Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Surely some of that mindset would have been involved in planning the Lagrange-point stations. Where was all that material? Air moved through the ductwork into every room; what was pushing that air? Where was it located? Solar power was wired into every room’s lights and wall heating panels. Where were the power cables and the fiber optics? Of course they were in the walls and floors … but nobody would build such a system in space without creating complete access to every centimeter, so that nobody would have to tear out walls to get to the wiring, the piping, the air ducts.

  I’m missing something, thought Dabeet, just like when I was trying to decipher the message. Only now I can’t explain it to Zhang He, because he and I aren’t talking all that much and I don’t know how he’ll react if he knows my mission.

  The one positive outcome, so far, was this: Nobody had interfered with his wandering or asked him what business he had on teacher-only levels, or in corridors far from his own army’s barracks. That might mean that he was not being tracked, or it might mean that they knew he was wandering around and didn’t care.

  Or it might mean that Urska Kaluza was secretly allied with the raiders and wanted him to obey their instructions. Therefore, she wouldn’t allow anyone to interfere with him. Or it might mean that the security people were monitoring him very carefully, waiting to catch him in an overt act that would allow them to expel him from Fleet School.

  Expel him from Fleet School? That would be the most elegant solution, wouldn’t it! If they sent him back to Earth, he couldn’t obey his orders. He’d be valueless to them through no fault of his own.

  Unless they assumed, correctly, that he planned to get expelled and punished him—directly, or by hurting his mother.

  I don’t know enough to decide anything, he realized.

  He found himself that day in the game room, which was full of kids competing in multi-player games or locking horns with the solo machines. There were stories about how Ender Wiggin had first made a splash at Battle School by beating older boys on these machines, but Dabeet found it hard to believe that somebody as smart as Ender would waste time on children’s games.

  Yet he needed to empty his head in the hope that his unconscious mind would bring out some useful idea.

  The human brain was such a design nightmare, cobbled together from repurposed parts. What use was it to have his most productive thinking take place at a level where his conscious mind was unaware of it and incapable of retrieving it? Why couldn’t it all happen where he could see it?

  His reflexes quickly adapted to each game he tried; once he caught the movement patterns required to get past the obstacle, the game became boring. Maybe being bored with what his hands were doing was part of “emptying” his mind, but it didn’t matter. He had to quit and move on to another game.

  He went from game to game till he was in a back corner, where the less popular games were set up. He didn’t want to play those games, either—they must have had these things installed for the days when they had younger kids in the school. He almost turned away to head back to the other games, or maybe he’d just head on out of the game room and go back to exploring and finding nothing. Except that he noticed there was an air intake down near the floor, in a spot where the view was blocked by the unused games.

  There were air ducts everywhere in the station, but most of them were up high. There were a couple of them in the barracks, but there would be no way to examine them without attracting unwanted attention from the other students. This one, though, was down low, completely accessible, mostly out of sight.

  Dabeet walked over and squatted to examine it. The grillwork framing and covering the duct looked as if it had been designed to come away from the wall rather easily, but it had been retrofitted with some clamps that attached to something on the other side of the wall. There would be no pulling it away.

  There was no reason for that level of security unless someone had once used exactly this access point, and the station administrators were determined that no one would be able to do so again. Whatever the purpose for going into the ducts—sabotage? spying? hiding his collection of marbles?—it must have annoyed somebody.

  It must have been a very small person who went into this duct. Even if the grill had not been permanently fixed in place, Dabeet was already too old, too big to get in there, or accomplish anything if he did.

  “They say it was Bean.”

  Dabeet whirled so fast he lost his balance and had to catch himself with one hand to keep from toppling over from his squatting position.

  It was Monkey—Cynthia Munk—the smallest and youngest of his squad of block-builders.

  Before he could reply with the obvious question, Monkey answered it. “Legendary, I know. All the weird stories in this place seem to be ascribed to Bean.”

  “Bean is a name? A person?” It was something Dabeet had never quite believed.

  “The smallest student ever admitted to Battle School, they say. Youngest. With test scores better than Ender Wiggin’s.”

  Now Dabeet remembered having heard of Bean—in the context of test scores. His were the only benchmarks Dabeet had not surpassed. But when he saw “Bean” at the top of all the listings, he assumed it was a statistical term representing some kind of optimum.

  “They emptied all the kids out of Battle School before they set up Fleet School,” said Dabeet. “So how could Battle School kids pass on a legend to Fleet School?”

  Monkey shrugged. “Some teachers were retained. Stories have a way of not dying. I’m not saying the stories are all true. Maybe not any. But if it was teachers who passed on the Bean stories, doesn’t that mean they’re more likely to be true? When I got here, because I’m kind of small, another kid told me I should start crawling around in the ductwork like Bean. And this exact intake was pointed out to me as Bean’s first entry point into the air system.”

  To Dabeet it sounded like pure folklore. What kind of name was “Bean”? Frijole. Was the kid from Lima or something? There was no such kid.

  Except that the name was there in the test-score tables, with numbers so high that Dabeet couldn’t even aspire to equal them.

