She started with the golden-dark people of the north. She gathered them up in her arms and blew a puff of air into each tiny face. As she did, each little grass person inhaled deeply and came to life with a happy laugh of surprise. And she sang to them. “I give to you a joyous task. You will go to the north and you will live there in happiness. You will sing this song, the song of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. As long as you do that, the grass will grow and you will flourish. And you will remember who gave you the breath of life. And that will please me greatly.”
And the people of the north laughed and thanked her and ran off into the grass to do as she had instructed.
Then she picked up the golden-bright people of the south and she blew a puff of air into each tiny face. And as she did, each of them inhaled her breath and came to life with a happy laugh of surprise. And she sang to them as she had sung to the people of the north. “I give to you a joyous task. You will go to the south and you will live there in happiness. You will sing of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. The grass will grow tall and strong around you and you will flourish. And you will remember who gave you her breath. And that will please me greatly.”
And the people of the south danced with joy and thanked her and ran off into the grass to do as she had said.
Now, the old woman turned to gather up the golden-green people of the west, but the wind had heard her singing. The wind had crept through the grass to listen, sneaking up as quietly as it could. When the wind realized what the woman intended, it grew angry, and it summoned itself up in a terrible rage. Before the old woman could gather up her people of grass, the wind swept across them, blowing itself into the faces of all the golden-green people of the west. They inhaled deeply and came alive with a startled scream of surprise.
And the wind blew itself across them again, and tumbled them away from the old woman’s arms, off the table and onto the ground and into the grass. And the wind sang to the golden-green people as it tumbled them this way and that. “Come with me. Let’s escape to the west. We’ll have magic and freedom as no one else can.”
The old woman called after her golden-green people, “Come back! Come back!” But the wind only sang louder, drowning her out. It blew the golden-green people farther and farther away, making ever more audacious promises to them. “We’ll play in the space between sunlight and dark. We’ll slip through the unseen shadows, and the laughter of our passage will sparkle behind. And we’ll tease and beguile all that won’t follow. We’ll sing the songs of enchantment and steal their hearts.”
The old woman called one more time, but the wind had taken the golden-green people of the west too far away. And now, out of earshot of the old woman, it sang even more audaciously. “In the night-time, we’ll dance naked with the twinkling stars and the glistening dew. In the day, we’ll soar high and we’ll drive herds of thundering clouds before us. We’ll roll them over the edge of the earth and block out the sun. We’ll swirl them in anger, sparking fire and ice to torment the grass. And when we’ve done that, we’ll bury the good dark earth in snow so deep that nothing can grow. Come with me now! We’ll dance in the air!”
The old woman fell to her knees and cried at her loss. The wind had stolen her children. She could hear them laughing all the way across the world as they ran away into the west, and she knew that she would never see them again.
Now, saddened—but ever more resolved—she gathered up the golden-fair people of the east. She blew gently in their faces, and as the others before them, they inhaled deeply and came to life with a happy laugh of surprise.
She sang gently to them. “I give to you the hardest of all my tasks. You will go to the east and you will live there as no one else in the world lives. You have a harder song to sing—a song of strength and a song of sorrow. You will keep the sea of grass and all that dwell within its waves safe from bedevilments. Take joy in your work. The grass will grow and you will flourish. Remember who gave you the breath of life. And that will please me greatly.”
And when the golden-fair people heard this, they cried at the magnitude of their task. They cried long and hard, and their tears touched the old woman’s heart—so much so that her own tears began to flow. She gathered her tears and washed each of the golden-fair people, promising each one as she did so, “I will watch over you always. You have nothing to fear. I live in your heart. But if you forget that, when you need me the most, then I will come to you as the dawn crossing the sea. If you cannot find me in your heart, you will find me in the waves of the grass. And if you cannot find me in the grass, then you will find me in the song of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. But wherever you find me, whenever you do, then I will wash you again in my tears. I will wash away all sorrows and bless you anew. And from that day on, you will never again have to search for me. You will find me always in your heart. I give you this promise, from now until forever.”
And when she finished, the golden-fair people of the east thanked her humbly, for she had given them the greatest promise of all. They took their song of strength and their song of sorrow, and they went off into the grass, joyous and unafraid.
Boffili
After lunch, da asked me if I wanted to go back and rest some more, but I shook my head no. Even though I was still tired and achy, I wanted to see how everything in the boulder worked, and da wanted me to see the view from the top, so he took me on a tour of the whole station.
Stepping out of Bus-Tractor One, we were inside a hollow irregularly shaped, seven or eight-story building. The inner walls were a negative impression of the outside of the boulder, so it felt like we were inside a cave—except everything here was lined with catwalks and lights and equipment, a lot more stuff than had been in place when I’d seen the shell opened up in the Hole.
