Child of Earth (19 page)

By morning, the firepit was always a dark smolder, and the air in the burrow would be as crisp as dawn, so mosty I tried to stay under the snuggly blankets until Mom-Lu roused everybody up for chores. There was a lot to do. We had to light lanterns, stoke the fire, empty the night-pots, hang the beds and sheets to air, get the little-uns up, help fix breakfast and clean up afterward. My job was washing the dishes in a big tub over the firebed. I didn't mind because it was the warmest job in the burrow. Big Jes and Klin had to go upstairs every morning and bring down buckets of snow, so we could have fresh water for washing and cooking. They said they didn't mind, but later on, when the snow got deeper, I figured they might change their feelings about that.

Over breakfast the second morning, I asked Da-Lorrin if we'd have to stay underground the whole winter, or if we'd be allowed to go up and play in the snow. Mom-Lu and Da and Aunt Morra all looked at each other and I got the feeling that they knew something that they weren't going to say.

“Might as well say it,” Morra said. She put down her tea.

Da nodded. “Should have told you before.” Everybody sitting around the table went silent and waited for Da to continue. He didn't look happy. “They've let the kacks out.”

“All of them?”

Da nodded. “We have only three kacks in the dome, but one of the females is pregnant. That's why they opened the canyon. She'll need to feed her litter. They get hungrier in winter and have to hunt more. They have to eat as much as they can as fast as they can, before the snow buries the kill and it freezes solid. By springtime, they can get fairly hungry; when the snow starts to recede, the kacks feed on the carrion as it thaws. They've got great noses for sniffing out meat. And near as we can tell, they're pretty good at remembering where their own kills were frozen and how deep.”

I must have looked impatient, because Da smiled at me. “Yes, Kaer, I know that you learned all this already. But Mom-Trey missed that class, so I have to retell it for her benefit, all right?” I knew he wasn't telling the exact truth, because Mom-Trey had sat beside me in that class. I remembered it because every time the scouts talked about the kacks,
Mom-Trey would make those little fear-noises that she does in the back of her throat. So I figured Da was talking for the microphones more than anything else, because we knew they were watching all of us a lot more closely now.

“We
think
—we do not know—that because the kacks are hungrier now, the implants might not work.” Birdie had told us that all the kacks were implanted so if they got too close to a human, they would get an unpleasant nerve-jolt. But it had never been tested. And we hadn't seen Birdie in months anyway—not since we'd moved into the Linnea Dome. So she wasn't the expert anymore—we were. Da held up a hand to keep anyone from interrupting. “We've had an incident in the north ranges. Nobody got hurt, but for a few moments, it looked serious.

“Three scouts went in for a close-up examination of a bunny-deer kill. They needed to take samples. They could have dropped a probe from overhead, but Authority uses the dome for training scouts too, not just families, so they have to attend their own exercises. While they were cutting slices from the kill, the kacks came circling. The scouts have trained well, so they knew what to do. One runs the growler, the noisemaker; you've seen how that works, haven't you, Kaer? It makes a very loud noise. Loud enough to make a kack slow down and study the situation. Long enough for the other two to mount their horses and arm their crossbows. Then they stand guard while the first one climbs up. Kacks have great cunning; they don't just run in. They circle slowly and stalk their prey first. Their hunting strategy is to worry the prey to exhaustion.

“Great-horses can't outrun a pack of kacks, but we've always assumed it unlikely that three kacks would take on three horses. We assumed wrong. Even though a recent kill still lay on the ground, the kacks kept advancing on the scouts. Not a good thing.”

“Didn't the implants work?” Big Jes asked.

Da nodded. “They did and they didn't. The scouts could see the kacks shuddering with the shock of the nerve-jolts. But they still kept advancing. Nobody wants to say for sure why, but apparently the winter-kill instinct overrules everything else. For a moment, the scouts feared they might have to kill the kacks.”

“What happened?”

“The horses. When a great-horse rears up and comes down hard, it makes for a remarkable sight—impressive enough to make a pack of kacks back off. The horses put on an astonishing display, whinnying and snorting and even shrieking—a noise we've never heard them make
before. Scared the maiz-likka out of the scouts. And the kacks too. They retreated. A strategic withdrawal. You'll see the video next time we have a meeting. Irm thinks we could build a growler that makes the same kind of noises, but nobody on Linnea has done that, so we can't either. But maybe we can; we don't know yet. Maybe we can do it with native technology, maybe we can print the electronics into the carvings on the outside; we have to look at all the possibilities. But this gives us two dilemmas, you know—what do we do on Linnea, when our lives get threatened? Do we use our advantages and risk giving ourselves away as aliens? Or do we not use our advantages and put ourselves in physical danger?

