Child of Earth (18 page)

But talking didn't accomplish anything, and there didn't seem to be much to say anymore. The family quietly decided to give the Kellys a wide berth. For a couple reasons. Mosty because they still wanted us to come over to their place for private Sunday prayer meetings and we felt that was a bad idea—because it meant not thinking like Linneans—but also because we didn't expect them to last much longer in the program anyway. Although we did spend a while speculating on how they'd gotten approved in the first place. Irm said they must have bribed a congressman to get in; Da-Lorrin growled at that. We'd had to do it the hard way. But it didn't matter how many congressmen you bought, Big Jes said, you still couldn't buy your way over to Linnea if the Dome Authority didn't trust you.

But after that evening with Smiller, it seemed like the Kelly family settled down anyway. We didn't hear any more about Bibles or chocolate from them, so maybe they had gotten the message, but even if not, I was through being Patta Kelly's friend. She'd already gotten me in trouble
once. I wasn't going to get my family in trouble a second time. I had a hunch we'd used up all our second chances. All of us.

But it didn't make too much difference anyway because we were too busy building our house. We had promised ourselves that we would make good on our work points as fast as possible, so we just went back to work. After a couple of long, hard days, we fell back into our old routines. Almost.

Only now, everything felt different. No one would say for sure, but everybody knew that something serious had happened over on Linnea. The scouts looked grim and the administors acted busy and preoccupied all the time. We figured it had something to do with cultural contamination, but nobody would say. Lorrin even asked Smiller about it, but she rebuffed him and told him to concentrate on getting the house finished before they started winter. “You'll have plenty of time to talk around the fire.”

Originally, we had planned to build the house without any wood at all, because we wouldn't have any wood on the open prairie; but then we realized that on Linnea we'd have at least two great-wagons to dismantle, so we petitioned for an amount of wood equal to the planking in a single wagon. We pretended that we were taking one wagon apart and used the wood for shoring up the sides of the house before putting in the bricks.

We had dug a great round hole in the ground, almost five meters deep. It was deeper than a swimming pool. Then we dug chambers off of it, like the petals of a flower. Six chambers in all; each with one wall of shelves and one wall of shelf-beds. It would be cramped, but at least we'd have a little privacy when we needed it.

We packed the dirt as solid as we could, both walls and floors, and then we painted everything with layers and layers of tarpay and mats of razor grass, until everything had a hard, sticky surface as thick as two hands laid one on top of the other. We hoped this would make a permanently watertight layer. Lorrin had figured worst-possible case for the weather and then doubled it, but we had no way of knowing for sure until the flood.

Even before the tarpay dried, we began laying bricks—two layers across the floor and two rows up the walls. We dipped every brick in tarpay, rammed it into place, and painted it again with even more tarpay. As we built the first row of bricks up the wall, we painted it again and pasted it with more mats of woven razor grass, then we rammed the second wall of bricks hard against it.

Next to the house, we'd dug a wide, shallow hole with a bottom slanting away from the house. After we painted it with tarpay, we installed a double lining of bricks; that would be our water tank. We built a sloping brick pipe from the house to a point halfway above the deep end. When I asked why not to the very deepest part of the tank, Big Jes explained that we had to leave the lowest place for sediments to settle; we didn't want to drink that stuff.

On the other side of the house, a safe distance away, we dug another pit which we painted, but didn't brick. That was the winter latrine. Later on, next spring, we'd dig a summer pit. At the end of every day, we'd drop all of our garbage and refuse into it and put a layer of razor grass and a couple of shovels of dirt on top. When it came time to plant crops in the spring, Big Jes said we would pull up buckets of rich stinky fertilizer and the crops would grow twice as tall.

If we had actually been on Linnea, we'd have had to dig out a barn and a root cellar and a fuel cellar as well, but the house we built proved that we knew what we were doing, so that was enough. The Dome Authority didn't want us building things we weren't going to need or use here.

