Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two

by David Gerrold

  An overhead map display showed a thin yellow line for the rail-tracks, the location of the boulder as a red circle, smaller red dots for the spybirds—and a kibbled amorphous mass of brown north of everything that must have been the herd. It was flowing toward us, even as I watched.

  “How close?” I managed to ask. I pointed at the map.

  Without looking up, one of the technicians said, “Half a klick and closing.”

  Alex turned around from his work-station, saw me, and flinched. “Kaer! Oh, God.” To his comm-set, he barked. “Byrne! Tractor One! ASAP! We’ve got a problem!”

  And then da was walking me to the bunk and Byrne slid down the fireman’s pole, carrying a med-kit, and for a moment I was surrounded. Da lifted me onto the bunk and started pulling my clothes off. “Oh, Kaer. If I had known, I’d have never—”

  “No, da! Don’t say that. I wanted to come—”

  “Shut up, Kaer!” That was Byrne. She was plugging things into me, pasting things onto me, cutting my clothes off me, plopping a mask over my nose and mouth—something bit my arm and I saw a plastic bag hanging over me with a tube dangling from it. I saw her injecting something into the line, and then something else again. I began to feel drifty and light. A screen above me lit up with lines and colors. Where did that come from?

  And suddenly remembered—“The old lady!” I clawed the mask away from my face. “The old lady in the grass! Someone has to go get her before the boffili get here! They’ll trample her.”

  “What old lady?”

  “Beck knows! I met an old woman in the grass. A crazy woman. She had a little house she made herself. And she gave me tea. And she washed me in her—in her spit. She said she washed away my sorrow. You’ve got to save her. The boffili will trample her—”

  Da grabbed me by my shoulders to keep me from scrambling out of the bunk. He exchanged a worried look with Byrne. Byrne said to me. “Kaer, we didn’t see any old lady. We had spybirds circling the rock all night. We scanned ten kilometers in every direction. And we had two spybirds watching you and Beck all night long. Your da sat in front of that screen there, watching you every moment. And we have everything recorded on disc. I can show you. If anyone else had come near either you or Beck, we’d have the video. We didn’t see anyone. We didn’t see an old woman. Now, lie down and let me work—”

  “But—I know what I saw—she had a house and a firepit and she made tea, and she washed away my sorrow and she told me—” I could see they didn’t believe me. I stopped. And then I started crying again, tears of confusion. I knew what I’d seen. The old woman was real. And I remembered very clearly what she’d told me.

  Da put his hand on my forehead. Partly to hold me down, and partly to reassure himself that I wasn’t feverish. While Byrne studied her display, he said, “You need to rest, Kaer. If it will make you feel any better, I’ll run a complete scan of the area myself, and see if we can find anyone else out there. All right?”

  “No, da,” I whispered. I was feeling woozy again. “Don’t bother. . . . You won’t find her. Not unless she wants you to. . . .”

  Da’s face grew sad. I knew that look too. He started brushing the hair away from my eyes, until Byrne pushed his hand away. She began wiping some kind of salve on my forehead and cheeks with her thumb. It was cold and it stung. She applied more of it to my neck and arms. I flinched—and da flinched in sympathy. He took my hand and held it in both of his, sandwiched in warmth. “Kaer, if you say you saw an old woman—I believe you.”

  “Da—don’t worry about it.”

  “Did she tell you her name?”

  “She didn’t need to.” I squeezed his hand. “Da, the old woman—I met the Mother of the World. She blessed me. I had a revelation.” I felt my smile spreading through me like a wave. Like the warming tea, but infinitely more intense. The sheer wonder of what had happened was starting to hit me. Such incredible joy—that the Mother of Linnea had given me her blessing. Oh, what a wonderful world this was! I wouldn’t let the Mother down. I couldn’t. I’d given her my promise.

  Rant

  I didn’t fall asleep. I just drifted for a while. I could hear conversations going on behind me somewhere. Phrases drifted overhead, but I didn’t reach out and grab any of them. Da’s voice though. I listened to his words. “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have put such a big responsibility on the child—”

  “Lorr, don’t beat yourself up.”

