Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  “They do when you can see where the words divide,” said Dabeet. “Or even which direction the lines run. Up and down? Diagonal? Boustrophedon? Maybe I can do it with a brute-strength attack, taking each possible orientation in turn, and trying to make sense of it letter by letter, guessing Spanish or English. The puzzle isn’t all that long. If I work on nothing else, by my rough guess I could solve it in about three weeks. I just don’t know if I have three weeks. If my mother has three weeks.”

  “It came on paper,” said Zhang, “so it can’t be too urgent.”

  “The shuttle schedules are known. They could have sent it to arrive just in time for whatever it is they want me to do.”

  “Have you told the commandant about this?” asked Zhang He.

  Dabeet noticed that when Zhang was thinking of her as someone who might help solve Dabeet’s problem, he called her by her title rather than “Urska Kaluza,” as the students mostly did when she wasn’t present.

  “Not about the message, but about my mother’s jeopardy, yes,” said Dabeet. “She didn’t believe me. Or pretended not to. For all I know, she’s in collusion with the smugglers and the terrorists, and they only need me so they’ll have a fall guy.”

  “Fall guy?”

  “Someone they can blame no matter how it turns out.”

  “You said ‘terrorists.’ Kidnapping, spying, but … how are they terrorists?”

  He wasn’t ready to tell Zhang that they wanted Dabeet to open the outside door of Fleet School Station to their raiding party. So Dabeet only shook his head. “They’re terrorizing me.”

  “Your brute-force method only works if the message is arranged the way you’re guessing—all in one orientation, with the Spanish and English parts separated like the Rosetta stone.”

  “Rosetta stone. Do you think it’s possible the two languages both say the same thing?”

  “You didn’t listen to me,” said Zhang He. “They’re not trying to make this too hard, but you have the reputation of being the smartest kid in the world. They expect you to be able to solve it quickly by getting some great insight. But to do that, there has to be an insight to be found. A trick that opens it all up.”

  “That’s exactly what I need,” said Dabeet. “A trick that solves it all! You don’t happen to have one, do you?”

  “Getting snotty with me?” asked Zhang He. “You’re such an emossen dollback.”

  “I’m not trying to be snotty with you. I just—my mother’s life depends on my cracking this, and you’re right, I have this stupid reputation to live up to, and what if I can’t? Passing tests designed by professional educators doesn’t show whether I can actually think.”

  “Too bad everybody thinks those tests measure intelligence,” said Zhang.

  “Now who’s being snotty?” asked Dabeet.

  “Whose fault is it that you have that reputation?”

  “Excuse me for doing my best on the examinations so I could win the prize of being up here with you.”

  “It’s not your test scores that cause you problems, Dabeet, it’s the fact that you can’t shut up about them.”

  “I’m not the one who spread it all over Fleet School that I…” But Dabeet couldn’t finish that, because yes, he had made sure to drop modest references to his higher-than-Ender test scores, not daily, but now and then, in a self-deprecating way, saying things like, “If those tests mean anything,” and, “All I can do is try to live up to those tests.” What a stupid lump of charach he had been. And it was compounded by the fact that Mother wouldn’t shut up about it back in the barrio, at Conn. And then he made it worse by it by sending emails in her name to everybody with a shred of authority in the IF. That’s what had drawn the attention of the South Americans in the first place. Unless it was that pointless visit by MinCol.

  “É,” said Dabeet. “You’re right. I’ve been acting like I think I’m toguro, and I’m just a nuzhnik.”

  “Pretty much.”

  So they agreed on something. But Dabeet still had a message to decipher. “Look, do you have any idea what you were talking about?”

  Zhang interrupted him. “No, how could anyone but you have any—”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. What you were talking about—the insight that would make it easy? Do you have any idea of the kind of thing it would be?”

  “You already said one thing, that Greek word, boustrophon—”

  “Boustrophedon, the lines alternating directions.”

  “É, that’s the kind of idea.”

  “But it didn’t help.”

  “I didn’t say it was the idea, I said it was that kind of idea,” said Zhang. “You really aren’t willing to let go of your mindset, are you. Like this: What if the Spanish and English aren’t in two separate sections. What if they’re in alternating words—no, better yet, alternating letters. Like, ‘como’ and ‘how,’ spelled C-H-O-O-M-W-O.”

  “That’s good,” said Dabeet. “That produced a double letter that didn’t exist in either word. That could be it.”

  “I wasn’t saying that was it.”

  “But I’m saying that I can’t do anything else till I at least try that. Most obvious case, both languages read left to right across the lines, from the top to the bottom of the word-search layout. Look.” Dabeet started moving the letters into two separate boxes, the odd-numbered letters in one spot, the even-numbered ones in another. The desk quickly caught on to what he was doing and proposed a pair of completed boxes. Dabeet saved it, then began to look at each one.

  “Two different languages, two different looks,” said Zhang. “If this is an A and this is an O, here they are at the ends of a lot of words, nouns with gender. This one could be Spanish.”

  “And the other one—look how this pattern repeats. That has to be ‘the,’ which makes the R stand for E.”