  “He used to crawl through the ductwork all over the station,” said Monkey. “Listening to the teachers talking, figuring out things that kids weren’t supposed to know.”

  “He must have been tiny,” said Dabeet. Now he realized there was no point in doubting her story openly. She enjoyed telling it, and Dabeet was in need of a friend. Well, an assistant, but the only way to get one was to turn an appropriate person into a friend.

  She was still talking. “They locked down all the air-intake covers so tightly that no kid could possibly duplicate Bean’s spying. Only who could do it anyway? Even I would get claustrophobic trying to go in there, and I’m not exactly a giant.”

  “Big enough in the battleroom,” said Dabeet, trying to say nice things.

  She looked at him quizzically. “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

  Dabeet tried to hide his consternation.

  “Oh, come on, Dabeet, you spend half a year hardly talking to anybody, not even when we were building pillars and towers and walls in the battleroom, and suddenly you’re complimenting me and not sneering at the legends of Bean? He is real, you know. His name is Julian Delphiki and he was in Ender’s jeesh in the war. It came up in the trial. Bean figured things out when Ender couldn’t. Really brilliant people figure things out because they don’t believe everything the adults tell them. When are you going to start doing that?”

  “What’s to figure out?” asked Dabeet.

  She laughed softly. “You’ve been wandering around every level, every corridor, looking for something. Trying to figure out something. Zhang He says you got a coded message after that time you got a private meeting with somebody by ansible.”

  “I didn’t know I was so obvious.”

  “It was obvious because I was looking. This whole school is full of the smartest kids in space, it’s not like we’
re dumb as houseflies. But nobody cares what you do, so it doesn’t matter,” said Monkey.

  Nobody cares. Well, he had tried to be invisible. Nobody caring what he did was pretty much the only way to disappear. “If nobody cares…”

  “I care,” said Monkey. “All this school stuff—you’re good with the book learning, bad with the body-training, really bad with the friend-making. Zhang He tried to be your friend but it’s like every word you said to him was a slap in the face.”

  Now Dabeet really was surprised. And hurt. He had tried to be nice to Zhang He right from the start.

  “No, no,” she said. “It was obvious you were trying to be nice, you’re just bad at it, so you always sounded condescending. Yes you may help me if you like, and I’ll be really patient when you screw things up. Like that.”

  “That’s not even how I felt or thought,” said Dabeet. “Zhang He never screwed anything up. I thought I was treating him like an equal.”

  Monkey rolled her eyes. “Dabeet. You’ve never met an equal. How would you know how to treat one?”

  Dabeet felt a flash of despair. He knew nobody at Conn really liked him, but he chalked it up to envy. No, Mother told him it was envy. And maybe it was. But human beings need acceptance by a community, and Dabeet didn’t have that—not at school, not in the barrio. Not even from the adults. He was never aware that this hurt him until this moment, when Monkey said it all outright. He had the normal human need to belong to a community, and he had actually believed that here in Fleet School, at least in the box-building squad that he had created, he finally had it for the first time in his life. He hadn’t thought of it this way before, but yes, it had made him happy. And that was all stripped away.

  “Come on, Dab,” said Monkey. “I didn’t realize it would hurt your feelings.”

  Dabeet heard her call him by an unthinkable nickname, and his first reaction was to lash out at her and forbid her ever to take such liberties. But he stopped himself instantly, because he realized that he was going to use the nickname as an excuse for hurting her back, rejecting her the way everyone rejected him. Only that was stupid and pointless because he needed her. And because she was being nice. She had shown him the respect and the kindness of telling him what was really going on.

  “Don’t go away,” said Monkey. “Not right now. People will see your eyes are kind of red and they’ll wonder what’s going on.”

  “I thought they didn’t notice me,” said Dabeet.

  “If you actually showed human emotion, Dab, they’d notice, believe me.”

  Dabeet brushed at his eyes with his sleeve. They came away wet. Which was really stupid. Counterproductive.

  “I know you’re really sad right now,” said Monkey, “but I’m not. I’m kind of glad, because I figured that you were actually a human boy inside. Really, really deep inside. And here you are—first time I went looking for him, and he came right out. So I’m feeling really proud of myself. That’s probably annoying but I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t trying to get through to you because I’ve got nothing to hide. If you want me to go away, I’ll go.”

  “I don’t want you to go away,” said Dabeet. He took a couple of deep breaths to clear his head and get rid of the unwelcome emotion.

  “Because you need my help,” said Monkey, “and I’m fine with that. Bacana, né? I’m eager to be part of it.”

  “Not if you can’t keep it a secret,” said Dabeet.

  “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” said Monkey. “People won’t think I’m your girlfriend or something. They really do think of me as a kind of pet and neither of us is anywhere near puberty.”

  “The secret isn’t the fact that we’re friends,” said Dabeet.

  “I’m glad that it’s a fact,” said Monkey.

  “The secret belongs to somebody else. Some ugly things are about to happen and I have to get ready without letting anybody else know.”

  “Except me,” said Monkey.

  “You’ll know what I ask you to do,” said Dabeet, “but I’m not sure I can tell you why I’m doing it.”

