Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  “So what? If neither makes a difference, then it doesn’t matter. Which one is more fun? Having a tantrum or doing the happy dance?”

  I really wanted to answer tantrum, but there was no arguing with Auncle Irm’s sideways logic.

  “So why not do the happy dance with me?” Irm lowered me to the floor, turned me around so we were facing each other. “Happy, happy, joy, joy!” Irm’s great belly shook like pudding. Resentfully, I copied the moves, and despite myself, I started giggling. Shona and Nona and Mikey came running over and started dancing with us. And then Rinky and Klin. And then everybody was happy-dancing, for no reason at all. And then we were all laughing, for no reason at all. And for a moment, I actually understood. There wasn’t anything else we could do; we might as well do this.

  Afterwards, still laughing, still smiling, I collapsed back into Auncle Irm’s ample lap. “Thank you. That was fun. I love you, Auncle Irm.”

  “I love you too, Kaer.”

  And then, after another little bit, I asked, “Why were you so unhappy the other day?”

  Irm chuckled deeply. “For the same reason as you. I forgot to do the happy dance. Thank you for showing me what I look like when I forget.”

  And then, after a longer bit, I asked, “How long do you think Da will be gone?”

  “Not too long, I hope. Maybe a Nineday, maybe longer. It all depends.”

  “I wish we could have gone with.”

  “That might have been—” Irm didn’t finish the sentence.

  “—Dangerous?”

  Irm didn’t answer.

  “I thought you said it wouldn’t be—”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be—”

  “But it is?”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t care. I still wish we could have gone with.”

  “And what would you have done?”

  “The happy dance.”

  Irm laughed. “No. I mean, on the mission.”

  “Whatever I could. That’s the Linnean way. Families stay together. We should have all gone.”

  Irm said, “Kaer, listen to me. Someday, we will separate. Someday half of this family will cross over and half of this family will stay here.”

  “You could come with—”

  “Kaer, listen to me. I’ll tell you why I was upset. It was because I’m old enough to have learned a very sad thing—that life is about saying good-bye to the people you love, over and over and over again. Someday you’ll have to say good-bye to Gamma and Gampa. Someday you’ll have to say good-bye to me and Morra and Bhetto. Someday, you’ll even have to say good-bye to the moms and to Da.”

  “I don’t want to say good-bye.”

  “Nobody ever does. But that’s the way life works. So what do you think we can do about it?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Yes, you do. You’re a very smart child.”

  “While we’re still together ...” Was I guessing? “—we try to make our time together as special as possible?”

  “That’s right,” said Irm. “Absolutely right. We give each other as many good memories as possible so we can live on in each other’s hearts. And that’s why I was upset. Because I haven’t always remembered to do that. And I was feeling bad that Da-Lorrin might have gone away without knowing how much I really love him—”

  “He knows,” I said.

  “I hope so,” said Irm.

  “You’ll tell him yourself when he gets back.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “I hope it’s soon.”

  “Me too.”

  And then we just sat there for a while, rocking and not talking.

  THE RETURN

  TWO DAYS LATER, I GOT MY WISH.

  The snow stopped as abruptly as if Administor Rance had flipped a switch. Maybe she had.

  Then, just as suddenly, the video sprang to life and a scout we didn’t know told us to dig our way to the surface, as fast as we could. She looked grim, and Mom-Woo immediately cried. “Oh, no. Something has happened to Lorrin. Hasn’t it?”

  The scout replied quickly, “Nothing has happened. I assure you. But we need you on the surface. Lorrin will meet you. Please get yourselves ready.” And then she blinked out.

  But this worried Mom-Woo even more. If nothing had happened, why was Lorrin coming back? Mom-Lu and Mom-Trey and Aunt Morra had already started pulling out boffili robes. “We won’t find out anything just standing around worrying. Come on, let’s get bundled up and let’s get upstairs and find out. Come on, all of you—get ready for Lorrin.”

