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 thirty thousand 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.
He took out a handkerchief and wiped my face, and he finally got me calmed down enough to find out what I was trying to tell him. It took a while, but finally I was finished and had stopped crying, and was only hiccupping occasionally.
“I’m truly sorry, Mia,” he said gravely. “I hadn’t really understood how things were. I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be better off in a dormitory with other children than living here alone with me.”
“No,” I said. “I want to live with you, Daddy.” He looked thoughtful for a long moment, and then he gave a little nod and said, “All right. I’ll call up the dorm and let them know so they won’t think you’re lost.”
Alfing Quad then became one of the two certain things in my life. You can’t count on a dorm or a dorm mother, but a quad and a father are sure. But now Daddy wanted us to leave one of my two sureties. And Geo Quad wasn’t even on the Fourth Level—it was on the Fifth.
The Ship is divided into five separate levels. First Level is mainly Technical—Engineers, Salvage, Drive, Conversion, and so on. Second is mainly Administration. Third has dirt and hills, real trees and grass, sand, animals, and weeds—it’s where they instruct us kids before they drop us on a planet to live or die. Fourth and Fifth are Residential, where we all live. Of these five, the Fifth is the last. All of us kids knew that if you lived way out on the Fifth Level you weren’t much better than a Mudeater. If you lived on the Fifth Level you were giving up one of your claims to being human.
I sat in my chair thinking for a long time, trying to recover myself. “You can’t be serious about moving to the Fifth Level?” I asked, hoping Daddy might be joking—not really hoping; more just trying to keep from facing the situation for a moment longer.
“Certainly I am,” he said, as though it were nothing. “I had to hunt for a long time before I found this apartment. I’ve already started getting us ready to move. You’ll like it there, I think. I understand there’s a boy your age in the school there who’s somewhat ahead