Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow by Alexei Panshin

Author:Alexei Panshin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2014-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

8

Arpad

I DON’T expect to live past sixty. Not on my life-style. Somebody will see me killed, I’ll attract lightning, or I’ll shock and thrill the world by dropping dead some Sunday. In the meantime, my style has advantages.

Sixty is early middle age by Ship standards and careful Shippies pace their lives accordingly. I don’t. I play go for broke. I shatter the common clown by enjoying everything he’s afraid would kill him by sixty, and I blind him with my speed. I act while he thinks about acting. I invent problems on the moment and dazzle my way out of them, and he merely invents problems.

I relish the thought of dying at sixty. I want to find out what I’m able to do with plastics, do it, do it big, and get out. I don’t want to hang on. Shakespeare and Napoleon, who did their own separate work in plastics, both died on the eve of fifty-three as bare young men. But they had tested their limits. I don’t yet aspire to die at fifty-three, let alone at thirty-three. Right now I’ll settle for sixty years to find my limits.

I haven’t found them yet. Understand that.

I was brought up a Shippie against my will and only gradually grew to enjoy it. My father was a disinherited Shippie, Expelled, or the closest thing to it, for marrying down. He lived at the tepid tempo of a Shippie to the day of his death.

I was born on the planet of New Albion. On the basis of my father’s stories of my fine heritage and the strength of my imagination I fancied myself a cut above my friends, but I had the same dirt between my toes.

My father died at the premature age of eighty-four. Some of his cronies in the old Universal Heirs of Man gang took their remorse out on me. I was rescued, saved from myself, saved from my mother—and what an operation that was—and restored to Mother Bertha, their Ship, to be made a first-class heir of Earth and Man, as was my due. They held their noses, told me of my luck, and abandoned me to a dormitory to make the most of my new opportunities.

Twice I was prevented from escaping. The third time I changed my mind and returned.

I decided I would show them that I could beat them on their own terms. At the age of fourteen in the Ships they turn you out on a colony planet—some hellhole like New Albion—to survive on your own resources. If you do survive, you are an adult citizen.

Well, that’s my own home jungle. I figured that if I could cope with New Albion—and I was doing all right there—and survive Ship civilization, I could pass Trial snickering. After that I could walk away—either pick myself a colony planet to my taste or act badly enough, after my fashion, to get ejected like my father before me.

By the time I did pass Trial, and I sailed, I had changed my mind.

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