  “How can I not—? I promised to watch over Kaer.”

  “Kaer will get over this. Probably very quickly. Will you?”

  “Kaer will get over this? An old woman in the sea of grass? And a revelation? I feel like a fool putting the child at such risk. How do I tell the family? Kaer had a revelation? Oh yeah, right. You don’t know the conversations we’ve had about this place—this world breeds religious fanatics. No wonder the Hale-Stones want it. The most infectious and dangerous meme of all—religious hysteria. And now I’ve got a kid who thinks the Mother of the World manifests as a real person, who sits and chats and serves tea and washes away sorrows. You tell me how I can break the reality of a religious hallucination like that. This kid will have traumatic after-effects for a long time to come—”

  “Maybe Kaer actually met a real person? Did you think of that?”

  “Yes, I thought of that. I desperately hoped for it. I wished I could prove it. That would spare us all a lot of unnecessary worry, wouldn’t it? I tried to tell myself that the magnetic chaos of the grass somehow interferes with all of our other scanners as well. Visual. Heat-sensing. Sonar. Z-state. But you know as well as I that we would have seen something. No. All that we have on the disc is evidence that Kaer went out into the grass and took a dump, got up, walked around, sat down again—sat there for a while, thinking or whatever, then went back to Beck.”

  “You don’t actually see Kaer on those videos. You only see the heat signature of Kaer’s body.”

  “Then we should have seen the heat-signature of the old woman too. And don’t tell me that feral Linneans have a two-degree lower body temperature. We both know that our equipment is configured to pick up Linneans too. Every other Linnean shows up on the displays just fine. So show me the old woman—”

  “Lorr . . . ?”

  “No, I haven’t finished my rant yet. Do you think I haven’t turned this over in my own head, looking for an explanation? Give me something to grab. Give me some reason not to beat myself up for making such a stupid decision. Tell me that one of the mysterious outsiders who seeded the six planets swooped down and blinded our instruments for a few minutes so she could talk to Kaer. Tell me something I can believe. Otherwise, I have to believe that my child had a hallucination, a delusional experience. Perhaps even a serious psychotic break with reality, brought on by the strain, the emotional overwhelm, and the stress of abandonment in the razor-grass again.”

  “We didn’t abandon Kaer.”

  “You know that. I know that. But I know what it must have felt like to Kaer. And now I’ve got a sick child, ten thousand kilometers away from the doorway to home. And I don’t even know why!”

  The other voice, it sounded like Byrne, said, “I can’t give you an explanation. What I can do, I can suggest that you slow down. Wait and see. Maybe it will work out. But if you drive yourself crazy over this, you don’t do anyone any favors, least of all yourself. However troubled you may feel over this, you’ll have to let go of it—because if you don’t, Kaer will see it. And take the blame for it. And that’ll give the child an even bigger problem to deal with. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t. I apologize for ranting.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. I understand. I’d rant too.”

  “I just . . . I just don't want to see Kaer fall into the same trap as the Hale-Stones. Believing something unprovable and then going off and making stupid decisions based on that belief. Hurting other people. It always starts innocently enough, with something like this. Then it gets out of control. R
eligious hysteria.”

  “You underestimate Kaer. You’ve raised the child well, Lorr. I doubt you have anything to worry about. Let’s wait and see what Kaer says.”

  The curious thing about that conversation—I knew they were talking about me, but it didn’t matter. It did and it didn’t. I loved da, I didn’t want to see him so upset, but at the same time it was all right that he was upset. He was upset because he loved me. And if he didn’t understand about the Mother, that was all right too. He didn’t have to understand. He hadn’t met her. I had.

  After a while, I sat up on the bunk and looked across at da and Byrne where they were sitting quietly. “Can I have something to eat?” I said.

  Da came over to sit on the bunk next to me, and Byrne scrambled to pour me a mug of tea. “How do you feel?” da asked.

  “I feel all right,” I said. I felt yucky, but I didn’t feel bad.

