Children of the Fleet Read online

  The star had moved to make this happen. The cube had self-extruded in order to bridge the last gap. The blocks had locked together without his having to flip any lever or adjust anything at all. Clearly, the star had sensed his design and cooperated. Or, rather, the computer program controlling the behavior of the wall units had helped him achieve his goal.

  The only possible conclusion was that the blocks had been designed with this exact process in mind. Bring wall blocks close enough to star blocks, and everything will self-adjust in order to fit.

  “OK, that’s amazing,” said a boy.

  It was Zhang He, who was rumored to be from the powerful Wu-Hu trading clan, a family both Great and Brave. This had been interesting enough that Dabeet had looked up his background, which revealed that Zhang He wasn’t from a Miner clan. He was a True Child of the Fleet, and his family were Onlookers, stationed on Luna during the war. This information was part of his public bio, so Dabeet couldn’t conceive of how the rumor of the Wu-Hu connection could have started.

  “Glad you’re amazed,” said Dabeet. Then, hearing his own voice, he realized that this could probably be taken as sarcasm, so he added, “It amazed me, too.”

  “Did I see the star move?”

  “I felt it and saw it,” said Dabeet. “It moved.”

  “Eppur si muove,” said Zhang He. The words that Galileo reputedly said after the Inquisition forced him to confess that the Earth does not move around the Sun; that it does not move at all. “And yet it moves,” the great astronomer supposedly muttered.

  Dabeet chuckled. “Not sure the discovery reaches Galileo’s level.”

  “Good enough for the battleroom,” said Zhang.

  “I wish I’d timed how long it took me to build this pillar and connect it up,” said Dabeet.

  “You did time it,” said Zhang. “You’re wearing a flash suit. It times everything you do while you’re wearing it.”

  Dabeet made an elaborate shrug, twisting his hands to show that if he was timed, he didn’t know where to find the data.

  Unfortunately, in making this gesture he drifted away from the star. He realized his plight almost immediately, and flashed out a hand to try to take hold. He was already just a hair too far away from a handhold—and the movement caused him to spin so that in a moment his feet were coming up and his hands were even farther from the nearest grip.

  Zhang He caught him by the ankle and pulled him back to the pillar. “Happens to all of us,” he said.

  Dabeet smiled slightly at the attempt to salve his pride. “Thanks for saving me from a long slow trip to the far wall.”

  “Pull the back of your glove—either glove—up to your mouth, whisper your question, and then look at the glove.”

  Holding tightly to the handhold, Dabeet asked his other hand, “How long did it take me to build this pillar and connect it to the star?”

  The back of his glove lit up with easily readable characters: “14:32.”

  “I hope that’s minutes and seconds,” said Dabeet.

  “Still a long time,” said Zhang He. “Longer than most battles.”

  So … still useless.

  Unless somebody would help him. Learn how to create and manipulate the blocks as quickly as Dabeet did. Learn how to be his partner in this insane project.

  Dabeet did not dare to ask. Zhang He was showing himself to have good will toward Dabeet, to be interested in what he was doing. But to ask one of the top soldiers in the team to apprentice himself to the lowest of the low, that might easily be an insult.

  “What if we did it together?” asked Zhang He. “Would I be a help or would I just get in the way.”

  “You’d probably get in the way at first,” said Dabeet, “and then be a great help as soon as you got skilled at extruding these cubic bubbles from the wall and sticking them together.”

  “I know,” said Zhang He. “I’m a top soldier and you’re kind of nothing, so people will say stupid things and some of them will get mad if I spend time doing this with you. I assume you’ve already taken enough shit to know how to ignore it?”

  “I have,” said Dabeet. “But have you?”

  “I have to listen to them calling me Wu-Hu all the time, just to point up the shameful fact that my parents were both stationed on Luna during the war.”

  “How is it shameful to be a True Child of the Fleet?”

  “Anything is shameful if people use it to ridicule you,” said Zhang He. “But I know that they mostly do it because it’s fun to say ‘Wu-Hu.’”

