“Better than merely pass, by a good bit. So will the others. It seems Caspor is in charge of things mathematical. Ferni is in charge of things biological. Flek, it turns out, has a family interest in armaments…”
“I didn’t know that!”
Well, neither had I known it, and I found it very interesting indeed, so I went nearer the hatch between kitchen and dining room and sat down quietly on the floor.
“Surely you know of Flexen Armor. Flexen Magma Canon, FMC? Her grandfather is Gorlan Flekkson Bray. Originally from Chottem.”
“She’s that family? I had no idea.”
“Cadet’s the offspring of one of the daughters, her surname isn’t the same, and the mother didn’t make anything out of it when her daughter was registered. She’s been wandering around the factories with her maternal grandfather since she was old enough to walk. She chose to come here, and her grandfather recommended her to the academy. She’s packed to the gills with engineering information she has no idea she knows, or knows the usefulness of.”
“I suppose the rest of them have hidden qualities as well?”
“Not that we know of. Jaker is a quiet, self-contained young woman from another extremely wealthy import-export family. The Jakers and the Pouls are linked, matrimonially, with cousins in common. She has no outstanding abilities, but she, too, is learning. And Naumi…well, he doesn’t shine in any particular class. He doesn’t attract attention. That pack that follows Grangel—all of whom will be dropping out any day now, one fondly hopes—harassed him a bit when he first arrived, but that’s dwindled off to nothing…”
“But he leads this group?”
“Oh yes, sir. He wouldn’t say that, of course, but he does. That’s his outstanding quality, I guess. That and something else…”
“Which is?”
“You know we give the cadets problems to solve. Tactical problems. You know. We’re looking for optimum, seventieth, eightieth percentile answers. Most cadets are lucky to rate over fifty percent with a solution. Naumi and his group come up with the optimum answer nine times out of ten. The tenth time, they come up with an answer we’ve never received before, and when we give it to the battle simulator, it comes back as an even more highly rated response, one that the simulator hadn’t thought of. He always says it’s a group effort, what he calls a talk-road effort, and from what we can learn, it is, but he’s always the one that pulls the group together.”
This was news. I knew we’d been doing well, but not that well.
“It seemed to us,” said a professor, “that is…we all thought he should be recommended to the war college, at once. Why wait four or five years with ability like that?”
There was a long pause, then Captain Orley said, “I objected to the boy being admitted, nobody that he was, late in the year as it was. I thought it would be a handicap both for the boy and for his house. However, I’m a man who can eat my earlier opinions for breakfast without choking on them, which is a good thing. This boy got in because he was recommended.”
Mr. Weathereye. I knew it!
Someone said “Every cadet who comes to Point Zibit is recommended by somebody!”
The captain said ruefully. “Oh, he had that sort of recommendation from his schoolmaster and friends back in Bright. That’s not what I’m talking about. Naumi was recommended by the Third Order of the Siblinghood.”
Someone, I think it was Professor Hilbert, the mathematics man, said something in a harsh voice. “The Order. I find a great deal wrong with that, Captain Orley. First, though I know the Siblinghood is real enough, I find some difficulty in believing the Third Order actually exists. Secondly, if it exists, why is this supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing group interested in a schoolboy? And finally, assuming such an organization does exist, how does one verify that any information comes from that organization and not merely some clever-cock who wants to pull strings?”
Captain Orley murmured a reply while I was wishing I could have seen his face, to know how he felt about it. “It’s a bit like discussing God, isn’t it? Is there one? If there is one, how do we know it is speaking? How do we know what it wants?”
“Exactly,” snapped Hilbert.
“The eternal questions,” the captain went on. “Which always come down to the same answer. One has to trust the interface between oneself and it. The prophet. The sacred writing. The beatific visions. Then the second prophet who clarifies the issues. Then the new writing, and the new visions. Then a declaration of heresy and a reformation. Then a schism. Then a sect. Except that with the Third Order there is no writing, no visions, no prophet that we know of…”
“Then how in the name of all good sense…?” yelled Hilbert, while two or three other people said, “Shhh, shhh.”
Captain Orley raised his voice. “…how does the lowliest member of the selection committee, myself, wake up one morning to find the message pinned to my shirt, which was in my locker, which was locked, which was inside my room, which was locked, which was in the officers’ quarters, which are guarded. A real message, which I read half a dozen times before it disintegrated into shiny dust.”
Hilbert huffed. “Ascribe it to whatever you ate and drank the night before, Captain. You were seeing things.”
“I could tell myself that. There are five of us on the committee, however, and we had not dined together for a long time. Nonetheless, it happened to all five of us. Same message, same location, more or less, all in places protected against intrusion, all signed, ‘The Third Order.’ I’ll be glad to give you the names of the other four if you’d like to hear it directly from them.”
I noticed I could see them reflected in the side of one of the big pots hanging on the wall. I saw them glancing at one another. I wondered if they were reviewing everything they had said, wondering
