Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  “I did.”

  “It never occurred to you that we might want to call you?”

  “It occurred to me,” said Dabeet. “Did it occur to you that I didn’t want to be called?”

  “It became clear within a few days. That’s when we started our nocturnal visits. You kept it completely off, but also completely charged.”

  “I might have had a use for it,” said Dabeet.

  “You really didn’t try to use it, not even once, or you’d know that no matter what number you dial, your calls are directed to a single phone number.”

  “Yours?” asked Dabeet.

  “Whoever’s on duty at the time. Even sneaky people need to sleep.”

  “What’s the real purpose of the phone?” asked Dabeet.

  “It contains information.”

  “You know they’ll inspect my phone at Fleet School, if they even let me keep it.”

  “The information is hidden.”

  Dabeet thought about this for a moment. “You can’t hide information on any computer. Anything that smacks of concealment, and they’ll be suspicious. If not alarmed.”

  “It’s hidden in plain sight.”

  “As what, a game?”

  “Games are hard to use as a disguise for data. To be believable, the game has to be good enough that they would believe someone of your intelligence would play it.”

  “So … in a graphics file.”

  “In a painting, very expressionistic. It’s one of your favorites.”

  “I don’t have a favorite painting. I don’t have any paintings.”

  “You have three paintings, all of which you treasure. In these roughed-in parts of each painting, there are several that seem smeary or pixelated. These actually contain code. If you run the exercise-charting program, using the painting as data input, it will show you a three-dimensional map of Fleet School, at least as it was during its Battle School days about eight years ago.”

  “What’s to stop the school authorities from doing that?”

  “It shows you an error message, and you have ten seconds, without any visible feedback or instructions, to type in the password.”

  “And what is the password?”

  “Whatever you type, the first time you run it. I suggest you do that here on Earth, as soon as possible. Run the exercise program on all three paintings, and you’ll have as much information as we have that might help you. And the address to which you should send instructions about what portal you’ll open for our little invasion force. We’ll watch for it to open, close, reopen, and close again. Then we’ll tell you the date and time you need to open it for our force.”

  “No,” said Dabeet. “I’ll tell you. You won’t know what times I’ll be free, what times the spot I chose will be accessible. I’ll let you know when the window will open and stay open.”

  “I don’t believe this will work,” said the general. “But other people think that poking the bear is a dandy idea, because after all, what harm can an angry bear do?”

  “I’m a kid,” said Dabeet. “What could go wrong, following the plans of some immigrant kid?”

  “My point exactly, but who listens? Each time you pull up one of the pictures to access the information, when you quit your session, all traces of the decoded data will be erased. Just so you know that your phone will always be secure.”

  “Secure as long as their searches are perfunctory. If they ever think they have something to worry about and become thorough, nothing will be secure,” said Dabeet.

  “It’s good that you know that,” said the general. “Emails can be sent to and from Fleet School. Watch for us. Check your filtering software—our messages will always go straight into your spam folder. They’ll never come from the same address twice, so never answer. Only write to the address concealed in one of the picture files.”

  “Which they’ll detect, if they want to.”

  “It never leads to the same place twice. And if you receive no message from us for more than thirty days, send a message to your mother complaining of the weather in Fleet School. We’ll know that means we must write to you through her as well.”

  “So you’ll be reading my mother’s mail?”

  “We will,” said the general. “Are you going to complain that her constitutional rights are being violated?”

  Dabeet said nothing. If they thought he would be more loyal to them because they would be in such close control of his mother, they were mistaken. He owed them nothing. Nor did he owe their stupid plan even token compliance.

  The general could not be reading his thoughts. Yet he said, “This is your plan, so don’t be skittish. There are risks, and you volunteered to take them.”

  “My plan is to try to involve the IF in Earthside wars, to put a stop to them. If there’s nothing to put a stop to—”

  “The first fighting has already begun on many battlefields. And Russia has made a play at kidnapping many of the top Battle School students. Whether that benefits them is unknowable, but it certainly harms those nations from which the Battle Schoolers were taken.”

  So the plan was regarded as necessary to preserve the independence of small countries. “Just make sure that when you come, you don’t hurt anybody,” said Dabeet. “Not one serious injury. Not one death.”

  “That’s our goal.”

  “You don’t think it will happen that way,” said Dabeet.

  “Live bullets will fly,” said the general. “No plan survives in the face of the enemy.”

  Unspoken, of course, was this: The moment Dabeet secretly let the invaders into Fleet School, he would have no more control over their actions than would any other child. It did not matter if the Trojan horse had second thoughts once the concealed Danaean soldiers had left its belly.

  “I consider myself warned,” said Dabeet. “Take me home, please. School’s over for the day by now.”

  5

  —You are going to a great deal of trouble for one boy, whose worth is unproven and whose loyalty is nil.

  —We have a responsibility to all the children left over from our wartime programs.

  —His native intelligence was gift enough. You know that he’ll thrive without any intervention from us.

  —Even if that were true, which is by no means secure, he has legal rights. He is a child of the Fleet. He does want to study at Fleet School. How, then, do we have the right to refuse him?

