Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

  The man said, “You timed things well, Mr. Havero. The rain stopped here less than an hour ago, though I won’t guarantee that it will stay stopped.”

  Daddy nudged me forward. “This is my daughter, Mia. I believe you’ve already met Mr. Tubman and George Fuhonin, my pilot.” As I shook hands, I took a good look at him. He had an eager-to-please manner that I didn’t know how to take, and I couldn’t get any clue from Daddy’s face or tone.

  Gennaro indicated the boy and the girl with him. “These are my children, Ralph and Helga. When you said you were bringing your daughter, I thought she might like to meet some children of her own age.” He turned on a smile and then turned it off again.

  The boy had dirty-blond hair. He was just a shade taller than I, but much more squarely built. The girl was also squarely built, and about my size. They both said hello, but not in an overwhelmingly friendly way.

  I said hello just as cautiously myself.

  “That was very thoughtful,” Daddy said to Mr. Gennaro.

  The man said, “Glad to do it. Glad to do it. Anything to keep up goodwill. Ha, ha.”

  The people and the band continued to make noise. “Shall we be going?” Daddy said.

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Gennaro said. “Children, mind your manners.”

  Daddy didn’t say anything to me, but simply gave me a sharp look. Mr. Gennaro mounted his horse, and Daddy and Mr. Tubman swung up on theirs. The band, still playing, backed off enough for them to pass through, and they clattered off and out of the square. The band followed after, still playing loud and tinnily, and a good portion of the crowd trailed them.

  I said, “Why is everybody following after Daddy?”

  “Your father is a celebrity,” George Fuhonin said in an ironic rumble, standing just behind me.

  I hadn’t been speaking to him, just voicing my thoughts, but I was reminded that I had determined not to speak to him, ever again. So I moved away a little.

  A section of the remaining crowd pressed forward toward the scoutship, bent on getting a good close look at us. George looked out at them with no particular sign of pleasure, as though he’d like to shoo them away.

  “Stay here,” he said to me. “I’ll be right back.”

  He walked up the ramp to the place where the three crewmembers were standing. They were lounging in the mouth of the ship and getting a big kick out of the crowd. When George came up, they said something that sounded like a joke, and laughed. George didn’t laugh. He shook his head irritatedly and motioned them to go inside.

  “What do we do now?” the boy, Ralph, said to his sister, and I turned back to look at them.

  On the Ship we have such long lives and low population that you never see brothers and sisters closer than twenty years apart, never as close together as these two. All the kids I know are singletons. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but except for build, this brother and sister didn’t look much alike at all. I had thought they would—in books they always do; either that or exactly like their long-lost Uncle Max, the one with all the money. Helga had dark hair, though not as dark as mine, and it was quite long, hanging down to her shoulders and tucked in place with combs. She wore a dress with a yoke front. Her brother wore long pants like those Daddy had put on to wear today, and a plain shirt. They had both obviously done some grooming for this little ceremony, and it made them look as stiff as their manners.

  I suppose I looked just as odd to them as they did to me. I was a short, dark little thing with close-cut black hair, and I was wearing what I usually wore, a white blouse with loose sleeves, blue shorts, and high-backed sandals. It was a costume I would have felt comfortable in at almost any sort of gathering within the Ship. I wouldn’t have worn exactly that to play soccer in—something a little less formal, actually, and harder shoes—but I was presentable. My clothes were clean and reasonably neat. However, after the glory of all those dark green uniforms, I could see that these kids might consider what I was wearing just a bit lacking in elegance.

  We looked at each other for a long starchy moment. Then the boy unbent a little and said, “How old are you?”

  “Twelve,” I said.

  “I’m fourteen,” he said. “She’s twelve.”

  Helga said, “Daddy told us to show you around.” She said it tentatively.

  I took a deep breath and said, “All right.”

  “What about him?” she said, pointing to the ramp. George was standing just inside the ship with his back to us. “He told you to stay here.”

  “He’s supposed to watch me, but I don’t have to pay any attention to him,” I said. “Let’s leave before he comes back.”

  “All right,” Ralph said. “Come on then.”

  He ran under the high rim of the scoutship, in exactly the opposite direction from Daddy and his own father. Helga and I followed him. George saw me as I started off, and yelled something, but I just kept on running. I’d be damned if I’d pay any attention to him.

  Ralph made a slight detour to tag the lower bulge of the ship—maybe to be brave and have something to tell about afterward, maybe just to do it—and then dashed on. We went all the way under the rim of the ship and out the other side. There were a few people there, but a much smaller crowd than on the side where the ramp was lowered, possibly because there weren’t any Ship people to stare at over here. We charged through them, and I noticed that they were all squarely built, too. We left them looking after us and dashed around the first corner we came to. I was feeling pretty daring in my own way, as though I were cutting loose on a great adventure.

  We took a couple of quick turns from one street into another, and if George was following after, he was soon left behind. By that time, I had no idea of where we were. It was a street like the others we’d been in, made of rounded stones and about the width of a large hallway at home, with buildings of stone and wood, and a few of brick, on either side.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I can’t run anymore.”

