Children of the Fleet, Page 3

  “Though there are quite a few as vain as you are,” said Graff.

  “Vanity is self-regard for trivial things—appearance, manner. Humility is recognition of the truth about oneself. The truth about me is that however I was conceived, I have abilities far beyond the capacity of the Charles G. Conn School for the Gifted in Elkhart, Indiana.”

  “There are four national schools for gifted students in the United States,” said Graff, “and there are sixteen Hegemony schools, two of them in North America.”

  “Those were the also-ran schools, for students not taken for Battle School.”

  “Many brilliant students were passed over for Battle School because they weren’t quite right for our very narrow purposes.”

  “You didn’t know what was quite right for your very narrow purposes,” said Dabeet. “You still don’t know. You don’t know why Ender Wiggin succeeded and others never came close to his abilities. Which test scores promised the results you got from him? Which students that you weeded out might have done even better, except that you measured them against criteria that had never been proven to have anything to do with military command success?”

  “My point exactly,” said Graff. “These Earthside schools are excellent, with superb faculty and, in most cases, a commitment to creativity that allows students to explore and become whatever they want to be.”

  “I want to be an explorer and a colonizer,” said Dabeet. “Which Earthside school has a career path leading there?”

  “Wait till you’re seventeen and enlist.”

  “I can finish a Ph.D. program in that time,” said Dabeet. “But it will all be wasted if I do it here on Earth.”

  “Well, you make a strong case,” said Graff.

  “But you’re unpersuaded.”

  “We have rules for a reason,” said Graff.

  “So you can hide behind them as you deny my application for reasons having nothing to do with those rules.”

  Finally, Graff smiled. “For a boy who has never worked in government, you understand something about how it works.”

  “Nobody understands how it works,” said Dabeet.

  “No, Dabeet. I understand how it works. I play the instruments of government as if they were kazoos and ukeleles. They make a horrible din but at least when I play them, the music reaches an end.”

  “The ugly noise of ambition,” said Dabeet.

  “If I wanted to make sure I got an early retirement because somebody else had maneuvered me out of my position,” said Graff, “I would invite you to come and be an intern in my office.”

  Dabeet felt a thrill of victory. Graff saw him as a potential threat. “I don’t want that job.”

  “Yes you do,” said Graff. “You want any job that gets you out into space and leaves your mother behind.”

  Dabeet had no answer. He knew that this would be one of the benefits of entering Fleet School, because it was the one school he could enter where Mother could not maneuver her way into following him. But Graff was saying that this was Dabeet’s main goal. To get away from his mother. Was it?

  Maybe.

  “Nobody ever wants just one thing,” said Dabeet.

  “I read your little retelling of the Pinocchio story. There are so many versions, but you’re the first person ever to make Geppetto into a nun.”

  “I think nuns are interesting,” said Dabeet.

  “No you don’t,” said Graff.

  Dabeet did not make a sarcastic reply about how Graff seemed to think he knew everything about somebody he had only just met. If Graff didn’t know how to read people, he wouldn’t have the vast power that he held.

  “Then what do I think about nuns?” asked Dabeet.

  “I have no idea, because Sister Geppetto in your story isn’t really a nun. She isn’t even the Holy Mother. She’s your mother.”

  “My mother didn’t carve me out of wood.”

  “Yes she did,” said Graff. “And now she won’t let go of the strings.”

  Dabeet had almost forgotten the story, once he wrote it. It had been nothing but a stupid, meaningless assignment, and he treated it like kleenex—he blew a snotty little story into it and then tossed it into the wastebasket of his teacher’s mind.

  “I don’t remember the story that well,” said Dabeet.

  “You remember everything,” said Graff.

  “I remember everything I care about,” said Dabeet.

  “You care intensely about everything,” said Graff, “and so you remember everything.”

  “Aren’t those useful traits?”

  “Your Baby Jesus puppet demanded that his strings be cut, even though it made him powerless and destroyed him.”

  “Puppets can’t do anything without strings.”

  “They can’t do anything with strings, either. They only have things done to them.”

  “Instead of trying to read an absurd amount of psychological twaddle into a throwaway story,” said Dabeet, “why don’t you just tell me what you think you learned from it?”

  “That you would rather die at the hands of the village children than continue to live under your mother’s control.”

  Dabeet sat and thought about this, trying to see whether it was true or not. Finally he said, “I can’t unwrap myself and see the truth. What you say might be true. Maybe I unconsciously revealed some deep inner hunger in a story that meant nothing.”

  “It was because it meant nothing and you never expected anyone who mattered to read it that you were free to say unconsciously truthful things,” said Graff.

  “War criminal, bully, dictator, and psychoanalyst,” said Dabeet.

  “You’ve only dipped a toe into the ocean of my résumé,” said Graff. “Tell me why you are not so deeply troubled that you’d be nothing but a disruptive influence in Fleet School.”

  “Without my mother,” said Dabeet, “I wouldn’t have—”

  “Without your mother you wouldn’t have a pot to piss in—or any basis for your arrogant disregard for the feelings of other people.”

