First Meetings Read online

  John Paul wanted to answer the questions. He wanted to take the test. He liked to take tests. He always answered silently when the older children were taking tests, to see if he could answer as many questions as they did.

  So when she was finishing up with Andrew, John Paul was just about to ask if he could take the test when the woman spoke to Mother. “How old is this one?”

  “We told you,” said Mother. “He’s only five.”

  “Look what he’s reading.”

  “He just turns the pages. It’s a game. He’s imitating the way he sees the older children read.”

  “He’s reading,” said the woman.

  “Oh, you’re here for a few hours and you know more about my children than I do, even though I teach them for hours every day?”

  The woman did not argue. “What is his name?”

  Mother didn’t want to answer.

  “John Paul,” said John Paul.

  Mother glared at him. So did Andrew.

  “I want to take the test,” he said.

  “You’re too young,” said Andrew, in Polish.

  “I turn six in three weeks,” said John Paul. He spoke in Common. He wanted the woman to understand him.

  The woman nodded. “I’m allowed to test him early,” she said.

  “Allowed, but not required,” said Father, coming into the room. “What’s he doing in here?”

  “He said he was going into the other room to read,” said Mother. “I thought he meant the other bedroom.”

  “I’m in the kitchen,” said John Paul.

  “He didn’t disturb anything,” said the woman.

  “Too bad,” said Father.

  “I’d like to test him,” the woman said.

  “No,” said Father.

  “Somebody will just have to come back in three weeks and do it then,” she said. “And disrupt your day one more time. Why not have done with it today?”

  “He’s already heard the answers,” said Mother. “If he was sitting here listening.”

  “The test isn’t like that,” said the woman. “It’s all right that he heard.”

  John Paul could see already that Father and Mother were both going to give in, so he didn’t bother saying anything to try to influence them. He didn’t want to use his ability to say the right words too often, or somebody would catch on, and it would stop working.

  It took a few more minutes of conversation, but then John Paul was sitting on the couch beside the woman.

  “I really was reading,” said John Paul.

  “I know,” said the woman.

  “How?” asked John Paul.

  “Because you were turning the pages in a regular rhythm,” she said. “You read very fast, don’t you?”

  John Paul nodded. “When it’s interesting.”

  “And St. John Paul II is an interesting man?”

  “He did what he thought was right,” said John Paul.

  “You’re named after him,” she said.

  “He was very brave,” said John Paul. “And he never did what bad people wanted him to do, if he thought it was important.”

  “What bad people?”

  “The Communists,” said John Paul.

  “How do you know they were bad people? Does the book say so?”

  Not in words, John Paul realized. “They were making people do things. They were trying to punish people for being Catholic.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “God is Catholic,” said John Paul.

  The woman smiled. “Muslims think that God is a Muslim.”

  John Paul digested this. “Some people think God doesn’t exist.”

  “That’s true,” said the woman.

  “Which?” he asked.

  She chuckled. “That some people think he doesn’t exist. I don’t know, myself. I don’t have an opinion on the subject.”

  “That means you don’t believe there is a God,” said John Paul.

  “Oh, does it?”

  “St. John Paul II said so. That saying you don’t know or care about God is the same as saying you believe he doesn’t exist, because if you had even a hope that he existed, you would care very much.”

  She laughed. “Just turning the pages, were you?”

  “I can answer all your questions,” he said.

  “Before I ask them?”

  “I wouldn’t hit him,” said John Paul, answering the question about what he would do if a friend tried to take away something of his. “Because then he wouldn’t be my friend. But I wouldn’t let him take the thing either.”

  The follow-up to this answer had been, How would you stop him? So John Paul went right on without pausing. “The way I’d stop him is, I’d say, ‘You can have it. I give it to you, it’s yours now. Because I’d rather keep you as a friend than keep that thing.’”

  “Where did you learn that?” asked the woman.

  “That’s not one of the questions,” said John Paul.

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not.”

  “I think sometimes you have to hurt people,” said John Paul, answering the next question, which had been, Is there ever a time when you have a right to hurt somebody else?

  He answered every question, including the follow-ups, without her having to ask any of them. He did it in the same order she had asked them of his brothers, and when he was done, he said, “Now the written part. I don’t know those questions cause I couldn’t see them and you didn’t say them.”

  They were easier than he thought. They were about shapes and remembering things and picking out right sentences and doing numbers, things like that. She kept looking at her watch, so he hurried.

  When it was all done, she just sat there looking at him.

  “Did I do it right?” asked John Paul.

  She nodded.

  He studied her face, the way she sat, the way her hands didn’t move, the way she looked at him. The way she was breathing. He realized that she was very excited, trying hard to stay calm. That’s why she wasn’t speaking. She didn’t want him to know.

  But he knew.

  He was what she had come here looking for.

  “Some people might say that this is why women can’t be used for testing,” said Col. Sillain.

