Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two

by David Gerrold

  Almost immediately, the whole boulder began to moan. I looked at da, alarmed. Then we both laughed at the same time. “Boffili in distress,” said the lookout. “And an occasional kack howl. Works wonders. No carrion smells tonight. That gets too intense. But—” He frowned off into the distance. “—just the kack noises alone make the boffili nervous. Very nervous. We have to watch them carefully.”

  “What do you watch for?” I asked.

  “Shh,” said da. “Don’t distract him. Take the helmet off, we’d better go down.” As we climbed down the ladders, da said, “They have to listen for certain warning sounds the boffili make. Snorts of fear or anger. The animals snort once or twice a minute. If they start snorting five or six times a minute, they’ve gotten spooked. They’ve been snorting three or four times a minute since they started moving south, so clearly they don’t like leaving their normal migration path. We’ll tolerate a little bit of unease, we can’t risk much more.”

  “What would happen if the boffili do spook?”

  “A couple of things—most likely, a scatter. Not a full stampede, just a small localized event, maybe a few hundred animals at most. Because the boffili tend to give each other a lot of room, panics don’t start easily. If the initial stimulus has a low level of impact, and only a relatively few animals move out, they might not affect too many others. You can always depend on the thickness of the grass to slow them down a little, especially in this area. And as they move away from the center of the disturbance, they move into the larger mass of the herd. If the larger mass of animals has a lower level of anxiety, the upset of a few animals will dissipate quickly. The herd will function as a calming influence and the scattering individuals will lose their momentum and space themselves out again in a few minutes.

  “On the other hand, if the herd has a higher than normal level of nervousness, or if you start with a large enough initial disturbance, then you get a scattering that doesn’t fade out. Maybe they get too scared, and the thickness of the grass frustrates them instead of calms them. And then you get a chain reaction of anxiety rippling outward from the center, spreading from one animal to the next. If the wave of disturbance gets large enough, you hit critical mass. The wave of panicking animals overwhelms the stability of ones in front of the wave; they panic too and become part of the wave. It still could die out. Animals on the leading edge could collide with each other or trip over a gully, or who knows what—or the wave could just collapse for no apparent reason at all. Chaotic functions, remember that discussion? But above a threshold level—determined by a variety of factors, ground conditions, spacing of the animals, time of day, how much they’ve eaten, mating season, overall level of anxiety, initial stimuli—the panic will escalate geometrically and the scattering will, yes, become a stampede. We’ve interrupted their migratory pattern, so Smiller and Jorge and all the other specialists think we have a very real possibility of—who knows? Maybe the very worst.”

  Da stopped me just before we went down the last ladder. “We know what it looks like when a major herd stampedes—what kind of damage they leave in their wake. Six years ago, it happened. I’ve seen the video, Kaer. I can’t remember ever seeing anything so scary. Do you remember what they said in the seminars? We have to regard the herd the same way we think of tornadoes and range fires—as a force of nature so huge, we can’t do anything but try to keep out of its way.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “In the boulder—?” I gave him the look, the skeptical one. “Keep out of the way?”

  “Smiller says the boulder should protect us.” And then, he added, “Theoretically, it should. Nobody’s ever tested it though. I mean, how do you test a thing like this?” He kept his hand on my shoulder, the trust-me gesture.

  “Da,” I said. “The size and shape of this station—not every animal will see it in time. Most will run around it—but too many of them will charge headlong into it. How many head-on impacts can one of these shells withstand before it cracks? How many more before the animals start crashing through? And if the whole herd panics, we’ll have a stampede that lasts all night long. If we get hit with that much meat—it doesn’t matter what Smiller says, does it?”

