Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Even when the rumor flew through the school that the great Hyrum Graff was visiting, the man who had been put on trial for his supposed crimes in the way he educated Ender Wiggin in Battle School, Dabeet meant to change his routine not a whit.

  Sure enough, the stout man rumored to be Graff himself was brought into the classroom, ostensibly because it was a “typical example” of a Conn classroom; but instead of counting across and down the rows, Graff’s eyes went immediately to Dabeet.

  It was too late to pretend that he had not seen that he was seen. So Dabeet flashed the Graffish man his best Indo-Malay smile, and only then ducked his head modestly and then focused again on the teacher.

  Even as he did these things, Dabeet thought: This is a not a man who needs to see me as unthreatening. This is a man who needs to see me as the most dangerous creature in the state of Indiana. I should have met his gaze, smiled, and then frozen the smile and stared at him unblinking, the smile unwavering, until he left.

  I did as I did, he told himself. Let Graff—if it was Graff—make of it whatever he wants.

  2

  Student Name: Dabeet Ochoa

  Assignment: Fable in Your Own Words

  Teacher Response: An interesting response to the Italian story of Pinocchio (Pine-eyes), with the Baby Jesus as the puppet. However, the fable seems incomplete to me. Was that the ending you intended? Or is there more to the story? Ending the story where you do, it sounds as if the purpose of this secret puppet was entirely fulfilled by its achievement of speech. Doesn’t it matter what else the Baby-Jesus puppet might have to say? Is the puppet capable of independent thought? Does it think like a baby, or like a wooden puppet, or like a god-made-flesh?

  Student Response: Here is the rest of the story:

  The nun Geppetto attached strings and made the fully articulated Baby Jesus crawl and then walk and then run and then dance. The Baby Jesus laughed with joy at each new movement, even as Geppetto exhausted herself with learning the intricate hand movements that allowed the Baby Jesus to carry out his lifelike activities.

  Because this Baby Jesus was not part of the play, and no one was quite aware of what Geppetto had been carving, there were no scheduled rehearsals and he was never on a stage. So the Baby Jesus did not seem to understand the reason for limitations. “Why did you not come to me when the sun was shining?” asked the Baby Jesus. “Why do you not take me out into the courtyard? Why can’t I go down to the village?”

  “I had to work in the garden while the sun shone.”

  “It’s winter and nothing is growing.”

  “The turnips and carrots are in the ground, and I must prepare the soil for next year’s seeds. Also, the geese are gleaning the field so we and the poor who eat at our table can get all the food value from the fallen grain when we roast the geese at Christmas.”

  “Then take me into the garden with you,” said Baby Jesus.

  “How can I do my work while my hands are making you walk and run and dance? Or how can I make you move while my hands are busy with my work?”

  “Take me down into the village, then. I hear laughter from the children there, even over the walls of this nunnery.”

  “I am not one of the sisters who is allowed to go into the village.”

  “Then send me with one of the sisters who is allowed.”

  “They must not know that you exist, because I did not have permission to make you.”

  “But now that I exist, why should I be forbidden to play among the other children?” asked the Baby Jesus.

  “The children would watch you in a show,” said Geppetto, “but they can’t play with you. They’d tangle your strings and pull on your limbs and break or bend your hinges so you didn’t work right anymore. Children can be rough and brutal, and you wouldn’t like how they treated you.”

  “I love the sound of their laughter,” said Baby Jesus, “and I need to be one of them.”

  “That is not in my power.”

  “Then as long as I belong to you, and you keep me secret solely in order to protect yourself, I am not free.”

  To Geppetto this was a terrible accusation because she knew that it was true. She had made this puppet to satisfy her own vanity, but she had pretended that she made it to honor God. She begged for it to have the power of speech, but for her own sake, not for the sake of the puppet. Did I create this in order to keep it as my prisoner? As my slave?

  What should I do with this pretended Baby Jesus? she prayed to God.

  But the only answer she heard in her heart was, How can you call it a pretended Baby Jesus, when it speaks to you like a real child?

  “Cut my strings,” said Baby Jesus whenever she took him from his hiding place. “Set me free among the children.”

  “Without your strings you cannot move at all,” said Geppetto.

  “Without my strings I cannot move under your control,” said Baby Jesus. “It is your control that you don’t want to lose. My freedom means nothing to you.”

  “There is no freedom if you can’t act on your own decisions,” said Geppetto.

  “There’s no freedom when you hold my strings,” said Baby Jesus.

  Then came the day when the Boss Nun found the hiding place of the Baby Jesus. Naturally the Baby Jesus said nothing to the Boss Nun, or if he did, she could not hear. When Geppetto came in from the garden, the Boss Nun showed her the puppet and said, “I do not remember this puppet in the Christmas play.”

  Then Sister Geppetto confessed all, and, weeping, begged the Boss Nun to tell her how she could earn forgiveness.

  “The workmanship of this puppet is the best of all your carving,” said the Boss Nun. “All the other puppets were used in a play to delight the people, excite their wonder at the story of Christ, and thus glorify God. What was the purpose of this puppet?”

