Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  A brief look of puzzlement passed across her face.

  “If they take Fleet School and hold the children as hostages, then maybe they hope the IF will take steps to mollify them. But if the goal is to make the IF get involved on Earth, their most effective plan might be to kill everybody in the station and then shuttle on back to Earth. Or the Moon. Or wherever they’ve arranged to escape.”

  “You do understand,” said Urska Kaluza coldly, “that by saying what you just said about terrorism, I am obligated to report this conversation, sending a full transcript to the authorities, because of the very strong likelihood that there is a terrorist threat, not from some mysterious cabal on Earth, but from you and your block-building friends.”

  “By all means pass this recording on up the chain. Make sure to include a complete report on the smuggling operations going on here, probably with your collusion. If you alter the recording by removing that reference, they’ll detect it and it will still trigger an investigation. I could not be happier than to have you pass along this conversation.”

  “If only you were as smart as you think you are.”

  “If I were smart,” said Dabeet, “I would have figured out a way to deal with this, keeping my mother alive and removing any threat to the school. But I’m not smart enough to do that, so I’m asking for your help.”

  “You’re asking me to run around and do stupid, dangerous, time-wasting things, while you and your friends laugh about how you got me to jump through hoops.”

  “So you don’t intend to take any extra precautions,” said Dabeet.

  “We already have a couple of boats doing defensive patrols. If there’s any threat, I’ll know of it in plenty of time.”

  “Just what the Formic Queen probably announced to all her soldiers, just before Mazer Rackham blew her to smithereens.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Second Formic War,” said Dabeet. “It’s called history. You should try it.”

  “Your insolence has no boundary, does it,” she observed. “I’ll tell you what steps I’m going to take. I’m going to put you under arrest and keep you in close, supervised confinement. That way you can’t open any doors for them, and we’ll be safe.”

  “I’m a child,” said Dabeet. “You can’t—”

  “Psychotherapeutic confinement,” said Urska Kaluza. “So I can.”

  “If my mother dies because of this arbitrary, ego-motivated action—”

  “Dabeet, you don’t seem to understand quite how stupid you are,” she said. “Even if you actually believe the kuso you’ve been telling me, you gave me plenty of reason to make sure you never see anyone again.”

  “Empty threats,” said Dabeet.

  “I’m not going to let you risk everything I—”

  “You know that I have the close interest and attention of people who are in a position to force you to produce me, alive and well, at any time.”

  She opened her mouth to answer. Thought better of it.

  “So I’ll be returning to my barracks and to my regular schoolwork and training,” said Dabeet. “Nothing will change, unless you take action to resist any attempt to raid the school. If you do nothing, then that’s your call. I’ve given you fair warning, a chance to do your duty—just in case some part of you still cares about that.”

  “For a powerless child, you have an obnoxious mouth.”

  “I’m offering you a chance to do the right thing.”

  “You’re offering me a chance to humiliate myself.”

  “What if I’m telling the truth?”

  “Oh, I think you believe everything you said. I just don’t think you understand anything about what adults intend to do or even can do. Children’s brains are simply incapable of grasping the adult world. If you tell other children or teachers the absurd story you just told me, I will put you in therapeutic confinement, because that will discredit your story completely. As long as you remain silent about these supposed threats, I’ll leave you alone. Oh, and if you try to open any airlock doors, then all bets are off. Do you understand?”

  “Probably not,” said Dabeet, “since I have an incapable mind. But I’ll do my best.”

  Dabeet walked to the door of her office.

  “I haven’t dismissed you,” she said.

  He would have ignored her, but the door didn’t open at his approach. She had to trigger it, so he would have to wait. He turned and faced her.

  “You will never have access to the ansible again, Dabeet. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  Somehow Dabeet did not laugh, or even let his face show a smile.

  “Dismissed,” said Urska Kaluza.

  He heard the door open behind him. He turned and left.

