AT THE END OF DECEMBER, just in time for Year End, the kids on Trial on New Dalmatia were brought home. Of the forty-two kids who were dropped, seven didn’t signal for Pickup and didn’t come home. One of the seven was Jack Brophy, whom I’d known slightly in Alfing Quad. I thought about that, and I couldn’t help wondering whether I would come back to the Ship in a year. I didn’t dwell on the thought, though. Year End is the sort of holiday that takes your mind off the unpleasant, and besides, I discovered something else that occupied my thoughts and gave me something of a new perspective on my mother.
Year End is a five or six day bash—five days in 2198, which wasn’t a Leap Year. In one of the old novels I read, I discovered that before the calendar was reformed, the extra day of Leap Year was tacked onto February. (This was as part of a mnemonic that was supposed to help you remember how many days there were in each month. My adaptation of it for our calendar would go: “Thirty days hath January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December.” I have a pack rat memory—I even know what a “pack rat” was.) Under our system, the extra day gets tacked onto Year End.
I was in charge of fixing up our apartment for Year End. Jimmy and I made a trip down to the Ship’s Store on Second Level and picked out a piñata in the shape of a giant chicken and painted it in red, green, and yellow. Jimmy’s dorm had a piñata, of course, but the impersonality of the dorm took a lot of fun out of Year End and I had arranged with Daddy for Jimmy to share ours. Between the two of us, Jimmy and I fixed the apartment very nicely and planned the parties we were having on Day Two (for our group of six and some of our other friends) and the big party on New Year’s Eve, more or less an open house for anybody who cared to walk in. Since that ticked off an obligation for Daddy, who has no patience for things like party arranging, he was just as glad to have us do it.
In Alfing Quad I had had my friends, but I had almost never brought them home. These days, having people around the place, particularly Jimmy, who lived in Geo Quad, was a regular thing. Daddy has his own patterns of living—in some ways he lives in a private world—and you would have thought that he would object to having strange kids permanently underfoot. I’m sure his life was disturbed but he never objected. In fact, he even went out of his way to make it clear that he approved of Jimmy.
“He’s a good boy,” Daddy said. “I’m glad you’re seeing a lot of him.”
Of course, this wasn’t too surprising since I had a distinct impression that Jimmy was one of the reasons that we were living in Geo Quad. It certainly wasn’t an accident that we had been assigned Mr. Mbele as a tutor at the same time. I even had an impression (partly confirmed) that a talk with the Ship’s Eugenist would have shown that Jimmy’s and my meeting was even less of an accident, but this didn’t bother me particularly because there were moments when I distinctly liked Jimmy and moments when just looking at him made me feel all funny inside.
The partial confirmation as well as another discovery came when I was prowling through the Ship’s Records. Every Common Room has a library and there is a certain satisfaction in using them because there is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow looks right. But simple space limitations make a physical collection of all the books that the Ship holds out of the question. So standard practice is to look over titles and contents by vid and then to order a facsimile, a physical copy, if you really want or need one. There are, of course, certain things that most people don’t ordinarily look at without some special reason, like Ship’s Records, and while I had no special