Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(19)

“You never actually applied,” said Dabeet. “You never even submitted my DNA for analysis.”

She wept even more bitterly.

“Why else do you think I went ahead and submitted the application myself?” he asked.

“I should have known you’d take matters into your own hands,” she said. “You’ve always been such a responsible boy.”

Buying groceries and bringing back the correct change was about all the experience she had with his “responsibility.” That and doing his own homework without nagging. “You let me ride my bicycle to the store, carrying money.”

“It was safe enough. None of the mothers would let their boys rob you or steal your bike. That’s why I didn’t work at a better job. I wanted the other women to know me and trust me.”

And that’s one of the lessons Graff wants me to learn, Dabeet realized. Mother could have had more money, more prestige—but it was more important, more useful for her to be able to trust in the neighbor women so they would watch over her child. Mother knew it already. She is a wise woman. Who’s to say I couldn’t have acquired whatever wits I have from her?

“Mother, all your plans have worked out well, and now I’m going to Fleet School. The war’s over, so they don’t censor mail now—I looked it up. We’re going to be free to email each other.”

That only made her cry a little harder as she waved him away. But he didn’t leave the room.

“Do you think I don’t know how much you sacrificed for me, Mother? How much I owe you?” Of course she didn’t know that he knew how much she had done for a child who was, after all, no kin of hers.

Then again, it was also possible that Graff was lying to him.

But if he asked her for the truth, she would only affirm the same lies she had always told him—if they were lies. He would know no more than now, and she would be even sadder in the bargain. Or angry—it might make her angry. What was the point of that?

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. I almost forgot.” Her tears stopped. She seemed eager, for a moment. She stood up and got a box from beside the sink. She unplugged from it a cord that was attached to the wall. “It’s a little old-fashioned, I know, but this was delivered for you today.”

It was a phone. Not an expensive one, but he saw that several games were pre-installed, along with various programs that looked promising. It was the kind of phone that could access anything and function as a real computer, if you attached the right things to it.

“Why would they give me this?” asked Dabeet. “There’s no phone service between Fleet School and Earth.”

“Are you sure?” asked Mother.

“You didn’t order this for me, did you?” Dabeet asked.

“Ay, que pudiera,” she said. “But if I had that kind of money, would I buy you a phone you couldn’t use in space?”

Only then did Dabeet realize that this phone was not from Fleet School, either. They would almost certainly have the most capable holographic desks for their students, not a flat-screen phone. This came from the people who had kidnapped him. This was certainly part of the plot that he had proposed—to open an entry point to an invading force.

I have to take it, even if I never use it.

Then he realized that the phone was also a message. We know who and where your mother is. Don’t think you can betray us with impunity just because you’re up in space. As long as your mother is on Earth, we can hurt you.

Maybe she could be brought into space.…

“What are you thinking? Do you like it?”

“It’s a strange thing for them to give me,” said Dabeet. “Maybe it’s a mistake.” Then he grinned. “If it is, I can’t think of a single reason to correct it.”

*

Dabeet did not use the phone at all—he kept it switched off and never connected it to his mother’s laptop. He did keep it charged, because why not?

But he was aware of it whenever he was at home, clinging to its lifeline plugged into the wall. Wireless charging was out of the question, because Mother believed it wasn’t safe to have loose electricity ricocheting off the walls. And they didn’t make wireless chargers these days that didn’t automatically connect the device with any computer or net connection in the house.

Dabeet continued going to school every day, but he only went to the few classes that interested him, and otherwise stayed in the library, reading or, when he had an idea worth working on, writing. He found that unexpressed ideas remained inchoate, with only a few broad strokes clearly in mind. But the moment he started to write them down, all sorts of complications and implications emerged, requiring further tweaking or exploration before the thoughts could be considered worthy of full-fledged idea status.

Only a week ago, there would have been complaints about Dabeet’s nonattendance. Long ago the administrators and teachers had realized that the argument “You’re going to fall behind” simply did not apply to Dabeet, who seemed perpetually to fall ahead.

So the argument of choice became “You’re setting a bad example for students who do need to attend class in order to keep up,” and Dabeet had learned enough about social niceties to leave unspoken the obvious point that it wasn’t his problem if they didn’t do what was required to excel.

“They’re in a school for the gifted,” Dabeet would reply. “If they haven’t the sense to do the work they need to do, they don’t belong here. The sooner they flunk back into regular schools, the better.”