We did have a small fuel cellar, though, which was a much politer name for it than it deserved. At the end of every day, Parra and Cindy and Rinky and I had to go out and gather up all the dried out manure we could find. Either horse manure or boffili manure would do. Sometimes we went over to the corral, and sometimes we looked along the trails, but usually we had to go over to where the herd was grazing. We couldn't take a great-horse, but we could take a wheelbarrow, and we had to bring it back full. The manure had to be completely dried out before we could toss it in the fuel cellar. In the winter, this would be our only source of fuel for the fire.

If we had started earlier, we would have harvested razor grass and dried it, rolling it up in bundles and pressing them in the brick presses to make fuel bricks for our fires. But we needed to concentrate on building the house first, so the brick presses were mosty busy. After we finished making bricks for the house, we did make some for the fire, but we were quickly running out of time.

We stored as many fuel bricks as we could make, but Da-Lorrin had calculated how many we'd need per day, and we knew we wouldn't be able to make enough to last through our first winter. And we'd already used most of our grass making tarpay. In future years, we'd start earlier and store a lot more fuel bricks; but for now, we kids had to take the wheelbarrows and go out looking for manure.

When it came time to put a roof on the house, we used the heavy axles from the wagon as cross beams. And we used the chassis boards too. Then we laid the rest of the planks across them to support a ceiling of bricks and earth. Then we laid more planks, more bricks and more dirt. The roof had to be strong enough to support the weight of a boffili stampede and thick enough to insulate us against a range fire. The scouts had told us that two meters of ceiling should be enough, but Irm and Bhetto had both been trained as engineers and decided that an extra meter of thickness was worth the extra effort.

One week after tossing the last shovelful of dirt onto the roof, we saw the first sprouts of razor grass poking through. That was good. The root system of the razor grass was a tough interwoven mat. Give it a few months to grow and it would knit the dirt of the roof into a strong solid piece.

That evening it started to snow.

It was almost like it had been waiting for us to finish.

WINTER BEGINS

IT STARTED WITH A COUPLE DAYS of light flurries while they tested the snow machines. Then we had two more days of gentle snow that drifted down in feathery drifts but didn't really get in anyone's way.

We had already moved most of our heavy stuff underground, but we still had a lot of little things to pack away for the winter, and we had to make sure that the ventilation chimneys were clean before we socked in for the coming storm. Linnean storms usually lasted a week at a time, sweeping across the plains like great avalanching blankets. We'd seen simulations of the way the storms formed up in the great northern ocean before they came rolling inexorably south, so we had some idea what to expect. The arc of the Desolation Mountains wouldn't let them spill west, so they angled eastward, meeting the hot air of the prairie and creating great walls of lightning and rain in the summer and smothering white in the winter. We wouldn't have satellite access on Linnea, at least not for a while, so until then we'd have no idea how long any storm would last. So we had to assume and prepare for the worst.

The snow continued intermittently while the Authority ran various weather tests, and we used the time as best we could. We wrapped ourselves a little warmer and concentrated on the last few chores we needed to do. We had to put canvas covers over everything we wouldn't be taking down into the house and we had to pull all the rest of our winter supplies down out of the wagon we had been living in. It was cold and nasty work, and Mom-Woo drove us all harder than ever. She fussed
and fretted and nagged, and a couple of times she even raised her voice impatiently at Da-Lorrin.

Maybe it was just the tension coming from the administors in the Dome Authority. And maybe she knew something in that secret way that mothers always do. And maybe it was just winter. The days had turned bitter-cold and everybody had to work long hours, and we were all cranky and hurting all the time.

Mosty, it was because we didn't know how long winter would last. On Linnea, sometimes the snow stays on the ground for as long as six months. They say they get a gut-buster like that every seventh year. Administor Rance hadn't given us any idea how long we would have to stay underground, but Mom-Woo assumed that was part of the test and she acted like we had to lay in half a year's supplies.

