Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

  I watched the people for a while, and then I pushed my way through the crowd and went into the bedroom wing. I called up Mary Carpentier from there.

  “Hello, Mia,” she said. “Seeing you on the vid like this, you might still be home.”

  “I am still home,” I said. “I haven’t moved yet.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her face fell. She must have had her heart set on a call from a distance.

  “I was just fooling,” I said. “I have moved.”

  That brightened her up again and we talked for a while. I told her about all the people who were squatting in our living room, and we got giggling like madmen about all the imaginary errands we made up for them to have come about. We also swore again that we would be true-blue friends forever and ever.

  When I was done, I went out in the hall just in time to see a heavyset man coming out of my bedroom. I knew I’d never seen him before.

  “What are you doing in there?” I asked.

  Before he answered, he stuck his head into the next room for a moment to take a good look around in there. Then he said, “I’m just poking around, same as you.”

  “I’m not poking around,” I said quietly. “I live here.”

  He realized then that he’d made a mistake. He didn’t say anything. He just turned red and pushed by me hastily. And that’s the way things had been ever since.

  Now, Jimmy Dentremont, looking closely at my face, asked, “What happened to your eye?”

  I don’t believe in answering leading questions if I can avoid them, but even beyond that I had no intention of telling anybody what had happened to my eye.

  “How old are you?” I asked in an even voice.

  “Why?”

  “If you’re as young as I think you are, you have no business asking me anything. Children should be seen and not heard.”

  “Well, I’m older than you are,” he said. “I was born November 8, 2185.”

  If he was telling the truth, then he was right by three weeks to the day.

  “How do you know how old I am?” I asked.

  “I asked about it when I found you were moving here,” he said quite openly.

  See what I mean? Staring and prying.

  The buzzer in the schoolroom sounded to signal the start of the second hour.

  “Is this First Room?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy Dentremont said. “They don’t tell you that.”

  Well, I knew they didn’t. They don’t want anybody feeling bad about what level he’s studying at—or feeling too good, either—but since it’s simply a matter of comparing notes, everybody knows just exactly what level his room is.

  Jimmy Dentremont was simply being contrary. So far we had been feeling each other out, and I had no idea of how to take him or even whether or not we could get along. I thought not.

  Mr. Quince called me in again after lunch, raised his eyebrows once more at my black eye—I had the feeling that he didn’t approve of it—and informed me that he had a change to make in my schedule.

  “Mr. Mbele,” he said, handing me an address.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Mr. Mbele is your tutor now. Not Mr. Wickersham as I told you this morning. I assume everything else I told you this morning will apply. Show up at two o’clock on Wednesday and please remember what I said about being late. I don’t want the students in my charge being late. A bad reputation always gets back and I’m the one who has to think up explanations.”

  “Can you tell me why I’m being switched?” I asked.

  Mr. Quince raised his eyebrows. With acerbity, he said, “That doesn’t seem to be any of my business. I was informed of the change, and I am informing you. You may believe that it wasn’t my idea. I’m going to have to alter two assignments now, and I do not deliberately make work for myself. So don’t expect any answers from me. I don’t have any.”

  It seemed like an odd business to me—switching me from one tutor to another before we’d even had a chance to inflict scars on one another. Almost frivolous.

  In spite of myself, I was glad to meet Jimmy Dentremont on Wednesday afternoon. I was having trouble finding Mr. Mbele’s apartment and he helped me find my way.

  “That’s where I’m going, as a matter of fact,” he said. Standing there in the hall with a slip with the address in his hand, he seemed almost friendly, perhaps because there weren’t any other kids around.

  So far, I hadn’t won any friends in Geo Quad, and by being quick-tongued had made one or two enemies, so I didn’t object to somebody being pleasant. “Is Mr. Mbele your tutor, too?”

  “Well, only since yesterday. I called Mr. Wickersham to find out why I was being switched around, and he’d only just been told about it by Mr. Quince, himself.”

  “You didn’t ask to be switched?”

  “No.”

  “That does seem funny,” I said.

  Mr. Mbele opened his door to our ring. “Hello,” he said, and smiled. “I thought you two would be showing up about now.”

  He was white-haired and old—certainly well over a hundred—but tall and straight for his age. His face was dark and lined, with a broad nose and white eyebrows like dashes.

  Jimmy said, “How do you do, sir.”

  I didn’t say anything because I recognized him.

  No name on the Ship is completely uncommon and I knew as many Mbeles as I knew Haveros. I just didn’t expect my tutor to be Joseph L. H. Mbele.

  When he sat on the Ship’s Council, he and my father were generally in disagreement. Daddy led the opposition to his pet plan for miniaturized libraries to be distributed to all the colonies. The third time it was defeated, Mr. Mbele resigned.

  When I was in the dorm, I once got into a name-calling, hair-yanking fight with another girl. She said that if Mr. Mbele wanted something to be passed, all he had to do was introduce a resolution against it, and then sit back. My father would immediately come out in favor of the proposal and ram it through for him.