  “My work here is done,” said Zhang He.

  “Thank you,” said Dabeet. “Really. I was too tired to think, but this works.”

  “Will you tell me what the message says, when you get it figured out?”

  Dabeet wanted to say no, straight out, because he saw the way Zhang reacted when Dabeet referred to the South Americans as terrorists. If the message made it clear that Dabeet was supposed to open a back door for a raid, there was no way to predict how Zhang would react. The last thing Dabeet needed was to have to fight or sneak his way past a bunch of angry students trying to prevent him.

  Or I could decide not to do what the message says. What then? Why not share it with Zhang? It’s only a problem if I plan to carry out whatever assignment they give me.

  Zhang rolled his eyes and started to turn away.

  “Zhang, I don’t know what the message says. I don’t know if I can tell you.”

  “You don’t know if you can trust me.”

  “I don’t know if it would put you in danger to know.”

  Zhang gave a short nasty laugh. “I see, we’re playing at spies. Glad I could help.” Zhang walked languidly away.

  Why didn’t I just say yes? I could have changed my mind later, with an explanation. Or told him that I never figured it out. Instead I’ve offended him, which loses me the only offer of help I’m likely to get.

  And what did he mean, “playing at spies.” The cipher was real. Dabeet really was working on it all night. Why would Zhang help him, then dismiss the whole project as worthless? Who is Zhang to me? My only friend? Or the person who despises me most?

  Yet I’m going to need somebody. I could use a second pair of hands, of feet. Somebody to run the airlock while I … no, stupid, Zhang doesn’t have any more access to the system than I do, it won’t obey students. But something. I have to do something in order to save Mother and …

  Why am I valuing her above all the students here? Because her death is a sure thing if I fail, while the raid isn’t supposed to kill anybody, or at least not any of the kids. Sure death versus a hard couple of days, maybe only hours? That’s when the life of the one is more important t
han the convenience of the many. Right?

  You’re not in control of this, Dabeet. You can’t predict any outcomes. You have to take action, or not take it, based on other criteria.

  Dabeet woke up from a doze and realized it would take him three times as long to decipher the puzzle if he tried to do it now, without sleeping. He saved the bifurcated puzzle and lay down on the bed. He’d miss lunch. So what. Nap first.

  Two thoughts just as he was drifting off.

  I wonder if I got credit for creating the floating wall in the conversations about it all over the ship.

  And when I was remonstrating with myself—“You’re not in control of this, Dabeet”—it wasn’t my own voice I imagined speaking to me. It was MinCol’s.

  12

  From Spanish: your message received door must be in new unfinished sector open eighteen october lunar eight pm no atmo needed

  From English: if defensive force ambushes us your mother is dead within half hour if our all clear not sent every half hour be smart

  Once Dabeet tried Zhang He’s idea, everything fell into place. The messages read, with alternating letters, from bottom to top, from right to left. The upper left corner contained sixteen letters of Spanish only, since the Spanish message took more letters than the English one. The weirdest thing was “atmo” because that just wasn’t a Spanish word. But their phrasing and spelling must have been shaped by the exact number of letters that would fit into a perfect puzzle square.

  Not a hard cipher at all, once Zhang He had come up with the key. But Dabeet had needed that key, so without Zhang’s help he might have been pounding his head into the problem till the deadline passed.

  More than a month away, though. And since all the near-Earth stations and depots used Lunar Time, which was tied to Eastern Standard Time in the United States, there would be no problem getting the time right. They had used the English expression “pm” in the Spanish section, because any Latin American or soldier would have written the time using the twenty-four-hour system: two thousand or twenty hundred hours. “Ocho pm” took up the same number of characters as “dos mil,” but they probably expected Dabeet to think like an American, even in the Spanish section.

  So his job was to be door-opening again. Only this time, the head of station security would not be giving him a free pass into the unfinished part of the station, and would not be opening an airlock for him. Dabeet now faced a much harder puzzle than the cipher had been—how to get past the tracking system, so he could get where he needed to go without setting off an alarm, and then how to get an airlock to obey his unauthorized hand on the command plate.

  Dabeet had already tried to hack his way into the computer system. He did it so easily that he knew at once the system was designed to be hacked—which meant that it wasn’t the real system. Instead, everything the students accessed was part of a virtual machine completely firewalled from the real station operating system. There would be no way to get from inside the student system to the real station system, because nobody with any authority would ever need to access anything from a student desk.

  To sign on to the real system would supposedly require having a teacher’s fingerprint and knowing a password. But that was only true, Dabeet knew, if all the teachers followed security protocol all the time. It took careful and constant observation, but within three days Dabeet had a chance to use a teacher’s computer for a few minutes when the teacher stepped away without logging off. What Dabeet quickly discovered was that the teachers operated inside yet another virtual system; they could do way more things than the students could, but the teachers, too, were shut out of real station operations.

  This made sense. The last thing the station needed was to let any idiot reset a thermostat or open some outside airlock door. But since Dabeet was exactly the idiot they were trying to keep out, this became a serious matter. The countdown was running, and he still had no idea how to fulfil his assignment.