  We climbed up the ladder one after the other, little avalanches of snow tumbling down around each of us. We climbed up out of the ground, up through a tunnel of cold blue snow, and then up into the underside of the great-wagon. It was parked right over the house. Big Jes and Klin had finished the ladder Lorrin had started. It went from the bottom level of our burrow-house all the way up to the underside of the wagon. At least two or three times a day, they went upstairs to check on the wagon and shovel the snowdrifts off the ladder and the top deck and whatever else they thought might need it. At least, that’s what they said, but I figured it was also because they wanted some time to themselves, and the daisy-wagon was a good place for privacy.

  All of us would have lived in the daisy-wagon if we hadn’t finished the house in time, but it would have been a lot colder and a lot more cramped. With the canvas sides rolled up, we could use the wagon as a high wooden observation platform, and on Linnea that would be exactly what we’d do. The wagon would be our summerhouse. In the winter, however, it was just dark and cold and empty.

  We climbed up through the great-wagon, without stopping, up to the second floor, and then from there up to the top deck, where we stamped our feet and shivered. The glare on top was dazzling, and when I stepped out into it, I was momentarily blinded. The sunlight blazed off the snow like a frozen detonation.

  And silence. Except for the sounds of our own breath and the crunch of snow underfoot, the world had gone as still as a tomb. In its own bright way, it was even more oppressive than the underground solitude we’d been suffering. All we could see was white silence in every direction.

  In dry weather, the daisy-wagon would tower over the landscape like a lighthouse almost five stories tall, giving us a long view over the hills—but now the snow was so deep that it completely covered the wheels of the wagon. In some places, it piled up almost all the way to the top deck. It was dry and powdery and if you fell into it, you’d probably fall all the way to the bottom. But Big Jes wouldn’t let Rinky try it.

  Aunt Morra shaded her eyes and squinted off toward Callo City. She worried aloud. “How are they going to get a wagon through all this?”

  Something made me look at her, and then past her shoulder—toward the part of the dome called “the wilderness.” Nobody was allowed to go there without permission, because it included a lot of test areas for new arrivals, plants and animals. It wasn’t officially off-limits, just sort of. That was where most of the boffili and the emmos roamed free, and even the kacks now that the Administration knew the stun-implants worked.

  “Not a wagon,” I shouted. “Look—” I grabbed her arm and turned her around to see. There was a blazing orange light in the sky, flying low enough across the snow to stir up sparkling clouds of it in a swirling wake, and all the time wailing like a chorus of banshees.

  As it came in closer ... we had to blink and wipe our eyes. It wasn’t an aircraft at all. It flew like one, but—it wasn’t like any aircraft we’d ever seen before. It looked like a fiery chariot and it sounded like a sky of demons. And it blazed with color, all red and orange and yellow. The lights glared off of it, and bright beams swiveled and searched in all directions. Whatever it was, the air glittered around it; the snow beneath it glowed with golden reflections. For a moment, I wondered if maybe somehow a eufora had gotten through the gate—

  “What in the name of the Mother’s loving soul—?” That was Big Jes.

  And
then I blinked and saw that it was a chopper after all, but one that had been painted with glow-brite paint and studded with thousands of bright pinpoint Christmas lights, flashing animated patterns. Even the protective rings around the blades had been illuminated to look like a halo. And there were outboard spotlights all over it. It was all flames and dazzle. And they were playing some kind of weird howling music that seemed to come from everywhere at once, until they got closer and they switched it off.

  “Swing low, sweet chariot... comin’ for to carry me home. ...” sang Klin.

  The chopper clattered down, blowing snow in all directions. The snow hadn’t hardened enough to provide a firm support, so the pilot hovered and dropped a huge flotation platform which inflated as it fell. They used those things for ocean landings sometimes; I hadn’t realized it would work on powdery snow as well, but apparently it did. It looked as wide as a field, but it was hard to tell in this all-white world where there weren’t any visual references.

  When the platform had stabilized itself, the chopper settled carefully; but the pilot kept his rotors turning. A door and a ramp popped open and several white-suited figures unrolled an inflatable ramp across the snow to the daisy-wagon. They scrambled clumsily toward us. At first, we didn’t recognize any of them, but then something about the second one in line, the way he moved, Mom-Woo screamed, “Lorrin!” And we all started waving madly.

