Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  And we talked about that a lot at the Threeday seminar. The trainers were very patient. One of them was an old white-haired man in a wheelchair. His name was Whitlaw, and we only saw him once or twice a month, because he had to fly in special just for the seminar. He spoke in English, because he was a visiting lecturer.

  The first time he came in, he talked about parallel worlds. “All these different worlds exist, each in its own timeline, each one a reflection of this one. We haven’t even begun to discover a hint of what’s possible. Think about it. There may be a million different versions of yourself out there. And very likely, there’s a million different versions of me, teaching you or a million someones like you what they most need to know, all of us living a million different lives and dying a million different deaths. Do you ever wonder how many different ways you could die? I sometimes do. I hope I have died well.” And then he grinned. “In this timeline, I intend to die in bed with a beautiful redhead. At the age of ninety-two. Shot in the back by a jealous husband.”

  But today, he spoke with a much more serious tone. “Don’t think we don’t understand what you’re giving up. We do understand. To put aside your culture, your heritage, your traditions, your cherished memories—that’s a terrible break in your identity. It’s an enormous loss that can’t be replaced. We know you’ll never feel really comfortable with the worship of the Mother, because you’ll always be aware of what’s been taken away from you.”

  He wheeled his chair up and down the aisles, talking to each of us directly. “You think I haven’t seen you in church? Some of you look like you have red-hot pokers up your butts—and I can’t think of any better way to advertise that you’re a maiz-likka than that. The celebration of the Mother is supposed to be a cleansing of sorrow, and an inspiration of new energy for the work still to come. It’s supposed to be joyous and jubilant. If you look like you’re in pain—well, only a maiz-likka would find the celebration of the Mother painful.

  “Yes, we know it hurts. And we know why. We can probably tell you more about it than you know yourself. You’re afraid of losing who you are, what you believe, what you stand for. Going to Linnea means giving up your whole world—and not everything the new world has to offer is big enough or intense enough or powerful enough to replace what you’re giving up. Do you think you’re the first ones to go through this? You’re not. Everyone who goes through the training here experiences a profound sense of loss and abandonment. And it doesn’t go away. You just learn to live with it. Some people can’t deal with it and they have to drop out of the program—or they change their commitment and join the support service teams instead. But it’s part of the job, part of the service, part of a much larger goal that will take decades or even centuries to accomplish.

  “We know it isn’t easy for most of you. That’s why we work so closely with you. We want you to succeed. What’s wanted and needed here is simple to say, but hard to achieve. Each of you, in your own head and in your own heart, has to find a way to make the Linnean faith work for you. You have to reinvent yourself, so you can create the same joy and strength for yourself out of the celebration of the Mother that you find in your respective Earth religions.

  “Are we asking you to convert? Yes, in a sense we are. And no, in a larger sense, we are not. We are asking you to change the way you say your prayers—we are not asking you to pray to a different god.”

  When he said this, I turned around in my seat to look back at the Kellys. Gamma immediately tapped my leg and made me turn forward again, but not before I saw how red-faced Buzzard Kelly was. He looked like he had the worst case of I-Don’t-Wanna-Be-Here I’d ever seen.

  But Mr. Whitlaw wheeled himself right up to the Kellys, so then it was all right to turn around and look. Whitlaw said, “I’ll give you this. You try it on and see if it works for you. It’s like a new jacket. If it fits, it’s yours. If it doesn’t fit, put it back on the rack and try another one. All right? Here goes.

  “Suppose, just suppose, that there’s only one God for the entire universe. You can wrap your head around that idea, can’t you? You probably already have. That’s the core idea for almost every major religion on Earth. ‘There is no God but Allah.’ Everybody else says the same thing, too; they just plug in a different name.

  “And the way we all get along together is that we pretend that all the different names aren’t different Gods. They’re just different names of the same God. And this relieves us of the responsibility of having to kill all the unbelievers. Whew! Instead, we just try to convert them while we try to keep them from converting us. This lets us keep our self-righteousness without having to risk getting nailed up on crosses or burned at stakes or put on the rack. Much more civilized, eh?”

