Alexei Panshin: Rite of Passage

The ducts moved in straight lines, and walking within them you could move through walls and arrive almost anywhere faster than you could through the halls. Anybody bigger than I was was too big to squeeze through the grate openings — there were larger openings for repairmen, but they were kept locked — and all the other kids I knew were too frightened to follow me, so the shortcut remained my own private route. They all thought I was foolish to go where I did, and for the sake of prestige I liked to pretend that they were right, though they weren’t. As long as you avoided the giant fans you were all right. It was simply that it was people, not things, that frightened me.

When I got to our corridor, I slipped the grate out and pulled myself up and out on the floor. I reset the grate and gave a swipe to my hair to teach it to behave and lie down flat again. I inherit my hair and eyes, my straight nose and my complexion from my Spanish and Indian ancestors on Daddy’s side of the family, and though I wear my black hair short, it will misbehave.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said as I came into our apartment. “Am I late?”

The living room was in a real mess. Books and papers were all in piles on the floor and the furniture was all shoved to one side. Our home ordinarily had a lived-in look, but this was far worse than usual.

Daddy was sitting in one of the chairs, sorting books. Daddy is Miles Havero. He is a small man just into middle age with a face that is hard to read, and a very sharp mind. He is mainly a mathematician, though he sits on the Ship’s Council and has for years. He and I had lived in this apartment since I left the dormitory when I was nine.

He gave me an inquiring look. “What happened to you?”

“I didn’t mean to be late,” I said.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m talking about your clothes.”

I looked down. I had on a white shirt and yellow shorts. Across the front of both were streaks of dust and grime.

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.

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.