My errors had been made. My self-confidence was still in the process of becoming. If Daddy had pointed out the errors, they would not have been mended, and the self-confidence might have been stillborn. But Daddy just smoked and smiled.
I was curious enough about the things that Ralph Gennaro had said that I repeated his comments to Daddy and asked about them.
“Don’t worry about it,” Daddy said.
“There’s not much sense in even listening to a Mudeater,” Mr. Tubman said. “They have no perspective. They live in such limited little worlds that they can’t see what’s going on.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Henry,” Daddy said. “It’s just as thoughtless as that silly word that Mia picked up. What did that boy say?”
“’Grabbie?’”
“Mm, yes. That one. There’s no reason to trade insults. We have our way of life and they have theirs. I wouldn’t live as they do, but disrespect seems pointless. I’m sure there are good people among them.”
“It’s their lack of perspective,” Mr. Tubman said. “I’ll bet Gennaro is complaining right now that you cheated him.”
“He might be,” Daddy said.
“You didn’t cheat him, did you, Daddy? He seemed happy that you were willing to make a deaL”
“When did you hear this?”
“When you rode up.”
“Lack of perspective,” Mr. Tubman said. “He doesn’t bargain well and he was afraid that your dad had been offended by your adventure. He gave in more easily than he had to. He was happy at the time, but he’s probably regretting it now.”
Daddy nodded and filled his pipe again. “I don’t see any reason to mind his interests for him. As far as I’m concerned, the less we do for the colonists, the sooner they’ll learn to watch out for themselves. And all the better for them when they do. That’s where Mr. Mbele and I disagree. He believes in exceptions to rules, in treating the colonists better than we treat ourselves. I’m not ready to accept that.”
Mr. Tubman said, “I’ll have to admit that I’ve learned things about bargaining from watching you, Miles.”
“I hope so. You will be a poor trader if you underestimate the people you deal with. And you, Mia, will be making a mistake if you underestimate a man like Mr. Mbele. His principles are excellent — sometimes, however, he only sees one route to a goal.”
After a few minutes, Mr. Tubman went over to make a fourth in the card game. I decided to go upstairs.
Daddy looked up as I left. He took the pipe from his mouth. It had gone out without his noticing. “Going to hear another story?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” And I went up and spent the rest of the trip with George.
So, I went home to Geo Quad. In my own time, I thought about things and discovered at least some of my errors, and the discovery did not hurt me, as it might have.
Sometimes there is art of a subtle sort in not touching, in simply sitting and smoking and talking of other people. When I got back to the Ship, I was still feeling good. And it lasted until I went to sleep.
I sat in a large comfortable chair — uncomfortably — and waited for Jimmy Dentremont. I wasn’t twitching; I merely had a definite feeling of unease. This was the living room of the Geo Quad dorm, and very similar to the one that I had once lived in. The similarity didn’t bother me much, but I was a stranger here and a little hesitant because of it. If it hasn’t become clear previously, perhaps I should say that I always prefer to feel in command of a situation.
The room was nicely-enough appointed, but very impersonal. Individuality in a room comes from personal touches, personal care, personal interest, and the more public a room is, the less individual it is bound to be. My own room at home was more personal and individual than our living room, our living room better than the sleeping quarters of this dorm — though I hadn’t seen them, I remembered well enough what dorm sleeping quarters were like — and the quarters better than this room I was sitting in. To be a stranger in an impersonal room in which there are other people who are not strangers to one another or to the place is to have the feeling of strangeness compounded.
The dorm had a living room, where I was sitting, a kitchen and study rooms out of sight, and living quarters upstairs. When I came in I looked around, and then stopped one of the small kids who obviously belonged here, a little girl of about eight.
“Is Jimmy Dentremont around?”
“Upstairs, I imagine,” she said.
Near the door there was a buzzer board for the use of people like me who didn’t live here. I looked Jimmy’s name up, then rang two longs and a short. Since it was not far out of his way, Jimmy usually stopped by for me on the way to Mr. Mbele’s, rather than me coming after him, but I had something to talk with him about today.
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 Fort 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.