  Byrne pressed a hot mug into my hands, not letting go of it until she was sure I held it firmly. But I didn’t move to drink it right away. Byrne looked at me oddly. “Go ahead, Kaer.”

  “I will—just a minute. Thank you, Mother, fall all of your gifts.” Then I drank. The tea wasn’t as thick as it should have been, but it tasted all right and I finished it quickly. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “Good. Thank you.” I handed back the mug.

  Both of them were watching me closely. As if I were about to grow horns or something. So I took a deep breath, and said, “I know you think I’ve gone crazy. You think I’ve gone delusional or that I’ve had a religious hallucination. Maybe I have. But it felt real at the time. If I close my eyes, I can still see the details of her clothes and the tea-bowl and the firepot. I remember the smell of the fire and the taste of the tea and the scrape of her fingers on my forehead as she washed away my sorrows. Maybe I did have a dream, but I’ve never had a dream this real before. And if this dream gives me strength or—or whatever it is I need to have, then let me have it for as long as I need it. And if I didn’t have a dream, if I really did meet the Mother, then let me have that too. Because we can’t do anything else, can we? We can’t make the memory disappear, can we? And if we could, should we? So why not just let me have my memory, and we won’t try to explain it. All right?”

  Da laughed gently and took my hand in both of his. “Your mother has taught you very well. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard her give that very same speech to you and Rinky and Klin and all the other children. Maybe the details of it have changed—but that speech definitely came from your mother. And she got it from Gamma. And Gamma probably got it from her Gamma. We’d need an historian or an archaeologist to find out where that speech originally came from. But you’ve learned it well. Remind me to thank your mom when we get home.”

  “So you’ll stop worrying about me now?”

  “I’ll never stop worrying about you—but I’ll stop worrying about this.”

  “Da, I came here to do a job with you. You don’t have to worry. Nor you either, Byrne. I’ll still do the job.”

  “Um—” Byrne hesitated. “We probably won’t need you to do it, Kaer. And maybe you shouldn’t anyway.”

  “No. We rushed here, you trained me, everybody has given me a lot of their time—we can’t quit now. Da always says that. When you quit, you fail. As long as you keep going, you haven’t failed. Well, I won’t quit and I won't fail.”

  Byrne shook her head. “The decision doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t even belong to you. And after your experience in the grass—no, not the old woman—the rest of it, the running and the choking, you don’t exactly look like an angel anymore. It might take a few days for your face to heal, the swelling to go down. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but it might not work for us now to have you do this job, Kaer.”

  I shook my head. “No. We have the makeup. We even have the mask. You go to them and tell them that I’ll do the job you brought me here for. Everyone else gets to do their job. I get to do mine.”

  “Everyone else follows orders too, Kaer.”

  “I followed mine—!”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, if Smiller orders you to stand down, you will.”

  “No! I made a promise. To da and to you and to Smiller and to everyone else. And I have to keep my promise.”

  “If we don’t use you, Kaer—” da began slowly, “it doesn’t mean you failed.”

  “No, da. I have to do this.” I looked to Byrne. “Tell them I have spoken!”

  Byrne got it then. Further argument was useless. “All right. I’ll tell Smiller that. She and Jorge and Jake were putting together an alternate plan. I’ll them you won’t hear of it.” She took a breath. “They’ll appreciate having the option . . . but you realize, Kaer, that they will make the final decision themselves. Do you want some more tea?”

  “No, thank you. Can I take a shower?”

  “Do you feel up to it? Or do you need help.”

  “I feel fine. I don’t need help. Well—help me to the shower.”

  The shower was small, but big enough. Byrne explained how it worked, but the instructions were also on a display panel on the wall. The inside of the door was a mirror with a hook over it. Byrne had found a new jumpsuit for me and hung it on the hook over the mirror. So all I had to do was step in, close the door behind me, and pull a plastic curtain across the door to keep the mirror and my clean clothes from getting wet. I got undressed slowly, I still hurt a lot everywhere, and tossed my dirty clothes into the wall slot under the shower head.

