Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(2)

Best of all, no one could question the absence of a father who might be deep in the reaches of the Kuiper Belt, years of travel away from Earth. But a year ago, someone’s pointed remark about the war being over triggered a revelation that took Dabeet—and no one else—by surprise. “Yes, the war is over,” said Mother, “but the Fleet has its own laws, and no court on Earth—not even the courts of the Hegemony—has any jurisdiction over him.”

“Why would the courts be involved?” Dabeet was glad that a nosy neighbor woman asked the question, so he didn’t have to trigger a spate of crying by asking her himself.

“Because if an officer of the Fleet has a spouse up there, then that’s the only marriage that IF law will recognize.”

Gasps. Moans of how unfair it was. “And you are not that spouse! Nuestra se?ora, tan atroz! Maria Rafaella, you poor thing. And your baby, legally fatherless! Better that your man had died in the war and left you a widow than this scandalous treatment!”

At this point, Mother burst into tears. “I was so young, and he was so glorious, an officer already, he gave his word, but now he denies that he would have carnal knowledge of a fifteen-year-old, because that’s how old I was, how old I had to be, when dear little Dabeet formed within my body. My family disowned me, so the whole fortune of the Ochoas of Barrio Campina in Ciudad Bolivar is beyond my reach forever.”

It was Dabeet’s firm and immediate conviction that if there were any Ochoas in Ciudad Bolivar in Venezuela, either they had no fortune or they were no relation to Mother. For all he knew, her name was Moreno and she came from Saltillo, Mexico. When she spoke Spanish, it was without a trace of any South American accent Dabeet had ever heard, and her face and body revealed far too much Aztec or Carib or Guajiro ancestry for her to claim to have much of the blood of Spain. And the great wealthy families of Latin America guarded their bloodlines too carefully to produce a daughter who looked as Amerindian as Mother.

Her claim to be Venezuelan probably sprang from a wish to associate herself with the great Venezuelan war hero Victor Delgado—though “El Victor” never lived in Venezuela, having been spaceborn in a free mining family in the Kuiper Belt.

This much was undeniable: Mother had given him half his DNA, and that meant she was half responsible for the wits he was born with. And those wits had earned him the test scores Mother always bragged about. “It wasn’t I who brought little Dabeet to America, it was Dabeet who brought me! Test scores! Achievements! At the age of five he was so brilliant that the US Immigration and Naturalization Department brought us in under the Genius Exception instead of one of the South American quotas.”

This always made Hispanics ooh and aah, though by now Dabeet knew perfectly well that they were all thinking, “Little bastard,” or, “So you’re saying my kids are stupid?”

And since Dabeet was a little bastard, and Mother was saying their children were stupid, Dabeet thought that it was not unfair of them to feel that way. Though, to their credit, few of them said it aloud, or even allowed it to show on their faces until they were away from Mother.

Instead they nodded politely, listening with varying degrees of patience as the serious brag began. “If the war hadn’t ended when it did, my Dabeet would have been one of those children taken up to Battle School. For all we know, he might have been The One instead of Ender Wiggin.”

Everyone, especially Dabeet, knew this idea was ridiculous, so they smiled indulgently at a mother’s pride and went on to talk about something else, like the way all the children in Battle School were coming back to their home countries on Earth, and such terrible things went on in Battle School that it was good that it had been shut down, and it’s better for the children of Earth to be educated on Earth.

“But Dabeet is not a child of Earth,” said Mother, every time. “Dabeet is a child of the Fleet. As much as anyone else, he is a child of the Fleet and my son will receive his benefits, no matter how much the Great Seducer of Underage Venezuelan Girls tries to avoid confirming his rights.”

Now, at age ten, Dabeet had realized a fact so obvious that only courtesy could have kept any of the neighbors from stating the obvious: Regardless of whether Maria Rafaella had any legal standing as the spouse of some IF officer, DNA did not lie. If Dabeet’s DNA had been tested against his purported father’s DNA, then the Fleet’s lawyers would immediately have stepped in to enforce Dabeet’s rights as a child of the Fleet.

They had not, which might mean any of several things. Perhaps Mother had not known the officer’s name, in which case the IF would not know to whom they should compare Dabeet’s DNA. Or perhaps Dabeet’s father had died in some explosion so spectacular that not even a fragment of his body had remained.

Or perhaps Mother had slept with a Fleet officer, but he was not the only man, and when she had Dabeet’s DNA tested, she learned that the most motile sperm had no connection with the Fleet.

Or, most likely, Mother had never made any formal claim and had never offered Dabeet’s DNA for testing. Their silence was understandable because they did not know that he existed.

And now that Battle School had been refitted as Fleet School, accepting only children who were part of an off-Earth family, why would she refrain from the obvious step of submitting his DNA so he would qualify?

Because it was all a lie. Perhaps Mother knew perfectly well who Dabeet’s father was, and what Latin American hamlet or city he was hiding in. She kept claiming he was with the Fleet because now she was stuck with the lie.