Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

I looked down at it with a great deal of satisfaction. Then I got to my feet, dusted off the seat of my pants, picked up my axe, and started back to where the cabin was going up. I waved at Jimmy as I passed.

  Of the fifteen of us, seven were girls. Five had cut down their trees in the morning, the only ones who hadn’t being me and Sonja. So I found her making a door for the cabin with Riggy. The saw pit was now turning out slabs from medium-sized logs—the slabs being really half-logs, flat on one side, round on the other. The slabs were to be used for shutters, doors, roof, and cabin floor. In the case of the door, the poles cut in the morning were being nailed to the flat sides of slabs about six feet long. I gave Sonja my axe and sent her along to find Mr. Pizarro, looked at the saw pit in operation for a minute, and then turned to my afternoon job. In the pit, one person gets down in it, one person stands on the ground above, and the log is sawed between them. The only disadvantage is that the person on the bottom gets sawdust in his hair, but if you switch off this evens out.

  My afternoon job was taking the mud and moss brought by the mud-and-moss detail (Juanita) and chinking the cracks between the logs. By the time I got back, the two boys on the walls were working on their third tier of logs. They had skids in place and were now looping ropes around the logs and pulling them up the skids and into place. I happily went along pushing my mud and moss into place, thinking of ethics and whiling the afternoon away as the walls rose.

  After Riggy finished the door and shutters, Mr. Pizarro showed up and they stopped putting up walls for a while. By that time the walls were high enough that I felt surrounded, tall enough that I had to stand on a cut block to do my chinking. Where I had yet to chink the light slanted through to cut across the shadowed floor.

  Mr. Pizarro climbed over the logs then, needing a little boost, and borrowed my block to stand on. Then he and Riggy cut through the solid logs to make the windows. They made two cuts for each window and removed the sections of log. It was then easier to get in and out, which was good because the logs were becoming harder to raise into place. Riggy came inside, and instead of two boys raising logs, there were now three boys and Mr. Pizarro, plus me when Juanita didn’t have enough mud and moss for me and they needed a hand.

  When there were two more rows of logs in place, they cut the door in the same way as the window and suddenly the cabin wasn’t a tight little box anymore. Everybody was coming in from the woods then, and I went out of the cabin through the hole that was a doorway. Juanita and I made one last trip for mud together while they were raising the last log into place over the door. When we came back with the mud, everybody pitched in and we finished the outside chinking. It was great fun and at the end we just took mud and threw it at each other. I caught Jimmy a great gob across the back and he returned the favor. All fifteen of us were running around throwing mud while Mr. Pizarro stayed out of range and watched us.

  When we were all out of mud, he said, “What are you going to do? You only have one spare change of clothes.”

  Jimmy looked at the river, gave an onward ho point of the finger, and said, “There we are.”

  He sat down, pulled off his shoes, and then made a dash, fully clothed, for the river, plopped through the shallows and made a plunge into the water. I had my shoes kicked off in an instant, and my notebook out of my shirt, and followed right after. The water was clear and cold, not too swift, and just fine for swimming. It was much better than my one previous planetary swimming experience. We all splashed and made grampus noises in the late afternoon sun, flipped water at each other, and had a real old-fashioned time. Very quickly we were joined by Mr. Marechal’s group, who were not mud-covered but most of whom had gotten reasonably dirty or sawdust covered in the course of the day and knew a good thing when they saw it. We stayed in until we were called out, and then we came out soggy.

  Our leaders were willing to make one concession to the good usages of civilization, and we took our clothes to the scoutship to be quickly dried. The rest of our weekend—sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand-prepared food—was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life. We did get this one concession, though.

  After dinner, freshly dressed, full of food and a warm glow, and thoroughly tired, I wandered over to look at the other cabin along with Jimmy. It was about as far toward completion as ours—that is, the walls were in place and chinked, and the door and window holes were cut—but it looked odd. One of the long walls was higher than the other, and higher than any of our walls. It gave the cabin an odd unfinished look, a hunchbacked look.

  We had been issued bubble tents, which can be folded to pocket size and are proof against almost anything, but we had been told not to bring them. Instead we unrolled our beds near the fire and took our chances in the open. I was one of those who drew guard duty, but I was lucky enough to get second hour. I stayed awake, relieved Stu Herskovitz, who hadn’t seen anything, and walked for an hour around the camp. I didn’t see anything except people ready to go to sleep. I yawned my way through the hour, then got Vishwa Mathur up and went to sleep myself.