Da pointed out all the different doors around the base of the boulder. The biggest opened up to reveal a delivery bay, so choppers could just lower equipment into the station. That’s how the dune-buggy vehicles had been delivered. When we’d entered the boulder at dawn, they’d been lifted up out of the way, I didn’t see them now. Da said the second demolition team were using them, heading west through the grass to get behind the caravan with our Scouts. Even though surveillance had picked two or three suitable places to break the tracks, Smiller had told them not to wait. She’d given them orders to break the tracks as soon as they were safely past the rail-wagons. She was afraid the all-pervading scent of boffili would spook the magistrates and they’d order a return to Callo. She didn’t want to risk that.
In fact, Smiller had already made up her mind that as soon as the tread was reassembled on Bus-Tractor One, she wanted the boulder moved—closer to the tracks and as far west as we could go before sunset.
“Huh? Move the boulder?”
Da showed me how it would be done. The base on which the shell was fastened was designed for this. The piece of floor directly under the tractors was detachable, it would be disconnected from the rest. Then, a set of cables would be pulled from winches on top of the buses, up through pulley arrangements spaced around the shell, and back down to connect to joints in the deck. When the winches started cranking in synch, the boulder would be lifted up off the grass, as high as necessary. “Think of a fat lady lifting up her skirts to walk,” da said.
The bus-tractors would then drive forward off the piece of floor they had been parked on, another piece of floor would be opened, and that piece would be winched up behind—and then the whole machine could be driven to a new location. Top speed was supposed to be thirty klicks, but they’d never gone faster than fifteen in the open sea. The grass was too unpredictable. But the whole operation could be performed without a single person stepping out of the boulder, or even down onto the soil of Linnea. We were totally self-contained.
Da then took me up in the catwalks. There were walkways and ladders and a lot of railed-platforms to be used as work-areas. We passed one balcony where three men were sleeping on cots, another where
two women were frowning over at a communications console, listening for the Hale-Stones’ radio chatter I guess.
I paused to peer down over the railing. The inside of the boulder actually looked crowded, there were so many people hurrying back and forth on their separate tasks. “Da? How many people did we bring?”
“Sixty,” he said. “But not everybody will go out on the rescue. We have to have station operators, communication techs, corpsmen, techs, specialists—a whole support team. And Smiller has three separate plans, each in a different state of readiness, depending on what happens out there.” He waved his hand to indicate the world outside the shell. “So that means we have to have a big enough team to handle all the different possibilities.”
“I know, but . . . so many?”
“Actually, we started with over a hundred. We cut out everything and everybody unnecessary.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry. You made the cut.” He gave me a playful poke and we climbed up the next ladder.
Higher up in the boulder, da showed me some of the hidden windows. They were supposed to be for observation, but they could also be used as gun ports in case a sniper had to shoot at someone or something. I didn’t like what that suggested, but I didn’t say so aloud. At the very top of the boulder was the “crow’s nest.” Just beneath it was the “crow’s latrine” where four technicians studied a bank of observation displays. “All clear?” asked da.
“All clear,” said the senior tech. “Go on up.” He glanced up at me and smiled warmly. “Glad to have you with us, Angel.”
“Thank you.” I followed da up the ladder to an observation platform just big enough to hold six or seven people. There were three people there, each wearing a binocular helmet for scanning the horizon. The lip of the boulder was at waist level. I put my hands on it and leaned out as far as I could. I was at the top of an eight-story building. If we’d wanted to, we could have climbed out onto the rock itself, for sun-bathing. We would have been invisible from the ground.
The view here was pretty good. Or it would have been if there was anything to see. Mostly, there wasn’t. It grass all the way out to the horizon, grass all around. Dark waving grass.
Linnea’s huge sun was just past zenith. Its ochre heat pressed down on everything like a layer of smoky glass. You could almost feel the sun pulling the water out of the ground, up through the stalks of grass and into the air above the uneasy sea. Tons of it was lifted out of the ground every day, all summer long. Enough to come back in the winter as ten or twenty meters of snow. The mugginess of the atmosphere was a tangible pressure.
The red-flavored light over everything made it feel like the inside of an oven. It gave the dark sea of grass an even darker, olive cast. It looked ominous and foreboding. We were high enough here to see how the wind brushed the tops of the stalks. It swept slow rippling waves across the surface of the sea, which made the grass seem even more sinister, but the breeze was strong enough to ruffle my hair and despite everything else, it felt good on my face. “I smell boffili,” I said suddenly, frowning at the distant horizon.
One of the lookouts pointed west, north, and east.
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
“We’ve got tall grass out there, Angel. Taller than the herd. Just a little miscalculation on our part. The bad-guys won’t see the boffili until they stumble into them.”
“They’ll smell them,” I said. “They won’t miss that.”
“Copy that.” He pointed. “Look there. See? You can just see the humps of the bulls—”
I followed the direction of his finger. Halfway to the horizon, something moved through the grass. Several somethings. I’d missed it before, because of the wind. The rippling grass had covered the motion. Now I saw the humps breaking the surface like whales in the distance.
