“You call me too often,” she said as we lined up to rap. “It’s not fair!”
She was so whiney about it that we stopped calling her number almost entirely — just often enough that she didn’t get the idea that she was being excluded. I went along with this, though I didn’t agree. I may be wrong, but I don’t see any point in playing a game with anybody who isn’t just as ready to face losing as to face winning. It’s not a game if there’s no risk.
A moment later when somebody else lost I noticed that Zena was right up there in line and happy to have the chance to do a little damage of her own.
We seven weren’t the whole class, of course. Some were talking, some were reading, Jimmy Dentremont and another boy were playing chess, some were just sitting, and three or four boys were chasing each other up and down the aisles. Mr. Marberry, who was in charge of us for the afternoon said, “Sit down until we get to Geo Quad,” to them in a resigned voice every time they started to get too loud or to make too much of a nuisance of themselves. Mr. Marberry is one of those people who talk and talk and talk, and never follow through, so they weren’t paying too much attention to him.
As we reached the last station before Geo Quad, somebody noticed and we decided to play just one last round. Since we were so close to home, the boys were out of their seats and starting up the aisle past us to be first out of the shuttle. They were bouncing around, swatting one another, and when they got up by us and saw what we were playing they began to try to distract us so that we would make mistakes and suffer for it. We did our best to ignore them.
One of the boys, Thorin Luomela, was paying close attention to our numbers so he could distract the right person when that number was called again. By chance, the first number he heard repeated was one of mine.
“Fourteen.”
Thorin waited until the right moment and smacked me across the behind. He put plenty of sting into it, too.
I said, “Fifteen,” and clouted him back. I brought my hand back hard and set him back on his heels. In those days, I was small and hard and I could hit. For a moment I thought he might do something about it, but then his resolve wilted.
“What did you do that for?” he asked. “I was only fooling.”
I turned back to the game. “Fifteen” happened to be Zena Andrus and she had missed as usual, so we started to take licks.
When I stepped up for my turn, Zena glared at me as though I had deliberately caused her to miss and was personally to blame for her sore wrist. I hadn’t intended to hit her hard at all because she was so completely hapless, but that look of hers just made me mad, it was so chock full of malice. I took a tight grip on her arm, stiffened the first two fingers of my left hand, and whacked her across the reddened area of her wrist as hard as I could. It hurt my fingers.
The shuttle was just coming to a stop then, and I turned away from Zena and said, “Well, here we are,” ignoring her whimper of self-pity as she nursed her wrist.
We were free to go our own way after the shuttle dropped us at Geo Quad, so I started for home, but Zena caught up with me before I’d gone very far.
She said, “Your father’s being Chairman of the Ship’s Council doesn’t make any difference to me. In spite of what you think, you’re no better than anybody else.”
I looked at her and said, “I don’t claim that I’m better than everybody else, but I don’t walk around telling everybody that I’m not, the way you do.”
I saw immediately that I’d made a mistake. Every so often I meet somebody with whom I just can’t communicate. Sometimes it is an adult. More often it is somebody my own age. Sometimes it is somebody who thinks in a different way than I do so that the words we use don’t mean the same things to both of us. More often it is somebody like Zena who just doesn’t listen.
What I’d said seemed obvious to me, but Zena missed the point completely. There were lots of times when I didn’t think well of myself at all, but even when I had cause to whisper mea culpas to myself under my breath, I would not concede that I was inferior to other people. I knew that I was smarter than most people, smaller than most people, clumsier than most, untalented in art (I inherited that), less pretty than most, and that I could play the pennywhistle a little. bit — at least, I owned one, and most people didn’t. I was what I was. Why should I crawl, or cry, or be humble about it? I really didn’t understand.
Zena either didn’t hear what I said the way I said it or she simply wasn’t able to understand anything that complicated.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “You do think you’re better than everybody else! I didn’t think you’d admit it. I’ve been saying that’s the way you are. You’re stuckup.’
I started to protest, but she’d already turned away, as pleased as though she’d been handed a cookie. I knew it was my fault, too. Not for what I’d said, but for losing my temper and being unpleasant in the first place. You can’t stamp on people and not get hurt in return.
It didn’t end there, though. Zena spread what she thought I’d said, plus some interpolations, plus some liberal commentary that demonstrated just how thoroughly noble she was, and how objective, all over the quad and there were kids willing to listen and to believe. Why not? They didn’t know me. And I didn’t care. Geo Quad meant nothing to me.
By the time that I realized that it did matter, I’d backed myself neatly into a corner. I had a few enemies — perhaps even more than a few — and a fair number of neutral acquaintances. I had no friends.
The major reason that I found it hard to think of leaving the Ship is that the Mudeaters, the Colons, are so different from us. They are peasants, farmers mostly, because that sort of person was best equipped to stay alive on a colony planet, some of which are pretty rough places. On the other hand, we people on the Ship mostly have technical training.
We could have joined them, I suppose, when Earth was destroyed — as, in fact, it was planned that we would — but if we had it would have meant dropping the better part of 5000 years of advance. You see, you have to have time for science, and working every minute through the day just to stay alive in order to be able to do the same thing tomorrow leaves no free time at all. So we never left the Ship, and none of the other Ships were abandoned, either.
Now when we need something from one of the colonies, we trade some of the knowledge we have preserved all these years, or some of the products our science has worked out, and in exchange we get raw materials — what we have for what they have. It’s a fair trade.
The truth is, I guess, I just find it easier to cope with things than with people. When I came to Alfing Quad, I got to know everybody. I thought I was settled for good and I set down roots. Or, you might say, I dug in my fingernails and held on for dear life. But then we came to Geo Quad and I had to face all these new people. I might not have done it very well, but I could do it because they were Ship people. People-type people. But they aren’t like us on the planets.
I really think I could have faced Earth. I think I could understand anybody who could take an asteroid roughly thirty miles by twenty by ten and turn it into a Ship. They split it into two halves, carved out forty or fifty percent of the rock in the two parts, leaving matching projections, and then put them back together again and restuffed the interior with all the fittings needed to make a Ship. All in one year.
To me, these people were fantastic and wonderful and it still hurts me to think that they had to cap it all by blowing themselves to pieces. But that was Earth. Not the Mudeaters.