  Sure enough, Zhang He’s toon leader and then the commander, Bartolomeo Ja, came to remonstrate with him. Zhang He answered cheerfully enough, but he neither obeyed them nor explained his reasons for working with Dabeet.

  “This is taking pity way too far,” said Bartolomeo. “He’s useless, but you’re the heart of your toon.”

  Zhang He’s answer was a gratified smile. “Why, it’s nice of you to say so.”

  The commander went on and on, to no avail, and then began yelling at Dabeet that he was forbidden to take up the time of such a valuable soldier.

  Dabeet’s answer was also mild. “Would you like to learn how to do this, too, sir, so we can get our time even faster?”

  “I think we should try a timed run now,” said Zhang He to Dabeet.

  Bartolomeo gave one last warning. “There’s no way that Kaluza will let you tear up my army like this,” he said.

  Dabeet thought he was probably right. But in the meantime, he and Zhang He had time enough for one real try. Zhang He was a quick learner, and even though his skill at extruding and binding the blocks wasn’t up to Dabeet’s level, he was nearly as quick.

  They divided their activities. First they both extruded and linked pillars of eight blocks each until they had enough to make the whole bridge. Then Zhang He, staying at the wall, launched them up to Dabeet, who caught each one and joined it to the growing pillar. Finally, Zhang He tossed the penultimate piece and then carried the last one as he scrambled up the bridge. They set the last piece in place together.

  “4:10,” said both their hands.

  “That’s less than a third of my pace working alone,” said Dabeet.

  “That was your first time, and you had to keep making the trip back and forth to the wall,” said Zhang He.

  “If I could figure out how this would have any effect on the battle,” said Dabeet, “then I’d be really excited that this can be built by two guys in about the time it takes for a battle to really get under way.”

  Zhang He grinned. “I wonder what we could do building four pillars at once. With a whole toon.”

  “Forget pillars,” said Dabeet. “I wonder what would happen if we built a fort that completely enclosed the gate.”

  “Or built a bridge from one gate to the other,” said Zhang He.

  “Or a tube that you could crawl through, where nobody could shoot you from one side of the battleroom to the other.”

  “Nothing stops them from tearing the tube apart as fast as we build it, of course. Like Nehemiah’s enemies tore down the walls of Jerusalem at night, after Nehemiah’s people had worked on it all day.”

  “Nehemiah?” asked Dabeet.

  “The book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament,” said Zhang He. “Come on, Dabeet, you’ve read everything and you remember everything.”

  “But you’re Chinese,” said Dabeet.

  “Chinese Christian,” said Zhang He. “Not very well accepted in China, I’m afraid. Our family was already part of a Chinese Christian community on Luna before either of my parents enlisted in the IF. They didn’t really enlist. The Fleet just took over the company they worked for, and they either took the oath or they were out of work.”

  “And you’re a Christian?” asked Dabeet.

  “We don’t talk religion here in Fleet School,” said Zhang He. “It’s one of the rules.”

  The end-of-practice light was already flashing.

  “Come on, let’s head for chow,” said Zhan
g He.

  This implied that Zhang He was actually going to eat with him. Dabeet was baffled. “Don’t we have to clean up all these blocks?” he asked.

  “If we have to, they’ll make us come back and do it. But I think the blocks know where they belong,” said Zhang He.

  Then it dawned on Dabeet. “Helping me was an act of Christian charity, wasn’t it?”

  Zhang He looked at him like he was crazy. “You’re the only person here doing anything interesting,” he said. “You letting me help you—that was charity.”

  Dabeet, trying to shape his responses to fit the expectations of others as normal people do, tried to detect any hint of humor or irony in Zhang He’s words. Dabeet? Charity? He knew enough about the word to associate it with generosity, as well as Christian teachings and practice. How had it been generous of Dabeet to …

  Well, he could have ordered Zhang He to go away and not interfere with Dabeet’s work. This would have been a preemptive strike on Dabeet’s part, to protect himself from ridicule. But Dabeet had not ordered Zhang He to leave him alone. He had felt no fear of him. Why was that?

