Child of Earth (7 page)

Outside the dome, there was a receiving station. This was one of only three access points. Everything else was self-contained. This station was the largest; it included an external monitoring facility for scouts, administors and other support personnel. The cable car slid into the docking station and connected to an airlock. There was a soft whoosh as the air pressure equalized, and then we exited into a receiving chamber where we had to pass through another set of decontamination locks. They sprayed us again and scanned us to see if all of our pills and implants were working. Then, finally, we were escorted into a long circular tunnel, big enough to drive six lanes of heavy traffic through.

An Earth-Guide took us halfway through the tunnel, where we were met by a Linnea-Guide. She was dressed as a scout and spoke only in Linnean. We hadn't learned very much of the language yet, just the most basic words, like “come,” and “stop,” and she wouldn't answer any questions spoken in English, so we followed mosty in silence, only occasionally whispering among ourselves.

The far end of the tunnel opened into a receiving station, where several more guides looked us over. They took away Da-Kelly's pocket watch and some of the beads and jewelry that the children were wearing—and even Nona's teddy bear, which she carried everywhere. Da-Lorrin tried to argue, “Oh, for God's sake—it's only a teddy bear,” but the scouts were adamant. Mom-Trey held Nona close and comforted her anguished sobs, but the rest of us put on our nasty-faces.

Finally, we entered Linnea.

As far as we were concerned, this was the
real
Linnea, not a simulation.

We walked outside into the yellow air and the first thing we noted was the dust and the stink. Everybody wrinkled their noses. The whole world smelled of shit and sweat. It wasn't pretty. My eyes started watering immediately. And Shona asked, “Mommy, what smells so bad?” Da grumpled, but said nothing. Big Jes and Little Klin exchanged a glance. “Linneans don't know much about sewage, do they?” One of the scouts heard that and gave them a disapproving glare.

We walked down the main avenue, gawking like Chinese tourists at Disneyland. It was hard to believe this was all real. It looked like false fronts, but the couple of buildings we peeked into were real all the way through to the outhouses in the back. That explained part of the smell.

The first night, we stayed at the Boffili Hotel, down at the far end of town; at least it was away from the stink. Mom-Woo had sort of been expecting it to be the kind of hotel with nice rooms and hot baths, but it wasn't. It was just a bunch of tents built against the outer walls of Callo City, which was kind of like an old-fashioned fort; all the walls were made out of sandbags. There was no electricity, so there were no lights or televisions or computers, and if you wanted hot water you had to boil it yourself. The bathtubs were brick washtubs and you had to fetch the water from a pump outside.

Lorrin and Big Jes both laughed at the moms' annoyance. Klin said it was a test. If we couldn't handle this, we certainly couldn't handle living on Linnea, and that pretty much ended that discussion. In short order, Klin organized all the kids into a bucket brigade to bring in water for the tub and start it boiling. Big Jes and Klin brought in firewood. Mom-Lu arranged a bath schedule, almost like home, and lined us up like a car wash. We went from station to station, and all of us kids were soaped, scrubbed, rinsed, toweled and tucked into bed in less than an hour. The beds were sort of soft and sort of lumpy. They were stuffed with feathers and a couple times I got stuck with the sharp end of a feather poking through the sheet. But I slept mosty okay.

The next morning, the sun came up earlier than it should have been legally allowed to and turned the whole world orange. That ugly light again. Almost all of us shielded our eyes against it when we marched across to the community hall for breakfast. It had sandbag walls, but a canvas roof. One whole end of it was an old-fashioned kitchen, with the canvas rolled back to let the smoke out, and cooks making
real
eggs and bacon! And fresh bread that they took out of the oven and sliced while I watched! And butter that came from a real boffili cow! I was afraid to eat food that hadn't been safely processed, but Mom-Woo said this was the only kind of food we could expect to find on Linnea. It smelled different, but not completely awful.