  “Well, I see you’ve done your math.” He took a breath. “All right, yes. A stampede will put us in danger. So I want you to stay close to me. Now, look—Smiller has choppers orbiting thirty klicks south of here. If the herd breaks, she’ll order an immediate evac. They’ll lift us right off the top. She says she can empty this station in fifteen minutes if she has to. If you hear the alarm, you don’t wait for me, you go straight up to the Crow’s Nest. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, da. Fifteen minutes, huh? I hope we don’t have to find out the hard way if the boulder can last that long.”

  He gave me a quick hug. “Come on, let’s go down to the Op Center and watch them blow up the tracks.”

  “And then we’ll run up the stairs and wait for the choppers—?”

  He pointed. “We’ll use the elevator.” I followed the direction of his finger. The elevator was an endless loop of cable suspended between a pulley at the top and another one at the bottom. It ran continuously, one side going up, the other coming down. The cable was strung with stirrups spaced about a meter apart. As I watched, a woman grabbed a stirrup with one hand, and as it rose, she shoved first one foot, then the other into the second stirrup down. The cable lifted her all the way up to the Crow’s Latrine where she stepped off easily. “All right?”

  “All right, da.”

  At least, now I knew why he had insisted on taking me up to the top of the boulder.

  Boom

  It was another forty minutes before Smiller decided that the boffili had moved far enough away from the tracks that she was willing to risk detonating the explosives. When she finally let Alex depress the plunger, there was a puff of smoke on the displays, and very little else. She sent a couple of spybirds circling in, and as soon as we had visual confirmation that the tracks were shattered beyond repair, she grunted in satisfaction.

  Then she swiveled in her chair and looked at the other display—the big tactical board. It updated in sections because it was a composite of multiple information sources, including several ultra-high spybirds, flying at stratospheric heights. What she was looking for was the response of the herd to the explosion. Even zooming in to ten square klicks, there didn’t seem to be any serious reaction, just some minor slow scattering from the closest animals.

  The southern edge of the herd was still sweeping across the yellow line of the tracks, except for a little notch of avoidance around the boulder’s unpleasant concert of distress calls.

  “All right,” she said, satisfied. “Looks like we dodged that particular bullet. Let’s pick up our skirts and go. Alex?”

  “Copy that.” He swiveled to a different work station and began a complex series of commands. “All right, team,” he spoke into his comm-set. “Secure yourselves. All non-essential personnel off the shell, you have two minutes.” He flicked a switch, and a klaxon reverberated three times. Then he began punching up a new series of commands, watching as his board lit up in rows of green lights. He looked over to Smiller. “Check, check, and double-check. Ready to winch.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Above us, the winch motors began to grind. Around us, various things started to creak and squeak. Da and I were sitting in swivel chairs halfway back on the lower level of Bus-Tractor One. We could see and hear everything that happened in the control center. A thought occurred to me. “Da? Which weighs more? The shell or the Bus-Tractors?”

  “The shell,” he said, blandly.

  The way he said it, I knew he hadn’t told me everything. “Da—if the shell weighs more than the tractors, then when we start winching up the cables, we’ll just lift ourselves up.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “We had to do that last night to get the jammed tread off. They designed the boulder so they could service the bus-tractors as necessary.”

  “Da—�
� I repeated. “If the shell weighs more than the tractors, then when we start winching up the cables . . . we’ll just lift ourselves up. We won’t go anywhere.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You may have a point there.”

  The sounds of the winches grew louder. They were turning steadily now. But the buses weren’t lifting. I glanced out the window. Was the shell moving? I couldn’t tell. There wasn’t a single pulley at the top, there were several—it was a complicated block and tackle arrangement. It meant less work for the winches, but it would take longer for the shell to lift.

  “Hmm,” I said. “Obviously, we’ve shifted some of the weight from the shell into the vehicles—” I glanced around. There were a lot of team members in both of the buses, and on top of them as well. There was part of the weight. But that couldn’t possibly be enough to offset the weight of the shell. Were the two vehicles that carefully balanced against the weight of the shell halves? No, this was a logic problem more than a math problem.