  Partly it was Zhang He himself. Dabeet had never seen him as one of the smug ones, who tried to elevate themselves by putting vulnerable kids down. And when he approached, Zhang He’s soberness of manner never wavered. He seemed genuinely interested, and, as his hard work and quick mastery of the techniques soon demonstrated, he was interested.

  Partly, though, Dabeet had to recognize a change in himself. At Conn, Dabeet never embarked on a project that would benefit from the help of others. His teachers always tried to intrude on his work in order to—as they imagined—give him guidance. Their guidance was always based on false assumptions about his purpose, their own ignorance making them worse than useless.

  But Graff had set Dabeet to several tests, and now Dabeet was beginning to understand. Graff’s tests were really teaching assignments. “What qualities would make a good leader of an expedition, or a colony, or a scouting or reconnaissance mission?”

  More telling had been the second part of that assignment: “Which of those qualities do you lack, making it meaningless to bring you into Fleet School?”

  Long before arriving at Fleet School, Dabeet had understood that leading other people under dangerous conditions—facing unknown dangers, or building a colony in a hostile environment—required that the team members trust their leaders, that they trust each other to do the jobs they were assigned to do. This meant helping each other, doing good work for each other—Dabeet could figure these things out as a thought experiment, and his readings only made the answer clearer: I can’t work exclusively by myself and be of any use to the Ministry of Colonization or the IF’s program of exploration.

  But knowing that he must be cooperative and actually finding ways to do it were two very different projects. He had years of habitual introversion and surliness to overcome. He had to become patient with abuse and not flare up at provocations.

  And he quickly learned that even when he offered to help, his offers were often rebuffed. He had tried to figure it out: Everybody by now understands that in academic subjects, I’m better than anybody in my age group. (Age groups are absurd anyway, but no complaining.) Why, when I offer to help students who are hopelessly struggling, or who look puzzled, or who shake their heads in frustration after a teacher’s inept explanation, do they shrug me off, walk away, or stare me down until I stop offering?

  Was it some conspiracy among them? Had they all agreed never to accept help from me?

  Or is it something about me? Some manner I have that makes them take my offer wrong?

  Now that Zhang He was letting Dabeet sit with him at lunch—no, to be exact, now that Zhang He was going to Dabeet’s formerly solitary lunch-table seat—Dabeet could actually ask the question that mattered most.

  “I know they bring fresh ingredients up here,” said Zhang He. “But I think they freeze them all by storing them in bags in cold space, like the rubbish stashes.”

  Dabeet chuckled—he could tell that Zhang He was joking and, just to make things easier, the image struck Dabeet as genuinely amusing. “I hope they never get confused about which bags are which.”

  “I think what’s on our trays is proof that they already have,” said Zhang He.

  Chuckle. Take a bite—no. Don’t take a bite. Ask the question instead. “Zhang, can I ask you something kind of personal?”

  “Can’t promise to answer.”

  “Not about you. About me.”

  “I don’t know anything personal about you. Just your school bio,” said Zhang He.

  “When I offer to help people. In their schoolwork, after class or in the library or even right there in the classroom. Nobody wants my help.”

  “Oh, they want it, all right,” said Zhang He.

  “They make it clear that they don’t,” said Dabeet, and then he did a pantomime of the normal response—the turning of the body, the raising of the shoulder nearest to Zhang.

  “It’s not always easy to accept help,” said Zhang He.

  “I know that better than anyone,” said Dabeet. “But I repel anyone who might offer to help me because I’m an arrogant oomay. These guys are all normal and they have, you know, friends.”

  “But you aren’t one of their friends,” said Zhang He.

  Dabeet could see that Zhang He was being evasive. “I can’t get better if you don’t tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

  “I’m here to help you on your wall extrusions,” said Zhang He. “I’m not here to fix you.”

