Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Dabeet tried reading something into every line in every direction but before long he had to conclude that this was a cipher. It couldn’t be a code, because he had been given no key; they must expect him to realize there was a letter-for-letter cipher and figure it out on his own.

  They knew he was smart, so they wouldn’t need to make it so obvious that some teacher or military censor could see that it was anything but a puzzle. If they looked closely, they’d see that there were no recognizable words and so they might get suspicious. But of course any adult at Fleet School who saw a puzzle that had been sent by a mother to her child wouldn’t bother trying to solve it.

  It really was a puzzle. A different kind of word search. It’s just that all the letters had been switched out with other letters.

  If it was language, then he should be able to pick up patterns that looked like words and sentences. There were no spaces, of course, but there should be letters that were particularly common in each language, and he could make guesses.

  How intelligent was the creator of this cipher? The goal wasn’t to make it uncrackable, because any cipher could be broken by brute-force computing. The goal was to hide the fact that it was a ciphered message, but then make it easy to crack so there was no chance that Dabeet would miss any part of the message.

  Whatever Dabeet did, he would need to rely on the power of his desk to help him. He scanned the puzzle into his desk and told the desk to treat the puzzle as individual letters, but keep the shape of the puzzle and not “correct” anything that looked like it was trying to be a word.

  How would Dabeet himself create a bilingual cipher to a kid without a key?

  He would choose a non-obvious direction and run the entire message consistently in that direction, maybe from bottom to top, right to left. Or perhaps one of the diagonals. They might use boustrophedon inscription, putting one line right to left, the next line left to right, as you would plow a field, back and forth in alternating directions.

  Then there was the problem of part of the message being in Spanish, part in English—if that’s what Mother’s letter meant. Dabeet looked up character frequency in both languages and found that they were quite different. E led the way in both languages, but in Spanish the frequency went down from there as E, A, O, S, N, R, I, L, D, T, U. In English, it was E, T, A, I, N, O, S, H, R, D, L, U.

  In a message this short, though, there was no guarantee that the frequency of letters would conform to the norms for the whole of literature.

  And Dabeet’s source on Spanish separated regular vowels and consonants from those with accent and tilde marks. The cipher couldn’t use separate characters to stand for N and Ñ, along with two characters for every vowel, because they’d run out of letters in the English alphabet. So “señor” would be enciphered as “senor” and “aquí” as “aqui.” Easy enough. Most Hispanics in America had long since stopped bothering with accent marks online, because it was such a bother on keyboards designed for American English.

  The rule with simple ciphers was, of course, to first find the Es. A simple count of each character indicated two candidates for E. Letters D and U were fairly evenly matched in the cipher, with a slight edge for U. Dabeet then scanned the lines and columns and diagonals to see which direction looked more plausible.

  None of them looked right. Whether he used D or U, there were formations that were impossible in both languages. Spanish and English both allow two Es in a row, but neither language ever allowed three. Neither language allowed any letter to be tripled. Yet in every direction, one letter or another was tripled. There was no direction in which he could scan the lines and detect a wordlike pattern.

  Why would they make it so needlessly hard? He even tried spiraling in toward the center and still found impossible combinations.

  Bleary-eyed and frustrated, Dabeet set down his desk and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. What if the message was urgent? What if they were already on the way and the message was “open the doors now”?

  Their own fault if they were too dumb to make the cipher breakable.

  “How long have you been awake?”

  Dabeet opened his eyes. Bartolomeo Ja was standing there by his bunk. The other kids were still asleep, but commanders were always wakened fifteen minutes before regular soldiers.

  “A while,” said Dabeet. “Running a problem that was keeping me awake.”

  “You look bleary-eyed and ragged,” said Ja. “How stupid are you?”

  At first Dabeet took that to be a mean-spirited criticism, but his momentary anger was quickly defused.

  “That came out wrong,” said Ja. “What I mean is, how sleep-deprived are you? We have a battle, and if the conditions are right I want to battle-test your wall. But not if you’re sleepy and slow.”

  “Doesn’t matter if I am,” said Dabeet. “The others will be sharp enough, and if I’m a little slow it won’t matter because we can continue assembling it in flight.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. My experience is that a tired soldier is a dead soldier.”

  “If I die, I die,” said Dabeet.

  “I know, it’s only a game,” said Ja as he walked away.

  The battleroom had stars in the eight corners but nothing right up the middle. Dabeet’s original wall would have had trouble forming up between those stars, but the scaled-down version was easy to maneuver. Dabeet was a little clumsier than usual, but they had practiced the assembly so much that he could almost do his part in his sleep—which is pretty much what he did.

  Ja formed the rest of the army behind the wall before it was finished. They had practiced doing that, making sure not to get in the way of the builders, who had to mine the fixed wall in order to get the building blocks of the mobile wall. The structure was in motion half-built, but it moved slowly enough that Dabeet’s newly expanded team could still pick up the last blocks, build them into three-by-three panels, and put them in place.

  “Fire through the breaks,” Ja reminded them. “Use your cover. But whatever you do, don’t let them get edge-on to the wall, or we’ve got no place to hide.”

