Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Then there was the hypothetical test—that maybe receiving the answer Dabeet was asking for would be as much of a test as any other. And which answer was the one he was looking for? He had wanted to know if his father was with the International Fleet, and now Dabeet knew that he was. Why would knowing that be a test?

  Or did Graff think that telling him his mother was not his mother was the answer he had been looking for? Absurd. It was probably a lie anyway. Children were often smarter than their parents. At least smart children were.

  Unless even smart children are too ignorant and naive to understand just how smart their mothers really are.

  That’s what the man wants. To set me thinking in circles and see if I can make rational decisions anyway.

  The third test might not have been a test at all. But the man phrased it as a challenge. That made it a test. “The secret is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.”

  Which knowledge did he mean? About Mother? About his putative father? About his rumored birth mother? About the fact that he was not considered qualified for Fleet School?

  That was such nonsense. A man like that does not come to the home of an unqualified applicant to reject him in person. He comes to an eminently qualified student in order to test him further by pretending to reject him.

  Now, there was some of the “knowledge” Dabeet had—that he wasn’t being taken up to Fleet School. But was it true? Was any of his “knowledge” true? And if it was not true, was it knowledge?

  The word “epistemology” flashed into his mind. He’s making me question which of my sources of information is reliable, and the answer is: None of them. Everyone has their own purposes in what they choose to say or not say, and then they have the purposes they don’t even know that they have, which means that I can’t actually “know” anything, if that’s supposed to mean possessing certainty about the truth-value of any portion of the information I “know.”

  Mother had been lying to him? Well, what child didn’t get lied to regularly? The question really is, Which things that she said were lies, and which were things that she believed to be true, which were actually false, and which were things she believed, which also happened to be true? A mother-centered epistemology wasn’t going to get him far. But at least she had his best interests at heart. Though of course she couldn’t possibly know what was best for him. Neither could the Minister of Colonization. Neither could Dabeet himself.

  Make use of whatever knowledge you have. All knowledge was tentative, untrustworthy. You had to act on what you believed, but constantly test it to see if it was not believable after all, and then adapt your plan.…

  Thus his mind spun around and around. Uselessly, because right now he had no power to act on any of the information he had. What was he going to do, stow away on a supply shuttle and turn up in Fleet School as a volunteer student? “Please, sir, may I audit your classes here?” “No, lad, as a pirate, you’re going to walk the plank!”

  At lunch, Dabeet ate alone, though he could have sat with any of several groups. He was not hated by the other students, and he liked many of them and regarded several as friends. Being very intelligent put off some of the other kids, but his penchant for covertly ridiculing the teachers or their lessons made him something of a hero to some students, and a source of entertainment to others. But he was not so close to anyone that, when he chose to be alone, anyone presumed to intrude on his lunchtime isolation.

  Dabeet was lost in thought—in daydreams, to tell the truth, about what Fleet School might be like, and how boring it probably was now that the war was over—when an adult hand gripped his shoulder, not so tightly as to cause pain, but firmly enough that Dabeet understood the pointlessness of resistance.

  Other children were looking at whoever had hold of him. If Dabeet had been more observant, he would have realized this and couldn’t have been taken by surprise. I’m not observant enough. That’s a test and I just failed it.

  “Could you come with me, Master Ochoa?”

  Ah. It was the principal himself. In the lunchroom. In order to bring Dabeet out in person. Dabeet could hear people whispering his name as the principal guided him past their tables. Dabeet was not sure he liked this kind of celebrity.

  In the corridor, where no one else could hear, Dabeet asked, “Can you tell me, sir, why I’m not being allowed to finish my lunch?”

  “You were just moving food around on your tray, Dabeet,” said the principal. “I have instructions to deliver you into the custody of your father.”

  My father. The idea ran through him with a thrill. And then, immediately, he disbelieved it. “My father doesn’t know I exist.”

  “He seems to think that he does,” said the principal. “Do you imagine we didn’t do the DNA exam required before delivering a child into the custody of a parent not already known to us by retinal scan? This man provided you with your Y chromosome.”

  They reached the school offices and Dabeet tried to hang back. After all these years, after spending many of them quite sure that his father was a myth entirely invented by Mother, Dabeet did not want to meet him now, not under these circumstances. Because, with the principal’s testimony, he might believe that it was true.

  They passed through the outer office, where none of the staff even looked up, and then past the principal’s private secretary and into the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, the place where students went to have authority work its magic on them.

  There was no one there.

  “But he was here only a few…”

  The principal didn’t finish his sentence, because he slumped to the floor.

  Dabeet barely had time to register this, and then he took one breath too many and he, too, felt himself slipping downward, the room spinning, and then … darkness.

  * * *

  Dabeet awoke on a large airplane, attached to a seat by an ordinary seat belt. This was the only restraint on him, and yet he felt like a prisoner. Of course, all passengers in an airplane in flight were prisoners, because they couldn’t leave the cage in which they were confined. And all children surrounded by adults were prisoners, because they were not free to make even the slightest decisions for themselves.

