Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  —The problem isn’t IF personnel, it’s Fleet School personnel—

  —Do they imagine we’re sending the teachers out to service the ships? It’s our own maintenance staff that does that work, during their copious downtime.

  —To which they would answer that if you have a surplus of maintenance personnel with nothing to do, your budget can be reduced accordingly and the redundant workers reassigned.

  —Our budget? Are they innumerate? The fees we charge—which, I will add, are no higher than the fees charged at other near-Earth servicing and resupply stations—completely pay for the mechanical operating budget of Fleet School. Life support, orbit maintenance, communications, energy—we may be the only self-supporting agency in the IF.

  —Most of the stations are self-supporting.

  —There! That’s my point! What Graff is demanding—

  —If it’s the Minister of Colonization—

  —is that Fleet School’s maintenance be returned to the general fund, so its expenses become a dead loss to the IF.

  —Here’s where the minister leaves his fingerprints: The proposal is that the funds come out of the Ministry of Colonization, since the school exists to supply the ministry’s needs.

  —This is a flimsy excuse for a bureaucratic budget grab. If Graff is paying, then he’s in charge, and—

  —Your arguments are cogent. Your books are in order—that was the first thing we checked. But these points are already known. I’ll tell you what would make the biggest difference with the Defense Council.

  —To arm Fleet School and call it a stationary battle cruiser?

  —Glad you haven’t lost your sense of humor.

  —On the contrary, I have completely lost it.

  —If you can show that bringing all these ships in to Fleet School for repair, resupply, and so on, has an educational purpose.

  —I’ve been keeping the students strictly away from any depot operations.

  —That was a wise policy, until now. If you could show that in the process of working with these ships, the students were learning teamwork skills, inventory and maintenance skills … you know, the kinds of things that they’ll have to know how to manage if they ever actually run a remote colony—

  —As if these exploratory missions to nowhere will ever happen.

  —Oh, it will happen, and it will be very valuable for you, or your successor, if Fleet School grads play an important role in the exploratory and colonizing missions.

  —Or my successor.

  —What, were you hoping to stay in Fleet School forever?

  —Bog no. I only thought I might be hearing a vague threat.

  —There’s nothing vague about it, Urska! How long do you think you’ll remain in your present position if ColMin gets Fleet School on its books?

  “You on this side of the room, you’re on the inside team,” said Lieutenant Oddson.

  Groans from everybody except Dabeet. “It’s because the mudfoot’s on this side,” said somebody.

  “I wasn’t going to send Dabeet outside no matter which team he was on,” said Odd. “The outside team is going to do observation only, because look at yourselves. You’re kids! You think somebody’s going to trust you to attach a fuel hose? To replace vital outside parts? You’re watching.”

  Groans from the other side of the barracks.

  “Get a clue, bunducks,” said Odd. “Get taller, show you’re good for something, and the brass will trust you. What matters is, we’re starting a new program here, and what you’re going to be doing, inside team, and watching, outside team, is real. When you’re exploring and colonizing, who do you think is going to tend to your ship?”

  “Crew,” said Dabeet.

  “And which jobs that the crew do should the commander be completely ignorant of?”

  “None of them!” shouted everybody, probably more for the pleasure of mocking Dabeet than for any eagerness to give an obvious answer.

  “You’re crew, or you can’t command,” said Odd. “You don’t have to be as good at the job as somebody who specializes in it, but you have to know if it’s being done right. And what if the crew member who knows how to do it best is killed? Eaten by an alien, smacked by a meteorite, killed by falling off a cliff? You think kuso like that is never going to happen on our expeditions? You have to know what he does—”

  “Used to do,” muttered Timeon.

  “Used to do,” said Odd. “You’ve got to know how to do it, how to train his replacement to do it, or understand what the machinery does well enough to jury-rig a workaround. Whatever it takes.”

  “What are we going to learn from watching?” asked Ragnar. “A lot of us grew up installing things on ships, in deep space and far away from any kind of supply station.”

  “Then you’ll have an advantage in learning,” said Odd. “Unless you get complacent and lazy, and then the other kids who work hard and think harder will pass you up like you lived your whole life in a high-rise in Taipei.”

  “But the inside crew?” asked Dabeet. “We’re doing something real?”

  “Kind of,” said Odd. “You’re shadowing the people who normally do the jobs. Inside installation, that’ll just be watching, too. But inventory management, checking everything off to make sure nothing is left behind and everything goes where it’s supposed to, you’ll be working with the real software, the real numbers, the real lists. There’ll just be somebody backing you up when you make mistakes.”

  “What if we find mistakes that they made?” asked Dabeet. “Will anybody listen to children when we report the error?”

  “Won’t it be interesting to find out,” said Odd. “We’ve never done this before, so nobody knows yet what’ll happen. But the people doing these jobs, they know their work and nobody’s been reprimanded or fired since we started letting ships resupply and refit at Fleet School.”

  “They never did this stuff when it was Battle School, did they?” asked Dabeet.

  Other kids groaned at Dabeet’s asking yet another question.

