Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  She studied Dabeet for a moment, then looked at the other children one by one. “It seems to me,” said Enya Polonia, “that only one of these boys shares your criticisms of and amusement at our teaching methods.” She indicated Zhang He. “The others wish you’d shut up.”

  “They wish I’d eat kuso and die,” said Dabeet. “It was explicitly stated. But I’d rather spend my time learning something real, than eating the kuso that the other guy was laying down for us.”

  “We have two ships docked here,” said Enya. “They both have to have a complete tally before they can be off-loaded. So we’ll divide you into two teams. You, Dabeet, the self-assessed genius. And Zhang He, is it? A little quieter, not so confrontational, but the disciple of an arrogant git has voted for the gitty arrogance.”

  Zhang He smiled and nodded.

  “I will give the two of you the slightly larger cargo, while the other four children will take the other ship. Your job is to tally—to make sure that every container on the bill of lading is present in the hold, and to identify any cargo that is not listed. In case you’re tempted to check everything off and declare the job done, I should inform you that we have five items that are either listed but not present, or present but not listed. They may be all in one ship, or divided between them, or I might have lied about the total. If you try to goldbrick on this job, you will be caught. That’s a matter of personal integrity and reliability, so it’s not like failing an exam. It’s failing as a human being. Am I clear?”

  As Dabeet and Zhang He followed their wall bands to their ship’s dock, Dabeet said, “I should be insulted that they would expect us to cheat, but for consistency’s sake, how can I pretend to be surprised? My whole argument with Git Number One was about how easily corrupted their system was, so why shouldn’t they assume that we’re corrupt?”

  “Only one correction,” said Zhang He. “It was our argument about the corruptible system. Not just yours.”

  “Apologies,” said Dabeet. “I’m really not used to doing anything with anybody, ever. I haven’t had much need for the first-person plural.”

  “I’m not your disciple,” said Zhang He. “She said that to hurt my feelings.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No,” said Zhang He. “But you’re just vain enough to believe that she was right about that, so I thought it was wise to clarify the matter.”

  Dabeet laughed. “So you call me vain.”

  “Aren’t you?” asked Zhang.

  “Of course I am. But if you were my disciple, you’d find a nice way of saying it. ‘Self-assured,’ ‘self-confident,’ greeyaz like that.”

  “If you ever hear me using weaselly words like that instead of speaking plainly, then you can be sure they’ve done something to my brain.”

  “They’re doing things to all our brains,” said Dabeet. “Wasting them.”

  There was nothing about the passageways into the ship that in any way resembled a terrestrial dock or wharf or even an airport. They went through corridors, passed through an airlock security system into a large cargo bay, and then through another corridor and airlock into a somewhat smaller room that was filled with strapped-down shipping containers of every conceivable size.

  “Here we are,” said Zhang He.

  “We’re on another ship?” asked Dabeet.

  “See the practical tie-downs to keep the cargo from shifting during ship movement?”

  “When did Fleet School end and the ship begin?”

  “The second airlock. That other big cargo space is where they off-load this cargo once we’ve tallied it.”

  “It occurs to me that spaceships also store things they’re going to consume in flight. Food. Water. Shouldn’t some of these containers be open?”

  “Only the tiniest ships use the same space for cargo and supplies,” said Zhang He. “The crew would never let us near the ship’s stores unsupervised. Their lives depend on that stuff.”

  “You lived your whole life on Luna,” said Dabeet. “How do you know that?”

  “We must have read different novels.”

  “We’re in a race now,” said Dabeet. “But I don’t actually care about winning. Do you?”

  “Not a whit,” said Zhang He. “I care about doing a good job so they don’t catch us in any mistakes.”

  “I also care about catching mistakes they didn’t make deliberately in order to trap us,” said Dabeet.

  “If there are any.”

  “How should we do this?” asked Dabeet. “It makes no sense for each of us to carry a list and do separate tallies. That way we might both overlook something. I think we need to have one pair of eyes do all the inspections, calling out the ID of each container, while the other one checks it on the bill.”

  “I agree,” said Zhang He. “And because you’re the one with the least skill at moving through reduced-gravity environments—”

  “Why aren’t we floating, if—”

  “Reduced-gee, not null-gee. You’re sticking to the floor because our uniform boots are designed to do that. In case the anti-grav equipment piffs.”

  It took Dabeet a moment to realize that it was stupid of him to pretend to understand what he didn’t. “I think I got the meaning from context, but … ‘piffs’?”

  “We lived in a Portuguese dome on Luna—they had room and took us in when my people fled China. So … separate slang. ‘Piff’ comes from ‘pifar’ which means to fall apart, fail, go blooey. English doesn’t have a good enough word.”

  “So it does now,” said Dabeet. “If I’m the worst at bouncing around in low-gee, then—”

  “This hold is set to lunar gravity, so that containers stay in one orientation, but they’re easier to move. They still have the same mass, so you can get crushed to death if you try to stop them by putting yourself between them and a wall. But there’s way less friction so it’s much easier to get them moving.”

  “We’re not moving anything, though, right?”