  Da saw me frowning about it. “Did you notice anything interesting about the tractors?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Of course, I hadn’t paid much attention to them since I’d gotten to the boulder. There’d been too much else to see, too much else on my mind.

  “Do you want to go have a look?”

  Without answering, I got up out of my chair and walked to the door. The door was open and the steps were down. I put both hands on the door frame and leaned out, looked left, looked right, looked down—

  I came back in and sat down again in the big swivel chair. “Did somebody bolt some tanks to the sides of the tractors? I didn’t see those at the Hole.”

  “Nope. The original design includes multiple water tanks. Five to a side, I think. 500 litres each. . . .” Da was smiling. I did the math in my head. 10000 litres of water. How much did that weigh? And what about the inboard water tanks? How much more was there aboard? Was all that water a separate chopper trip—? Da saw by my expression that I’d figured it out, but he waited for me to say it.

  “You pump the water into the shell when you want to lift the tractors. You pump the water back into the tractors when you want to lift the shell.”

  “Very good, Kaer.”

  “The lighter gravity helps too, doesn’t it?”

  “Somewhat, yes.” He pointed out the window. “Look, the shell has started to lift.”

  The winches were turning faster now. The upward movement of the shell was slow, but perceptible. “How long will it take?”

  “Depends on how high they want to lift it. Smiller doesn’t want to leave too wide a trail, so she’ll probably want the base lifted above the wheels.”

  Jake came sliding down the fire pole then. “Ready for me?” he asked.

  “Just about,” replied Alex.

  Jake levered himself into the driver’s seat at the front of the command center and began powering up his control panel. It looked more like the cockpit of an airplane than the controls of a bus or a tractor. But there were a lot of separate things to control. “I’ve got green lights,” he reported. “Check, check, and double-check. Heading?”

  Smiller passed him a clipboard. He studied it for a moment, then looked up at an overhead display and punched in some numbers there. He swiveled around to look at the tactical board. The boulder’s course appeared on the screen. Alex and Smiller turned to study it too.

  “Looks good to me,” said Smiller. Alex nodded his agreement.

  “All right,” agreed Jake. He swiveled forward again, and pulled the control helmet down over his head. This would give him an unobstructed view of the world outside the boulder. He put his hands on the control yoke, and eased the tractors into half-gear. The floor beneath us began to vibrate.

  Smiller turned to her headset and began alerting the orbiting choppers of our change in position. They would get an automatic update relayed to them through the spybirds, and so would the station in the Hole, but Smiller obviously wanted the verbal confirmation too. It wasn’t enough that the computers knew it, she wanted to make sure the people knew it too.

  “Da,” I whispered. “How come Jake flies choppers and drives tractors too?

  “Everybody has to know at least three jobs. The more things you get certified to do, the more you get to do. Jake has six certifications, more than anyone else except Smiller. And Jorge, I think.”

  “And how many do you have?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer immediately. He was figuring out what he could safely say. Finally, “Well, I have three certificates I can tell you about, two I can’t, and two more that don’t officially exist. Does that help?”

  “It explains a lot,” I said, swiveling forward again. For one thing, it explained the reason everybody treated him with so much respect—and why I had been picked for my job and nobody else. I had a hunch that da’s unofficial certificates were part of the reason we’d been approved for Linnea Dome in the first place. Thinking back on it now, there had been something funny about the way we’d been approved so suddenly—and the way Irm and Betto and Morra had caved in on all their resistance. I wondered who had talked to them and what they’d said. Not that it mattered much now. Everything had worked out all right quickly enough. But someday, I wouldn’t mind knowing.

  The vehicles gave a little lurch then—and we were moving. Not very fast, but fast enough. Ten klicks an hour. By sunset, we would be within range of the rail-wagons. Smiller had been making noises about moving even closer under cover of dark, but Jake wasn’t certain that was a good idea. Even with the visibility provided by the control helmet, he didn’t feel comfortable driving in the dark. They hadn’t made a final decision yet, but I could tell Smiller was hoping to get to our Scouts tonight if she could.

