Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two

by David Gerrold

  “No, no, I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Kaer?” Da put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You asked me to do this, da. I said yes. I will.”

  “Forgive me. A father worries.”

  I pushed the rest of my tray away. “I don’t want anymore, thank you.”

  “You sure.”

  I nodded. For some reason, the feeling in my dream had come back, it was stronger than ever. I wondered, maybe this is how Angels really feel. . . .

  I pushed the rest of that thought away. It was as unpleasant as the lasagna. “We have a job to do,” I said. “Come on.”

  Break a Leg

  The studio had been set up against one wall of the boulder that wasn’t being used for anything else. There was a platform made of black grillwork for me to stand on, with black drapes hung around it on three sides. My costume hung in the center of the stage, while two techs calibrated the lights. Most of the lights were on an overhead rack, a few were on the floor at a distance, and two more were at eye level, pointing straight into the draped stage. They were adjusting the colors, trying the lights at various shades of pink, yellow, and even blue-white.

  Eighteen eyeball-sized cameras surrounded the costume. Six wires were stretched vertically from floor to overhead rack. They were spaced equidistantly around the stage, each about three meters from the edge of the platform. There were three cameras on each wire, one at eye-level, one at waist level, and one at knee level. Anyone standing on the platform would be photographed from eighteen different angles at the same time.

  “The images go from the cameras into these computers,” Byrne said, pointing to three notebooks lined up side-by-side on a nearby table. “We have them networked. They duplicate each other’s processing. Even if we lose two of them, we still have imagery.”

  I peered at the screens. Even though my costume was hanging still, the image on the notebook screens was rotating in all three axes. Alex saw me frowning at that and stepped over to explain. “We take the pictures from the different cameras and we synthesize them into a real-time three-dimensional model. When you move, it moves—and even if we don’t have a camera in a specific position, we have the information to synthesize the view from that position—just as if we did have a camera there. Understand?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “Good. As you move, we’ll send a frame-by-frame update of the model out to the projectors in the heli-birds. Each heli-bird will calculate its position relative to the others, and relative to the pillar of smoke, and it will synthesize the appropriate perspective, and project that point of view into the pillar. Everyone in front of the pillar will see the overlapping images in the smoke, and all the radiance lines of the off-axis projections as well, and it’ll look almost like a giant three-dimensional image, only spookier. The multiple light sources will make the common image all that brighter, and the overlapping radiance lines will make the image look shimmery and magical, so that works in our favor too. It makes you more amazing. Almost like real holography, but much better suited to our needs tonight. We’ll also insert a kaleidoscopic background behind you, flames, flower petals, waves of colored light, combinations, whatever we need for the emotional effect. We’ll match the different effects to make the pillar look more like radiance than smoke.”

  I tried to visualize how it would look to the people on the ground. Probably overwhelming. A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Won’t they see the beams from the projectors in the helis?”

  “Oh yes, they most definitely will. But they don’t have any experience with projectors—and even if they do, we expect your image to overwhelm them. We’ve run some simulations in Virtual Reality. From their point of view, it will probably look like the light is coming out of you and energizing the helis, not the other way around. We can live with it—at least until someone invents a holography projector. Ready for hair and makeup?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He pointed me toward a folding chair. I hopped into it and he tilted a couple of lights toward me. Byrne appeared in my field of vision with a bottle of liquid and a cotton ball. “Hold still,” she said, and started cleaning my face with an alcohol wipe. It stung, and I flinched, and she apologized, but she didn’t stop. She tsked at me as she worked. “You’ve still got too much swelling, Kaer, but we’ll get you up on the stage, and Alex will calibrate the model of you, and we’ll take it out in the computer.” She put aside the alcohol and rummaged around in her makeup case.

  “How do you know makeup?” I asked.

  “Everybody knows three jobs, remember? I studied stagecraft in college. Mostly a hobby, but it turns out we need a lot of illusionists here on Linnea. Who do you think designs the camouflage for our stations?”

  “You?”

  “I do a little of it, yes. So does Alex. Jake helps. He builds models for us. We’ve got more than a hundred people working all over the continent on various camouflage projects. Alex does a lot of the engineering. All right, close your eyes now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m putting on what we call Goldenrod Six. We’ll use that for the base. Then I’ll use a little copper for shadowing and diamond for highlights. After that, I’ll dust you with twinkles. When I’m done with you, you’ll sparkle. All right, you can open your eyes. How does that feel?”

  “Fine, so far.”

  “Good.” She worked in silence for awhile, applying makeup to my forehead, my nose and upper lip, then my chin and my cheeks, finally working her way back to my ears, then down to my neck. She took a step back to survey her work. Alex came up to stand beside her. He squinted and cocked his head. Too bright?” she asked.

  “No. I don’t consider brightness a problem. Flaring works in our favor tonight. I’ll need time to calibrate the model, you know.”

  “We know. Don’t panic. You’ll have plenty of time. I still have to do eyebrows and lips.” She worked for a while on the highlights and shadows of my face, pausing every so often to hold up a mirror for me. “What do you think?”

  “I look like a fairy princess—”

  “Or a fairy prince.”

  “Or just a fairy.”