  “Just tallying.”

  “You grew up in lunar gravity.”

  “So won’t it be good for you to work out how to move in that environment?”

  “If I’m busy trying to control my movements, won’t I be more likely to miss something?”

  “I’ll be keeping my eye on you when you’re not actually reading labels. And I’ll be right behind you. We’ll both be making sure we don’t miss anything.”

  It wasn’t a bad system, and Dabeet learned that lunar gravity was a lot easier to work with than zero-gee in the battleroom. Though there were still tricks to it.

  “Don’t race up the stack so fast!” Zhang called out, and in a moment Dabeet found out why. When he reached the top container, he didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. He just flew upward, hit the ceiling, and bounced back down.

  “Sorry,” said Zhang He. “I should have warned you sooner. Your momentum is based on your mass. Every kid on Luna learns that if you race up a ladder, you run out of ladder long before you run out of momentum.”

  “But there’s still gravity,” said Dabeet. “Even if I hadn’t hit a ceiling I would have come back down, right?”

  “Eventually. Somewhere,” said Zhang. “Nice and easy wins the race.”

  It turned out that apparently all five trick items were in their ship—unless both ships had five. But Dabeet was skeptical. “Two of these ‘mistakes’ were those shallow containers stacked against the wall behind that massive one. We wouldn’t have known they were there if we hadn’t been so thorough about investigating every side of every stack.”

  “True,” said Zhang He. “So they were messing with us.”

  “They were hiding it from somebody,” said Dabeet. “The other three were obvious. Right out in the open. And we haven’t finished the whole inventory, so we don’t know whether we’ll still find some on the list that weren’t in the hold.”

  “So you’re thinking that maybe those two hidden ones were concealed from lazy tallyboys, not a trap set to catch them.”

&
nbsp; “Let’s finish, and then go back and look at them again.”

  Zhang He agreed. But before they got to the end of the cargo bay, some men came in with drags and drones and started off-loading the cargo nearest the door.

  Zhang immediately bounded along the floor—a true lunar run, Dabeet realized, having seen vids of lunar movement before—and confronted them. He could hear Zhang in his earpiece: You can’t take anything yet, we haven’t signed off on the tally, and some adult is supposed to check our work before—

  “There’s always a schedule,” said one of the men, “and this happens all the time. You’re trainees, right? So you’re being stupid-careful. We don’t have time to wait for your training. You already checked everything at this end. Just keep going and we promise not to catch up with you.”

  Dabeet would probably have argued. Might even have followed Zhang, much more clumsily of course, to join in the discussion. But his body position marked the spot where their tally had stopped, so he waited till Zhang came back.

  “You couldn’t see his face from here,” Zhang explained. “He sounded nice enough, but his face said for me to back off or we’d be the first cargo they off-loaded.”

  “So we keep at it,” said Dabeet. “Because this is how the world works.”

  “Nothing is done by the book, ever. You just pretend not to see it.”

  It didn’t take long to finish, but as they made their way to the door they realized that the stevedores had been moving cargo faster than the tallyboys could count it. If Dabeet and Zhang hadn’t had such a head start, they would have had to count the last containers as they were being removed.

  “What do you want to bet,” said Zhang, “that a lot of tallies are made standing at the door, watching it all get loaded off.”

  “What I bet,” said Dabeet, “is that a lot of tallies are made in the office without the tallyboy ever looking at the shipping containers or checking the labels.”

  “But not in the IF,” said Zhang with a grin. “And certainly not at Fleet School.”

  “Where honor and integrity reign supreme.”

  They checked the bill of lading and found two missing items that hadn’t been in the tally.

  “So that’s five,” said Dabeet. “The three obvious extras, and the two that were missing.”

  “Then that’s seven,” said Zhang.

  They were still in the loading dock, as the last items, hanging from drones, were being pulled by drags out of the ship.

  “Unless the two hidden ones were the two on the bill that we didn’t find.”

  “Different numbers,” said Zhang He. “Different numbering system. Not the IF’s standard codes, so … maybe not from a legitimate Fleet inspector?”

  “Let’s step out of here,” said Dabeet. He didn’t like the way the stevedores kept looking over at them.

  “Shouldn’t we look for those two shallow containers?” asked Zhang He.

  “So let’s say it’s contraband. Either it won’t be here and they’ll deny ever seeing it, or it will be here and they’ll have to put us out into space through a door in the ship,” said Dabeet.

  “So we leave this room and never know?” asked Zhang He.

  “We know what we know,” said Dabeet. “We’re not doing anything that might risk our lives.”

  Zhang He suddenly grinned and whooped, then lifted up Dabeet’s hand and slapped it.

  “What are you…”

  Dabeet saw that the stevedores had stopped their work. Zhang He turned to them and shouted. “We caught all five errors the teachers set for us! Done!”

  In a moment they were in the corridors, heading back to the conference room they had started from. But as they were turning to go, Dabeet saw that the stevedores had turned back to their work without pausing for even a moment’s thought. Having trainees do the tally at Fleet School might be new, but as long as the stevedores thought of them as exuberant children, they’d be in no danger.

