but he had a great gash on his arm that was just starting to heal. So much for a turtle policy, at least on Tintera. Riggy said that he had been minding his own business in the woods one day when a Losel jumped out from behind a bush and slashed him. That may sound reasonable to you, but you don’t know Riggy. My opinion is that it was probably the other way around—the Losel was walking along in the woods one day, minding his own business, when Riggy jumped out from behind a bush and scared him. That is the sort of thing that Riggy is inclined to do.
Riggy said, “Where did you get that gun? Can I see it?”
I handed it over to him. After a minute of inspection, Riggy said, “You wouldn’t want to trade something for it, would you?”
I said, “Riggy, you may have it.” I didn’t particularly want it anymore. I knew I would never use it again and it held no fascination for me.
Only seventeen of us in all came aboard. Twelve didn’t live or trigger their signals. I thought about that on the way back to the Ship. I counted the times I was in some danger of being killed, and I came up with a minimum of five times. If you say the chances of living through any single one of these encounters was nine in ten, the chances of living through five are only six in ten. Fifty-nine in a hundred, actually. If everybody’s experience was like mine, it wasn’t unreasonable that twelve of us should not come back. The trouble was that Att was among the missing twelve.
When we got to the Ship, people were there to take care of our horses. We went through decontamination quickly and then they led us into the reception room. They had decorations up for Year End on the walls and colored mobiles that twinkled overhead. There was a band and Daddy in his official capacity to welcome the new adults. Daddy shook my hand.
There were parents waiting. There was Mother and I saw Jimmy’s mother and her husband and his father and his father’s wife. When they saw Jimmy they all waved. And I saw Att’s mother.
I said to Jimmy, “I’ll see you later.”
I went to Att’s mother and I said, “I’m sorry, but Att isn’t with us.” I didn’t know how else to say it. I wished I could say it so that it didn’t hurt her, but it hurt me, too, to know that he wasn’t coming back, and it hurt me to tell her. When she hadn’t seen him with us, she must have known. She began to cry and she nodded and touched my shoulder, and then turned away.
I went over to Mother and she smiled and took my hand. “I’m pleased you came home,” she said, and then she began to cry, and turned her head.
Daddy came away from giving his congratulations and he hugged me. He put a measuring hand over my head and said, “Mia, I believe you’ve grown some.”
I nodded, because I thought I had, too. It felt very good to be home.
Epilogue: Rite of Passage
Chapter 20
I’VE ALWAYS RESENTED THE WORD MATURITY, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me.
It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that