Rite of Passage

“Mr. Mbele is your tutor now. Not Mr. Wickersham as I told you this morning. I assume everything else I told you this morning will apply. Show up at two o’clock on Wednesday and please remember what I said about being late. I don’t want the students in my charge being late. A bad reputation always gets back and I’m the -one who has to think up explanations.”

“Can you tell me why I’m being switched?” I asked.

Mr. Quince raised his eyebrows. With acerbity, he said, “That doesn’t seem to be any of my business. I was informed of the change, and I am informing you. You may believe that it wasn’t my idea. I’m going to have to alter two assignments now, and I do not deliberately make work for myself. So don’t expect any answers from me. I don’t have any.”

It seemed like an odd business to me — switching me from one tutor to another before we’d even had a chance to inflict scars on one another. Almost frivolous.

In spite of myself, I was glad to meet Jimmy Dentre… mont on Wednesday afternoon. I was having trouble finding Mr. Mbele’s apartment and he helped me find my way.

“That’s where I’m going, as a matter of fact,” he said. Standing there in the hall with a slip with the address in his hand, he seemed almost friendly, perhaps- because there weren’t any other kids around.

So far, I hadn’t won any friends in Geo Quad, and by being quick-tongued had made one or two enemies, so I didn’t object to somebody being pleasant.

“Is Mr. Mbele your tutor, too?”

“Well, only since yesterday. I called Mr. Wickersham to find out why I was being switched around, and he’d only just been told about it by Mr. Quince, himself.”

“You didn’t ask to be switched?”

“No.”

“That does seem funny,” I said.

Mr. Mbele opened his door to our ring. “Hello,” he said, and smiled. “I thought you two would be showing up about now.”

He was white-haired and old — certainly well over a hundred — but tall and straight for his age. His face was dark and lined, with a broad nose and white eyebrows like dashes.

Jimmy said, “How do you do, sir.”

I didn’t say anything because I recognized him.

No name on the Ship is completely uncommon and I knew as many Mbeles as I knew Haveros. I just didn’t expect my tutor to be Joseph L. H. Mbele.

When he sat on the Ship’s Council, he and my father were generally in disagreement. Daddy led the opposition to his pet plan for miniaturized libraries to be distributed to all the colonies. The third time it was defeated, Mr. Mbele resigned.

When I was in the dorm, I once got into a namecalling, hair-yanking fight with another girl. She said that if Mr. Mbele wanted something to be passed, all he had to do was introduce a resolution against it, and then sit back. My father would immediately come out in favor of the proposal and ram it through for him.

I don’t think, this girl knew what the joke meant, and I know I didn’t, but she intended it to be slighting, and I knew she did, so I started fighting. I didn’t know Daddy very well in those days, but I was full to the brim with family loyalty.

Assigning me Mr. Mbele as a tutor seemed like another poor joke, and I wondered who had thought of it. Not Mr. Quince, certainly — it had cost him extra work and his time was precious.

“Come inside,” Mr. Mbele said. Jimmy prodded me and we moved forward. Mr. Mbele tapped the door button and the door slid shut behind us.

He motioned us toward the living room and said, “I thought today we’d simply get acquainted, arrange times that are convenient for all of us to meet, and then have something to eat. We can save our work for next time.”

We sat down in the living room, and though there wasn’t much doubt as to who was who amongst the three of us, at least in my mind, we all introduced ourselves.

“Yes, I think I’ve met both of your parents, Jimmy,” Mr. Mbele said, “and, of course, I knew your grandfather. As a matter of interest to me, what do you think you might like to specialize in eventually?”

Jimmy looked away. “I’m not positive yet.”

“Well, what are the possibilities?”

For a long moment, Jimmy didn’t speak, and then in a row and unconfident voice, he said, “I think I’d like to be an ordinologist.”

If you think of the limits of what we know as a great suite of rooms inhabited by vast numbers of incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom are eccentric recluses, then an ordinologist is somebody who comes in every so often to clean up. He picks up the books around the room and puts them where they belong. He straightens everything up. He throws away the junk that the recluses have kept and cherished, but for which they have no use. And then he leaves the room in condition for outsiders to visit while he’s busy cleaning up next door. He bears about the same resemblance to the middle-aged woman who checks out books in the quad library as one of our agriculturists does to a primitive Mudeater farmer, but if you stretched a point, you might call him a librarian.