  There were clouds over the sky in the morning and it was gray through breakfast and cold, but then the clouds began to break into white pieces and move apart and then the sky was clear again and it was bright.

  We raised the gable ends of the roof into place and fit the doors and shutters. Then all of us working, we raised the three roof logs into place, the ridgepole on top, the other two below on either side, forming a slope. As we were finishing, somebody looked over at the Marechal cabin and saw what they were doing. They were slanting a roof from the tall wall across the short one. “That’s not fair,” I yelled. “You’re building a shed, not a cabin.”

  “Ho, ho—too bad,” Venie called back. We booed.

  We laid the poles that Riggy and Sonja had collected the day before over fitted slabs to make the roof. I was inside the cabin helping to lay the floor. The slabs of wood were laid rounded side down, side by side, to make a reasonably flat floor, what is called a puncheon floor. If we had had the time, we would have smoothed the flat sides, but as it was, we couldn’t. The result was a floor that I wouldn’t recommend walking on in bare feet unless you have a genuine affection for splinters, but it was a good solid floor. Jimmy was on the roof laying slabs, stuffing moss, and placing poles. A little of the moss filtered through as they worked, but the roof closed in quickly over our heads and when they were done it looked as solid as our floor.

  We were clearly beaten by Mr. Marechal’s group, which finished almost an hour before we did and then came over and made comments, but we were done before noon, too. I looked over the other building when we were done, along with some curious friends, and I’ll have to honestly say that I preferred our cabin to their shed—better workmanship.

  In the afternoon we relaxed with an easy hike and then a swim, this one in suits, not in our clothes. After that, I got out my notebook again and made some more ethics notes—these about an easy one, the philosophy of power.

  In effect, the philosophy of power says that you should do anything you can get away with. If you don’t get away with it, you were wrong.

  You really can’t argue with this, you know. It is a self-contained system, logically self-consistent. It makes no appeal to outside authority and it doesn’t stumble over its own definitions.

  But I don’t like it. For one thing, it isn’t a very discriminating standard. There doesn’t seem to be any possible difference between “ethically good” and “ethically better.” More important, however, stoics strap themselves in ethically so that their actions have as few results as possible. The adherents of the philosophy of power simply say that the results of actions have no importance—the philosophy of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

  * * *

  We slept that night in the cabin with the door latched, and there was a certain comfort and solidity in sleeping in what we had built. I can also say that the puncheon floor was
much harder than the ground had been. Or perhaps I wasn’t as tired.

  The next day was our last of the excursion and we celebrated it by jumping off the bluff across the river. Then we cleaned up the camp and came home.

  It was foggy in the morning, and though the fog lifted, the clouds stayed low and gray over our heads. We set out in one big group this morning with Mr. Marechal leading and Mr. Pizarro bringing up the rear and carrying ropes. Looking at the river, our cabin was on the left and the shed on the right. We had gone upriver for our logs, and Mr. Marechal’s group the other way. We went downriver along the riverbank, past the point where their skid tracks went uphill away from the river, and then around the long slow bend where the river curved out of sight of the camp. It was a gloomy day but we were in good spirits, chattering as we walked. Our group of six, reunited, walked together.

  We picked our way along for more than a mile, sometimes having to leave the river edge and move inland, but making a pretty good pace of it. At last we came out on a sand shoal and looked across at an easy bank on the other side of the river and a broken and easily climbed bluff.

  “We’re going to have to swim,” Mr. Marechal said. He waded out into the water until he was standing in water to his waist about one-quarter of the way across.

  Then we started across with both of our leaders standing guard. The water was cold and it wasn’t half as much fun to get soaked as it had been the first time. Our clothes are dirt- and water-resistant and dry quickly, but believe me, it is far nicer to have them dry off you than to have them dry while you are wearing them. On the far bank I dripped and shivered.

  We all gathered on the grassy bank and then Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal splashed and swam across to join us. We climbed through the underbrush and tumbled rock and by the time we reached the top of the bluff, if I wasn’t fully dry at least I wasn’t shivering.

