Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(76)

“If we fail spectacularly, everybody dies except the orbital team. If we find out that there’s no way humans can establish any kind of permanent base on a planet, then we leave, right? And we don’t even count that as a failure, because we now know that it’s a goldilocks planet that, for whatever reasons we report, is off-limits for settlement. We go there with a test question—‘Is this planet a potential human habitat?’—and if we do our work properly, then either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will be the right answer.”

“They sent me a coded message because they knew I’d solve it,” said Dabeet. “They think of me as Test Boy, too.”

“No, you had to solve it, I mean, there was nothing wrong with that. But why did they send it? Why do they want you to do the things they’ve told you to do? What will really happen to your mother? Why haven’t you enlisted your secret pal on the ansible to protect her? Why are you letting them manipulate you and put all of us in danger?”

Dabeet covered his face with his hands. “Because she’s the only person in the whole human race who cares whether I live or die.”

“Well, I care,” said Monkey. “Though I doubt I care as much as she does.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on, but how can I know whether I’m right?”

“Exactly the problem,” said Monkey. “You can’t know whether you’ve found the right answer because there is no right answer. This isn’t a problem to which a solution is already known. But you have to be ready to adapt to whatever happens. And here’s what doesn’t work: trying to solve it by yourself. On classroom tests, if you don’t solve it alone, it’s called cheating and they kick you out of school. But in space, if you try to solve things alone, you endanger everybody because we’re all in it together, and no one person can think of everything.”

“I get it, I get it,” whispered Dabeet. “I’m the most stupid useless person here because I don’t have any useful skill.”

“It’s not about you,” said Monkey. “It’s not about whether you’re the most of this or the least of that. It’s about the whole community that lives in this fragile habitat. I’m sounding like my own father now, but it’s the lesson we all learned by the time we were four. We never, never, never do anything without telling somebody else what we’re doing, and where, and why, and for how long, because our lives all depend on knowing everything about everybody else.”

“I shouldn’t have kept my problem a secret.”

“Obviously,” said Monkey. “And when Zhang He realized that whatever was going on, it was a potential threat to all of us, he told everybody in our building club. The people who actually know you and work with you. We know you’re not stupid, but we also know you do everything solo, and we decided we couldn’t let you keep acting like that because it was going to get us all killed.”

“You couldn’t have known that, because you didn’t know about the threat from—”

“We know all about the threat from people thinking they can fix big problems without the embarrassment of telling other people how they screwed up. When it affects everybody, there’s no shame in telling about your mistakes and the potential bad results. Until you learn that, you can’t be trusted on any exploratory team.”

“The South Americans have me jumping through hoops.”

“Which means they almost certainly aren’t South Americans at all. Oh, the people who kidnapped you probably are, but they’re obeying somebody else’s orders.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“Somebody who was tracking you. You. Why would your name even come up in any South American country?”

“Because of my test scores.”

“If it’s because of your test scores, then they really are stupid and our danger is probably a great deal less, though they could still screw up and kill us all. Dabeet, haven’t you followed any news reports from Earth? Battle School students and graduates back on Earth are getting kidnapped, only they don’t get returned, like you did. But you were kidnapped before all the other kidnappings, weren’t you?”

“I don’t know. I heard of a couple, so…” Dabeet thought carefully about what that could mean. What if his kidnapping wasn’t an isolated event? What if it was merely an early kidnapping? “Those kids were taken because they were trained military leaders.”

“And you were a trained test-taker. Test-taking is an obedience test. Will you do what the test tells you to do?”

“So I wasn’t picked because of my ability,” said Dabeet. “I was picked because I follow instructions. Because if they told me the right story, I’d betray everybody in Fleet School.”

“There’s no shame in that,” said Monkey. “They didn’t choose you because you wanted to be a traitor, they chose you because you were extremely skilled at figuring out very hard problems with known solutions, and because you had one person in the whole world that you loved.”

“I don’t even know if I love her,” said Dabeet. “She isn’t even my biological mother. No genetic connection. All I know is that she loves me.”

“Do you think the people who kidnapped you were smart enough to figure all that out?”