Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  When we got back home, the parents had lots of grown-up talks about Linnea and the other worlds. We kids hadn’t seen much of the other worlds. Apparently, the gate people thought we were best suited for Linnea, and the parents seemed to agree. The Linnean Scout Authority was ready to start training families now, and the other two worlds that New Mexico station was developing wouldn’t be ready for years, and they were nowhere near as habitable.

  Black-World was dry and hard. It looked a lot like Mars, only darker. There wasn’t much life there either. So if anyone went over there at all, they’d have to start almost completely from scratch. The problem was that because there wasn’t much life—just some lichens and little bugs—and there wasn’t much breathable air either. There was atmosphere, but it was mosty carbon dioxide; not enough oxygen in it to live on. So you’d have to wear a respirator every time you went outside. Nobody in the family liked that. Black-World really was mosty an industrial place; there would be mines, and dirty factories, and maybe some observatories and science stations; but not a real colony.

  And Blue-World was mosty water with a few scattered islands here and there. Some of the islands had life. The biggest island was in the north and it actually had real animal life, things that looked like big shaggy apes. They were cunning like baboons and just as vicious; not sentient, but enough of a hazard that the island was off-limits. Klin laughed and said it wouldn’t be a problem because Jes could pass for one of those apes and Big Jes laughed too and offered to put Klin through a wall.

  Anyway, it didn’t need much discussion. Linnea was really the only world that the family would consider, and it looked like it was the only world we were eligible for in any case. If we’d wanted, we could have made application for one of the gates in Canada or Australia, but our chances of approval there weren’t as good, and most of those worlds looked just as hard as Black-World. So that pretty much settled that. It was Linnea or nothing. The family talked about it for a long time at the airport while we waited for everybody to catch their different planes. Irm and Bhetto and Morra went off to talk by themselves, and Lorrin’s face got all funny when they did.

  I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did because Mom-Trey was wiping spilled chocolate soda off the baby’s shirt and I was helping. Mom-Trey said to Da, “Let them be, Lorr.”

  He shook his head. “You know what we’re up against. They won’t take a split family. If those three won’t go—”

  “They don’t want a divorce,” said Mom-Lu. “Morra and I talked about it last night.” I fussed with the baby; I started searching through the diaper bag, pretending to look for something important, hoping I would find something before they noticed me. I had my headphones on, so they must have thought I was listening to music; but the player was off, so I could hear everything they said. “Morra and Irm and Bhetto, all three know that if they keep the rest of us from going to Linnea, they might as well move out altogether. The family will never recover.”

  She lowered her voice, but I could still hear. “They’re talking about splitting off into a separate partnership; they’ll manage the family’s affairs while we’re in training and after we go to Linnea. It might work.” She touched Da-Lorrin’s arm. “They’ll go through the training with us—as our support system—but they won’t cross over with us. Morra thinks Irm and Bhetto will go along with it. But the rest of us have to give them time to see the logic of it. You know how Bhetto gets.”

  Da half-cocked his head as if weighing the idea on his tongue to see how it tasted. “There are a lot of details to talk over, but ... it might work. Whose idea was it?”

  “Morra thinks it’s hers,” said Mom-Lu in that harder voice of hers. She turned around and saw me, as if for the first time. She took the diaper bag away and pushed me toward the other children. “Go on now, Kaer. Thank you.”

  I pretended to turn off my music and looked blankly at her. “What?”

  She wasn’t fooled. “Don’t tell anyone what you overheard. That’s not for casual talk, you understand?”

  I flushed and nodded, then hurried off to stand by the departure gate with Big Jes. At least she trusted me a little bit.

  The grown-ups must have worked out everything by themselves, because I didn’t hear any more about it. We went home and nothing happened for what felt like longest time, although it was only two or three months; but it was long enough. The memory of the horses faded and I began to think that we hadn’t been accepted and we weren’t going to Linnea after all.

  Later on I found out that the family was taking care of all kinds of business, making arrangements about money and property and inheritance—all the stuff that had to be done if you were leaving a world behind. My tenth birthday came and went before we got the word that we were approved and we were going back to New Mexico to live in a training dome.

