Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Dabeet was about to answer, but realized that anything he said would be speaking, and therefore would prove the aptness of Oddson’s warning. So he sat down.

  “Press your hand on the back wall and your locker opens,” said Oddson. “Don’t expect any privacy here—anybody’s hand opens your locker.”

  Dabeet refrained from pointing out that the word “locker” was clearly misapplied in this situation. He pressed the back wall, the locker popped open, and there was a holodesk.

  “Is this mine?” he asked.

  “Was it in your locker?” asked a nearby boy, his voice sarcastic enough that Dabeet got the point.

  “How do I log in?” asked Dabeet.

  Oddson answered before any sarcastic boys could do it. “The holodesk already knows who you are. The desks are completely interchangeable. Whatever you create on one desk will be available on any other. Anything you create will be looked at by monitoring software and, whenever they feel like it, by teachers and administrators. But no other students can read your files. That’s all the privacy you get.”

  Generous, thought Dabeet. But he had had no privacy at Conn either. Until his abduction and his deal with his kidnappers, the only privacy that mattered was keeping things from Mother.

  After Oddson left the barracks, Dabeet familiarized himself with his desk, but that only took a small fraction of his attention, especially since it didn’t matter yet whether he did things wrong and had to do them over. What mattered was the other boys. If he was going to make this work, he had to figure out how to work with other children. And even though Conn had been a school for the gifted, Dabeet could not be sure that Fleet School was not composed of students who were far more intelligent; perhaps a few who were Dabeet’s equals. Perhaps one, or several, or many, were cleverer than he.

  After the first half hour, Dabeet reached the conclusion that if he had peers at this school, they were not in this particular barracks, though one or two showed promise. What surprised him, after having pored over the testimony and documents in the courts-martial of Graff and others who had supervised Battle School, was that these children did not seem to be obsessed with victory in the battleroom. They did not seem to form a single cohesive unit at all. They were not a team, much less an army.

  Piecing together bits and pieces of information, he realized that the squad was divided into several groups. First, there were the “True Children”—the offspring of IF officers and soldiers. This group was further subdivided among the “Veterans,” who had at least one parent who was active duty in space during the war, and the “Onlookers,” whose parents were commissioned or enlisted, but stationed on Earth or Luna.

  This seemed absurd to Dabeet, because anyone stationed in the solar system was an Onlooker, except the children in Ender Wiggin’s jeesh, who directed the operations of the real fleets many lightyears away. Yet the three children here who had an ancestor in one of the actual combat fleets were called “grandchildren,” because their IF relative had left after the Second Formic War several generations before. Apparently it wasn’t just about where your parent served, but also about how many generations you were removed from the pertinent forebear.

  The True Children all carried themselves as if they bore special authority or status, despite the pecking order among them. But the other kids were not at all deferent to them. One group was called “Inks,” which, Dabeet learned from a quick inquiry on his desk, was derived from the American abbreviation for a corporation: “inc.” These children had parents who worked for the big multinational corporations that owned all the best real estate in the Asteroid Belt and on Mars and the various moons that had stations.

  Then there were the “Miners”—or, as they called themselves, the “Freeborn,” whose families worked mostly in the Kuiper Belt as independent asteroid hunters. They were generally poor, compared to corporate families, but they had been crucial in the first two Formic Wars and had been granted full equality with the corporate and Fleet families by treaty after the Second Formic War.

  Even within this lowest-status group, there were the children of the “Great” families—the rich, multi-ship free mining clans—and of the “Brave” families—the free mining families who had been most prominent in the first two Formic Wars, either by suffering terrible casualties or by astonishing feats of navigation and derring-do. There were only two of the Brave among the Freeborn, and they barely spoke to each other, since one of them, Delgado, did not believe that the other’s ancestors had done anything noteworthy in the earlier combat.

  How could any of these children be classified as smart, or even educable? These meaningless distinctions only kept them from forming anything like a real army. Even Ender himself could not have made anything out of them, because it was clear they cared more about maintaining status derived from their parents’ positions than about anything they might accomplish here.

  But Dabeet quickly learned that there was one other group, with only one member: “Dirt.” Because he was directly from Earth, and had never even been in zero-gee until yesterday, he was the most worthless person there.

  Which made him amazingly valuable to them all, because as long as he was on the bottom, everybody else could look down on him. They didn’t persecute him, they mostly shunned him, except for those who, with exaggerated patience, answered his questions. Even when he managed to keep one of them engaged in conversation for more than a single answer, it was clear that they were being polite to him and nothing more. They got away as quickly as they could.

  Dabeet had hoped to find a mentor in the group, someone who’d take pity on his plight and help speed up his learning process. Or if compassion failed, someone who would realize that this army’s place in the standings would depend on bringing Dabeet up to snuff as quickly as possible.

  Here’s how that went.