  The other thing we had to worry about was the herd. They were north and east of us right now. And as long as we kept moving west, we would be moving away from them. But the projections on the tactical board showed that the entire target zone would be in the heart of the herd by sunset—if they kept spreading south. Our northern spybirds and choppers, the ones that had been herding the boffili, had already been recalled. They’d gotten their job done and Smiller was rearranging her resources now.

  “Smiller? Can I ask you something?”

  Smiller looked up from her board. An expression of annoyance flickered across her face, she didn't like being interrupted. But she caught herself and said, “What do you need, Angel?”

  “Um, I keep looking at the tactical board—and I keep wondering. Now that you’ve got the got the boffili mostly where you want them . . . where will they go after this? I mean, because we’ve disrupted their migration. Will they go back to their normal route, or what?”

  Smiller looked to da. He shrugged. “Good question,” she said.

  “Do you think they’ll go to Mordren?” I asked, pointing toward the display. They were spreading that way.

  Smiller swiveled around and studied the projection. “It sure looks like they will. In fact don't see how the herd can avoid the enclave. Essentially, we’ve got an avalanche of meat fifty or sixty klicks across. If it turns back north, no problem, it’ll miss Mordren. The hunters will take a few dozen like they always do, and the city will eat during the winter. But if they head south or east, the Mordren river will funnel them further south. Who knows how far they’ll go? Unless they try to cross it there at the delta. And if they do that, then they’ll never get back to the great plains because they won’t find a route north from the east. They’ll sink into the swamps and drown.”

  “So we might have triggered an ecological disaster?” I asked.

  Smiller didn’t answer. But the look on her face was enough.

  “We have to turn the herd back north—” I said. “As soon as we can. We can’t let them die. The cows have their calves with them and—”

  “Kaer, stop. I know about the herd. I’ve lived with boffili for years, remember? You’ve made your point.”

  I shut up.

  Smiller swiv
eled back to her work station and frowned at her displays. She buried her chin in her fist. She said a word.

  “I apologize,” I whispered to da.

  “No, don’t. You did the right thing.”

  “But I’ve made Smiller’s job harder.”

  “Not really. If anything, you’ve made it easier.”

  “Huh? How?”

  “Because, when we get back home—when Smiller gets back home, now she can show that she averted a disaster instead of causing one. That’ll look good for everyone. You made a little extra work now. You saved a lot of problems later on. You’ll see. After she solves the problem, she’ll thank you.” He leaned over and ruffled my hair. “I love you, kiddo. You honor me. And your mother. And your whole family.”

  “Thank you, da.”

  Byrne came climbing over from the other vehicle then. She stabbed a finger at me. “All right, you—back in bed.”

  “Huh?”

  “We might need you tonight. I need you to sleep. I have a couple of injections for you, and some salve for your face and neck and arms.”

  “I don’t feel tired—” I protested.

  “It doesn’t matter. Everybody else is taking this chance to sleep. It looks like we’ll have a lot of work to do tonight. We’ll all need our rest. You too, Lorrin.”

  “Aye, aye, Doc.”

  We followed her aft, pulling curtains across the aisle to give us some dark and some privacy.

  Beneath us, I could feel the treads crunching steadily over the grass, but the floor was otherwise steady. We must have been leaving an ugly trail straight through the sea. I wondered if the Hale-Stones had any spybirds. If they did, they might see our track.

  “Don’t worry about that, Kaer,” da said as he helped me into my bunk. Byrne stepped in and unzipped my jumpsuit. She began sticking monitors to my skin.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because, we triggered EMP-bursts over the Motherland, Calitoo, and Mordren last night. And just in case they’d hardened any of their equipment, we started jamming all the frequencies this morning. And we’ve got hunter-killer spybirds out looking for rogues.”