Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  —He wrote to me. How sweet. A thank-you letter?

  —What would you conclude if it were a thank-you letter?

  —That he wanted something and thought that stroking me would help.

  —Does it?

  —If you had ever tried, you’d know.

  —I suspect that if I had tried, I wouldn’t be here today handing you this printout.

  —True, but mostly because you’d probably be terrible at it. You’ve never been much of a sycophant.

  —How about you?

  —I was a champion at it. How do you think I got things done back when I was a junior officer? The vanity of high officers is a career-eating tiger, always needing to be fed on the blood of lesser ranks, but prone to purring when properly petted.

  —You’re a poet of bureaucratic maneuver, sir. How was that?

  —Obvious, but also true, and therefore completely believable. The note?

  —Should I leave while you read it?

  —He wants a private conversation.

  —Remarkable. That brings the number of people seeking a few minutes of your time to, let me see … everybody with ambition or a crackpot plan.

  —Which of those is Dabeet, I wonder?

  —He’s already famous for his relentless ambition.

  —Not sure yet how much of that was his upbringing and how much his innate character.

  —I forgot, sir, that you’re the one educated person in the world who believes in innate character.

  —Most people believe in it. They just don’t know what it would look like if they ever ran across its trail. So they pretend to believe that it doesn’t exist.

  —Just as you pretend to believe that all those tests for Fleet School you put out there actually measure something.

  —They do measure something. They are excellent tests of the mental skills that we have agreed to call “intelligence.”

  —But you have long pretended that they also measure a child’s future potential for leadership and command.

  —And as long as we continue to censor any negative comments about the testing of children, we will continue to get excellent results from gathering the data from people who think their children are as clever as Andrew Wiggin.

  —It brought you Dabeet.

  —We’ve had Dabeet all along.

  —What for? What do you see him for?

  —Well, as Dabeet himself pointed out, we’re not quite sure the Formic Wars are over. Now or three thousand years from now, the hive queens may suddenly burst upon the scene again, but this time much better armed and better prepared to take us on.

  —I’ve watched Ender Wiggin and Bean and the whole jeesh, and I’ve seen no sign that Dabeet could ever have been fit to take part in that.

  —I don’t think Dabeet is a candidate to replace Ender Wiggin, should we ever need such a commander again, which I doubt.

  —Then why do you indulge this arrogant child?

  —Because someday we’ll need a replacement for … well … me.

  —I’ve read your file, sir. Your own test scores are not in the league of any of these children.

  —We’ve known for a couple of centuries, at least, that great achievement—and yes, I know perfectly well that my achievements have changed the world—great achievement is not the result of inborn talent. It’s about persistence. Courage. Measured self-regard.

  —Dabeet has no shortage of self-regard.

  —But the measurement has only just begun.

  —And we have to give the boy credit for persistence.

  —Relentlessness.

  —But courage, now.

  —All things in their time. He doesn’t realize it, but he’s in a dangerous place. So we’ll see.

  —So should I arrange your schedule to give him this meeting?

  —It can’t be by ansible. That would show Kaluza way too much about the importance I attach to the boy. I have to drop in for a sudden inspection, and then happen to bump into Dabeet. Kaluza will be certain that my visit is about her, so she’ll think nothing of my incidental contacts with others.

  —How urgent is this?

  —Keep me within a shuttle trip of Fleet School. Earth or Luna or nearby space stations. Give no sign that I have my eye on Fleet School. Then, when I give the word, I want my arrival at Fleet School to be limited only by the physics of space travel.

  —Are you going to answer the letter?

  —Heavens no! And make the boy think that I care?

  To Dabeet’s surprise, other children began gathering with him and Zhang He in the battleroom. At first each newcomer would observe what they did. Some of them would then go off and start pulling cubes out of the walls. Some drew out only a few; others began a few small constructions and then drifted a meter or two away and looked at what they had built with apparent satisfaction.

  Only a very few remained to listen as Dabeet and Zhang He talked through what they were doing. Their vision was to use pillar construction during an actual battle, and that demanded planning, speed, and a clear division of labor. Using the stopwatch function on their suits, each one timed the other on the basic tasks, then critiqued what they had seen.

  “You’re trying to move too quickly to start putting the pillars in place,” Zhang He told Dabeet. “It isn’t solid yet when you start moving it around, and so what you bring to the structure is still a kind of noodle, far too flexible. So you end up doing the solidifying twists again, on site, where it’s much harder and more time-consuming to do it.”

  “So slower is faster,” said Dabeet.

  “That’s just stupid. Slower is slower,” said Zhang He. “It’s finishing the job before you move on that will make a difference.”

  So Dabeet made sure each four-cube pillar was solid before he unlocked it from the wall and took it to the place where he needed to lock it in place to advance the structure.

  The few kids who listened to them critiquing each other, or laying out the order of construction and assignment of jobs, didn’t go off by themselves to try out this weird activity. Instead, each one in turn would come up to Dabeet or Zhang and ask if they could try.