  “No,” said Odd. “But that’s because during the war there was no non-military traffic. Now it’s peacetime, and Fleet School is perfectly situated at L-5, and if we weren’t here some big corporation would build a station on this spot and make money hand over fist.”

  “So Fleet School makes a profit from this,” said Dabeet.

  No groans. The other kids were getting interested.

  “This is not a class in interplanetary economics,” said Odd. “But yes, I think so. I’ve heard that these refitting operations pay all the operating expenses of Fleet School.”

  Zhang He chimed in: “And tuition pays for the rest.”

  Several people laughed, since there was no tuition.

  “You all have two hours of training—useless training, because it’s all lecture, except for those of you working with the inventory software. And then the outside team will suit up and the inside team will wear your pussycat costumes.”

  That earned him a chuckle—Odd was always saying that this or that task was so easy that a pussycat could do it—but before Dabeet could get to Odd to ask for more information, he saw that Odd was putting the boy who had called Dabeet a mudfoot on report. Best for Dabeet to pretend he didn’t know what was happening. He slid past them and headed out the door with the rest of the inside team.

  Only as he saw the suited-up outside team pass the doorway to the office where Dabeet, Zhang, and a couple of others were getting an explanation of how bills of lading worked did it occur to Dabeet that if he was actually going to do what his South American masters demanded in order to keep them from harming Mother, he would have to know how to do real work while wearing a spacesuit. That was a skill that had never come up in a class at Conn. There was a space club, but they worked with telescopes and had no field trips even to the Moon. Dabeet’s job, though, was to open a door and leave it open. Since that would lead to instant evacuation of atmosphere from whatever room he was in, there was no way to do th
at without a spacesuit. And he had no idea where the spacesuits were kept, what it took to get one, and how to put it on and use it even if he had one.

  More to the point, every aperture in the Fleet School space station was electronically monitored. Every door—into barracks, into closets, into classrooms, into restrooms—reported its status to a central security system, which kept a record of it. How could he open a door without its being detected, closed, and then rigged with better security so it wouldn’t happen again?

  For that matter, every door already knew the identity of the person who approached it. They had palmpads beside them, but nobody ever had to use them because the door knew you were coming and, if you were authorized, slid open so you could pass through it. So even if Dabeet found an outside door he could mechanically open himself, the system would surely know that he was the one who was there opening it.

  Dabeet wondered: How do they track us? We didn’t get any implants—unless one of those injections before we launched actually put some kind of nano-ID into my body. Not likely. It’s probably our clothing. Simple test: Try to get out of the barracks naked. But that’s the other problem. Anything I do to defeat the door security system will keep me from leaving the barracks.

  Anything I do will raise questions. Questions will get back to the commandant. And Urska Kaluza is not my friend.

  If I can’t do it, I can’t do it. Didn’t any of these security problems occur to the general or at least one of his brighter minions? Why did they think a child would have the ability to do anything, especially breach the exterior of a space station without its being noticed?

  Dabeet could imagine the general’s response. “You took the tests. They show you are very smart and resourceful. Find a way.”

  Whether or not Dabeet really believed Graff’s story about Mother not having any genetic connection to him did not change the fact that she had spent his whole lifetime taking care of him, sacrificing whatever else she might have done with her life. With due candor, Dabeet recognized that he had not been an affectionate child—what reward had she received? She certainly did not deserve whatever the general would do to her if Dabeet failed to deliver on his promise.

  Yet fail he would, fail he must. Children here were prisoners, not in status but in fact. Safety considerations alone would dictate that the one group that could not be given access to any passage into hard space was the students. Since bright kids—no, sane kids—would never try to open a door into space, there hadn’t been any warnings. There weren’t warnings issued about not drinking cleaning fluids or eating random medicines or sticking sharp objects into your eyes or ears, unless you counted what was printed on the containers. It was assumed that any kid who made it into Fleet School would have a healthy respect for the vacuum of space.

  Dabeet imagined himself opening an outside door and then getting swept out into space with the rush of evacuating air. Nobody would be able to find him before he was long dead. Eventually, if he didn’t plummet to Earth and burn up on reentry, somebody would run across his body. “Ah, a Fleet School student who was too dumb to graduate.”

  Rafa Ochoa deserved his loyalty. But he could not do what could not be done.

  “I don’t think you’re paying attention, young man,” said the accountant who was lecturing them.

  Dabeet gave him a dead-eyed look and proceeded to continue the man’s explanation from the point where he had left off to annoy Dabeet. The accountant’s eyes widened. “I haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he said.

  “While you were talking, what did we have to do but read ahead? Why give us these papers if you’re just going to recite them aloud? Why not give us hands-on practice so you can see how well we understand?”

  “We have a tried-and-true method of—”

  “Of boring your trainees while preventing them from learning. Anyone who doesn’t get it needs specific answers to the problems they have in working with the records. For instance, who makes sure that the items listed on the bill of lading are actually what the bill says they are?”

  “People who aren’t you,” said the accountant.