  —Do you think I’m naive enough to think you would lose sleep over depriving someone of their “right” if granting it would atrapalliate some program you value?

  —Why should some nation on Earth have the use of him, when he may prove valuable as an explorer or expedition commander or colony governor?

  —Since we don’t know how your experiment with Ender Wiggin as a colony governor is going to turn out, I hope you’re not thinking of trying this with other children.

  —I’m in no hurry. We can wait to see who he becomes in training. I am quite sure that within a few more years, we’ll have a good idea of what this boy will or won’t be worth to us.

  —And if he’s dangerous?

  —A combat position is possible. Then his dangerousness will be directed against the enemy.

  —We’re not at war. The Formics are destroyed.

  —It’s difficult to imagine that there’ll be no combat in his lifetime.

  —You’re not going to train him for war, anyway.

  —If he needs to learn war, he’ll learn it.

  —Why did you continue this bizarre program, once we had Ender and Bean?

  —We had no way of knowing how long the war would last, or how thoroughly Ender and his jeesh might lead us to victory. Many scenarios were possible in which the war lasted long enough for Dabeet to be part of the next generation of child warlords.

  —It’s always such a bother, disposing of war surplus goods.

  —I’m taking that as a joke, my friend. Because Dabeet is definitely a person not a “good.” A person, I might add, wh
ose good side it may someday be very important for you to be on.

  —With any luck, I’ll be dead by then.

  —It’s all about how you die, my friend.

  —If he’s that dangerous, then kill him now.

  —The bear and the bee are only dangerous if you provoke them.

  —Warning taken.

  They finally gave him a date for his departure in the lunar shuttle, and from lunar orbit, he’d board an outbound supply craft that would be making a stop at Fleet School. During the Formic Wars, there had been direct shuttles to Battle School, each one full of new students. But now that the school was no longer recruiting on Earth, it was cheaper to funnel all Earth–to–Fleet School transport through ordinary IF channels. Civilian clothes, in a civilian shuttle to lunar orbit, and only then boarding an IF supply ship to finish the trip.

  Dabeet read as much as he could about spaceflight, especially near-Earth shuttles. The only thing that frightened him about it was weightlessness. So many people got very sick the first few times they went through it. Some never lost that uncontrolled nausea. Wouldn’t it be ironic if they had to send him back because he couldn’t function in zero-gee?

  Life in Fleet School was mostly in a near-Earth-gravity environment, but the battleroom—which still, according to what he could learn, played a large role in the curriculum—was in null-gee, and if Dabeet couldn’t stop puking, his future with the IF would be in considerable doubt.

  None of the other students will have problems like that, because they grew up in space, or at least they’ve been off Earth long enough to get over the nausea.

  And that led him to realize: They’ll all think of themselves as True Children of the Fleet, and I’ll be a child of Earth, a complete outsider. If I’m puking in the battleroom, what choice will they have but to shun me? One dose of vomiting, and I’ll have lost my value to Fleet School. If they send me home right away, then Mother and I really will have to go into hiding, because I won’t be there to open the door for a tiny invading army. Which won’t happen because they ban all private electronics so I won’t have their stupid phone.

  Dabeet got his mother to take him to a doctor to inquire about medicine for space sickness. The doctor merely looked at him as if he were insane. “Are you planning a space voyage soon?”

  “Not a ‘voyage,’ but yes, a trip. To L-5.”

  “There’s nothing there but the old Battle School, and they don’t allow tourists,” said the doctor.

  “If there’s a preventive for motion sickness, I’d appreciate a good dose. I don’t suppose there’s anything like an inoculation.”

  “Motion sickness isn’t caused by an infectious agent, Dabeet.”

  “Perhaps something with laser or ultrasound involving the semicircular canals in the ears?”

  “You don’t want to mess with those delicate organs.”

  “I don’t want to puke my guts out, either, especially when I’m in the null-gee battleroom.”

  The doctor, who hadn’t made any kind of study of Battle School, had no idea what Dabeet was talking about. “If there’s some kind of problem that arises in space, I’m sure the IF doctors already have appropriate treatments for it.”

  Including the option of sending pukers home.

  “But here’s my advice. Relax about it. Don’t fill your body with stress. Trust that you probably won’t get sick—most people don’t, or it passes within a couple of minutes. And if you do, they’ll have a way to treat it.”

  “Very comforting,” said Dabeet.

  Yet all his worry was in vain, because when the shuttle took off and, more importantly, when he was in the cargo ship flying from Luna to Fleet School, he felt not even the slightest twinge of nausea.

  Shouldn’t I have felt something? he asked himself. But when he asked one of the cargo ship’s crew if it was natural to feel nothing out of the ordinary, the man laughed. “It’s natural to turn green and live on soda crackers or dry toast for a week, that’s what’s natural.”

  “That didn’t happen to me at all, and this is my first voyage.”

  “You must be heroically lucky. Like all the idiots in the stories, who get the help of some fairy because they pulled a thorn out of the fairy’s ass, or something like that.”