  “Dab, I’m really smart. In the test scores, yes, but I’m ship-smart, too, I figure out how things work, I feel it in my bones. You really think I won’t guess?”

  “You’re smart, but you’re not insane,” said Dabeet. “And my secret really is insane. So I don’t know if you’ll figure it out. But you have to promise me that you’ll keep secret the things I ask you to do to help me, and also keep secret anything you figure out or think you’ve figured out or even speculate about.”

  “I get it,” said Monkey. “I promise.”

  “Are you good at keeping secrets?”

  “I’m brilliant at not blabbing,” said Monkey, “because if you don’t learn how to not-blab on a mining ship, especially a corporate ship like the one I mostly grew up on, then pretty soon you’ve got an eight-percent kuso atmosphere and you can’t breathe that.”

  Dabeet grinned. “You sound pretty sure of that. Experience?”

  “Toilet repairs. You know, sometimes the gravity generator goes down or misdirects when you’re in the middle of your business. Not me, but a couple of little kids, both of them sick, and I was on the clean-up crew. In a hazmat suit. Because I told them I didn’t mind getting the mess out from behind the appliances, and by the end, it was true. So yes, Dab, I’ve had my face mask covered in other people’s vomit and poo and I only threw up twice inside my helmet, and both times I got it all into the spit bell so the suit could dispose of it. Well, almost all.”

  Just picturing this made Dabeet feel faintly nauseated, but because she was telling it humorously and a little bit proudly, he laughed instead of gagging. Or in addition to it. Gag-laughing.

  “Don’t choke to death,” she said.

  “I do need your help. Or I will, if I can find a way into the bones of the station.”

  Now the laughter ended. She regarded him steadily, then sat down on the floor. She patted the floor in front of her. “Sit,” she said.

  Dabeet sat.

  “My shortness is mostly in my legs, so when we sit down we’re more the same height so I don’t spend the whole conversation craning my neck to look up at you. Also, if nobody can see us then nobody’s going to come over to find out what we’re talking about.”

  It made sense.

  “I accept that you can’t tell me everything, but you’ve got to tell me something or how can I figure out how to help you?” she asked.

  Dabeet shook his head. “I’ve got to find some stuff out before you can possibly help me. There are jobs where I need another pair of hands, but before I get to those jobs—”

  “Wrong answer,” said Monkey. “Come on, Dab, don’t be such an oomay. I’m not just an extra pair of hands, I’ve got a brain. Tell me what it is you’re trying to find out. You said the bones of the station, what do you mean? What do you need to do?”

  “I’ve already tried to break out of the student and teacher computer systems but they’re both in a virtual box and the real system is inaccessible.”

  “And it’s all fingerprint- and body-heat-sensitive,” she said, “so you’re never getting in unless they appoint you to the faculty.”

  “The faculty doesn’t have access either,” said Dabeet. “I’m talking about station stuff, not Fleet School stuff—mechanical things, life-support things.”

  Her eyes got a little wider. “You don’t mess with life support, Dab,” she said. “You’re a dirtbaby, you can’t help that but it means you don’t get what it means to Inks and Miners. If anybody finds out you’re planning to mess with that, somebody’s going to try to kill you. I’m not exaggerating.”

  “Is one of them going to be you?” asked Dabeet.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Monkey. “I told you I wouldn’t tell anybody else, but that means that if you’re endangering the survival of the station, I’ll have to kill you myself. I really don’t want to do that.”

  Dabeet almost said something boastful
, like, “You’re welcome to try,” but then he realized that with his lack of agility in zero-gee—no, his lack of combat skills of any kind—she probably could kill him.

  “I see that you get it,” she said. “So now, you better tell me, really specifically, what it is you need to figure out how to do.”

  Dabeet nodded, but then held his silence for a long moment, trying to figure out how much he could tell her.

  She started to speak but he held up a finger for silence.

  And then he was ready. All his plans of telling her only bits and pieces had to be abandoned. Now that he realized how seriously Inks and Miners took the mechanicals, there was nothing he could safely tell her unless he told her everything. Except, maybe, that he sort of suggested the whole plan to the South Americans in the first place. And even then, she might not consent to helping him.

  “Nothing I tell you will sound sane,” he said, “unless I tell you pretty much everything. And it’s not going to make me sound any better, except you’ll see why I have to do it. Maybe you’ll see.”

  “Don’t describe what my reaction will be, because you don’t know,” said Monkey. “Just tell me what you can tell me, knowing I won’t tell anybody else.”

  So Dabeet told her about the kidnapping by the South Americans, the threat against his mother, the signal using the outside doors of the station.

  She listened, shaking her head, nodding gravely, all the appropriate responses as if she actually believed him—nothing like Urska Kaluza’s reaction. Of course, he hadn’t told Urska Kaluza everything. But he was pretty sure Monkey was not part of the smuggling ring, so he talked about that, too—the things that Zhang and he had found out.

  Monkey grinned. “That emossen git. I mean Zhang. I can’t believe he never breathed a word about this smuggling ring to anybody.”

  “If they knew that we knew, we’d be dead.”

  “That is an incentive to silence,” said Monkey. “But you told Robota.”