These carts would probably never be useful, because the students would probably never have a reason to flee upward into this top corridor. Yet if they were needed, the carts existed and it might be possible for some of the students to become proficient drivers.
For a moment he thought of waiting to tell anybody until he had really mastered driving a cart while lying on his back looking into a mirror. Then he stifled his ego. It’s more important for as many people as possible to be proficient drivers than for me to have the pleasure of being the best at something really fun.
In fact, he knew that he needed to get the others up here, so that lots of people could be proficient with the carts. And he needed to do it at once, before he talked himself into doing something egotistical and counterproductive.
I really hate this atmo suit, he realized. He was soaked with sweat and it was rolling into his eyes, making them sting. Weren’t there supposed to be temperature controls in the atmo suit?
Oh. That’s right. Dabeet found the temperature controls easily, just where the instructor had shown him when he first came to the station. It helped a lot. Cooler air fanned across his face and he didn’t feel so claustrophobic in the suit.
He couldn’t take off the suit up here. He had to get back down to the level where he found it, and hang it back in its place.
He went down a different ladderway and soon had the atmo suit back in place. Then, still a little sweat-soaked, he stepped out into the corridor.
The others were still conversing in the barracks, and once again they fell stone silent when he entered. “I think you need to see the top level.”
“Not right now,” said Zhang He. “We’re making progress, and we can go up on our own, one or two at a time, after we’ve decided the things we have to decide.”
“Fine,” said Dabeet. Then he briefly told them about the ladderways and the carts. “Imagine if somebody was injured. The cart could get them from one side of the station’s wheel to the other in far less time than walking.”
“Injured people are going to be hard to get up that ladder,” said Monkey, smiling.
Dabeet smiled back. “I guess we’ll have to wait to injure them until they’re already up,” he said.
His message had been delivered. Time for him to leave again, so they could decide how to deal with the problem Dabeet had brought to Fleet School.
15
—Mind-reading is essential to human life, but we’re all so bad at it.
—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.”
“But come on, Dabeet. Even if our wall forts are brillia
nt, they aren’t weapons. We can’t build traps into them. They’ll figure out how to dismantle them as fast as we did.”
“Well, maybe. Maybe not. Defensive structures don’t win battles, they only delay them while you wait for relief or hope they give up and go away.”
“Because if they get delayed for a couple of minutes, they’re bound to get discouraged.”
“So the only plan that matters is how to stop them from reaching their objective, and unless their objective is in the battlerooms, there’s no reason they’d ever go there.”
“Well…” said Monkey.
Dabeet tried to guess what she was thinking. “You’re right. We’re the objective.”
“We have no idea what the objective is,” said Monkey, “so I don’t know what you think I was going to say.”
Dabeet started to explain why he thought she had been about to contradict him, but she cut him off.
“So because you imagined you could guess that I was going to contradict you,” said Monkey, “you immediately thought of a deep hole in your previous statement, and talked as if I had said it.”
That was exactly what Dabeet had done. “Yes.”
“I think you’ve just discovered a new mental discipline. Self-contradiction as a spur to creative thinking. You think up something, then you assume it’s an idiotic idea and figure out why it’s dumb, then you think of ways to make it less dumb, and then think of why those things are idiotic—”
“And meanwhile I also assume that the assumption of idioticness is also idiotic and poke holes in that—”
“And in the end, you never reach any useful conclusion or plan of action.”
“Once they hear of this new mental discipline,” said Dabeet, “geniuses everywhere are bound to adopt it as their primary means of analysis.”
“Until it occurs to them that such a mental discipline is also idiotic.”
“Leading to exactly the same result that most commanders get to in war with far less effort,” said Dabeet, “which is why the real geniuses beat them.”
“Why?” asked Monkey. “What result is that?”
“When you focus on trying to figure out the enemy’s plan before he’s shown it to you by taking action, you’re basically playing mental chess against yourself and doing nothing. What if the enemy is so much smarter than you that all your guesses are ridiculously wrong? Or what if the enemy is so stupid that you give them way too much credit?”
“It’s stupid to assume your enemy is stupid,” said Monkey.
“True,” said Dabeet, “but it’s even stupider to try to wage war by outguessing the enemy.”
“Well, you have to try.”
“What you mean is, you can’t help but try,” said Dabeet, “but it’s such a waste of time that you can’t regard anything you think of as a ‘plan.’”
“So we just sit here trying not to think,” said Monkey.
“Not at all. We spend our time planning what we will do to them.”
“How is that better? We don’t know a bit more about them than before, so anything we plan is just a waste of time.”
“Here are the huge differences,” said Dabeet. “First, defensive plans are wasted if the enemy won’t attack where you need him to. But offensive plans don’t require the enemy to act in a certain way. We initiate the action, so we don’t guess what they’ll do, we simply see what they’ve done and where they actually are.”
“They’re not here,” said Monkey, “so we can’t see what they’ve done.”
“And we do know a lot about them,” said Dabeet.
Monkey immediately looked suspicious. “Have you held back information that we need to have?”
“I haven’t held back anything,” said Dabeet. He did not say how hurtful it was that she went straight to that assumption. Why shouldn’t she? She didn’t know Dabeet. She didn’t know she could trust him.