“But we will consider those questions over time. Right now, we have three hungry kacks running loose. We do not have enough bunny-deer in the dome to feed them for a full winter, so we will have to continue to provide Earth-meat for them. The thing is—all the Earth-meat they've been eating, the kacks have developed a taste for it. The administors think that's why the nerve-jolts didn't work. Perhaps the animals' nervous systems have changed. Unless we dissect one, we won't know for sure. But that question has to remain for another time as well.

“More important, we now face the same problem that the Linneans do. We have hungry kacks prowling the grasslands. The boffili can live off their fat for a while, but the kacks need to eat at least once a week. We have to assume that they will prowl the whole dome—”

I knew I shouldn't interrupt, but I couldn't help myself. “What about the horses? They'll go for the horses, won't they?”

Mom-Lu started to shush me, angry that I had spoken out of turn; but Da reached over and touched her arm. “No, dear, please. Let the child speak. We all share Kaer's fears for the great-horses.” To me, Da said, “The scouts have already moved the horses behind the stockade walls of Callo City. They will have to live off hay and oats for a while, but they will suffer no further attacks.”

Mom-Woo nodded. “A very wise precaution, Lorrin. How soon do they plan to return the kacks to their canyon? How will they accomplish that task?”

Da looked surprised. Hadn't Mom-Woo understood? “They have no plans for that,” he said quietly.

“Then they intend to kill them? I don't understand. I thought the administors intended to duplicate life on Linnea as much as possible.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Auncle Irm. He got it. “Linnea has kacks running wild. So do we. The kacks will continue to run free, right, Lorrin?”

Da nodded. “Yes,” he said, his voice still soft. “That means that we cannot allow anyone, especially the children, to go up alone and unguarded. We will have to take special precautions from now on, every time someone has to go upside. The children may have chances to play in the snow, but only when we have certainty that we have no kacks anywhere near.”

SNOW

AFTER A FEW MORE DAYS OF INTERMITTENT FLURRIES, the sky darkened over and stayed dark. We only went up in groups, and all the grown-ups carried whistles and crossbows now. Several of the scouts had ridden out to all the farms and delivered additional supplies, including extra weapons and bolts. The administors had decided that the kacks represented too big a danger; they'd have to break their own rules. When we'd entered the dome, they'd told us that we would have to build our own equipment. Big Jes had built one crossbow, but it hadn't turned out well and he had planned to use the winter to try again. In fact, he intended to keep at it until he got it right. He said he'd build as many as necessary so that everyone in the family would have protection. But with the kacks running loose, we couldn't afford to wait.

Most of the families had turned angry when they heard about the kacks. Buzzard Kelly wanted to hold a special meeting to demand action. He wanted the Authority to either capture and contain the kacks or send the scouts out to kill them. But on this point, the administors dug in their heels. We had to learn to live like Linneans, and that meant with Linnean danger too. Buzzard never got his meeting; not enough families wanted to risk the journey across the dome.

In the evenings, we could hear the kacks howling. Sometimes they yipped and called to each other across the darkened prairie. Maybe the great roof overhead bounced the sounds back down. Little Klin tried to explain about standing waves and focus points and reflectivity. The
curved walls and ceiling could made the kacks sound closer and louder if you stood at the right place.

I didn't think the kacks would come sniffing around our burrow. Mosty they stayed close to their den in the north. But one morning, I went up with Big Jes and Klin and Da to help gather snow and we found big splayed paw prints all around the half-disassembled wagon. The kacks had visited during the night, sniffing and inspecting. We found a lot of tracks around the entrance. And we found more tracks around the ventilation shafts, where they must have sniffed the air rising from below.

Da and Big Jes told me to stand at the entrance and hold the wooden doors open for them; they circled the camp slowly, pointing out paw prints to each other. The kacks had sniffed our cold firepit, our bricklines, our latrine, everything—like a burglar checking out a house before he breaks in. Not a good sign. When Da and Jes came back, they went back down and had a quiet hurried conference with Irm and Bhetto and Cindy. Then the five of them went back up topside and rebuilt the doors to the burrow; they made them bigger and heavier. After that, nobody went up for the rest of the day. And not for a couple of days after that either.

