Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  I didn’t think the kacks would come sniffing around our burrow. Mosty they stayed close to their den in the north. But one morning, I went up with Big Jes and Klin and Da to help gather snow and we found big splayed paw prints all around the half-disassembled wagon. The kacks had visited during the night, sniffing and inspecting. We found a lot of tracks around the entrance. And we found more tracks around the ventilation shafts, where they must have sniffed the air rising from below.

  Da and Big Jes told me to stand at the entrance and hold the wooden doors open for them; they circled the camp slowly, pointing out paw prints to each other. The kacks had sniffed our cold firepit, our bricklines, our latrine, everything—like a burglar checking out a house before he breaks in. Not a good sign. When Da and Jes came back, they went back down and had a quiet hurried conference with Irm and Bhetto and Cindy. Then the five of them went back up topside and rebuilt the doors to the burrow; they made them bigger and heavier. After that, nobody went up for the rest of the day. And not for a couple of days after that either.

  At dinner that night, Da said that we would not fear the kacks, but we would respect them. I couldn’t see that much difference, but I wouldn’t argue the point either. Because the kacks were running loose, it meant everybody else would have to stay in their burrows or travel only in large, protected groups. To compensate, despite their policies against dependence on electronics, the administors increased the number of hours of online access from two to six, and we settled in to take our classes off the wall instead of trekking in to Callo City.

  Klin had hidden the projector inside a wall, not in the main room but in one of the rooms we used for private time. He’d dug out a hole, slid the tube into it, then packed the dirt back in around it. Then he’d hung a grass-totem in front of it. Linneans respected representations of the grass-mother, and they would be unlikely to look behind the mam. After he finished, he said he wanted to find a better way to hide a projector; but Big Jes said he didn’t think it likely that any Linnean with average curiosity would even know to look for one. Nevertheless, Little Klin still thought the installation too vulnerable—what if we met a Linnean who had more than average curiosity? So he wanted to talk to the scouts about it.

  But for the moment, we had video; we had a window on the world, and that helped take away some of the buried-alive feeling. Mom-Woo had us all playing different games. One day, we were journeying to the center of the Earth, the next we turned into bunnies hiding from the wolves, the third we pretended that we lived under the sea. The burrow became a spaceship, a submarine, an igloo, a secret cave hidden from horrible monsters. Sometimes we dressed up in hats and shawls. But my favorite of all the games we played, we turned the burrow into a vast underground complex and we became the secret defenders of the whole world, sending forth armies of super-agents and robots and spies to fight the monsters who lived on the far side of the sky. On days like that, the burrow felt safe and warm.

  But we had just as many days when we all felt cramped and cranky. We stopped talking to each other and withdrew into ourselves, into our private selves, into the most secret and sometimes most lonely places of all. On those days, we’d turn on the video and do a scan to see if the kacks were prowling anywhere near. If not, we’d all go up as a group; we’d keep close to the burrow entrance, but at least we’d see the sky—or at least something that looked like a sky. The dome ceiling was high and far away.

  But most days, we couldn’t even do that. The snow kept falling, kept piling higher and deeper. Sometimes, even on days when it paused, we couldn’t go up. And when we finally could, the snow lay everywhere in huge drifts that rose taller than Big Jes. We wanted to dig tunnels in it, but Da wouldn’t let us; he feared that the snow would collapse down on us. But he did allow us to dig out a clearing, and eventually trenches, and the more water we needed below, the longer and deeper the trenches became.

  After a few weeks, going up meant standing around in a deep hole or digging a little further in a rising trench. We could look up at the dome sky and see it as a bright yellow sliver. Sometimes blue, sometimes greenish, but mosty amber because of all the micro-dust in the air. Well, on Linnea, it would be micro-dust. On Earth, it was tunable light-panels.

