In other words, how do we keep expeditions from functioning like every real-world bureaucracy ever known? Why should we imagine that this utopian culture can ever possibly exist? Is there something about being on another planet that will automatically transform human nature? Or will the Expeditionary Fleet only choose as its expedition leaders those persons who are already eligible for sainthood? By what system will such leaders be identified, and how will we get anybody else in the expeditions to follow them?
—Teacher comment: Coming from a corporate environment, it is not surprising that this student would assume that the well-known corporate tendency toward bureaucracy and careerism would also dominate in the Expeditionary Fleet. Will counsel student on the responsibility of leaders not to succumb to bureaucratic tendencies.
—Additional teacher comment: Student immediately agreed with all my comments and criticisms. Assume student was entirely ironic in doing so, and privately mocked our entire conversation after it was over.
—Conclusion: This student continues to show remarkable leadership promise.
Monkey was eager to demonstrate on a panel in the game room, but Dabeet said no. “How many kids come in here every hour? A vent near the floor is hidden, but a whole wall coming open?”
So they made their way to an upper level that had no active barracks. The rumor was that the IF had no intention of bringing Fleet School back to the number of students it sustained when it was Battle School. There was talk about quartering soldiers in the unused barracks, or housing faculty families there, or opening some kind of advanced school, but nothing real had happened and as far as Dabeet knew, the IF had no plans for these spaces at all. What mattered now was that nobody was likely to walk past the door while they had it open.
Dabeet braced himself on the panel just to the right of the one Monkey was going to try to open. “All the ones I tried opened from the right,” she said, “but who knows?” This one fit the pattern: Monkey clambered up Dabeet’s body, stood on his shoulders, and palmed the upper-right corner of the panel next to the one he was braced on. It sprang away from the wall about ten centimeters.
Monkey pulled it open farther and then held to the top of the door, swung off of Dabeet’s shoulders, and then dropped down inside whatever space had just been revealed.
“What is it, a closet?” asked Dabeet.
“Come inside so we can close it again,” said Monkey.
“How will we see?” asked Dabeet.
“Sonar,” said Monkey. “Very quiet sonar. You don’t know how to do that? Emit high squeaks and then listen for the echo.”
It took Dabeet a moment to realize she was joking, and a moment longer to be sure that she wasn’t ridiculing him, because it never occurred to her that anybody might not know, instantly, that it was a joke. Only after he had settled his emotional response did he step inside.
Monkey reached around him and pulled the door closed, using a mechanical handle. It was pitch black inside.
Monkey squeaked. Immediately a light came on. She was grinning. No, she was laughing silently, her shoulders shaking.
Dabeet almost asked her how she knew the pitch to squeak in order to turn on the light. Before he could humiliate himself, however, he saw that her left hand was leaning on a wall near a rocker switch. She flipped it down and the place was dark again.
“On please,” said Dabeet.
“You have to squeak,” said Monkey.
“I beg you, no,” said Dabeet.
The light came on. “You have no sense of play,” she said.
“I have no love of silliness,” said Dabeet.
“Same thing,” said Monkey. She started to head around a corner.
“Wait,” said Dabeet. “You’ve seen this kind of thing before, but I haven’t.”
She waited while he looked at the six child-sized emergency suits and the two adult ones, each with a small air tank. “How long are these good for?”
“Half an hour if you hold still, fifteen minutes if you’re active,” said Monkey. “Come on, they trained you on these when you first got here.”
Only then did Dabeet realize that yes, these were just like the training suits, except grey instead of white. “Right,” he said. “What’s this other stuff?”
“I don’t know,” said Monkey. “It looks like cleaning supplies.” She indicated a shelf with plastic bottles.
Dabeet looked more closely. “If we were inclined to make explosives, these would do.”
“You are insane,” said Monkey. “These would make a poisonous smoke and one explosion could wipe out the entire school.”
“Then let’s not make one,” said Dabeet, “unless the school is already doomed. But we should also look into the chemistry and see whether we can make some kind of flash-bang explosion that doesn’t raise a poisonous smoke.”
“Dirtbabies want things to go boom.”
“Those who come against us will be dirtbabies too, most of them,” said Dabeet. “I’m not making any decisions here, I’m taking inventory. But let’s go on and see how deep this corridor runs.”
There were many alcoves and doors identical to the one through which they had entered. The corridor itself was wide enough for a supply cart, and now and then there was a door on the other side, and an occasional trap door in the floor. Dabeet tried to open one; it was too heavy to lift it far, and while he held it up, Monkey looked and told him that it only gave access to a junction of various cables and pipes. “I could crawl along under the floor, though, I think,” said Monkey. “This is a kind of invisible road, this crawlspace. Suppose we led the enemy along the corridor here, then ducked down under and made our way behind them.”
“They might guess where we’d gone.”
“They’ll send men, not children,” said Monkey. “And I’m not the only Ink or Belter who can move quickly through claustrophobic spaces, even if the gravity is switched off.”
