Rumors started to spread almost as soon as we had arrived home. To die on Trial was one thing - to have children assassinated by Mudeaters was another. Finally, they had killed an unprecedented number of our Trial Group. They had obtained a scoutship by some low method and had intended to use it against us. (I don’t like that idea even now.) They might be slavers. The Tinterans were Free Birthers beyond a doubt. Our experiences were shocking to the Ship, and Tintera seemed like a glimpse of the Pit. I came to this conclusion after the Ship’s Assembly that was held as a result of our experiences on Tintera. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of.
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