He came on the screen by the buzzer and said, “Oh, hello Mia.”
I said, “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you about something. Get dressed and come on down.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll be down as soon as I get some clothes on.” He rang off and his image faded.
So I picked a seat and waited for him. He hadn’t been living in the dorm long, only a year or so. His birth had been a result of a suggestion by the Ship’s Eugenist — his parents had barely known one another — but his mother had wanted him and raised him. When he was eleven, however, she had decided to get married, and on Jimmy’s own suggestion he had moved into a dorm.
“I didn’t want to be underfoot,” he’d said to me. “I do go over there evenings sometimes. And I see my father, too, from time to time.”
Perhaps it was because he could move back with his mother if he wanted that he didn’t find living in the dorm painful. He seemed to view it as just a temporary situation to be lived with until he came back from Trial and could have an apartment of his own. In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.
There were kids playing a board game of some sort and I sat in my chair. I watched the game and I watched the people watching the game, and I watched people passing, but nobody watched me at all. Jimmy came down in a few minutes and I got out of my chair, quite ready to be gone.
By way of greeting, I said, “What I really want to know is whether you want to go over with me on Friday.”
“Where?”
“What do you mean, ‘where’?”
“Mia, you know I’d go anywhere you asked. Simply name a place and lead the way.”
“You’re lucky I’m not bigger than you are. If I were bigger, I’d hit you. You don’t have to be smart.”
“Well, where is it that you’re going?”
“Don’t you know what I’m talking about?”
He shook his head. “No.”
I got out the note that had come for me yesterday and unfolded it. It said that I was to have a physical examination Wednesday, and on Friday I was to assemble with the others in my survival class at Gate 5, Third Level for our first meeting. I handed the note to Jimmy and he read it.
This first meeting of my survival class would be on Friday, June 3, 2198. My physical would be one year and six months to the day before we would be dropped on one colony planet or another to actually undergo Trial. There is no rule that says a child has to attend a survival class, but in actual practice everybody takes advantage of the training that is offered. Clear choices as to the best course to take in life are very rare, and this was one of those few. They don’t drop us simply to die. They train us for a year and a half, and then they drop us and find out how much good the training has done us.
New classes are started every three or four months, and the last one had been in March, so this note was not unexpected. Since Jimmy had been born in November, too, as he had been so quick to point out when we first met, he was bound to be in the same class with me. Frankly, I wanted company on Friday.
“I didn’t know about this,” Jimmy said. “I should have a note, too. When did this come?”
“Yesterday. I thought you’d call me this morning about it but you didn’t.”
“I’d better check this out. Hold on here.” He went off to find the dorm mother and came back in a few minutes with a note similar to mine. “It was here. I just never looked for it and she never thought to mention it.”
There was one thing that irritated me about Jimmy, but that in a way I admired. Or, perhaps, something I marveled at. On at least two occasions, I had called Jimmy and left a message, once to call me back, once to say I wasn’t going to be able to make our meeting with Mr. Mbele. Neither time did he get the message, because neither time did he stop to look for one. That irritates me. I also feel envious of anyone who can be so unanxious about who might have called. Jimmy simply says that he’s so busy that he never stops to worry about things like that.
Jimmy liked the idea of going to the first meeting on Friday together. To this time, at least, we were not close friends — there was an element of antagonism — but we did know each other and we had Mr. Mbele in common. It seemed to make sense to both of us to face the new situation together.
As we were on our way to Mr. Mbele’s, I said, “Do you remember when I got back from Grainau and I was talking about that boy and his sister to you and Mr. Mbele?”
“The one with the weird ideas of what we’re like?”
“Yes. One of the things they said was that we went around naked all the time. I was objecting to all the things they were saying. I wonder what I would have said if they’d been here to see you on the vid without even your socks on.”
“I suppose they would have thought they were right all along,” Jimmy said reasonably.
“Yes. But they weren’t.”
“I don’t know. I was naked, wasn’t I?”
“Sure, but that was in your own room. I go naked at home, too. They thought we never wear clothes.”
“Well,” Jimmy said brightly, “there’s no real reason we ought to, is there?” He started to pull his shirt off over his head. “We could be just what they think we are, and we wouldn’t be worse because of it, would we?”
“Don’t be perverse,” I said.
“What’s perverse about going naked?”
“I’m talking about your contrariness. Are you going to eat dirt just because they think we do? I shouldn’t have brought the subject up in the first place. It just struck me as something incongruous.”
“Incongruous,” Jimmy corrected, putting the accent on the second syllable where it belonged.
“Well, however you pronounce it,” I said. This comes of reading words and not having heard them pronounced. This also was a matter of talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. It seemed that I might do better just to leave Grainau out of my conversations completely. Just after I’d gotten back home, I’d made the mistake of saying what I really thought about the Mudeaters in front of Jimmy and Mr. Mbele.
“Do they really stink?” Mr. Mbele asked.
Jimmy and I were seated on the couch in Mr. Mbele’s apartment. I had my notebook with notes on my reading, subjects I wanted to bring up, and some book titles that Mr. Mbele had suggested. I realized that I’d just said something I couldn’t really defend, so I backtracked.
“I don’t know if they do. Everybody says they do. What I meant is that I didn’t like what I saw of them.”
“Why not?” Jimmy asked.
“Is that a serious question, or are you just prodding?”
“I’m interested, too, Mia,” Mr. Mbele said. In his case, I could tell that it was a seriously intended question, not just digging. Mr. Mbele never did any ganging up with either one of us against the other.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “We didn’t get along. Do I have to have a better reason than that?”
“Of course,” Jimmy said.
“Well, if you think so,” I said, “give me one good reason you have for being so antagonistic.”
Jimmy half shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
“You don’t have one,” I said. “I just said something you didn’t take to. Well, I didn’t take to the Mudeaters. I can doggone well say they stink if I want to.”
“I guess so,” Jimmy said.
“Hmm,” Mr. Mbele said. “What if it doesn’t happen to be true? What if what you say damages the other person, or if you are just building yourself up by tearing another person down?”