  They knew it, of course they knew it, but this was the first real test in a game, and if this whole structure-building thing was to get a fair test, they couldn’t make mistakes.

  They made mistakes, because Homo sapiens is not always sapient. But they adapted and recovered from their mistakes, and the battle ended with an overwhelming victory before the mobile wall was halfway across the battleroom. It was Odd Oddson who emerged from the teacher door and congratulated them, talking over the objections from the opponents, whose recriminations included words like “cheat” and “unfair” and “not what we trained for.”

  Oddson was amused by that last one. “The enemy that beats you is always the one who does something you didn’t train for.”

  “We didn’t get any building blocks!” one of them said.

  Which led Oddson to invite Ja to demonstrate how the blocks were pulled out of the wall. Ja admitted he had never done it himself, so he called for the block squad to come demonstrate. Both armies gathered around to watch—including Dabeet, who was so exhausted by now that he was afraid he’d make hash of the demonstration.

  Without saying anything, without delegating, he by default turned it over to Zhang He, who did an excellent job of showing how the wall panels could be pulled out to four blocks high, or separated into four individual blocks. Clear explanations, in very few words, as if he had written out the instructions and rehearsed them. Maybe he had.

  They took another fifteen minutes in the battleroom for everybody to try pulling out blocks. Dabeet understood why Oddson allowed it—now that building something with blocks had won a decisive victory, every army would have to develop what amounted to a construction brigade.

  While the others were playing, Zhang He came over to Dabeet. “What was that about?” he asked, looking annoyed.

  Dabeet didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Making
me do the demonstration. People will think I’m the expert.”

  “You’re as expert as I am. And today, much more expert.”

  “What do you mean, today?”

  “I didn’t sleep last night.”

  Zhang regarded him for a few moments. “Ja said you woke up early. Do you mean you never slept?”

  “Working on a problem, time got away from me.”

  “Then things went pretty well today. I thought you were just testing us by not giving us any instructions or supervising us in any way.”

  “I don’t usually, now that everybody knows what they’re doing.”

  “But you’re usually watching, so you can call out if one person’s lagging or somebody else is doing careless work.”

  “Today it was all I could do to watch my own work and get it done.”

  Zhang He squinted at him. “What are you lying about?”

  “Not lying.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Zhang.

  “Don’t give me that San Tomás the Skeptic look,” said Dabeet. “What’s there to lie about?”

  Zhang He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said ‘lie.’ What I meant was, you’re hiding something, and I think it has to do with the problem you were working on all night. You never have to work even fifteen minutes on any problem from class.”

  “It wasn’t from class.”

  “What, then? It’s not like you have a day job with a mean boss.”

  I kind of do, thought Dabeet. “It’s a puzzle my mother sent me.”

  Zhang He looked at him even more skeptically. Dabeet started moving toward the practice door as gravity faded back in, drawing them down to the floor.

  “What, a mother can’t send her son puzzles?” asked Dabeet.

  “I didn’t know you had a mother,” said Zhang.

  “Everybody does. Or did.”

  “You never talk about her.”

  “Nobody talks about their families.”

  “Everybody talks about their families,” said Zhang. “With their friends.”

  And there it was, the real difference between them. Zhang He had friends. He had been here longer than Dabeet—everybody had—but Dabeet was nearly six months into his time at Fleet School and Zhang He was, as far as he could tell, his only friend.

  Zhang He didn’t say anything, because what could he say? He started to open his mouth, possibly preparing to apologize for saying such an insensitive thing, but Dabeet waved off his remark. “Can’t be offensive if it’s true,” he said. “I’m not a friendable guy.”

  Zhang He gave the cruelest response: He didn’t disagree. Mercifully, he changed the subject. “That puzzle. You said it was a puzzle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I try it?”

  Dabeet was nonplussed. On the one hand, whatever the South Americans were doing, it would become obvious soon enough, if they really came up here. Why keep it such an amazing dark secret? On the other hand, what if Zhang He did figure it out? Then the puzzle would be solved and Dabeet could read the message. Zhang He could read it, too. So was Dabeet ready for that?

  Why was Dabeet worrying about this? If Dabeet couldn’t read it, how could Zhang He? Either they were friends or they weren’t. Trust or don’t trust, there’s no half-trust.

  “Sure,” said Dabeet.

  Zhang He’s mouth twisted into a wry little smile. “Took a few moments to decide. Good cop bad cop? Good angel bad devil?”

  “I’m not used to discussing my business with anybody.”

  “Except whoever you get ansible calls from.”

  Of course the rumors had spread through the school. Kids didn’t get use of the ansible unless somebody in their close family died, and usually not even then. There was an ethos of self-sufficiency; it was embarrassing to admit you needed your family. But Dabeet had an ansible call from somebody in the Fleet. Somebody so important that Urska Kaluza herself had been excluded from the conversation.

  “Get yourself an ansible, I’ll talk to you, too,” said Dabeet.