  “Good job,” said Dabeet. “They’ve written us off as kids.”

  “Still wish we could have double-checked those two extras,” said Zhang.

  “We checked them thoroughly. We saw every side of them. There was no second label.”

  “We didn’t see the front and back at a good angle,” said Zhang. “If those two containers have disappeared, they’ll never believe we found anything at all.”

  “If they’ve disappeared,” said Dabeet, “then we know something corrupt is happening here. So we don’t want to make a big deal of it.”

  “If they only left us five errors, and we found seven…”

  “Then they’ll make a big deal about it. See? If they don’t already know about those two hidden ones, and they can’t find them now, they’ll want to claim we were lying, they’ll say we failed the test, that we made stuff up. Do you care?”

  Zhang He smiled a little. “É, I do. I don’t like failing when I didn’t fail.”

  “Neither do I. But look, Zhang, either they’ll make a big deal about it or they won’t. I think they won’t. If nothing corrupt is going on, then either they left us seven mistakes, and we found them all, or they left us five deliberate mistakes, and a couple were genuine mistakes and they go looking for the extras and they find them and hey, we did good work.”

  “But if they don’t find them…”

  “If they don’t find them, then something hinky is going on. If the brass here don’t know about it, they call us in, make sure we stand by our story and that both of us agree on what we saw. Then they launch an investigation that we children of the Fleet never hear about. Or the brass is in on the scam, in which case they know we saw what we say we saw, but they never ask us about it at all, because they know that for all we know, they set all seven traps for us. So unless they bring it up, we won’t think any more of it. It just disappears because, you know, we’re children.”

  “So we don’t even point out the difference in labeling.”

  “We act as if we think it’s just one of their traps unless they ask about it. Then they’re really investigating, and we tell everything we know, including that they were off-loaded while we were finishing our tally.”

  “Otherwise, we found seven mistakes when they said there’d be five, so aren’t they tricky.”

  “And come on, Zhang. If there is something corrupt, how likely is it that they’d assign us to a ship carrying contraband?”

  Zhang smiled. “Nobody planned this,” he said. “This has all the markers of improvisation. Badly planned, ill-prepared teachers, letting us hijack their process—and the people carrying out this new program might not know anything about the smuggling operation, if there is one, and if those two containers were part of it.”

  “I still remember those lading numbers,” said Dabeet. “But you’re the only person I’m going to admit that to.”

  “Good idea.”

  “And I’m not going to do a search for those numbers to see what the system thinks they are or where they’re from.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Not for a few weeks,” said Dabeet.

  “If you write them down, they’ll find them in your desk.”

  “I won’t type them into the desk.”

  “You’re not going to use paper, are you?”

  “I have those numbers, Zhang. When I have them, they don’t go anywhere I don’t want them to.”

  “You’re so full of brag,” said Zhang.

  “If it’s true, it ain’t bragging.”

  “Yes it is. In fact, it’s especially bragging when it’s true.”

  “I don’t forget numbers,” said Dabeet. “And so I rely on that, because my brain has never let me down.”

  “Don’t look them up, not even in a couple of weeks,” said Zhang He.

  “You’re even more paranoid than I am.”

  “They monitor everything we do,” said Zhang. “Even if they don’t instantly recognize the numbers, they’ll pass around a memo about what you looked for and what you found
. You think that won’t come under the gaze of the people who might feel a need to silence us?”

  Dabeet had no answer for that.

  “If somebody’s smuggling, then that’s a career-stopper if they’re caught. That’s Earthside jail and never going back out into space. Of course they’d kill us, especially you, once they realize that you’ll never forget those numbers.”

  “You won’t remember them?”

  “Whether I have a good memory for numbers or not,” said Zhang, “I don’t know how it does me any good to say.”

  Dabeet smiled. “I think you’re right. No search on those numbers. Not as long as I’m at Fleet School.”

  “Unless,” said Zhang.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we both agree that there’s somebody we can trust who might have the authority to investigate.”

  “And has protection enough that he won’t get killed himself, along with us,” added Dabeet.

  “As if somebody at that level would ever talk to us!” scoffed Zhang.

  “Hey, if they’re really monitoring everywhere we go in Fleet School,” said Dabeet, “what’s to say they haven’t recorded our whole conversation in the corridors?”

  Zhang He smiled wanly. “Or simply read our lips from the security cameras.”

  They walked the last few strides to the conference room in silence. But Dabeet was thinking: I do know somebody who has the authority to investigate things, and probably wouldn’t get killed if he launched an investigation.

  But how can I get a message to Graff? thought Dabeet. And more to the point, how will I know that there’s anything illegal to look into? If nobody is crooked and this is part of the test, then they’ll all behave exactly as they would if everybody’s in on a smuggling operation.

  A dead end. Just like trying to get to a door so I can open it and save Mother’s life. And I thought I was powerless on Earth.

  9

  —You told me to bring you anything concerning Dabeet Ochoa.

  —What has he done this time?

  —He’s obsessing over the construction system inside the battleroom, but I wouldn’t interrupt you for that. Look at this.