  “Possibly.” And then, realizing what she said, she added, “Fairies have no sex. The ones in fairy tales, anyway.” She rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Let’s not go there.” She had to take a moment to stifle her smile and get serious again. “Remember what we said about androgyny? Not male, not female—but with just enough of each to look good as either?” She held up the mirror again. With the lipstick and the eye make-up, I looked a little over-painted. Almost like a clown.

  “Too heavy,” I said.

  “No. Not for the computer. We’ll adjust it—we’ll fix it in post. But the computer needs good contrast, and remember, we have to project into smoke, so we really won’t have much in the way of nuance, you know.” She added, “Alex will have to calibrate your voice too. We’ll adjust the timber of it in the computer to make it an androgynous voice. We don’t want the Linneans to see our Angel male or female. We want confusion on that point. Partly for the mystery, and partly because we don’t want to subvert the worship of the Mother by giving her Angels a specific gender. Got that? Good. Because you have to act that way too—a little like a girl, a little like a boy. Can you do that?”

  I thought about the times I’d been teased in school, especially when stinky Aaron Lewis used to come up to me and ask, “Are you a boy or a girl, Kaer?” At least, until I kicked him in the balls and nearly got expelled. But after that, he stayed away from me. Mom-Wu said he only teased me because he wanted to be my boy friend—I screwed up my face real hard and said, “Yick!” And everybody laughed and that was the end of it, mostly. But the memory of his taunts still hurt.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “I can do that. Screw Aaron Lewis.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “All right.” She gave a last pat with the powder puff. “That should do it. Take a look.”
<
br />   I hardly recognized myself. I looked like I was made out of some kind of glowing material. Silvery metal or something—I raised an eyebrow. The mirror raised its eyebrow back at me.

  “Try looking sad.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Think about Jaxin and the other Scouts, locked up in cages for days, with people throwing garbage and shit them. With nothing to eat but crusts of bread and maybe some stagnant water to drink. And nothing to look forward to but the torture dungeons at Mordren Enclave. And if they survive that, maybe they’ll get turned out naked into the grass. Or burned alive. Or worse—”

  What she said made me feel sick at heart. And humble. And sorry I’d even asked the question. I looked down at my feet, unhappily. Finally, I raised my eyes to hers—

  “Good. That’s a sad face.” She looked at me dead-on. “Whatever you do tonight, you must remember that when the Linneans see you . . . they will believe that you speak for the Mother. Whatever you say or do, they will believe. Do you understand the enormity of what we do here?”

  “Yes, Byrne,” I said quietly.

  “Good. All right, let’s get your hair done.” She nodded to someone over my shoulder, then stepped out of the way as Beck stepped in.

  “Hello, Kaer. You look a lot better than the last time I saw you.” She started teasing my hair into larger and fluffier curls. “Will you forgive me for treating you so roughly? We had a couple of boffili right behind us.”

  “You didn’t tell me that part.”

  She shrugged, frowned at a knot in my hair, tugged at it gently. “I wish I had time to give you a proper ‘do,’ but I don’t, so I won’t, and we’ll fix it in post, along with everything else.” She took a step back, frowned, squinted, cocked her head, looked at me like I wasn’t a person, but just a thing to work on. She puffed out her cheeks while she thought. She came to a decision and stepped in to brush, comb, tease, tweak, and tug some more. “No, I didn’t tell you that part. I thought it would scare you. And sometimes when kids get scared, they freeze. I didn't know how you’d react or what you’d do, so I did what I thought best. Grownups do that, you know. It probably doesn’t seem right or fair or good, but sometimes grownups have to make decisions in a hurry and kids just have to accept it. So, will you forgive me or not?”

  “I ended up covered with scrapes and scratches and welts. They almost didn’t want to let me do this.”

  “I heard. I felt very bad about that. But I had to make that decision in a hurry. I told your da that I thought he’d rather have you alive and scratched than dead and beautiful. Or more likely, dead and squashed. Stepped on by a boffili does that, you know.”

  “Da said the same thing.”

  “Well, there you have it.” Beck exhaled, loudly. “All right. Good, but not good enough. We’ll use the hairpieces.”

  “A wig?”

  “No.” She held up two tiaras. Hanging from both were long curly waves of hair, the same color as mine, curly red-brown-blond, depending on the light. The hair on one was chest-length, the hair on the other was twice as long. “What do you think? Want to go for waist length? Or will that feel uncomfortable?”

  “I like the long,” I said. “Angels have long hair, don't they?”

  “You tell me.”

  “The long. Do you have any longer than that?”

  “I can do knee-length—” She looked at me with a quizzical expression. “I’ve got one I never cut. Do you want to go that long?”

  “I think so, yes. It feels right to me.”

  “All right.” She said. She put the two tiaras aside and grabbed a third one from the rack she’d wheeled over. The hair on that one was looped up and over the rack to keep it from dragging. She lifted it up, shook it out, and turned to me with a calculating eye. She brought the tiara with its streaming curls around to the back, shook it again, then lifted it gently up and over my neck and ears. “I’ll have to pin this down. We can’t risk having it fall off. And I have to hide a couple of earphones under this too. Thank God they didn’t decide on pointed ears?”