  “To satisfy my own vanity, and to be the child that I will never have.”

  “So this puppet represents worldly pride and your last doubts about your vocation as a nun?” asked the Boss Nun.

  “I fear that it is so.”

  “Then let us set you free from that fear,” said the Boss Nun. “Yet I cannot bear the thought of burning something so beautifully made.”

  “Oh, I beg you not to burn it, for that would be like burning my own child. Don’t you know that I have heard this baby’s voice inside my head? He begs me to set him free and let him play with the children.”

  “Then that is what you must do,” said the Boss Nun.

  That very night, the Boss Nun led Sister Geppetto to the town square. At this hour, no one was there. Geppetto used her carving knife to cut all the strings, one by one. Then she laid the Baby Jesus beside the well at the center of the square.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Baby Jesus.

  “This will not end well for you,” said Sister Geppetto.

  The Boss Nun had not heard him. “Did he speak to you?”

  “He thanked me for his freedom.”

  “Then the words you told him are the words God could say to all humankind, were it not for the sacrifice of his Only Begotten.”

  Geppetto kissed the forehead of the inert Baby Jesus and wept as the Boss Nun took her back inside the convent.

  The next night, the Boss Nun took her back to the square. They walked all around the square but did not see the Baby Jesus puppet, until finally they stopped at the town’s well in the middle and Geppetto heard the Baby Jesus calling out to her.

  “Oh I am broken!” he cried. “Tie a string to me and raise me out of here!”

  “He’s at the bottom of the well,” said Sister Geppetto. “And he’s broken.”

  “You hear his voice?” asked the Boss Nun. “You believe this?”

  “He never lied to me,” said Geppetto.

  The Boss Nun looked as if she had much to say, but at last all she did was turn the crank and raise up the bucket full of water. The puppet was not in the bucket.

  “Please let me try again,” said Geppetto. “We only need to
get the bucket under him. He’s wooden, so he must be floating.”

  So patient and understanding was the Boss Nun that she stayed with Sister Geppetto until she raised up the Baby Jesus on the third try. All the puppet’s metal joints were bent, though none had fully come apart; one wooden arm was broken, but the cloth of the shirt plus a few splinters held it in place.

  “And still he speaks to you?” asked the Boss Nun doubtfully, as she examined the puppet to assess the damage.

  “He weeps in pain,” said Sister Geppetto, “and he also says that freedom is a strange gift, because without strings he had no power even to protect himself.”

  “Nor have any of us,” said the Boss Nun. “Have you also learned this lesson?”

  “I have learned that when I do not obey the rule of my order, I have no power to do good, but only power to do harm, even when I meant it to be good.”

  “Then this puppet of Baby Jesus has done its work and completed its mission in your life. I will pray for the Spirit of God to cease quickening this puppet so you no longer hear its voice. But I will let you keep this wooden body as a reminder of all you learned.”

  All I learned, thought Sister Geppetto, and all I loved, for this Baby Jesus was the god of my idolatry and all that I will ever love so completely in my life.

  Seventy-five years later, having served long years as the Boss Nun herself, Sister Geppetto died as a feeble old woman and, according to instructions that she left, a certain old broken puppet was laid beside her body in the coffin when it was lowered into the ground. Only then did anyone remember that yes, it was Sister Geppetto who carved the puppets that were used in the Christmas pageant every year. But as for this puppet, which had never been a part of the show, no one knew what it had been made for, or why it was broken, or why she had kept it without ever repairing it.

  Five women from neighboring apartments rushed to the Ochoa apartment to tell them that a car from the International Fleet had stopped in front of the building. “The man asked if you lived here!” they reported, and soon variants also were said: “The man asked about Dabeet.” “The man is here to take Dabeet to Fleet School.”

  Dabeet knew that it was barely possible that the man had spoken Mother’s name, and that all the rest was people leaping to conclusions and telling Mother what they knew she wanted to hear.

  By the time Hyrum Graff, Minister of Colonization, came to their door, he was out of breath, and there was nowhere in the apartment for him to sit, because neighbors were occupying every surface and leaning against all the open wall space.

  Graff stood leaning on the doorframe, a younger man in a much crisper uniform standing near him. “Four flights is a long way up for a fat old man,” said Graff.

  Dabeet said nothing.

  Mother said nothing.

  “I need to talk to Dabeet Ochoa alone,” said Graff.

  After a few moments, everybody got up and filed out of the apartment. When no one was left but Dabeet and Mother, Graff shook his head. “Dabeet Ochoa. Alone.”

  “He may not be interviewed outside the presence of his parents.”

  “You know the law,” said Graff. “Insist on it, and I’ll leave right now. If you want me to stay, then you leave.” He looked at his watch.

  Mother got up and left the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

  Graff sat down on the tallest chair, the one with sturdy arms. He sighed as he lowered himself into it. “I have to sit in a chair I have some hope of getting up out of without assistance,” he said.

  Dabeet simply looked at him. He had not expected Graff to come.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” asked Graff.

  “I do not, sir,” said Dabeet.

