Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two

by David Gerrold

  “Well, then that leaves us with the simplest plan of all. We catch the train on the open prairie and come down shooting. Horses, riders, everything. We have smart targeting. We can pretty well avoid hitting the wagons. And we can stay out of range of the crossbows until we’ve got total-kill confirmation. . . .”

  “As soon as you start shooting, the great-horses will probably bolt—”

  Jake nodded grimly. “We’ll have to take them out first.”

  “I hate that,” said Smiller, shaking her head. “And after we get our people out, then what? What do we do about the evidence?”

  “Incinerate it.”

  “With heavy winds rising? You’ll start a range fire.”

  Alex rubbed his chin. “I’ve got an idea. . . .” Everyone looked to him. “We’ve got some liquid nitrogen. Spray the bodies. The wagons too. Then shoot them, shattering them into fragments. The Linneans will find only unexplainable shreds. Very mysterious. Very miraculous. Just what we need.”

  “Have you got enough for a couple hundred bodies and twenty wagons?”

  Alex thought about it. “Three—no, four choppers. A day to get the liquid nitro, another day to bring it and the choppers through the Gates, and one more day to get them in position. Three days. Get the choppers as far the Earth Gate and we can have our own pilots bring them the rest of the way. We have enough pilots. We can do it.”

  I could see that Smiller was considering the plan. So far it sounded the most workable. She rested her head in the palm of her hand and tapped her fingers nervously against her temple. Around the table, everyone else was considering it too.

  A thought occurred to me, but I didn’t know if I had the right to say anything. But then I realized if I didn’t say anything, I’d have to live with my consequences a long, long time. “Um?” I raised my hand tentatively. “I’d like to say something. Please?”

  Amazingly, Smiller and the others stopped talking and looked to me. “Go ahead, Kaer.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “It means killing horses. It means killing people too, but I think from what you’ve said some of these people might deserve it. But even so, I think that whatever you decide to do, you should think of the Mother of the World. What would she want? What would she do? I think we should respect her world the way we found it. If we can,” I added.

  Smiller looked around the table. “Out of the mouths of children,” she remarked. “When we teach them this well, we should listen.” She steepled her hands in front of her face, almost as if she were praying. She closed her eyes for a moment, and I wondered if she were. But more likely, she was just thinking it over.

  When she opened her eyes again, she said, “Okay, let’s try this. Put the herd on the tracks two thirds of the way to Mordren. No stampede, just a lot of meat in the way. Meanwhile, we find a place to break the tracks—as close to the herd as possible—and we make it look like the boffili did it. We’ll need a place where we have good ground cover. Rolling hills, gullies, whatever. When the caravan gets to the broken track, we break the track behind them. Ten klicks back, twenty, whatever—maybe we can find a bridge across a gully and break it—we need something that keeps them from taking the wagons off the tracks, because they will if that let them keep going. It doesn’t matter how we do it, as long as we isolate the rail-wagons. Then we move the herd in—”

  She counted off her points carefully now. “If it looks like the herd will surround them, they’ll start getting real nervous.”

  “Nervous?” said Jake. “They’ll shit their pants.”

  Smiller ignored the interruption. She was still checking off the points of her argument. “In all probability—I can’t see that they won’t—the Magistrates will have sealed the wagons with magisterial locks. And the guards won’t dare break those locks to open the wagons. The Magistrates won’t let them. But will the Magistrates open the wagons to save the prisoners? They’ll consider it, certainly. But if the boffili start coming in fast enough, the troops won’t wait for them. They’ll withdraw—if they don’t bolt and run first. Nobody stands and waits for a thirty kilometer long herd of twenty ton dinosaur-sized mammals to pass around them. I’ll bet the drivers will unhitch the horses and follow the troops. The Magistrates will have to choose between staying or retreating.

  “Will the Magistrates consider the prisoners important enough to justify risking their lives to save them? I doubt it. They might even regard the boffili as an opportunity to let Linnea solve the problem for them, so the Holy Church can avoid dealing with a very sticky issue. Certainly, they fear our Scouts and what they might represent. . . . So I think they’ll retreat—without the prisoners. I seriously doubt anyone will stay with the rail-wagons. They’ll abandon the prisoners to the good will of the Mother. . . .

  “So let’s assume we have the wagons untended—or mostly untended. If anyone does stay with the wagons, we put them to sleep. That puts our Scouts to sleep too, but we can accept that. We’ll put vaporizing gas-mines along the tracks in the target area and trigger them before moving in—if we need to.” She glanced around the table. “So—does anyone see any problems with that?”

  “When we move the herd in, we put our observers at risk,” said Byrne.

  “Yes. We’ll have to pull the teams out as soon as the second piece of track is broken—before the herd starts moving. That’ll give us some logistical problems, but we’ll have to solve those after we select a site.” She pointed to someone across the table. “Get surveillance started on site-selection immediately.” He unfolded his phone and started whispering into it.

  Jake raised a paw. “I’ve got a question. How do we get our Scouts out of the wagons? And once we get them out, how do we get them off the prairie?”