“Put on a helmet,” da said. “You’ll see better. He handed me a piece of gear identical to the ones the lookouts were wearing. I pulled it on and waited two seconds for the fit to adjust itself. It was lighter than the helmet I’d worn for landing in the grass, and the goggles were calibrated differently. And the stereo effect was exaggerated too make everything stand out in sharper relief.
I could zoom in on distant objects or zoom out again for a normal view. I could also switch between different visual ranges, including infra-red, microwave, ultra-violet, sonar, and Z-state. And a couple I’d never heard of before. Or I could look at the world through a weighted composite of all views. That was the easiest. Readouts up and down the sides and across the top told me what I was looking at, how far away it was, and when it had last brushed its teeth.
Now I could see the boffili as if I was right up next to them. The goggles couldn’t exactly look through the grass, but they could detect mass and they could extrapolate and synthesize what they couldn’t actually see. It was like looking through a world where everything was made of gelatin. But it was very effective. I turned up the ears and I could hear the powerful grunting of the boffili as they puffed for breath, snorting their way through the thick grass.
“They don’t normally move through the heat of the day,” I said. “I mean, I thought they rested during the hottest parts, chewing their cud. Why do they move now?”
“We have spybirds and choppers all over the north edge of the herd, broadcasting kack howls and boffili distress calls—and spreading bad smells too,” said da. “The boffili like to space themselves evenly, so when the northern edge of the herd turns south, they’ll push all the others before them in a great southward wave.”
“We turned off the broadcasts yesterday,” said the lookout, “but the herd still keeps coming. And they’ve gotten all nervous and spooky. Maybe all the bad smells haven’t dissipated yet, or maybe they have better noses than we realized. The only good news, they’ve spaced themselves out wider than normal. Thirty meters now. It’ll slow down any panic, if one gets started.”
Da pointed off to the northwest. “See that boffili right there?”
“Yes?”
“Where she stands—you slept in that spot last night. That old cow has a calf with her too. She’d have killed you without thinking, if you hadn’t gotten out of her way.”
“Or if not her, any of the fifty others who’ve passed that spot since dawn,” said the lookout. “I heard you had a narrow escape.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see any boffili until now.”
Da said, “I’ll show you the video, Kaer. You had three young bulls plowing behind you, almost all the way to the roll-down path. Didn’t you see the men with the guns around us?”
“I didn’t see anything, da. Remember?”
In reply, he patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Smiller wants to move the boulder west and south. If we can stay away from the leading edge of the herd, we can keep some of our grass cover. I don’t think it’ll work. The body of the herd is headed this way.”
I looked to the south. I fiddled with the helmet view. “I don’t see the rail-line.”
“Almost impossible without the overlay,” said the lookout. “Wait.” He touched a button on the side of my helmet. “Right there—that’ll give you a real-time status map.” Almost immediately the landscape was highlighted with markers and lines. Some of the lines were latitude and longitude cues. Some of the markers were arrows showing the direction of individual boffili. And a few were pre-targeted artillery points; those kept shifting around, even as I watched. But starting out at the westward horizon and stretching all the way east, was a bright yellow line, very thin and very straight—the rail-line through the grass. It passed due south of us half a kilometer away.
“Have you seen any travelers on the line?” I asked.
“We had a couple late yesterday, heading east. Two hours later, they came back again, heading west. They must have run into boffili.”
“On foot? Horseback? Rail-wagon?”
“On horseback.”
“What if they warn the rail-wagons?”
“An ideal target for the Hale-Stones,” da agreed. Apparently he knew this lookout well enough to speak candidly. I kept forgetting that da had already spent considerably more time with these people than I had. “Jack up the existing religious faith, slide a new one under it, and take over the mechanisms of power. Instant theocracy—just add a few fanatics.”
“How soon will the wagons get here?” I asked.
“Our spybirds show them fifty-five klicks west of here. They had a breakdown on one of the wagons. They lost a wheel. It took them all morning to replace it. Our best guess is that they’ll want to make up the lost time, so they’ll drive well into the night. We could see them around midnight. Look over there—” He pointed.
“What? The red line?”
“Uh-huh. I know you can’t see it, the grass covers everything too thickly, but we’ve put a roll-down path all the way to the tracks. We had a team out there all morning. They tried breaking the tracks by hand, but that didn’t work, the Linneans build their rail-lines too well—so they’ve packed a section of track with explosives. As soon as Smiller gives the word . . . wait a minute.” He listened to something on his helmet radio. “They say they’ve placed the package. They’ll roll up the path and come back in.” He listened again. “Smiller has just ordered keep-away sounds broadcast from both the package and the boulder. She doesn’t want the explosion setting off a stampede.”
Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Page 22