Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  The day before we moved, the horse we were supposed to use, Leadfoot, threw a shoe; so instead we got Mountain. The Administration didn’t usually lend Mountain out to families because she was supposed to be only for the use of the scouts. She was the biggest horse in the dome; but she was also one of the gentlest and best behaved. So because we’d done so well with our wagon and because they didn’t want us to fall behind schedule and because they wanted to start winter soon, they made a special exception for us. I was thrilled.

  Mountain was big and beautiful and probably the smartest great-horse in the dome as well. She was famous for poking her nose into second-story windows looking for her grooms whenever she got hungry. And there was a story that she’d scared the yell out of Molina’s new bride on their wedding night. But that was a long time ago. Molina was head-groom now, and he warned us that we had to treat Mountain like a lady or she’d just ignore us. She’d head back to the stable, wagon and all. Molina said she could be pretty headstrong if she wanted to be, but I guessed anything that big would be. Mountain looked more like a force of nature to me than a lady; but she had such a sparkle of wisdom in her eyes that I fell in love with her at first sight.

  I wished she could have been our horse all the time; Aunt Morra said I wished that about every horse I met, and she was right, I wished we could have a thousand great-horses. But Mountain was special. She pulled our wagon out to our site with barely a grunt, like she knew she was doing us a big favor. She shook her huge head proudly and stamped her feet impatiently while Lorrin staked out the boundaries of our house. I guess she thought he was taking too long. Then she plowed up the ground as good as any Earth-tractor could have done. All of us took turns riding the plow. We had to weigh it down; the ground was hard. Then we put a bulldozer-yoke on Mountain, and she began pushing the dirt back and forth into huge piles. She knew her job better than we did. Before midday we had a hole in the ground big enough and deep enough to bury a couple of buses, or a good-sized tube house.

  After lunch, Rinky, Klin and I drove Mountain back to Callo City, even though that meant we’d have to walk the five kilometers back. But we didn’t mind. We got back to the city while the sun was still high, so we decided to feed Mountain, then wash her and groom her, so Molina would feel good about having let us use her. When there are only three, it takes a long time to wash a great-horse, especially when you have to pump every liter of water yourself, but Mountain seemed to enjoy it and we had a lot of fun. And Molina was so impressed that he drove us home, saving us a long walk. That was the best day I ever had in the dome.

  Now we started the hard part of the job—building a house. Well, actually a burrow. On Linnea, we wouldn’t find much lumber on the prairie, so we would have to build our house out of dirt. The easiest way was to dig a hole and put a roof on it—a strong roof, because there might be boffili or emmo stampedes. Some of the herds were so large that even stampeding they could take two or three hours to pass overhead. We had to dig a burrow strong enough to withstand that. If we could do that, then we would prove we could live on Linnea. That was the test.

  We already had the hole. Mountain had dug most of it, but there was still a lot of work to do, shaping the walls and hardening them. Lorrin and Big Jes and Klin were still designing, and we would have to make a lot of bricks, no matter what, so we expected to be living under the stars for several weeks. Sort of.

  They weren’t real stars. They were just the lights in the sky; and it wasn’t a real sky, it was just the dome. But it looked real enough. Almost too real. That first night, I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. Even though we’d worked hard all day, it felt like someone had left the lights on. I’d never seen so many stars so bright and beautiful before, but Lorrin said that was how the stars really looked without a dirty atmosphere in the way. That was hard to believe, and I spent a long time on my back just staring up at the lights in the sky. Wondering.

  After a few days, though, I stopped wondering how the Dome Authority had created such a convincing illusion and simply accepted it that we were already on Linnea. That was the easiest way.

  THE DAY OF THE SEA

  THE LINNEANS COUNTED TIME IN TRIADS. A week was nine days long, and there were three weeks to a month. On Threeday, you went to a morning service at church, on Sixday you went to an evening service, and Nineday was an all-day Sabbath. In this way, the people of Linnea reenacted the Nine Days of Creation when the Mother of the World created human beings.

  The first few times we went, the Linnean services were very confusing, mosty because I didn’t understand what was happening, but later, after I learned the words to the songs, I started to enjoy going. The Linneans celebrated the changing seasons, so every service was a little different from the last, because everything cycled with the calendar. There were ritual dances to mark each week of the calendar, and those were a lot of fun. The game was to get everybody in the room participating in each circle. And when we did get everybody circling, we cheered because that meant that the Mother would bless us for the completion of our intention.

  As much fun as that was, I liked the singing the best. Those who wanted to play the part of the wind would sit on the upper balcony; it ran all the way around the whole building. And at key moments in the service, we would make whispering or shooshing or howling sounds. The little-uns loved that the most, so I spent a lot of time up there in the balcony with them. Gamma and Gampa usually sat up there with us too.

  Down on the main floor, the adults sat in a circle around the center dais, a platform representing the house of the Mother. They would sing the songs of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth, and they would try to drown us out. But their songs had happy hand-clapping and exuberant words, melodies easy to sing and piquant harmony that made your feet dance—and our song had only sounds of shooshing and whispering. The adults always had stronger and louder voices, and the song would rise buoyantly to the rafters, drowning us out.