  Smiller grinned. “We can get them out of the wagons with the liquid nitrogen. That’ll leave a nice mysterious hole. Getting them off the prairie is another matter. We don’t dare risk the choppers. Even a distant lightning bolt is enough to spook a herd.” She looked across to Alex. “What the about the boulder?”

  Alex shrugged. “We can hang it from a chopper and we can have it onsite within two days. But. . . .”

  “It doesn’t have to move, Alex. At least not very far. If it leaves tracks, the herd will cover them up anyway.” Smiller went on. “And if we work at night, it’ll look like just another big indistinct lump.”

  “It still makes too much noise.”

  “Enough to spook the herd?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What about silent-running?”

  “Depending on power usage and heat absorption and how many passengers aboard, I can give you fifteen to twenty hours. Maybe more. Once we have the Scouts aboard, the team can sit and wait for the herd to pass or try driving off-axis and call for a pickup. Your call.”

  Smiller glanced around the table. “Any comments? No? It looks like a plan to me. We have logical go-points. We’ll take it one step at a time. And we’ll adapt as necessary” She looked at her watch. “All right, everyone, let’s move out. Jake, file your flight plans and get your teams airborne. I want the tenders in the air,”—she glanced at her watch—“ten minutes ago!”

  She pointed at me. “You, upstairs with Byrne!” And to Byrne, “Get the fittings done quickly. The God-chopper boosts in 90 minutes.”

  Fitting

  I still didn’t know where I fit into the plan, but I had a pretty good idea what I was going to wear.

  First, Byrne had me try on a white body-stocking. It was too tight, so we went two sizes up and that fit fine. She packed three of them. And then she had me try on a whole bunch of other things too, a gold nightgown-thing that too much cloth and hung on me like a circus tent. When I came out of the fitting room complaining, Byrne just shook her head and said, “Wait.”

  There were two serious-looking fellows in jump suits also waiting with Byrne and da; their names were Tim and Barry. Tim held up a hand while Barry did something on a hand-held control panel. Suddenly, the nightgown began billow
ing around me in slow, languorous waves—as if it were blowing about in a slow-motion wind. “Stand still,” Tim said. Barry turned out the lights and did something else, and suddenly the material began glittering and sparkling like a neon sign. Da said, “You look like an electric butterfly.” I gave him the look.

  “It works in the lab,” said Byrne. “Will it work in the field?” Byrne asked Tim.

  “It should,” said Barry. “We over-engineered everything. And we tested it in the wind-tunnel. You can wear this in a hurricane if you want.”

  “I hope we won’t need to. All right, Kaer—take that off. Let’s find out how well you fly.”

  “Huh?” I followed them out into a larger space; almost a warehouse. Not all the lights were on, but I assumed it was part of a hangar deck or something, because of all the repair gear on the walls and the tracks and lights suspended from the ceiling.

  Barry brought out a harness thing, like a parachute and had me try it on. That was very uncomfortable, no matter how they adjusted it. I didn’t know what it was for, but I didn’t like it and I said so. “It hurts.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “It binds under my arms and it chafes under my legs.”

  “We could put some padding in the armpits, and maybe down here we could try a—”

  “No, this won’t work, believe me. It just doesn’t fit right. Please, Byrne—my moms have sewn enough clothes on me in the past year that I should know how something will fit by now.”

  Byrne exchanged a glance with Barry. “All right. We’ll use the body-shell.”

  “I told you,” said Barry. “I think the body-shell will work better for us anyway.” He was already pulling it down off a shelf. It looked like a transparent cast of the front of my body and it fit as closely as if I had laid down in clear plastic.

  “Lie down in this,” he said, putting it flat on a mat on the floor.

  “Will it hold me?” I rapped it with my knuckles. “It feels like glass.”

  “Much harder than that,” said Barry. “This will stop a crossbow bolt—” Byrne gave him a dirty look and he shut up abruptly.

  “Will I have to worry about that?” I asked. I ignored Byrne and looked at Barry. He hesitated. I was immediately sorry I’d asked the question, because I was certain I wasn’t going to like the answer.

  I looked to da. Da looked to Byrne. “Don’t hold back.” The way he said it, Byrne didn’t have a choice.

  She sighed. She brushed her hair back and turned directly to me. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Kaer. Yes, it could happen; but we don’t think it will. And if it does look like it might happen, we have you do this. But if you don’t want to, just say so now—”

  I looked over to da. He was wearing that expression that I hated; the one that said I’m not going to tell you what I want you to do. You have to make up your own mind, Kaer.

  So I made a face to let them know I was annoyed and laid down on the body-shell; Tim and Barry strapped me tightly into it with bindings across my shoulders and back and butt. Then they connected a set of wires under my arms and at my hips and up through my legs. Then the engineers did something at a console and the shell lifted up into the air until I was floating above their heads.

  “How does that feel?”

  I tried to shrug. You can’t really shrug while lying flat on your belly, so I said, “It feels fine. Very comfortable.”

  “It doesn’t hurt or pinch? No uncomfortable bumps anywhere?”

  “No. It feels like you made this to fit me exactly.”

  “We did. We got your body measurements from the Administration, but we worried you might have grown since your last exam. All right—” They lowered me down to the ground again. As I came down, the body shell tilted back sharply, dropping my feet directly under me—I came down standing.