“If we could do that,” said Dabeet, “then the children of Fleet School would have a huge advantage over dirtsiders.”
“Except you, of course,” said Monkey cheerfully.
“I don’t think I’ll be much use in any kind of battle,” said Dabeet. Admitting it out loud was painful but it could not be denied. “Unless it comes down to making new walls and structures in a battleroom, and Zhang He is now the master of that.”
“Not really,” said Monkey. “Everyone knows that you were best at it, the one who could envision new structures and their uses in battle. But Zhang He won their hearts as well as their respect. If only you were likable.”
If only. But Dabeet answered, “We don’t know how the battle will work out, if there’s a battle at all. But your plan is a good one, if opportunity presents itself, so everyone should know about it, in case you aren’t where it’s needed.”
For about the fifteenth time, Monkey stopped moving farther along the corridor and turned around to face Dabeet, looking around him and over him as if she were wishing for someone more interesting to talk to.
“Why do you keep doing that?” asked Dabeet. “Can’t you concentrate on exploring this place?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” said Monkey.
“I mean that dancing around and facing every which way,” said Dabeet.
She shook her head. “Turn around and look back,” she said.
She moved past him and pointed back the way they had come. Because of the curve of the station, the floor rose up like a hill, so that only the first two alcoves were visible. “Do you know how far we’ve come?”
“Well, a lot farther than I can see,” he said.
“This is the fourteenth doorway, just behind us.”
“You’ve been counting?”
“Counting is unreliable,” she said. “Too easy to lose concentration. All numbers sound right and familiar, by the time you’re our age. We’ve counted them all so many times. Look at the bottom shelf.”
Dabeet looked. “What am I supposed to see?”
“Who ca
res what you’re supposed to see,” said Monkey. “This isn’t a test made up by some teacher. What do you see?”
“Plastic bottles on all the shelves.”
Monkey looked at his face. Waiting.
“I still see plastic bottles. And again, plastic bottles. Nothing’s changing, Cynthia Munk. What am I missing?”
She just smiled benignly.
“You say you’re not a teacher, but you’re acting like one.”
“I didn’t say that I wasn’t teaching you, only that I hadn’t made up a test for you. I marked our path and kept the count. It’s plainly visible. I’ve given you the answer now, so look and see.”
Dabeet saw that on the bottom shelf in the nearest alcove, the second bottle on the outside edge of the shelf was a little bit pushed in, away from the edge. No more than a centimeter’s difference. Then he looked at the farther alcove, and it was the front bottle that had been pushed in. “Your dancing involved pushing in the bottles. Did you just alternate the front and back ones?”
“And the second shelf up, the third shelf up. That gives me six places to mark. Every sixth place, when I push in the second bottle on the third shelf, I also push in a lower bottle. You can’t see those because the sixth and twelfth alcoves aren’t visible from here, but no matter which one I come to, I can see which group of six I’m at, and which member of that group of six, counting from our starting point.”
Dabeet knew then that her dancing around had never been pointless or exuberant. Except it had been exuberant, which made him wonder if she had been mocking him, marking their trail like this without telling him, while making herself look silly and flighty in order to conceal what she was doing.
“So all the dancing was to keep me from noticing?”
“You kept you from noticing,” she said. “My movements were all visible. But you thought you knew that they were meaningless, so you got annoyed instead of catching on.”
“So you weren’t testing me. You were making sure I failed the test.”
“Was I?” she asked. “What an ugly world you live in, filled with enemies.” She waved back at the marked alcoves. “Why do you think I pushed them in so slightly. I was trying for about a centimeter.”
“So that if some custodian comes along here, he won’t feel obliged to straighten the shelves.”
“Custodians might straighten them anyway—you can’t expect these to last forever—but yes, that’s right. See? I’m not trying to make you fail, I’m trying to help you see how you keep track of a long series of identical locations. So we’re coming up on the next one. You code it.”
Dabeet started moving farther along the corridor. “The next one will be second shelf, front bottle, in a centimeter.”
“Maybe,” said Monkey.
“Come on,” said Dabeet, growing impatient and embarrassed. “Why can’t you just answer me?”
She stopped. He realized that the next alcove didn’t have two ranks of bottles on the second shelf. Only the back one. So there was no way to continue the marking.
“Oh,” said Dabeet.
“What will we do?”
Dabeet stopped, reached for the next bottle in from the edge, and slid it over to fill the position of the missing bottle. Then he pushed it a centimeter back. He looked at her for approval.
She looked back at him.
“You know more than me,” said Dabeet. “Tell me if that’s the right move.”
“You have a brain of your own. Tell me if that’s the right move.”
“It’s the same chemical, so any custodian coming along won’t think it’s out of place. Or at least not completely out of place.”
She nodded. And waited.
“But the custodian might always take bottles from the outside edge and work inward. So having a gap between the edge bottle that we’re using as a marker and the next one in will register as a mistake. The custodian will move it back.”
