Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(86)

—I knew you would say that.

—Some people are so predictable that all their decisions seem to be by reflex. Provoked, they get mad. Stroked, they purr and snuggle. Fed, they fall asleep.

—I like it when you’re all metaphorical.

—Even when people try to be unpredictable, they usually do it in completely predictable ways. Adolescents who show their originality exactly as all their friends do.

—You’re saying all this because Achilles is truly unpredictable and it makes you afraid.

—I don’t like being wrong, and I don’t like acting blindly.

—So you figure him out, you take action, and when you turn out to have been wrong, not only do your actions fail to contain him, but also you feel resentful that he led you to make wrong decisions.

—He’s not trying to deceive us. He isn’t thinking about us. He’s trying to accomplish something, but his goal is rooted so deeply in his psyche that he himself doesn’t know what it is.

—Thus you project onto Achilles your own ignorance of his purposes.

—Can you do better?

—I can fail less often, by never trying to read his mind.

—You can afford that luxury because stopping him isn’t your responsibility.

—It isn’t yours, either.

—I make it mine.

—And by so doing, you doom yourself to failure.

—Satisfying some unconscious inner hunger of my own. Except that my conscious hunger is to stop that boy before he does some real damage.

—He has so many plots under way that it’s easy to think that every terrifying path leads back to his door.

—You think all this business about a raid on Fleet School isn’t Achilles after all?

—Achilles has been kidnapping Battle School graduates. That fits with his normal pattern of relentless revenge against anyone who saw him weak.

—Which is everyone he ever met.

—But he only notices that they see his weakness when he sees his weakness and sees them seeing it.

—And none of the kids in Fleet School had anything to do with Battle School. The only thing they have in common is venue. Battle School happened in the same Lagrange-point station. Is he taking vengeance on terrastationary habitats?

—Maybe he sees it as an act of altruism: If he destroys the school, then teachers and fellow students there can never humiliate somebody like Achilles again.

—Doing a favor to the kids he blows to bits.

—To be fair, we don’t know that’s his plan.

—Is it the most vile, violent, and incomprehensible act you could imagine?

—As applies to a space station, smithereens is about as total a triumph as you can aspire to.

—We have to assume he means to do the worst.

—But not everybody working for him will have that goal. Evil isn’t best served by equally evil servants.

—A thing little understood by war-crimes tribunals dealing with civil servants in an evil regime. In what way did administrators of the water supply or transportation system absorb the evil of the regime? The more virtuous these civil servants are, the more the evil ruler can count on them to keep their word. Then all he has to do is conceal from them the most likely consequences of their actions.

—Like what you and I did to Andrew Wiggin.

—We were saving humanity. Ender knew that was the goal. He wanted us to succeed with him.

—I notice you’re not openly embracing the title “evil ruler.” Or rejecting it, either.

—If I die before you, you can have that inscribed on my tombstone.

*

Maybe somebody else went to that innermost—topmost—ring of the station in the next few days after Dabeet discovered it, but Monkey was the only one who asked him to take her there. They indulged in a little playing with the carts—it was impossible for venturous children not to see what happened if they collided two of them on the same track. Not at high speed, of course. But it didn’t matter. The carts had collision-avoidance so all they did was stop abruptly, tossing Monkey and Dabeet a little and making them laugh.

“Now my original plan of making all the bad guys lie down on these tracks so we could run over them won’t work,” said Monkey.

“We can’t make them do anything,” said Dabeet.

Monkey narrowed her eyes at him. “Have you ever heard of ‘humor’?”

“I knew you were joking, if that’s what you’re asking. I simply chose to remind myself of the ludicrousness of making any plans until we see what they actually want to do once they get here.”

“That’s why I’m here with you,” said Monkey, “instead of sitting around with the bigger kids listening to them make elaborate plans about ‘luring them’ here or ‘driving them’ there.”

“Just for amusement,” said Dabeet, “where do they plan to lure them or drive them?”

“Mostly to a battleroom. All four of them or just one of them. And when they get there, they find that teams of builders have constructed elaborate forts or mazes out of wall cubes.”

Dabeet nodded. “That was my first impulse, too.”

“You think our little wall forts would slow them down?”

“They can’t use projectile weapons, or they’ll perforate the hull and drain the whole place until the nanooze on the outside walls can seal the holes. So inside a battleroom, our wall forts will behave to their weapons just like walls.”