Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  JINKER

  IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER LUNCH that we got to Halfway Dome, one of only two domes that had great-horses. This one was a lot safer. You could actually go down to the floor. Birdie said that this dome was a “compromised” dome, where Linnean plants and animals could be safely exposed to Earth plants and animals. That’s why we could actually enter.

  There wasn’t any danger of contamination. The Linnean creatures had all been sterilized of microbes and bacteria when they were brought over. This dome served as a halfway station where the Linnean plants and animals could be monitored for compatibility with Earth conditions. Eventually, some of these life-forms might be imported for Earth agriculture. But not for years yet. Not until they’d been fully tested in side-by-side conditions.

  Inside, it was just like being outside—only outside on a different planet. We had to pass through six airlocks and a whole set of long corridors, but finally we came out on a balcony overlooking a giant bowl. From underneath, the dome looked just like sky. We walked down some wooden steps and we were there—on that other world.

  The first thing you notice in the dome is the color of the light. Everything was yellower. It hurt my eyes. I thought that I’d get used to it after a while, and I did, sort of; but everything looked more orange, more red, more brown—not a whole lot, but enough to make everything more dusty-looking. It made my eyes water and I was rubbing them a lot more. Birdie said that was a normal reaction. Linnea’s sun was just a few degrees redder than ours and they had accurately duplicated its spectral output. If we were actually living in the dome, she said, our eyes would adjust within a week or two. But for a while, I was wondering if I really wanted to live under such a yellow sky.

  The rest of the landscape was different, too. There were rolling hills, and a lake, and that was normal; but there were scrubby little trees that didn’t look like trees at all. They didn’t have any real leaves, they were furry instead. And the grass was dry and brownish. It was end of summer here.

  We followed a long dirt path that curved back and forth between some little hills without really getting anywhere. The little hills went all around the outside of the bowl. I guess that helped make it look more real from the center.

  Then finally, we came around a curve and there they were. The great-horses. And I forgot everything else.

  They were taller than trees. Bigger than elephants. They had huge, thick legs, thicker than tree trunks, all covered with shaggy white hair and great flat hooves that made the ground thump when they pawed at it. They were so big most of us stopped, afraid to approach the corral any closer.

  “Come on, Kaer,” Birdie said. “Let’s go say hello.” She nudged me forward. I let myself be pushed. In person, the great-horses didn’t look so glamorous anymore. They looked big. And they smelled. Not a bad smell, but definitely a horsey smell.

  “Are they, um ...?”

  “Friendly?” Birdie finished my question. “Yes. They’re used to people. See that dappled one? That’s Jinker. She’s the mom-boss. You can’t say hello to any of the horses until you make friends with Jinker first. She’s very fussy about that. Here, Kaer—” Birdie reached into a big wooden crate just outside the corral. “Give her this apple. Go ahead, she likes apples. And she won’t bite. Just hold it out on the flat of your hand, like this.”

  I took the apple. It was as big as a pumpkin, only heavier. I held it with both hands reaching over the wooden rail. Jinker raised her huge head and shook it ponderously. She looked directly across the corral at me. And then she snorted, a sound like an old steam locomotive warming up. Then, as if building up steam, she took a single step, then another, and finally three more and she was here.

  She lowered her gigantic head toward me—I leaned back away as far as I could, I was afraid to look—but she never touched me. She just inhaled the apple up off my outstretched hands and it was gone in a single quick crunch.

  “Attagirl,” said Birdie, slapping Jinker’s nose with her hand. Jinker took another step forward and lowered her great head so it was right in front of me. Her eyes were as large as spotlights. Her nostrils were deep caves. The flat of her nose was like a wall. “Go ahead, Kaer. You can’t hurt her.”

  I reached out and touched her. She was warm.

  “Harder than that,” said Birdie. “Otherwise she can’t feel you. You have to slap her. Don’t be afraid.”

  Jinker snuffled impatiently, a sound like an earthquake clearing its throat. So I slapped her—gently.

