Rite of Passage

He took out a handkerchief and wiped my face and he finally got me calmed down enough to find out what I was trying to tell him. It took awhile, but finally I was finished and had stopped crying, and was only hiccuping occasionally.

“I’m truly sorry, Mia,” he said gravely. “I hadn’t really understood how things were. I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be better off in a dormitory with other children than living here alone with me.”

“No,” I said. “I want to live with you, Daddy.”

He looked thoughtful for a long moment, and then he gave a little nod and said, “All right. I’ll call up the dorm and let them know so they won’t think you’re lost.”

Alfing Quad then became one of the two certain things in my life. You can’t count on a dorm or a dorm mother, but a quad and a father are sure. But now Daddy wanted us to leave one of my two sureties. And Geo Quad wasn’t even on the Fourth Level — it was on the Fifth.

The Ship is divided into five separate levels. First Level is mainly Technical — Engineers, Salvage, Drive, Conversion, and so on. Second is mainly Administration. Third has dirt and hills, real trees and grass, sand, animals and weeds — it’s where they instruct us kids before they drop us on a planet to live or die. Fourth and Fifth are Residential, where we all live. Of these five, the Fifth is the last. All of us kids knew that if you lived way out on the Fifth Level you weren’t much better than a Mudeater. If you lived on the Fifth Level you were giving up one of your claims to being human.

I sat in my chair thinking for a long time, trying to recover myself. “You can’t be serious about moving to the Fifth Level?” I asked, hoping Daddy might be joking — not really hoping; more just trying to keep from facing the situation for a moment longer.

“Certainly I am,” he said, as though it were nothing. “I had to hunt for a long time before I found this apartment. I’ve already started getting us ready to move. You’ll like it there, I think. I understand there’s a boy your age in the school there who’s somewhat ahead of you. It will give you a chance to scratch for awhile instead of coasting along with no competition the way you do here.”

I was afraid, and so I started to argue desperately, naming all the places we could move into inside Alfing. I even cried — and I didn’t do that often anymore — but Daddy was unshakable. Finally I dragged my sleeve across my face to dry my eyes and folded my arms and said, “I’m not going to go.”

That wasn’t the right tack to take with Daddy. It just convinced him that I was being stubborn, but it wasn’t stubbornness now. I was truly frightened. I was sure that if we moved things would never be the same for me again. They couldn’t be.

But I couldn’t say that to Daddy. I couldn’t admit to him that I was afraid.

He came to the chair where I was sitting defiantly with my arms crossed and fresh tears lurking in the corners of my eyes, and he put both of his hands on my shoulders.

“Mia,” he said. “I realize that it isn’t easy for you, but in less than two years you will be your own master and then you can live where you please and do as you like. If you can’t take an unpleasant decision now, what kind of an adult will you make then? Right now — no arguments — I am moving. You have a choice. Move with me, or move into the dormitory here in Alfing Quad.”

I’d lived in a dormitory and I had no desire ever to go back. I did want to stay with Daddy, but it was still a hard decision for me to make. It was a question of which of my two certainties I wanted to give up. In the end, I made my decision.

After I wiped my eyes once again with the lower edge of my shirt, I walked slowly back down to the quad yard. When I got there, both soccer games had broken up and the whole yard was a turning kaleidoscope of colored shirts and shorts. I didn’t see Venie Morlock anywhere in the mass of playing kids, so I asked a boy I knew if he had seen her.

He pointed, “She’s right over there.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I got her down. I rubbed her nose in the ground. Then I made her beg to be let up. I got a black eye for my trouble, but it was worth it to make her remember who was who, even if I did live on the Fifth Level now.

After that, Daddy and I moved.

2

The people who run our schools are very conservative — that probably holds true just about everywhere, not just on our Ship. In any case, usually once you get assigned to a tutor you don’t change to another for years. In fact, I knew a boy in Alfing Quad who hated his tutor and got along so badly with him that they could both show scars, and it took him three years to change to another.

Compared to that, anything less has to seem frivolous.

Monday morning, two days after we moved, I reported to my new school supervisor in Geo Quad. He was thin, officious, prim and exact, and his name was Mr. Quince. He looked at me standing in front of his desk, raised his eyebrows as he took in my black eye, finished examining me, and said, “Sit down.”