  “Then those people would be mentally deficient,” said Helena Rudolf.

  “Too susceptible to a cute face,” said Sillain. “Too prone to go ‘Aw’ and give a kid the benefit of the doubt on everything.”

  “Fortunately, you don’t harbor any such suspicions,” said Helena.

  “No,” said Sillain. “That’s because I happen to know you have no heart.”

  “There we are,” said Helena. “We finally understand each other.”

  “And you say this Polish five-year-old is more than just precocious.”

  “Heaven knows, that’s the main thing our tests identify—general precociousness.”

  “There are better tests being developed. Very specific for military ability. And younger than you might think.”

  “Too bad that it’s already almost too late.”

  Col. Sillain shrugged. “There’s a theory that we don’t actually have to put them through a full course of training.”

  “Yes, yes, I read all about how young Alexander was. It helped that he was the son of the king and that he fought unmotivated armies of mercenaries.”

  “So you think the Buggers are motivated.”

  “The Buggers are a commander’s dream,” said Helena. “They don’t question orders, they just do. Whatever.”

  “Also a commander’s nightmare,” said Sillain. “They don’t think for themselves.”

  “John Paul Wieczorek is the real thing,” said Helena. “And in thirty-five years, he’ll be forty. So the Alexander theory won’t have to be tested.”

  “Now you’re talking as if you’re sure he’ll be the one.”

  “I don’t know that,” said Helena. “But he’s something. The things he says.”

  “I read your
report.”

  “When he said, ‘I’d rather keep you as a friend than keep that thing,’ I about lost it. I mean, he’s five.”

  “And that didn’t set off your alarms? He sounds coached.”

  “But he wasn’t. His parents didn’t want any of them tested, least of all him, being underage and all.”

  “They said they didn’t want.”

  “The father stayed home from work to try to stop me.”

  “Or to make you think he wanted to stop you.”

  “He can’t afford to lose a day’s pay. Noncompliant parents don’t get paid vacations.”

  “I know,” said Sillain. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if this John Paul Whatever—”

  “Wieczorek.”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, after all our stringent population control efforts—for the sake of the war, mind you—it turned out that the commander of the fleet turned out to be the seventh child of noncompliant parents?”

  “Yes, very ironic.”

  “I think one theory was that birth order predicts that only firstborns would have the personality for what we need.”

  “All else being equal. Which it isn’t.”

  “We’re so ahead of ourselves here, Captain Rudolf,” said Sillain. “The parents are not likely to say yes, are they?”

  “No, not likely,” said Helena.

  “So it’s all moot, isn’t it?”

  “Not if…”

  “Oh, that would be so wise, to make an international incident out of this.” He leaned back in his chair.

  “I don’t think it would be an international incident.”

  “The treaty with Poland has very strict parental-control provisions. Have to respect the family and all.”

  “The Poles are very anxious to rejoin the rest of the world. They aren’t going to invoke that clause if we impress on them how important this boy is.”

  “Is he?” asked Sillain. “That’s the question. If he’s worth the gamble of making a huge stink about it.”

  “If it starts to stink, we can back off,” said Helena.

  “Oh, I can see you’ve done a lot of public relations work.”

  “Come see him yourself,” said Helena. “He’ll be six in a few days. Come see him. Then tell me whether he’s worth the risk of an international incident.”

  This was not at all how John Paul wanted to spend his birthday. Mother had made candy all day with sugar she begged from neighbors, and John Paul wanted to suck on his, not chew it, so it would last and last. Instead Father told him either to spit it out into the garbage or swallow it, and so now it was swallowed and gone, all for these people from the International Fleet.

  “We got some questionable results from the preliminary screening,” said the man. “Perhaps because the child had listened to three previous tests. We need to get accurate information, that’s all.”

  He was lying—that was obvious, from the way he moved, the way he looked Father right in the eye, unwaveringly. A liar who knew he was lying and was trying hard not to look like he was lying. The way Thomas always did. It fooled Father but never Mother, and never John Paul.

  So if the man was lying, why? Why was he really coming to test John Paul again?

  He remembered what he had thought right after the woman tested him three weeks ago, that she had found what she was looking for. But then nothing had happened and he figured he must have been wrong. Now she was back and the man who was with her was telling lies.

  The family was banished to other rooms. It was evening, time for Father to go to his second job, only he couldn’t go while these people were here or they’d know, or guess, or wonder what he was doing, hour after hour during the evening. So the longer this took, the less money Father would earn tonight, and therefore the less food they’d be able to eat, the less clothing they’d have to wear.

  The man even sent the woman out of the room. That annoyed John Paul. He liked the woman.

  He didn’t like at all the way the man looked at their house. At the other children. At Mother and Father. As if he thought himself better than they were.

  The man asked a question.

  John Paul answered in Polish instead of Common.

  The man looked at him blankly. He called out, “I thought he spoke Common!”

