Child of Earth

by David Gerrold

  Willow spoke to the phone. “Yes, we’ve got a kit. Everything current.” Pause. “Actually, I’d prefer not. We’ve got a full house here.” Another pause. “Yes, I understand. Yes. All right. If we can. But I won’t endanger any lives. Yes, all right. Thank you.” He clicked off and pocketed the phone. He said a word I didn’t recognize.

  Da climbed forward to the seat just behind him. He put a hand on Willow’s shoulder and leaned forward. He spoke quietly, but I stood close enough to hear. “What did they ask you to do?”

  Willow’s breath made clouds. He said, “They want us to capture a pup, if we can. Tranquilize one and bring him in so they can do a full bio-scan, implantation, the works.”

  “That sounds risky.”

  Willow nodded. “One pup doesn’t represent any danger. The rest of the pack, however...they might defend it.” He turned half-around to look at Da directly. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll only attempt it if they approach. As long as they keep their distance, so will we. Every minute that passes favors us. As soon as the horses have rested, we’ll move on.”

  A few moments later, Kilter and Kale began snorting impatiently, shaking their heads and clattering their wooden bells. Driver picked up the reins and shouted loudly, “All right, move it! Ye stubborn great beasts!” The wagon jerked and slid and we headed on toward Callo City.

  MOCKS

  DEPENDING ON THE COURSE, we would spend two or three days in town before heading home again. We did this one triad out of every three, once every nineday.

  It was both training and test to see how much we’d learned, how well we’d mastered the Linnean way of being. The way it worked, the trainers would assign us a situation, a job of some kind, and then we’d try to do it the same way native Linneans would. The other people in the cast would watch us carefully; if anybody did anything that was wrong or stupid or just inappropriate, a loud ugly buzzer would sound.

  We had to learn every tiny detail of how to behave in public as well as in private, when it was polite to turn away and when it was not. Don’t sneeze or touch your nose in formal company, it’s a bad omen. Don’t use your left hand at the meal table, it’s unclean. Don’t use your left hand to wave, it’s an insult. Don’t use your left hand to lift your tea to the Old Woman, it’s sacrilegious.

  If we had thought the training difficult before, now it became rigorous to a degree we had not imagined. As Birdie had told us on the very first day, “It will not only be harder than you imagine, it will be harder than you can imagine.”

  We had to learn how to barter in the store, the greeting rituals, the blessings, the polite way to negotiate, achieving the right combination of generosity and self-interest. We had to learn how to order a ritual meal in the inn, how to eat with respect instead of hunger, how to treat the innkeeper as an informal agent of the Old Woman, how to request lodging the evening and what to expect and how to behave inside the shared sleeping chambers. We had to learn how to respond to the ritual greetings of the local authorities, especially the churchmen. Every relationship had strict rules of conduct; even something as simple as a casual greeting on the street required specific symbols of respect depending on how well you knew the person you were greeting and whether the relationship was formal or business or... or a whole bunch of other things we still didn’t understand. Nobody understood. Because the scouts hadn’t determined it yet, and neither had the probes provided the information to decode that part of the Linnean semiotic.

  You couldn’t just watch and imitate the behavior of others. That didn’t work, because adults had different levels of courtesy and familiarity, based on relationship, trust, gender and caste. Children had to talk to adults different than adults had to talk to children. Men and women had different ways of speaking to each other, depending on how they knew each other, what they were discussing, whether one or the other or both were married, if they had children, and so on. The Linneans had a lot of specific words and phrases, some just for men and some just for women—and no language at all for inbetweens or unchosen or recently-chosen or chose-backs. When you spoke in Linnean, you had to think Linnean—and the thinking sometimes hurt, because you knew that there were things that didn’t exist in the language, that you couldn’t say, couldn’t describe and couldn’t even imagine, unless you switched back to thinking in English. And that would be dangerous.

  To put it bluntly, not knowing all the correct words and phrases and rituals meant you couldn’t function in society. Not polite society, anyway.

  Impolite society, however ... that was our access. Out on the frontier, folks spoke the “rude tongue,” a kind of catchall language that let folks who had just met exchange information without first having to go through several days of negotiations and discoveries. Not just useful, but necessary—especially if you wanted to warn someone of an impending boffili stampede.

  We had several sessions where we had to learn various children’s games. Even the adults had to learn the games, because on Linnea, they would have grown up playing these games. Not knowing slither or runaround or little dog would have seemed as suspicious as not knowing football or soccer or baseball back on Earth.

  But the hardest exercises were the “mocks”—the simple conversations between one person and another. How do you answer even the most innocent-seeming of questions? I liked the pretend games; I hated the ugly buzzer. Bzzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. Please step over here so we can burn you to death in the firepit.

  The scouts and the trainers continually tested us. Suppose, for example, you had information from a weather satellite that a dreadful storm would strike in a few hours. How do you warn your neighbors? Bad weather is maizlish, the work of demons stirring up the wind. Anyone who predicts bad weather must have spoken with maiz-likka. So how do you warn people? I had to think about that one for a bit. I raised my hand. “My gamma fears the demons work tonight.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she always gets a terrible itch just before a dust storm hits. And she has that terrible itch now. She fussed all morning.”