  I don’t think this girl knew what the joke meant, and I know I didn’t, but she intended it to be slighting, and I knew she did, so I started fighting. I didn’t know Daddy very well in those days, but I was full to the brim with family loyalty.

  Assigning me Mr. Mbele as a tutor seemed like another poor joke, and I wondered who had thought of it. Not Mr. Quince, certainly—it had cost him extra work and his time was precious.

  “Come inside,” Mr. Mbele said. Jimmy prodded me and we moved forward. Mr. Mbele tapped the door button and the door slid shut behind us.

  He motioned us toward the living room and said, “I thought today we’d simply get acquainted, arrange times that are convenient for all of us to meet, and then have something to eat. We can save our work for next time.”

  We sat down in the living room, and though there wasn’t much doubt as to who was who among the three of us, at least in my mind, we all introduced ourselves.

  “Yes, I think I’ve met both of your parents, Jimmy,” Mr. Mbele said, “and, of course, I knew your grandfather. As a matter of interest to me, what do you think you might like to specialize in eventually?”

  Jimmy looked away. “I’m not positive yet.”

  “Well, what are the possibilities?”

  For a long moment, Jimmy didn’t speak, and then in a low and unconfident voice, he said, “I think I’d like to be an ordinologist.”

  If you think of the limits of what we know as a great suite of rooms inhabited by vast numbers of incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom are eccentric recluses, then an ordinologist is somebody who comes in every so often to clean up. He picks up the books around the room and puts them where they belong. He straightens everything up. He throws away the junk that the recluses have kept and cherished, but for which they have no use. And then he leaves the room in condition for outsiders to visit while he’s busy cleaning up next door. He bears about the same resemblance to the middle-aged woman who checks out books in the quad lib
rary as one of our agriculturists does to a primitive Mudeater farmer, but if you stretched a point, you might call him a librarian.

  A synthesist, which is what I wanted to be, is a person who comes in and admires the neatened room, and recognizes how nice a copy of a certain piece of furniture would look in the next room over and how useful it would be there, and points the fact out. Without the ordinologists, a synthesist wouldn’t be able to begin work. Of course, without the synthesists, there wouldn’t be much reason for the ordinologists to set to work in the first place, because nobody would have any use for what they do.

  At no time are there very many people who are successful at either one job or the other. Ordering information and assembling odd scraps of information takes brains, memory, instinct, and luck. Not many people have all that.

  “How much do you know about ordinology?” Mr. Mbele asked.

  “Well, not very much at first hand,” Jimmy said. And then, with a touch of pride, “My grandfather was an ordinologist.”

  “He was, indeed. And one of the best. You shouldn’t feel apologetic about trying to follow him unless you’re a complete failure, and you won’t be that,” Mr. Mbele said. “I’m not in favor of following ordinary practice simply because it’s done. If you don’t tell anybody, we’ll see if we can’t arrange to give you a detailed look at ordinology, and some basis for you to decide whether you want it or not. All right?”

  It was plain that Mr. Mbele was going to be an unorthodox tutor. What he was proposing was something you don’t ordinarily have the chance to do until you’re past fourteen and back from Trial.

  Jimmy grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Then Mr. Mbele turned to me. “Well, how do you like living in Geo Quad?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to like it,” I said.

  Jimmy Dentremont shot a look at me. I don’t think he’d expected me to say that.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Mbele.

  I said, “There hasn’t been one moment since we arrived here in this quad that we haven’t had strangers all over the house. They don’t leave us any privacy at all. It was never like this back in Alfing Quad, believe me.”

  Mr. Mbele smiled openly. “It isn’t Geo Quad that’s to blame,” he said. “This always happens when somebody becomes Chairman. The novelty will wear off in a few weeks and things will be back to normal again. Wait and see.”

  After a few more minutes of talk, Mrs. Mbele brought us something to eat. She was somewhat younger than her husband, though she wasn’t young. She was a large woman with a round face and light brown hair. She seemed pleasant enough.

  While we ate, we decided that we would meet on Monday and Thursday afternoons and on Friday night, with the possibility of changes from week to week if something came up to interfere with that schedule.

  Mr. Mbele wound up our meeting by saying, “I want to make it clear before we begin that I think your purpose is to learn and mine is to help you learn, or to make you learn, though I doubt either of you has to be made. I have very little interest in writing out progress reports on you, or sticking to form charts, or anything else that interferes with our basic purposes. If there is anything you want to learn and have the necessary background to handle, I’ll be ready to help you, whether or not it is something that formally falls among the things I’m supposed to teach you. If you don’t have the background, I’ll help you get it. In return, I want you to do something for me. It’s been many years since I was last a tutor, so I expect you to point out to me when I fail to observe some ritual that Mr. Quince holds essential. Fair enough?”

  In spite of my basic loyalties, and contrary to them, I found myself liking Mr. Mbele and being very pleased that I had been lucky enough to be assigned to him, even though I couldn’t admit it publicly.

  When we were in the halls again and on our way back home, Jimmy said suddenly, “Hold on.”