  Big Jes and Klin dropped a rope ladder down to the inflatable road and Da came scrambling up, followed quickly by Smiller and Molina and two others I didn’t know. Da hugged each of the moms tightly, taking as much time as he could, whispering privately to them; Mom-Lu started shaking her head, Mom-Trey started arguing—but Da was insistent. “If we don’t, someone else will have to. Who do you trust to do it right?” Mom-Woo nodded first, whispering to the others until they finally added their reluctant assent. Meanwhile, one of the two scouts I didn’t recognize kept asking Smiller, “Which one?” until she hushed him firmly.

  “We can’t stay long,” Da finally said to Woo. “We have to get back to the other side.” And then he turned to me, hugging me quickly, pushing back the boffili hood off my head and studying me as if he’d never seen me before. “Yes, even more than I thought.”

  “Even more what—?”

  “Kaer, will you come back to Linnea with us? Will you help us rescue Jaxin?”

  “Huh?” I heard the words, but I didn’t understand the meaning. Not immediately.

  “I can’t explain it quickly or easily. I can’t explain it here, because we need to keep the plan a secret. But we might need you to help with a very important part of the rescue.”

  “To do what?” Everyone crowded close, demanding answers to a thousand simultaneous questions. “Tell us what happened. Where did you go? Did you rescue the scouts? Why do you have to go back?” And all the little-uns were clamoring around us too.

  Da waved them off. He focused on me. “Maybe we won’t need you, Kaer, but we might need you, so we have to take you over with us tonight, just in case. Because if we do need you, we won’t have time to send for you later. If not you—someone else. Another child. We need a child your size, your age, with the right kind of look, for it to work. I said that I thought you could do the job better than anyone else. You don’t have to if you don’t want to; I know that we’ve come back very suddenly, and I won’t blame you if this scares you, but I think you can handle this, and I think we can trust you to do it right. Will you come back with us? Now?”

  I didn’t have to think about it. “Da, I’ll go anywhere for you. You know that—”

  “Yes, but I need to hear you say it, so I know that you know it too. I couldn’t just come and take you.” And with that he turned to the moms. “If we do our job right, we’ll have almost no risk at all to anyone. I can’t tell you the details, but I promise you Kaer and I will come back unharmed.”

  Mom-Woo said it for everybody. “Lorrin, you can’t simply drop in here out of the sky like some crazy hairy maizlish thing and swoop off with Kaer without telling us the plan—”

  “But I have to,” said Da, “because I have to. I can’t explain. We have to go now. If you have ever trusted me, Woo, will you trust me now?”

  Mom-Woo bit her lip. “Of course, I trust you, Lorrin.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and held him tightly, as if she wanted to shake an explanation out of him. “But—oh, the hell with it,” she snapped in English. “I do trust you. And Kaer too. Just tell me that—”

  “Yes, Woo. We have no other way to do this. But I won’t take Kaer if you say no.”

  My mother looked deep into my father’s eyes. “I would never say no to you, Lorr. I know you wouldn’t ask this if you didn’t absolutely need to. I trust you. Take care of our child.”

  Lorrin glanced around to Mom-Lu, Mom-Trey, Big Jes, Klin, Parra, Cindy, Irm, Bhetto, Morra, Rinky and all the others. “Do you all agree?” Nods all around. And Da grinned. “Thank you!” He went from one to the other, hugging quickly and intensely. Irm whispered something into Da’s ear and the two of them looked into each other’s eyes, smiling, and then hugged again.

  Meanwhile the moms surrounded me for hasty good-byes. Hugs and kisses. Everything. Even Aunt Morra and Uncle Bhetto too. And especially Auncle Irm, turning away from Da. Big Jes gave me a punch on the shoulder and Klin snuck a quick kiss—

  Then Smiller was saying to everyone, “... You cannot tell anyone that we came back this morning, or how we came back. Don’t even speculate among yourselves. Remember, you don’t know who listens to your table chatter. Please. You could put us at risk. Lorrin will explain when he gets back. No more than a Nineday. I promise. Lorrin, Kaer? Let’s go now!”