  Zhang He didn’t laugh, he just sighed and walked through the barracks door ahead of Dabeet.

  “Come on, that was funny,” said Dabeet.

  “To somebody, maybe,” said Zhang He. “Maybe to everybody who knows who you were talking to.”

  “I was talking to Ender Wiggin,” said Dabeet, impulsively.

  “Still not funny,” said Zhang He. “But I also don’t care. So let me see the puzzle.”

  They went to Dabeet’s bunk and Dabeet extracted the word-search puzzle from his locker. Zhang He looked it over. “There aren’t any words here.”

  “That’s why the puzzle took me all night.”

  Zhang He handed it back. “Is it in some weird language?”

  “It’s in English and Spanish, maybe half and half. And it’s also in cipher.”

  Zhang He raised his eyebrows. “All right, that makes it a challenge.”

  Dabeet told him about letter frequency in both languages, and scanning for repetitions of E. “I also don’t know if it’s consistently in rows or columns or diagonals. Maybe the decoded puzzle really is a word search, so I have to find individual words and only then arrange them in order.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” said Zhang He. “That is, if anybody cares whether you ever read the message correctly. English is so positional that it’s hard to come up with a statement of any length that doesn’t lose all meaning if the words are jumbled, or mean the opposite of what’s intended if you place one word out of order.”

  “That’s why I looked for letter patterns only in straight lines. I kept running into triples.”

  “Oh. That’s not entirely impossible, of course, since there aren’t any spaces, so you could have a double letter followed by the same letter. ‘Climb a tree, either the oak or the elm.’ ‘Tree’ followed by ‘either.’”

  “That works in English. But the triples are all over, and I don’t think that can happen in Spanish. The only doubled letter is LL. The N used to have a double, but when they palatalized it, the second N became the tilde.”

  “Adventures in etymology,” said Zhang He.

  Dabeet didn’t like the sarcastic tone, but when it came to friends, beggars couldn’t be choosers. “I just thought they might have replaced Ñ with double NN, for purposes of the puzzle.”

  “They’ve replaced everything with everything else,” said Zhang He. “I haven’t done a cipher since I was little. They get tedious too fast.”

  “Meaning you were pretty good at it, but when you deciphered them the messages weren’t worth the work.”

  “‘A stitch in time saves nine.’”

  “‘All’s well that ends well,’” said Dabeet. “I only wish that were true.”

  “Who’s the message from, really?” asked Zhang He.

  “I told you, my—”

  “Mother, right, only you wouldn’t stay up all night deciphering a puzzle that probably says ‘big loves and hugs’ in two languages.”

  Dabeet closed his eyes. Now he was so tired he could drop off to sleep in a moment if he didn’t work at staying awake. He was not going to make a good decision here. Decisions made on the edge of sleep were usually a mistake. Did that mean that he should think of what he really thought he should do, and then do the opposite?

  “It might be a life and death message,” Dabeet said, not knowing whether he was doing what he thought he ought to, or the opposite, or just being impulsive.

  “Is that American exaggeration, or real?”

  “I’m not all that American,” said Dabeet. “I’m from the barrio.”

  Zhang He shrugged. “I’m a Chinese Christian, which means I’m not Chinese, I’m not Lunar, most other Christians wouldn’t think me Christian, so I’m not anything.”

  “I’m saying it’s life and death.”

  “Whose?” asked Zhang He.

  “My mother’s. When it was announced that I was accepted to Fleet School, it was in the papers and Mother’s friends spr
ead it through our church group. So then I’m at school, and out of the blue—literally—come these guys in uniform, pretend they’re from my father in the Fleet, and in a minute I’m aboard a private airplane heading south by south-southeast over the Caribbean. Kidnapped.”

  Zhang He looked at Dabeet intently. Dabeet knew that he was deciding whether to believe this story or not.

  “I’m not important, we don’t have any money. What we had was me going to Fleet School, and that’s what they wanted. I’m supposed to do something up here, or they’ll hurt my mother.”

  “And by ‘hurt’ you mean ‘kill.’”

  “I don’t mean anything. They mean it. And yes, probably that’s what they mean. The idea is that if I don’t follow their orders…”

  “Orders to do what?” Zhang He asked.

  “It’s a puzzlement,” said Dabeet.

  It took Zhang a moment to realize that Dabeet was referring back to the enciphered message. “É, I can see how that might give you a sense of urgency about deciphering it. Only I wonder if they’d be happy to know that you told me about them. The point of a cipher is to keep the wrong people from reading it.”

  “They’ll never know,” said Dabeet.

  “Come on, if they’re planning to do something inside Fleet School, they probably have spies up here,” said Zhang.

  Dabeet couldn’t tell if Zhang was joking. “They do,” he finally said, “and it’s me.”

  “Oh,” said Zhang. “But nothing is happening here. It’s a school.”

  “Hence the need for a message.”

  Zhang looked at it again. “It doesn’t look like it’s divided into two languages.”

  “It wouldn’t, it’s enciphered.”

  “No, they’d look different. Languages look like themselves, even if they’re in cipher.”