Dabeet wasn’t even sure she could trust him, because he didn’t trust himself. He wouldn’t know what he could do until he did it. He wouldn’t know if he could be trusted until he actually accomplished something.
“Monkey,” said Dabeet. “You know that we know a lot about these raiders. They have to arrive here in a spaceworthy vehicle.”
“Well, duh.”
“Not duh, Monkey. That’s not guessing, it’s something we know. We know it. And that means that you—and everybody like you, who grew up in a spacefaring culture—you already know way more than nothing about their arrival vehicle. I don’t know that stuff, except, like, they have to be able to contain and replenish atmosphere, there’ll be airlocks, some kind of propulsion system. Places for passengers and crew to sit during the voyage. Food. Water.”
“That’s like saying, we know the enemy has to poop sometime. Yeah, but so what?”
Dabeet couldn’t help but laugh. “Monkey, knowing that the enemy has to poop is actually important. On Earth, there’s the whole disposal problem. If their poo gets into their drinking water, they’re going to start getting dysentery and that can destroy your enemy for you.”
“On a spaceship, you’d have to work really hard to get poo into your drinking water,” said Monkey.
“Right. But peeing and pooing are right up there with breathing and drinking and eating, when it comes to necessities. As long as you aren’t facing a robot army—”
Monkey looked surprised. “Do you think they really would?”
“They tried robot soldiers against the Formics,” said Dabeet. “Drones are better. Human soldiers are best. It’s not just speed, strength, and accuracy, it’s also adaptability and knowing where to strike in the first place. And making independent decisions.”
“I thought the whole point of massed armies was to make them all submit to the single will of the commander.”
“You see any massed armies around here? You think we’re going to go toe to toe with whatever men they send against us? This will be asymmetric fighting, and our actions will be individual or small squad.”
Monkey looked thoughtful. “They don’t really teach us military stuff here, do they.”
“When I was trying to get into Fleet School, I read everything. Watched everything.”
“But you knew this wasn’t a military school anymore.”
“It’s the school where the IF sends their own children.”
“So we should all be listening to you because you read more books?”
“Nobody should listen to me. Everybody should prepare themselves to carry out their own plans. Cooperating where we can, but not falling apart if we find ourselves alone.”
Monkey looked at him a little sideways. “You’re preparing to go off and do crazy things on your own.”
“You see anybody inviting me to be part of their army?”
Monkey gave him the eyebrow equivalent of a shrug.
“I’m making plans to do what I can. I’m practicing the skills I think I’m going to need.”
“And what are those skills?”
“Moving in freefall,” said Dabeet. “Working in a spacesuit. Or an atmo suit. Figuring out how the electronics work. Improving my skills with hand tools, in and out of gravity.”
“That sounds very specific,” said Monkey. “You already know what you’re going to do.”
“It isn’t and I don’t. But if everybody else is going to the battlerooms—which is no worse than any of the idiotic ideas I’ve come up with, by the way—somebody needs to see what’s going on in the ship they came in.”
“So you, the one with the fewest space skills, have appointed yourself to reconnaissance.”
“I’m the only one who’ll recognize my mother if they actually have her on their ship.”
“Are you serious? Why in the world would they bring her here?”
“My first thought, too. But there are a few things to consider. If they’re planning to use me as the fall guy, then bringing her here gets a prime witness to my innocence off Earth and makes her look like part of the expedition.”
> “Not a very good reason.”
“The second reason they might bring her is also the answer to your objection: Who says these clowns are reasonable?”
“What happened to ‘It’s stupid to assume your enemy is stupid’?”
“It’s right there with ‘It’s stupid to assume your enemy will only do reasonable things.’”
“You got any other reasons why they’d bring your mother?”
“So she can die along with the rest of us. So everyone I know and love will be extinguished.”
“You really do think this is all about you.”
“I can’t rule it out,” said Dabeet.
“I can. It’s not about you.”
“Monkey, I know this is far-fetched. But look, I don’t know who my father is except that the woman who raised me believes that he’s an officer in the IF. What if he’s a very high official? What if he’s kept me hidden because his enemies would use me against him if they knew about me? So, maybe they found out about me, and they want to kill me in some spectacular way so that whoever my father is, he’ll know that his son was killed, along with the woman who raised me, and the act of terrorism was blamed on me.”
“You’re a loon,” said Monkey. “I don’t mean that in a teasing way. I mean a jackboot strapped-in lubricated paranoid.”
“I don’t believe that, Monkey. My father really is with the IF somehow, because they let me in here. But beyond that, he’s probably just a guy. I know that. But I don’t know that I’m not being used to target him. What if he’s powerful, and this is a way to get to him?”
“Delusions of grandeur,” said Monkey. “They usually go along with paranoia. Why would everybody be spying on you? Because I’m so important. How do you know you’re so important? If I weren’t, why would they all be spying on me?”
“And yet important people often have children, and they get their education somewhere,” said Dabeet. “As I said, he’s probably just a guy.”
“So tell me, genius test boy,” said Monkey, “were you planning to do your freefall practice outside the ship?”
“That’s where they keep the zero-gee.”
“There’s the battleroom.”