“Where there’s always somebody watching.”
“Well, you certainly have privacy in outer space. One miss and you’re gone forever. Is this just a way of concealing from yourself your unconscious decision to commit suicide?”
“Quite possibly. But maybe you could coach me.”
“I could. But maybe I should be making my own war plans.”
“Are you?”
“I didn’t realize I needed to till now.”
“So maybe you train me so I can accomplish the stealth mission of spying on a ship that’s docked with Fleet School, and maybe sabotaging it or rescuing somebody inside it.”
“Literally everybody here is better qualified for that mission than you, Dabeet.”
“And yet it’s my mission,” said Dabeet.
“I’ll do it,” said Monkey. “It needs doing, I think you’re right, but you don’t have the skills.”
“Help me with that,” said Dabeet.
“There’s no possibility of your being competent by the time they get here.”
“There’s no chance I’ll be as competent as you. But this isn’t a competition. I only have to be competent enough to do the job. And you’ll be needed elsewhere. You already are, they’ve already assigned you.”
Monkey grimaced slightly. “Building walls in the battleroom.”
“You have that skill, too.”
“Thanks to you,” said Monkey. “And also, no thanks.”
“You have a team,” said Dabeet. “I don’t. I’m expendable. If no one can think of a use for me, I’m expendable, unless I think of a use for myself.”
“Don’t do this dangerous thing,” said Monkey. “Annoying as you are, I’m kind of used to you. I’d miss you a little if you died.”
“That is, truly, the nicest thing that anybody’s said to me in Fleet School.”
“É, well, I’m not going to spend the time to train you.” To Dabeet she sounded a little defiant, as if she felt she were doing something wrong by refusing to help him.
Dabeet’s first impulse was to play off of this, to try to persuade her. But he thought better of it immediately. He was not going to treat other people as things to be manipulated until he got what he wanted. She had a right to make her own decision, and if Dabeet was her friend, he would respect that.
“I get it,” said Dabeet. “You have to practice with your team of incompetent wall-builders.”
Monkey smiled at his characterization of her team. “It’s my assignment.”
“It’s the role you play in the community,” said Dabeet. “Teacher, shepherd, guide.” Only when he said it did he realize that this was true. As she had appointed herself his teacher, shepherd, guide.
He could see her relent … a little. Instead of Dabeet arguing her into it, she was responding to his respect. Maybe. It wasn’t as if Dabeet could reliably decode what was going on in anybody’s mind.
“I don’t have time to teach you,” she said, “but I’ll tell you the rules they tell little children who are doing their first tasks outside the ship. The children who follow these rules live. The ones who don’t, don’t. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.” Even though he would remember everything she said without making any special effort, he faced her directly and made steady eye contact, which would show her that he was listening, paying attention. Another gesture of respect.
“One,” said Monkey. “Don’t let go of one thing until you’re holding something else that’s attached to the ship.”
“Doesn’t sound like freefall to me.”
“Freefall comes after about a year of these rules. Get it? Now listen.”
Listening meant not questioning. Dabeet flashed on Monkey as a two-year-old, hearing her father or mother tell her these rules. With children of that age, the adults would have to work to make sure they were being heard and understood, and Monkey was treating him as she herself might have been treated. Must have been.
“Rule One, don’t let go till you’re holding something else attached to the ship, you got that. Rule Two. The ship is always above you. If you let go you fall away from the ship.”
“In zero-gee…” Dabeet began, but at the narrowing of Monkey’s eyes he fell silent.
“It’s how you think. You use your gravity sense to pretend that you’ll fall if you let go. Got it?”
“So it’s really Rule One all over again,” said Dabeet.
“It’s Rule Two,” said Monkey.
“Sí, Maestra,” said Dabeet.
“Rule Three,” said Monkey. “Before you move from your present position, name out loud the thing you’re reaching for.”
“But you won’t be there to hear me,” said Dabeet.
“Name it,” said Monkey, “or die.”
Dabeet thought: It isn’t about naming it for the adult. It’s about having a clear idea of what you’re reaching for before you reach, so you don’t get sloppy in your habits. “Name it out loud. I will.”
“Rule Four. Find where your target is attached to the ship and say it out loud.”
Made sense. So you don’t reach for some piece of debris only because you assume it must be attached to the ship. “I assume by ‘ship’ we mean ‘station’ in this context.”
“Is the station moving through space?” asked Monkey.
“Sí, Maestra,” said Dabeet. “And I want to keep moving with it at exactly the same velocity.”
“Rule Five.”
“How many rules do you expect your two-year-olds to memorize?”
“All of them,” said Monkey. “Rule Five. If you ever come loose from the ship, wrap your arms around any object that you come near. Do not use your hands to catch on to it. Wrap your arms around it.”
“Such a waste of opposable thumbs,” said Dabeet.
“The rule is actually simpler: Wrap your arms around it, not your fingers.”
“Because the hands of babies are too small to grab anything.”
“Because humans are deceived by their own weightlessness into forgetting how much mass they have, and therefore how much momentum.”
“I’ll think I can grasp something, but I won’t have enough grip strength to hold it.”
