he approved of Jimmy.

“He’s a good boy,” Daddy said. “I’m glad you’re seeing a lot of him.”

Of course, this wasn’t too surprising since I had a distinct impression that Jimmy was one of the reasons that we were living in Geo Quad. It certainly wasn’t an accident that we had been assigned Mr. Mbele as a tutor at the same time. I even had an impression (partly confirmed) that a talk with the Ship’s Eugenist would have shown that Jimmy’s and my meeting was even less of an accident, but this didn’t bother me particularly because there were moments when I distinctly liked Jimmy and moments when just looking at him made me feel all funny inside.

The partial confirmation as well as another discovery came when I was prowling through the Ship’s Records. Every Common Room has a library and there is a certain satisfaction in using them because there is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow looks right. But simple space limitations make a physical collection of all the books that the Ship holds out of the question. So standard practice is to look over titles and contents by vid and then to order a facsimile, a physical copy, if you really want or need one. There are, of course, certain things that most people don’t ordinarily look at without some special reason, like Ship’s Records, and while I had no special reason beyond curiosity, I was quite willing to look and quite willing to presume upon Daddy’s position in the Ship to make it possible for me to look.

“Are you sure?” the librarian said. “They’re not very interesting, you know, and I’m not sure that you really ought to be allowed…”

I swear that I didn’t exactly say that Daddy, Miles Havero, Ship’s Chairman, had told me that I could and was willing to discuss the point at length with the librarian if he insisted, but I think if you talked to him, the librarian might have had an impression that I had said it. In any case, I got to look at the Records.

As I’ve said, I found some twenty-year-old eugenics recommendations that gave me pause, but it wasn’t until I looked up me, or more properly, Mother and Daddy, that I discovered something that really rocked me. I had a brother!

That was a shock. I switched off the vid and it faded away, and then I turned to my bed and just lay huddled there for a long while, thinking. I didn’t know why I hadn’t been told. I remembered that somebody had once asked me or talked to me or tickled me into wondering about brothers and sisters, but I couldn’t place the memory and I never had done anything about it.

Finally I went back to the vid and I found out about my brother. His name had been Joe — Josй. He had been nearly forty years older than I and dead for more than fifteen years.

I dug around and found out more. Apparently he had been as conscious as I of the lack of creative writing within the Ship. He had written a novel, something I would never do, particularly after I read his. It was not just bad, it was terrible, and it gave me some reason to think that perhaps the Ship just isn’t a viable topic for fiction.

In other respects, Joe was much more competent. He’d been regarded as quite a corner in his branch of physics. His death had been the result of a grotesque and totally unnecessary accident not of his own making. He had not been discovered immediately, and when he was it was too late to revive him. His death had apparently bothered my mother greatly.

Now that I knew, I didn’t know what to do about it. Finally, in a quiet moment, I approached Daddy and as impersonally as I could I asked him about it.

He looked puzzled. “You knew all about joe,” he said. “You haven’t asked about him in a long time, but I’ve told you twenty times.”

I said, “I didn’t even know he existed until a week ago.”

“Mia,” he said seriously, “when you were three you used to beg for stories about Joe.”

“Well, I don’t remember now,” I said. “Will you tell me?”

So Daddy told me about my brother. He even said that we were a lot alike in looks and personality.