  He looked directly at Buzz Kelly. “I can’t think of anything sillier than killing someone because you don’t like the way he says his prayers, can you?”

  Kelly didn’t answer directly. He just sort of grunted and shook his head curtly. More a rejection than a reply.

  Abruptly, Whitlaw wheeled around to face the rest of us. “So—the question for the rest of us remains. How does a sane and rational and faithful human being stay true to God? No, put your hands down. It was a rhetorical question. I’m going to give you the answer.

  “You do it by remembering that God is the one God. And he—or she—has many manifestations. Many different faces. Whatever may be appropriate for the time and place. Here on Earth, God manifests the way God manifests. On Linnea, God manifests as the Mother of the World. Here, visualize it this way.” He held up his hand and wiggled his stubby pink fingers. “This is me, right?”

  He pointed his index finger at Da and wiggled it. “Is this me?”

  Da nodded.

  He waggled his pinky at Auncle Irm. “Is this me?”

  Irm said, “It’s part of you. Yes, it’s you.”

  “Good.” Whitlaw stuck out his thumb at me. “Is this me too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” He turned back to the rest of the room. “Three different people. Each one has a different experience of me. Index finger, pinky, thumb. But however I manifest, I’m still Whitlaw, aren’t I? So if I can show up in different ways to different people, why can’t God?”

  I started to giggle.

  Whitlaw turned to me. “Yes, Kaer?”

  “I was just laughing at the idea of God in your thumb.”

  Whitlaw smiled. “But why not? If that’s where God needs to be, and that’s what you need to see at that moment, then God lives in that thumb, doesn’t he? If God lives everywhere, then God lives in Linnea too. Doesn’t she? And if you pray to the Mother of the World, isn’t that the name of God on Linnea?” I must have been frowning, because he asked, “Do you think God doesn’t manifest on Linnea?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, so imagine this. Imagine a place where God doesn’t manifest.”

  I didn’t know how to answer, so I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re having trouble imagining such a place, aren’t you? If there were such a place that had no manifestation of God, what would we call it? Want to take a guess?”

  “Hell?”

  “Right. A place without God would be Hell. So do you think Linnea is Hell?”

  “Um ... no. I don’t know.”

  “Good answer. All right, so let’s go back to Hell for a minute. If you were in Hell, could you pray?”

  “I guess so. Do they allow praying in Hell?”

  “They might. I’ll find out when I get there. I’ll send you a postcard.” He grinned. “But even if they did allow prayers, do you think God could hear your prayers in Hell?”

  “Um ...I don’t know. I thought God hears all prayers.”

  “Well, think about it. If God can’t be found in Hell, then God isn’t there to hear you, right?”

  “Okay, right.”

  “So if there’s a place where God can’t hear your prayers, that’s Hell too, right?”

&n
bsp; I nodded.

  “Good. Thanks.” He started to wheel away, then turned abruptly back. “So, if you were on Linnea—go ahead, close your eyes, take a moment to imagine yourself on Linnea—and if you said a prayer, do you think anyone would hear it?”

  I closed my eyes, imagining. He waited patiently. The answer seemed obvious. I opened my eyes. “Yes.”

  “Who do you think would hear it?”

  “Well, I would.”

  “Good. Anyone else?”

  “And God too.”

  “On Linnea?”

  “Of course. God is everywhere.”

  “So God is on Linnea ...?”

  I blinked. “Yes.” And then I got it. “Yes.”

  “Good. So that means Linnea isn’t Hell.”

  I nodded.

  “And God is there too.”

  I nodded again.

  He wiggled his thumb at me. “And if God needed to manifest as a thumb on Linnea ... ? He could do that too, couldn’t he?”

  I felt my smile widening. I could feel a laugh coming up. “Yes.”

  “And if God needed to manifest as the Mother of the World, she could do that too, couldn’t she?”