  * * *

  He had told her everything—including the fact that he suspected her of being involved in the smuggling. At first he thought that he had failed completely, but no, he realized, I said those things and I’m not in custody. I’m not outside the station without a suit in a tragic accident. I was able to talk her to a standstill. That isn’t failure.

  I gave her a chance to do the right thing.

  She didn’t believe me, but I wouldn’t believe me, either. Surprising facts rarely pass the plausibility test. If it hasn’t happened before, it’s hard to believe it can happen at all. Urska Kaluza didn’t reject my story because she’s stupid or evil. She rejected it because she’s a liar herself, and therefore she assumes other people are lying.

  In class, Dabeet was attentive—more so than for the past few weeks. He actually enjoyed class, and not just because he could show off what he learned by reading ahead. He realized that this was what Ender Wiggin had offered him—by telling an adult, it was no longer his responsibility.

  Only she hadn’t believed him, so she would do nothing, and that meant it was still his responsibility. Thanks, Andrew Wiggin.

  In the battleroom, Dabeet’s team built a few quick structures—familiar ones, nothing new, just to warm up. The one Zhang called “bridges,” a series of arches rising from the four corners of the gate. The one Timeon called “walls,” a series of three-by-three platforms that provided cover and hiding places.

  “What’s this for?” asked Bartolomeo Ja, the team leader; the commander of the army.

  Dabeet looked at his team, who were still securing the links that held the whole structure together.

  “Does it have a purpose?” Monkey asked Dabeet.

  “If the enemy assaults us in an open room, this gives us cover. Behind this, you can move unobserved, but whenever you want you can come to dozens of different protected places from which to shoot.”

  “So, purely defensive,” said Ja.

  Dabeet didn’t like the dismissive way he said that. Of course, it was purely defensive, rooted to the wall. But Dabeet didn’t like being disdained.

  “It’s perfect for an open-room offense,” he said.

  Ja turned to face him. After Urska Kaluza’s scornful responses, Dabeet appreciated the fact that Ja seemed ready to listen.

  Dabeet turned to his squad and said, “Can we detach it from the wall and have it hold its integrity?”

  “Who knows?” said Ignazio. “Let’s find out.”

  Dabeet’s first impulse was to stick with Ja and show him all the clever things they were doing. But no. Ja needed to hear it from people he knew and liked. “Zhang?” said Dabeet. “While we detach it, why don’t you show Barto how it works.”

  “I know how the boxes work,” said Ja.

  “Not the boxes,” said Zhang He. “The whole structure.”

  In about a minute, they were slowly propelling the jumbled structure across the battleroom. “How much mass?” asked Ja. “Can I propel myself backward?”

  “It’ll speed up the wall,” said Zhang He. “You know, equal and opposite reaction.”

  “It’ll flex the wall, too,” said Ragnar. “Let’s see how much flexion the connections can take.”

  Ja pushed off from the mobile wa
ll, straight back toward the gate. He bounced off at an angle, getting past the edge of the structure. Then he coasted a side wall to get a view of the whole thing from the other side.

  “Can’t see a single person,” he called out.

  “If we let it hit the enemy’s wall,” said Dabeet, “it might stick and completely block their gate.”

  “The teachers wouldn’t allow that,” called Ja. “But come on, people, get to the enemy wall and prepare to catch this thing and push it back.”

  It was a ragged attempt, and there was a lot more testing of flexion. One corner of the wall detached. But Dabeet’s people quickly put it back together and now they went back across the battleroom in the other direction, with the back of the wall now leading. It didn’t matter. It was just as effective as a barrier to sight and weaponry.

  “How long did it take you to put this together?” asked Ja, after he assigned his toons to spread out and find good protected vantage points for shooting at an imaginary enemy.

  “With just the six of us,” said Dabeet, “almost four minutes.”

  “Too long,” said Ja. “In an empty room they’d slide the walls and be on you before you had it half built.”

  “But when there are only a couple of three-by-threes, those provide cover. They can protect us while we build.”