  Inside, the chopper was just as cold as outside, but the seats were heated and more comfortable than anything I’d sat in since we’d come to Linnea Dome. Lorrin moved me to a place by the window and sat down next to me.

  Almost immediately, someone I didn’t know sat down opposite and began unpacking a military field medi-kit.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Shh,” he said. He started sticking little tabs across my forehead. “Open your robe, please.”

  I looked to Lorrin. He nodded. “We don’t have much time, Kaer.”

  I opened my robe. I wasn’t wearing much underneath. I’d stopped wearing underwear a long time ago, but the doctor didn’t even blink. He just pasted a few more tabs across my chest. Then, while the machine calibrated itself and listened to my inner body functions, he looked down my mouth, up my nose and into my ears. If he saw anything, he didn’t even grunt. He glanced at the readouts of his field kit, then started pulling the tabs off my chest and forehead. “All right,” he said. “Surgeon says go.”

  He rummaged around in his kit some more and pulled out a syringe and a vial of pills. He pressed the syringe against my arm and it hissed something through my skin. Then he handed me a pill to swallow. “Take it now, please. You can close your robe.” Without saying anything more, he got up and headed forward to confer quietly with Smiller.

  “Buckle up now,” Da said. As soon as I was buckled in, we jerked roughly up into the air. The chopper reeled in its portable landing pad and we were off.

  The trip was only a few minutes long, and we were heading straight across the wilderness part of the dome. Maybe we’d see some kacks. There was a pink glow racing across the snow beneath us. Everything was so unreal and happening so suddenly, I couldn’t believe it. Lorrin took my hand in his; I guess he’d missed us all, and this was probably just as hard on him as it was on me. But we were up in the air now and I just wanted to look out the window and enjoy finally getting out of the house—except I didn’t get the chance.

  Da put his arm around me and pulled me close. “It pleases me that you said yes, Kaer.”

  I looked to him. “What do I have to do?”

  Instead of answering, he asked, “When you looked across the snow and saw this aircraft, what did you see?”

  “I saw a chopper
—” And then I realized what he was asking. “Oh, I know what you mean. I thought I saw a—a eufora spirit. Even when you got closer and I knew it for a chopper, it still looked like one of the eufora. Whatever the eufora look like,” I amended quickly. “I mean, if I didn’t know what a eufora looked like and I saw this chopper, then I’d say that I’d seen one.”

  Lorrin smiled. “Then it works. We had some uncertainty about that. So we tested it on you. What did everyone else see? Did the rest of the family see a spirit too?”

  “I think so.” I repeated what Big Jes and Little Klin had said. “You made quite an impression.”

  “Good. We want to do that. But you should see the vehicle at night,” he added. “It has an even more astonishing appearance, because you can’t see the machinery, only the light.”

  “But why? What do you need it for?”

  He put his arm around me and hugged me close. “I hate to say this, but we might need to put the fear of God into the Linneans.”

  CROSSOVER

  ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE WILDERNESS, 180 degrees away from Callo City, there’s another installation in the dome. Much bigger, and with almost no attention to Linnean detail. This is the real Administration of the dome. And the gateway. Most of the trainees in the dome don’t know where the gateway really is, and the Administration likes to keep it that way. All things considered, that was probably a wise decision.

  The Administration buildings were on higher ground, and while they had the same high foundations and steep roofs and covered arcades of Callo City, they were almost totally free of snow. After what we’d been living through, I had to blink in surprise. The buildings were clearly Earth buildings, made of shiny polycrete and glass, and although they were shaped against the weather like Linnean structures, here in the dome their appearance seemed otherworldly. I guess I was thinking more like a Linnean than I’d realized.

  As soon as we landed, a team of mechanics rushed the aircraft. Even before the door was popped, they were doing things underneath—servicing it, I guess; I heard clanking and banging. From my window, I saw a truck filled with supply containers pulling up behind. But before I could see anything else, Da said, “Come on, Kaer. We don’t have time for that.” We hurried down the ramp after Smiller and the doctor and rushed for the transit building. I managed one quick glance backward. Behind us, the mechanics had finished securing the chopper; they were rolling it up onto a truck platform.