Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  “Weren’t they glad to see you?”

  “That’s the bad news. They’d forgotten all about us. They must have had a rough time those first few generations, and somewhere along the line, Earth stopped being history and became myth.”

  “Didn’t you just tell them the truth?”

  “It wasn’t that easy. They didn’t believe us. They killed the contact teams.”

  “Huh—?”

  “Would you believe it if someone came up suddenly and said you were really the great-grandchild of alien explorers?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess not.”

  “That’s the problem. They don’t want to hear it. It sounds too outlandish to them. That’s the problem with a lot of us—we don’t want to hear anything that will unsettle us.”

  “Are we going to see a gate today?” That was Parra, changing the subject.

  “Not today. There’s a lot of other stuff that you need to see first.”

  Birdie was right; there was so much to see I couldn’t remember it all. A lot of it was pretty boring. There were these big buildings where hundreds of intelligence engines worked night and day. The intelligence engines monitored all the hours and hours of video coming back from the different worlds, looking for interesting stuff. If they found anything really important, they posted it for people to review, only there weren’t enough people to look at all the things they found.

  Birdie said that the primary goal is to develop new Earths, places where people can just drive through the gate and go right to work, planting farms and building cities. Lots of farms and lots of cities. But opening a gate is a very expensive proposition; it costs three billion dollars to build the nexus itself, and at least a hundred million a year to maintain. And that’s just for the physical plant. It costs three times that much to pay for all the people necessary to run the operation. See, the first thing they do when they open a gate is send over probes to bring back samples. Hundreds of thousands of samples. So opening up a new world also means building a whole city to service the gate traffic, and that means training thousands and thousands of people for all the different kinds of access and analysis and follow-through.

  The most important thing to find out is whether or not the world can support human life; but if it can, it probably already has life of its own, so then the gate scientists have to see what kind of life it is; and eventually, what they really want to know is how hard will it be for humans to live in such an environment.

  On one world, they found creatures like dinosaurs, only different; mosty what the dinosaurs might have turned into if a comet hadn’t smacked into the Earth. That was interesting, but it was also an ethical dilemma, because if we moved over there, we’d have to wipe out a lot of local life.

  On a second world, all they found was mosty barren rock and some kind of yucky green slime that only grew on the shady side of boulders near the acid shores. There wasn’t the right kind of air to breathe, so the big problem there would be introducing the right kind of bacteria and plankton and lichens to create a breathable atmosphere, one with enough oxygen. But that was a heavy-gravity world. Nearly thirty percent heavier. So they decided not to terraform it and were using it mosty for mining operations.

  On a third world there were giant hairy red worms and an ecology so aggressive and dangerous that only robots were allowed to go across. And most of those were dismantled by the local life-forms in a matter of hours. They weren’t sure what to do with that world—they couldn’t afford to study it forever, they didn’t dare send people over, and they didn’t dare risk any of its life-forms escaping to Earth. Eventually it would have to be closed, unless somebody could think of a compelling reason for keeping it open.

  One of the places we toured was the robot factory. There was a whole unit dedicated to building probes to go into new worlds and explore them, making maps and charts of all the terrain. Every world had different conditions and so a new set of probes had to be designed and built for each world, depending on what conditions existed on the other side.

  Birdie showed us all the different kinds of probes. My favorites were the ones that looked like transparent airplanes. They were sort of like city monitors, only better. These were built to stay up in the air for years if they had to, high enough so that you couldn’t see them from the ground, but with cameras that were so good they could read license plates from a mile up—that is, if there were any license plates to read.

  Birdie said that all the probes were set to self-destruct automatically at the first hint of danger or failure, vaporizing themselves so completely that there wouldn’t be any pieces big enough to interfere with local life-forms; this was especially important on Linnea where the pieces might be found by people who weren’t supposed to know they were being watched.

  One of the factory guides explained that all the probes talk to each other. They’re a stochastic network, reforming on the fly; they relay their signals back through the gate, back to New Mexico or Houston or Australia or wherever. There, the intelligence engines process everything, correlating and calculating and analyzing. “We know more about the weather on Linnea than the Linneans do,” Birdie said.

  That’s when Rinky asked, “Do you ever find a planet with intelligent life already there? I mean aliens.”

  Birdie looked like she wished Rinky hadn’t asked the question. “Well, yes and no. The Australians found a world once that looked promising, but it was filled with different species of—we don’t even know what to call them. They’re so different we have nothing to compare them to. They looked like two-legged termites. Or naked mole rats. About Kaer’s size. They dig deep tunnels into the earth or they built giant mounds above the ground. We’ve studied them for years now, but nobody is willing to say if they’re sentient or not. Their behavior is sophisticated, but so is the behavior of termites and ants. We’ve tried sending over contact robots—but every time, they immediately dismantled them. So we’re definitely not going to risk human beings. We’re not sure if they don’t recognize other lives or what, we just don’t know yet. It’s an interesting world, but its very existence raises scientific and ethical questions that we’re not prepared to address; there’s even some talk about shutting down that gate.”