  “Harder.”

  I slapped again, this time as hard as I dared. Jinker bobbed her head once or twice in approval. She made an mmph noise in her throat.

  “Good, she likes you,” said Birdie. “Of course, she likes everybody who gives her apples.”

  “Can I give her another one?”

  “She’ll eat as many as you give her.”

  “Really?” I was already reaching into the barrel. Jinker watched me closely.

  “Jinker’s very considerate. She won’t hurt your feelings by saying no to an apple.”

  I held out another apple. This time I watched as Jinker curled back her great lips, parted her teeth and vacuumed the apple into oblivion. I didn’t think I would ever get used to the sight. But I reached for another apple.

  “How much food does she have to eat a day?”

  “You couldn’t give her enough apples to keep her alive. She needs a dozen bales of hay per feeding. A half ton a day, just for maintenance. And a dozen barrels of oats on a heavy work day.” Birdie slapped Jinker’s head again. “And of course, all the carrots and apples she wants.” Jinker snorfled in agreement.

  “It sounds like a lot of work.”

  “No, feeding the horse is fun. It’s cleaning up afterward that’s a lot of work. All that hay comes out the other end. We’ve got half a dozen great-horses here. Each one leaves hundreds of kilos of droppings. That’s quite a load. On the open prairie, dung-mice would take care of it. But here, we shovel it into a compost pit. On the world Jinker comes from, it gets plowed into the fields. It’s very good fertilizer.”

  “Oh, ick!”

  “Where do you think fertilizer comes from, Kaer? If it weren’t for the great-horses, a lot of those folks on Linnea might starve to death.”

  I looked at Jinker with new respect. She nudged me with her nose and knocked me flat on my butt.

  “She wants more apples,” Birdie laughed, helping me up. “I think you’ve made a new friend.”

  SCOUTS

  LATER, RINKY EXPLAINED TO ME that the great-horses were a test. Because if we were going to go to Horse World, we would probably have to go with horses and wagons, so they needed to see how everybody in the family felt about the horses. I didn’t believe her, but she said, “If we passed the first test, they’ll take us out riding. Then you’ll see.” Birdie had said we might get a chance to go riding, if the schedule allowed. So maybe she was right.

  Dinner that night was in a big restaurant overlooking the interior of the dome. We could see the horses in their paddock as they pulled at the bales of hay, and I spent the whole meal talking about Jinker until Mom-Trey finally asked me to change the subject or be quiet.

  They didn’t serve normal food here. Everything was from Linnea. They had meat from a big bird, kind of like an ostrich, only scruffier looking. They called it an emmo. And there was boffili stew. The boffili was like a big hairy cow, even bigger than the great-horse. Birdie said there were vast herds of them on the western continent. I didn’t like the boffili, but the emmo wasn’t too bad. It tasted like hamburger.

  After dinner, we met with some scouts—folks who had gone over to Linnea to explore and then come back to help train more families. They told us what it would be like if we went there. There wouldn’t be any electricity, they said. The Linneans hadn’t discovered it yet, so that meant none of us could have it either. And we weren’t going to be allowed to “discover” it for them. So that meant no music or television or computers. And no lights after su
nset except candles and lanterns.

  “But what do you do—?” Aunt Morra asked.

  “Mosty, we go to sleep. And get up at the first light of dawn. You’ll get used to it. It can be a good life.”

  “I mean, what do you do for entertainment?”

  “We make our own,” said one of the mom-scouts. “We play instruments. We read books—usually one person reads aloud while others knit or do other work. We act out plays. We have our children recite their lessons. We do all the things that folks on that world do. Understand this,” she said. “When you’re over there, you have to fit in perfectly. You have to forget you ever lived on another world. We can’t risk cultural contamination.”

  Auncle Irm said, “Morra and I won’t be going, we’ll be staying behind to manage the family affairs here. Will we have any contact at all? We’re used to regular conferences, you know.”

