Child of Earth (26 page)

“We've already seen them,” said Willow. “You probably can't make them out from here—they keep well beyond the circle of the light—but if you had eyes sharp enough to see through yellow twilight, you would have already spotted three large kacks hunkering low on those hills over there. Watching us.” He inclined his head north.

“How do you know?”

He opened his robe and pulled out a tablet display. “See? Those three red blips? Kacks. The green blip? Us.”

“How far?” I gulped.

“Far enough,” Willow said. “They track all the wagons now. They've done it for several weeks. They've learned the roads. We think they've begun teaching the pups to hunt.”

“How many pups?”

“Only four. The little one didn't make it. We haven't implanted them yet, so we have to track them with overhead probes and cameras. The pups all have white fur, so that makes it even harder to spot them against the snow. But the infrared should give us good targets.” He started tapping at the display. “Ahh, we've got them now. They've spaced themselves out along the ridge. Hunting behavior. They don't have the endurance of the great-horses, so they run a relay to exhaust their prey. We haven't seen the pups do this before.” He unclipped his phone and punched for Authority. “Yeah, Willow here. We might have a situation. Have you got us on monitor? Look at the positioning of the pups. ... Yes, definitely a shift in behavior. No, they haven't moved yet. But look at their readings—they look more intense than usual. I don't think we can count on them holding back much longer. The flush of adrenalin could push them over the edge. And remember, we haven't implanted the pups yet. What do you advise? Yes, we have a kit. I think. Wait a minute, we'll look.” He motioned to Burr.

Burr came back to the passenger area of the wagon and motioned for me to get up. I stepped forward while she pushed the cushion aside and lifted the seat to access the compartment beneath. She pulled out a large plastic case. “I've got it,” she called. She opened it up, looked and added, “All current.” Inside the kit, I saw various medical supplies, but
also a few things with metal and straps that I didn't understand.

Willow spoke to the phone. “Yes, we've got a kit. Everything current.” Pause. “Actually, I'd prefer not. We've got a full house here.” Another pause. “Yes, I understand. Yes. All right. If we can. But I won't endanger any lives. Yes, all right. Thank you.” He clicked off and pocketed the phone. He said a word I didn't recognize.

Da climbed forward to the seat just behind him. He put a hand on Willow's shoulder and leaned forward. He spoke quietly, but I stood close enough to hear. “What did they ask you to do?”

Willow's breath made clouds. He said, “They want us to capture a pup, if we can. Tranquilize one and bring him in so they can do a full bio-scan, implantation, the works.”

“That sounds risky.”

Willow nodded. “One pup doesn't represent any danger. The rest of the pack, however...they might defend it.” He turned half-around to look at Da directly. “Don't worry about it. We'll only attempt it if they approach. As long as they keep their distance, so will we. Every minute that passes favors us. As soon as the horses have rested, we'll move on.”

A few moments later, Kilter and Kale began snorting impatiently, shaking their heads and clattering their wooden bells. Driver picked up the reins and shouted loudly, “All right, move it! Ye stubborn great beasts!” The wagon jerked and slid and we headed on toward Callo City.

MOCKS

DEPENDING ON THE COURSE, we would spend two or three days in town before heading home again. We did this one triad out of every three, once every nineday.

It was both training and test to see how much we'd learned, how well we'd mastered the Linnean way of being. The way it worked, the trainers would assign us a situation, a job of some kind, and then we'd try to do it the same way native Linneans would. The other people in the cast would watch us carefully; if anybody did anything that was wrong or stupid or just inappropriate, a loud ugly buzzer would sound.

We had to learn every tiny detail of how to behave in public as well as in private, when it was polite to turn away and when it was not. Don't sneeze or touch your nose in formal company, it's a bad omen. Don't use your left hand at the meal table, it's unclean. Don't use your left hand to wave, it's an insult. Don't use your left hand to lift your tea to the Old Woman, it's sacrilegious.

