Child of Earth (6 page)

“Eventually, at some point in the future, we hope to establish formal contact, leading to free and open passage through the gate, trade agreements and perhaps even colonization. Colonization was always the plan before the interruption, but now we have to figure out how to deal with the descendants without sending them into massive cultural shock. We don't want to risk a war or an inquisition. That means were going to need people over there who can act as intermediaries. People who have lived there and who know the culture will be the best representatives of all. So in the long run, we're training you to be part of the contact team.”

“Spies,” said Big Jes. “You're training us to be spies and propagandists. Right?”

“Well ... yes, you can think of it that way. But we'd rather you think of yourself as guardian spirits. The people on Linnea aren't our enemies. They're our children. But we need them to be our partners.”

WORLDS

AND I THOUGHT IT WAS just about horses. But we did get to ride Jinker two days later. So I guess we passed the test, whatever it was.

Just getting on the horse was hard enough. There was a huge wooden A-frame, taller than Jinker, with a giant saddle hanging from it, with baskets on each side. Two of the scouts led Jinker into the A-frame and lowered the saddle onto her back. Then they rolled some stairs on wheels up to her side and we climbed up to ride in the baskets. Jinker could carry four people on a side. The driver climbed up on a rope ladder and sat on a chair just behind her neck. He had a long rod which he used for tapping her neck to guide her.

At first it was scary, because we were so high off the ground. I thought we were higher than a double-decker bus, but the driver said not quite. But then he said there were some horses bigger than Jinker, so my guess wasn't all that wrong.

I sat in front on the left side. Rinky sat behind me. Then Mom-Lu and Lorrin. Aunt Morra and Auncle Irm were on the other side with Parra and Cindy behind them. Bhetto didn't want to ride. He didn't like the great-horses that much. Too bad. He missed a good time.

I was surprised that Jinker wasn't very fast. The driver said her natural gait was about ten miles per hour. She could hit thirty or forty at a gallop, especially because the gravity on Linnea was lighter than on Earth, but she couldn't sustain it for long. The great-horses were really too big and too heavy for speed; but they were strong, even stronger
than elephants. A single great-horse was as strong as eight Percherons and could pull an enormous wagonload of goods. That's why the people on Linnea used great-horses where people of equivalent cultures would have already invented the steam engine.

Our driver was named Dando. He said he was scheduled to go to Linnea in a few months, just ahead of the first big group of settlers, to help select a target site.

“I thought there were settlers there already—?” Auncle Irm asked.

“Scouts and their families only. We're still in second-stage mapping. Third-stage is when we start a real immigration pipeline, and we expect that certification next month. The first group is in the last semester of training. Second group is halfway through. You folks will probably be in the third or fourth set, depending on how well you do in training. Of course, a lot depends on getting the support system in place too.

“Right now, we're working on getting the parts of a launch catapult over there so we can put up heavy satellites.”

“Is that your specialty?” Irm asked.

“Uh-huh,” Dando said. “It's tricky work. It turns out we need a lot more engineers and tech-specialists on-site than we thought.”

“Really—?” said Irm, actually showing interest.

Dando went on. “We've found a number of sites on the equator where we can operate a catapult undetected, including several uninhabited islands. But the problem is getting the people and the equipment there undetected. It means shipping a small town. Do we look for secret harbors and build inflatable ships? Or do we try and move everything by air? We can't begin serious importation of families without reliable communications in place. Right now, we're still depending on the spybirds—like the remote probes we showed you.”

“You need engineers, eh?” Irm said thoughtfully.

“We need everything. But if you've got useful skills in that area, talk to your caseworker.”

I wasn't really interested in that part. I wanted to talk about the horses again. “Mr. Dando?”

“Yes?” He glanced back at me.

“When you're over on Horse World—Linnea, I mean—are there any dangerous animals?”

He nodded. “Some.”

“Dangerous to great-horses?” I was still thinking of the coyote-lizards from the other dome.

He hesitated before answering. Finally: “Yes, Kaer, there are things
like wolves, only bigger. The Linneans call them kacks. They hunt in packs, and they'll track a single horse for days if they have to, worrying it to death, not letting it sleep, rushing in to nip at its legs, until it collapses from lack of sleep or lack of blood. It's not a pretty sight.” Then he added, “The great-horse isn't defenseless, though. Mosty they keep to the plains, where they can see across great distances. And they travel in small herds, so they can share each other's protection. If a kack gets too close, a horse will rear up to stamp it flat. Mosty the kacks look for easier game than horses. They're much more dangerous to smaller animals. Especially people. But they prefer boffili.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You shouldn't have to worry, if you're careful. The people on Linnea have crossbows. Properly handled, a crossbow can be more efficient than a rifle—and you usually get the bolt back. But if you go over there, kiddo, you'll probably live in a town, safe behind a very tall fence.” He said that to reassure me, but I had bad dreams about kacks for several weeks after that.

When we got back home, the parents had lots of grown-up talks about Linnea and the other worlds. We kids hadn't seen much of the other worlds. Apparently, the gate people thought we were best suited for Linnea, and the parents seemed to agree. The Linnean Scout Authority was ready to start training families now, and the other two worlds that New Mexico station was developing wouldn't be ready for years, and they were nowhere near as habitable.

Black-World was dry and hard. It looked a lot like Mars, only darker. There wasn't much life there either. So if anyone went over there at all, they'd have to start almost completely from scratch. The problem was that because there wasn't much life—just some lichens and little bugs—and there wasn't much breathable air either. There was atmosphere, but it was mosty carbon dioxide; not enough oxygen in it to live on. So you'd have to wear a respirator every time you went outside. Nobody in the family liked that. Black-World really was mosty an industrial place; there would be mines, and dirty factories, and maybe some observatories and science stations; but not a real colony.