  “Are you saying I’m not nice?” asked Dabeet. “There’s now a niceness test for getting into Battle School?”

  “There always was,” said Graff. “But I’m sure you can be charming if you decide to be. No, what you seem utterly to lack is the ability to imagine the feelings of other people and adapt your program in order to fulfil their needs along with your own.”

  “My ‘program’ has nothing to do with anybody but me.”

  “If you made it into Fleet School, there would be someone else who did not get that place.”

  “He should have done better on the tests.”

  “Here’s a test for you: Why not apply your adequate intelligence to figuring out what qualities would make a good leader of an expedition, or a colony, or a scouting or reconnaissance mission? Then see which of those qualities you lack, making it meaningless to bring you into Fleet School.”

  “You could have sent me an email saying all this.”

  “But then I couldn’t have seen the stubbornness in your face as you rejected every idea I offered you without even a moment’s consideration that you might have something to learn from me.”

  “I consider everything.”

  “You consider everything impossible unless you want it, and then it already belongs to you, in which case anyone who stands in your way is a thief.”

  Dabeet inwardly reeled back at this blow. To him, stubbornness had always meant his mother, her refusal to adapt to reality or to realize how ridiculous or offensive she seemed to others. Graff was saying that these were Dabeet’s flaws as well.

  The thought of his mother’s many faults brought Dabeet back to the only important thing he had to learn from Graff. “You had my DNA tested,” he said. “Have the decency to tell me if my mother is right about my parentage.”

  Graff chuckled with what seemed to be real amusement. “You want the truth of your parentage.”

  “Am I a child of the Fleet?”

&nb
sp; “Your mother was not so promiscuous as that. At most, you would be a child of one member of the Fleet.”

  It took a moment for Dabeet to remember the old epithet “child of the Regiment,” which was a cruel term for someone whose mother had slept with every soldier when a regiment was stationed in her town. “So you amuse yourself at my expense,” said Dabeet, “and yet you can’t tell me a simple truth that you possess and I have a right to know.”

  “A right to know,” said Graff, “eventually, when the time is right.”

  “Now is the right time,” said Dabeet.

  Graff cocked his head slightly, and his smile faded to grimness. “If you were not such a preternaturally brilliant child, I would never give you an accurate answer until you came of age. But now I see that receiving the answer you ask for is as much of a test as any other test I could devise. So we’ll see what you make of it.”

  Dabeet knew that Graff was hinting that the answer would be something unpleasant. But he had imagined so many possible fathers that …

  “Your father is most definitely an officer of the International Fleet. He knows about you, and if you possessed the qualifications for Fleet School, you would be admitted as a legitimate child of the Fleet.”

  Dabeet knew that this could not be the information that would stagger him, that would be a test of his qualifications. “You could have told this to me or my mother at any time.”

  “That’s not the information that your mother withheld from you,” said Graff. “She’s been saying it all along. But your DNA also told us that you have no closer relationship to Maria Rafaella Ochoa than to any other woman with some degree of Amerindian ancestry.”

  It took Dabeet a moment to register what Graff had said. “She isn’t my mother?”

  “Nor your aunt, nor your cousin, nor your cousin’s cousin’s cousin. She barely qualifies as your neighbor. Neither she nor you comes from Venezuela. She is a native-born citizen of the United States, and she learned Spanish as a second language when she was about your age, and her mother was a career diplomat stationed in Ecuador.”

  “But…”

  “Dabeet Ochoa, at a loss for words?” asked Graff.

  “Why would she…”

  “Why would she devote her life to you like a mother? Why would she claim to be what she was not? Why would she lie to you? Or—and this is the most interesting question—why would a genius like you never question how his extraordinary intelligence could possibly have sprung from an above-average but not-extraordinary intelligence like hers?”

  “Because she…”

  “Because you lived in a world entirely of her shaping, and you showed not the slightest ability to question the basic parameters of the stories she told you.”

  “I doubted all her stories!”

  “You doubted the ones that sounded false,” said Graff. “That your father was a Fleet officer, that your mother’s family was wealthy—and they are, by the way. But you never doubted the ones that were most outrageous—that she is a Venezuelan yet has no trace of that accent, and that she is the mother of a son like you.”

  “Did she kidnap me?” asked Dabeet.

  “Now you’re flailing about, trying to turn this into some romantic or tragic farce,” said Graff. “Your real mother was unable to raise you. You were placed into the foster care system in the place where your mother abandoned you—though she saw to it that anonymous donations were made to provide for your upkeep and education. And you were lucky enough to come quickly under the care of an extraordinarily devoted and loving foster mother, who recognized your extraordinary abilities and knew that you would never reach your real potential in that place. So she brought you to the United States—legally, I might add, because she could prove that she was an American citizen, and, by claiming parentage, won you the rights and privileges of citizenship.”

  “What can I … what am I supposed to do with this information?” asked Dabeet.

  “Nothing at all,” said Graff. “You would gain nothing by denying her parentage, and lose much, including residency in the United States. She would also suffer, because she kidnapped you from your native country.”

  “Ecuador?”

  “I think I’ve told you enough to show you that knowledge you have no use for is rarely worth having. The secret, by the way, is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.”

