“Ah, yes. Well, let me tell you Theory Number Two. Perhaps a very advanced civilization exists—human beings, just like you and me—but their technology and science stands at least as far above ours as ours stands above the Linneans. Call them the outsiders. Perhaps they monitor us like we monitor the Linneans. Perhaps they have gotten to all these different worlds before us and seeded them with human beings and all kinds of plants and animals that humans need. . . . Maybe they’ve even gotten to Earth and helped steer us toward a higher level of civilization and science, just like we intend for the Linneans. Maybe they secretly helped us invent the Gates.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Why do Earth people come to Linnea?”
“Hm.”
More silence. More dark.
Finally, I asked, “And which one do you believe?”
“I like the second explanation best.”
“Why?”
“Because then I can believe that whenever I get into trouble—real trouble, like now for instance—there might exist someone, somewhere, who watches over me, and who will come and rescue me, for no other reason except that she cares.”
“Ahh,” I said. “I like that explanation too.”
“And . . . if she doesn’t show up to rescue me, then that means that I still have the ability to rescue myself.”
I thought about that for a while. I liked that story. It was totally illogical, of course, but I liked it anyway.
“Beck?”
“Yes, Kaer?”
“So that means that if maybe you really came from those people with the advanced science and advanced civilization, and if you had the special responsibility of watching over me, you still wouldn’t tell me, because you’d want me to solve my problems by myself. Right?”
“Right.” She gave me another squeeze like a hug. In the dark, it felt comforting.
After that, neither of us talked for a while. A long while. So long that I began to wonder if she’d fallen asleep.
“Beck?”
“Yes, Kaer?”
“Thank you.”
“Shhh.” She stroked my head gently. “Get some sleep now.” A heartbeat later, she added, “You’re welcome.”
In The Grass
Beck let me sleep six hours and then woke me up to keep watch until dawn, only two more hours. When I protested, she said, “I didn’t have the heart to wake you. You looked so peaceful. And I wasn’t ready to sleep anyway. Besides, I only need a couple hours.”
She pushed something into my hands, her helmet. “Here—if you need to look around, use my helmet. If you turn the ears up, you can hear the grass growing.”
“Oh, good. That’ll reassure me.”
I put the helmet on and flipped the goggles into place. I could see again! Almost immediately, I felt better. The grass was still too close, I couldn’t straighten out my arm in any direction, but at least I could see what was around me now.
Oh, here—” Beck shoved something else at me, a coil of nylon rope. “Clip the end of this to your belt. It’ll keep you from getting lost.”
“I won’t go anywhere.”
“You might have to go pee. If you do, you can follow the rope back to me.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” I clipped the rope to my belt. I watched Beck as she wrapped the Mylar blanket around herself and was almost instantly asleep.
I tried looking around for a while, but except for Beck, there wasn’t much to see. Her blanket shimmered with silver and cold blue patterns. It was hard to look at, so I turned the goggles down.
I stretched out and picked up my own helmet. I fiddled with the settings on the goggles there to see if maybe I’d accidentally turned something off. But the goggles remained dead and after a while, I put the helmet aside.
I rummaged around in my pack and found a couple of ration bars. One tasted like peanut butter and mildew. The other was a cardboard slab with industrial filling. I wondered if there was some law that packaged food had to be made out of wallpaper. Or maybe it was because I had gotten so used to eating real food in the Dome and here on Linnea that I couldn’t stomach this stuff anymore. Did I really like these things once? I took a long drink of water to wash the taste out of my mouth.
Well, that used up five minutes. Two hours still to go until dawn. I folded my arms around my knees and waited. That was all right for a few minutes. The morning was cool, almost chilly, but not so much that I felt like pawing around for the Mylar blanket tucked at the bottom of my pack.
Despite my good intentions to stay awake, my head sank down to my chest. I wasn’t exactly tired. But there wasn’t anything to do. Out of curiosity, I turned down the goggles and turned up the helmet’s ears and listened to the grass grow for a while.
Beck was right. You could hear it grow.
It was a sound like rustling. Sort of.
Above us, there was wind. If I looked up, I could see the tops of the grass stalks bending ever so slightly against the cooling breezes. But there was something else in the air too. I closed my eyes and listened. It was like something stretching. And stretching. And stretching. And stretching forever. . . .
It was a sound made up of a whole bunch of other sounds, each one inside the other. If I turned the amplification up, it was a dry sound of something sticky pulling wetly and crackling. If I turned it down, the sound became a susurrus of a hundred voices all whispering together—whispering to each other somewhere close by. The people of the grass, sneaking up. I knew about the people of the grass. . . .
It’s only the grass rustling in the wind. The stalks rub up against each other, and in the wind, a myriad waxy stridulations soften into an intimation of other sounds. The mind plays tricks—it hears distant voices whispering together. Whispering about me.
Very close. Just below the edge of the horizon. The people of the grass.
They call to foolish children. Follow me, follow me. Sing with me in the space between light and dark. Slip into the unseen shadows and we’ll live forever in the land of enchantment.