  We didn’t spend a lot of time studying how the dome worked, but our enforced captivity in the burrow gave us a lot of time for talking, and we needed to practice our language until it was second nature. Most important, we had to lose our accents. Or learn how to fake Linnean accents. Aunt Morra explained that to all of us, more than once. She said that every language has its own rhythm, its own set of inflections and idiosyncrasies. Most tricky, she said, every language puts the emphasis on different syllables. Hungarian puts the emphasis on the last syllable of the word, German puts it on the first, and the French speak all syllables with equal emphasis. Not only that, but you can hear this emphasis reflected in the music of each nation, because song comes from speech. “If I had a piano here, I’d show you,” she said. And then she sighed. “I miss my music. I could never give up my music.” Then she remembered what she intended to say, shook her head as if to brush away the memories, and continued. “We all speak Spanglish. That has a very lyrical set of rhythms and inflections, inherited from at least two distinct languages. When we speak Linnean, we don’t realize it, but we add those inflections and rhythms. We need to unlearn our Earth ways of speaking, and match the Linnean sounds instead: the drawl, the slur, the way the vowels and the consonants are pronounced, and most of all, we need to match the rhythms and emphasis of Linnean speech. Otherwise, our language will give us away. If even one person with a Spanglish accent gets caught as a maiz-likka, then every other person with that accent will immediately come under the same suspicion. So let’s do our language exercises again. Our lives—I mean, your lives,” she corrected herself, “will depend on it.” She seemed suddenly embarrassed by the reminder that she would not be going to Linnea with the rest of the family.

  Little Klin had become fascinated with the mechanics of winter in the dome. He and Bhetto argued about it for hours. Days. Where had the water come from to manufacture all this snow? That part was easy, of course. Authority had a gate open to a frozen world. They could pump in as much frozen H2O as they needed. But Klin and Bhetto were more concerned with the engineering. Did they pipe it in as liquid or solid? If liquid, that meant expending energy to heat it on the frozen side so it could be piped over, and then more energy on this side to freeze it again for the dome; but if solid, that meant cutting the ice into blocks or shaving it into particles and moving it through different kinds of tubes. Neither of them ever convinced the other, and the question remained unanswered because Authority had long since made it clear that they would not reply to any questions about the mechanics of the dome. You could lose work points for asking. We had to behave as if no such place as Earth existed, as if we lived only on Linnea. We must focus ourselves on the sea of grass and nothing else.

  Linnea has longer days than Earth, about three hours longer. At first, we thought that the dome had a translucent ceiling and the rotation of the Earth determined our days and nights; but after a month or two, Mom-Trey remarked that the days and nights seemed unnaturally long. Then the rest of us began to notice it too. Very quickly we realized that the dome was gradually shifting to Linnean time; on one of the few occasions that the administors talked about the workings of the dome, they actually admitted to adding two minutes a day—one minute to the day and one to the night. In just a little more than six months, the cycle of life in the dome would match the day-night cycle of Linnea. If we stayed on Earth long enough, it would eventually happen that our days and nights would be totally opposite those of Earth, before creeping back toward a semblance of synchronicity.

  Of course, that created another argument between Klin and Bhetto—how the dome managed to successfully create the illusions of day and night skies, especially sunrises and sunsets. They each had theories about projectors and light panels, and insulation agai
nst Earth-daylight too. But most of the rest of us paid little heed. It had become much easier to accept the cycle of light and darkness that we saw.

  After a while, the snow stopped falling. We had reached midwinter, a time when the whole world sat quiet and waited. The snow lay on the ground and the few animals that hadn’t “migrated” crunched their way from place to place, leaving broken trails through the icy crust. That’s how we knew that the kacks were prowling close again.

  We didn’t go up as much as we wanted to. When we did, we all went, and every grown-up had a crossbow. Big Jes had offered to make a smaller bow for me, but Da-Lorrin had quietly vetoed that. Just as well. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of weapons. I could see their necessity, I just didn’t want to be the person who carried one—because I didn’t want to be the person who might have to use it.

