Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(8)

“No you don’t,” said Graff.

Dabeet did not make a sarcastic reply about how Graff seemed to think he knew everything about somebody he had only just met. If Graff didn’t know how to read people, he wouldn’t have the vast power that he held.

“Then what do I think about nuns?” asked Dabeet.

“I have no idea, because Sister Geppetto in your story isn’t really a nun. She isn’t even the Holy Mother. She’s your mother.”

“My mother didn’t carve me out of wood.”

“Yes she did,” said Graff. “And now she won’t let go of the strings.”

Dabeet had almost forgotten the story, once he wrote it. It had been nothing but a stupid, meaningless assignment, and he treated it like kleenex—he blew a snotty little story into it and then tossed it into the wastebasket of his teacher’s mind.

“I don’t remember the story that well,” said Dabeet.

“You remember everything,” said Graff.

“I remember everything I care about,” said Dabeet.

“You care intensely about everything,” said Graff, “and so you remember everything.”

“Aren’t those useful traits?”

“Your Baby Jesus puppet demanded that his strings be cut, even though it made him powerless and destroyed him.”

“Puppets can’t do anything without strings.”

“They can’t do anything with strings, either. They only have things done to them.”

“Instead of trying to read an absurd amount of psychological twaddle into a throwaway story,” said Dabeet, “why don’t you just tell me what you think you learned from it?”

“That you would rather die at the hands of the village children than continue to live under your mother’s control.”

Dabeet sat and thought about this, trying to see whether it was true or not. Finally he said, “I can’t unwrap myself and see the truth. What you say might be true. Maybe I unconsciously revealed some deep inner hunger in a story that meant nothing.”

“It was because it meant nothing and you never expected anyone who mattered to read it that you were free to say unconsciously truthful things,” said Graff.

“War criminal, bully, dictator, and psychoanalyst,” said Dabeet.

“You’ve only dipped a toe into the ocean of my résumé,” said Graff. “Tell me why you are not so deeply troubled that you’d be nothing but a disruptive influence in Fleet School.”

“Without my mother,” said Dabeet, “I wouldn’t have—”

“Without your mother you wouldn’t have a pot to piss in—or any basis for your arrogant disregard for the feelings of other people.”

“Are you saying I’m not nice?” asked Dabeet. “There’s now a niceness test for getting into Battle School?”

“There always was,” said Graff. “But I’m sure you can be charming if you decide to be. No, what you seem utterly to lack is the ability to imagine the feelings of other people and adapt your program in order to fulfil their needs along with your own.”

“My ‘program’ has nothing to do with anybody but me.”

“If you made it into Fleet School, there would be someone else who did not get that place.”

“He should have done better on the tests.”

“Here’s a test for you: Why not apply your adequate intelligence to figuring out what qualities would make a good leader of an expedition, or a colony, or a scouting or reconnaissance mission? Then see which of those qualities you lack, making it meaningless to bring you into Fleet School.”

“You could have sent me an email saying all this.”

“But then I couldn’t have seen the stubbornness in your face as you rejected every idea I offered you without even a moment’s consideration that you might have something to learn from me.”

“I consider everything.”

“You consider everything impossible unless you want it, and then it already belongs to you, in which case anyone who stands in your way is a thief.”

Dabeet inwardly reeled back at this blow. To him, stubbornness had always meant his mother, her refusal to adapt to reality or to realize how ridiculous or offensive she seemed to others. Graff was saying that these were Dabeet’s flaws as well.

The thought of his mother’s many faults brought Dabeet back to the only important thing he had to learn from Graff. “You had my DNA tested,” he said. “Have the decency to tell me if my mother is right about my parentage.”

Graff chuckled with what seemed to be real amusement. “You want the truth of your parentage.”

“Am I a child of the Fleet?”

“Your mother was not so promiscuous as that. At most, you would be a child of one member of the Fleet.”

It took a moment for Dabeet to remember the old epithet “child of the Regiment,” which was a cruel term for someone whose mother had slept with every soldier when a regiment was stationed in her town. “So you amuse yourself at my expense,” said Dabeet, “and yet you can’t tell me a simple truth that you possess and I have a right to know.”

“A right to know,” said Graff, “eventually, when the time is right.”