“And there’s no guarantee that with the slight vision distortion of even the best-made spacesuits your eyes will guide your hand to the exact spot. It’s been a long time since our lives depended on being able to grab branches.”
“These are good rules,” said Dabeet.
“Rule Six.”
“Good thing I can count to six.”
“Don’t walk. Don’t run.”
Dabeet immediately thought of a little girl running along the outside surface of a ship and launching herself into space with the first step. “You learn to walk and run inside ship’s gravity, but none of that works on the outside surface.”
“Most ships these days have hulls covered with nanooze. Besides self-sealing any punctures in the hull, the nanooze grips human feet. But you don’t run—the nanooze won’t let go fast enough and you’ll fall over. You don’t even walk, because that implies a steady rhythm of movement. You carefully pry up one foot and set it down in the new location. You give the nanooze a moment to grip, and then you pull up the other foot and put it in a new place. That isn’t walking.”
“Very wise.”
“Tell me the rules,” said Monkey.
“One. Don’t let go of one thing till I’m holding something else that’s attached to the ship. Two. The ship is always above me. Three. Before I move from my present position, I name out loud the thing I’m reaching for. Rule Four. Find where my target is attached to the ship and say it out loud. Five. If I ever come loose, wrap my arms around any object I come near. No hand-grasping. Six. Don’t walk, don’t run.”
Monkey looked at him oddly. “You didn’t even have to try.”
“I don’t forget things.”
“Knowing the words won’t help you unless you do everything the rules say.”
“I’
ll do them, Monkey. And thank you for teaching me this much.”
“Follow these rules, Dabeet, and you’ll live. Don’t and you won’t.”
“Got it.”
“Good luck, Test Boy.”
And that was it. She jogged off down that uppermost corridor and was almost immediately out of sight behind the curvature of the ceiling.
She had really meant it. Just tell him the rules and he was on his own.
But this would be better, wouldn’t it? He had discovered in his first attempts in the battleroom that, unlike the way he could learn any words or numbers or sounds or images that he encountered, he had a hard time getting his body to do what he wanted.
No, his body did everything he wanted. What was hard was figuring out where his body actually was, and what movements followed each other in a sequence.
I’m not a dancer, that’s what it is. I can’t learn sequences of movements easily. And I’m about to trust my survival to my ability to acquire new habits of carefulness.
But that’s what these rules are for, thought Dabeet. If I’m obeying them, then I’m not acquiring habits of anything. Each movement is methodical and new. Not part of a sequence—a single movement. Reaching for a named, attached location. Or wrapping my arms around an object.
If I ever have to wrap my arms around something, it’ll be because I’m loose from the ship. A drowning man, flailing around, panicking. That’s why I can’t trust my twitchy fingers. Too frightened to be functional. When a drowning man attaches himself to his rescuer, there’s no brain involved. Just clutching. But Rule Five gives me a plan to recite. Overcome my panic. No flailing. Just arm-wrapping. These are good rules.
Because I’m going to panic.
Not that he was ever afraid in the battleroom. Why would he be? He was wearing armor in an enclosed space with plenty of atmosphere.
Out there, though. He had read about it—the awareness of a huge universe of downward movement. A place without horizons.
Rule Two. The ship is upward. I’m holding on so I don’t fall forever into that nothing.
I can do this. Forewarned is forearmed.
Dabeet got into a spacesuit and felt it compress in the limbs and neck to fit his small size. The gloves also tightened. But not enough. They were still almost as fisty as mittens. Another reason not to imagine he could grasp anything that was flying past in a blur. The gloves were supposed to augment his grip—but he had to aim his hand exactly right so the object he wanted to hold would be in the crease of his palm. Now, wearing gloves, would that mean the crease of the glove’s palm, or of his hand inside the—
He knew what this internal monologue was about. There was no doubt in his mind—the crease of the glove was the thing that would come into contact with any object out there. No, he was chattering to himself in his own mind to postpone the inevitable moment when he went through the tiny workman’s airlock and found himself outside.
Because he had caught himself procrastinating, he moved immediately. Suit sealed? Confirmed by the row of green lights along the bottom of the heads-up display inside the helmet. Breathing suit atmo? Yes. How many minutes? Only an emergency suit, not recently recharged—two hours of air, but only half an hour of full battery. Got to get a bunch of these fully charged before they …
Procrastinating again. Inside the airlock, he sealed the interior door, then carefully thought through the steps in airlock training. If you just pop the outer door, you’ll be ejected along with the air. Don’t even imagine you’re strong enough to hold on to something and not get blown out the door. Even though this airlock was much tinier than the cargo airlocks they had trained them on, Dabeet wasn’t taking chances. First activate the pump and get as much air out of the chamber as possible. Done. Wait wait wait. Didn’t take long—air cleared.
Not all of it, of course, but there wouldn’t be any rapid puff of air when the outer door opened.
Even so, Dabeet hooked an arm through the bar on the inner door—no doubt put there for just this purpose, since it stood out far enough to insert an entire spacesuit arm into the gap. Only when he was securely in place did he push the button to open the outer door.
