Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  As soon as we were inside the building, we were rushed to the decontamination section. We pushed through three revolving door airlocks into a steaming room where we were surrounded by technicians in isolation suits. We had to strip off all of our clothes—in my case only my robe and my boots. Da said to me, “Kaer, why don’t you wear underwear?”

  “It itches,” I said.

  He laughed and said, “Good reason.”

  The technicians in isolation suits put our clothes into large wire baskets to send them through the irradiation tunnel. We had to decontaminate the hard way. As we all stood around naked, me wondering what to do next, Da handed me a plastic bag with a label that said “Internal Decontamination Kit.” Inside was a toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash and a plastic squeeze bottle filled a green foamy liquid; it had a long, slender nozzle on top.

  “Brush your teeth for five minutes, top and bottom, front and back, then swirl with the mouthwash for two minutes.”

  I nodded. “I know how to brush my teeth.”

  “No, Kaer—brush your teeth as if Mom-Woo will inspect.”

  I got his meaning. “Yes, Da.” I took the plastic bottle out of the bag and sniffed it. “What does this hold? Something else to drink—?” I started to take the top off.

  Laughing, Da stopped me. “No, Kaer. The other end.”

  “Huh?”

  He explained. “Everybody has to have an antibiotic enema. Everybody.”

  I looked at the bottle. I looked back to Da. “You mean I have to stick this up my—?”

  He nodded. “And squirt.” He pointed me toward a booth with a toilet in it. “Three times, Kaer.”

  An enema doesn’t really hurt—well, not too much—but it’s embarrassing and unpleasant, and it’s probably the worst part of crossing over to the other side. Even though the purpose of it was to clean out my insides so I wouldn’t accidentally carry any weird bacteria over to Linnea, I didn’t feel all that clean afterwards. Mosty, I felt squooshy.

  Then, all of us were ushered into the foam-and-scrub room, where great sheets of peppermint-smelling foam dripped from the ceiling, covering us like whipped cream. We looked like snowmen. It would have been funny, if we weren’t in such a hurry. Da handed me a pumice scrubbing stone and told me to sandpaper the foam into my skin everywhere I could reach, as hard as I could.

  The places we couldn’t reach, we had to sandpaper each other. And it hurt. We had to scrub the foam into our hair, our skin, everywhere. Inside, under, around, between—all those places that polite people pretend they don’t have.

  “This stuff stings—!” I said.

  “The germs bite when they die,” said Da. Actually, he didn’t say “germs.” The Linneans have no word for germ, so he used “maiz-likka” instead. But I knew that he meant germs. He added, “It helps if you cry out, ‘Die, maizlish, die!’” He handed me his pumice stone and turned his back. “Scrub my back, Kaer.”

  After we finished in the foam-and-scrub room, we entered the hosedown chamber, where jets of disinfectant of a different kind shot out at us from the walls, the ceiling, even from the floor. The last of the foam washed away quickly, while we turned around and around in the needle sprays. I kept my eyes closed tightly, just in case it stung. It didn’t, but just in case.

  “Hold your arms out, Kaer,” Da said.

  After the disinfectant, which took five long minutes, we were sprayed down with warm water. Then the water jets went off and heat lamps switched on, and we were hit with blasts of hot air. In less than a minute, we were completely dry. I felt tingly all over.

  In the next room, we had to line up and go through what Da laughingly called “the security check” because it looked like the row of scanners you have to pass through at the airport. Only these were fullspectrum body-scanners, with much greater resolution. There were a bunch of technicians behind a glass wall, apparently studying display panels and readouts and monitors. I don’t know what they were looking for, but they didn’t find anything in any of us. Or at least they didn’t say if they did. One of them gave us a thumbs-up signal, and Smiller called out, “Surgeon says go.”