  Birdie went on to say that for every good gate that gets opened, there are at least five more that can’t be used for one reason or another. In addition to the sixteen gates open to good worlds, there are fifty-seven more that are open but unusable, and nine gates that are permanently locked for security reasons—and these are the ones that they just don’t talk about. Plus there are all the gates that were attempted, that were deemed unacceptable, and dismantled and rebuilt to new specifications. Gates are a big industry. We need them for the import of metals, water, fuels, electricity, gases and other necessary resources—even agriculture. Four of the worlds already have successful farming communities. According to Birdie, at the present rate of growth, gates will provide nine percent of all global mining resources within ten years, and within a hundred years, maybe 100 percent. She wouldn’t say how much food, though; they hadn’t yet decided if alien crops were safe.

  After that, we saw a bunch of other buildings. Most of them looked like factories or schools. There were a lot of places where folks were studying the language of Linnea and watching videos of Linneans talking to each other. It all sounded like mish-mash to me. I didn’t see how anyone could learn it, let alone speak it, but people did.

  And then after that, we went over to the “macroscope” which was kind of like a multiplex theater, only instead of movies there were pictures coming in from the different probes so we could see what was happening in the three active worlds that the New Mexico campus serviced, and the two prospective sites. One was Linnea, of course. The second one was the dinosaur world, and mosty they were just studying it, trying to decide how safe it might be to have people go across. The third gate opened onto a world almost completely frozen over; but it was a good source for ice, which meant water for New M
exico, Arizona and Texas. Some people were arguing that they should shut that gate for a bit and then come back when the ice age was over; only nobody knew if this was a cold period or a warm period for this world, so they were still studying. And meanwhile, sucking out water and electricity for the southwest. The water made the gate cost-effective, so they might just leave it like it is.

  Birdie explained, “Every world is useful in some way. If there’s no life, we can still mine minerals and gases and chemicals. And if there is life, it’s always different. That means new plants, new animals, new things that we can use. We’re always discovering new foods, new spices, new flavors—and most important, new medicines. The thing about gateworlds, you’re always going to be surprised. More surprised than you can imagine—even when you know you’re going to be surprised.”

  And then she got very serious. She looked at all of us when she said it. “Those of you who are planning to be scouts or emigrants, you need to start learning this now. If you go through a gate, you have to start with one single fact—you cannot assume anything. Remember that. Everything is different on the other side. Remind yourself of it every morning. And maybe you’ll survive.”

  DINOSAURS

  THE NEXT DAY WE VISITED the world-domes, each like a zoo, but not really. Each dome was at least a kilometer across, or more. And each one had a different environment in it, holding all the various plants and animals from whatever specific part of the gate-world it was simulating. There were twenty different domes. From a distance they looked like big pink pimples to me, but Rinky said they looked like tits. Mom-Woo gave her a look that said that kind of remark wasn’t appropriate here and Rinky shut up. Mom-Lu whispered to Mom-Woo, “I think Rinky’s getting ready for puberty. We’re going to have to talk about that.”

  “I am not,” said Rinky, and Mom-Woo gave her another look.

  Most of the domes you couldn’t go into. We had to look in through thick security windows. This was to protect the creatures inside from our bugs and vice versa.

  Birdie said the most dangerous part of crossing over to any world with its own life was that the germs would almost certainly be different. Every world has its own microbe ecology. And germs go through so many generations in a week, a month, a year, that after a thousand or two thousand or ten thousand years, the bacteria and viruses and whatever else there was would have had the chance to evolve a million different ways. So one of the first things the scientists have to do to make it safe to visit any new world is develop vaccines and medicines for everything we find over there.

  The other side of it, though, is even harder. When we cross over to a new world, we risk infecting the things over there with our bugs. And they’re no more likely to have any more immunity to our germs than we’ll have to theirs. This is especially true for Linnea, which already has human beings—but with three thousand years of one-sided separation, so who knew what immunities they might have gained or lost? So we would have to be completely sterilized before we went. Everything inside and out—from the mites that lived in our eyelashes to the germs in our guts that help us digest our food. Birdie said it wouldn’t hurt, but we might have queasy stomachs and diarrhea for a couple of days while we got used to their equivalents.

  And it’s not just the germs. It’s all the plants and all the animals too. We can’t risk accidentally introducing any of their species to our world, or our species to theirs. The Linnea we’d come back to when the gate was reopened was very different than the Linnea that had been there when the gate was closed. The scientists theorized that there had been some mass die-offs simply due to the consequences of exposure to terrestrial life.

  Birdie said this was the most difficult part of the job, keeping the world-gates biologically secure—a lot harder than learning the language or teaching people how to behave on a new world or even figuring out a valid set of coordinates for a new gate—because there were so many different interrelationships in an ecology, we could never know them all.