  “Of course,” said Zhang He. “There’s a lot of wall.”

  But Dabeet knew what they were really asking. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll watch you and tell you what you’re doing wrong, till you get it right.”

  Soon Zhang picked up the same habit. Four kids went through this process and began to show some skill in pillar construction. In fact, it became a game, to start them all at the same moment, time them, and see who could finish first.

  But one of the boys, Ignazio Cabeza, shrugged off the race. “I don’t care if I’m faster or slower than them. I want to know if I’m improving over how fast I was before.” And soon Dabeet stopped the competitive heats and turned to stopwatching each trainee in turn.

  After a week of working with this new team, Zhang He teased Dabeet at lunch. “I thought you were the anti-social one, and here you brought these new guys in so deep that now we’re hardly getting any practice time for ourselves.”

  “Aren’t you learning from what they do?” asked Dabeet.

  “We’re all learning this useless set of skills, Dabeet,” said Zhang He. “If this ever becomes a zero-gee Olympic event, we’ll win. My point is that I don’t get why you give up so much of your own time to help them.”

  “Because the six of us might conceivably build a structure quickly enough to be of use in an actual battle. The chance of just you and me doing it is pretty remote.”

  Zhang He thought about this. “So you need other people.”

  “I was working on structures that you and I alone could make in under two minutes. They weren’t bad, depending on the configuration of stars in the room. But when these guys started actually paying attention and trying to improve, instead of just playing, I started designing more substantial structures, and pairs or trios of war machines.”

  “War machines,” said Zhang He. “Sounds like catapul
ts and trebuchets.”

  “More like turtles and pontoon bridges,” said Dabeet, “but yes. War machines that can be made on the spot.”

  “So it’s not that you suddenly became nice,” said Zhang.

  “I’m nice,” said Dabeet, feeling a little hurt.

  “You are,” said Zhang. “You just kept it secret.”

  “It’s easy to be nice when we have a purpose in common, when we’re working together.”

  “If you treated classes that way, working together instead of trying to crush everybody else on every test, you’d have more friends.”

  “That kind of friend just distracts you from meaningful progress. If anybody really wanted help with classwork, I’d help them. But what would they do? Learn good habits of self-criticism so their work improved? So they could understand things without my help? Somehow I think not. Most of them just try to get the work over with so they can go off and ‘have friends.’”

  Zhang laughed. “So if people don’t study as methodically as you do…”

  “Then they’re not interesting to me. And I’m quite sure that I’m not interesting to them, either.”

  That was their last private conversation at lunch, because starting the next day, the other kids on their team joined them, and they spent lunch hours planning structures and making assignments. “You have to memorize the dance you’re going to do,” said Dabeet. “This step, and the next step—it has to be out of your head and into your fingers and arms and feet and legs so that you move smoothly from one to the next without hesitation.”

  “So it’s art,” said Ragnar.

  “Yes,” said Dabeet. “Art that you do over and over again, perfectly each time. I want us to learn how to build six or seven really useful structures, and know the task so well that the moment the gate opens and reveals the configuration, I can say, ‘Two flying turtles and a picket fence,’ and all six of us know exactly the steps we’ll do. We’ll dance through it like a ballet company doing the same show for the fifteenth or fiftieth performance.”

  “No,” said Timeon.

  Everyone looked at him in startlement.

  “I’m not disagreeing,” said Timeon, seeing the looks they gave him. “I’m just saying, it’s not really like ballet. Somebody else sets up the stage for dancers. But we’re making the stage.”

  “We’re stagehands?” asked Monkey, the only girl who had joined Dabeet and Zhang.

  “No,” said Timeon. “I just think we’re not dancing, we’re cooking. We’re like a team of chefs working in the same kitchen. We make the same dishes every single day, and they have to be exactly on time and exactly the same quality as every other time. Nothing different. And yet we have to do it from scratch, from the ingredients at hand.”

  “É,” said Dabeet. “You’re right, that’s a better comparison. So next time we’re in the kitchen, we’ll know what’s on our very small menu and we’ll all be able to cook every dish.”

  They laughed and used forks and chopsticks to toss their food a little ways upward from their trays. “May we be better chefs than these!” Zhang chanted, as if it were an ancient Chinese prayer.

  “Careful,” said Ignazio. “If the cooks hear us abusing their food—”

  “Then they’ll know we’re actually eating it,” said Dabeet.

  When everybody laughed, he felt himself blushing and his eyes watering. He had never said anything spontaneous that made a group of people laugh with delight.

  No, he told himself honestly. I’ve never had real friends before. This is what it feels like. This is why people will sacrifice so many accomplishments in order to stay with their friends instead of their tasks.

  But I have these friends because I stayed with my task. So instead of dragging each other down, we’re building each other up. We’re not just good friends, we’re friends who do each other good.

  And, for the first time, Dabeet thought of Ender Wiggin and wondered: Is this what it felt like for him to work with his famous jeesh? They weren’t famous when they did their work. They were just kids who were working together, not to save the world, but to solve whatever problems the adults set before them. Did they all master their individual skills, and then Ender would deploy them, the way I intend to deploy these kids? But they could only be relied on when Ender himself had helped them train, had guided them into becoming as close to perfect as they were willing to become.

