"Alexei Panshin - Rite Of Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

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To be honest, I haven’t been able to remember clearly everything that happened to
me before and during Trial, so where necessary I’ve filled in with possibilities— lies,
if you want.
There is no doubt that I never said things half as smoothly as I set them down
here, and probably no one else did either. Some of the incidents are wholly made up.
It doesn’t matter, though. Everything here is near enough to what happened, and the
important part of this story is not the events so much as the changes that started
taking place in me seven years ago. The changes are the things to keep your eye on.
Without them, I wouldn’t be studying to be an ordinologist, I wouldn’t be married to
the same man, and I wouldn’t even be alive. The changes are given exactly— no lies.
I remember that it was a long time before I started to grow. That was important to
me. When I was twelve, I was a little black-haired, black-eyed girl, short, small, and
without even the promise of a figure. My friends had started to change while I
continued to be the same as I had always been, and I had begun to lose hope. For
one thing, according to Daddy I was frozen the way I was. He hit upon that when I
was ten, one day when he was in a teasing mood.
“Mia,” he said. “I like you the way you are right now. It would be a real shame if
you were to grow up and change.”
I said, “But I want to grow up.”
“No,” Daddy said thoughtfully. “I think I’ll just freeze you the way you are right
now.” He waved a hand. “Consider yourself frozen.”
I was so obviously annoyed that Daddy continued to play the game. By the time
that I was twelve I was doing my best to ignore it, but it was hard sometimes just
because I hadn’t done any real growing since I was ten. I was just as short, just as
small, and just as fiat. When he started teasing, the only thing I could say was that it
simply wasn’t true. After awhile, I stopped saying anything.
Just before we left Alfing Quad, I walked in with a black eye. Daddy looked at me
and the only thing he said was, “Well, did you win or did you lose?”
“I won,” I said.
“In that case,” Daddy said, “I suppose I won’t have to unfreeze you. Not as long
as you can hold your own.”
That was when I was twelve. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have anything to
say. And besides, I was mad at Daddy anyway.
Not growing was part of my obvious problem. The other part was that I was
standing on a tightrope. I didn’t want to go forward— I didn’t like what I saw there.
But I couldn’t go back, either, because I tried that and it didn’t work. And you can’t
spend your life on a tightrope. I didn’t know what to do.
There are three major holidays here in the Ship, as well as several minor ones. On
August 14, we celebrate the launching of the Ship—last August it was one hundred
and sixty-four years ago. Then, between December 30 and January 1, we celebrate
Year End. Five days of no school, no tutoring, no work. Dinners, decorations hung
everywhere, friends visiting, presents, parties. Every fourth year we tack on one
more day. These are the two fun holidays.
March 9th is something different. That’s the day that Earth was destroyed and it
isn’t the sort of thing you celebrate. It’s just something you remember.
From what I learned in school, population pressure is the ultimate cause of every
war. In 2041, there were eight billion people on Earth alone, and nobody even had
free room to sneeze. There were not enough houses, not enough schools or
teachers, inadequate roads and impossible traffic, natural resources were going or