At dinner that night, Da said that we would not fear the kacks, but we would respect them. I couldn't see that much difference, but I wouldn't argue the point either. Because the kacks were running loose, it meant everybody else would have to stay in their burrows or travel only in large, protected groups. To compensate, despite their policies against dependence on electronics, the administors increased the number of hours of online access from two to six, and we settled in to take our classes off the wall instead of trekking in to Callo City.

Klin had hidden the projector inside a wall, not in the main room but in one of the rooms we used for private time. He'd dug out a hole, slid the tube into it, then packed the dirt back in around it. Then he'd hung a grass-totem in front of it. Linneans respected representations of the grass-mother, and they would be unlikely to look behind the mam. After he finished, he said he wanted to find a better way to hide a projector; but Big Jes said he didn't think it likely that any Linnean with average curiosity would even know to look for one. Nevertheless, Little Klin still thought the installation too vulnerable—what if we met a Linnean who had more than average curiosity? So he wanted to talk to the scouts about it.

But for the moment, we had video; we had a window on the world,
and that helped take away some of the buried-alive feeling. Mom-Woo had us all playing different games. One day, we were journeying to the center of the Earth, the next we turned into bunnies hiding from the wolves, the third we pretended that we lived under the sea. The burrow became a spaceship, a submarine, an igloo, a secret cave hidden from horrible monsters. Sometimes we dressed up in hats and shawls. But my favorite of all the games we played, we turned the burrow into a vast underground complex and we became the secret defenders of the whole world, sending forth armies of super-agents and robots and spies to fight the monsters who lived on the far side of the sky. On days like that, the burrow felt safe and warm.

But we had just as many days when we all felt cramped and cranky. We stopped talking to each other and withdrew into ourselves, into our private selves, into the most secret and sometimes most lonely places of all. On those days, we'd turn on the video and do a scan to see if the kacks were prowling anywhere near. If not, we'd all go up as a group; we'd keep close to the burrow entrance, but at least we'd see the sky—or at least something that looked like a sky. The dome ceiling was high and far away.

But most days, we couldn't even do that. The snow kept falling, kept piling higher and deeper. Sometimes, even on days when it paused, we couldn't go up. And when we finally could, the snow lay everywhere in huge drifts that rose taller than Big Jes. We wanted to dig tunnels in it, but Da wouldn't let us; he feared that the snow would collapse down on us. But he did allow us to dig out a clearing, and eventually trenches, and the more water we needed below, the longer and deeper the trenches became.

After a few weeks, going up meant standing around in a deep hole or digging a little further in a rising trench. We could look up at the dome sky and see it as a bright yellow sliver. Sometimes blue, sometimes greenish, but mosty amber because of all the micro-dust in the air. Well, on Linnea, it would be micro-dust. On Earth, it was tunable light-panels.

We didn't spend a lot of time studying how the dome worked, but our enforced captivity in the burrow gave us a lot of time for talking, and we needed to practice our language until it was second nature. Most important, we had to lose our accents. Or learn how to fake Linnean accents. Aunt Morra explained that to all of us, more than once. She said that every language has its own rhythm, its own set of inflections and idiosyncrasies. Most tricky, she said, every language puts the emphasis
on different syllables. Hungarian puts the emphasis on the last syllable of the word, German puts it on the first, and the French speak all syllables with equal emphasis. Not only that, but you can hear this emphasis reflected in the music of each nation, because song comes from speech. “If I had a piano here, I'd show you,” she said. And then she sighed. “I miss my music. I could never give up my music.” Then she remembered what she intended to say, shook her head as if to brush away the memories, and continued. “We all speak Spanglish. That has a very lyrical set of rhythms and inflections, inherited from at least two distinct languages. When we speak Linnean, we don't realize it, but we add those inflections and rhythms. We need to unlearn our Earth ways of speaking, and match the Linnean sounds instead: the drawl, the slur, the way the vowels and the consonants are pronounced, and most of all, we need to match the rhythms and emphasis of Linnean speech. Otherwise, our language will give us away. If even one person with a Spanglish accent gets caught as a maiz-likka, then every other person with that accent will immediately come under the same suspicion. So let's do our language exercises again. Our lives—I mean,
your
lives,” she corrected herself, “will depend on it.” She seemed suddenly embarrassed by the reminder that she would not be going to Linnea with the rest of the family.