out ways of living that observed exactly allow us to survive and go on living. If they are not observed exactly, we cannot survive. Alicia MacReady made a choice. She chose to have a fifth child that the Ship’s Eugenist had not given her permission to have. It was a choice between the Ship and the baby. The choice made, there are certain inevitable consequences of which Alicia MacReady was aware when she made her choice. Would we be fair either to her or ourselves if we didn’t face and help her to face the consequences? We are not barbarians. We don’t propose to kill either Miss MacReady or her unborn child. What we do propose is to give her what she has elected, her baby and not the Ship. I say we should drop her on the nearest Colony planet. And good luck to her.”
Which was a nice way of pronouncing a probable death sentence. But then Mr. Tubman wasn’t wrong—she had asked for it.
Soon after, they held the vote. Seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three people voted to let her stay. Eighteen thousand, four hundred and one voted to expel her.
Alicia MacReady fainted, the reaction of an hysteric. Mr. Persson and some of her friends gathered around. The other people began to file out of the great room, the business of the evening behind them.
I got up and switched off the vid. “How would you have voted?” I asked.
“I don’t know that much about things like this,” Zena said looking up. She’d only been half paying attention. “They don’t give her anything, a horse or weapons or a heli-pac or anything, when they put her off on a Colony planet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, isn’t that pretty harsh?”
“It’s like Mr. Tubman said, we’ve got rules that have to be followed. If people don’t follow the rules they can’t stay here. They were doing her a favor by even letting the Assembly vote on the question.”
Zena looked sour and said, “What will your father do if he comes home and finds that you haven’t thrown out the dinner things?”
“Oh, heavens,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”
I’m likely to put off little bits of drudgery, even when they wouldn’t take long to settle. I had managed to put the dinner remains completely out of mind.
As I was collecting the dishes and throwing them in the incinerator, Zena, standing by, said, “Why are you so strong on rules?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re so set on the rules that you won’t allow any mistakes at all. And that MacReady woman is going to die now.”
I stopped stacking dishes. I looked at her. “I didn’t even vote. I had nothing to do with what was decided.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said, but she didn’t say what the point was.
Daddy came home about ten minutes later. I asked him if things had gone as he had expected them to, and he said yes.
“I cleared up the dishes,” I said.
Daddy said, “I never doubted you would for a minute.”
At our next meeting, I asked Mr. Mbele if he’d expected the decision to go the way it had.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Your father’s point of view is widely shared in the Ship. That is why he’s Chairman.”
Chapter 9
IT MAY SOUND LIKE AN ANACHRONISM to speak of seasons on a Ship, but we always did: that is, July, August, and September were “summer,” as an example. This never struck me as odd until I was fifteen or sixteen when I was going into the factors responsible for planetary weather, and one day I really thought about the meaning of the terms we used so casually. It was obvious that through time they had lost their weatherly connotations and now simply referred to quarters of the year—well, for that matter, the fact that we use the Old Earth Year at all is an anachronism, but we do it anyway.
At the time I was doing my puzzling about this, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. (Since he appears in this book several times, I won’t mention his name—he has enough burdens without being made to sound stupid here.) I said, “Do you realize that our calling November ‘fall’ means that most of the people on the Ship probably came originally from the Northern Temperate Zone on Earth?”
He said, “Well, if you wanted to know that, all you have to do is call for the original Ship Lists from the library.”