  I didn’t mind being naked in front of all the scouts, or even Da. Everybody had to get naked. And it was interesting to see what some of them looked like without any clothes. But I was just as glad to get dressed again because I didn’t like being naked in front of all the technicians and the helpers in isolation suits. They looked like space-aliens or eufora or even maiz-likka, and it made me feel like a specimen.

  Once through security, they let us get dressed again. In the next room, there were baggy brown jumpsuits for all of us, with camouflage patterns all over them. They even had one my size. The material was rugged, but so soft and comfortable in comparison to Linnean clothes it felt like pure luxury. The jumpsuit looked and felt sort of like an exercise suit; it had baggy pockets too, already stuffed with ration packs and other things I’d have to investigate later. There wasn’t time now. And fresh underwear too—real underwear—the Earth kind! Da said that we’d get our Linnean clothes back after we crossed over. I told him the jumpsuit pleased me just fine.

  There were clean hair brushes and combs for us to use, but we didn’t get much time to use them. “Bring the combs and brushes, Kaer,” Da said, scooping up two or three. “You’ll do your hair on the other side. Come on, let’s go.” He pushed me in the direction of Smiller and the others, a little harder than he intended to, because he added, “I apologize for hurrying you, sweetheart. Remember, we do this for Jaxin and the others.”

  “I know, Da. I have no complaints. Whatever I can do to help, just say so.”

  “Thank you, Kaer. That means a lot to hear you say that.”

  We went through a couple more revolving door airlocks and finally came out into a huge tube, at least fifteen meters high, with rings of glowing light outlining every section. There were huge pressure doors at each end, and a conveyor bridge wide enough for two trucks to pass was suspended through the length of the tube, with guard rails at the sides, so nothing could touch the walls. There were industrial noises all around us. Underneath us, on the bottom level of the conveyor bridge, I could feel the vibrations of things rushing back past us. This was the transit tunnel. I felt a sudden rush of feelings, all mixed up—anticipation, fear, wonder, panic, dread, excitement.

  Da started to say something, but I cut him off. I said, “I know. I recognize it from the pictures.”

  We walked down the center of the bridge toward the far pressure door. I assumed that was the entrance to the actual gate chamber. But when we got there, it didn’t open for us. Instead, we stepped off the bridge and out through a side-chamber.

  I hesitated. “Why do we have to stop here?” I asked. “When do we cross over?”

  “We just did,” said Da.

  I looked back the length of the transit tunnel. “We just went through the gate—?”

  Da laughed. “Yes, Kaer. We just went through the gate.”

  “But I didn’t feel anything! Not even a shift in gravity!”

  That made him laugh even more. He ruffled my hair. “Come on, my little eufora. We still have a long way to go.”

  “Yes, Da!”

  FROM DAVID GERROLD’S

  UPCOMING SEQUEL,

  CHILD OF GRASS

  AIRBORNE

  WE WERE STILL INSIDE. The corridors on this side of the gate looked just like the corridors on the other side. I shook my head as I followed Da-Lorrin through some more revolving door airlocks. “What a disappointment. I always thought the gate would look like a big window, that we would see the Linnean landscape on the other side, and just step through into it.”

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “Oh yeah. You did. Boy, do I feel stupid.” And then I thought of something. “But why didn’t I feel the gravity change?”

  “Earth has four-and-a-half-percent higher gravity than this planet. You won’t feel that small a difference. And the ramp has an arch to it. You’ll feel m
ore effect walking slightly up and slightly down.”

  I thought about what he said. We were still hurrying. We came out into a brightly lit hangar with humongous pressure doors sealing it. The whole place smelled of industrial cleanser.

  The heavenly-chariot chopper was here too, still on the same truck bed. Several mechanics were just rolling it down toward the hangar doors. Smiller and the doctor and the other scouts were gathered there, waiting in an impatient group. The pilot and copilot were conferring over a clipboard, probably their flight plan or checklist. For the first time, I had a moment to catch my breath.

  And then something else occurred to me. Da had said this planet. He hadn’t said Linnea. And Earth had nine-percent higher gravity than Linnea!