  My legs were aching and I was out of breath. It took a lot more effort to get around here than it did at home, and I had no doubt that if I fell down it would hurt more. Grainau was a planet that was what they called “Earth-like to nine degrees,” as were all the colony planets, but that one degree of difference offered a great deal of latitude for the odd or uncomfortable, including Grainau’s slightly stronger gravity. That “slightly stronger” was enough to tire me in almost no time.

  “What’s the matter?” Ralph asked.

  I said, “I’m tired. Let’s just walk.”

  They exchanged looks, and then Ralph said, “Oh, all right.”

  The air was a little hard to catch your breath in, it seemed so thick and warm. It felt wet. Something like walking through stew, and about as pleasant as that.

  “Is the air always like this?” I asked.

  “Like what?” Helga asked, with the barest hint of a defensive edge in her voice.

  “Well, thick.” I could have added, “and smelly, too,” since it carried an odd variety of odors I couldn’t identify, but I didn’t. They always prate about planetary fresh air, but if this was it, I didn’t like it.

  “It’s just a little humid today,” Ralph said. “This breeze that’s coming up now should clear the air.”

  We started that afternoon by all being a little afraid of each other, I think. But very quickly Ralph and Helga found out how silly their fear was, and pretty soon, when they didn’t think to mind their manners, the contempt that replaced the fear slipped out. It took me a while to see what it was. All I knew was that they found a lot of what I said foolish, and made it clear that they found it foolish, and that they did a lot of exchanging of significant glances.

  I found I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what time it was. I said something about the morning, something that made it clear that I thought it was morning, and they both turned on me. Turned out it was lunch here. No matter that I had stared at my breakfast just before we left.

  I pointed at a
building and asked what it was.

  “That’s a store, silly. Haven’t you ever seen a store?” Well, I hadn’t. I’d read about them, and that’s all. We have such a small society on the Ship that buying and selling aren’t really practicable. If you want something, you put in a requisition for it and in a little while it comes. You can live as simply or as lavishly as you want—there’s a limit as to how much you can jam into one apartment, though some people do live up to the limit. In a society where anybody can have just about anything he wants, there’s no real prestige in having things unless you use them or get some esthetic pleasure from them, so I would say the tendency in general is toward simple living.

  I can think of only one regular program of exchange on the Ship. Kids under fourteen are given weekly allowance chits to draw against in the Common Room snack bars; that way none of them get a chance to ruin their health. After fourteen, they assume you know what you’re about and leave you alone.

  “Can I take a look?” I asked.

  Ralph shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

  It was a clothing store, and most of the clothes looked very strange to me. There were even some items I couldn’t figure out.

  After a minute, the man who ran the place came up to Ralph and said in a loud whisper, “What’s he dressed like that for?”

  “She’s a girl,” Helga said. “And she doesn’t know any better.”

  My ears went red, but I pretended I didn’t hear and just kept poking through the rack of cloaks I was looking at.

  “She’s down from that Ship,” Ralph said in a whisper as good as a shout. “They don’t wear clothes up there. She probably thought that junk she has on is what we wear.”

  The man sneered and quite deliberately turned away from me. I wasn’t sure why, and I was puzzled because it was obviously meant to be offensive. He only stopped short of spitting on the floor at my feet. It seemed excessive if it was only because I didn’t have the sense to dress like a proper girl in the horrible things he had to sell.

  As we went out, the storekeeper muttered something about “grabbie” that I didn’t catch. Ralph and Helga didn’t seem to notice, or pretended they didn’t, and said nothing.

  We had just left the store and turned the corner, starting on a long downhill slope, when I stopped still and said, “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  I pointed at the dead gray mass tipped with white that stretched across the bottom of the street, blocks away downhill. “Is that water?”

  They looked at each other, and then in an “any blockhead should know that much” tone of voice, Ralph said, “It’s the ocean.”

  I’d always wanted to see an ocean, since they’re even rarer on the Ship than stores. “Could I take a look?”

  “Sure,” Ralph said. “Why not?”

  First there was a stone wharf and warehouses stretching away on either hand. The harbor stretched two great arms around to enclose a large expanse of water. At the sides were wooden docks on pilings running out like fingers into the harbor. Close at hand were boats of all sizes. Nearest were the great giants with several masts big enough to have smaller boats tied on board. There were medium and small boats tied up at all the docks.

  Even in the harbor, the water ran in white-crested peaks and slapped noisily at the stone and wood. There were birds of white, and gray, and brown, and black, and mixtures of all these colors, all wheeling around and crying overhead, and some of them diving down at the water. The air down here smelled strongly—of fish, I think. Outside the harbor the water was running in mountains that made the peaks inside look small, and it stretched away farther than I could see clearly, to join somewhere in the distance with the gray sky overhead.

  I might have made comments about all the things I saw, the odors, the men working, but I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t strike Ralph and Helga as amusing, and by that time I was starting to be a little cautious about exposing myself. I was seeing them as something less than the allies they had been when we were running from George. We walked along the waterfront and off the quay and onto the wooden docks. Ralph led us out onto a little spur and we stopped there.

