Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(108)

—Genius?

—Would bring a desperate war to a quick, successful conclusion.

—Luck.

—Luck that we had you in the Second Formic War, and that you were in a place, at a time, with a weapon, when your brilliant insight could be put into action. Dumb luck. I agree.

—And you knew that if you didn’t have a commander of genius in the Third War …

—If we waited for them to come at us again, their many worlds against our single world would be our doom. A war of attrition that we couldn’t win, no matter how spunky we were.

—Not sure “spunky” is the—

—It’s true that we invented some powerful new technologies under pressure. They didn’t have our nanobots, or our gravitics, which led to the molecular-disruption device, but that would no more have won the war, if the endgame had taken place here in our solar system, than the V-1 and V-2 saved the Nazis.

—If we’re talking about World War II, don’t forget the atomic bomb.

—It came at the end of a crushing war of attrition. If the Japanese hadn’t already lost the war, by every measure, the A-bomb would have been no more effective than the fire-bombing of Dresden. You know what I’m saying. We should have lost all three Formic Wars. We did lose them, except for a single, miraculous, decisive battle, the rarest form of victory.

—Hannibal had Cannae but Carthage lost the Punic Wars, the English had Agincourt and Crécy and they still lost the Hundred Years’ War. I know.

—With multiple planets and the ability to reconfigure their fleet on the fly, their endless supply of soldiers, their—

—You learned the right lesson from the wars, my friend. The human race was doomed if we remained on only one world.

—We can’t count on our gene pool squeezing out military geniuses whenever we need them. Good commanders are hard to find, but even the best commanders can’t win lopsided wars of attrition, and a species confined to one planet is a single roach waiting to be stepped on.

—Not a roach. Roaches can scurry.

—So we’re a fly caught in a web of our own weaving.

—Better.

—The sheer luck of having you in the Second Formic War, the miracle of Ender Wiggin and, let’s be fair, the unsung Julian Delphiki—

—And, even fairer, you.

—Ain’t we grand.

—But we did have Ender Wiggin.

—Won’t happen again. We’ll revert to the normal pattern of war. For all we know, there are six Formic fleets heading toward us right now, seriously pissed off and ready to exact vengeance against us. Carthage. That’s what we are. A single city on the edge of the desert of space, waiting to be obliterated and have salt sown in our fields.

—So, having won the last war, you’re winning the next one by dispersing the human species.

—Like a dandelion, blown out by a little child to take root wherever the breeze carries the tiny seeds.

—And you’re the little boy with the puff of air.

—Which is why I’m not preparing my son to be the genius who will save the human race in a grand, spectacular battle.

—You’re preparing him to be one of those little windblown seeds.

—Not even a seed. A part of the wisp of filament that serves as the kite to carry the seed along till it finds broken, fertile ground.

—It’s called the “pappus.” The achene, the beak, the stalk. I paid attention when we did dandelions in botany class.

—You took botany.

—The best preparation for a soldier. So that when the war is over, I can return, like Cincinnatus, to the farm, and make war against dandelion, thistle, nettle, and vetch.

—Andrew Wiggin is going to try to live the life of Cincinnatus, without any kind of preparation to suit him for the task. Dabeet, by his inborn character, was doomed to a life of arrogant isolation, useless to any community, more damaged from the start than Ender was. I had no way of knowing how he would respond to a crisis that showed him the futility of isolation.

—I think he’s done rather well.

—If he lives, it will have been worth it.

—And if he dies?

—Then I am a Darwinian dead end, the brazen fiery Molech, Saturn devouring his son.

—Having adopted the human race, my old friend, you have billions of children, your dandelions in the lawn of the galaxy.

—I love the little bastard. I want my boy to live.

—Which will require him and his team to score an unlikely tactical victory against the most talented monster in centuries.

—That’s what our geniuses are born for. Not to fight off aliens, not to prevent astronomical or ecological catastrophes, but to stop our own homegrown monsters from eating us alive from the inside out.

Dabeet found his suit where he had left it, now fully charged. Oh good, he thought. When Monkey fails to catch me—or, more likely, I fail to catch her—I’ll have plenty of time to regret my many flaws and failures as I drift into the fires of reentry or the bitter cold of space.

He moved carefully, making sure that every piece of the suit fit. The suit reported itself to be intact and functional. Dabeet walked up the passage between the cartons of Vacoplaz, touching nothing. Then along the aisle between the passenger seats, which had so recently held the raiders who came here, wittingly or not, to kill a school full of children, along with themselves.