  “Or you can build it faster,” suggested Ja.

  “We’re already pretty damn fast,” said Monkey.

  “What if you had a dozen builders?” asked Ja.

  “They’d just get in our way,” said Ignazio. “They haven’t practiced.”

  “What if they practiced?” asked Ja.

  “Then they’d get better,” said Dabeet. “I don’t know if it would cut the time in half. But we can get it under three, I bet.”

  “Maybe enough,” said Ja. “What about a smaller wall?”

  “It’ll hide fewer people,” said Dabeet.

  “Look how many places aren’t getting used with the whole army on this wall,” said Ja. “Break it in half, let’s see how many can use it.”

  They reached the home wall before Dabeet’s squad had it broken into two parts. Now the structure made no sense, visually—but the whole army was able to swarm through it and find protected vantage points.

  “So now,” Ja asked Dabeet, “with half the wall, half the time?”

  “Less than half,” said Dabeet, “because we’ll never anchor this to the floor when we start it.”

  “Midair assembly?” asked Ignazio skeptically.

  “Let’s try it in battle,” said Ja. “Next time we have a clear battleroom.”

  “You want us to train more soldiers, then?” asked Zhang He.

  “No,” said Ja. “Build half a wall and float it, just the six of you.”

  “While some soldiers lay down protective fire?” asked Dabeet.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” said Ja. “We have to respond to what the enemy does, and that may force us to use a different tactic. But if possible, yes, protective fire, we won’t let them stop you.”

  For the first time, Dabeet began to attend battles. He still hovered near the home gate, observing, because his skills, though vastly better, were still not good enough for him to take part in a battle that counted on the stats. But he knew he had to be able to function in the midst of fighting and flying, not letting anything distract him.

  After the first battle, Dabeet told his squad, “Since we’re floating it anyway, we start with the outermost units, all right? Work our way back. That way we don’t spend the whole time exposed to enemy fire, we can hide behind the first units while we build backward.”

  It caused them a lot of confusion for about fifteen minutes, but they were smart and, without Dabeet having to take over and tell everybody what to do, they worked it out. Now they built from the outside in, and they were down to two minutes by the third day.

  11

  From the landing parties that are establishing colonies on Formic worlds, we have learned that microbiota from two completely isolated genetic traditions are so incompatible that we are likely to have little to fear from microparasitic life-forms on planets we discover and explore. This does not mean we can shirk the precautionary measures etc. etc.

  It stands to reason that the native flora and fauna of worlds we discover and explore also have little to fear from the microparasites we bring with us. The War of the Worlds scenario cannot take place. We, as invaders (although our hearts are pure), will not be overwhelmed by the local version of the common cold. Nor will we wipe out any species with smallpox.

  Invasive species of macrofauna and macroflora are far more likely. Barnacles will not cling to our spaceships to overwhelm one world with another world’s fauna, but because of the incompatibility of evolutionary traditions, we will have no recourse, when establishing colonies, but to introduce Earthborn species in new worlds.

  As responsible explorers, we aspire to non-interference, but our very presence is potentially overwhelming on any life-bearing world, which we assume will be all rocky planets in the goldilocks zone. A casual visit, suited up, should do no harm, but even a brief colonial experiment of, say, five years, may provide opportunistic Terran species a chance to become invasive and outcompete the local life.

  However, the problem may be self-curing. If herbivores get loose that can only eat gaiagenic vegetation, then they can only live where that vegetation continues to thrive. Therefore the local flora will be safe on any isolated continents. If carnivores get loose, they can only live on gaiagenic herbivores and each other. It can be assumed that any problems we cause will be localized or self-curing.

  The only exception I foresee is the statistically most-invasive mammal species, the hyperpredator and hypercarnivore we call “housecat.” Felis catus quickly returns to a wild foraging habit when cut off from human subsidies—if indeed it ever left that state.