  “But you have a guess?”

  “If you were still head of Battle School, I would imagine you had come to tell me that I was accepted, or to give me some kind of final test to see if I were qualified.”

  “But I am now Minister of Colonization,” said Graff.

  “That means that you’re really the boss of the International Fleet,” said Dabeet.

  “Oh, no, that’s far from the truth. The International Fleet is ready to fight an interstellar war at any time, and I play no part in war readiness and training.”

  “Neither does Battle School,” said Dabeet.

  “We are no longer drafting the brightest potential commanders from among Earth’s children, because there is no present enemy and the nations have withdrawn our authority to take such actions,” said Graff.

  “The IF still takes volunteers,” said Dabeet.

  “As adults, age seventeen and above. All volunteers are then screened for command potential. You still have … six years left?”

  “Battle School has been repurposed as Fleet School,” said Dabeet.

  “It’s a very different school now,” said Graff. “We aren’t really training soldiers there anymore.”

  “Commanders, though.”

  “Commanders of exploratory, recon, outpost, and colonizing missions. A very different set of tasks than we require of war leaders.”

  “But a nearly identical set of qualifications,” said Dabeet. He did not say what they both knew: that command of an exploration, reconnaissance, outpost, or colonization mission required exactly the skill set of a military commander—and more.

  “Less centered on killing,” said Graff.

  “You only recruit among the children of the Fleet,” said Dabeet.

  “And here you are, a boy without a birth certificate, but making claims based on … what?”

  “My mother’s word,” said Dabeet.

  “Do you believe your mother?”

  “I neither believe nor disbelieve,” said Dabeet. “I have submitted my DNA to be tested against the IF rolls. Either I’m the son of an IF soldier or I’m not. You know the answer, and I don’t.”

  “Your mother does, or thinks she does,” said Graff.

  “What I know is that the Minister of Colonization has come to visit a poor eleven-year-old Venezuelan immigrant to the United States in his mother’s humble apartment, presumably in response to either my mother’s petitions, if she ever really made them, or my own repeated submission of my test results and my DNA through every channel I could find.”

  “Most of those channels having nothing to do with admissions to the IF or Fleet School or … anything.”

  “My test scores are very, very good,” said Dabeet. “I thought they might make their own channels.”

  “They did,” said Graff. “Which is why every single one of your submissions has been brought to my attention, regardless of the channel you submitted it through.”

  “A year of silence,” said Dabeet. “And now … you.”

  “If you couldn’t bear a year of silence,” said Graff, “what possible use could we make of you? Every voyage our ministry undertakes is at least thirty years long.”

  Dabeet rolled his eyes. “I know about relativity. Nobody will experience all thirty years.”

  Graff smiled. “But everybody they leave behind will be at least sixty years’ worth of old or dead by the time they get back. If they ever do.”

  It was fine to discuss abstractions, but Dabeet saw that Graff was steering around the questions that mattered right now. “What about my mother’s petitions?”

  “What you’re really asking is whether your mother actually made those petitions. What you’re asking is if she ever really meant for you to go into space.”

  “I’m asking about whether you received any petitions from my mother.”

  Graff nodded. “I know what you’re asking and what you’re not asking, what you don’t know and what you do know.”

  “But you’re not answering.”

  “You’re an eleven-year-old boy.”

  “Nearly twelve. I’m vastly more mature than I was a year ago.” Dabeet hoped that the irony would make Graff smile.

  It didn’t. “Why should I provide you with information that your mother hasn’t given yo
u?”

  Dabeet did not believe there was any such information. “Because you’re a man of integrity who respects the wisdom of children,” said Dabeet.

  “And you would know this because…”

  “I read the trial transcripts,” said Dabeet.

  “Ah, yes, my court-martial for causing the deaths of two children and abusing countless others.”

  “There was a war. We won. As a direct result of your training methods.”

  “I heard the verdict,” said Graff. “I believe the court-martial ended with my receiving a medal, a commendation, a reprimand, a suspended sentence, and an honorable discharge from the International Fleet.”

  “And an immediate appointment by the Hegemon, the Polemarch, and the Strategos as Minister of Colonization, with an enormous budget and the authority to construct exploratory, reconnaissance, outpost, and colonization ships,” said Dabeet. “‘With Battle School placed under the Ministry of Colonization to serve as a preparatory school for children of the Fleet who showed promise as future commanders of such ships and expeditions.’”

  “Word for word,” said Graff. “Demonstrating that your ability to memorize and retain is remarkable.”

  “I don’t care who my father is, Minister. I don’t care if he’s still in the Fleet, denying he ever slept with a native girl, or if he harvested bananas on a plantation and was stung by a dozen tarantulas and died an agonizing death.”

  “You just want to get into Fleet School.”

  “There’s no law against a child of Earth being admitted to Fleet School.”

  “There’s also no budget to pay for lifting some worthless piece of human cargo to a place where he cannot possibly benefit any nation on Earth.”

  “Give me a scholarship,” said Dabeet. “You can’t have an oversupply of children as qualified as I am.”