Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

The only story that leads to our certain survival as a species is number three, and that depends on so much wishful thinking about Formic psychology, of which we know nothing, that I would rather believe in Santa Claus, since there is so much more evidence of his existence.

  If I, as a child in school, can see these obvious points, then the finest minds of the International Fleet cannot have missed them. I affirm that the effort to colonize hitherto unknown worlds is the only plan with any chance of bringing about the survival of the human species. Therefore our Ministry of Colonization is the most important portion of the International Fleet, and the faster they can find habitable worlds and get colonies established, the better our chance of riding out the attempted obliteration of humanity by an enemy that has every reason to hate us forever.

  This is the only important problem faced by the IF after the “end” of the Formic Wars, precisely because we have no reason to imagine that those wars have ended.

  Dabeet, your third essay on the diagnostic test was nonresponsive and shows a combative and rebellious attitude. It is inappropriate and imprudent to speak with such authority on matters you know so little about. If you bandy about such ideas and attitudes with other students, your continuation here at Fleet School will be in doubt.

  Dabeet learned the theory and rules of the battleroom almost instantly. Hadn’t everyone seen the movies about Ender and his jeesh, movies in which kids in flash suits skittered across the interior of the hundred-meter cube, carrying out intricate maneuvers and zapping each other, freezing parts of each other’s suits or immobilizing them completely in death? Dabeet had found them interesting as he evaluated the physics of the computer simulations to see if they were accurate in depicting real null-gravity movement. Usually there were flaws; usually nobody at school or at home cared about Dabeet’s explanations of why they would be impossible.

  So Dabeet needed no introduction to the real flash suit, except to be shown how the pieces linked together as he put it on. Nor was he surprised at the way the handles on the wall popped out as his hand drew near to catch one, while remaining recessed if he approached in a different orientation, so that a protruding handle wouldn’t injure him as he struck it, or interfere with the billiard-ball perfection of his rebound.

  Dabeet thought: Bacana, smart walls. Nothing that happens in real war is analogous to this. The battlefield doesn’t reach out to enfold soldiers in a cozy embrace. Not unless they’re dead.

  Only after a few practice sessions did Dabeet turn his analysis inward: I’m bad at this, and I’m not getting better fast enough to contribute to my team in actual games. Everybody’s patient with me, but that’s because the emphasis in Fleet School now is on cooperation as well as competition. Niceness counts. What do they really think of me? Not hard to guess. I’m a burden when I’m in play, and at my rate of improvement I always will be. I’ll never catch up with any of the other kids.

  And I don’t care. I’m not even interested in becoming that good at this putative game. I don’t want to spend the time it would take to overcome my natural clumsiness.

  So maybe it’s a good thing the game isn’t as important in the life of Fleet School as it was in Battle School. Our worth as individuals isn’t completely defined by our win-loss record on the leaderboards.

  Yet I still have to spend hours a day in the battleroom for practice sessions, where I take up someone else’s time trying to change this donkey into a steed. I need to find something else to do that doesn’t waste other people’s time.

  It was in pursuit of that goal that Dabeet did something to annoy somebody, and now that he was standing in front of Urska Kaluza’s desk, he assumed he was going to find out what.

  “So if you can’t immediately win at something, you won’t continue?” she asked.

  “I’ll continue if you tell me that I must, sir,” said Dabeet. “I didn’t quit going, I simply asked if I could employ my time elsewhere, freeing up the time of whoever would have had to babysit me during practices. I really have tried to improve, Commandant Kaluza, and I am improving, but not fast enough.”

  “So you’ll spend your time surpassing everyone in academic subjects,” said Kaluza.

  “If you don’t think that’s a better use of my time, sir, I’m happy to be guided by you in another direction.”

  “In Fleet School, we do teamwork. We do cooperation. We don’t do solo grandstanding. So no, you may not be excused from practice time in the battleroom. You’ll wear your flash suit and you’ll be there ready to take part in whatever way your leaders require, or sit and do nothing if that’s what they require. But if you do nothing, we’ll be asking sharp questions of the other students.”

  “Thank you for the clarification, sir,” said Dabeet.

  “That wasn’t a clarification,” said Kaluza. “That was a denial of your request and a set of strictures and warnings. Don’t use weaselly words with me. We both know what’s going on. You’re a competitor in a cooperative place. You aren’t willing to occupy the lowest rung on a ladder; if you can’t climb as fast as the others, then you want to change ladders. Ain’t happening … lad.”

  He was quite sure that what she wanted to call him was not “lad,” but in the IF even the watchers were watched, and she couldn’t be caught calling a boy “mudfoot” or one of the other charming words for someone who had never been off Earth before.

  He saluted and left. She had judged him wrongly—he was actually trying to be cooperative and help accomplish the larger purposes of Fleet School, but it was not surprising that she couldn’t grasp the distinction. If a low motive could be attributed to him, then she would hear no argument. That’s fine, ma’am, he thought. I’ll work within whatever fence you build around me. And I’ll find a way to build up my army in the process, until even you have to admit that I am not flying solo. I’m helping support and even form a community.