  “I’ll need some help learning how to navigate and maneuver in zero-gee.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “You’ve been doing it all your lives. I’m going to be terrible at it.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Don’t you care that I’ll damage your place in the standings?”

  “Standings?” The boy—a Miner—laughed out loud and repeated what Dabeet had said.

  “The war’s over,” said another boy. “This isn’t Battle School. We don’t care about the standings.”

  “Then why do they still have battles?” asked Dabeet.

  “Because teachers be crazy,” said a Veteran.

  “Physical exercise,” said an Ink.

  “Because it’s fun,” said Cabeza.

  “Listen,” said Delgado, asserting a superiority over everyone that only he recognized, “nobody can teach you to navigate in zero-gee. You just do it. That’s what the battleroom is for. You can make stupid baby mistakes and you don’t drift off into space and get lost. So go in, fly around, make a kintama of yourself, and learn what you learn. It’s what we all did.”

  “As little children,” said Dabeet.

  “We didn’t make you do something as dumb as getting born on Earth,” said Timeon.

  End of discussion. He was on his own.

  So much for trying not to be the loner that Graff had accused him of being. As far as Dabeet could see, he was the most cooperative of the whole group.

  Or were they testing him?

  No. The teachers might test him, but these kids really were as shortsighted and narrow-minded as they seemed.

  And if he hadn’t gotten the idea already that the battleroom combats weren’t all that important, Oddson told him not to go to practices in the battleroom until he was fully up to speed on his coursework. “We have to know where you are in the curriculum.”

  So when the other kids went to the battleroom, Dabeet sat or lay on his bunk and read, taking little self-tests on the computer. He had no control over the testing, and had no idea what level he was revealing himself to be at. The tests were ludicrously simple at first, but finally got hard enough that he
was actually having to think and work things out in his mind before writing.

  And then Oddson came to him and told him the testing was over. “Here’s your flash suit. Practice putting it on and taking it off until you can do it with your eyes closed.”

  “What did all these tests reveal?”

  “That you’re almost as smart as you think you are,” said Oddson.

  Dabeet did not say anything like “I could have told you that,” because he recognized the thinly veiled insult and the challenge in Oddson’s words.

  “Look at you, trying not to gloat,” said Oddson. “I’ve heard of people who could strut sitting down, but you can do a victory dance without even twitching.”

  “Victory dances,” said Dabeet, “are apparently in the eye of the beholder.”

  “You’ll attend classes, but everybody does work at their own level on their own desk. Just don’t expect the teacher to waste the whole class’s time by lecturing to you.”

  That far ahead of everybody. Dabeet was justifiably proud of his self-education. Though some of his ability had been honed by the handful of good teachers at Conn.

  “When I’ve mastered putting on clothes and taking them off,” said Dabeet, “could you explain why I’m going to waste my time trying to play games with this group?”

  “Ah, there it is, the superiority complex I was warned about.”

  “I’m not superior to anybody,” said Dabeet. “When it comes to the battleroom, I’m going to be like a snail clinging to the wall and leaving a slime trail. And even if I could fly like the others, so what? They aren’t an army. They’re barely a committee.”

  Then Dabeet proceeded to explain his observations about the groups that the children were divided into and how it made cohesive action impossible.

  “Very good observations,” said Oddson.

  “They weren’t observations, they were criticisms.”

  “You can hardly blame the children for divisions that affect the whole IF and everybody else who isn’t on Earth or Luna.”

  “I don’t blame anybody. Well, no, I do blame the administration and teachers at this school for tolerating this social situation. It must be completely counterproductive and yet you let it go on this way.”

  “We do,” said Oddson. “So now that you’ve pointed out our culpability, I eagerly await your plan of action.”

  “Why should I have a plan? I’m a child.”

  “If you don’t have a plan, then your criticisms are just blather.”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to reform the way teaching is done at this school?”

  “You don’t know anything about teaching, though you’re a bit of a whiz at learning. So … learn what’s wrong with this school, learn it so deeply and well that you can fix it. Then we’ll all know how to do it, and Fleet School will be better from then on, all because a dirtboy named Dabeet Ochoa was allowed to come from Earth into space to save us.”

  Then Dabeet realized that Oddson was simply restating Graff’s original challenges. “What qualities would make a good leader of an expedition?” Obviously this group was not ready to accomplish anything as a team, and so Dabeet’s challenge was to somehow make a team out of them. Without even a shred of authority, without getting respect from any of the other children, Dabeet’s challenge was to make a team out of these kids.

  Had they deliberately let a team succumb to all these prejudices and divisions solely to pose a challenge for him? Was this all put together as a test for Dabeet?

  No, that was solipsism, the idea that the whole world was set up solely for his benefit. This army was real, its problems were real, and Dabeet had been given his assignment—to reshape the children until they became a team.

  He couldn’t possibly tell anybody else what to do. He couldn’t even make suggestions—he was already being treated with disdain, but if he uttered the criticisms that every suggestion was bound to imply, he would be even more isolated, treated with hostility rather than mere contempt.