  So maybe I don’t fulfil it. What do these clowns expect? I’m a kid in a place designed specifically to contain really bright kids. He couldn’t find any forgotten back doors because there had never been any paths from the virtual operating systems to the real one. If there was no solution to the problem, then the South Americans would be jaunting into space for nothing.

  And Mother would die.

  Was there some way to tell them he couldn’t get the door open?

  Yes. He could have failed to get the door open the first time. But he didn’t fail. He got it open. They had no way of knowing he couldn’t use the same method twice.

  Meanwhile, classes went on, and Dabeet found himself struggling to pay attention, which meant he made a few mistakes here and there. Nothing out of the ordinary for an ordinary student, but two different teachers took Dabeet aside to ask him what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, of course. But to silence them, he smiled wanly and said, “I miss my mother.” Did he want to talk about it? “Talking about it makes it worse. But thanks.”

  Apparently, if you tell the exact lie that they want to hear, they’ll believe you without your having to make even the slightest effort at acting. Dabeet suspected that the flatter his voice while saying these emotional things, the more believable he seemed. And also the more seriously they took his rejection of them as counselors. No doubt they talked among themselves about how Dabeet was suddenly going through a crisis of homesickness, but nobody tried to talk to him. He knew it was only a matter of time before the resident shrink brought him in for sessions, but till that started, his slippage on coursework was explained to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, Dabeet kept looking for some way to get inside the bones of the station so he might be able to find a door that could be opened mechanically, or a back way into some station administrator’s office where a real computer might allow him to create his own pathway into the system.

  Since Dabeet had no access to current station blueprints, all he had to guide him was the regular map, which showed doors and rooms and corridors. He looked for gaps, for places where life-support machinery might be housed or weapons stored. But the maps were vague enough that such places could be anywhere or everywhere.

  One thing he noticed was that each level of the station was proportionate to the one above and below. The top and bottom floors became quite narrow, because of the tubular shape of the station’s wheels, but on the regular-width levels, the plan was basically the same. Visit one level, you’ve seen them all.

  But was that really true? Access to life support would not need to be on every level. What Dabeet needed to find was a level that had a door or ceiling access that the other levels lacked. Anything important would certainly be locked. But once he found an anomalous door in the inhabited section of the station, he could then look for the same door in the unfinished part, where perhaps the same electronic safeguards weren’t yet in place.

  Wishful thinking, but it wasn’t impossible. The station had been designed for security and isolation, but nobody expected sabotage or invasion, so it was easy to say, It can wait, there’s no urgency about installing the locking system into the doors of the unfinished section.

  How, though, could Dabeet explore the entire station, the finished and unfinished parts, without being tracked? He could bluff his way through questions about slippage in classroom performance, but he didn’t know how he could plausibly answer the question, “What are you doing in this area?” Especially if it came up a second or third time in the same week.

  Had Robota Smirnova reactivated the tracking device in his clothing? Dabeet couldn’t be sure. She had put her hand on him several times—on his shoulder and even on his back, to propel him and steer him. But had she pressed in the exact center of his back, as she did when she turned off his tracker? Or did the tracker come back on automatically after a pause?

  If his tracker was still off, then that meant nobody had noticed that he wasn’t leaving any kind of trace in the student-monitoring system. No alarm had gone off. How could he find out
whether his suit was broadcasting a signal?

  He went places. This meant skipping meals, or arriving just before the mess-hall doors closed, or wolfing down his food and disappearing. He cut out of a couple of physical exercise sessions, but realized that was a bad idea—he needed to be in top shape when the raiding party came, because he could not predict what strenuous actions might be required of him. So he began skipping battleroom practices.

  At first he asked Bartolomeo Ja’s permission, but Ja’s response was so indifferent—or even annoyed at the interruption—that Dabeet got the clear impression that Ja didn’t care what Dabeet did. Ever since Dabeet stepped aside to let Zhang He demonstrate the techniques involved in building with wall blocks, Zhang had become the de facto leader of the block squad. When Dabeet did show up, he was reduced to asking, “What are we building?” or “What should I do?” because it was Zhang who was planning new structures.

  Dabeet was human—he felt a stab of resentment more than once, that nobody thought he was essential or even valuable in an art that he had discovered and developed. But he was smart enough to realize that being inconsequential was an asset, when the most important thing he could do with his time was wander the station looking for hidden rooms and unexplained doors.

  That is, it was important if there was anything to find.

  It was only a couple of days before the halfway point to the deadline that Dabeet took a break to reassess his plans. The results weren’t nothing; he may not have found anything, but he had toured every corridor available to students in the inhabited section and ascertained that there were no unexplained doors or gaps between rooms that might be filled with a service corridor or storage room.

  This in itself was strange, he knew, because he had absorbed enough of spacer culture and lore from overhearing the other kids to know that even corporate and Fleet ships and stations always carried spare parts. Spare everything, because if something went wrong there was no time to order something from a warehouse and wait for it to be delivered. The goal in every Belter and Kuiper mining ship was to have on board everything needed to replace or rebuild everything on the ship, twice—and yet still have room for consumable supplies and cargo stowage.