Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)
Orson Scott Card
To Scott Allen
All these years,
You’ve been with me
Every step along the way
1
Student Name: Dabeet Ochoa
Assignment: Fable in Your Own Words
The nun Geppetto came from a family of woodworkers and was among the best of them before her religious vocation took her to a place where she never expected to have a knife and block of wood in her hands again. But the boss nun wanted to present a pageant at Christmas time, and when Sister Geppetto tentatively suggested that a puppet show might allow the nuns to perform without personally wearing costumes on a stage, the boss nun assigned her to carve all the puppets.
Sister Geppetto had a year before the next Christmas, but she had to allow time for even the clumsiest nuns to learn to operate the puppets, so she spent every waking moment in woodcarving. The boss nun relieved her from all other duties and admired her rapid progress.
All the puppets were carved, put together, painted, and strung to the control units by August, and while other nuns worked on the script, the voices, and learning to operate the puppets, Sister Geppetto carved the last of the puppets—the one that would be used the very least in the pageant, and yet the one that was most important. The Baby Jesus.
All the Baby Jesus had to do was get lowered in and lie in the manger. Three strings would be enough to ensure that he didn’t get skewampus as he was lowered. But this seemed irreverent to Sister Geppetto, to treat the God of Heaven as if he were a mere prop in someone else’s story, instead of what he was: The Story Itself.
So she made articulated arms and legs, and designed a different control unit so that the limbs could all waggle like an infant’s, without raising the baby from the manger.
The boss nun praised it as quite clever and immediately placed this wiggly baby puppet in the show. Then she thanked Sister Geppetto, and officially reassigned her to working in the garden through the harvest season, so that the nuns working on the pageant could be free to master their parts.
However, Sister Geppetto was not satisfied. It was wrong to make the Baby Jesus into a prop with wiggly limbs; she might have done the same with a puppet octopus or beetle.
No, Baby Jesus had to be able to grow up into a toddler. The limbs that waggled in the manger needed to be able to rotate into place for crawling and then walking. This required so much ingenuity that through all her gardening work, Sister Geppetto thought of nothing but ways to create joints that could do such different tasks, and then at night tried out each idea to see how well it worked.
In mid-November, when she had solved all the mechanical problems and was assembling the working baby-to-toddler version of Baby Jesus, the thought came to her: I chose to be a nun, which means to have no children; and yet I have this child, and he will grow from infant into boychild as if he were alive. I have incarnated a being in the image of God.
This thought turned into a prayer: O Holy Mother, Our Lady of Hope and Love, grant this image of Thy Good Son the gift of speech, even if only I can hear his voice. I wish to know from his own lips if this offering is acceptable to Him. Forgive me if I sin in saying this prayer, and forgive me for making this puppet secretly when I was commanded to be done with woodcarving and work in the garden instead.
At once she heard the voice of the Baby Jesus, though the lips of the puppet did not move. “Attach my strings, O mother of mine,” said the baby. “How can I dance my joy if you do not raise me up?”
Dabeet Ochoa was halfway through fifth grade, which was just right for a ten-year-old, when he decided it was time to stop living in his mother’s dream world. It’s not that she cocooned him—he had friends to talk to, in person and on the nets. He got along well with all his teachers. He rarely made errors on examinations. He was well-informed about events in the wider world.
But now that the third and final Formic War was over, and the world was getting back to something like normal, Dabeet realized that all his mother’s lies were going to be put to the test, and he didn’t want his life to come crashing down along with her delusions.
The problem was that with the end of the war, the families of the International Fleet were being reunited. Many of those who had served in the IF were coming back down to Earth or Luna, where their spouses and children awaited them. Many others were staying with the Fleet, and their families were being ferried up into space, to join them in space stations, warships, cargo ships, asteroid stations, and the moons of various farflung planets.
Somewhere among those soldiers and officers was Dabeet Ochoa’s father—presumably a man of Indian ancestry, though Mother had never been quite clear on why Dabeet had an Indian first name. Dabeet had not dared to ask whether his father would return to Earth or bring them up into space. Why did he hesitate? He finally admitted to himself that he was like an American child who was almost completely certain about Santa Claus, but dared not ask for fear the answer would lead to the end of the annual largesse of Christmas.
Is my father, the brave officer of the Fleet, a myth my mother made up, to console me for being fatherless? Or was he invented to impress the neighbors, so they wouldn’t think of Mother as a common tramp who fell for some idiotic lies and got pregnant?
Dabeet suspected it was the latter, because she had never regaled him with stories of his father until she was insinuating herself into their Hispanic neighborhood in Elkhart, Indiana. Dabeet first learned about his father from remarks like, “He’s with the Fleet, of course.” The way she said it, everyone knew she meant the International Fleet—spaceships, not wet-bottom ocean ships. Her “of course” meant that they could not possibly imagine she would have had a child with someone who was not a valued participant in the war to save the human race.