  Once I was ready for the actual shower, all I had to do was press the start button. The display lit up with instructions for each step. You got five minutes of water total, no more. First you got one minute to wet down and lather up. There was liquid decontaminant in a dispenser. There was a little corner seat, so you could sit down and wash your hair, your feet, behind your knees, and so forth. Then when you were ready, you hit the button again and you got two more minutes to rinse off. Then you could use a couple of squirts of liquid shampoo to lather up your hair. And then you got two more minutes to rinse that out and you were done. After that, you got two minutes of hot air to dry off. Actually, you could have as much hot-air as you wanted. According to the display, it was piped in directly from the floor of congress. I assumed that was joke. One of the techs must have programmed it in.

  Then you were done. While you dressed, the water would be filtered and distilled for the next bather. If the boulder was going to be on-station for a long time, extra water tanks would be delivered with the shell.

  After I finished showering, I felt a little better, but not a whole lot. I ached. I pulled the curtain aside and took my clean jumpsuit down off the hook. It was made of some kind of light papery material. I kept my eyes down and turned away from the mirror so I wouldn’t have to see. I pretended to be interested in the material of the jumpsuit. But at the same time, I couldn’t not look.

  So I turned back and faced it. I looked at the mirror. Either it flinched, or I did—probably both of us. I looked awful. My face was puffy. My hair was ragged and matted. I had welts all over my body—especially my face and neck and arms. The grass had slapped me repeatedly, and my body had responded by turning me into a ferocious little ogre. I looked like a troll. I almost started to cry again. I liked being pretty. This was the worst thing Linnea had done to me. The Mother’s blessing cost an ugly price.

  I peered at myself closely. The skin wasn’t broken anywhere—although there were a couple of places that had slightly scabbed along the surface of the welt. Byrne had said I’d heal in a few days. But even makeup wasn’t going to help here. I said a bad word.

  Then I did sit down on the bench to cry. Everything was ruined. If only Beck hadn’t—

  No, that wasn’t fair. I couldn’t blame Beck. After all, she’d thought she was saving our lives. And if it was a choice between pretty or alive, I’d choose alive every time. Just the same—I didn’t look like an angel anymore.

  I pulled on the clean jumpsui
t, dried my hair. I finger-fluffed my curls back into a semblance of whatever, took a deep breath, and opened the door. Smiller was standing there. So was Jake.

  “You hungry? We’ve got lunch upstairs. Come on up.”

  Lunch

  I followed them up to the top level, where da was already sitting at a pull-down table—with a cup of coffee! Alex was pulling trays out of the microwave and putting them on the table. I sat down next to da, and he filled my cup with hot chocolate! Something else smelled good too. Turkey! I hadn’t had Turkey since before we’d moved into the Dome—our last big family dinner before we left for New Mexico.

  We took a moment arranging ourselves at the table, da and me on one side, Jake and Alex on the other, Smiller at the end. She immediately poured herself a cup of strong-smelling coffee.

  Alex slid a tray into place in front of me. Without waiting, I popped off the top. Yes! Sliced turkey and stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmallows and pecans, green peas and pearl onions—mmm! I grabbed for my fork—“Thank you, Mother, for your gifts.”—and started eating. Smiller and Jake exchanged a glance, then picked up their own forks.

  After a moment, Smiller asked, “So, Kaer, how do you feel?”

  “Mostly fine,” I lied.

  “Mm,” Smiller didn’t look convinced. “Byrne says that you, uh . . . had quite an experience out in the grass.”

  I answered around a mouthful of sweet potatoes. “I met an old woman.”

  “Byrne says you met the Mother.”

  “I met an old woman. Maybe I met the Mother. Maybe I met a crazy woman. Maybe I met a crazy woman who had the spirit of the Mother inside her. I don’t know, and I won't try to explain it, because if I tell you what I think, you’ll all get into arguments about what it means. Maybe I met an old woman, maybe I dreamed I met an old woman. It seemed real enough at the time. She served me tea. She told me that all the strange people and strange noises in the grass kept her from sleeping.”