  One of the da-scouts stepped forward then. “While we don’t specifically discourage contact, we do try to limit it—for the protection of the families on the other side. It represents too great a risk. Someone might say or do something that’s so bizarrely out of character for that culture that it would taint the local relationships.”

  He exchanged a glance with the mom-scout, then shrugged and added, “Look, it depends on the circumstances. Last year, the winter was so bad that some families were snowed in for months. We gave them an open line until spring. We fed them lots of their favorite entertainment. We’re not out to punish anyone. But once the snow began to thaw, they had to work extra hard to get back into character. There’s a price to be paid, no question. You’re going to be isolated over there. Not everybody can handle it. Even the folks who think they can handle it sometimes crack and call for emergency pickup.”

  “You mean it’s possible to quit?” Da-Lorrin asked.

  The mom-scout nodded grimly. “If you’re thinking that you can bail out the first time you hit turbulence, don’t go. We don’t want to waste the investment. And besides, we don’t make those kind of pickups easily. There’s too much risk. We have to send a chopper through, and that risks a UFO incident. We’ve already had one too many ‘sightings.’”

  The da-scout was even more direct. “Quitting is a disaster. If we have to pull you out, we have to fake your deaths. Usually by fire. We can’t have you just go missing, and we can’t leave bodies unless we find donors. If we have to go to that kind of effort, there’s a mandatory board of inquiry. And if it’s determined that it wasn’t absolutely necessary, well...I don’t like to say this, because it gives the wrong impression, but we’ve had people fined and imprisoned for putting the project at risk. You don’t want to do it.”

  Lorrin held up his hands in defeat. “Okay, I got your point. I wasn’t looking for a way out. I was just curious.”

  The da-scout had a hard expression. He didn’t look like he laughed very often. Lorrin sat down again and the scouts went on to talk about other stuff, like crops and seasons and how to build houses and furniture and other stuff.

  We wouldn’t be totally cut off, he said. We would have some technology. Only it would all be disguised to look like things that were normal over there—a doll, a music box, a mirror, a book, ordinary-looking stuff like that. If you didn’t know what it was and how to work it, you wouldn’t know it was anything special, even if you broke it open. Everything would be nanotech. Even us. The scout said we’d each be implanted. And whatever tech we might have, it wouldn’t work for anyone who wasn’t implanted. There were all kinds of safeguards.

  It was Mom-Woo who said what everybody was thinking. She usually did, that was why she was Mom-Woo. She said, “If it’s that dangerous, why do you send families over there at all?”

  “That’s a good question,” said the mom-scout. “I’ll be honest with you. We’ve had that discussion ourselves—every time we meet a new family. We ask ourselves, is it a good idea to send these people over? But the truth is we have to send families. We can send singles or couples, but families work best. People trust families. And families can live in a community and observe its workings a lot easier than any other kind of observation team. And—” The mom-scout paused. “There’s another consideration too. Our long-range planning.

  “Eventually, at some point in the future, we hope to establish formal contact, leading to free and open passage through the gate, trade agreements and perhaps even colonization. Colonization was always the plan before the interruption, but now we have to figure out how to deal with the descendants without sending them into massive cultural shock. We don’t want to risk a war or an inquisition. That means were going to need people over there who can act as intermediaries. People who have lived there and who know the culture will be the best representatives of all. So in the long run, we’re training you to be part of the contact team.”

  “Spies,” said Big Jes. “You’re training us to be spies and propagandists. Right?”

  “Well ... yes, you can think of it that way. But we’d rather you think of yourself as guardian spirits. The people on Linnea aren’t our enemies. They’re our children. But we need them to be our partners.”

  WORLDS

  AND I THOUGHT IT WAS just about horses. But we did get to ride Jinker two days later. So I guess we passed the test, whatever it was.

