Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(60)

Zhang He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said ‘lie.’ What I meant was, you’re hiding something, and I think it has to do with the problem you were working on all night. You never have to work even fifteen minutes on any problem from class.”

“It wasn’t from class.”

“What, then? It’s not like you have a day job with a mean boss.”

I kind of do, thought Dabeet. “It’s a puzzle my mother sent me.”

Zhang He looked at him even more skeptically. Dabeet started moving toward the practice door as gravity faded back in, drawing them down to the floor.

“What, a mother can’t send her son puzzles?” asked Dabeet.

“I didn’t know you had a mother,” said Zhang.

“Everybody does. Or did.”

“You never talk about her.”

“Nobody talks about their families.”

“Everybody talks about their families,” said Zhang. “With their friends.”

And there it was, the real difference between them. Zhang He had friends. He had been here longer than Dabeet—everybody had—but Dabeet was nearly six months into his time at Fleet School and Zhang He was, as far as he could tell, his only friend.

Zhang He didn’t say anything, because what could he say? He started to open his mouth, possibly preparing to apologize for saying such an insensitive thing, but Dabeet waved off his remark. “Can’t be offensive if it’s true,” he said. “I’m not a friendable guy.”

Zhang He gave the cruelest response: He didn’t disagree. Mercifully, he changed the subject. “That puzzle. You said it was a puzzle?”

“Yes.”

“Can I try it?”

Dabeet was nonplussed. On the one hand, whatever the South Americans were doing, it would become obvious soon enough, if they really came up here. Why keep it such an amazing dark secret? On the other hand, what if Zhang He did figure it out? Then the puzzle would be solved and Dabeet could read the message. Zhang He could read it, too. So was Dabeet ready for that?

Why was Dabeet worrying about this? If Dabeet couldn’t read it, how could Zhang He? Either they were friends or they weren’t. Trust or don’t trust, there’s no half-trust.

“Sure,” said Dabeet.

Zhang He’s mouth twisted into a wry little smile. “Took a few moments to decide. Good cop bad cop? Good angel bad devil?”

“I’m not used to discussing my business with anybody.”

“Except whoever you get ansible calls from.”

Of course the rumors had spread through the school. Kids didn’t get use of the ansible unless somebody in their close family died, and usually not even then. There was an ethos of self-sufficiency; it was embarrassing to admit you needed your family. But Dabeet had an ansible call from somebody in the Fleet. Somebody so important that Urska Kaluza herself had been excluded from the conversation.

“Get yourself an ansible, I’ll talk to you, too,” said Dabeet.

Zhang He didn’t laugh, he just sighed and walked through the barracks door ahead of Dabeet.

“Come on, that was funny,” said Dabeet.

“To somebody, maybe,” said Zhang He. “Maybe to everybody who knows who you were talking to.”

“I was talking to Ender Wiggin,” said Dabeet, impulsively.

“Still not funny,” said Zhang He. “But I also don’t care. So let me see the puzzle.”

They went to Dabeet’s bunk and Dabeet extracted the word-search puzzle from his locker. Zhang He looked it over. “There aren’t any words here.”

“That’s why the puzzle took me all night.”

Zhang He handed it back. “Is it in some weird language?”

“It’s in English and Spanish, maybe half and half. And it’s also in cipher.”

Zhang He raised his eyebrows. “All right, that makes it a challenge.”

Dabeet told him about letter frequency in both languages, and scanning for repetitions of E. “I also don’t know if it’s consistently in rows or columns or diagonals. Maybe the decoded puzzle really is a word search, so I have to find individual words and only then arrange them in order.”

“Doesn’t seem likely,” said Zhang He. “That is, if anybody cares whether you ever read the message correctly. English is so positional that it’s hard to come up with a statement of any length that doesn’t lose all meaning if the words are jumbled, or mean the opposite of what’s intended if you place one word out of order.”

“That’s why I looked for letter patterns only in straight lines. I kept running into triples.”

“Oh. That’s not entirely impossible, of course, since there aren’t any spaces, so you could have a double letter followed by the same letter. ‘Climb a tree, either the oak or the elm.’ ‘Tree’ followed by ‘either.’”

“That works in English. But the triples are all over, and I don’t think that can happen in Spanish. The only doubled letter is LL. The N used to have a double, but when they palatalized it, the second N became the tilde.”

“Adventures in etymology,” said Zhang He.

Dabeet didn’t like the sarcastic tone, but when it came to friends, beggars couldn’t be choosers. “I just thought they might have replaced ? with double NN, for purposes of the puzzle.”