The people of the grass dance naked in the cold bright wind, leaving only the laughter of their passage sparkling in the air. Sometimes children try to catch them, following their laughter and their whispers. But those who follow them never come back. No one ever sees them again.
Back in the Dome, Jaxin had talked to us kids about the people of the grass. It was just a week after I’d gotten lost in it. By then, everybody in the Dome had heard all about my misadventure, and all the Scouts and trainers were so concerned that they increased their warnings about the dangers of the grass.
“Don’t think of it as grass like the kind we have here on Earth. The grass on Linnea is thicker, taller, stronger, stickier, louder, meaner, hungrier, and as dangerous as anything you can imagine. You can be three meters from your best friend and not be able to see or hear her. Unless you have an electronic guidance monitor, you will not know which way to turn. Even a compass won’t work. Linnea doesn’t have as much iron in its core, so it has a much weaker magnetic field—and the razor-grass takes up iron from the soil, so a field of grass will surround you with enough magnetism to make an ordinary compass worthless.
“If something goes into the grass—a ball, a dog, a doll—you have to assume you have lost it forever. And if you go after it, your families will mourn you as well. This happens on Linnea all the time. Children wander away from their homes. They think they can just step into the grass a meter or two. But it doesn’t work that way. Strong men have died in the grass. Whole families have disappeared. A child doesn’t have a chance of survival.
“You’ll push your way forever through the grass—and the grass will fight your every step. The smell alone will overpower you. Your eyes will water, your lungs will ache from the sticky stink of it. Finally, exhausted, you’ll sink to the ground, too tired to move, gasping for every breath. You’ll die of exposure or starvation or dehydration. And your body will rot. The grass will sink its roots into your moldering fles
h and you will provide sustenance for that little patch of it.
“And if someday, that little patch of grass grows tall enough and rustles loud enough, then on the darkest of nights, when the wind sweeps across the top of the waving sea, making a sound like the faraway whispering of little children, then your family will hear it and say, ‘Listen to Kaer, dancing with the children of the grass.’ But in truth, your bones will probably lie rotting within walking distance of your home. And your mothers and your fathers will feel an unhealing ache in their hearts whenever they hear the sound of the grass.”
Jaxin grew very serious. “Look,” he said. “You have no idea what it feels like to live in the sea of grass. It surrounds you always. You will have days when you think it sucks the energy right out of your bones. People who live there either grow stronger—or they give up entirely. The Linneans don’t talk about this very much, but they know that people sometimes get so depressed that they ‘go to live in the grass.’ They mean suicide. If they say, ‘She went to dance with the people of the grass,’ they mean that she killed herself. But saying that she went to dance can also mean that she stumbled into the grass by accident and didn’t mean to kill herself, and that way they take away some of the sting of the person’s death. But the grass kills hundreds of people every year.
“When we first crossed over to Linnea, we had no idea. We underestimated the power of the grass. We lost machines, we lost Scouts, we lost equipment. We had to develop whole new ways of scanning and monitoring. We had to find ways to work with the grass instead of against it. Now, sometimes the grass serves as our greatest ally, because we have learned to hide in it too. But you must learn to respect the power of the grass. You must. Or you will end up as just another name remembered in the night, when the wind dances through the waves. ‘Listen. Kaer dances with the people of the grass.’”
He’d scared me well enough. If that had been his intention, he’d certainly accomplished it. Later, he said to me privately. “Kaer, we had you on the monitor all night. You would not have died in the grass of the Dome. But we left you out there as long as we did to teach you to respect the grass. When you get to Linnea, you will have no one to rescue you, so remember your night in the little sea here. It will serve you well as a warning. I do not want to hear you dancing in the wind.”
And after all of that, after all the warnings and cautions, here I was—alone in the sea anyway.
I looked at my watch. Only an hour and a half to go before dawn.
The Woman in the Grass
The voices were louder now. They called me by name. Kaer. Come here, Kaer.
Da?
It sounded like da’s voice.
I started to get up. “Da—?”
Something slipped off of my lap. The rope. Reminding me where I was.
There are no people in the grass.
That wasn’t da.
But if there were people in the grass—then maybe da was with them now and—
No.
The grass did funny things to people, made you think funny things. Da had helmet problems, just like me. Nothing else. There were no people in the grass.
I tugged at a couple of strands of grass. I began weaving them between my fingers, maybe making them into something—a shapeless mass, probably.
I looked at my watch. An hour and twenty-two minutes.
I whispered a little prayer to the Mother. “I hope you can hear me. I hope you’ll take a moment to listen. I came such a long way to get here. I just want to find my da. And I want to know the right thing to do. I know you don’t owe me anything, but if you could let me find the wisdom and the strength to do the right thing, I’d really appreciate it. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to . . . well, you know . . . I like your horses. I want to take care of them. If you’ll let me. Anyway, thank you for listening. Even if you can’t help. And if you can help, thank you for that too.”
Kaer. . . ?
I wondered if I should wake Beck. But I didn’t want her to think I was a baby. Or a coward. But maybe she might hear it too.
Kaer. Come here, Kaer.
If it really was da, shouldn’t I tell her?
