Rite of Passage

I said, “Before today, I didn’t even know that there was a Sixth Level.”

“Oh,” Daddy said. “Well, it’s simple enough. At the time they converted the Ship it was pretty Spartan living here. We had more space than we needed with all the colonists gone, but not enough of everything else. They stripped the Third and Sixth Levels and used the materials to fix up the rest of the Ship more comfortably. They changed the Third to as near an approximation of Earth as they could, and closed the Sixth down as unnecessary.”

“Oh,” I said. That seemed to make sense out of the tomb that we had seen.

Daddy said, “I guess I’d forgotten how barren the Sixth Level is. If you want to find out more about it, I can tell you where to look it up. Right now, though, I have to be on my way or I’ll be late.”

Before he got out of the kitchen, I said, “Daddy?”

He turned around.

I said, “I changed my mind today. I think I’d like to go with you next weekend after all.”

Daddy smiled. “I was hoping you’d change your mind if I gave you a little time. You make your share of mistakes, but most of the time you show good sense. I think you did this time.”

Daddy is nice, so he wouldn’t say, “I told you so,” but I was certain that he thought that it was seeing the Sixth Level and not getting stricken dead for it that had changed my mind. It wasn’t, though. I think I changed my mind on the ladder — there are times when you have to go forward whether you like it or not, and if Zena Andrus could do it, as scared as she was, so could I. That’s all.

I smiled and said, “Do I get unfrozen?” I was at least half-serious. For some reason, getting Daddy to say so was important to me.

Daddy nodded. “I guess you do. I guess you do.”

I was still smiling as I sat down to eat. It was just about time I started to do a little growing. It was then that the thought struck me that if I did start to grow, in not very long at all I wouldn’t be able to squeeze my way into the ducts.

Well, you can’t have everything.

5

While I think of it, I want to excuse myself in advance. From time to time, I’m going to say terribly ignorant things. For instance, when I come to speak of boats shortly, anybody who l3as ever sailed will probably find reason to laugh and shake his head at my description. Please forgive me. I’m not writing technical descriptions, I’m simply trying to tell what I saw and did. When I felt the need to grab onto something, I didn’t grab onto a “gunwale,” I grabbed onto the plain old side of the boat. That’s what it was to me.

In any case, through the week before we went to Crainau, my spirits slid down again. Having decided to go on Sunday, if I had left on Monday I wouldn’t have felt bad at all, but unfortunately I had a whole week to mull things over, worry and imagine. Friday night,, the night before we were to leave, I lay awake for hours, unable to sleep. I tried to sleep on my stomach, but bleak possibilities came into my head, one after another. Then onto my side, and imaginary conversations. Onto my back, and thoughts of all the things I might be doing tomorrow instead, if only I could. Finally I did go to sleep, but I didn’t sleep well.

At breakfast, Daddy advised me to eat up, but I couldn’t. My stomach was nervous. After breakfast, we got on the shuttle and traveled down to the First Level, and then over to the bay in which the scoutships sit waiting to take damned fools places they’d rather not go.

We arrived in the scout bay fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave for Grainau. Daddy said, “Wait here, Mia. I’ll be right back.” He went over to a cluster of men standing by the nearest scoutship.

I stood there in a great entranceway carved in the rock, feeling just a little abandoned. Daddy had brought me here, and now he was just going off and leaving me. I was nervous and scared. If I could legitimately have gone back home and crawled in bed, I would have — and not gotten up again for two days, either. If I could have done it without losing face. Unfortunately, it was now harder to back out than to go on, so I was going on, carried by the momentum of my Sunday night decision.

It was the first time I’d ever been in the scout bay. Hesitantly, I looked around. The rock roof arched over the long single line of ships, all squatting over their tubes, waiting for the catch bars that ringed their rims to be released so they could drop out of sight. Scoutships are used for any errands planetside where the Ship can’t go itself because of its size. These include delivering and picking up traded items, tooting off on joyrides, carrying diplomatic missions like ours, and dropping kids on Trial. The scoutships are pigeons that nest in a cote that hoves between the stars, and some are out and away at almost any time. To keep my mind off my unhappy stomach, which was growling sourly, I counted the ships that were home, and there were a dozen. The ships are disc-shaped, with bulges top and bottom in the center. Each of them had at least one of its four ramps lowered.