And Blue-World was mosty water with a few scattered islands here and there. Some of the islands had life. The biggest island was in the north and it actually had real animal life, things that looked like big shaggy apes. They were cunning like baboons and just as vicious; not sentient, but enough of a hazard that the island was off-limits. Klin laughed and said it wouldn't be a problem because Jes could pass for one of those
apes and Big Jes laughed too and offered to put Klin through a wall.

Anyway, it didn't need much discussion. Linnea was really the only world that the family would consider, and it looked like it was the only world we were eligible for in any case. If we'd wanted, we could have made application for one of the gates in Canada or Australia, but our chances of approval there weren't as good, and most of those worlds looked just as hard as Black-World. So that pretty much settled that. It was Linnea or nothing. The family talked about it for a long time at the airport while we waited for everybody to catch their different planes. Irm and Bhetto and Morra went off to talk by themselves, and Lorrin's face got all funny when they did.

I wasn't supposed to hear, but I did because Mom-Trey was wiping spilled chocolate soda off the baby's shirt and I was helping. Mom-Trey said to Da, “Let them be, Lorr.”

He shook his head. “You know what we're up against. They won't take a split family. If those three won't go—”

“They don't want a divorce,” said Mom-Lu. “Morra and I talked about it last night.” I fussed with the baby; I started searching through the diaper bag, pretending to look for something important, hoping I would find something before they noticed me. I had my headphones on, so they must have thought I was listening to music; but the player was off, so I could hear everything they said. “Morra and Irm and Bhetto, all three know that if they keep the rest of us from going to Linnea, they might as well move out altogether. The family will never recover.”

She lowered her voice, but I could still hear. “They're talking about splitting off into a separate partnership; they'll manage the family's affairs while we're in training and after we go to Linnea. It might work.” She touched Da-Lorrin's arm. “They'll go through the training with us—as our support system—but they won't cross over with us. Morra thinks Irm and Bhetto will go along with it. But the rest of us have to give them time to see the logic of it. You know how Bhetto gets.”

Da half-cocked his head as if weighing the idea on his tongue to see how it tasted. “There are a lot of details to talk over, but ... it might work. Whose idea was it?”

“Morra thinks it's hers,” said Mom-Lu in that harder voice of hers. She turned around and saw me, as if for the first time. She took the diaper bag away and pushed me toward the other children. “Go on now, Kaer. Thank you.”

I pretended to turn off my music and looked blankly at her. “What?”

She wasn't fooled. “Don't tell anyone what you overheard. That's not for casual talk, you understand?”

I flushed and nodded, then hurried off to stand by the departure gate with Big Jes. At least she trusted me a little bit.

The grown-ups must have worked out everything by themselves, because I didn't hear any more about it. We went home and nothing happened for what felt like longest time, although it was only two or three months; but it was long enough. The memory of the horses faded and I began to think that we hadn't been accepted and we weren't going to Linnea after all.

Later on I found out that the family was taking care of all kinds of business, making arrangements about money and property and inheritance—all the stuff that had to be done if you were leaving a world behind. My tenth birthday came and went before we got the word that we were approved and we were going back to New Mexico to live in a training dome.

LINNEA DOME

LINNEA DOME II HAD ONLY BEEN open for three years; it was the newest and biggest world-dome ever built, even bigger than the dino-dome. It was over twenty kilometers in diameter and the sky was 800 meters up. It was thirty klicks away from the other domes and had been built right next to the gate.

The dome was built like a bunch of suspension bridges in a circle. Tall towers surrounded it; heavy cables were strung between opposing towers to support the weight of the dome's vast roof. It was the largest enclosed space on Earth. There were 320 square kilometers of usable terrain inside. Almost all of its services were located in the towers or underground. Next to the dome there was a rounded building with transport tunnels leading in and out of it. Supplies for the dome and for the world-gate came in through underground trains.

There was no way anyone could just drive up to the dome or get into the tunnels. Access was heavily restricted. And even if you could get past the guards, the dome was separated from the land around it by a wide moat. And even if you could get across the moat, there were no doors, only high concrete walls around the base. They looked thick too. There were helicopter decks on two of the towers, but those were for emergency traffic only.

We didn't go direct to the dome; we landed at Overlook Station instead. The station was built into the neighboring cliffside and it had a great view of the entire station; only we weren't given any time to enjoy
it when we arrived. First, we all had to sign consent forms and insurance waivers and training agreements.

There were twenty-five of us—us and the Kellys—counting the little-uns, so everything took awhile, and it was boring. After the paperwork was finished, we were each given an implant to swallow; then we had to wait for calibration and confirmation, and that was even more boring.

After dinner, there was an orientation session, and then we were assigned to quarters that looked like hospital rooms. That was because we had to spend three days getting “transplanted.” We had to have our Earth-bacteria “terminated” and the necessary ones replaced with Linnean counterparts. That was why the rooms were like a hospital—so the doctors could watch us for allergic reactions. By now they'd pretty well gotten the hang of “bio-transplanting,” so the worst we had to deal with was upset stomachs and diarrhea and a little baby vomit. Just the same, it wasn't much fun.

But finally we traded our Earth clothes for Linnean costumes and took the cablecar down to the dome. Mom-Trey thought the clothes looked silly; Nona and Shona complained that they were itchy. One of the briefing videos said that the Linneans made silk from grass fibers, but when Klin and Rinky asked the trainers about it, they said that if we wanted silk underpants, we'd have to gather the grass, thread it, weave the cloth and sew the garments ourselves. Klin got
that
look on his face and I expected him to start harvesting grass before bedtime. Rinky put dibsies on the first pair.