  “Thank you for the astonishingly wise counsel,” said Dabeet.

  “Sarcastic little bastard to the bone,” said Graff. He pressed down on the arms of the chair and lurched to his feet, groaning. “Oh, for the pleasures of low gravity.”

  “So that’s it? You’re leaving me with nothing?”

  “I left you with true information, and a serious test. Now let’s see how you use the information and try to pass the test.”

  “How can I contact you when I’m ready?” asked Dabeet.

  Graff was already out the door. “If you’re ever ready for anything that pertains to me, I’ll let you know.” By then he was halfway to the stairs. He moved much faster than his bulk should have allowed.

  All the neighbors were outside, watching both Graff and Dabeet. Many were clustered around Mother, muttering questions or judgments. With such an audience, Dabeet dared not call out after Graff. Nor did he want to demean himself by running after him in order to ask one more question.

  Besides, he had no idea what that question would be.

  The car moved off. Mother headed back inside.

  Do I still call her Mother? Of course I do. She sacrificed everything to bring me here, and even if she surrounded me with lies, the lies were all meant to elevate me and advance me and help me achieve my potential. What child has had a more dedicated parent than this one? She may be ridiculous, but she has earned the title Mother far more than the woman who bore me, who was, like my father, little more than a gene donor.

  “I don’t think it went very well, Mother,” said Dabeet quietly when she ushered him back into the apartment.

  “Tell me everything.”

  So Dabeet spoke to his mother for an hour, and almost nothing that he said was any truer than the stories his mother had told him all his life, and so when he had satisfied her curiosity, he felt empty and wicked and angry and deeply, deeply sad.

  I am never going to Fleet School, because Graff doesn’t like me, and whatever attributes he doesn’t like, they aren’t likely to change.

  Besides, Dabeet realized, I don’t have the same urgency to get away from Mother. She’s my one protector in a hostile world where minds like mine are a commodity to be captured or killed or exploited by governments—haven’t we seen what happened to the Battle School students when they came home to Earth? I would have to be a fool to get out from under her protection.

  And under that was a feeling so deep and so irrational that Dabeet was ashamed that it formed part of his reason for no longer seeking to leave her behind: She did not deserve to lose contact with the child for whom she had sacrificed her former life.

  Only gradually did he realize that somewhere, apparently still living, were his birth parents. They must be brilliant to have been Dabeet’s genetic sources. How can they possibly be as obscure as Mother? Somewhere, in some country, his birth mother now lived the life she had abandoned him in order to pursue. Did she rule a nation? Run a great corporation? Had she produced works of art or literature? Was she a performer? Was she famous in some way? She must have Amerindian blood—Graff had said so. As for Dabeet’s father, he was in the Fleet, he knew about Dabeet’s existence … was there some way to figure out, perhaps from his picture, who he might be?

  Stop it! Dabeet ordered himself silently. If they wanted to help you they’d already be helping. There’s only one person who will help you, and that’s Mother, and it’s time you treated her with the respect she has earned from you.

  3

  —That was too provocative, going to see him.

  —How could I make any in
telligent decision about him without meeting him?

  —You could have called him in. You didn’t have to show your face.

  —It’s on the front of my head. And bringing him in would be even more provocative.

  —You know what’s going on right now. You know it’s only beginning. And now you’ve put a target on him.

  —I don’t see how. He’s never had even the slightest military training. He’s useless to them.

  —Whoever “them” is, are they going to think that matters? Ender Wiggin aced all the tests. Dabeet Ochoa aced all the tests. This is a matter of record and yes, of course they’ll find a way to access those records.

  —I wish I had foreseen all these potential consequences.

  —You foresee everything.

  —I’m not God, you know. If he sees everything, either, which I’m not sure he does.

  —You want them to take him.

  —A child? You think I want them to—

  —I think you want to see what he’ll do.

  —He’s eleven. Which of the other kids was able to do anything?

  —You placed a tracker on him?

  —“Them” would find anything like that.

  —You just can’t stand to let anybody in on your plans, even when it’s their legal responsibility to know what you’re doing to a child.

  —It’s sweet that you imagine that I have plans. That’s why I shouldn’t have admirers working with me.

  —I don’t admire you. I distrust you intensely.

  —Yet you’re sure I have a plan.

  —You always have plans, sixty-four layers deep, and reaching forward generations.

  —I have aspirations. Let’s watch Dabeet carefully and see who does have plans for him.

  The day after the Minister of Colonization visited him, Dabeet went to school as he normally did, but he could hardly concentrate on anything. Not that he needed to concentrate in order to answer in-class questions or deal with teachers. But he kept spinning through the tests that the minister had assigned to him.

  The first test had been explicit: Figure out the qualities of a good colony leader and then see which of those qualities Dabeet lacked. Answers that immediately came to mind were: I don’t make friends with other children. I’m arrogant and they resent me. But the adults admire and respect me. Will I be leading a team of children or of adults, if I’m a Fleet School graduate? Adults, of course. But perhaps when I’m an adult, other adults will resent me and fear me the way other children do now. I need to think more about that.