  If, that is, I can’t think of something to do in the battleroom that isn’t just more of the same clumsy thumping around like the clodhopper I am.

  Besides the battleroom practices, Dabeet threw himself into strength and dexterity training in the gym. Though there was definitely gravity in the gym and the martial arts training room, Dabeet was pretty sure it wasn’t Earth-normal, or he wouldn’t have been so strong. Here’s the place where his recent departure from Earth would have given him an advantage—so of course the gravity was fudged to help out the breakable spaceborn children.

  Not that those breakable children could help it. Long months and years away from gravity weakened the body, whether you came from Earth or were born in a ship or station with centrifuges or gravity manipulation. Most families tried to maintain a level of familiarity with gravity that would allow them to live on Luna with little or no transition—and to visit Earth without immediately dying. Dabeet could not begrudge them a little compensation for their fragility.

  Everything evens out in the end—who said that? Mother? Some neighbor of hers? A teacher? Yes, it was a teacher, but he was being ironic, joking with a rather ugly girl that someday the very pretty girl who was the object of her envy at the moment would someday be in front of an audience or promotions board, and a huge bubble of snot would form, pushing out and sucking in with her breathing. “Everything evens out in the end.”

  “She’ll still be a pretty girl with a snot-bubble,” said the plain girl. “And she’ll have the kind of cleavage that makes people not notice snot-bubbles.”

  “There’s no cleavage that magical,” said the teacher, and his laugh ended the conversation.

  His point had obviously been that things do not even out in the end. Lucky people might bemoan this or that small thing that went wrong in their lives. But to others less lucky, they would seem to have sailed through life without trouble.

  Like me, thought Dabeet. Nothing has gone wrong for me. Sure, my father’s missing, but look at my genetic heritage. My devoted mother. Good teachers, good books. My brains. Important enough to be kidnapped. Clever or useful enough to
be let go. Taken up into Fleet School, where I’m mastering the coursework faster than anybody. My few setbacks are trivial, in areas that don’t matter to me anyway.

  So it was that Dabeet found himself clinging forlornly to one of the three-dimensionally floating objects in the battleroom that all the kids called “stars.” They seemed to be made of the same material as the walls—their handholds extruded or receded as children approached each square.

  Dabeet was holding tightly to one of the handholds, because his unconscious mind had noticed that the nearest wall or floor was as far away as if he were on a four-story building. He knew the vertigo would pass soon, and then he could let go and fly back to the wall.

  As he thought these thoughts, a change in position caused him to give the handhold a hard twist, and something extraordinary happened. The whole face of that square extruded in the form of a pyramid, with the handhold perched on its top. The base of the pyramid was still aligned with the adjacent wall plates.

  No one had mentioned that the surface plates could do such things. Dabeet twisted the handhold sharply back in the opposite direction. The pyramid was sucked back into the panel until it was completely flat.

  Another twist, and this time the whole square panel moved forward, forming a cube. More torque, and the cube became a square pillar.

  “Stop playing with the shapes,” said Ragnar Olafson. “Are you three?” Ragnar had come out of nowhere and was instantly gone again.

  So this was called “playing with the shapes.” No doubt they all knew about it and had gotten tired of it years ago.

  Dabeet gave the handhold another twist and the whole pillar snapped back into place, flush with the wall.

  Dabeet had no idea why these panels had such capabilities, but perhaps by figuring out what they could do, he could think of a reason why they had been designed to do it. Dabeet launched himself toward a wall near one of the gates that armies used when they launched themselves into battle.

  He began torquing the handles of the panels surrounding the door. Within a couple of minutes, he had shaped a low parapet all the way around the gate. It would be useless for the possessors of that gate—what defense could it offer when enemies could attack from above at any time?—but if an enemy team built such a low wall before the enemy emerged from their gate …

  “That never does any good,” said Ragnar again. “We tried all kinds of things back in the day. None of the teams waste time with the shapes anymore.”

  “I have to figure out what they can do,” said Dabeet. “Especially if everybody else already knows.”

  “Nobody else cares,” said Ragnar. “But play in the sandbox all you want.”

  Dabeet perked up at that reference. “Do they have sandboxes where you grew up?”

  Ragnar looked confused. “A sandbox is a thing?” he asked.

  “A box filled with sand where you can play. Digging and piling things up.”

  “I guess that would work, in gravity,” said Ragnar. “Legal. I just thought it was an expression. Something you can play with that doesn’t matter and does no harm. Makes sense that the thing came before the expression.”

  Dabeet might have allowed himself to get sidetracked into a discussion of idioms in various languages—one of his favorites was “raining cats and dogs,” which was the equivalent of the Danish “It’s raining shoemakers’ apprentices” and the Greek “It’s raining chair legs” and the French “It’s raining frogs” and “It’s raining like a pissing cow.” The Serbian “The rain falls and kills the mice,” the Welsh “It’s raining old ladies and sticks”—Dabeet had memorized a long list of them and entertained a classroom during a rainstorm at Conn reciting the oddest ones until half the class was laughing hysterically, especially when they started making up new ones after “pissing cow,” on related themes.

  But this was not the moment to repeat that event, especially because he wasn’t sure whether Ragnar had ever experienced rain at all.

