Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(32)
Not that those breakable children could help it. Long months and years away from gravity weakened the body, whether you came from Earth or were born in a ship or station with centrifuges or gravity manipulation. Most families tried to maintain a level of familiarity with gravity that would allow them to live on Luna with little or no transition—and to visit Earth without immediately dying. Dabeet could not begrudge them a little compensation for their fragility.
Everything evens out in the end—who said that? Mother? Some neighbor of hers? A teacher? Yes, it was a teacher, but he was being ironic, joking with a rather ugly girl that someday the very pretty girl who was the object of her envy at the moment would someday be in front of an audience or promotions board, and a huge bubble of snot would form, pushing out and sucking in with her breathing. “Everything evens out in the end.”
“She’ll still be a pretty girl with a snot-bubble,” said the plain girl. “And she’ll have the kind of cleavage that makes people not notice snot-bubbles.”
“There’s no cleavage that magical,” said the teacher, and his laugh ended the conversation.
His point had obviously been that things do not even out in the end. Lucky people might bemoan this or that small thing that went wrong in their lives. But to others less lucky, they would seem to have sailed through life without trouble.
Like me, thought Dabeet. Nothing has gone wrong for me. Sure, my father’s missing, but look at my genetic heritage. My devoted mother. Good teachers, good books. My brains. Important enough to be kidnapped. Clever or useful enough to be let go. Taken up into Fleet School, where I’m mastering the coursework faster than anybody. My few setbacks are trivial, in areas that don’t matter to me anyway.
So it was that Dabeet found himself clinging forlornly to one of the three-dimensionally floating objects in the battleroom that all the kids called “stars.” They seemed to be made of the same material as the walls—their handholds extruded or receded as children approached each square.
Dabeet was holding tightly to one of the handholds, because his unconscious mind had noticed that the nearest wall or floor was as far away as if he were on a four-story building. He knew the vertigo would pass soon, and then he could let go and fly back to the wall.
As he thought these thoughts, a change in position caused him to give the handhold a hard twist, and something extraordinary happened. The whole face of that square extruded in the form of a pyramid, with the handhold perched on its top. The base of the pyramid was still aligned with the adjacent wall plates.
No one had mentioned that the surface plates could do such things. Dabeet twisted the handhold sharply back in the opposite direction. The pyramid was sucked back into the panel until it was completely flat.
Another twist, and this time the whole square panel moved forward, forming a cube. More torque, and the cube became a square pillar.
“Stop playing with the shapes,” said Ragnar Olafson. “Are you three?” Ragnar had come out of nowhere and was instantly gone again.
So this was called “playing with the shapes.” No doubt they all knew about it and had gotten tired of it years ago.
Dabeet gave the handhold another twist and the whole pillar snapped back into place, flush with the wall.
Dabeet had no idea why these panels had such capabilities, but perhaps by figuring out what they could do, he could think of a reason why they had been designed to do it. Dabeet launched himself toward a wall near one of the gates that armies used when they launched themselves into battle.
He began torquing the handles of the panels surrounding the door. Within a couple of minutes, he had shaped a low parapet all the way around the gate. It would be useless for the possessors of that gate—what defense could it offer when enemies could attack from above at any time?—but if an enemy team built such a low wall before the enemy emerged from their gate …
“That never does any good,” said Ragnar again. “We tried all kinds of things back in the day. None of the teams waste time with the shapes anymore.”
“I have to figure out what they can do,” said Dabeet. “Especially if everybody else already knows.”
“Nobody else cares,” said Ragnar. “But play in the sandbox all you want.”
Dabeet perked up at that reference. “Do they have sandboxes where you grew up?”
Ragnar looked confused. “A sandbox is a thing?” he asked.
“A box filled with sand where you can play. Digging and piling things up.”
“I guess that would work, in gravity,” said Ragnar. “Legal. I just thought it was an expression. Something you can play with that doesn’t matter and does no harm. Makes sense that the thing came before the expression.”
Dabeet might have allowed himself to get sidetracked into a discussion of idioms in various languages—one of his favorites was “raining cats and dogs,” which was the equivalent of the Danish “It’s raining shoemakers’ apprentices” and the Greek “It’s raining chair legs” and the French “It’s raining frogs” and “It’s raining like a pissing cow.” The Serbian “The rain falls and kills the mice,” the Welsh “It’s raining old ladies and sticks”—Dabeet had memorized a long list of them and entertained a classroom during a rainstorm at Conn reciting the oddest ones until half the class was laughing hysterically, especially when they started making up new ones after “pissing cow,” on related themes.