  Just getting on the horse was hard enough. There was a huge wooden A-frame, taller than Jinker, with a giant saddle hanging from it, with baskets on each side. Two of the scouts led Jinker into the A-frame and lowered the saddle onto her back. Then they rolled some stairs on wheels up to her side and we climbed up to ride in the baskets. Jinker could carry four people on a side. The driver climbed up on a rope ladder and sat on a chair just behind her neck. He had a long rod which he used for tapping her neck to guide her.

  At first it was scary, because we were so high off the ground. I thought we were higher than a double-decker bus, but the driver said not quite. But then he said there were some horses bigger than Jinker, so my guess wasn’t all that wrong.

  I sat in front on the left side. Rinky sat behind me. Then Mom-Lu and Lorrin. Aunt Morra and Auncle Irm were on the other side with Parra and Cindy behind them. Bhetto didn’t want to ride. He didn’t like the great-horses that much. Too bad. He missed a good time.

  I was surprised that Jinker wasn’t very fast. The driver said her natural gait was about ten miles per hour. She could hit thirty or forty at a gallop, especially because the gravity on Linnea was lighter than on Earth, but she couldn’t sustain it for long. The great-horses were really too big and too heavy for speed; but they were strong, even stronger than elephants. A single great-horse was as strong as eight Percherons and could pull an enormous wagonload of goods. That’s why the people on Linnea used great-horses where people of equivalent cultures would have already invented the steam engine.

  Our driver was named Dando. He said he was scheduled to go to Linnea in a few months, just ahead of the first big group of settlers, to help select a target site.

  “I thought there were settlers there already—?” Auncle Irm asked.

  “Scouts and their families only. We’re still in second-stage mapping. Third-stage is when we start a real immigration pipeline, and we expect that certification next month. The first group is in the last semester of training. Second group is halfway through. You folks will probably be in the third or fourth set, depending on how well you do in training. Of course, a lot depends on getting the support system in place too.

  “Right now, we’re working on getting the parts of a launch catapult over there so we can put up heavy satellites.”

  “Is that your specialty?” Irm asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Dando said. “It’s tricky work. It turns out we need a lot more engineers and tech-specialists on-site than we thought.”

  “Really—?” said Irm, actually showing interest.

  Dando went on. “We’ve found a number of sites on the equator where we can operate a catapult undetected, including several uninhabited islands. But the prob
lem is getting the people and the equipment there undetected. It means shipping a small town. Do we look for secret harbors and build inflatable ships? Or do we try and move everything by air? We can’t begin serious importation of families without reliable communications in place. Right now, we’re still depending on the spybirds—like the remote probes we showed you.”

  “You need engineers, eh?” Irm said thoughtfully.

  “We need everything. But if you’ve got useful skills in that area, talk to your caseworker.”

  I wasn’t really interested in that part. I wanted to talk about the horses again. “Mr. Dando?”

  “Yes?” He glanced back at me.

  “When you’re over on Horse World—Linnea, I mean—are there any dangerous animals?”

  He nodded. “Some.”

  “Dangerous to great-horses?” I was still thinking of the coyote-lizards from the other dome.

  He hesitated before answering. Finally: “Yes, Kaer, there are things like wolves, only bigger. The Linneans call them kacks. They hunt in packs, and they’ll track a single horse for days if they have to, worrying it to death, not letting it sleep, rushing in to nip at its legs, until it collapses from lack of sleep or lack of blood. It’s not a pretty sight.” Then he added, “The great-horse isn’t defenseless, though. Mosty they keep to the plains, where they can see across great distances. And they travel in small herds, so they can share each other’s protection. If a kack gets too close, a horse will rear up to stamp it flat. Mosty the kacks look for easier game than horses. They’re much more dangerous to smaller animals. Especially people. But they prefer boffili.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have to worry, if you’re careful. The people on Linnea have crossbows. Properly handled, a crossbow can be more efficient than a rifle—and you usually get the bolt back. But if you go over there, kiddo, you’ll probably live in a town, safe behind a very tall fence.” He said that to reassure me, but I had bad dreams about kacks for several weeks after that.