Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(75)

“That sounds about right,” said Monkey.

“Did you know that? Did you think of that?”

“Is this a competition?” asked Monkey. “Does it matter whether I thought of it? You thought of it, and you told me, so now we’re both thinking of it.”

“I have to know if I—”

“You have to know if you thought of anything I didn’t think of? I, who grew up in spaceships, crawling around in service corridors because I was small and agile and smart and observant enough to report on any structural damage or other anomalies that might be symptoms of something dangerous to the ship? Compared to you, whose parents called the building superintendent when the plumbing didn’t work?”

“We did our own repairs whenever we could. I learned how plumbing works and electricity and I fixed things.”

“That’s good,” said Monkey. “Not useful here, but good. If we’re ever on Earth and have a leaky toilet, I’ll defer to your expertise.”

“I can’t help where I was born.”

“I know that, and I don’t criticize you for it,” said Monkey. “Though if you were a friend, I could tease you about it.”

“If you were a friend, you wouldn’t want to.”

“If you had ever had a friend, you’d know how idiotic that statement is. The way you know you have a friend is, they spill a little wind from your sails, when you’re running before the wind. And then tighten your lashings when you’ve been a little storm-whipped. And yes, we study ocean sailing lore like crazy in space because it makes us feel as if we’re still doing something human.”

“I came from a place where I always did well,” said Dabeet. “You have to understand that.”

“No I don’t,” said Monkey. “Because it isn’t true.”

Dabeet now felt anger rise hot into his neck and face. “You don’t know anything about my life before Fleet School.”

“I know everything about it that matters here. You never tried anything back on Earth that you didn’t know you could be best at. If you weren’t best, right from the start, then you ran away from it. True or false?”

Dabeet wanted to lash out with some cruel retort, but everything that came to mind was foolish. Childish. Because there was no rational answer. “That’s true,” he said, grudgingly.

“When you got here, we all called you ‘Test Boy,’ because it was the only thing you were willing to do, because it was the only thing you were really good at. Anything you actually had to work at to learn, you hid from. The battleroom, martial arts, even the calisthenics that keep our bones strong and straight—anything that everyone else was good at, and you weren’t, you didn’t even try to learn. So … Test Boy.”

“Why do you say it like it was … contemptible?”

“Because it is,” said Monkey. “You and I are in this corridor, counting alcoves and looking for passages, because the whole station is in danger, partly because of decisions you made. And you’re angry at me because you don’t know as much as I do about things I’ve done all my life. That’s not the contemptible part. What’s contemptible is that you could have been better than you are by now, and you chose not to, because you couldn’t win at it.”

“But schoolwork isn’t nothing. My being good at that isn’t—”

“We’re training to go out into space, discovering goldilocks planets and exploring them and reporting on life-forms and habitability, and getting perfect scores on schoolroom tests won’t prepare you for that in any way.”

“They’re teaching us subjects that we need to know in order—”

“No, Dabeet. No and no and no. Think what it means to take a test in a class. They say they’re giving us problems that we’re supposed to solve. But that’s never true, is it? Because they give us problems to which the solutions are already known. That’s why they’re able to give us grades. So all you do in classroom tests is solve problems that have already been solved.”

Dabeet had never thought of it that way.

“Even that coded message you got, the one that Zhang He helped you with—it wasn’t a real problem, it was a test, because there was already a known solution. You didn’t know it, but you knew how to get it, and you would have solved it eventually, even without Zhang’s help, because you knew there was a solution or it wouldn’t have been sent to you. Right? All you know how to do is solve solvable problems.”

“Outguess the teachers.”

“You aren’t guessing,” said Monkey. “You really do figure things out. But there’s no pressure, because you know that somebody, somewhere, already knows the answer, which means there is an answer.”

“Well, what’s the point of solving problems when there isn’t an answer?”

“That’s how we’re going to spend our lives, Dabeet. When we go down to a planet, we’ll have procedures we’re supposed to follow—but only as long as those procedures yield desirable results. We have to know when to stop following them because they’re not working, or they’re counterproductive.”

“They’ve never been solved,” said Dabeet. “So we don’t even know if there is a solution.”