Most of the grown-ups said they liked it, but Klin and Rinky made faces as they tasted everything. I decided I sort of liked the food, even if it was weird. They told us we could eat as much as we wanted, so I went back for seconds and thirds—until I had tasted everything. Real sausage and real jelly and real syrup on real pancakes, so that sort of made up for the lumpy beds.

After that, we were supposed to go on a walking tour of Callo City with Birdie, but everybody had to wait until Nona and I threw up. Klin started to laugh at us, but he stopped when his stomach started to hurt. That was because Big Jes' elbow bumped into it a little.

The real Callo City on Linnea was a lot bigger than this, but there was only room in the training dome for a partial reconstruction. Most of the important places were recreated here, because we would need to be familiar with them. The Boffili Hotel was built along the northwest wall, which was called Immigrant's Corner. Southeast of that was Merchant's Circle. Long Avenue stretched diagonally between them, and most of the hotels and businesses along it were nearly-exact duplicates of their counterparts on Linnea. Any Linnean passing through Callo City would have traveled up “Immigration Alley.” When we crossed over, we would have the same experience as the real Linneans.

The city was up on a hill because during winter, the snow sometimes got piled as high as ten meters. And during the spring thaw, the flood waters could be as tall as a great-horse. So settlements had to be on high ground. But also, the high vantage gave the people who lived there a good lookout for range fires, boffili stampedes, kacks, bandits, tornados, hurricane storms and other dangers.

All the buildings in Callo City were built on high foundations, and they had steep roofs slanting down into deep trenches. This was so that snow couldn't pile up too deep, and when it slid down, it wouldn't block
the streets. Later, when it melted, it would fill the water tanks and canals under the buildings, or it would run off down the slope into the lake. Most of the buildings had covered arcades along their sides, again with steep slanted roofs. Lorrin explained that this was so that when the winter snows came, the people would still have clear walkways.

They hadn't simulated winter in Linnea Dome yet, because the dome was still too new, but they were talking about having one in the next year or so, certainly before we crossed over. And it wasn't just to test us. The Linnean ecology depended on regular freezing and flooding, so they had to schedule floods or the forests would suffer, and the animals that lived in them too.

There were already lots of boffili and bunny-deer and kacks living in Linnea Dome, except the kacks weren't running free yet. For now, the kacks were living in a long canyon with rocky walls too steep for them to climb. Birdie said there was a plan that someday the kacks would roam free in the northern ranges of the dome, so they could feed on the herds of bunny-deer when they started to get too big. Da asked if that might not be a problem for humans, but Birdie said that all the kacks were implanted; if they got too close to a great-horse or a human, they would be automatically stunned. The techs were sure that this would work, but nobody was in any great rush to test it yet. Linnea Dome was still too new. And the kacks were awfully big.

All of the people and all of the great-horses in Linnea Dome were also implanted, so everybody's health and location could be monitored constantly. Even though the dome was supposed to be a perfect duplicate of Linnea for training colonists, it was also a laboratory for studying how this part of that world worked, so they were always tinkering and measuring and monitoring.

There were spybirds overhead all the time; we couldn't see them, but we'd been told; and I was pretty sure there were wabbits in the underbrush as well, though we never really saw them either. Sometimes we'd see dogthings chasing wildly through the grass, but we never saw what they were hounding after. There were probably cameras in the rocks and trees as well. Lorrin told us that we should assume that everything we said and did was recorded, that the intelligence engines were always watching and listening, so this would be a good place for us to start practicing keeping secrets, so we'd be in the habit when we got to Linnea.

Over two thousand species of plant, animal and insect had been transplanted from Linnea and it looked like the ecology had been perfectly duplicated, but Birdie said there were probably at least ten thousand
more species that they'd missed; no place is ever as simple as it looks. I couldn't figure out what other kinds of plants and animals there might be—maybe Birdie was talking about bugs and beetles and birds and different kinds of ground-rats and burrowing things. Critters you wouldn't see normally.

