Rite of Passage

The Ship is a place where it is almost impossible to get dirty. The ground in the quad yards isn’t real dirtand-grass, for one thing. It’s a cellulose product set in a milled fiber and plastic base — when a square gets worn they rip it out and put in a new one, just like in your living room floor. Tbe only place there is dirt in any quantity is the Third Level, where there isn’t anything else but. A certain amount of dirt does get carried out of the Third Level and spread and tracked around the Ship. Eventually it gets sucked into the collecting chutes and blown down to Engineers on the First Level, where it is used to feed the Convertors to produce heat, light and power inside the Ship. But you can see that ordinarily there isn’t much opportunity to get filthy.

I once asked Daddy why they didn’t work out a system to keep the dirt at its only source — the Third Level — instead of going to the trouble of cleaning the Ship after it gets dirty. It wouldn’t be hard to do.

He said, “You know what the Ship was built for, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. Everybody knows that. It was built to carry Mudeaters out to settle the Colonies — I don’t call them that in Daddy’s presence, by the way; though it may seem surprising, he doesn’t like the word.

Daddy went on to explain. The Mudeaters — Colons, rather — were packed in at very close quarters. They weren’t clean people — try to convince a peasant to wash — and people packed in as close as they were are going to sweat and stink anyway. For that reason, mainly, the Ship was built with a very efficient cleaning and air-distribution system. The Ship is used now for a completely different purpose, so we no longer need that system.

Daddy said my suggestion wasn’t completely out of line.

“Why doesn’t the Council do something about it, then? I asked.

“Figure it out yourself, Mia,” Daddy said. He was always after me to try to figure things out myself before I looked them up or asked him for the answers.

I did figure it out. Simply, it would be just too much trouble for too little result to scrap a complicated existing system that worked well at no present cost in favor of another system whose only virtue was its simplicity.

I brushed at my shirt and most of the dirt went its own way.

“I took a shortcut home,” I said.

Daddy just nodded absently and didn’t say anything. He’s impossible to figure. I was once taken aside and pumped to find out how Daddy was going to vote on a Council Question. They weren’t very nice people, so instead of telling them politely that I didn’t have the least idea, I lied. I can’t guess what Daddy is thinking — he has to tell me what’s on his mind.

He set down the book he had been looking at and said, “Mia, I have some good news for you. We’re going to move into a new place.”

I gave a whoop and threw my arms around his dear neck.

This was news I had wanted to hear. In spite of all the empty space in the Ship, we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow after I left the dorm and moved in with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a larger one. We were too busy living in the one we had. The one thing I had disliked most when I was living in the dormitory was the lack of space — they feel they have to keep an eye on you there. Moving now meant that I would have a larger room for myself. Daddy had promised I could.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Which apartment are we going to move into?”

The population of the Ship is about 30,000 now, but once we had transported thirty times that many and cargo besides. The truth is that I don’t see where they had fit them all. But now, even though we’ve spread out to fill up some of the extra space, all the quads have empty apartments. If we had wanted to, we could have moved next door.

Then Daddy said, as though it made no difference, “It’s a big place in Geo Quad,” and the bottom fell out of my elation.

I turned away from him abruptly, feeling dizzy, and sat down. Daddy didn’t just want me to leave home. He wanted me to leave the precarious stability I had worked out for myself. Until I was nine, I had nothing, and now Daddy wanted me to give up everything I had gained since then.

Even now, it isn’t easy for me to talk about it. If it were not important, I would skip right over it and never say a word. I was very lonely when I was nine. I was living in a dormitory with fourteen other kids, being watched and told what to do, seeing a procession of dorm mothers come and go, feeling abandoned. That’s the way it had been for me for five years, and finally there came a time when I couldn’t stay there any longer, and so I ran away. I got on the shuttle, though I don’t know quite how I knew where to go, and I went to see Daddy.

I kept thinking about what I’d say and what he’d say and worrying about it all the distance, so that when I finally got in to see him I was crying and hiccuping and I couldn’t stop.

“What’s the matter?” Daddy kept asking me, but I couldn’t answer.