  Dabeet assured him that there was no fairy—or fata, or djinn, or leprechaun.

  The man smiled at that. “Well, nausea or not, work at getting your space legs. It takes several years to stop lurching around like a drunk. Though children may learn faster. Good luck.”

  In the shuttle from Earth to the Moon, there had been a strict requirement that everybody stay belted in. In the cargo ship, there was room for him to move around and practice flying. He wouldn’t arrive in Fleet School without being competent enough at zero-gee to avoid the scorn of the other kids.

  It was only as the cargo ship approached its docking station alongside Fleet School that it occurred to Dabeet that there was no reason for him to have a natural immunity to space sickness. It was one of the crewmen on the vessel, who kept asking him if he was in any kind of distress. “Are you sure this is your first space voyage?”

  “I think I would have noticed,” said Dabeet.

  The man laughed. “I guess so. But everybody feels nauseated the first time they go into freefall. The human body just isn’t designed to feel OK like that. The kids raised out in the belts, in the Miner families—they get over it when they’re infants. They learn to float and grab before they can walk. But you’ve lived your whole life on Earth.”

  “As long as I can remember,” said Dabeet. “I have a very good memory.”

  “You remember being a baby?” asked the man.

  Dabeet smiled, and the man clapped him on the shoulder and floated away. But the question bothered him. What was his earliest memory? Was it possible that he had once lived in space? Perhaps Mother didn’t even know about it. But if he had been in space as an infant, would he still be acclimated to freefall?

  If Graff was telling the truth—a huge if—then there wasn’t time for him to have lived in space. So was there another reason he might be immune to the nausea of freefall?

  Being Amerindian might be part of it. Didn’t they use some norteamericano tribe to build skyscrapers? Navahos? Or was that just the code-talking in World War II? No, it was Iroquois, mostly Mohawk, who worked on skyscrapers, because those were the Native Americans who lived near Manhattan during the early days of skyscraper-building. And it wasn’t that they weren’t afraid of falling, it’s that they learned from an early age not to show fear.

  Besides, this wasn’t about fear of falling. This was about being in freefall, which is something which, on Earth, you don’t live through, because it means you already fell from a high place. You fall from a skyscraper frame, you don’t have time on the way down to the ground to even notice whether, in addition to terror, you’re also feeling sick to your stomach.

  Dabeet had never heard of Amerindians having some kind of immunity to motion sickness or freefall nausea—and he would remember, if he had ever read it. He also had never heard that everyone was susceptible to it. In fact, he knew that in the old days of ocean-going ships, some people never got over seasickness completely, even on the largest, most stable ships, while others quickly adapted.

  But that was the point. They adapted. They felt the nausea, and then they got over it. Did anybody not feel the nausea?

  Me. I don’t feel it. Yet my balancing organs function properly—I don’t fall over or bump into things. So I’m sensing all the balance issues that other people feel. I’m simply not bothered by them.

  Why am I fretting about this so much? Why is this capturing my thought?

  Because there’s something important about this. Some question that is answered by my immunity to freefall nausea.

  Dabeet closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift. His immediate thought was that closing his eyes should have made the discomfort of freefall worse—it was well known that the best self-treatment for
seasickness was to focus on the distant horizon, not the pitching deck or the nearby waves. And dancers were able to remain vertical through long spins by focusing on a single point and finding it again the moment they could whip their heads around on the next spin. Yet closing his eyes had no effect on him.

  He allowed a piece of music to enter his mind. He had long ago learned to enter a meditative state by rejecting his own conscious control of his thoughts. He had noticed that when he became aware of music playing in the back of his mind, it was a fully-scored orchestra or mariachi band or pop ensemble, all the instruments playing with all the rhythms and harmonies. But as soon as he tried to take conscious control of the music, or even follow it closely, thinking about it, all that fullness faded and what was left was the single melody line of his attention.

  So he had trained himself to let his mind go, without consciously controlling his thoughts, and resist the temptation to examine those thoughts closely. He needed to let the music come up from his unconscious and continue to move forward in its fullness, its intricate interconnectedness, and be aware of it without paying attention to it.

  As the cargo vessel docked with Fleet School, that was the meditative trance that Dabeet put himself into. And what emerged from it was this:

  The IF did not know that Ender Wiggin and his jeesh would be so spectacularly successful in their invasion of the Formic worlds. Every enemy fleet destroyed, then the home world itself blown to bits and every hive queen with it. For all the IF high command knew, at least one Formic world might have survived, and therefore a new invasion of Earth was likely. Also, it was possible that a Formic fleet had embarked forty years before and would enter the solar system ten years after the human invasion of the Formic worlds was over.

  This still might happen. There might yet be a Fourth Formic War.

  So why, then, did they dismantle Battle School and replace it with a school whose purpose was colonization and exploration?

  It was a good strategy, in the long term, because the human race could never again afford to be caught clinging to only one planet, whose destruction would mean the end of our species. Graff was probably quite sincere in that policy, that in the long run the protection of the human race depended on dispersal rather than fortification.