  “Da?”

  “Yes?”

  “This planet—?” I asked him. “It has a name?”

  “I wondered how long it would take you to figure it out.” He grinned. “I told them you would. Can you keep a secret?”

  “Da ...?” I gave him the look. It was actually Mom-Woo’s look, but I’d been practicing it.

  “They didn’t build the gate to Linnea on Earth. They couldn’t. The physics won’t allow it. So they opened a gate to an intermediate world, and from there, they opened a gate to Linnea.”

  “So why didn’t we just come out of one gate and into the next?”

  “Because of the physics, little pumpkin. We have to fly ten thousand kilometers south to get to it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Earth rotates. That means that an object at the equator will have more speed than an object at a higher latitude. So you can only open a gate to a latitude where the speed is the same. Because the planets all have different sizes and different rotational speeds, you have to build the gates to compensate. You open the gate on the slower world close to the equator and the gate on the faster world as far north or south as you have to go to match rotational velocity. You can’t every match everything perfectly, of course—you always get some leakage—so you build a margin for leakage into the system. The extra energy is channeled back to power the gate engines; so that makes the gates self-sustaining. You only need to power up the gate once—to open it. But if you can’t find a match for the two worlds’ rotational speeds, you can’t open a gate. If you tried, you’d get too much energy blasting back through the system, and the gate would rip itself apart instantly. That happened once. And after that, they decided to build gates across as many intermediate worlds as necessary, so that they would only have to work with controllable power surges. Even so, if a gate blew up, it would make a hole the size of that big meteor crater in Arizona.”

  He stopped then, because it was time to go. Da gave me a gentle nudge, and we followed the others up the ramp and into the chopper. We took the same seats as before. The engines began stropping almost immediately. This pilot was impatient to get going. Smiller sealed the doors and took her seat quickly.

  Da reached into the pocket of his baggy jumpsuit and pulled out something in a cloth bag, a pair of dark plastic goggles. “Put yours on too, Kaer.” I felt around in the pocket he indicated and found my own goggles. I had to adjust the strap to get them to fit. “Why do we need these?” I asked.

  He nodded at the window. “You’ll see, as soon as they open the hangar doors.”

  I looked out. The last of the mechanics was waving at the pilot, giving him a thumbs-up signal. Then he turned and ran to a pressure door in the wall behind the chopper, pulling it shut after him. I could see the wheel on this side turning as he sealed it. So they were sealing off the gate?

  I craned my head forward. The big doors at the front of the hangar were sliding open now. Despite their huge size, they moved apart quickly, revealing a widening bar of light so bright I couldn’t look at it. Outside the doors, the world was blazing shards of blue and white—a color called actinic. It hurt my eyes to look at it. The wider the doors slid open, the more it hurt. Finally, I popped the goggles on. That helped some, but it was still hard to see. Crimson after-images floated in the air in front of me.

  “This planet circles a blue-white star,” said Lorrin. As if that explained everything.

  “I thought they only opened gates to Earthlike worlds.” I wiped my watering eyes on my sleeve.

  “The intermediate worlds don’t have to be quite as Earthlike as the destinations,” Da said. “Sometimes, you have to take what you can get.”

  The chopper was already rolling forward into the brightness. Some of the other passengers pulled dark filters down over their windows to block the horrific wash of brightness coming through. Lorrin pulled down a shade over our window and that helped a lot. When all the windows were filtered, people began pulling off their goggles. So did I. The cabin was warmer than before. I didn’t feel quite so shivery anymore.

  “They’ve pressurized the plane,” said Da. “We can’t breathe the air on this world; it doesn’t have any life yet—maybe someday it will—but right now the atmosphere has the wrong mix of gases. Almost no free oxygen.”

  “Will they terraform it?”