  The bluff was covered with forest, too, but standing on the edge we could see the easy, forest-covered slope on the other side from above, a dark green rising carpet. Then we turned into the woods and didn’t come out again until we were standing on the bluff edge opposite our camp.

  I didn’t like standing on the edge, so I came to the lip on my knees and looked down at the river. It looked a long way down—a drop big enough to kill you, and after that distances are academic. At the base, there looked to be just room to stand and no more. As it had been explained to us, the two ropes would be tied in place here at the top of the bluff and then each of us would whip the ropes around our waists and step off the cliff backward. Looking down, I didn’t exactly relish the idea. I moved back from the edge and then got to my feet.

  “Well,” Mr. Marechal said, “who’s going to be the first to try it?”

  Jimmy said, “Mia and I will.”

  Mr. Marechal looked at me and I said, “Yes.” I didn’t like the thought of doing it, but if it was something expected of everybody and I was going to have to do it eventually, I didn’t mind doing it first and getting it over with.

  The ropes were tied to trees and then passed around our waists, around the main ropes, and then back around the waists again. Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal demonstrated for everybody how this worked. The ends were finally dropped back between our legs and over the edge of the cliff to dangle just above the river. In effect, what we were doing was putting ourselves in a running loop that slid freely on the rope and then moving down the rope to the river.

  At the signal, we stood with our backs to the river, the rope taut between us and our trees. I looked down at the river and sighed, then stepped backward off the edge. I let line pay out for a moment and then stopped it and swung in to come to a halt with my feet against the cliff-face, my body hanging in the loop from the tree on the cliff above. I was almost surprised that it worked. Then I pushed off again and went down another six or seven feet. This was not hard at all, and rather fun. I looked over at Jimmy and laughed. Then, almost before I knew it, I was at the bottom. The bank here was wider than it looked from above, four or five feet wide, and Jimmy and I landed at almost the same moment.

  We pulled the ropes free and waved up at the people on top.

  “It’s easy,” Jimmy called.

  “It’s fun,” I said.

  The ropes were snaked up again to the top of the bluff as we watched.

  Jimmy said, “There’s no sense in staying down here. Let’s go across the river.”

  We swam across again and then watched while the next pair rappelled down the cliff. We sat on the last completed part of the cabin, a slab doorstep.

  As we watched, I said, “Thank you for volunteering me, by the way.”

  “I know,” Jimmy said. “You’re a reluctant daredevil. Aren’t you the person who used to crawl around in the air ducts?”

  “That was different,” I said. “That was my idea.”

  Chapter 12

  AT THE END OF DECEMBER, just in time for Year End, the kids on Trial on New Dalmatia were brought home. Of the forty-two kids who were dropped, seven didn’t signal for Pickup and didn’t come home. One of the seven was Jack Brophy, whom I’d known slightly in Alfing Quad. I thought about that, and I couldn’t help wondering whether I would come back to the Ship in a year. I didn’t dwell on the thought, though. Year End is the sort of holiday that takes your mind off the unpleasant, and besides, I discovered something else that occupied my thoughts and gave me something of a new perspective on my mother.

  Year End is a five or six day bash—five days in 2198, which wasn’t a Leap Year. In one of the old novels I read, I discovered that before the calendar was reformed, the extra day of Leap Year was tacked onto February. (This was as part of a mnemonic that was supposed to help you remember how many days there were in each month. My adaptation of it for our calendar would go: “Thirty days hath January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December.” I have a pack rat memory—I even know what a “pack rat” was.) Under our system, the extra day gets tacked onto Year End.

  I was in charge of fixing up our apartment for Year End. Jimmy and I made a trip down to the Ship’s Store on Second Level and picked out a piñata in the shape of a giant chicken and painted it in red, green, and yellow. Jimmy’s dorm had a piñata, of course, but the impersonality of the dorm took a lot of fun out of Year End and I had arranged with Daddy for Jimmy to share ours. Between the two of us, Jimmy and I fixed the apartment very nicely and planned the parties we were having on Day Two (for our group of six and some of our other friends) and the big party on New Year’s Eve, more or less an open house for anybody who cared to walk in. Since that ticked off an obligation for Daddy, who has no patience for things like party arranging, he was just as glad to have us do it.

  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—José. 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 in 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.