  LINNEA DOME

  LINNEA DOME II HAD ONLY BEEN open for three years; it was the newest and biggest world-dome ever built, even bigger than the dino-dome. It was over twenty kilometers in diameter and the sky was 800 meters up. It was thirty klicks away from the other domes and had been built right next to the gate.

  The dome was built like a bunch of suspension bridges in a circle. Tall towers surrounded it; heavy cables were strung between opposing towers to support the weight of the dome’s vast roof. It was the largest enclosed space on Earth. There were 320 square kilometers of usable terrain inside. Almost all of its services were located in the towers or underground. Next to the dome there was a rounded building with transport tunnels leading in and out of it. Supplies for the dome and for the world-gate came in through underground trains.

  There was no way anyone could just drive up to the dome or get into the tunnels. Access was heavily restricted. And even if you could get past the guards, the dome was separated from the land around it by a wide moat. And even if you could get across the moat, there were no doors, only high concrete walls around the base. They looked thick too. There were helicopter decks on two of the towers, but those were for emergency traffic only.

  We didn’t go direct to the dome; we landed at Overlook Station instead. The station was built into the neighboring cliffside and it had a great view of the entire station; only we weren’t given any time to enjoy it when we arrived. First, we all had to sign consent forms and insurance waivers and training agreements.

  There were twenty-five of us—us and the Kellys—counting the little-uns, so everything took awhile, and it was boring. After the paperwork was finished, we were each given an implant to swallow; then we had to wait for calibration and confirmation, and that was even more boring.

  After dinner, there was an orientation session, and then we were assigned to quarters that looked like hospital rooms. That was because we had to spend three days getting “transplanted.” We had to have our Earth-bacteria “terminated” and the necessary ones replaced with Linnean counterparts. That was why the rooms were like a hospital—so the doctors could watch us for allergic reactions. By now they’d pretty well gotten the hang of “bio-transplanting,” so the worst we had to deal with was upset stomachs and diarrhea and a little baby vomit. Just the same, it wasn’t much fun.

  But finally we traded our Earth clothes for Linnean costumes and took the cablecar down to the dome. Mom-Trey thought the clothes looked silly; Nona and Shona complained that they were itchy. One of the briefing videos said that the Linneans made silk from grass fibers, but when Klin and Rinky asked the trainers about it, they said that if we wanted silk underpants, we’d have to gather the grass, thread it, weave the cloth and sew the garments ourselves. Klin got that look on his face and I expected him to start harvesting grass before bedtime. Rinky put dibsies on the first pair.

  Outside the dome, there was a receiving station. This was one of only three access points. Everything else was self-contained. This station was the largest; it included an external monitoring facility for scouts, administors and other support personnel. The cable car slid into the docking station and connected t
o an airlock. There was a soft whoosh as the air pressure equalized, and then we exited into a receiving chamber where we had to pass through another set of decontamination locks. They sprayed us again and scanned us to see if all of our pills and implants were working. Then, finally, we were escorted into a long circular tunnel, big enough to drive six lanes of heavy traffic through.

  An Earth-Guide took us halfway through the tunnel, where we were met by a Linnea-Guide. She was dressed as a scout and spoke only in Linnean. We hadn’t learned very much of the language yet, just the most basic words, like “come,” and “stop,” and she wouldn’t answer any questions spoken in English, so we followed mosty in silence, only occasionally whispering among ourselves.

  The far end of the tunnel opened into a receiving station, where several more guides looked us over. They took away Da-Kelly’s pocket watch and some of the beads and jewelry that the children were wearing—and even Nona’s teddy bear, which she carried everywhere. Da-Lorrin tried to argue, “Oh, for God’s sake—it’s only a teddy bear,” but the scouts were adamant. Mom-Trey held Nona close and comforted her anguished sobs, but the rest of us put on our nasty-faces.

  Finally, we entered Linnea.