If we had thought the training difficult before, now it became rigorous to a degree we had not imagined. As Birdie had told us on the very first day, “It will not only be harder than you imagine, it will be harder than you
can
imagine.”

We had to learn how to barter in the store, the greeting rituals, the blessings, the polite way to negotiate, achieving the right combination of generosity and self-interest. We had to learn how to order a ritual meal in the inn, how to eat with respect instead of hunger, how to
treat the innkeeper as an informal agent of the Old Woman, how to request lodging the evening and what to expect and how to behave inside the shared sleeping chambers. We had to learn how to respond to the ritual greetings of the local authorities, especially the churchmen. Every relationship had strict rules of conduct; even something as simple as a casual greeting on the street required specific symbols of respect depending on how well you knew the person you were greeting and whether the relationship was formal or business or... or a whole bunch of other things we still didn't understand. Nobody understood. Because the scouts hadn't determined it yet, and neither had the probes provided the information to decode that part of the Linnean semiotic.

You couldn't just watch and imitate the behavior of others. That didn't work, because adults had different levels of courtesy and familiarity, based on relationship, trust, gender and caste. Children had to talk to adults different than adults had to talk to children. Men and women had different ways of speaking to each other, depending on how they knew each other, what they were discussing, whether one or the other or both were married, if they had children, and so on. The Linneans had a lot of specific words and phrases, some just for men and some just for women—and no language at all for inbetweens or unchosen or recently-chosen or chose-backs. When you spoke in Linnean, you had to think Linnean—and the thinking sometimes hurt, because you knew that there were things that didn't exist in the language, that you couldn't say, couldn't describe and couldn't even imagine, unless you switched back to thinking in English. And that would be dangerous.

To put it bluntly, not knowing all the correct words and phrases and rituals meant you couldn't function in society. Not polite society, anyway.

Impolite society, however ... that was our access. Out on the frontier, folks spoke the “rude tongue,” a kind of catchall language that let folks who had just met exchange information without first having to go through several days of negotiations and discoveries. Not just useful, but necessary—especially if you wanted to warn someone of an impending boffili stampede.

We had several sessions where we had to learn various children's games. Even the adults had to learn the games, because on Linnea, they would have grown up playing these games. Not knowing slither or runaround or little dog would have seemed as suspicious as not knowing football or soccer or baseball back on Earth.

But the hardest exercises were the “mocks”—the simple conversations
between one person and another. How do you answer even the most innocent-seeming of questions? I liked the pretend games; I hated the ugly buzzer. Bzzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. Please step over here so we can burn you to death in the firepit.

The scouts and the trainers continually tested us. Suppose, for example, you had information from a weather satellite that a dreadful storm would strike in a few hours. How do you warn your neighbors? Bad weather is maizlish, the work of demons stirring up the wind. Anyone who predicts bad weather must have spoken with maiz-likka. So how do you warn people? I had to think about that one for a bit. I raised my hand. “My gamma fears the demons work tonight.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she always gets a terrible itch just before a dust storm hits. And she has that terrible itch now. She fussed all morning.”

“You think we'll have a dust storm?”

“I don't know, but I intend to lock up everything tight just in case. I think you should too. When Gamma gets fussy, you don't want to listen to her say, ‘I told you so.'”

Whitlaw was one of the trainers. He nodded, “That one works. But what other problems might it create?”

“If Gamma gets itchy before every storm, that starts to look like a kind of magick,” said Rinky. “It might make people think Gamma a witch.”

“But Gamma
is
a witch,” said Gampa. “That's why I married her.” Gamma smacked him, but not hard; everybody laughed.

But Whitlaw took it seriously. “Yes, you have that danger with any prediction you make. A successful prediction makes you look maizlish. So how do you defuse that?”

“Make some wrong predictions?”

“Make them guesses?”

“But that still makes you someone who pretends to have knowledge of the future. Do you really want others to regard you that way?”