  “Oof!”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll practice landings. First, we need to get your headset on. You’ll love this.” Tim brought out a glittery thing that would have looked like a diamond tiara if diamonds were gold, only it had wires and earpieces hanging down from it. Tim held it above my head for a moment, as if he were adjusting something, then he placed it on my head, carefully working the wires and other fittings into my hair. “This will work perfectly,” he said. “Your curls will hide the wires.” He did some other stuff and I could feel him fitting things that felt like clamps around my head. “Does that hurt?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, tell me if it does. We have to make the fitting as tight as possible. We can’t risk having your hat fall off. Just one more thing here—” He twisted the ear pieces into place, and pulled my hair around to cover them. From the front, they would be invisible. “Can you hear me?” whispered Byrne from across the room. She sounded like she was right next to me.

  “I can hear you perfectly,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “All right, one more thing,” said Tim. He brought out a shimmering golden thing that looked kind of like a necklace and kind of like a collar; it matched the tiara. He fastened it around my neck and studied it for a moment. “Say something,” he commanded.

  I started counting numbers slowly, until he told me to stop. “Okay, good. Now we can hear you.” He turned me around to face Byrne. “What do you think?”

  “Let’s see it with the lights out.”

  Tim stepped away from me and turned out the lights. Barry did something at his portable console—and suddenly the room around me lit up in shimmering colors. I held up my hands and the shadows told me that some of the light was coming from the collar around my neck, but most of it was coming from the tiara on my head.

  “Put your hands down, Kaer,” Byrne said. To Tim, she remarked, “I like the way it makes the hair glow. But I wish we could get more light on Kaer’s face.”

  “The makeup will help—unless you want to go with the mask.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “We agreed. We need a real face. Okay, kill the halo.” She stepped forward and took my chin in her hand, turning my face from side to side. “You look good, Kaer. Perfect for the part. I can see why everybody else thought so too. Do you know the word androgynous?”

  I shook my head.

  “The word comes from Earth. We use it to describe someone who looks as pretty as a girl and as handsome as a boy, both at the same time. You have an androgynous appearance. Your strawberry curls, your rosy cheeks, something in the way you smile—you have exactly the look we need. To make this work, you can’t think of yourself as either a boy or a girl, but something of both at the same time. Can you do that?”

  I thought of Rinky who hadn’t decided yet. And Cindy who’d changed herself into himself when he was old enough. I nodded my head. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Thank you.” She gave Barry a thumbs-up. “All right, let’s launch this bird.” She turned back to me and said, “When I tell you, reach up for the ceiling—and jump. Ready? Go!”

  I reached. I jumped—and bounced up into the air. The body-shell lifted me halfway to the ceiling. I shrieked in surprise—and delight.

  Barry stopped me in mid-air. I hung there for a moment, while the rig compensated for my motion. “No sudden moves, Kaer. You have to do everything slowly. Otherwise you put too much stress on the compensation routines in the rig. They can’t keep up if you start flailing around; so they’ll shut you down until they catch up, and we don’t want you swinging around out of control. Hold still for a moment and give the system a chance to calibrate your weight distribution.”

  I waited, hanging in mid-air. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just a little boring. Finally, Barry looked up from the control-box he held. “It’ll work. No problem.”

  Tim called up to me. “All right, we’re going to give you back control. Can you see how I have my hands? Hold your hands the same way—just like this.” He was holding his hands low and close to his body, but very relaxed. “Keep your hands down, until I tell you,” h
e said. “Feel your balance? Good. All right, very slowly now. Raise your arms and point them forward.”

  I did what he said—and almost immediately I started moving across the room. Startled, I pulled my hands back and came to a sudden stop in mid-air. For a moment, the rig shuddered, then compensated.

  “Good! Again! Hold your hands out. No, not in front of you, more out to the sides. Ten O’clock and two O’clock positions. Good! That looks good, you’ve got it now. Just one thing—you don’t have to hold your arms that straight. It looks rigid. You can bend them a little. That looks more natural. Don’t worry, Kaer. We can go slowly until you get the hang of it. We have enough time for you to practice. We want you to look good. We have to convince them or we might as well not bother.”

  Da called up to me, “So just relax and concentrate on your flying and try not to worry about the fact that the success of the entire mission depends on you.” When I looked down, he was grinning—and I realized he was joking with me, telling me not to take it so serious. It was just what I needed to hear. I laughed and waved—and the rig shuddered in reaction.

  “Let me try again,” I said. I held my arms out slowly.

  “Right,” said Tim. “Use your arms to direct yourself, just like a bird. Imagine yourself an eagle.” I moved forward, stopped, moved forward, stopped again. The rig was very responsive, and I was still moving too jerkily. I was worried that I was doing it wrong, no matter what Byrne said—but I glanced back and saw da smiling at me and I knew everything was all right.

  “Very good, Kaer. Now try turning. Lean to the right. Not too far, not too far—good, good! Very good.” If I lowered one arm and lifted the other, I banked and turned. It was sort of instinctive, but not quite, because how sharply I turned depended on how fast I was moving.