  As far as we were concerned, this was the real Linnea, not a simulation.

  We walked outside into the yellow air and the first thing we noted was the dust and the stink. Everybody wrinkled their noses. The whole world smelled of shit and sweat. It wasn’t pretty. My eyes started watering immediately. And Shona asked, “Mommy, what smells so bad?” Da grumpled, but said nothing. Big Jes and Little Klin exchanged a glance. “Linneans don’t know much about sewage, do they?” One of the scouts heard that and gave them a disapproving glare.

  We walked down the main avenue, gawking like Chinese tourists at Disneyland. It was hard to believe this was all real. It looked like false fronts, but the couple of buildings we peeked into were real all the way through to the outhouses in the back. That explained part of the smell.

  The first night, we stayed at the Boffili Hotel, down at the far end of town; at least it was away from the stink. Mom-Woo had sort of been expecting it to be the kind of hotel with nice rooms and hot baths, but it wasn’t. It was just a bunch of tents built against the outer walls of Callo City, which was kind of like an old-fashioned fort; all the walls were made out of sandbags. There was no electricity, so there were no lights or televisions or computers, and if you wanted hot water you had to boil it yourself. The bathtubs were brick washtubs and you had to fetch the water from a pump outside.

  Lorrin and Big Jes both laughed at the moms’ annoyance. Klin said it was a test. If we couldn’t handle this, we certainly couldn’t handle living on Linnea, and that pretty much ended that discussion. In short order, Klin organized all the kids into a bucket brigade to bring in water for the tub and start it boiling. Big Jes and Klin brought in firewood. Mom-Lu arranged a bath schedule, almost like home, and lined us up like a car wash. We went from station to station, and all of us kids were soaped, scrubbed, rinsed, toweled and tucked into bed in less than an hour. The beds were sort of soft and sort of lumpy. They were stuffed with feathers and a couple times I got stuck with the sharp end of a feather poking through the sheet. But I slept mosty okay.

  The next morning, the sun came up earlier than it should have been legally allowed to and turned the whole world orange. That ugly light again. Almost all of us shielded our eyes against it when we marched across to the community hall for breakfast. It had sandbag walls, but a canvas roof. One whole end of it was an old-fashioned kitchen, with the canvas rolled back to let the smoke out, and cooks making real eggs and bacon! And fresh bread that they took out of the oven and sliced while I watched! And butter that came from a real boffili cow! I was afraid to eat food that hadn’t been safely processed, but Mom-Woo said this was the only kind of food we could expect to find on Linnea. It smelled different, but not completely awful.

  Most of the grown-ups said they liked it, but Klin and Rinky made faces as they tasted everything. I decided I sort of liked the food, even if it was weird. They told us we could eat as much as we wanted, so I went back for seconds and thirds—until I had tasted everything. Real sausage and real jelly and real syrup on real pancakes, so that sort of made up for the lumpy beds.

  After that, we were supposed to go on a walking tour of Callo City with Birdie, but everybody had to wait until Nona and I threw up. Klin started to laugh at us, but he stopped when his stomach started to hurt. That was because Big Jes’ elbow bumped into it a little.

  The real Callo City on Linnea was a lot bigger than this, but there was only room in the training dome for a partial reconstruction. Most of the important places were recreated here, because we would need to be familiar with them. The Boffili Hotel was built along the northwest wall, which was called Immigrant’s Corner. Southeast of that was Merchant’s Circle. Long Avenue stretched diagonally between them, and most of the hotels and businesses along it were nearly-exact duplicates of their counterparts on Linnea. Any Linnean passing through Callo City would have traveled up “Immigration Alley.” When we crossed over, we would have the same experience as the real Linneans.

  The city was up on a hill because during winter, the snow sometimes got piled as high as ten meters. And during the spring thaw, the flood waters could be as tall as a great-horse. So settlements had to be on high ground. But also, the high vantage gave the people who lived there a good lookout for range fires, boffili stampedes, kacks, bandits, tornados, hurricane storms and other dangers.