  He would have to do it without seeming to do anything at all.

  Maybe Ender Wiggin could have done it. But Dabeet was not a natural leader of anything.

  They’re setting me up to fail.

  Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. But I’m going to work hard at learning to fly in zero-gee without puking or humiliating myself, and by then maybe I’ll have an idea of how to influence people who despise me already for things completely beyond my control.

  Somehow, I’ve got to become the kind of person that every kid in this army will want to follow.

  He laughed aloud in his bunk that night, thinking about his impossible dilemma. Other boys, hearing him, were sure that he was crying himself to sleep. “Misses his mommy,” one boy muttered—loudly and clearly enough to be sure Dabeet heard him.

  “I do miss her,” Dabeet said, loud enough to be heard by just as many people.

  “Don’t miss your father, though,” said another.

  “I’ve missed him my whole life,” said Dabeet. “But I’ve never shed a tear for either of them.”

  This was not actually true, but it didn’t matter, because there was no more response from anybody. He hadn’t silenced them with his comment. They just didn’t care enough to say anything more.

  7

  3. What are the most important problems the IF has been required to solve since the end of the Formic Wars?

  There is no honest way to answer this question in the terms given, because it begs the question. We have no evidence, at least insofar as the public has been informed, that the Formic Wars are over.

  We have seen the vids of the destruction of the presumptive Formic home world, and we have seen the vids of Formic warriors and workers collapsing and dying of their own accord, purportedly at the same moment that all the hive queens died on that home world.

  However, since that planet is unable to provide us with an archaeological or fossil record demonstrating that it was the world on which the Formics evolved, this cannot be more than a supposition. Nor have we evidence that the inhabited worlds we invaded and seized were all the settled Formic worlds.

  More to the point, it would be at least irresponsible and quite possibly insane to assume that the Formics did not have other colonizing expeditions underway at the time of Ender Wiggin’s glorious victory. The expedition that came to our solar system and was defeated finally by Mazer Rackham’s daring victory at the end of the Second Formic War had its own hive queen. Presumably other such expeditions would also have hive queens, and those hive queens would not have been destroyed when the “home world” smithereened.

  Nor can we discount the possibility—or probability—that the Formics had launched a war fleet at least as terrible as our own, which cannot be detected yet because they are still traveling at a pace very close to lightspeed. We will only detect them when they decelerate.

  So the biggest problem the IF had and has to deal with is the fact that most of the human race believes that the Formic threat has been completely extinguished, whereas we do not and cannot know that any such thing is true. We may be facing the most dire threat of all, potentially beginning at this instant or any other instant in the future. Since the Formics communicate mind to mind, they write nothing down. They make no maps. We cannot possibly have discovered their plans. It is insane for any student of military history to assume that because we have not detected an enemy fleet, it does not exist.

  Yet even though we might face a savagely vengeful Formic armada at any moment, the government structures on Earth and Luna that provided funding and personnel for the International Fleet for half a century have now been allowed to lapse.

  From this I believe we may conclude several things:

  1.  The IF has conclusive evidence of the non-existence of any Formic war fleets or colonial expeditions, so the claimed certainty that no Formics remain alive anywhere is actually a certainty, or

  2.  The IF has prepared such a massive and technologically advanced fleet, which now p
atrols the outskirts of the solar system, that no matter where a Formic armada assailed us, we could respond and give reliable protection to Earth, Luna, and all the important outposts of humanity in the solar system. This huge fleet is so capable that the Ministry of Colonization can make a great show of converting former warships into colonizing and exploratory ships in order to colonize the former Formic planets and discover new habitable planets where no Formic has ever been, or

  3.  The IF has reason to believe that the Formics were not capable of any of these things. I can imagine the scenario like this: The hive queens were involved in a continuous civil war, competitive colonization like the European occupation and colonization of Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. This savage warfare only ended just before the Formics sent out the colony that came to Earth to start the Formic Wars. Therefore this was the only expedition the Formics had launched.

  Then, abashed at realizing, after Mazer Rackham’s victory in the Second Formic War, that humanity was indeed sentient and capable of besting them in war, they humbly decided to leave us alone and hoped that we would do the same. All their resources were devoted to creating defensive fleets around each of their inhabited worlds and, most especially, around their home world, and they gathered all the hive queens together on the home world in the belief that they could protect it against anything we might throw against it. Thus the Second and Third Formic Wars resulted in the destruction of every living hive queen, and there are no fleets or expeditions with their own hive queens wandering through our region of the galaxy.

  I believe that if number one were true, conclusive evidence would have been broadcast by the government to every sentient being in the solar system. I feel confident in ruling it out.

  If number two is believed by the IF high command, then our own successful invasion of the Formic planets and the destruction of their massively defended home world clearly demonstrates that anyone who thinks a Maginot Line cannot be penetrated or circumvented by the enemy is a fool doomed to destruction.