  “You think we’ll have a dust storm?”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to lock up everything tight just in case. I think you should too. When Gamma gets fussy, you don’t want to listen to her say, ‘I told you so.’”

  Whitlaw was one of the trainers. He nodded, “That one works. But what other problems might it create?”

  “If Gamma gets itchy before every storm, that starts to look like a kind of magick,” said Rinky. “It might make people think Gamma a witch.”

  “But Gamma is a witch,” said Gampa. “That’s why I married her.” Gamma smacked him, but not hard; everybody laughed.

  But Whitlaw took it seriously. “Yes, you have that danger with any prediction you make. A successful prediction makes you look maizlish. So how do you defuse that?”

  “Make some wrong predictions?”

  “Make them guesses?”

  “But that still makes you someone who pretends to have knowledge of the future. Do you really want others to regard you that way?”

  Da raised his hand. “You have to get caught unprepared a few times too. Lock down what you can’t afford to lose, but sacrifice a wagon or a corral to show that you had no special advantage.”

  Whitlaw nodded. “Yes, that works. Let’s try another. A neighbor has a sick child. It’s only a mild infection, but it could become pneumonia. What do you do?”

  Gamma raised her hand. “Bring over chicken soup, laced with antibiotics.”

  “Yes, that will work. And how many neighbors will you have to cure before they start wondering if you practice witchcraft?”

  “But if it saves their lives—?”

  “Yes, some of them might overlook it. Some of them might have genuine gratitude. But fear overwhelms gratitude nine times out of ten. Do you really want to start a witch-hunt? And what happens the first time you fail to save someone’s life? If people believe you have the power of life and death, then a fail
ure is regarded as deliberate, even malicious.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yes, oops. That can earn you a quick trip to the firepit.”

  “So ...?” Mom-Woo raised a hand cautiously. “Does that mean we must let people die?”

  Whitlaw shook his head. “Think of every situation as a place where you must apply careful judgment. You must hold it as your most important responsibility to take care of your own well-being first. Otherwise, you have nothing to give to anyone else. Sometimes, you will have to withhold your own generosity, because in the long run that might ensure your own survival. If you ever get to the point where the people around you begin asking you for help, because your cures always work, then it will be time to disappear and disappear quickly. We do not want you to have to do that.”

  Whitlaw suddenly turned around and pointed to me. “Kaer. Where did your Gampa meet the Old Woman?”

  “Huh? You mean Gamma—?”

  Bzzzt!

  “Huh? What did I miss?”

  “The story of the Old Woman and Her Promise.”

  “Um. What story is that?”

  “Warm up the firepit. We just caught a maiz-likka.” He stepped down off the dais and grabbed my arm and started dragging me toward a taped-off area that we had from time to time identified as the penalty box. Now we called it the firepit. Others in the room started chanting, “Burn the demon-child! Burn the demon-child!” For a moment, I almost started to cry.

  “What? What did I do wrong?”

  “The story of the Old Woman and Her Promise.”

  “I never heard that story! Nobody ever told us that story! How can you punish us for not knowing what you didn’t teach us?!”

  Whitlaw stopped and stared straight into my eyes. “Exactly, Kaer. Ignorance does not excuse you. The Linneans will burn you for not knowing.”

  “But—but—nobody told us that story.”

  “Yes. Nobody told you that story. That does not give you a get out of Hell free card. If anything, it only proves that you and your whole family stand outside the Law. So off to the firepit.”

  I said a word. A Linnean word. The closest translation was, “That’s not fair.” The other word I said referred to a certain body function.

  Whitlaw shrugged. “Who promised you fairness? I didn’t. The Old Woman didn’t.” Then he added, “We didn’t withhold the story out of maliciousness, but so that you would realize how much exists on Linnea that you don’t know, that we don’t know, that we couldn’t teach you, that you will have to find out for yourself. And you will have to find out without letting anyone know that you don’t already know. You may go back to your seat now. We will burn you to death another time, when we run out of firewood and need a warm blaze.”

  A moment later, Whitlaw turned back to me. “Why do you cry, Kaer? Did I say something to upset you?”

  “I’ll never learn all this, I’ll never remember it. I’ll make a stupid mistake and we’ll all end up in the firepit. I can’t keep up.”

  Whitlaw sat down opposite me. He took one of my hands in his. His hands were huge and rough, but gentle. He said, “All this feels so difficult to you, sweetheart, because you know that other possibilities exist. You’ve lived in a world that has much wider horizons, a world filled with a greater richness of flavors, colors, textures and experiences. You’ve flown through the sky, you’ve visited faraway places and soared through worlds of imagination that the Linneans could never conceive. You know so many more possibilities of life. What you feel now—the pressure of cramming your great big life into a very small container—it hurts, it frustrates and it saddens. Do you think no one else before you hasn’t felt this? We’ve all felt it. All of us. Over and over.