  “They wanted pointed ears?”

  “They talked about it.” Her face crinkled into a smile. “But only for about thirty seconds. They dismissed the idea as too silly.”

  “Good. You know what it really needs?”

  “What?”

  “Feathers and beads and ornaments woven into it, all the way down.”

  Beck hesitated. She took a step back and squinted at me, imagining. “Y’know. It would probably look better—more like a real Linnean spirit. I wish I’d thought of it. But we don’t have enough time to do it today. Next time though. Promise.”

  She worked silently for a while, hairpins in her mouth, frowning and narrowing her eyes at every detail. She held her hand over my eyes and sprayed something cold and perfumy around my head. Then she took an ordinary tissue between her fingers and used it to gently stroke the top and sides of my hair. “Loose strands,” she said. “Sticking them down.”

  “There,” she finally announced. “I think that’ll have to do. Anything else, we’ll fix in post, after we see how the model assembles. Don’t worry, I’ll tell Alex. Right.” She patted my arm to let me know she was done, and started to gather up her equipment.

  “Beck?”

  “Yes, Kaer?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Happy to help. I put myself through school doing hair.”

  “No. I mean, thank you for saving my life. In the grass.”

  She wrinkled her nose in a brief smile. “Part of the job, Angel. All part of the job. You’ll do great tonight. Break a leg.”

  “Break a leg—?”

  “It means good luck. It’s an Oerth-expression, don’t use it here.”

  Finally, it was time to go stand on the stage. Da was waiting there, standing behind Alex. Somebody had taken the costume down and all I had to do was step into the center of all those rings. “Take your jumpsuit off, Kaer,” Alex said.

  “Don’t I get a dressing room?”

  “My fault,” said da quickly. “In all the rush, I forgot to tell Kaer about the calibration. He turned to me. “We need you to stand naked on the stage so we can get a body calibration.”

  “Um. Underwear?” I asked.

  “Did you bring any?” da asked.

  “Uh—”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Could we borrow some?”

  “I don’t think anyone else here wears your size.” He scratched his nose while he turned around and looked across the station. “Beck maybe. . . ? Do you want me to ask her?”

  “Never mind,” I said. I started unzipping. “It doesn’t matter that much. The hair covers everything.” And once I’d said it, it was true. I’d taken so many baths in the living room of the burrow we’d dug, with everybody else in varying stages of nakedness, it really didn’t matter anymore. Everybody was naked all the time anyway under their clothes. But just to make sure, I pulled a little more of the long curly hair around from the back to the front. “And besides, we have a job to do, and we don’t have any time to waste.”

  Da blinked, surprised. “Angel, you amaze me every day.”

  I dropped my jumpsuit on the floor and stepped through the wires and up onto the stage. “How do you want me to stand?”

  “Just stand normal?” Alex said. He bent to his keyboards and started typing in instructions. “I’ll repaint your body to match the colors of your face. That’ll help.” I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he kept up a running commentary.

  After a moment, Beck came over and made some comments about my hair, suggesting that he add luminous highlights, as if coming from within. He liked that idea and then he added flickers and sparkles and a little bit of Disney dust coming off the ends. “Too much?” he asked.

  “No such thing as too much in a miracle,” Beck said. “Not this miracle anyway.” She looked across the boulder and called, “Byrne?”

  Byrne came over to study the screens. She listened t
o something on her comm-set, then asked, “Why so much hair?”

  “Kaer said it felt right.”

  Byrne made a face. She disagreed, but she wasn’t going to argue. She looked at the screens again. “Actually, it doesn’t look bad.” She exchanged a couple of words with whoever was on the comm-channel. “We don’t have time to change it anyway.” She turned back to the rest of us. “We’ll go with Kaer’s feeling.” She started to turn away, then looked back to the screens and blinked. She bent in for a closer look, then turned and looked up at the stage where I stood watching. “Didn’t the body stocking fit?”

  “Body stocking?” I asked. We all looked at each other.

  “I hung it on the same hangar with the costume. Oh, good grief—” Byrne turned to Alex. “Where did you put the costume? Oh, never mind. I see it.” She turned back to me with the body-suit. It looked like a leotard with arms and legs.

  “Uh-uh,” I’ve said. “I don’t want to wear that.” I made a face. “I’ve worn those things before. I don’t like them.”

  “You want to do this naked?”

  “Why do angels need clothes?” I asked.

  “Good question. You don’t want the robe?” She held it up.

  “Just the streamer part. Only you have to make the streamers look like flames or radiance or . . . you know. And add sparkles. Like the hair.”

  “Got it.” Byrne looked over to da. “Your kid has good stage sense.”

  “We do plays at home,” I said. “Auncle Irm taught me.”

  “We’ll, then give your auncle my thanks for a job well done. Let me get my makeup kit—” She looked at her watch. “Oh, shit. You’ll have to wear the leotard, Kaer. We don’t have time for full body makeup.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Alex, typing. “I can sample the colors on Kaer’s face and texturize the model to match. Here—look at this.” He made a couple more adjustments and stepped back for Byrne to look over his shoulder.