  Dabeet tested this idea by unfastening his seat belt.

  Immediately, a uniformed man stood in front of him. “Please fasten your seat belt, Dabeet,” he said.

  Dabeet realized—as he should have realized immediately, he knew—that this was not a normal commercial airliner. He had seen movies. He knew that he should have been in a row of five or six or seven or nine seats, all facing forward. But his seat had its back against the wall of the fuselage, and there was a wide space between him and the seat on the opposite wall, facing his. It was unoccupied.

  “I need to micturate,” said Dabeet.

  The uniformed man didn’t bat an eye at the deliberately rare word; nor did he look contemptuous at Dabeet’s attempt at intellectual bullying. “No, you do not,” said the man. “The gas that was used to render you unconscious also causes your body to retain water, and hardly anything has been taken up by your kidneys in the hours since you were taken.”

  The man was actually being rather candid, which was a good thing. How far would it extend? “While I’m sitting here wishing I could take a piss and forbidden to do so,” said Dabeet, “can you give me some information about who kidnapped me, where I’m being taken, what the purpose of this expedition is, what happened to the principal of my school, and whether my father really was the person who came to my school to get me?”

  “Quite a list,” said the uniformed man.

  “And yet you can see that these are all reasonable things for me to ask about,” said Dabeet.

  “Reasonable, and yet premature,” said the man.

  “You’re a colonel,” said Dabeet, “and your uniform is gaudy enough that I assume you’re from a Latin American country. Your accent suggests that you are not Brazilian, so I assume you
speak Spanish. You look European, so I also assume you’re from an Andean country where Amerindians like me are an oppressed, low-status minority that has little chance of advancing to high rank. The chance of Chile or Ecuador mounting a kidnapping in the United States is nil, and the Bolivian economy couldn’t supply a plane this luxurious to be used on a clandestine mission. This smacks of the perks of high-ranking officials.”

  “It used to be a presidential plane,” said the officer, “but it’s been repurposed.”

  “So the president now has a better plane. That suggests a prosperous economy, and yet a nation eager to thumb its nose at the United States. Venezuela or Peru.”

  “All Latin American nations are happy to thumb their noses at the norteamericanos,” said the officer. “I’m a general but you couldn’t have known that because this is not the uniform of my own country and it does not display my true rank. Nor is this airplane the one-time property of the top political leader of my country.”

  “I think I’m going to wet my pants now.”

  “Whatever pleases you,” said the general. “You will still have to sit in it until we land, and you will not be allowed to change clothing until bedtime tonight. You’re free to decide how childish you want to appear and how smelly you wish to be when you arrive at your new home.”

  “I liked my old home, and wherever you’re taking me, I will never regard it as my home.”

  “It’s the nation of your birth,” said the general. “The United States was not. And whether this fits the overly sentimental American meaning of the word ‘home,’ it will definitely be tu casa. Your dwelling place for the foreseeable future.”

  “Does my mother know what’s happened to me?”

  “She knows that you left school with your father,” said the general.

  “Did I?”

  “I’m not that person, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Nobody involved with this operation is my father,” said Dabeet, “because he’s with the International Fleet, and the IF does not carry out any kind of operation on the surface of Earth.”

  “At least not while wearing the uniform of the IF,” said the general. “Really, Dabeet, you keep leaping to conclusions and relying on public information which might be, for all you know, disinformation. Be as bright as your reputation says you are. Try to think at least a few words ahead of your mouth.”

  Dabeet said nothing more.

  The general reached down and rebuckled Dabeet’s seat belt.

  Dabeet unbuckled it.

  The general bent over as if to whisper in Dabeet’s ear, but instead jabbed Dabeet sharply in the upper stomach, just below the ribs. Dabeet doubled over, unable to breathe.

  “Are we in agreement now? About your continuing to wear a fully fastened seat belt?” asked the general softly.

  Dabeet, unable to catch enough breath to answer, nodded.

  “Smart enough to learn from experience,” said the general. “But not smart enough to recognize the power structure in a new environment without direct and painful experience. You’re already such a disappointment.” The general walked away.

  There were other people seated or walking back and forth in this cabin of the airplane, but nobody spoke to him or looked at him. Dabeet’s mouth was very dry. His skin felt dry. They couldn’t want him to dehydrate. But he didn’t feel inclined to ask for anything at the moment.

  He tried to do as the general had suggested, and think through his situation and extrapolate more information from the crumbs the general had let fall. But the gas they had given him left him groggy and he had a headache. He wasn’t thinking at his best.

  Or maybe everything had been faked from the start. Maybe he had been told he was smart, and had been given wildly inflated scores on all his tests. Maybe the easy tests he took were not the same ones Ender Wiggin had been given. Maybe the Charles G. Conn School for the Gifted was nothing of the kind, and the visit of the Minister of Colonization had not been because Dabeet was anything special, but because the Minister wished to provoke exactly this kidnapping. Because Dabeet really was a rather stupid boy, with a reputation for genius, if Dabeet happened to be killed or left in the custody of some monstrous foreign power, it would be no loss to anyone except, perhaps, Mother.

