Rite of Passage

From what I learned in school, population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war. In 2041, there were eight billion people on Earth alone, and nobody even had free room to sneeze. There were not enough houses, not enough schools or teachers, inadequate roads and impossible traffic, natural resources were going or gone, and everybody was a little bit hungry all the time, although nobody was actually starving. Nobody dared to raise his voice because if he did he might disturb a hundred other people, and they had laws and ordinances to bring the point home — it must have been like being in a library with a stuffy librarian twenty-four hours a day. And the population continued to rise. There was a limit to how long all this could go on, and that end was reached one hundred and sixty-four years ago.

I’m lucky, I know, even to be alive at all. My great-great-grandparents were among those who saw it coming and that’s the only reason I’m here.

It wasn’t a case of moving elsewhere in the Solar System. Not only was Earth the only good real estate in the vicinity, but when Earth was destroyed so was every colony in the system. The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight that were in service as well as two more that were uncompleted went up with everything else in 2041. Between those two years we Ships planted 112 colonies on planets in as many star systems. (There were 112 at the beginning, but a fair number simply failed and at least seven acted badly and had to be morally disciplined, so around ninety still exist.)

We in the Ships learned our lesson, and though our Ship has only a small, closed population, we won’t degenerate. We won’t become overpopulated, either. We have a safety valve. Within three months of the day you turn fourteen, they take you from the ship and drop you on one of the colony planets to survive as best you can for thirty days. There are no exceptions and a reasonably high percentage of deaths. If you are stupid, foolish, immature, or simply unlucky, you won’t live through the month. If you do come home, you are an adult. My problem was that at twelve I wasn’t afraid to die, but I was afraid to leave the Ship. I couldn’t even face leaving the quad we lived in.

We call that month of survival “Trial,” and I don’t think there was a day from the time I was eleven that it wasn’t in my thoughts at least once. When I was eleven, a man named Chatterji had a son due to go on Trial, and he had serious doubts that the boy would make it. So he went to a great deal of trouble to try to ease the boy through. He found out where his son was to be dropped and then he coached him on every danger that he knew the planet had to offer. Then, before the boy left, he slipped him a whole range of weapons that are not allowed to be carried on Trial, and he advised him to find a protected spot as soon as he landed and to hole up there for a month, not stirring at all, thinking the boy might have more of a chance that way.

The boy still didn’t make it. He wasn’t very bright. I don’t know how he died — he may not have been able to cope with one of the dangers he knew was there; he may have run into something unexpected; he may accidently have blown his head off with one of those weapons he wasn’t supposed to have; or he may simply have tripped over his own feet and broken his neck — but he didn’t live to come home.

And Mr. Chatterji was expelled from the Ship. He may have died, too.

This may sound harsh — I can’t judge. It doesn’t really matter whether Or not it’s harsh, because it was necessary and I knew that it was necessary long before I was even eleven. At the time, however, this made a great impression on me, and if I had been able to force myself to face things outside the confines of the quad in which I lived I would have rested much easier.

There may have been other reasons, but I suspect that all this is why when Daddy became Chairman of the Ship’s Council he decided that we had to move.

Boys and girls, all of us in the Ship grew up playing soccer. I’m sure I knew how to play by the time I was four or five, and I was certainly kicking the ball around earlier than that. We used to play every chance we got, so it wasn’t surprising that I was playing soccer in the quad yard — Alfing Quad, Fourth Level — when I got word to come home. The yard stretches three floors high and two hundred yards in each direction. There’s a regulation-sized soccer field, green and beautifully kept, in the yard, but some older kids newly come back from their month of Trial and feeling twice as tall because of it had exercised their privileges and taken the field for themselves. We had moved down to the smaller field set up in the far end and were playing there.