Rite of Passage

I handed it over to him. After a minute of inspection, Riggy said, “You wouldn’t want to trade something for it, would you?”

I said, “Riggy, you may have it.” I didn’t particularly want it any more. I knew I would never use it again and it held no fascination for me.

Only seventeen of us in all came aboard. Twelve didn’t live or trigger their signals. I thought about that on the way back to the Ship. I counted the times I was in some danger of being killed? and I came up with a minimum of five times. If you say the chances of living through any single one of these encounters was nine in ten, the chances of living through five are only six in ten. Fifty-nine in a hundred, actually. If everybody s experience was like mine, it wasn’t unreasonable that twelve of us should not come back. The trouble was that Att was among the missing twelve.

When we got to the Ship, people were there to take care of our horses. We went through decontamination quickly and then they led us into the reception room. They had decorations up for Year End on the walls and colored mobiles that twinkled overhead. There was a band and Daddy in his official capacity to welcome the new adults. Daddy shook my hand.

There were parents waiting. There was Mother and I saw Jimmy’s mother and her husband and his father and his father’s wife. When they saw Jimmy they all waved. And I saw Att’s mother.

I said to Jimmy, “I’ll see you later.”

I went to Att’s mother and I said, “I’m sorry, but Aft isn’t with us.” I didn’t know how else to say it. I wished I could say it so that it didn’t hurt her, but it hurt me, too, to know that he wasn’t coming back, and it hurt me to tell her. When she hadn’t seen him with us, she must have known. She began to cry and she nodded and touched my shoulder, and then turned away.

I went over to Mother and she smiled and took my hand. “I’m pleased you came home,” she said, and then she began to cry, and turned her head.

Daddy came away from giving his congratulations and he hugged me. He put a measuring hand over my head and said, “Mia, I believe you’ve grown some.”

I nodded, because I thought I had, too. It felt very good to be home.

Epilogue: RITE OF PASSAGE

20

I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me.

It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature.

I came to this conclusion after the Ship’s Assembly that was held as a result of our experiences on Tintera. Our experiences were shocking to the Ship, and Tintera seemed like a glimpse of the Pit. The Tinterans were Free Birthers beyond a doubt. (I don’t like that idea even now.) They might be slavers. They had obtained a scoutship by some low method and had intended to use it against us. Finally, they had killed an unprecedented number of our Trial Group. To die on Trial was one thing — to have children assassinated by Mudeaters was another.

Rumors started to spread almost as soon as we had arrived home. The day after we came home, a Ship’s Council Meeting was held, and thereafter an account of what had actually happened was broadcast through the Ship. To most people, it was worse than the rumors.