Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(119)

“You know who my parents are.”

“Of course I do,” said Graff. “And I know why you have been deprived of their presence in your life, and I, and they, agree that this is your best chance for a normal life.”

“Why?” said Dabeet. “Are they too famous to raise me? Famous people have had children before. They don’t all turn into horrible human beings.”

“Fame doesn’t enter into it,” said Graff. “Beyond that, I will neither confirm nor disconfirm any guesses you make. Please don’t waste time.”

Dabeet wanted to strike out at that complacent face across the table. To scream at him for his smug decisions about what was good for Dabeet, without any attempt to let Dabeet be part of the decision.

“I can see that you are determined to deprive me of knowledge about my parentage, and to conspire in keeping me from having any kind of parent in my life.”

“You had years with Rafa Ochoa,” said Graff.

“And now those years have ended.”

“You were not deprived of love. You still aren’t.”

Dabeet thought immediately of his friends, and his eyes watered. He calmed himself and answered with a steady voice. “So my only family, here on forward, is whatever brothers and sisters I can find for myself.”

Graff nodded slightly. “A good way of looking at it.”

“And my real father and mother consent to this,” he said.

“They do,” said Graff. “Though not happily.”

“The fact that they gave consent at all means that part of my education must now include trying to overcome the soullessness they have bequeathed to me in my genes.”

“Yes,” said Graff.

Something flickered across his face and Dabeet wondered if it might be pain.

Why would Graff have felt pain at Dabeet’s words?

An answer came immediately to Dabeet’s mind. “Sir,” he asked, “are you my father?”

Graff immediately shook his head. “I am not,” he said. “But I would be proud to claim you as mine, if it were so.”

Graff pushed himself up from the table. Dabeet knew dismissal when he saw it, so he also got up from his chair. “Thank you for meeting with me, sir,” he said. “Thank you for being candid with me.”

“I suspect that you’re determined to go to great lengths to discover your parentage,” said Graff. “Don’t waste your time. If there’s any human being alive who knows better than me how to erase every trace of certain information from the databases and archives, I will hire him and make him check my work. You’ll never succeed, so I urge you not to try.”

“I’ll spend my life trying to figure out why you’re so grimly determined never to let me know who I really am,” said Dabeet.

“Speculate all you want,” said Graff. “Guessing is free. It’s also bound to fail.”

“Then you, sir, are my enemy,” said Dabeet. “I once counted you as my only friend.”

“Wrong on both counts,” said Graff. “You have until I leave Fleet School, probably near noon tomorrow, to change your mind and return to Earth.”

“Do you have a new mommy waiting to be assigned to me there?” asked Dabeet.

“Do you need a new mommy?” asked Graff.

Dabeet had no answer. Because the only true answer was: I need my real mommy and daddy, sir. Not another substitute.

“I didn’t think so,” said Graff. “But of course you would be assigned to a foster family of very high quality. With foster siblings who would welcome you.”

“If I were still the kind of boy who would accept that situation,” said Dabeet, “then they would be fools to welcome me. But I’m not that kind of boy. I’ll be staying here.”

Graff extended his hand. “You did well here, Dabeet, under very difficult circumstances.”

“Are you saying that I passed your test, sir?”

Dabeet watched as Graff seemed to puzzle over what he had been referring to.

So Dabeet quoted it back to him. “‘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.’”

Graff nodded. “Do you know which of those qualities you lack?”

Dabeet replied instantly. “All of them,” he said. “But I’m getting better, and I’ll never learn them anywhere but here.”

“Was that the whole test?”

“You gave me advice,” said Dabeet. “‘Knowledge you have no use for is rarely worth having. The secret is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.’”

“Have you followed my advice?” asked Graff.

“It was bad advice,” said Dabeet. “What I have lived by is this: Whatever I need to know, and don’t, I must learn. And if learning it fights against my natural inclinations, then it’s all the more important that I learn it anyway.”

“My advice was good enough,” said Graff. “You merely found a higher priority. Good for you. You learned to crawl around on the surface of space vehicles and how to jump from one to another without dying. Are you good at it now?”