Child of Earth (32 page)

“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.

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.”