Alexei Panshin: Rite of Passage

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.

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.”

The supervisor is in charge of all the school’s administrative work — he assigns tutors, handles class movements, programs the teaching machines, breaks up fights, if there are any, and so on. It’s a job with only a minimum of appeal for most people so they don’t make anybody stay with it for longer than three years.

After looking through all my papers with pursed lips, and making a painstaking entry in a file, Mr. Quince said, “Mr. Wickersham.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, puzzled.

“Mr. Wickersham will be your tutor. He lives at Geo C/15/37. You’re to meet him at his home at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, and thereafter three times a week at your mutual convenience. And please, let’s not be late on Wednesday. Now come along and I’ll show you your room for first hour.”

School is for kids between the age of four and fifteen. After fourteen, if you survive, they let you give up all the nonsensical parts. You simply work with a tutor or a craft master and follow your interests toward some goal.

I was due to make a decision on that in about two years. The trouble is that except for math and reading old novels I had a completely different set of interests than I had had a year before, and since I didn’t really have a solid talent for math and reading old novels isn’t much use for anything, I had to find something definite. I didn’t really want to specialize. I wanted to be a synthesist, knowing a little about everything and seeing enough to put the pieces together. It’s a job that had appeal for me, but I never talked about wanting it because I suspected I wasn’t smart enough to handle it and I wanted room to back down in if I had to.

At my moments of depression I thought I might well wind up as a dorm mother or something equally daring.

At some point between fourteen and twenty everybody finishes his normal training. You pick something you like and start doing it. Later, after twenty, if you’re not already in research, you may apply for educational leave and work on a project of some sort. That’s what my mother keeps herself busy with.

I followed Mr. Quince to the room I was scheduled to be in first hour. I wasn’t anxious to be there at all, and I was half-scared and half-belligerent with no way of knowing which part would dominate at any given moment. When we arrived, there was a lot of sudden moving around. When the people unsorted themselves, I saw there were four kids in the room, two boys and two girls.

Mr. Quince said, “What’s going on here?”

Nobody said anything — nobody ever does to a supervisor if they can avoid it.

He said, “You, Dentremont. What are you up- to?”

The boy was red-headed and even smaller than I, with very prominent ears. He looked very young, though he couldn’t have been since he was in the same class as I.

He said, “Nothing, sir.”

After a moment of sharp gazing around, Mr. Quince accepted that and unbent sufficiently to introduce me. He didn’t introduce anybody else, apparently assuming I could catch on to the names soon enough on my own. The buzzer for the first hour sounded then and he said, “All right. Let’s set to work.”

When he left, the red-headed boy went behind one of the teaching machines and busied himself in tightening down the back plate.

The girl nearest me said, “One of these days Mr. Quince is going to catch you, Jimmy, and then there really will be trouble.”

“I’m just curious,” Jimmy said.

Everybody more or less ignored me, probably no more knowing how to take me than I knew how to take them. They did watch me and I have no doubt they took their first opportunity to tell everyone their idea of what that new girl from the Fourth Level was like. It was soon clear to me that they eyed us as suspiciously as we on the Fourth Level regarded them, with the added note that in our case it was justified while in theirs it was not. I took no pleasure in having girls look at me and then put their heads together and whisper and giggle and if I had been a little more sure of myself I would have challenged them. As it was, I just dug into my work and pretended I didn’t notice.