  The laugh bubbled to the surface, a giggle of delight. “Yes, she could.” It all made sense, the way Whitlaw explained it.

  “So it would be all right to pray to the Mother on Linnea, wouldn’t it? Sure it would. Thank you, Kaer.” To the rest of the room, he said. “Your prayers are still going to the same server; they’ll just be coming in from a different terminal, using a slightly different protocol and operating system. Any questions? Anyone?”

  Big Jes stood up. “What if I don’t believe in God?”

  “That’s all right too,” said Whitlaw. “God still believes in you.”

  After that, I didn’t mind going to church so much. The service wasn’t for Linnea anymore, it was for us. We were learning another way to speak to God. The same God, everywhere. And even if we weren’t on Linnea yet, I was sure that the manifestation called the Mother of the World was already listening to us and smiling.

  CHOCOLATE CAKE

  WE SPENT MY ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY making bricks. The Linneans didn’t celebrate birthdays the same way we did, and even though I felt disappointed at not having a party and presents, it wouldn’t have felt right. Not anymore. Because we were starting to think like Linneans now.

  Our ten acres were down on the flood plain, which would be the hardest place to build a house. The dome had never been flooded yet, but they’d designed it to recreate the Linnean seasons, and if they didn’t have a winter flood soon, some of the plants that depended on the flooding wouldn’t reproduce. So we had to think about building for flood control too.

  The Linneans have different ways of dealing with floods. Mosty they move to higher ground. But on the broad plains, that’s not always possible. So sometimes they build their houses on stilts, and sometimes, they build them like boats, and sometimes they sink them deep into the ground and line them with clay bricks and tar, and stick up snorkels, just in case.

  But out on the plains, you can’t bake bricks out of clay and straw, because there isn’t any. And there isn’t any tar either. So you have to make your bricks out of rammed earth instead. You start by boiling down a lot of sticky razor grass to make a stinky syrup the Linneans call tarpay. Then you mix some of this syrup in a big pit with the dirt you’re going to make into bricks. Then you put the sticky dirt—tarpay dirt—into a brick-shaped box with a wooden top and a lever to press the top down hard. And then you put as much pressure on the wooden top as you can.

  Gampa and Da-Lorrin and Irm built a Linnean machine that looked like a big garlic press. Or a nutcracker. There was a ratchet thing, into which the men would push the end of a thick tree trunk to be used as a lever. Three men or one great-horse would push the lever down, locking the ratchet into place, and that would put so much pressure on the dirt in the box that it would harden into a real brick. The machine had nine compartments, so we could make nine bricks at a time. You had to leave the bricks in long enough for the tarpay to solidify, so that meant one machine wouldn’t be enough if we were going to finish in time.

  After we got the hang of it with the first brick press, the men built a bunch more, so that eventually we had a kind of brick assembly line. Everybody had to help; everybody had to learn how to do everything. Even Gamma. So while the parents were pressing down one set of bricks in one machine, the kids would have already started unloading the finished bricks from the next one in line. The moms would shovel buckets of new tarpay dirt into the empty press until it overflowed the top. Then the men would install the lever into the ratchet and press that one down as far as it would go. We worked in teams, each team moving along the line, one after the other. All day long, we went down the row, filling one press, emptying the next. It was hard work, and at first everybody complained. Everybody’s back and legs and arms hurt. And we all took turns giving each other back rubs with stinky liniments.

  We had to get up early every morning, even before the sun rose, because that’s when the razor grass was the freshest. We’d pack a quick breakfast of hardtack and cheese and sausage to eat while we worked, and then we’d all go out together and cut a quarter-acre of razor grass, because that’s how much we needed each day. It grew faster than we could cut it—at least it seemed that way. Then we’d start it boiling down while we stopped for second breakfast—our first real meal of the day. After second breakfast, we’d start digging down to get the dirt for the day’s bricks. By the time we had enough dirt and the tarpay was bubbling, it was time for lunch. By the time we finished lunch, the tarpay was ready for pouring.

