In truth, the MacReady side had no case. All they could do was make a plea for leniency. Alicia MacReady cried when it was her turn to speak, until Daddy made her stop.
Mr. Persson said, “Once we all agree that it was a stupid thing to do, what more is there to say? Alicia MacReady is a citizen of this Ship. She survived Trial. She has as much right to live here as anyone else. Granted that she did a foolish thing, it’s a very simple thing to abort the child. You all watched her crawl for you. There isn’t any question of this sort of thing happening again. It was a mistake made in a wild moment and heartily repented of. Can’t we say that this public humiliation is punishment enough and drop the whole matter?”
When Mr. Tubman had his chance to speak, he said, more crisply than I was used to hearing him speak, “If nothing else, there are a few corrections I would like to make. If what Mr. Persson chooses to call ‘this public humiliation’ is a punishment, it is a self-inflicted one — discount it. Miss MacReady’s case could have been settled before the Council. Bringing it before an Assembly was her own choice. Secondly, her so-called repentance. Repentance when you are found out is much too easy — discount it. ‘A mistake made in a wild moment’? Hardly. It took more than a month of deliberate dodging of her APPs for Miss MacReady to become pregnant. That is hardly a single wild moment — discount it. Corrections aside, there is something else. There is a matter of basic principle. We are a tiny precarious island floating in a hostile sea. We have worked out ways of living that observed exactly allow us to survive and go on living. If they are not observed exactly, we cannot survive. Alicia MacReady made a choice. She chose to have a fifth child that the Ship’s Eugenist had not given her permission to have. It was a choice between the Ship and the baby. The choice made, there are certain inevitable consequences of which Alicia MacReady was aware when she made her choice. Would we be fair either to her or ourselves if we didn’t face and help her to face the consequences? We are not barbarians. We don’t propose to kill either Miss MacReady or her unborn child. What we do propose is to give her what she has elected, her baby and not the Ship. I say we should drop her on the nearest Colony planet. And good luck to her.”
Which was a nice way of pronouncing a probable death sentence. But then Mr. Tubman wasn’t wrong — she had asked for it.
Soon after they held the vote. 7,923 people voted to let her stay. 18,401 voted to expel her.
Alicia MacReady fainted, the reaction of an hysteric. Mr. Persson and some of her friends gathered around. The other people began to file out of the great room, the business of the evening behind them.
I got up and switched off the vid. “How would you have voted?” I asked.
“I don’t know that much about things like this,” Zena said looking up. She’d only been half paying attention. “They don’t give her anything, a horse or weapons or a heli-pac or anything, when they put her off on a Colony planet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, isn’t that pretty harsh?”
“It’s like Mr. Tubman said, we’ve got rules that have to be followed. If people don’t follow the rules they can’t stay here. They were doing her a favor by even letting the Assembly vote on the question.”
Zena looked sour and said, “What will your father do if he comes home and finds that you haven’t thrown out the dinner things?”
“Oh, heavens,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”
I’m likely to put off little bits of drudgery, even when they wouldn’t take long to settle. I had managed to put the dinner remains completely out of mind.
As I was collecting the dishes and throwing them in the incinerator, Zena, standing by, said, “Why are you so strong on rules?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re so set on the rules that you won’t allow any mistakes at all. And that MacReady woman is going to die now.”
I stopped stacking dishes. I looked at her. I didn t even vote. I had nothing to do with what was decided.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said, but she didn’t say what the point was.
Daddy came home about ten minutes later. I asked him if things had gone as he had expected them to, and he said yes.
“I cleared up the dishes,” I said.
Daddy said, “I never doubted you would for a minute.”
At our next meeting I asked Mr. Mbele if he’d expected the decision to go the way it had.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Your father’s point of view is widely shared in the Ship. That is why he’s Chairman.”
9
It may sound like an anachronism to speak of seasons on a Ship, but we always did: that is, July, August and September were “summer,” as an example. This never struck me as odd until I was fifteen or sixteen when I was going into the factors responsible for planetary weather, and One day I really thought about the meaning of the terms we used so casually. It was obvious that through time they had lost their weatherly connotations and now simply referred to quarters of the year — well, for that matter, the fact that we use the Old Earth Year at all is an anachronism, but we do it anyway.
At the time I was doing my puzzling about this, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. (Since he appears in this book several times, I won’t mention his name — he has enough burdens without being made to sound stupid here.) I said, “Do you realize that our calling November ‘fall’ means that most of the people on the Ship probably came originally from the Northern Temperate Zone on Earth?”
He said, “Well, if you wanted to know that, all you have to do is call for the original Ship Lists from the library.”
I said, “But don’t you think this is interesting?”
He said, “No.”
Perhaps stupid is not the word I intended. Perhaps contentious.
In any case, the summer when I was twelve passed. I think of it as a busy block with a whole number of items, and I’m not sure in what exact order any of them happened. I could invent an order, but since none of them is central, I won’t. For instance, during that summer, I had my first menstrual period — that’s important insofar as I took it as a sign that I was growing up, but that’s about all you can say for it. Then there were dancing lessons. You might well wonder what we were doing with dancing lessons, but they were actually a part of our Survival Class training.
Mr. Marechal said, “This isn’t meant to be fun and it isn’t meant to be funny. It is deadly serious. You stumble over your own feet. You don’t know what to do with your hands. When you are in a position where you have to do the exact right thing in an instant, deft movement is the most important element. You want your body to work for you, not against you. Not only, by God, am I going to give you dancing lessons, but I’m going to start you on needlepoint.”
We not only got needlepoint, dancing lessons, hand-to-hand combat training, and weapon instruction, but Mr. Marechal was our tutor in all of them. He showed us films of people drawing hand-guns and dropping them, of people falling off horses (I did that a couple of times myself), of people in a blue funk. The films were taken on an obstacle course where, for instance, if you didn’t watch out, the ground might suddenly fall out from underneath your feet. There might be a rope to grab, or you might simply have to land without breaking your ankle. At the end of the summer, when we moved up from Sixth Class to Fifth, we started going through obstacle courses ourselves. The primary aim was not to teach us any individual skill, but how to react smoothly and intelligently in difficult situations. We were shown how to do individual things, but that wasn’t the primary aim of the instruction.
All of this adds up to the fact that I had been wrong in thinking it would be simply businesslike first to last. Survival Class was earnest, it was businesslike, but it was intelligent and interesting, too. What it was not was an adventure, but since I had my desire for an adventure settled very shortly it no longer bothered me that Survival Class was not an adventure.