For that, we'd dug a snow locker—another underground room—and after the snow came down, we filled it with as much ice as possible. On Linnea, we would hang emmo or boffili carcasses there and keep them frozen for as long as the ice lasted; if the snow locker was big enough and deep enough, a family could have ice all spring and most of the summer.

Gampa said we could smoke the extra meat if we wanted to dig a smokehouse too. But the only fuel we had for smoking meat was boffili chips, which didn't really appeal to anybody, so we talked about pickling the meat in clay jars instead. Gamma said she could make a pretty good corned beef out of boffili, and next year we'd have cabbages and potatoes to go with. But those were decisions we wouldn't have to make until we got to Linnea. Here in the dome, we didn't have to build a whole ranch, just demonstrate that we could when we got there. On Linnea, we'd gather grass all summer and make fuel logs for the winter.

But here in the dome, this first time, it wasn't going to be a long or a severe winter. Mosty because it was more a test of the weather machines than anything else. They wanted to see how everything worked, so they could see what kind of problems they might have. Drainage was one concern; humidity was another. But the authorities also worried about the lack of sunlight and something they called “winter depression.”

Living on Linnea, spring was spent planting; summer was about digging and repairing and gathering; and autumn was for harvesting as much as you could, as fast as you could, and getting it safe underground. Winter—that was about hunkering in the cold dark earth and waiting for spring, so you could start all over.

Not that the winter had to be an unhappy time, but it was definitely
cramped. Older families on Linnea would dig one or two new rooms every year. Sometimes more. Some of the oldest families had grand underground villas, sometimes even four or five levels deep. Whatever you were willing to dig.

At first, most of us kids thought living underground would be fun. Nona and Shona and the toddlers played at being bunnies. They crunched Linnean carrots and asked each other, “What's up, Doc?” They never tired of it, but the rest of us soon found it boring, even annoying.

As we settled in, we discovered that there are lots of advantages to living in a burrow. For one thing, once you're underground, you don't have to worry about heat and cold the same way you do aboveground. Da-Lorrin explained it. Because we roofed over the rooms with the natural insulation of dried razor grass, we created a kind of underground umbrella, and once you get deep enough, the surrounding soil temperature is pretty much the same in summer or winter. Ten degrees Celsius or fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

Because you heat the house with a firebed, the whole dwelling acts as a heat-radiator in the ground, and eventually, the surrounding soil starts to warm up, maybe a degree a year. It takes a lot of time and living to heat up a home. The scouts said that some of the older burrows actually get up to a comfortable twenty Celsius or sixty-eight Fahrenheit, and really old dwellings sometimes need to open extra ventilators.

The firebed was like a big flat brick oven. Big Jes and Klin had taken a week to build it. The top was a platform as big as a king-sized bed; underneath was a deep firepit with a chimney up on each side. Every morning we started a roaring fire in the pit and by the time we'd finished the rest of our chores, the top of the bricks were hot enough for the moms to cook breakfast. The center of the platform was always hottest, and the edges were the coolest, so you could boil things in the middle or just keep them warm on the sides. After breakfast, the moms would start lunch and dinner stews in different pots and leave them to cook slowly all day. As the fire ebbed, the pots would get pushed closer to the center. By bedtime, the firebed was comfortably toasty, so we'd stretch out our sleeping pads on top of it or next to it and we'd be warm all night. It was kind of like camping out, only forever.

We had originally planned separate sleeping rooms, but as we finished the burrow, we realized that wouldn't work for a couple of reasons. First, we wouldn't have enough room for everybody, and second, the rooms would be too cold. Big Jes and Klin tried it the first night and they both woke up shivering and moved back in with the rest of us, so
they could be closer to the fire. Next evening at dinner, we decided we'd use these rooms for when anyone needed private time, because sometimes people just need to be alone. But more important,
real
Linneans don't have separate bedrooms. Linnean families all sleep together on firebeds. So we would too.