  All the buildings in Callo City were built on high foundations, and they had steep roofs slanting down into deep trenches. This was so that snow couldn’t pile up too deep, and when it slid down, it wouldn’t block the streets. Later, when it melted, it would fill the water tanks and canals under the buildings, or it would run off down the slope into the lake. Most of the buildings had covered arcades along their sides, again with steep slanted roofs. Lorrin explained that this was so that when the winter snows came, the people would still have clear walkways.

  They hadn’t simulated winter in Linnea Dome yet, because the dome was still too new, but they were talking about having one in the next year or so, certainly before we crossed over. And it wasn’t just to test us. The Linnean ecology depended on regular freezing and flooding, so they had to schedule floods or the forests would suffer, and the animals that lived in them too.

  There were already lots of boffili and bunny-deer and kacks living in Linnea Dome, except the kacks weren’t running free yet. For now, the kacks were living in a long canyon with rocky walls too steep for them to climb. Birdie said there was a plan that someday the kacks would roam free in the northern ranges of the dome, so they could feed on the herds of bunny-deer when they started to get too big. Da asked if that might not be a problem for humans, but Birdie said that all the kacks were implanted; if they got too close to a great-horse or a human, they would be automatically stunned. The techs were sure that this would work, but nobody was in any great rush to test it yet. Linnea Dome was still too new. And the kacks were awfully big.

  All of the people and all of the great-horses in Linnea Dome were also implanted, so everybody’s health and location could be monitored constantly. Even though the dome was supposed to be a perfect duplicate of Linnea for training colonists, it was also a laboratory for studying how this part of that world worked, so they were always tinkering and measuring and monitoring.

  There were spybirds overhead all the time; we couldn’t see them, but we’d been told; and I was pretty sure there were wabbits in the underbrush as well, though we never really saw them either. Sometimes we’d see dogthings chasing wildly through the grass, but we never saw what they were hounding after. There were probably cameras in the rocks and trees as well. Lorrin told us that we should assume that everything we said and did was recorded, that the intelligence engines were always watching and listening, so this would be a good place for us to start practicing keeping secrets, so we’d be i
n the habit when we got to Linnea.

  Over two thousand species of plant, animal and insect had been transplanted from Linnea and it looked like the ecology had been perfectly duplicated, but Birdie said there were probably at least ten thousand more species that they’d missed; no place is ever as simple as it looks. I couldn’t figure out what other kinds of plants and animals there might be—maybe Birdie was talking about bugs and beetles and birds and different kinds of ground-rats and burrowing things. Critters you wouldn’t see normally.

  Mosty we were surrounded by rolling waves of razor grass. The grass was taller than a man, and on a windy day, you could see it rippling like green fire. Later in the year, it would turn brown and brittle. Here and there, the grass was spotted with those funny-looking short furry trees, and wherever there was a pond or a lake, there were also a couple of sleeping willows. Out on the prairie, travelers who needed to water their horses always looked for willows as evidence of water.

  On the second day, we all piled onto a huge wagon pulled by two great-horses for a ride across the prairie to give us a sense of what we’d find across most of the continent. Once we were out of sight of Callo City, it was pretty spooky. There weren’t any landmarks. And most trails were overgrown by razor grass in a matter of days. So cities had to put up markers for hundreds of klicks in every direction, pointing travelers the right way. We passed one of them, and an outpost tower too, with semaphore flags; but mosty, once we got away from Callo City, we were on our own. We didn’t see any sign of people.

  We headed toward the “mountains” first, so we could see what the limits of the world were. From a distance, the mountains looked white, but when we got closer, we saw the hillsides flashing with albino aspen, flickering like the noise on an old television screen. Here and there, up and down the slopes, were scattered groves of gnarly oaks, all twisted together so badly they were mosty one big wooden knot. Birdie said that some of the older cities had walls of gnarly oaks all around them, that’s how hard it was to get through an old grove—unless you were a monkli and went up into the canopy. From the crest of one of the hills, we saw a herd of boffili. Later we saw some emmos and bunny-deer.