  The woman stuck her head back into the room. Apparently she had only gone to the kitchen. “He does, fluently,” said the woman.

  The man looked back at John Paul, and the disdainful look was gone. “So what game are you playing?”

  In Polish, John Paul said, “The only reason we’re poor is because the Hegemon punishes Catholics for obeying God.”

  “In Common, please,” said the man.

  “The language is called English,” said John Paul in Polish, “and why should I talk to you at all?”

  The man sighed. “Sorry to waste your time.” He got up.

  The woman came back into the room. They thought they were whispering soft enough, but like most adults, they thought that children didn’t understand adult conversations so they weren’t all that careful about being quiet.

  “He’s defying you,” said the woman.

  “Yes, I guessed that,” said the man testily.

  “So if you go, he wins.”

  Good one, thought John Paul. This woman wasn’t stupid. She knew what to say to make this man do what she wanted.

  “Or somebody does.”

  She walked over to John Paul. “Colonel Sillain thinks I was lying when I said you did so well on the tests.”

  In Common, John Paul said, “How well did I do?”

  The woman only got a little smile on her face and glanced back at Col. Sillain.

  Sillain sat back down. “All right then. Are you ready?”

  In Polish, John Paul said, “I’m ready if you speak Polish.”

  Impatiently, Sillain turned back to the woman. “What does he want?”

  In Common, John Paul said to the woman, “Tell him I don’t want to be tested by a man who thinks my family is scum.”

  “In the first place,” said the man, “I don’t think that.”

  “Liar,” said John Paul in Polish.

  He turned to the woman. She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t speak Polish either.”

  John Paul said to her, in Common, “You rule over us but you don’t bother to learn our language. Instead we have to learn yours.”

  She laughed. “It’s not my language. Or his. Common is just a universalized dialect of English, and I’m German.” She pointed at Sillain. “He’s Finnish. Nobody speaks his language anymore. Not even the Finns.”

  “Listen,” said Sillain, turning to John Paul. “I’m not going to play around anymore. You speak Common, and I don’t speak Polish, so answer my questions in Common.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked John Paul in Polish, “put me in jail?”

  It was fun watching Sillain turn redder and redder, but then Father came into the room, looking very weary. “John Paul,” he said. “Do what the man asks.”

  “They want to take me away from you,” said John Paul in Common.

  “Nothing of the kind,” said the man.

  “He’s lying,” said John Paul.

  The man turned slightly red.

  “And he hates us. He thinks we’re poor and that it’s disgusting to have so many children.”

  “That is not true,” said Sillain.

  Father ignored him. “We are poor, John Paul.”

  “Only because of the Hegemony,” said John Paul.

  “Don’t preach my own sermons back at me,” said Father. But he switched to Polish to say it. “If you don’t do what they want, then they can punish your mother and me.”

  Father sometimes knew exactly the right words to say, too.

  John Paul turned back to Sillain. “I don’t want to be alone with you. I want her to be here for the test.”

  “Part of the test,” said Sillain, “is seeing how well you obey orders.�
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  “Then I fail,” said John Paul.

  Both the woman and Father laughed.

  Sillain did not. “It’s obvious that this child has been trained to be noncooperative, Captain Rudolf. Let’s go.”

  “He has not been trained,” said Father.

  John Paul could see that he looked worried.

  “Nobody trained me,” said John Paul.

  “The mother didn’t even know he could read at college level,” said the woman softly.

  College level? John Paul thought that was ridiculous. Once you knew the letters, reading was reading. How could there be levels?

  “She wanted you to think she didn’t know,” said Sillain.

  “My mother doesn’t lie,” said John Paul.

  “No, no, of course not,” said Sillain. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  Now he was revealing the truth: That he was frightened. Afraid that John Paul might not take his test. His fear meant that John Paul had power in this situation. Even more than he had thought.

  “I’ll answer your questions,” said John Paul, “if the lady stays here.”

  This time, he knew, Sillain would say yes.

  They gathered with a dozen experts and military leaders in a conference room in Berlin. Everyone had already seen Col. Sillain’s and Helena’s reports. They had seen John Paul’s test scores. They had watched the vid of Sillain’s conversation with John Paul Wieczorek before, during, and after the test.

  Helena enjoyed how much Sillain hated having to watch this six-year-old Polish boy manipulate him. It hadn’t been so obvious at the time, of course, but after you watched the vid over and over, it became painfully obvious. And, while everyone at the table was polite, there were a few raised eyebrows, a nod, a couple of half-smiles when John Paul said, “Then I fail.”

  At the end of the vid, a Russian general from the office of the Strategos said, “Was he bluffing?”

  “He’s six,” said the young Indian representing the Polemarch.

  “That’s what’s so terrifying,” said the teacher who was there for the Battle School. “About all the children at Battle School, actually. Most people live their whole lives without ever meeting a single child like this one.”

  “So, Captain Graff,” said the Indian, “are you saying he’s nothing special?”