  “Yes, they say they want to. If they ever find enough kinds of plants that can survive a forty-hour day of acid-light, they probably will. But who would want to live here under that sun? Right now, except for the transit stations, we only have miners here—mosty mining the gases in the atmosphere. Every time that hangar door gets opened, they lose a roomful of air. So they have to import more air from Earth; but they pay for it by exporting different gases back.”

  The chopper bumped up into the air then, and I looked out the window to see the transit station dropping away. It was surrounded by jagged black rock. Through the filter, it was hard to see all the details; but as we rose, I saw other buildings too. Soon, it became apparent that the transit station was the smallest installation here. Beyond it, there were shimmering industrial structures, gantries and towers and tanks, all standing naked and harsh in the cold blue light, and a lot of other stuff I didn’t recognize. It surprised me that there was no snow on the ground, but after I thought about it, why should there be? It isn’t winter everywhere at the same time.

  Da said, “All the buildings, everything you see—the people who built it had to wear airtight construction suits. A little bit like scuba gear. They could only work two hours at a time.”

  As we lifted, I saw three huge tractors carving away at a nearby hillside. I pointed them out to Da.

  He nodded. “They’ve found so many different metals here—copper, iron, nickel, rare earths, gold, platinum, silver, all kinds of things we need for industry—that they have to build more facilities to process the ore. Eventually, they’ll ship only pure ingots back to Earth.”

  “They must make a lot of money.”

  “Not yet, but they will. First they have to earn back the cost of opening the gate. That will take thirty or forty years. At least.”

  Once we were up and away from the gate, the ground was pretty bleak, all black and white with sharp blue edges. Not much in the way of scenery. Mosty rocks and more rocks—and a lot more rocks beyond them. The pilot swiveled the jets rearward, and a sudden surge of heavy acceleration pressed me back into my seat. Da patted my hand and said we’d be traveling over fifteen hundred klicks per hour. We had a long way to go.

  Another thought occurred to me then. “If this atmosphere has no oxygen, why do the jets work?”

  “The atmosphere has methane. We carry liquid oxygen. We still get combustion. We’ll switch the mixture back when we get to Linnea.”

  “Oh.” I pressed my nose to the window again. Knife-edge escarpments cut upward from the ground. Jagged, un-eroded hills looked like broken blocks of concrete. Where there were plains, the ground was barren and strewn with boulders the size of houses. Some places it was cut with gullies so bad it looked like a wrinkled bedsheet. It all swept past beneath us, each dreadful landscape giving way quickly to the next in a sliding mural of black and blue desolation. At least it wasn’t winter here. But it was still ugly
, and I said so.

  Da nodded. “It takes life to make a planet beautiful. At least, I think so.” He patted my arm. “I think you’ll find Linnea beautiful. Wait until you see the dandelion trees. They tower into the sky in great forests, and from a distance, they turn the whole landscape silvery.”

  “How long will it take? How far do we have to go?”

  “Five hours. We have to go all the way south to the equator. And up a mountain. It might get a little bumpy. As soon as we land, they’ll put the chopper through the gate to Linnea. We’ll service and refuel on the other side. That shouldn’t take too long. And then we have another long flight ahead of us to get to North Mountain One. We’ll meet the rest of the team there and all head east together.”

  As if on cue, Smiller joined us then, bringing us mugs of hot tea. She sat down opposite me, putting her own mug in the holder in the arm of her seat. For a moment, she didn’t say anything at all; she just studied me carefully, tilting her head and squinting. “Did Lorrin tell you anything yet?”

  “I was waiting for you to explain,” said Da.

  Smiller grunted an acknowledgment. “Probably the best thing. I can understand your reticence.” Then she turned back to me. “Then you must have a lot of questions, Kaer?”

  “Only one.”

  Smiller waited for me to ask it.

  I said, “I’ve already figured out that you want me to play the part of an angel. But after everything you and everyone else have said about not wanting to contaminate the Linnean culture ... why do you want to do this?”

  Lorrin laughed and said to Smiller, “I told you Kaer would ask.”