  Sooner or later, we couldn’t help it, some of us in the balcony would start singing along with the adults below. Their songs were more fun than just shooshing and giggling. And pretty soon, everybody in the whole church would be loudly singing the songs of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth—and the songs of the wind would be banished from the sea. At least for as long as we kept on singing.

  Even people who couldn’t sing had a good time, because if you couldn’t sing you could bring an instrument—a drum or a crackler or a jubilator,which was kind of like a drum, but with six or twelve strings tight across its surface. You played it like a guitar or a banjo, either strumming or picking. There were a lot of other instruments too, mosty handmade. During the winter, families had time to invent different kinds of noisemakers and music boxes, and Jaxin told us there was quite a spirited competition every spring, when the new services began. All spring long, families would bring their new instruments to services, adding a new noisemaker to every service, each trying to outdo the other, building to a grand celebration of beautiful jangly enthusiasm on the third Nineday.

  Three Ninedays completed a month, so the third and last Nineday was always the grandest day of the month. Kind of like a New Year celebration. The Nineday to celebrate the end of three months was the grandest day of the season. Then there was a period of three, six or nine more days—depending on the calendar—until the next season began.

  During the times of no-season, there were different kinds of celebrations. One holiday was the celebration of the wind. It was celebrated twice yearly, once between winter and spring and once between summer and autumn. During the celebration of the wind, the people of the Mother honored and thanked the wind for bringing the rain to the great sea of grass. Of course, you couldn’t properly thank the wind during the Mother’s seasons, so you had to do it during a time of no-season. If the wind hadn’t brought rain in the season past, the celebration became the cursing of the wind. In that way, the people reminded the wind of its responsibility to the Mother’s green sea.


  Another holiday, held in the no-season between autumn and winter, was the Day of the Sea, when the living were permitted to visit with the spirits of those who had gone to live in the sea. On the Day of the Sea, people dressed in brown clothes and built houses of grass for their loved ones in the sea to come and live in for the day. The celebrants would bring various carved and woven totems representing places or moments or things in the lives of the spirits for whom the houses had been built. They would bring baskets containing the favorite foods of the spirits, so they could nourish their memories of their lives.

  Families would often start building their houses days before the celebration, and if they had many people to remember, they would carve or weave many totems as if they were inviting all the spirits they knew to a great grand party.

  On the Day of the Sea, when the house was completed and furnished with baskets of food and an altar of totems, the people who built it would invite the spirits to enter. Then they would enter themselves. Inside, the oldest living person would pour a cup of tea for everyone present, including the spirit or spirits who had been invited to visit. Then the celebrants would share themselves with the spirits, thanking them for their gifts—their heritage, their traditions, their care and their love. They would tell the spirits why they had brought this item or that, what they were remembering and why it was important to them. They would tell the spirits what was happening in their own lives and what they planned next. And finally, they would ask the spirits to watch over them in the name and the service of the Mother for the coming year. In a large family, the Day of the Sea could take all day.

  In the evening, all the grass houses would be taken down and gathered together in a huge pile, and a great bonfire would be held. Part of the preparation for the Day of the Sea meant clearing a great circle of grass, lest a spark from the bonfire find its way into the sea. This was usually considered an ill omen, and if the spark ignited a range fire, somebody’s spirit had been really pissed off—maybe by not being remembered or by being remembered the wrong way. A fire was always seen as a punishment. But mosty, the spirits were joyous and grateful for another happy day with their loved ones. As the smoke rose into the air, it carried the jubilant spirits high into the sky. There, the impish wind would catch them and carry them off to the land beyond the horizon, where they would return to their lives in the sea. And finally nothing would be left but the twinkling stars and the dark rustling of the distant sea, whispering its thanks for another good year.

  The next day, winter would begin.

  THE OLD WOMAN AND THE WIND

  A VERY LONG TIME AGO, in the time before time, an old woman lived in the grass. She lived in a house of grass, she slept on a bed of grass, and she wore a dress of grass. She sang of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth and the grass grew tall and strong around her.

  One day, while she was singing, she began to hear a new song in the world. She didn’t hear it every day, but she heard it often enough. Sometimes she heard it as a soft whisper, and sometimes she heard it as a distant howl, and sometimes she heard it not at all—but it always came back again. Sometimes it harmonized with her song, and sometimes it whistled and roared and drowned out her song altogether. And every day, the new song sounded just a little bit closer than the day before....

  So one day, when the new song whispered so close it sounded as if it hid just below the near horizon, she sang back to it across the sea of grass. “Who sings there? And what do you sing of?”

  And the answer came back on a breeze of air that lifted her hair away from her face. “I sing of me.”

  “What a beautiful song you sing,” said the old woman.

  “I sing of the sky and the clouds that sail in the sea of air,” said the voice.