  There was no shortage of dirt—we already had a big pile of it—and as we shaped the walls and dug out extra rooms and storage space, we had more than enough. We weren’t going to run out of dirt. It wasn’t the same kind of dirt as we’d find on Linnea, but it was close enough, and the experience was good for us.

  We worked every day until we ran out of tarpay. We couldn’t afford to waste it, so sometimes we worked until after sunset. Any extra tarpay and razor grass we smeared on the hardened walls as a lining. We also had to harden the ramp that Mountain had left leading down into the hole, because eventually that would be our ladder up and out, after we put the roof on.

  There was another way too, even faster, but you needed a lot of canvas. You sewed canvas sacks and filled them with dirt, then you made sandbag walls. That’s how the forts were constructed. You could put up a lot of wall in a very short time, if you had enough people working. But we didn’t have enough canvas, and besides, the purpose of this exercise was to see how much we could do with grass and dirt alone.

  After a couple of weeks, we got used to the work and our backs stopped hurting and our muscles stopped complaining. And we had three huge piles of bricks growing around a hole that was finally taking shape as a house. Despite all the hard work, it was one of our happiest times. Or maybe it was because of all the hard work. Like Auncle Irm said, we were all working together—and that was special. We made a game out of it, laughing and singing and seeing how many bricks we could make in a day. On our best day, we made 900 bricks.

  We didn’t win the brick-making competition, though. We only came in second. The Kelly family, our closest neighbors, only a kilometer away, worked day and night in shifts and turned out twice as many bricks. We rode over there on one of the days we had use of a horse, and they had a long row of brick piles, all neatly stacked, more bricks than they would need for building a house. Unless they were planning to build some kind of warehouse too. And in fact, they were. Their idea was to build a secret underground room outfitted for emergencies.

  The scouts agreed that this was a good idea, but all those extra piles of bricks looked suspicious. If they planned to do that on Linnea, they would have to find a way to camouflage what they were doing. They had to hide their extra bricks. A week later, most of the brick piles were gone. They’d put them down in the
finished rooms of the house they were digging. It probably meant a lot of extra work, moving all those bricks around, and it made me think of Sokoban, a Japanese game where you have to push little crates around a funny-shaped warehouse until each one is in its right place. But it worked, because the next time we went over there, you couldn’t tell that the Kellys were digging a bigger-than-usual house.

  The Kellys were Traditionalists. They believed in only one mom and one dad—and a whole bunch of kids. But there were three Kelly families in the Kelly compound. Gamma Mary Kelly had three daughters and each daughter had her own husband and her own children. But they raised them all together, so they were pretty much like a normal family anyway.

  I liked visiting the Kellys. When we weren’t at church, they were very friendly people. Rose Kelly always had something good-smelling on the stove. Whenever we went visiting, she had oat-bread or oatmeal cookies or pumpkin pie. And once ... she made a chocolate cake for Ned Kelly’s birthday.

  They didn’t have chocolate over on Linnea, along with a lot of other stuff we liked, so most of us were learning to do without. But when little Ned cried that he wanted chocolate cake for his birthday, Rose indulged him. Technically, chocolate in the dome was a rules violation. And the Kellys could have been fined a hundred work points for it. But they managed to keep it a secret simply by not using the word chocolate. It was just “Rose’s special recipe.” Patta Kelly shared a piece with Rinky and me on picnic, but only on condition that we wouldn’t tell. I hadn’t had chocolate in so long—

  We’d all signed agreements, even the children, that we wouldn’t do anything Earthlike while we were in Linnea Dome. At first, a lot of it felt like playacting, but after awhile it began to seem real, and Earth was like some place out of a fairy tale or a history book that didn’t exist anymore. So anything that came over from Earth looked and felt wrong to us now.

  But the chocolate cake tasted soooo good. And I hadn’t had a birthday party of my own and Patta Kelly knew that, otherwise she wouldn’t have snuck a piece of cake out of the house for me.