He’d struck us so hard and fast that we just looked blankly up at him. Nobody said anything.
“Good,” he said. “Goodbye.” And he walked off as though the last item on his list were settled quite satisfactorily, and another tedious but necessary little task were out of the way.
Mr. Marechal looked at the whistle in his hand, and then after Fosnight as he walked to the shuttle station. He didn’t look as though he liked whistles. Then he stuck the whistle in his pocket. He folded the list and put that away, too. When he was finished, he looked up and looked us over slowly, perhaps taking our measure. We looked back up at him, taking a good look at the man who was going to have us in charge for a year and a half. It wasn’t a case of taking his measure, since the child’s side of an adult-child relationship is pretty ordinarily to assume that the adult knows what he is about. If he doesn’t and the child finds out, then things go to pot, but to start with he generally has the benefit of the doubt. I will admit that Mr. Marechal was not an overwhelming figure at first sight.
He said, “Well, Mr. Fosnight forgot something he usually says, so I’ll say it for him if I can remember more or less how it goes. There’s an anthropological name for Trial. They call it a rite of passage. It’s a formal way of passing from one stage of your life to another. All societies have them. The important thing to remember is that it makes being an adult a meaningful sort of thing, because adulthood has been earned when you come back from Trial. That makes Trial worth concentrating on.”
He stopped then and looked off to his right. Everybody looked that way. Mr. Fosnight was coming back toward us. Mr. Marechal looked at him and said questioningly, “Rites of passage?”
“Yes.”
“Never mind. I just finished going over it for you.”
“Oh,” Mr. Fosnight said. “Thanks, then.” He turned around and went back toward the shuttle station.
He was so dogged about the whole thing that the moment he was out of sight, everybody started laughing. Mr. Marechal let it go on for a moment and then he said, “That’s enough. I just want to say a couple of things for myself now. Me and the people who’ll be coming in to show you things are going to be doing our best to get you through Trial. If you pay attention, you shouldn’t have any trouble. Okay? Now the first thing I’m going to do is assign you horses and show you the first thing about riding.”
Mr. Marechal was a slow-speaking sort of person, and didn’t have a complete command of grammar, but he did have the sort of personal authority that makes people listen. Without consulting the list in his pocket, he called off people’s names and names of horses. I got stuck with something called Nincompoop. That got laughs. Jimmy’s horse was Pet—the final t is written but not pronounced since it comes from the French. Venie Morlock got a horse named Slats. When Rachel Yung was assigned her horse, we moved over to the corral, where Mr. Marechal perched up on the top rail.
“These horses are yours from here on out,” he said. “Don’t get sentimental about them. They’re just a way to get from one place to another the same as a heli-pac, and you’ll be getting practice with both. But you’ll have to take care of both, too, and that means especially the horse you have. A horse is an animal and that means he’ll break down easier than a machine if he isn’t taken care of. You damned well better take care of them.”
One of the kids raised his hand. “Yes, Herskovitz?”
Herskovitz was a little surprised to be tagged quite that easily. “If horses are that lousy, why do we have to go to the trouble of learning how to ride them? That’s what I want to know.”
Even more slowly than usual, Mr. Marechal said, “Well, I could give you reasons, I suppose, but what it all boils down to is that you have to pass a test. The test goes by certain rules and one of those rules is that you have to be able to ride a horse. But don’t let it bother you too much, son. You may find that you like horses after a while.”