  That first day, we only visited two of the world-domes. The first one was the one with the dinosaurs. They weren’t the same kinds of dinosaurs like we’d had on Earth 65 million years ago, but they looked like they could have been.

  There weren’t any people living on dinosaur world, except a few explorers who only went over there to study it. Birdie said we probably weren’t going to colonize it. Maybe only a few little parts. Research stations, not real settlements. Because there was still so much that the scientists wanted to study that they didn’t want to risk contamination.

  We couldn’t go down to the floor of the dinosaur dome. It was too dangerous. Instead, we rode above the simulated savanna on a kind of aerial-car hung from the roof of the dome. It was almost like flying. The pilot could drive the vehicle almost anywhere he wanted because the suspension carriage navigated on a set of overhead cables, kind of like those overhead cameras they use at football games. Plus, he could lower the car to give us closer looks or raise it quickly if any of the bigger creatures got too close.

  There were a lot of different creatures in dino-dome. It was the biggest of all the domes, covering more than a hundred square kilometers. There were at least fifteen different kinds of herbivores there, all sizes, but they didn’t have a lot of them, only a few small herds, but on dino-world some of the herds had thousands, even tens of thousands of individuals. There were birds too, of course, but not like Earth-birds. Some of them had long stringy feathers, some had fur; two of the birds looked more like big black bats.

  We saw a large herd of herbivores that looked like small gazelles, only they had long lizardly tails that they held up in the air behind them, and birdlike faces with sharp beaks. They nipped at the grassy tufts like chickens pecking for bugs. Another family of creatures thundered through the grass like armored tanks with horns; they were the size of rhinos. They were big and leathery and had little piglike eyes that made them look distrustful and mean. Birdie said they were distrustful and mean.

  And then we saw the biggest ones of all. They were the size of blimps, colored all shades of brown and gold, darker on top and brighter along their bellies; they had necks and tails longer than their bodies. They had to lift their tails every time they lifted their heads, something to do with equalizing blood pressure—but they could lift their heads high enough to peer into the monorail car. One of them did and all the little-uns screamed. Me too. But Birdie said there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Birdie called them Patty-saurs, after the woman who discovered them. She said they only ate people by accident and usually they spit them out after a few bites because they didn’t like the taste. I didn’t know if she was joking or not.

  Birdie said that there were over a thousand species of smaller animals in this dome—a lot of little things that were sort of like lizards and squirrels and frogs and scorpions. It was tricky to balance a whole ecology, but they were doing pretty good with just this cross section. So far, anyway.

  Part of the problem was balancing the herbivores against the carnivores. Birdie said that you need about 120 kilos of herbivore for every kilo of carnivore. And to support that many herbivores, you need at least 100 times that amount of edible foliage. The ratio varies depending on the diet, and because they weren’t really sure what the right ratios were on dino-world, they’d brought in as much native foliage as they could, and were hoping that the animals would adjust their populations accordingly. So far, only a few species had gone into decline. And some of the others were thriving too well—so maybe there were some predators missing still.

  But the predators they did have were impressive. We saw a family of things like allosaurs, only bigger. They were faster and meaner than the equivalent T. Rex would be. We stayed well above them, but they were snoozing lazily and paid us no attention.

  We also saw a pack of red-brown raptor-beasts. They were striped with gold, and they had dark brown shading around their eyes, which gave them a kind of clownish appearance—but only until they started running. Then they held the
ir tails high and their bodies low and forward, and with their necks outstretched, their heads waving back and forth, they bounded across the ground like giant roadrunners. Even though they were sort of funny looking, nobody laughed.

  Birdie told us that this was a good day because we were getting to see so many different kinds of animals. The spookiest were the coyote-lizards, spidery-gaunt horrors that watched us warily as we flew past. They had the most intelligent faces. Birdie said they were mosty carrion-eaters, following the allosaurs like hyenas and jackals; but they’d occasionally been seen hunting their own prey in packs. She said that mosty they went after the gazelle-things, but they’d been known to worry some of the larger animals too, especially during calving season.

  But the highlight of the afternoon was when the pilot checked his scanner-display and took us around to see King Rex, the one they show in all the videos. He wasn’t as big as the allosaur-things, but he was impressive just the same, and someday he’d be a lot bigger. He had just killed one of the rhino-things the day before and he was still torpidly guarding the kill until he was hungry again. He made me think of a sleeping alligator and I didn’t want to be around when he woke. Pilot must have felt the same way. We didn’t approach too closely.

  Later, three of the red-brown raptors chased underneath the monorail for awhile, hissing and screeching and leaping; but we were high enough off the ground that we knew they couldn’t get to us. Mikey called them names, but Nona hid her eyes against Mom-Lu’s side. The expression on Mom-Lu’s face suggested that she didn’t like the raptors either.