  We’d all hike up one of trench-ramps to the surface and crunch our way around through the snow, packing down the old, and breaking the crust of the new. We’d wrapped our feet in boffili skins; the soles of our boots were cut from wooden planks. By midwinter, we’d made Linnean snowshoes; bit thatches of grass, frozen solid. Once we built a snowman, but we didn’t know for sure if Linneans built snowmen, and none of the scouts could answer that question either, so we decided not to do it again. The Linneans didn’t make representations the same way we did; they had totems instead.

  We all decided that the long midwinter was the hardest part of all. The nights were silent and dark and lasted forever. Twenty hours of night to ten hours of day. Everyone grew sullen and cranky, even more so than usual. We stopped playing games, we stopped pretending our adventures, and we simply stayed in bed and slept longer than usual. Even the videos from Linnea failed to arouse our interest anymore. We just wanted winter to be over.

  And then, one day, the snow started to melt. Not a lot, just a little. We noticed the icy crust on the snow and the glistening drops that hadn’t quite solidified. We noticed that the bite in the air didn’t burn as sharply as before. So of course, Bhetto and Little Klin started arguing about where all the water would go and how long it would take to drain the dome. For some reason, Linnean math is twelve-based, so when they started scratching out their numbers on the grass paper Mom-Trey had made, they would sometimes stop to curse in frustration at having to think in a different number-base. Of course, they got used to it eventually, but for the rest of us, the sight was always funny. Sometimes, we’d have to go into another room in the burrow to laugh; otherwise, they’d both get angry and that could start an argument that would leave everyone upset for two or three days. Or until Mom-Woo made her special honey-cake. Eventually, we renamed it “forgiveness cake” because while you’re dipping cake in honey-sauce you can’t stay angry about anything—and if you tried to stay angry, then Mom-Woo wouldn’t let you have any cake anyway, at least not until after you did the silly-dance. You had to do the silly-dance until everyone was laughing. And then, if you could still stay angry after doing the silly-dance, then you had to have a snow-bath, administered by the whole family. Nobody ever wanted a second snow-bath. So we usually resolved all serious quarrels before the end of the silly-dance. The best silly-dance we ever had, nobody remembered the argument that started it, but we all remembered joining hands and dancing in a big circle around the firebed and singing, “Ding dong, the bricks are red....” At least until we realized we couldn’t sing that song at all. Nobody on Linnea sang that song, so we couldn’t either. We’d have to find a Linnean song. Aunt Morra said that she would research that. And all the rest of Linnean music too, even though we didn’t have very much of it to work from. The scouts said that Linnea had a rich heritage of folk music, but not a lot of it was written down and they hadn’t been able to record as much of it as they wished. Not yet anyway. Some of the researchers thought that a large part of the culture was embedded in the music, because it was an easy way to codify information and pass it down from one generation to the next; if that was true, then we had a great big blind spot and not a lot we could do about it.

  As the thaw continued, the ice and snow above the burrow turned to slush. It was treacherous footing and not very safe, even for the grown-ups, even when they wore snowshoes. And it really wasn’t much fun for us kids either. Linnea doesn’t have a lot of trees. Not on the sea of grass, anyway, so we stayed downstairs and played dress-up, or we went upstairs and got wet and muddy, or we just lurked on the stairs halfway between and felt bad because we had nothing interesting to do. At least until one of the moms got tired of listening to us whine and put us to work.

  The moms kept us busy, and we had lots to do every day. Not just our daily chores, but all the others too. We had cloth to weave and clothes to sew. And we had to make new boots and repair old ones. Authority had given us three boffili skins to work with, and a side of boffili to last through the winter; we hung it in the snow locker to age, but it was nowhere near enough meat for all of us. Just like the administors promised, we were going to go hungry—unless we rationed ourselves. The moms argued about it for three days before finally settling on a schedule of four small meals a day. Seven hundred fifty calories per adult for breakfast and supper; 500 calories each for lunch and dinner, with halfrations every third day. Bhetto did the math and said we still wouldn’t have enough food to last until the first spring crops; so we revised the numbers down by 100 calories per meal. We might make it, but we were all going to look a lot thinner, come thaw.

