Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(11)

The third test might not have been a test at all. But the man phrased it as a challenge. That made it a test. “The secret is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.”

Which knowledge did he mean? About Mother? About his putative father? About his rumored birth mother? About the fact that he was not considered qualified for Fleet School?

That was such nonsense. A man like that does not come to the home of an unqualified applicant to reject him in person. He comes to an eminently qualified student in order to test him further by pretending to reject him.

Now, there was some of the “knowledge” Dabeet had—that he wasn’t being taken up to Fleet School. But was it true? Was any of his “knowledge” true? And if it was not true, was it knowledge?

The word “epistemology” flashed into his mind. He’s making me question which of my sources of information is reliable, and the answer is: None of them. Everyone has their own purposes in what they choose to say or not say, and then they have the purposes they don’t even know that they have, which means that I can’t actually “know” anything, if that’s supposed to mean possessing certainty about the truth-value of any portion of the information I “know.”

Mother had been lying to him? Well, what child didn’t get lied to regularly? The question really is, Which things that she said were lies, and which were things that she believed to be true, which were actually false, and which were things she believed, which also happened to be true? A mother-centered epistemology wasn’t going to get him far. But at least she had his best interests at heart. Though of course she couldn’t possibly know what was best for him. Neither could the Minister of Colonization. Neither could Dabeet himself.

Make use of whatever knowledge you have. All knowledge was tentative, untrustworthy. You had to act on what you believed, but constantly test it to see if it was not believable after all, and then adapt your plan.…

Thus his mind spun around and around. Uselessly, because right now he had no power to act on any of the information he had. What was he going to do, stow away on a supply shuttle and turn up in Fleet School as a volunteer student? “Please, sir, may I audit your classes here?” “No, lad, as a pirate, you’re going to walk the plank!”

At lunch, Dabeet ate alone, though he could have sat with any of several groups. He was not hated by the other students, and he liked many of them and regarded several as friends. Being very intelligent put off some of the other kids, but his penchant for covertly ridiculing the teachers or their lessons made him something of a hero to some students, and a source of entertainment to others. But he was not so close to anyone that, when he chose to be alone, anyone presumed to intrude on his lunchtime isolation.

Dabeet was lost in thought—in daydreams, to tell the truth, about what Fleet School might be like, and how boring it probably was now that the war was over—when an adult hand gripped his shoulder, not so tightly as to cause pain, but firmly enough that Dabeet understood the pointlessness of resistance.

Other children were looking at whoever had hold of him. If Dabeet had been more observant, he would have realized this and couldn’t have been taken by surprise. I’m not observant enough. That’s a test and I just failed it.

“Could you come with me, Master Ochoa?”

Ah. It was the principal himself. In the lunchroom. In order to bring Dabeet out in person. Dabeet could hear people whispering his name as the principal guided him past their tables. Dabeet was not sure he liked this kind of celebrity.

In the corridor, where no one else could hear, Dabeet asked, “Can you tell me, sir, why I’m not being allowed to finish my lunch?”

“You were just moving food around on your tray, Dabeet,” said the principal. “I have instructions to deliver you into the custody of your father.”

My father. The idea ran through him with a thrill. And then, immediately, he disbelieved it. “My father doesn’t know I exist.”

“He seems to think that he does,” said the principal. “Do you imagine we didn’t do the DNA exam required before delivering a child into the custody of a parent not already known to us by retinal scan? This man provided you with your Y chromosome.”

They reached the school offices and Dabeet tried to hang back. After all these years, after spending many of them quite sure that his father was a myth entirely invented by Mother, Dabeet did not want to meet him now, not under these circumstances. Because, with the principal’s testimony, he might believe that it was true.

They passed through the outer office, where none of the staff even looked up, and then past the principal’s private secretary and into the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, the place where students went to have authority work its magic on them.

There was no one there.

“But he was here only a few…”

The principal didn’t finish his sentence, because he slumped to the floor.

Dabeet barely had time to register this, and then he took one breath too many and he, too, felt himself slipping downward, the room spinning, and then … darkness.

*

Dabeet awoke on a large airplane, attached to a seat by an ordinary seat belt. This was the only restraint on him, and yet he felt like a prisoner. Of course, all passengers in an airplane in flight were prisoners, because they couldn’t leave the cage in which they were confined. And all children surrounded by adults were prisoners, because they were not free to make even the slightest decisions for themselves.