“Erasing our marking,” said Monkey. She waited.
Dabeet thought a moment more. “The custodian will also wonder who came in here and messed up the stacks. She’ll comment on it to somebody. Or look up some duty roster and find out that officially nobody was in here. And she’ll wonder.”
Monkey grinned. “What will other people expect to see?” she said. “If you’re doing an official job, it won’t matter. But if you’re a couple of sneaks like us, then it puts our ability to get into the service corridors at risk.”
Dabeet pushed the bottle he had moved back into its original position.
“Now our marker is gone, but the custodian won’t be surprised.”
“Our marker isn’t gone,” said Dabeet. “We’ll remember that in position fifteen, there was no bottle, but that still means that in exactly the right position, the bottle isn’t flush on the outside edge.”
“Except that we won’t think ‘fifteen,’” said Monkey. “We’ll think position three, three. Third group of six, third alcove.”
“Six plus six plus three,” said Dabeet. “Fifteen.”
“You think inside your own system, and the memories sustain each other.”
“Now you sound like a Jesuit,” he said.
“Mansions of memory,” she said. “Exactly. The system works, so stay inside it.”
“How many of these are there going to be?” he asked.
“You’ve walked all the corridors on every level of this wheel. You tell me.”
“I wasn’t counting,” said Dabeet.
“Of course you were,” said Monkey, “or you wouldn’t have known whether you had checked the whole length of the corridor, all the way around the wheel.”
Dabeet thought for a moment. “I just remembered the colors of the barracks I started at, and kept going till I reached those colors again. Green green brown, and keep on till I get to green green brown.”
Monkey shook her head. “That’s what you thought you were doing,” she said. “But you have a number.”
Dabeet thought a little more. The colors had a pattern. Green green brown was followed by green brown brown, then brown brown yellow, then brown yellow yellow, then … “Each color appears on three adjacent doors. There were sixteen colors. So three times—”
“Two times,” she corrected him.
Embarrassed, he saw his mistake at once. “Each one overlaps with the two adjacent colors, so it’s two times sixteen to get a total of thirty-two barracks, and therefore thirty-two of these alcove entrances.”
Monkey still waited.
“Come on, that’s right.”
“Mess hall,” she said.
Dabeet turned his face to the wall and leaned his forehead on it. “How stupid do I have to show myself to be?”
“One mess hall, with its kitchen,” said Monkey. “And an upshaft and a downshaft.”
“We should have hit a shaft already,” said Dabeet.
“What would that look like?” she asked.
Dabeet thought about it. “Nothing. It would just be a longer space between alcoves.”
Monkey grinned. “Except that maybe that was where we had doors going out the other side.”
“Did I see anything?”
“I don’t know. You were looking so carefully and methodically that I assumed you were seeing what you looked at.”
“But not understanding it.”
Monkey rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t punish yourself by standing with your head against the wall. You were thinking like a dirtbaby, that’s all. You were expecting that you’d see unusual things that would call attention to themselves. But inside a spaceship—which is all a space station is—things get repeated and nothing looks unusual because spaceships are artificial. They don’t have scenery. Well they do, but nothing is designed to be scenery, so nothing will just happen to stick out.”
“I did wonder where those right-hand doors led,” said Dabeet.
“What was your conclusion?”
“I wondered if there were structures on that side of the wheel. Maybe
ladderways going up and down from one level to another, so you didn’t have to go all the way to a shaft to change levels.”
“That sounds about right,” said Monkey.
“Did you know that? Did you think of that?”
“Is this a competition?” asked Monkey. “Does it matter whether I thought of it? You thought of it, and you told me, so now we’re both thinking of it.”
“I have to know if I—”
“You have to know if you thought of anything I didn’t think of? I, who grew up in spaceships, crawling around in service corridors because I was small and agile and smart and observant enough to report on any structural damage or other anomalies that might be symptoms of something dangerous to the ship? Compared to you, whose parents called the building superintendent when the plumbing didn’t work?”
“We did our own repairs whenever we could. I learned how plumbing works and electricity and I fixed things.”
“That’s good,” said Monkey. “Not useful here, but good. If we’re ever on Earth and have a leaky toilet, I’ll defer to your expertise.”
“I can’t help where I was born.”
“I know that, and I don’t criticize you for it,” said Monkey. “Though if you were a friend, I could tease you about it.”
“If you were a friend, you wouldn’t want to.”
“If you had ever had a friend, you’d know how idiotic that statement is. The way you know you have a friend is, they spill a little wind from your sails, when you’re running before the wind. And then tighten your lashings when you’ve been a little storm-whipped. And yes, we study ocean sailing lore like crazy in space because it makes us feel as if we’re still doing something human.”
“I came from a place where I always did well,” said Dabeet. “You have to understand that.”
“No I don’t,” said Monkey. “Because it isn’t true.”
Dabeet now felt anger rise hot into his neck and face. “You don’t know anything about my life before Fleet School.”
Children of the Fleet Page 22