  “I intend to fix myself. But I can’t even start till I know what parts are broken.”

  “Nothing’s broken,” said Zhang He. “You really are smarter than everybody. We’ve all seen you in class. You don’t just read ahead, it’s like you see the whole picture and understand the subject better than the teacher. You’re doing great.”

  “Wrong answer,” said Dabeet. “What is it you’re not saying?”

  Zhang He closed his eyes. “Look, it’s the way you say things.”

  “Yes, please, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Like when you said ‘wrong answer’ just now,” said Zhang. “We’re friends, right? You don’t hate me. Yet you said ‘wrong answer’ as if you had just found me like pus coming out of a sore.”

  Dabeet made another try. “Wrong answer,” he said, much more mildly. And then, almost affectionately, “Wrong answer.”

  “Dabeet,” said Zhang, trying not to laugh, it seemed. “The problem is that there’s no way to use the words ‘wrong answer’ and not make them sound like ‘you dull bob.’”

  “I was asking you to help me communicate better, to find out why nobody accepts my offers of help. And you went off on how smart I was, like I was some moose who needed to be placated.”

  “Oh, I know that’s what happened,” said Zhang He. “And then you said, ‘wrong answer’ and proved exactly why I was right to try to placate you.”

  “I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even rude.”

  “‘Wrong answer’ is rude, prima facie,” said Zhang. “Teacher to student, it’s even rude. But student to student, it’s kind of awful. And friend to friend—well, you better smile when you say something that condescending.”

  “Smile?”

  “To show me that the rude thing you’re saying is between friends. That your rudeness is a joke, proving that we can trust each other.”

  “I’m such a zhopa,” said Dabeet. “I know what you’re talking about, I’ve seen other guys do it. I just don’t know how to apply it to myself.”

  “Hey, at least you get it,” said Zhang. “That’s like being halfway there.”

  “Who’s being condescending now?” asked Dabeet.

  “Me,” said Zhang. “But let’s face it, if you really want to start taking human lessons, you have to recognize that you’re starting at a pretty elementary level.”

  “I think the euphemism is that I ‘show promise but have a long way to go.
’”

  “Except for showing promise, é, that’s right.”

  “You were smiling. That’s what you mean. You insult me that I don’t show any promise, but your smile means that you think I do show promise, or at least that you think I have a chance here.”

  “When you’re working on something,” said Zhang, “you’re perfectly easy to work with. You never get mad at me for making mistakes—”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “Exactly,” said Zhang. “You’re sensible, you’re respectful. While we’re working on the blocks. The job is what matters, sure, but you also take care not to alienate anybody.”

  “You’ve got to remember, the only person I’m working with is you. Smart, hard-working, creative…”

  Zhang He gave him a big grin. “So kind of you to say so.”

  “Sarcastic,” said Dabeet.

  “Completely sincere, but hiding behind a veneer of sarcasm so if you take it wrong, I have an out.”

  Dabeet sat there digesting these ideas.

  “The food gets worse with age and falling temperature,” Zhang He pointed out.

  “Obviously false,” said Dabeet. “This food could not get worse.”

  “Good smile. Got the signal,” said Zhang. “And you’re right, the food can’t get worse, because long before that, it’ll cease to be food.” He grinned.

  Dabeet grinned back. “Thanks for eating lunch with me.”

  “Friends don’t thank each other for being friends.”

  “I just didn’t know, for sure, that we were friends. Till now.”

  8

  —You may not be able to confirm this, but I assume that this complaint originated with the Minister of Colonization.

  —Complaints are all bastards. Father unknown. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

  —Since I’m not supposed to know about this, I can hardly offer any counter-arguments, but really, how absurd this is, to claim that it’s inappropriate for IF personnel to provide services for inbound and outgoing ships. From the moment that the IF commandeered all fueling and supply and maintenance stations throughout the solar system at the end of the First War, IF personnel have been—