  Dabeet’s guess was that the accountant had never thought of that question and had no idea of the answer. “So you look at the list, someone tells you—orally? on another list?—that all the items are here and have been sent to the right place, and—”

  “I hope it’s you doing the tally,” said the accountant. “That would explain why they’re using children for a serious job. You can crawl around among the shipping containers and check the numbers against the bill.”

  “So it’s all shipping containers. The bill of lading says, ‘Paper diapers for space babies,’ but nobody ever opens the airtight container to make sure it isn’t explosives or dehydrated dogs or military robots?”

  “Somebody checks all of that, of course—at the time it’s put into the container,” said the accountant. “Then, as long as the seal is unbroken, we know it’s the same stuff that was put into it in the first place.”

  “Unless somebody knows how to unseal and reseal those seals,” said Dabeet.

  “Only the proper authorities can do that.”

  “And there are no improper authorities, is that what you believe?”

  The accountant was angry, and ready to utter a retort that would put Dabeet in his place, when Zhang He spoke up. “It’s good to assume that everyone is faithful and law-abiding in carrying out their assignments.”

  The accountant seized on this seeming olive branch. “We have to believe that other people are reliable, or we could never board a spaceship or eat a meal or go under a surgeon’s scalpel.”

  “And yet there are some incompetent surgeons, and some surgeons who are bribed to commit undetectable assassinations, and some surgeries that simply turn out badly despite everybody’s best efforts,” said Zhang He.

  “We aren’t doing surgery here!”

  “I was merely agreeing with Dabeet that this system allows anything to be put aboard our space station, awaiting transfer to another vehicle, and we’d never know whether our own safety was being compromised,” said Zhang He.

  His tone was so mild, his expression so open and honest, that the accountant didn’t show any anger at all. He took Zhang’s I’m-so-helpful act at face value.

  I have to learn how to do that, thought Dabeet. Instead of my you’re-so-stupid attitude. Zhang really is helpful. And this man really is dim-witted. But Zhang is only helping me, yet convinces this git to react as if Zhang were helping him.

  “I’m going to teach the whole lesson,” said the accountant. “And you’re going to listen.”

  “Why not let me continue the recitation, and you correct me if I get anything wrong? That way I’ll have a task to keep me awake.”

  “They should have sent you outside,” said the accountant. “Wise-asses die out there.”

  “And in here, too,” said Dabeet. “Of boredom. Drowned in mindless rote. Do you even remember how to do this job? Are you capable of evaluating our hands-on work? Or do they bring in somebody else to actually teach?”

  “You think you’ve mastered it, just because you have a photographic memory?” asked the accountant. “Show me.”

  “Show you what?”

  “On that example bill of lading. Any errors?”

  “I don’t have any tallies to compare it to,” said Dabeet. “But here are seven errors of spelling and punctuation.” He tweaked them in the holodisplay. “And here are three arithmetic mistakes that will cause the bill to be rejected by the computer. However, since the bill presumably came out of a computer, the real discovery here is that the computer must be seriously malfunctioning to produce an error-filled bill of lading like this.”

  “I think these errors were deliberately introduced,” said Zhang He, “to test our ability to spot them.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Dabeet. “But what are they actually testing? Since this class of error can’t come up on a computer-generated bill of lading, they�
�re testing our ability to spot errors that will never exist. While the real errors remain impossible to see.”

  “And what real errors do you suppose those are?” asked the accountant.

  “I imagine that most of the time, there aren’t any errors at all. The tallyboys will spot any discrepancies. And the people who seal and unseal the containers are the only ones who can vouch for the contents, right? So examining the books and bills of lading at this level serves no purpose except proofreading the spelling of odd names, and serial numbers that spell-checkers can’t catch.”

  Dabeet heard a very faint beep.

  The accountant sighed. He left the room.

  “I think his earpiece gave him an alert,” said Zhang He.

  “Didn’t realize he had an earpiece,” said Dabeet.

  “I think it might only be on the side of his head that I can see.”

  One of the other kids said, “If you oomays have won us an early lunch, bacana. But if you’ve gotten us some kind of punishment, then eat kuso and die.”

  “I’m not from your culture,” said Dabeet. “The flavor of kuso remains a mystery to me.”

  “‘Kuso’ means ‘shit,’” said the boy.

  “I knew what it meant,” said Dabeet. You couldn’t be in Fleet School for three days without getting a full vocabulary dump of all the offensive slang. “I just lacked your firsthand knowledge of how it tasted.”

  He gave the boy his best grin. The kind of grin, Dabeet realized, that several books he’d read described as “shit-eating.” What a happy confluence of fecal references.

  It was someone else who came back in. A woman. “My name is Enya Polonia. I’m the supervisor of loading and cargo here at Fleet School.”

  Dabeet, unintimidated, asked, “Is there really enough traffic that somebody has that as a fulltime job?”

  “I’m also inventory manager for Fleet School. And one of the two purchasing agents. You’re a very perceptive young man.”

  “I’m a child,” said Dabeet. “One of several children who learn things very, very quickly. We’re ready to learn the actual job that we’re being trained to do, not just listen to memorized lessons and find typographical errors in bills of lading.”