Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(33)

But this was not the moment to repeat that event, especially because he wasn’t sure whether Ragnar had ever experienced rain at all.

Besides, at that moment Dabeet inadvertently pushed downward on one handle, and the beveled extrusion he had formed broke away from the wall behind it. It was as if the panel had come out of its socket, except that where it had been, there was a regular flat panel with a handhold, and on the bottom side of the block Dabeet was now holding there was another flat panel with a handhold.

“Did you know it would do that?” Dabeet asked Ragnar.

“I heard that they could come loose,” said Ragnar. “What did you do?”

“Pushed down on the left side, pulled up on the right.”

“Can you put it back?”

Dabeet set it back in place. It stayed, but it wasn’t stuck. He could pull it off easily, rotate it, put it back. Then he tried repeating the motion that had made it come free. And he felt a clunk from inside the block as it reattached itself.

Well, no. Because when he pulled up the block came free, only now it was attached to another cube of panel material that came up easily, as a part of the structure.

“That’s greeyaz,” said Ragnar. “You can’t do anything with it in combat.”

“Throw it at somebody?”

“Accomplishing what? Doesn’t freeze their suits, and they throw it back anyway. Just gets in the way.”

“So you’ve seen people do this?”

“Never,” said Ragnar. “But if it was useful, somebody would be doing it.”

“Maybe nobody knows,” said Dabeet.

“Same point.”

“Nobody knew how to do archery till somebody invented arrows and bows,” said Dabeet.

“You think that’s like longbows at Agincourt?” asked Ragnar, laughing. “Good luck with that.” And, once again, Ragnar launched himself away.

Still, it was the longest conversation he’d had with anybody in his team that didn’t consist of them telling him what to do and how wrongly he was doing it.

*

Dabeet thought so much about the panels that turned into cubes and blocks that he began to dream about them, because after pulling them cube by cube out of the walls and joining them to each other, the shapes he made from them, the process of extrusion and connection, these became the forms and processes that went on in his dreams, endless pipes and bridges, arches and spirals, things he couldn’t imagine the cubes might actually be able to become. He even hallucinated some of these shapes, watching them pass before his eyes while looking at a teacher, a diagram, his desk, blank walls. At any time he’d find his mind rotely putting blocks together, shaping them. Closing his eyes didn’t get rid of the images. Nothing did. But he forced himself to continue concentrating on the lesson, making sure that his schoolwork didn’t suffer because of this growing obsession with drawing shapes out of the battleroom walls.

How did Ender Wiggin and his jeesh ever get anything done, when they had these building blocks to play with?

If they had them. For all Dabeet knew, this feature of the walls had been added during the transition from Battle School into Fleet School. Maybe somebody realized that building things would be one of the most important tasks of the explorers and colonists. They would need shelter and defenses on these other worlds, for predators would not know that human flesh was indigestible, and resentful natives might be tempted to steal artifacts or take a biological trophy or two while the colonists slept.

But if it was worth creating these deep walls, with so many cubes hidden inside them, why hadn’t anyone emphasized to the students the importance of building with them? Why wasn’t the use of the cubes built into the game?

Or was it a test? Which students would keep doing the same old thing, and which would make a discovery and run with it?

It could be testing in the other direction, too, of course. To see how long Dabeet would keep working at this pointless, unappreciated, hypnotic, mind-numbing task until he realized that it was of no practical use. If that was the test, he was failing and had no intention of changing what he was doing.

The other kids on his team ignored him completely now, except when he built a structure that extended far into the battlespace. Some of them would mutter some kind of invective as they came closer to his building than they meant to. Others, saying nothing, simply grabbed on to one of the handholds on his pillar and used it to change direction. There is a use for these pillars, thought Dabeet.

But that was half an hour into a practice; in an actual competitive situation, the battle would be over before Dabeet’s structure was half done.

Unless somebody was helping him build.

As he thought about this, Dabeet let his gaze wander around the battleroom. “Knowledge you have no use for is rarely worth having,” Graff had said. “The secret is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.”

Maybe there’s a use for this knowledge about the blocks in the battleroom.… Maybe if I could put up a structure quickly enough, the instant we were allowed to pass through the gate, then the rest of the army could use my structure to change trajectories and be able to move through the battleroom using paths that weren’t so ballistic, and with a decent amount of cover from enemy fire along the way.

When there are stars in the room, are they placed so that the blocks can be built out to link to them?