  “Do you want to know the saddest part? We feel for the Linneans, for the trap they’ve built around themselves. If we could break them out, we would—but we can’t, we just can’t. I can’t even begin to tell you all the reasons why it doesn’t work; but think of it this way. You cannot help a baby chick out of its shell, or it dies. It has to peck its way out by itself. It has to learn that life only happens when you attack it aggressively. If you help it out of its shell, it never learns that lesson, so it just lies there and waits for life to happen; it lies there until it dies.

  “We can’t help the Linneans out of the shell they live in, because they don’t remember how they got into it. They have no memory, no experience, of anything else. Someday we’ll know enough; we’ll find a way to get them back to where they once belonged. But we can’t do that until we know more. We just don’t know enough yet.” He paused. “Y’know, sweetheart, I think that’s the exciting part. Think of it this way; every new thing you learn about the Linneans—no one else will know that until you tell them. You will have the first bite of every new apple you pick off the tree of knowledge. Oops—I can’t use that phrase, can I? ‘Tree of knowledge.’ That doesn’t exist on Linnea. Shame on me. Off to the firepit I go. Come on, we’ll go together this time. We will have an honorable death together.”

  That should have been frightening, but it made me laugh. And everyone else as well. Somehow, we always felt better after attending class, no matter how hard the work had been.

  THE OLD WOMAN AND HER PROMISE

  A VERY LONG TIME AGO, in the time before time, an old woman left her village and went out into the world. She took nothing with her but a knife and a song. As she walked, she sang of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. And the sun shone, and the rain fell, and the shoots of grass came up fresh in the ground. She walked for a very long time, and wherever she walked the grass came up at her feet, happy to grow in the sun and drink in the rain.

  She lived in a little hut on the edge of the world and gave her songs to the sky. The wind carried her songs to the far ends of the world. She sang of birds and beasts and children. And the world gave birth to birds and beasts and children. They sprang forth from the earth, all the birds, and all the beasts, and all her beautiful sons and daughters.

  The old woman loved her children. She loved all her sons and all her daughters, and in the fullness of time, all her sons and all her daughters loved her as well. She taught them to sing of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. And in the fullness of time, all of them knew joy.

  But soon, her little corner of the world grew crowded, and some of her children began to quarrel; so the old woman gathered them all together, blessed them and told them all how much she cherished them. Then, she sent them out into the grass so that they would each have their own place in the world and would not have to quarrel with each other.

  “But,” her children cried, “we will never see you again. If we travel to the far corners of the world, how will we ever see you again? How can we love our mother if we live too far away to visit?”

  The old woman patted the heads of her children and made them each a promise. “You will never go so far away that I cannot come to you. I will visit each of you in your life. I promise you this: when you most need me, I will come to you. I give you my word; now go out to the world and sing of life.”

  And her children did just that. All her sons and all her daughters went out into the world, singing. They grew plentiful and joyous and they had many beautiful children of their own.

  The old woman kept her promise—not just to her children, but to her children’s children, and her children’s children’s children, and unto all the generations thereafter, because she believed in her children; but not all of her children believed in the old woman. Some of them turned bitter and angry. Others became cynical and skeptical. And when the old woman came to them, they did not recognize her. And when she offered them her love and all the gifts that came with it, they rebuked her and turned her away. The ungrateful children had become even too selfish to accept the love of the old woman. They grew bitter in their lives, never knowing that the faults they found in the world grew first in their own hearts.

  The old woman saw this and felt sad; but she did not grow bitter. She had an en
dless love for all her sons and for all her daughters and for all their children everywhere in the world and even if they did not recognize her, she always recognized them. And even if they did not recognize her gifts, she always gave them anyway, freely and without question. Because she believed in them, she blessed their hearts and souls; she sang of their joy and their fulfillment.

  Once in every life, the old woman comes to visit. She never breaks her promise. Will you recognize her when she comes to visit you? Will you welcome her or turn her away?

  THE RIDE HOME

  WE COULD HAVE SPENT ONE MORE NIGHT at Callo City, but the administors had scheduled a major storm and wanted everyone back in their own burrows, so we all bundled back into the wagon and lurched off into the evening. Twilight ran late and both the moons shone high and bright, so we rolled through a silent blue-green world. I felt as if we had gone underwater, to some magical realm of faeries. Except Linnea didn’t have faeries. Linnea had little grass people. But we didn’t know much about the little grass people; the scouts hadn’t had the temerity to ask.

  This time around, the classes had exhausted us. The trainers even acknowledged the exhaustion, telling us not to worry at it; this particular set of classes always frustrated trainees. “Don’t try to understand it; just sit with it awhile and let it sink in. You’ll get it.” I didn’t like that answer; there was still so much I didn’t understand and it seemed like neither did anybody else, and even though the trainers explained it over and over again, sometimes the explanations just didn’t make sense. It felt like a game of Hide the Potato. They wouldn’t tell you where the potato had gone, only where it hadn’t.