Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

invisible and then found China quickly. It was a big country.
    The map included several wiki entries, and Victor read through them, feeling more ignorant by the moment. He had known China was a country—there had been a few Chinese corporate miners in the Kuiper Belt. But China’s nationhood had been the extent of his knowledge on the subject. He had not known that China was in a continent called Asia, or that it was the most populated country in the world, or that the Chinese language spoken by the corporates was actually one of many variations of Chinese, or that the language was written in ridiculously difficult to decipher characters instead of letters. In other words, he hadn’t known what every schoolchild on Earth probably knew.
    Again, he felt stupid and frustrated. How was he supposed to get into a university when he couldn’t even name the continents? An admissions committee would laugh him to scorn. All their perceptions of free miners as dumb, bumbling grease heads was true. It wasn’t a stereotype, it was him.
    Oh sure, he could fix things. He could take a busted water pump and rebuild it with nothing but scrap metal and discarded circuits, but he couldn’t tell you the capital of Japan. And now that he thought about it, he wasn’t even certain Japan was a country. Was it a state somewhere? Or a province? He looked it up.
    Country.
    Yeah, you’re a real brain, Victor. A genius.
    He was sure Mother had taught him all of this at some point. He remembered lessons on geography when he was little. But he had been, what, seven years old at the time.
    Then again, maybe he had missed that lesson. He had started apprenticing with Father at a young age, much younger than was the norm. So he had been absent for a lot of the classes. Mother and Father had argued about it. Mother had wanted Victor to stay with the other children and sit through the lessons, but Father had wanted Victor’s help and had said that the survival of the family took precedence. Mother had been insistent however; Father would just have to find someone else.
    Father had tried that, using a fifteen-year-old boy for a while named Gregor. But it hadn’t worked out. Gregor had initially been assigned to the kitchen, and it soon became clear to Father why. “The boy doesn’t think,” Father had said. “He’s slow. He can’t work his way through a repair. The parts are all pieces to him. He can’t see how they go together, how they intertwine and function as one.”
    “So teach him,” Mother had said.
    “I’m trying,” Father had said. “That’s the problem. I spend half my day trying to drill a simple principle into the kid’s head, and the other half of the day I’m redoing what he did wrong. I’m losing time. And all the while, this ship is continuing to break down. I’ve got a backlog of work orders now, some of them critical. This kid isn’t helping. He’s dragging me down. I do more without him. I need Victor.”
    And so on special repairs—ones that needed a second person to hold a pipe while Father tightened it, or ones that needed a tiny child’s hand to reach into a small space and remove something—Victor had tagged along. At first these had been exceptions, but slowly, over time, Father had become more and more dependent on Victor until Victor was going with Father more than he was going to class. And then eventually, without anyone acknowledging it aloud, Victor was going with Father every day.
    So perhaps Mother had taught all the children about China, and Victor had simply been elsewhere on the ship at the time, crawling through an HVAC duct or squeezed into an engine room or packed tight beside a water heater, making some repair to keep the ship moving and the family alive.
    “I didn’t mean to offend you, Vico,” said Imala. “I was just surprised you had never heard of China before.”
    She was behind him, hovering there, which of course only made him blush again. He should have apologized earlier. It should be him instigating this conversation. He turned around, not caring now if she saw how embarrassed he was. “I’ve heard of China, Imala. I just didn’t know anything about it. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I was out of line. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I just can’t help but feel like an idiot. I should know all of these things about Earth, but I don’t.”
    “You’re space born, Vico. Earth has never been your world. You grew up on a ship in the Kuiper Belt. You think I know