  Besides, at that moment Dabeet inadvertently pushed downward on one handle, and the beveled extrusion he had formed broke away from the wall behind it. It was as if the panel had come out of its socket, except that where it had been, there was a regular flat panel with a handhold, and on the bottom side of the block Dabeet was now holding there was another flat panel with a handhold.

  “Did you know it would do that?” Dabeet asked Ragnar.

  “I heard that they could come loose,” said Ragnar. “What did you do?”

  “Pushed down on the left side, pulled up on the right.”

  “Can you put it back?”

  Dabeet set it back in place. It stayed, but it wasn’t stuck. He could pull it off easily, rotate it, put it back. Then he tried repeating the motion that had made it come free. And he felt a clunk from inside the block as it reattached itself.

  Well, no. Because when he pulled up the block came free, only now it was attached to another cube of panel material that came up easily, as a part of the structure.

  “That’s greeyaz,” said Ragnar. “You can’t do anything with it in combat.”

  “Throw it at somebody?”

  “Accomplishing what? Doesn’t freeze their suits, and they throw it back anyway. Just gets in the way.”

  “So you’ve seen people do this?”

  “Never,” said Ragnar. “But if it was useful, somebody would be doing it.”

  “Maybe nobody knows,” said Dabeet.

  “Same point.”

  “Nobody knew how to do archery till somebody invented arrows and bows,” said Dabeet.

  “You think that’s like longbows at Agincourt?” asked Ragnar, laughing. “Good luck with that.” And, once again, Ragnar launched himself away.

  Still, it was the longest conversation he’d had with anybody in his team that didn’t consist of them telling him what to do and how wrongly he was doing it.

  * * *

  Dabeet thought so much about the panels that turned into cubes and blocks that he began to dream about them, because after pulling them cube by cube out of the walls and joining them to each other, the shapes he made from them, the process of extrusion and connection, these became the forms and processes that went on in his dreams, endless pipes and bridges, arches and spirals, things he couldn’t imagine the cubes might actually be able to become. He even hallucinated some of these shapes, watching them pass before his eyes while looking at a teacher, a diagram, his desk, blank walls. At any time he’d find his mind rotely putting blocks together, shaping them. Closing his eyes didn’t get rid of the images. Nothing did. But he forced himself to continue concentrating on the lesson, making sure that his schoolwork didn’t suffer because of this growing obsession with drawing shapes out of the battleroom walls.

  How did Ender Wiggin and his jeesh ever get anything done, when they had these building blocks to play with?

  If they had them. For all Dabeet knew, this feature of the walls had been added during the transition from Battle School into Fleet School. Maybe somebody realized that building things would be one of the most important tasks of the explorers and colonists. They would need shelter and defenses on these other worlds, for predators would not know that human flesh was indigestible, and resentful natives might be tempted to steal artifacts or take a biological trophy or two while the colonists slept.

  But if it was worth creating these deep walls, with so many cubes hidden inside them, why hadn’t anyone emphasized to the students the importance of building with them? Why wasn’t the use of the cubes built into the game?

  Or was it a test? Which students would keep doing the same old thing, and which would make a discovery and run with it?

  It could be testing in the other direction, too, of course. To see how long Dabeet would keep working at this pointless, unappreciated, hypnotic, mind-numbing task until he realized that it was of no practical use. If that was the test, he was failing and had no intention of changing what he was doing.

  The other kids on his team ignored him completely n
ow, except when he built a structure that extended far into the battlespace. Some of them would mutter some kind of invective as they came closer to his building than they meant to. Others, saying nothing, simply grabbed on to one of the handholds on his pillar and used it to change direction. There is a use for these pillars, thought Dabeet.

  But that was half an hour into a practice; in an actual competitive situation, the battle would be over before Dabeet’s structure was half done.

  Unless somebody was helping him build.

  As he thought about this, Dabeet let his gaze wander around the battleroom. “Knowledge you have no use for is rarely worth having,” Graff had said. “The secret is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.”

  Maybe there’s a use for this knowledge about the blocks in the battleroom.… Maybe if I could put up a structure quickly enough, the instant we were allowed to pass through the gate, then the rest of the army could use my structure to change trajectories and be able to move through the battleroom using paths that weren’t so ballistic, and with a decent amount of cover from enemy fire along the way.

  When there are stars in the room, are they placed so that the blocks can be built out to link to them?

  No sooner thought of than he had to try it, so Dabeet spent half the practice extruding boxes and building them up in a single rigid pillar that came to a stop exactly half a box-width away from the star, and not quite aligned with it.

  Dabeet took the handhold of the square nearest his pillar’s end, drawing it up from the surface of the star. He had only brought it half the distance to the end of his pillar when something shifted.

  The star shifted. The whole star moved away from the pillar and sideways exactly the right amount to allow the box he was now extruding to line up perfectly with the end of the pillar.

  Dabeet snaked his hand out from between the new cube and the pillar. They could hardly connect as long as he still had a body part involved.

  As soon as his hand was clear, the new cube from the star finished extruding itself and snapped into place on the pillar. The star was now anchored to the wall by a long, inflexible tether.