  We stopped and he faced me.

  “I want you to promise me one thing,” he said. “Promise not to tell anybody about my grandfather or about me wanting to be an ordinologist.”

  “That’s two things,” I said.

  “Don’t joke!” he said pleadingly. “The other kids would make it hard for me if they knew I wanted to be an odd thing like that.”

  “I want to be a synthesist,” I said. “I won’t say anything about you if you don’t say anything about me.” We took it as a solemn agreement, and after that anything that was ever said in Mr. Mbele’s apartment was kept between us and never brought out in public. It was, if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious.

  Jimmy said, “You know, I’m glad now that I was switched. I think I’m going to enjoy studying under Mr. Mbele.”

  Cautiously, I said, “Well, I have to admit he’s different.”

  And that was about all that we ever said to anybody who ever asked us about our tutor.

  I saw Daddy after he closed his office for the day. That is, he closed our living room to new people at five o’clock, and by almost eleven he’d seen the last person who was waiting.

  Excitedly, I said, “Daddy, you know my new tutor is Mr. Joseph Mbele!”

  “Mmm, yes, I know,” Daddy said matter-of-factly, stacking papers on his desk and straightening up.

  “You do?” I asked in surprise. I sat down in a chair next to him.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, he agreed to take you on as a personal favor to me. I asked him to do it.”

  “But I thought you two were against each other,” I said. As I have said before, I don’t fully understand my father. I am not a charitable person—when I decide I’m against somebody, I’m against him. When Daddy’s against somebody, he asks him to serve as my tutor.

  “Well, we do disagree on some points,” Daddy said. “I happen to think his attitude toward the colonies is very wrong. But just because a man disagrees with me doesn’t make him a villain or a fool, and I sincerely doubt that any of his attitudes will damage you in any way. They didn’t hurt me when I studied Social Philosophy under him sixty years ago.”

  “Social Philosophy?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Daddy said. “That’s Mr. Mbele’s major interest.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t have you study under a man who didn’t have something to teach you. I think you could stand a very healthy dose of Social Philosophy.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Well, there was one thing I could say for Mr. Mbele. He hadn’t done any eyebrow raising over my black eye. Neither had his wife, for that matter. I did appreciate that.

  Still, I wished that Daddy had warned me beforehand. Even though I had liked Mr. Mbele, it would have saved me a few uncharitable thoughts right at the beginning.

  Chapter 3

  TWO WEEKS AFTER WE MOVED, I came into Daddy’s study to tell him that I had dinner ready. He was talking on the vid to Mr. Persson, another Council member.

  Mr. Persson’s image sighed and said, “I know, I know. But I don’t like making an example of anybody. If she wanted another child so badly, why couldn’t she have become a dorm mother?”

  “It’s a little late to convince her of that with the baby on the way,” Daddy said dryly.

  “I suppose so. Still, we might abort the baby and give a warning. Well, we can bash it all out tomorrow,” Mr. Persson said, and he signed off.

  “Dinner’s ready,” I said. “What was all that about?”

  Daddy said, “Oh, it’s a woman named MacReady. She’s had four children and none of them have made it through Trial. She wanted one more try and the Ship’s Eugenist said no. She went ahead anyway.”

  It put a bad taste in my mouth.

  “She must be crazy,” I said. “Only a crazy woman would do a thing like that. Why don’t you examine her? What are you going to do with her, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure h
ow the Council will vote,” Daddy said, “but I imagine she will be allowed to pick out a colony planet and be dropped there.”

  There are two points—one is population and the other is Trial—on which we cannot compromise at all. The Ship couldn’t survive if we did. Imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have children every time the notion occurred to them. There is a limit to the amount of food that we have space to grow. There is a limit to the amount of room that we have in which people could live. It may seem that we are not very close to these limits now, but they couldn’t last even fifty years of unlimited growth. This woman had four children, not one of which turned out well enough to survive. Four chances is enough.

  What Daddy was suggesting for the woman sounded over-generous to me, and I said so.

  “It’s not generosity,” Daddy said. “It’s simply that we have to have rules in the Ship in order to live at all. You play by the rules or you go elsewhere.”

  “I still think you’re being too easy,” I said. It wasn’t a light matter to me at all.

  Somewhat abruptly, Daddy changed the subject. He said, “Hold still there. How’s your eye today? It’s looking much better, I think. Yes, definitely better.”

  When Daddy doesn’t agree with me and he doesn’t want to argue, he slips out by teasing.

  I turned my head away. “My eye’s all right,” I said. It was, too, since the bruise had faded away almost completely.

  At dinner, Daddy asked, “Well, after two weeks, how do you like Geo Quad? Has it turned out as badly as you thought it would?”

  I shrugged, and turned my attention to my food. “It’s all right, I guess,” I mumbled.

  That’s all I could say. It just wasn’t possible for me to admit that I was both unhappy and unpopular, both of which were true. There are two reasons I started off wrong in Geo Quad, one big one and one small one.