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

anyway. For that reason, mainly, the Ship was built with a very efficient cleaning and
air-distribution system. The Ship is used now for a completely different purpose, so
we no longer need that system.
Daddy said my suggestion wasn’t completely out of line.
“Why doesn’t the Council do something about it, then? I asked.
“Figure it out yourself, Mia,” Daddy said. He was always after me to try to figure
things out myself before I looked them up or asked him for the answers.
I did figure it out. Simply, it would be just too much trouble for too little result to
scrap a complicated existing system that worked well at no present cost in favor of
another system whose only virtue was its simplicity.
I brushed at my shirt and most of the dirt went its own way.
“I took a shortcut home,” I said.
Daddy just nodded absently and didn’t say anything. He’s impossible to figure. I
was once taken aside and pumped to find out how Daddy was going to vote on a
Council Question. They weren’t very nice people, so instead of telling them politely
that I didn’t have the least idea, I lied. I can’t guess what Daddy is thinking— he has
to tell me what’s on his mind.
He set down the book he had been looking at and said, “Mia, I have some good
news for you. We’re going to move into a new place.”
I gave a whoop and threw my arms around his dear neck.
This was news I had wanted to hear. In spite of all the empty space in the Ship,
we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow after I left the dorm and moved in
with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a
larger one. We were too busy living in the one we had. The one thing I had disliked
most when I was living in the dormitory was the lack of space— they feel they have
to keep an eye on you there. Moving now meant that I would have a larger room for
myself. Daddy had promised I could.
“Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Which apartment are we going to move into?”
The population of the Ship is about 30,000 now, but once we had transported
thirty times that many and cargo besides. The truth is that I don’t see where they had
fit them all. But now, even though we’ve spread out to fill up some of the extra
space, all the quads have empty apartments. If we had wanted to, we could have
moved next door.
Then Daddy said, as though it made no difference, “It’s a big place in Geo
Quad,” and the bottom fell out of my elation.
I turned away from him abruptly, feeling dizzy, and sat down. Daddy didn’t just
want me to leave home. He wanted me to leave the precarious stability I had worked
out for myself. Until I was nine, I had nothing, and now Daddy wanted me to give up
everything I had gained since then.
Even now, it isn’t easy for me to talk about it. If it were not important, I would
skip right over it and never say a word. I was very lonely when I was nine. I was
living in a dormitory with fourteen other kids, being watched and told what to do,
seeing a procession of dorm mothers come and go, feeling abandoned. That’s the
way it had been for me for five years, and finally there came a time when I couldn’t
stay there any longer, and so I ran away. I got on the shuttle, though I don’t know
quite how I knew where to go, and I went to see Daddy.
I kept thinking about what I’d say and what he’d say and worrying about it all the
distance, so that when I finally got in to see him I was crying and hiccupping and I
couldn’t stop.
“What’s the matter?” Daddy kept asking me, but I couldn’t answer.