  Housecats have invaded every ecosystem that humans have entered, brought with us because of our fantasy that they love us and the reality that we love them. Having no loyalty except to food, housecats will inevitably stray into the wild.

  They will always pose a danger to every small animal, bird, or fish that we try to establish, and it is also not far-fetched to imagine that if any creature can acquire the ability to make some use of the proteins found in alien life-forms, it will be the housecat, which kills without hunger, so that it would keep experimenting with every available ambulatory life-form until it found those whose proteins it could digest.

  In addition, it seems highly unlikely that we could find a population of humans completely devoid of the toxoplasmosis parasite. Since this dangerous parasite can only complete its lifecycle in cats, banning the transportation of cats to any new world would also, within a generation, eliminate the oocytes of toxoplasmosis.

  The ban on cats should be extended to every interstellar craft, because unplanned or accidental landings could inadvertently provide onboard pet cats an opportunity to get free and begin their astonishingly prolific breeding pattern.

  This ban should not be extended to dogs, which, since we co-evolved with them for millennia, are useful companions and servants. Dogs are better at controlling seed-eating rodents and take their responsibilities far more seriously than cats, and humans would do the work of exploration and colonization far better and more safely with dogs. After all, we and our dogs shaped each other’s bodies and minds for at least fifteen thousand years and quite possibly a hundred thousand. Dogs are irreplaceable as human companions. Their presence on spaceships should be encouraged. There is zero chance of dogs thriving on their own well enough and long enough to acclimatize themselves to become invasive outside the bounds of human settlement, or to acquire the ability to digest alien amino acids.

  Cats do no useful work, unless we account it useful to provide a blank face for their owners to project emotions onto. They explore willingly, but take very inconsistent and unreliable notes. Leave them and their toxoplasmotic oocytes in the star system the
y’ve already infested.

  From “Keep Cats Out Of Space,” an in-class opinion essay by Dabeet Ochoa, for exogeography class.

  It turned out to be surprisingly easy for the South Americans to get a message to Dabeet. It came in the form of a letter from his mother. The letter was genuine enough; it could not have been faked, since it was in her handwriting and it sparkled with her wit, slipped back and forth between Spanish and English in exactly her idiosyncratic way, and contained just enough pleading for him to write more and better letters that it was as if she sat in the room with him.

  She had sat in some room with someone, for sure, because she included a word-search puzzle that “our old friend” had included for him. “It’s especially challenging, he says, because it contains both Spanish and English. I told him, Why not Latin? Why not Russian? You didn’t speak them here, but I imagine you could pick them up in no time, if there was a need.”

  Word searches were boring to Dabeet; he had outgrown them by age four. All they were was a series of treasure hunts with singularly unrewarding treasures. You search among seemingly random letters till you find the words that were laid in backward and forward, up and down, and diagonally. He had long since learned that all you do is move your eye back and forth, up and down on every line, finding words. Like plowing a field or mowing a lawn—not that Dabeet had ever done either task.

  Only there weren’t any words on any of the lines in any language Dabeet knew. Just a bunch of letters.

  “Our old friend” meant nothing to Dabeet—they had no “old friend” unless she meant MinCol himself, which was highly unlikely, since she wouldn’t have concealed his name, she would have used it openly, as a brag. So she might—must—be referring to the South Americans. As far as Dabeet knew, she hadn’t met them when he left for Fleet School, but if they made themselves known to her, it would be in the guise of friends of Dabeet’s. Unless they openly told her that she was their hostage for Dabeet’s good behavior. It’s not as if they were subtle men.

  Dabeet received the letter at bedtime, when he was putting away his desk; it was a physical, paper letter in his mother’s own hand, which meant that it had waited on Earth until a shuttle could take it on its regular rounds, probably first to the Moon and then from the Moon to Fleet School. The most important and least important messages traveled that way. But in this case, Dabeet assumed that the South Americans wanted it that way—probably so he would see Mother’s handwriting on the letter. The puzzle, though, was a computer printout.