  He pointed down at a little craft tied alongside. It was about twelve feet long, with a mast that stood up high enough to reach above the dock. It had a boom that was lashed in place. It was painted a serviceable white with black trim, and had the odd name Guacamole painted on it.

  “What do you think of her?” he asked.

  “It’s a very nice ship,” I said.

  “It isn’t a ship. It’s a boat, a sailing dinghy, and it’s ours, Helga’s and mine. We go sailing all the time. Want to go for a sail?”

  Helga looked at him, obviously pleased. “Oh, can we?”

  “If she’ll go,” Ralph said. “It’s up to her. Otherwise we’ve got to do what Daddy said and stay with her.”

  “Oh, do come on,” Helga said to me.

  I looked at the water and tried to make up my mind. The water looked rough and the boat looked small. I really didn’t want to go at all.

  Helga said, “We’ll just stay inside the harbor.”

  “It isn’t dangerous,” Ralph added, looking at me.

  I didn’t want him to think I was scared, so after a minute I shrugged and started down the wooden ladder that reached from the dock down to the rear of the boat. The ladder stood about two feet above the dock at its highest point, and I grabbed it and backed down. I seemed to be seeing more of ladders lately than I really cared to. Ralph and Helga started down after me.

  The boat was rising and falling on the water as the swells came in to break on the docks and the quay. I waited until the boat was rising and then stepped in. I almost slipped, but I held my feet and then moved carefully to the front, grabbing on when I had to. When I got by the mast, I sat down on the seat that ran across the front. Helga dropped into the boat as I was sitting, and Ralph was right behind her.

  I blinked a little as a trace of spray wet my cheek. “Aren’t we going to get wet?” I asked.

  They didn’t hear, and I repeated my question in a louder voice.

  “It’s just spindrift,” Helga said. “You’ve got to expect that. We won’t get too wet.”

  Ralph said, “Besides, the water will get you clean. I know you don’t see much water in your Ship.”

  That was another thing that irritated me about Ralph and Helga. They had all sorts of misconceptions about the Ship which they insisted on trotting out. Ralph was worse because he was dogmatic. I thought at first he was being malicious until I realized he actually believed what he was saying, like that bit about going naked—that wasn’t completely wrong; some people do go without clothes in the privacy of their own apartments, but I would like to see somebody trying to play soccer while completely bare. The point is that what he said wasn’t quite right, either, and he wouldn’t listen. He would just say his misconceptions flatly and expect you to agree with him.

  Right at the beginning he’d said something about how it was too bad we had to live in crowded barracks—something along that line—and didn’t I like all the space here? I tried to explain that that was only the way it used to be on the Ship, right at the beginning, but then I made the mistake of bringing in the dormitories, which are a little bit that way, trying to be honest, and that only confused the issue. Ralph finally said that everybody knew what things were like, and I didn’t have to try to explain.

  Helga was a little more bearable because she only asked questions.

  “Is it true you don’t eat food on your Ship?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they say you don’t grow food like we do, that you eat dirt or something.”

  “No,” I said.

  And: “Is it true that you kill babies who are born looking wrong?”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, no. But everybody says you do.”

  The thing that really annoyed me about Ralph and his “water to get you clean” remark is that we o
n the Ship had very clear memories of how dirty the colonists had been. Ralph apparently wasn’t even able to notice the horrid odors that clung to the whole harbor, which demonstrated how defective his sense of smell was, but I still didn’t like the blithe, “of course” way he said it.

  Ralph and Helga got the sail up in short order, while I watched, and then Helga came up by me, untied the bow, and sat down. Ralph untied the stern and we pushed off. He had a little stick tiller to steer with and held the boom by a line. He put the boom over and the breeze filled the sail with an audible flap.

  We started from the right-hand curve of the harbor with the wind behind us, and sailed across the long width of the harbor. The chop of the waves and the spray were annoying, and the grayness of the day wasn’t very nice, but I thought I could see how, given better weather and time to get used to this sort of thing, sailing could be fun.

  Uncharitably, though, I couldn’t help thinking that we handled weather much better on the Third Level than they did here. When we wanted rain, everybody knows it’s coming ahead of time. We throw a switch and it rains until we want it to stop, and then it stops. None of this thick air with its clamminess.

  As we were sailing, Helga started a conversation, trying to be friendly, I think. She said, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I never heard of any.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you know? I mean half-brothers and half-sisters, too.”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I was never told of any. My parents have been married so long that if I had a brother he’d be all grown or dead years ago.” This may seem strange, but it was an idea that I’d never entertained before. I just never thought in terms of brothers and sisters. It was an interesting notion, but I didn’t really take it seriously even now.

  Helga looked at me with a slightly puzzled look. “Married? I thought you didn’t get married like regular people. I thought you just lived with anybody you wanted to.”

  I said, “My parents have been married more than fifty years. That’s Earth years.”