  Of course, Aunt Morra had something to say about that too. Aunt Morra always had something to say. Big Jes once said, behind her back, “That woman has a mouth like a torn pocket. Everything just spills out.” Mosty, everyone ignored her comments. But this time, it was a cranky day for Mom-Woo, so when Aunt Morra said, “You could stand to lose a few,” and then went on to comment on everybody else’s weight as well, it started a three-day uproar. And no amount of silly-dancing was going to stop this family riot. Even Da-Lorrin’s expression grew harder than usual.

  Aunt Morra meant well, in her own clumsy way—I’d figured out that much about her—but she didn’t have any sense at all about how to deal with other people. Sometimes she said what needed to be said, but mosty not. Or maybe she shouldn’t have said it that way. I couldn’t always figure her out. But she was smart and she was a hard worker and nobody ever faulted her for not carrying her share of the load. I used to wonder how she got into the family, until Mom-Woo told me she came in when we merged with Irm and Bhetto, and that sort of explained a lot.

  The funny thing is Aunt Morra was right. Most of the moms could stand to lose a few. And Bhetto and Irm too. Maybe Big Jes, but not Little Klin. Da-Lorrin always looked just right to me. We’d all hardened up quite a bit during the digging, but none of us looked as thin as real Linneans. Not yet. So maybe the administors had planned it this way. They needed to starve us down.

  The thing about hunger, real hunger, it hurts. Not a hurt like being punched in the arm or the belly, because that hurt goes away after a while; no, this is a hurt like something nagging inside that doesn’t go away, a kind of nervous emptiness that makes you all jittery and tired at the same time. The moms insisted that the little-uns get full rations, and that included me too.

  I felt bad about having a full plate when everyone else didn’t, except that some of us didn’t need as much as others, and a couple of us, like Big Jes, needed more. So even after Mom-Trey served out the stew or the beans or whatever, some of us would quietly shove part of our supper on to the plate of whoever needed it more. I’d always give some of mine to Da or Jes. I’d pretend I’d eaten my fill and I’d say I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want any more and it would offend the Old Woman in the Grass if it went to waste and I’d shove it onto the nearest other plate faster than Mom-Woo could argue. She knew what I was doing and she always gave me a disapproving look, but I think inside she felt proud that I was trying to take on the responsibilities of a grown-up. Even if it meant going hungry. During the day, we’d chew on bits of boffili hide, and th
at helped a little, but only a little, not very much. One day, Big Jes’ trousers slipped off his waist, all the way down to his knees, and that made everybody laugh; but it also showed how much weight we all were losing. Mom-Trey made some noises that this couldn’t be good for the babies, but Mom-Woo took her aside for a private talk and after that, she kept quiet about the food.

  We had rice and beans and Linnean noodles. We had potatoes and carrots and Linnean corn. And we had a lot of different spices too. Plus we had a couple of bales of dried grass, which could be used to make soup or tea, depending on what you wanted to call it. You could fill your belly with it, even though it didn’t have a lot of calories. So we had the winter-hungries as Mom-Woo called them. We were all nervous and jittery and cranky and we all tired easily and slept long. By midwinter, we were even wondering why we’d signed up for this and if it was ever going to be worth it.

  Bhetto and Irm and Jes and Klin got into a week-long argument about that. “Why not just send in a couple of divisions and take control of Linnea? Why not just go in and tell the descendants of the original explorers what happened? We could bring them medicine and technology and education. We could make their lives so much better. That would be the quickest solution. So why should we go through this whole silly game of pretending to be Linnean natives, just so we could infiltrate their society and study them?”

  Da-Lorrin wisely kept away from that discussion. Even Aunt Morra uncharacteristically kept her mouth shut, though Cindy and Parra foolishly spoke up more than once. At least, until they learned better. I thought that Bhetto and Irm made some good points. Why didn’t we just go in? But the more I listened to Big Jes and Klin, the more I realized that there were two very good reasons why we shouldn’t.