  And they took correction and criticism from Ender, even before he had any official authority over them. Why?

  At that moment, for the first time, Dabeet realized that he needed to learn what Ender Wiggin knew.

  I’m never going to be an official leader, because Urska Kaluza hates me. But I created a task that didn’t even exist, and worked hard to become good at it and to turn it into something useful for the whole army, the whole team. And by doing that, I accidentally drew these five people together.

  Are they the best or worst of the players in the game? So far the leaders haven’t come over and told us to stop playing around. They haven’t demanded that any of my kids stop working with me. They might, of course, anytime they choose. But it’s also possible that these are the worst players, so their absence isn’t missed.

  Some of them might be the worst players of that game, but they are the best players in the entire universe of the game I’m playing, and they’re getting better with every practice. I’m getting better when I practice, too, no matter which of them is coaching me, because they’ve all learned to look for the right things. I taught them everything—Zhang and I taught them—but now they coach us and we all get better together.

  Is this the great secret of Ender Wiggin’s leadership? Do I have any chance of equaling him in a skill that I never thought I’d be able to learn—leading other kids?

  Are there any records of his games and his practices when this was Battle School? Is there any chance I could watch them?

  Not if I have to get Urska Kaluza’s permission.

  * * *

  “They don’t allow me to go outside the ship,” said Dabeet, almost as soon as he entered the office of the head of Fleet School Station security.

  “Why am I hearing this sad tale?” asked Robota Smirnova. “It’s not my policy. Pick a door, I’ll let you go right out. Unless you want a spacesuit.”

  “I realize that you’re the head of station security, not school security, so you don’t normally deal with students,” said Dabeet.

  “You misunderstood completely. I don’t deal with students. Period. Not ‘normally’ and not ever.”

  “I was never in space before I came here. I’m way behind the other students. And I’ll never catch up, because Urska Kaluza hates me, for some reason.”

  “An excellent reason, I’m sure. What do you really imagine is going to come from meeting with me, Dabeet Ochoa?”

  “It depends on how private this conversation is,” said Dabeet.

  “Is anyone else in the room? This is as private as it gets.”

  “I don’t know who reports to whom,” said Dabeet. “Do you report to Kaluza? Or to someone else, outside the station?”

  Robota Smirnova looked at him, her half-lidded eyes showing no more interest than before. But that look went on for a long time. Five seconds. Fifteen seconds. An eternity.

  Then Robota Smirnova arose from her desk and walked to the door. It opened as she approached. “Coming?” she said impatiently.

  Dabeet followed her. Out into the corridor. Up one of the tubes toward the center of the station. Then into a corridor, then into a door a few steps up into the tubular wall, and this time their path was parallel to the axis of the station.

  Dabeet was well-enough-oriented now to understand that they were moving from the main wheels of the station, where all the activities of Fleet School were conducted, to the next wheel up. Or over. When Dabeet helped with the cargo tally, he wasn’t sure yet of the geography of the station, so he didn’t know if they were now heading toward the wheel that held all the ca
rgo, storage, mechanical, and port functions of the station, or the other direction, toward one of the unoccupied and, rumor had it, unfinished wheels on the other side.

  Curious as he was, Dabeet said nothing, because this little expedition had come directly after, and therefore probably as a direct result of, his question about whom Robota Smirnova reported to.

  He had meant this question really to mean, Is this conversation being recorded? If so, who will be able to hear the recording? I have things to say for you alone.

  If she had taken it that way, then maybe she was leading him into an unwatched portion of the station. If anybody should know a place that was unrecorded, it was the head of station security.

  It was the unfinished portion of the station. Not that it was stacked up with construction materials or anything—it looked every bit as clean and tidy as the occupied section. But there was a different smell, a lack of all the living smells of human occupation. And it was cold. This section was not maintained at the steady twenty-two degrees of the school. Closer to ten degrees, so as not to waste energy. They couldn’t let it get lower than that, or condensation of water vapor would become a problem, and if it went to zero, the water would freeze. So … Dabeet had an answer to one question: At least part of the unused portion of the station was airtight, had atmosphere, and was connected to an air-heating system.

  Robota Smirnova stopped at the door leading into an airlock. It took a moment for Dabeet to realize this, because there were no signs at all. But otherwise, it was identical to the personnel-sized emergency airlocks that came every fifty meters in the populated part of the station. This one also lacked the spacesuits, adult- and child-sized, that always hung in frames just outside the airlock.

  “No suits,” said Dabeet.

  Robota’s hand flashed out and covered Dabeet’s mouth. Then her other hand reached around behind his neck and a little way down his uniform. She touched something. Pressed hard on something so it dug into his back. He felt a slight tingle, like the tiniest electric current. And then he didn’t feel it.

  “No,” she said. “No suits, because nobody is authorized to be here anyway.”