  But this was obviously not true. The tests had been genuine. The questions had been hard. Dabeet had answered them all correctly. The other children at Conn Gifted were, in fact, quite clever in their way. Dabeet was a genuine target for genuine kidnappers.

  And now he realized what was going on. Graff had set him up. The news media had carried several recent stories of Battle School alumni and students who were either kidnapped or assassinated upon their return to Earth. Some said this was why Ender Wiggin himself remained in space, because he was too much at risk. Newly released from the constraints of the Formic Wars, nations were maneuvering for advantage and preparing for wars; Battle School–trained children might be the secret weapons that could be used to save one nation—or destroy another.

  The country that has taken me doesn’t think it has enough clever Battle Schoolers, and so they want me. Or they want to deprive some other country of my services.

  But I have no training in war. I didn’t think I’d need any. Yes, I’ve read about Ender Wiggin and I’ve read about other generals, but not with any serious intent. Fleet School has different purposes now. So whoever has taken me, they’re going to be disappointed with my performance.

  Disappointing them won’t lead to any good outcome for me.

  So I’ll pretend to know whatever they need, and then I’ll learn it in order to perform superbly. If I decide I want to help them. If not, I’ll figure out how to seem to be helping while actually sabotaging them.

  At about that point in his thinking the grogginess and inaction overcame him, and he slept again.

  * * *

  When he awoke he was sitting in a different chair. Still strapped in, but now he looked over the top of a rather large desk to see a man in a civilian suit, sipping at a tiny coffee cup while another voice droned on in a language that only sometimes sounded like Spanish. Dabeet looked for the source of the other voice, and finally concluded, from the periodic breaks and cracks in the voice, that he was listening to a speakerphone that carried a signal via satellite.

  Dabeet understood colloquial Spanglish, the language of the immigrant community in Indiana, and he had learned some formal Spanish. But this sounded as if a Frenchman had inserted his DNA into the conversation.

  Nasals. Otherwise Spanish-like. Português. Brazilian, then? Why in the world would Brazil, one of the major powers, need a definitely not-Brazilian boy untrained in war?

  No, the other people on the plane had spoken Spanish flawlessly and smoothly. It was quite possible that for some reason Brazil had funded a poorer Latin-American country in this kidnapping. Perhaps Brazil wanted to help one of its dependent countries prevail in some minor local squabble without getting directly involved itself.

  Finally the man behind the desk spoke—and in Spanish, but slowly, as if to allow the man on the other end of the conversation to understand him more easily. Dabeet learned little from the conversation: “The visitor is awake and listening. I will find out what I can.”

  So Dabeet would be interrogated. About what, he did not know, since he possessed no state secrets, and, between his mother’s lies and Graff’s, he did not know if he knew the things he did know.

  “Your visitor,” began the man behind the desk.

  Dabeet knew at once that the man wished to ask about Graff. So Dabeet would pretend not to understand him. “No, sir,” said Dabeet—in English. “I am not your visitor, nor am I your guest. I am your captive, and I’m a child as well.”

  “The boy pretends to be an idiot,” said the man, in Spanish.

  After a second: “No,” said the Brazilian on the speakerphone, this time in English. “He pretends to believe you are an idiot.”

  “You are all idiots,” said Dabeet i
n low Spanish, guessing that the Brazilian would not understand him, especially because he added a few colorful fighting words to the statement.

  As Dabeet had hoped, the man behind the desk was forced to interpret his words, though he paraphrased considerably. All the while, he placidly looked Dabeet in the eye, like a cow chewing its cud.

  After a couple of seconds of satellite lag, the voice over the telephone, again in English, said, “We are curious to know why a genius is so stupid as to insult those who hold his life in their power.”

  “You are playing into the hands of the Minister of Colonization,” said Dabeet. “You noticed me because he came and spoke to me. But what did he say? That there was no more Battle School. Now they train the children of the Fleet to explore and colonize, and I am badly suited to such a mission. So even though I am a child of the Fleet, I will not be taken off Earth to study. This is the prize you have captured.”

  “He’s convinced me,” said the man at the desk. “He’s worthless to us.”

  “I’m a child of the Fleet,” said Dabeet. “Do you imagine that the Ministry of Colonization has not been watching everything you do? I’m quite sure this airplane is being watched from space. I’m sure the IF knows who is aboard this plane, where it took off, and where you think it will land. Even if they have no use for me, do you think that the IF will overlook any harm you might do to a child of the Fleet?”

  “The IF has no authority on the surface of the Earth or the Moon,” said the man at the desk.

  “Authority is one thing,” said Dabeet. “The ability to kill you at will, from space, is something else.” At that moment, another thought occurred to him. “You wanted me because you represent a nation so feeble that no Battle School students or graduates returned to you when the school was disbanded. You must have enemies that you fear, and you hoped that a Battle School commander would make a difference in the war that you know is coming.”