Da raised his hand. “You have to get caught unprepared a few times too. Lock down what you can't afford to lose, but sacrifice a wagon or a corral to show that you had no special advantage.”

Whitlaw nodded. “Yes, that works. Let's try another. A neighbor has a sick child. It's only a mild infection, but it could become pneumonia. What do you do?”

Gamma raised her hand. “Bring over chicken soup, laced with antibiotics.”

“Yes, that will work. And how many neighbors will you have to cure before they start wondering if you practice witchcraft?”

“But if it saves their lives—?”

“Yes, some of them might overlook it. Some of them might have genuine gratitude. But fear overwhelms gratitude nine times out of ten. Do you really want to start a witch-hunt? And what happens the first time you fail to save someone's life? If people believe you have the power of life and death, then a failure is regarded as deliberate, even malicious.”

“Oops.”

“Yes, oops. That can earn you a quick trip to the firepit.”

“So ...?” Mom-Woo raised a hand cautiously. “Does that mean we must let people die?”

Whitlaw shook his head. “Think of every situation as a place where you must apply careful judgment. You must hold it as your most important responsibility to take care of your own well-being first. Otherwise, you have nothing to give to anyone else. Sometimes, you will have to withhold your own generosity, because in the long run that might ensure your own survival. If you ever get to the point where the people around you begin asking you for help, because your cures always work, then it will be time to disappear and disappear quickly. We do not want you to have to do that.”

Whitlaw suddenly turned around and pointed to me. “Kaer. Where did your Gampa meet the Old Woman?”

“Huh? You mean Gamma—?”

“Huh? What did I miss?”

“The story of the Old Woman and Her Promise.”

“Um. What story is that?”

“Warm up the firepit. We just caught a maiz-likka.” He stepped down off the dais and grabbed my arm and started dragging me toward a taped-off area that we had from time to time identified as the penalty box. Now we called it the firepit. Others in the room started chanting, “Burn the demon-child! Burn the demon-child!” For a moment, I almost started to cry.

“What? What did I do wrong?”

“The story of the Old Woman and Her Promise.”

“I never heard that story! Nobody ever told us that story! How can you punish us for not knowing what you didn't teach us?!”

Whitlaw stopped and stared straight into my eyes. “Exactly, Kaer.
Ignorance does not excuse you. The Linneans will burn you for not knowing.”

“But—but—nobody told us that story.”

“Yes. Nobody told you that story. That does not give you a get out of Hell free card. If anything, it only proves that you and your whole family stand outside the Law. So off to the firepit.”

I said a word. A Linnean word. The closest translation was, “That's not fair.” The other word I said referred to a certain body function.

Whitlaw shrugged. “Who promised you fairness? I didn't. The Old Woman didn't.” Then he added, “We didn't withhold the story out of maliciousness, but so that you would realize how much exists on Linnea that you don't know, that we don't know, that we couldn't teach you, that you will have to find out for yourself. And you will have to find out without letting anyone know that you don't already know. You may go back to your seat now. We will burn you to death another time, when we run out of firewood and need a warm blaze.”

A moment later, Whitlaw turned back to me. “Why do you cry, Kaer? Did I say something to upset you?”

“I'll never learn all this, I'll never remember it. I'll make a stupid mistake and we'll all end up in the firepit. I can't keep up.”

Whitlaw sat down opposite me. He took one of my hands in his. His hands were huge and rough, but gentle. He said, “All this feels so difficult to you, sweetheart, because you know that other possibilities exist. You've lived in a world that has much wider horizons, a world filled with a greater richness of flavors, colors, textures and experiences. You've flown through the sky, you've visited faraway places and soared through worlds of imagination that the Linneans could never conceive. You know so many more possibilities of life. What you feel now—the pressure of cramming your great big life into a very small container—it hurts, it frustrates and it saddens. Do you think no one else before you hasn't felt this? We've all felt it. All of us. Over and over.