Mosty we were surrounded by rolling waves of razor grass. The grass was taller than a man, and on a windy day, you could see it rippling like green fire. Later in the year, it would turn brown and brittle. Here and there, the grass was spotted with those funny-looking short furry trees, and wherever there was a pond or a lake, there were also a couple of sleeping willows. Out on the prairie, travelers who needed to water their horses always looked for willows as evidence of water.

On the second day, we all piled onto a huge wagon pulled by two great-horses for a ride across the prairie to give us a sense of what we'd find across most of the continent. Once we were out of sight of Callo City, it was pretty spooky. There weren't any landmarks. And most trails were overgrown by razor grass in a matter of days. So cities had to put up markers for hundreds of klicks in every direction, pointing travelers the right way. We passed one of them, and an outpost tower too, with semaphore flags; but mosty, once we got away from Callo City, we were on our own. We didn't see any sign of people.

We headed toward the “mountains” first, so we could see what the limits of the world were. From a distance, the mountains looked white, but when we got closer, we saw the hillsides flashing with albino aspen, flickering like the noise on an old television screen. Here and there, up and down the slopes, were scattered groves of gnarly oaks, all twisted together so badly they were mosty one big wooden knot. Birdie said that some of the older cities had walls of gnarly oaks all around them, that's how hard it was to get through an old grove—unless you were a monkli and went up into the canopy. From the crest of one of the hills, we saw a herd of boffili. Later we saw some emmos and bunny-deer.

Later, we also saw farms. It didn't look like there were that many here, but Birdie said that every farm was at least a kilometer from the nearest neighbor, so we wouldn't see a lot of them. And no, not every farm had a great-horse. There were only a dozen great-horses in this dome and they all had to be shared. There were more on the way, but it was hard work buying a horse and transporting it. The problems were enormous—in more ways than one. Birdie said that every great-horse in the dome cost a million dollars or more; that's how hard they were to bring over. And they cost another half million a year to maintain.

Some of the farms were close to Callo City, because that's how the city got most of its food, but most were far away, so the colonists could learn how to be self-sufficient. “You'll have to learn how to grow your own food,” Birdie said. “And you'll probably go hungry for a while, until you pick up the knack of harvesting and preserving.”

“What if we don't grow enough ... ?” Rinky asked.

“We won't let you starve, if that's what you're worried about,” said Birdie. “But don't plan on any pizza deliveries either. If you don't grow enough crops to make it through the winter, I promise you, your subsistence rations will be only marginally better than starvation. You will have to deal with the consequences of your mistakes here.”

“Ick,” said Klin. “I don't like the sound of that.”

“We'll just have to make sure we grow more than enough. That's all,” said Da-Lorrin, but even he didn't sound too sure of himself.

“Does everybody have to learn how to farm the land?” Rinky asked.

“Farming is the most important work in the world,” Birdie said quietly. “If you don't farm, you don't eat.”

“But here on Earth, we don't have to farm. We have machines to do it.”

“On Linnea, you won't have machines. When we send you over, you'll know how to survive on your own. Or we won't send you.” Birdie was quite insistent that all of the colonists had to learn self-sufficiency. Later, some could make their way to the cities; but so far, only scouts had been to the larger settlements. They'd come back with a lot of recordings and even a few artifacts, but they hadn't tried to live there yet. Birdie didn't say so, but I got the feeling there was something weird about the cities that she wasn't ready to tell us yet.

Apparently the society of Linnea—at least this part of it—was rigidly structured. Birdie said that not all the rules had been figured out yet. There were rules for marriage and kinship and inheritance and all kinds of conditions on contractual obligations. A lot of it had to do with their religion. Birdie said we'd start learning about that right away, because there was so much to learn. For instance, Linnean marriages were only one man and one woman, and they had to be approved by some kind of council and registered in each community. Families had to live in cooperative communities so all the children could be taught at the same school. If a family wasn't part of a community, they were denied important rights and privileges. There was no way around it—at least not yet.