He had thought there would be some kind of metal-on-metal prang, but no, he had to turn his body to see that the door was open. No sound at all.
Do I leave the door open for when I come back?
Airlock discipline. Always close the door. Always always always. Because your rescuers may need an airlock. And you can’t be sure you’ll return to the same spot.
But to close the door, Dabeet had to pass through it.
There were arm-grip bars on all four sides of the door. At first Dabeet tried to snake an arm around and push it through the gap, but no. These bars were meant to be held by hands, not by arms.
He tested the grip. Sure enough, it was clumsy and fumbly when he first tried to attach, but when he pressed the crease of the palm into the bar, the gloves activated and gripped like steel.
Bacana. He could go out the door now.
Right now. Any second now.
Because he became impatient with his own fear, Dabeet almost pushed himself right out, but he stopped himself. He had no idea how much force he should use. With his hand gripping the outside bar, his back was to the doorway. The last thing he wanted to do was push so hard he broke the glove’s grip on the bar. Or broke his arm. Could that happen?
Dabeet pulled his other arm away from his handhold on an interior bar and used his fingers to push his body out into … space … no, just the area outside the …
He felt his breathing growing fast and ragged as he seemed to whirl out of the door.
But his grip on the outside bar held as a kind of pivot, and it did not let go when he whumped against the hull of the station.
He expected himself to bounce off, but no. The nanooze gripped him immediately. It was holding his back firmly to the hull.
By reflex, he almost pulled his hand away from the bar, almost let go. After all, this was like lying on a hill, wasn’t it? The nanooze holding him like gravity.
The ship is always above me. I am not lying on the ship. I am hanging from the ship. I’m holding on to the ship for dear life. Obey these rules and live.
Dabeet opened his eyes and allowed himself to see and understand his situation.
He was on the upper curve of the inside of the wheel of the station. He could see the under-construction wheel “down” near his feet. It was actually parallel to the wheel he was on, but that would only be obvious down near the fattest part of the tube. Up here near the top, it could have been a separate vehicle.
Dabeet looked left, then, slowly, right. The wheel he was on curved like a huge halo above and around him. The unfinished parallel wheel went only partway in one direction, where it left off with construction materials and equipment fastened to it at the end. In the other direction, he could see that it went much farther, before it ended in a similar welter of supplies and tools. The wheel he was on was complete.
He thought of the inside of a bicycle wheel. There were no spokes here, though. Just tubes snaking out to the four cubes of the battlerooms. It took a bit of study to figure out that yes, all four cubes were in place, one of them mostly occluded by the other three.
Those tubes had to be the corridors. But they were so small. Forty at a time, kids would run along those corridors and …
No. Those tubes must be life support, because there was the corridor. A single corridor, because that’s how the children experienced it. One corridor leading to each end of the one battleroom it was attached to. Rigid, rectangular. Like airplane jetways, only longer.
Now Dabeet could see how that single corridor always stayed attached to the same battleroom. But it also continued around the outside of the first battleroom and then forked to go on to the second, the third, the fourth. That’s how it looked from the inside, too. They never saw where the other corridors led off. They only ran the path that was open to them, lit up with their team colo
rs. Each one leading to one end or the other of the square. The enemy’s gate, our gate. And then the corridors leading to the teacher door, the observation rooms. The mysteries of the battleroom now laid out clearly before him.
Completely irrelevant to the task at hand.
Or not. Because there was something quite pertinent that had never occurred to him before. There were no airlocks leading out of the battleroom cubes. If something happened to damage the station so severely that the battleroom corridors were compromised, there was no other escape route. Ultimately, just the one corridor providing an exit from all the battlerooms.
The most terrible place to be if somebody attacked the station, because there would be no escape.
That was important information. He would tell Monkey, she would tell the others. Maybe they’d change their plans. Maybe they wouldn’t. He could imagine Zhang He saying, “Dabeet just doesn’t like the plan because he didn’t think of it.”
So unfair of Dabeet to think that. Zhang He wasn’t his friend, he understood that now. But it didn’t mean he was Dabeet’s enemy. That sense of betrayal, Dabeet couldn’t give it any weight. In all likelihood, Zhang He would be the one who’d instantly recognize the danger, argue on the same side as Monkey. We can’t stake our survival on the sturdiness of the corridor connections.
Dabeet shut his eyes. He hadn’t come out here to play through imaginary scenarios of how the other students would react to any information that came from him. This wasn’t the time or place to indulge his hurt feelings. His loneliness.
He opened his eyes and stared straight forward. With the hoops of the station in his peripheral vision, the battleroom boxes mostly above him, all he could see straight forward was … nothing. Stars.
And then, suddenly, not nothing. The luminous blue and white of Earth, larger from here than the Moon was from Earth.
His eyes immediately tried to find recognizable objects on the globe. Was that Africa? No, it was clouds. Were those mountains? Maybe, doesn’t matter. Does not matter.
And then the stab of light as the Sun first edged into view. At once his screen darkened in a single patch, making a near-total eclipse of the Sun inside his suit. Good design, thought Dabeet. Good for people wearing these suits not to go blind whenever they happen to spin to face a star.