  “Ahh,” said the old woman. “I thought so. Only the wind can sing such a beautiful song.”

  “Would you like to sing with me? I will teach you my song,” invited the wind.

  “Thank you, but no. I sing of the sun, the rain and the good dark earth. And when I sing my song, the grass grows tall and strong.”

  “No, you cannot sing that,” the wind replied in an angry burst. “Your song will clash with mine. Here the land belongs to me and I will not permit you to sing any song but mine.”

  But the old woman just shook her head. “Your song has a great and powerful beauty and it gives me great joy to hear it. But your song celebrates only the sky and the clouds that sail in the sea of air. My song celebrates the rest of the world, the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. Together our two songs make a joyous noise greater than either of us alone can sing. Let us celebrate each other’s partnership in the greater glory of the world.”

  But the wind would have none of that. “No. I will not allow you to diminish my power. I rule this land, not you, and we will sing no song but mine.”

  The old woman bowed her head sadly, and for a moment, the wind thought it had won. But then the old woman raised her head and said, “I will sing my song and you will sing yours. We will sing together or we will sing apart. You can choose how you wish to sing. You can sing in harmony or discord. But I will not leave here, nor will I stop singing of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth.”

  At this, the wind howled in fury, whipping the old woman’s hair about her shoulders and flattening her robe against her body. “Hear me, old crone. I will drive you from this land, and I will sing alone.”

  “Hear me, angry wind,” the old woman shouted back. “Hear me well—” She wrapped her robe around her and turned her back to the furies of the wind. She began to sing as joyously as she could of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. The wind howled around her, but she ignored its fury.

  She sang her song both soft and loud, but always sweet, and her gentle notes soared generously above the deeper moaning of the angry wind—and somehow the two songs became as one. The grass grew tall and strong around her, twice as tall as a man. It waved in the wind, keeping time with both songs, rippling in joyous celebration of the sun and the sky, the clouds and the rain, and the sea of grass and the sea of air above it.

  And to this very day, if you go out into the sea, you can still hear both of the songs, sometimes separate, and sometimes together, but always clear.

  GOD’S THUMB

  WE WENT TO CHURCH EVERY THIRD DAY, just like we would do when we crossed over to Linnea, only, because we were in training we also had classes about the church services, so we would understand the why as well as the what. On Threeday we had an afternoon class after services. On Sixday, we had a morning seminar. On Nineday, we had no training sessions at all, just a real Sabbath.

  We attended the Threeday seminar as a family. Even though a lot of the discussions were held at the adult level, everybody was supposed to participate. The course leaders said that it was necessary. If the Agency was going to put children into a new world where they would have to take on the responsibilities of adults, then the Agency had a corresponding obligation to give the children the corresponding adult privilege of discussion. The course leaders said that a full understanding of the responsibilities meant that we would be able accept them as our own commitment instead of as an authoritarian restriction placed on us by someone else. All of which meant that we spent a lot of time sitting through stuff that made no sense at all—or if it did make sense, we couldn’t understand why anyone would bother with it. Who cared? We wanted to get outside and feed the horses or make bricks or build our house.

  But even though most of the discussions were boring, there were a few times when it was very exciting too—mosty when one family or another raised the issue of why we had to give up our old religions. That’s when the arguments broke out. Sometimes the arguments were already raging even before we got to the seminar.

  Some of the families, the Kellys in particular, always sat through the morning service as if they were determined not to enjoy it. They looked as if they’d been forced to suck sourberries. When it came time to sing the Mothersong,
they’d just sort of mumble and mouth the words. Only the littlest Kellys, sitting up in the balcony with the rest of the kids, would get into the spirit of the moment. The grown-ups just looked pained and insincere.

  No matter how much everyone else around them tried to get them to just relax and have a good time, the Kellys—and a couple other families who always sat with them—acted like they had been dragged to church against their will.

  Afterward, everybody else might be feeling joyous and exuberant, with the Mothersong still bouncing in our hearts—and the Kellys would take their children aside and whisper to them. Once, while we were walking up the hill to the seminar building, I asked Patta what her da had said to her after church that morning. She didn’t want to tell me, but I promised not to tell anyone, so finally she admitted that her da was worried about losing the true faith. So he reminded everyone in the family every day: “Remember, we go to do the work of the Lord. These heathen ways have no power over us. We only pretend to share them so we can go to the new land of Canaan.”

  At dinner that night, I shared that information with the rest of the family. There was a brief embarrassed silence, as if I’d brought up a subject we really shouldn’t be talking about, but then Gamma said, “No wonder they all look so constipated.”

  And then Gampa said, “I suggest a simpler explanation for the way the Kellys look. They’ve fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

  And then Mom-Woo said, “Kaer, you promised Patta you wouldn’t tell. Now you’ve broken your promise. And the rest of us have to pretend we don’t know. Please don’t put us in that position again.”

  “Yes’m.”

  But the Linnean religion was a big issue for everyone. It meant giving up all our old holidays. Especially my favorites—Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. And my birthday.