And if it wasn’t da—then who was it?
We knew there were Linnean refugees moving eastward through the grass along the rail lines. Maybe some of them had strayed off the tracks and gotten lost? Or maybe it was a troop of Linnean soldiers, patrolling? Did they patrol in the grass?
Or maybe it was the Hale-Stones? Maybe they’d tracked our landing point and they were out here looking for us!
Kaer. Can you hear me? Kaer?
Maybe I could take just a few steps in the direction of the voice. If I could get a little closer, I could hear for sure.
I was starting to feel like maybe I should get up and go pee anyway. I could do that. That would be all right.
I looked at Beck and made sure one end of the rope was clipped to her belt. Then I checked that the other end was securely clipped to mine. There was at least three hundred meters here. I didn’t have to go that far. Just far enough to pee.
I stood up.
I turned up the sound on my helmet. The crackling and the rustling of the grass drowned out the voices. But even so, in the distance very faint and faraway, I could still hear something. It sounded like . . . talking. Voices.
Kaer? Where are you?
I took a look back at Beck. She was still sleeping. This wouldn’t take long. I pushed through the grass. It wasn’t as hard to push through as before. I remembered something about early morning being the best time to move through the grass because that’s when it was softest with dew.
The grass was one of the reasons why the western continent had so few lakes and rivers. The grass sucked the moisture out of the ground and held it. The grass held so much moisture that it took all summer for it to evaporate back into the sky and come down again as snow in the winter. That hadn’t sounded right to me until Jaxin had shown me the math. Six godzillion square kilometers of razor-grass, two to six meters high, every stalk coated with wax. How much moisture did I think was in each stalk? Almost a full glass of water. An acre of grass used up a meter’s depth of water. Scary. No wonder the Linneans called it the sea.
I pushed steadily forward, always making sure the rope was playing out safely behind me. The grass snapped around me, hitting me in the face, slapping my arms. Every step still resisted, but now it resisted wetly. Finally, I judged that I had come far enough. I pulled down my fatigue pants, squatted, and . . . gave a little gift to the grass. Linnean style.
As I zipped up again, I realized that this was the first time, I’d given any gift at all to the grass. It made me smile. “Okay, grass. Your turn. Give me . . . whatever.” I took a few more steps toward what I thought was the direction of the voices, then turned up my ears another notch.
The voices were gone. The night had gone still. In the distance, I could hear the faint sigh of the wind, nothing else. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath.
I turned around several times, looking. But there was nothing but the wall of grass around me. And silence.
No, not silence. A sound. Wind? A voice? I couldn’t tell.
I turned up my ears. The noise was coming from over there.
The rope was still clipped to my belt. So I was safe. I took a few steps to my right. Maybe this way. . . ? I knew I shouldn’t, but I did it anyway. I had the rope.
The sound was closer. It was a voice. Singing.
A few more steps. . . .
A woman’s voice, singing softly.
And then, suddenly, there was—a space in front of me. And a light.
Just to be sure, I lifted up my goggles. There was a faint orange glimmer directly ahead. I pushed forward cautiously. Through the stalks of grass, I could make out . . . it looked like a campfire in a clearing. The yellowish light flickered and shadows danced around the wall of dark green stems. The woman was bending by the fire, putting leaves in a teapot, and humming to herself.
Not very loud. It was a wonder I’d heard her at all.
“You there—” she called abruptly, without looking up from what she was doing. “Don’t hide in the grass. Come have some tea.” She sounded stern, but she didn’t sound angry. “Come on out. Let me see you.”
There was no point in hiding. She knew I was there. I don’t know how. So I stepped forward into the flickering light of the clearing.
She was an old Linnean grandmother, bending to put another fuel bundle into her fire. Her face was leathery from years in the sun. Her white hair hung down her back, all the way to the ground in a shower of straight thin braids—it probably hung below her knees when she stood, she’d probably never had it cut in her entire life. Her braids were woven with feathers and colored beads their entire length. She looked a little wild. Not crazy, just wild. She wore grass sandals and a knee-length dress, also woven with bright beads. They glittered with reflections of the camp fire, making her shine in the dark.
The cloth of her dress was woven from fibers of grass. We hadn’t yet learned how to make it ourselves, it was what da called “labor-intensive,” but we’d planned to tackle it during the winter. We’d already learned how to make yarn out of grass stalks and knit things with it, but I was looking forward to real cloth, even if it did take more work.
“Let me look at you,” she said, straightening up and coming to me. I was right; her braids hung down her back like a veil, all the way to her knees. She studied me up and down, reaching out to finger the material of my clothes with genuine curiosity. Her eyes were lively and bright; she did not seem surprised by my camouflage pants or any of the equipment I wore, just interested in a professional sort of way. “You have come a long way, haven’t you? Let me guess. You couldn’t sleep either. Neither could I. The night crackles with strange noises, strange voices, strange people blundering around. Like yourself. Come,” she pointed toward a cushion of grass on the ground. “Sit next to me. We’ll talk. The teapot will boil soon and we’ll share stories in the dark while we wait for the sun to rise.”
Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Page 17