Child of Earth

“Like some perfect fusion of Clifford Simak's
Ring Around the Sun
and Robert Heinlein's
Tunnel in the Sky
, David Gerrold's
Child of Earth
depicts a vivid, alluring future of limitless possibilities, where world upon world awaits human exploration and colonization. His adolescent narrator, Kaer, offers a charming and wise-beyond-her-years perspective on the thrilling events of what I predict will be a landmark trilogy.”

âPAUL DI FILIPPO, author of
Neutrino Drag

“
Child of Earth
provides further evidence that David Gerrold has to be a clone: his genome clearly includes genetic material from Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny, Edgar Pangborn, Frederik Pohl, and James Tiptree, Jr., at a minimum. For newcomers to sf, that means he is
better than
as good as it gets, and this is one of his very best novels.”

âSPIDER ROBINSON, author of
The Crazy Years

~ PRAISE FOR DAVID GERROLD ~

“David Gerrold is one of the most original thinkers and fluent writers in contemporary science fiction.”

âBEN BOVA

“Gerrold bores easilyâthat's why you'll never see him using the same idea or angle of attack twice. Hold on for the ride!”

âGREGORY BENFORD, author of
Timescape

“Without question, David Gerrold is one of the most talented and creative writers of this generation and always fun to read.”

âJOHN C. DVORAK, columnist,
PC Magazine
and
CBS Marketwatch

ALSO BY DAVID GERROLD

The Star Wolf Series
The Voyage of the Star Wolf
The Middle of Nowhere
Blood and Fire

The War Against the Chtorr Series

The Dingilliad Trilogy

The Man Who Folded Himself
The Flying Sorcerers*
When HARLIE Was One
The Martian Child

*With Larry Niven

for Brad Frank,
with love

THE OLD WOMAN WHO LIVED IN THE GRASS

A VERY LONG TIME AGO, in the time before time, an old woman left her village and went out into the fields. Why she left, no one knows. 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.

The old woman walked across the whole world, singing, and soon the grass grew everywhere, so tall and so thick that she couldn't walk anymore. At last she came to a place where the grass reached up to twice her height. She stopped and sang to the grass, “I will live here. I will sing of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. I will sing every day.” This made the grass very happy and the tallest and the strongest plants around her responded by bending low over her head to form an arch. Still singing, she reached up and wove the ends of the stalks together. When she had finished, she had the frame of a little round house. It looked like an upside-down basket.

Then, still singing of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth, she asked the grass to help her furnish her house. So the grass reached up and caught a great wind; it lay down as a carpet for her. The old woman walked out into the field and cut the grass gently. She laid it out in the sun to dry, all the time singing her thanks. Every day she went out into the fields and cut down only as much grass as she needed, always laying it out to dry with reverence and care.

When the grass had dried, she began to weave it. She used every part of the grass, the stiff stems and the soft leaves. She began by weaving a roof and walls onto the frame of her house, careful to leave herself a door and three round windows. She put one window on the east side of the house so she could watch the sun rise in the morning, and she put one window on the west side of the house so she could watch the sun set in the eveningâbut she put the third window high up in the roof, so she could look up and see the stars at night. She made the door wide enough so she could always look out and see the endless sea of grass.

She wove an awning for each of the windows and another for the entrance as well, so she would have shade. She wove herself shutters and a door, so that in the winter she could close the house against the cold and wind. She dug a hole in the middle of the floor and lined it with rocks. She built a bed of dried grass and started a fire to keep herself warm and to cook over as well.

But even after she had finished her house, she still had not finished her work. So she kept on singing of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. And the grass, happy to help, lay down in the fields again so she could cut what she needed. She needed so very muchâmuch more than you would think just to look at the little grass house. But the grass didn't mind. As long as she sang of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth, the new green shoots came up happily.

The old woman took the thick strong stems of the grass and tied them into bundles to make a chair and a table and a bed. She used the softer parts of the grass, the shoots and leaves, to make cushions and blankets and baskets and curtains and mats. She even wove herself a hat and a skirt and a jacket of grass.

And finally, at the end of the day, as the very last thing she did, she made herself dinner. She ate the roots of the grass, the fresh young shoots, and the tender stems. She ate every part of it that her old teeth could chew, and when she was done with the grass and had passed it through her bowel, she returned it as night soil to enrich the good dark earth.

Every evening, as the day turned orange in the west, she went out into the fields and thanked the grass for its bounty. She sang of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth.

And the sun shone, and the rain fell, and the shoots came up fresh in the good dark earth.

A FAMILY MEETING

WHEN I WAS EIGHT, Da showed up for a visit with pictures of a world where they had horses so big a whole family could all ride at the same time. They were bigger than elephants. Da said the world was called Linnea, but we kids called it Horse World. He also showed us pictures of some of the other worlds that you could get to through the gates, but none of them had horses and some of them looked pretty awful.

Horse World had a sea of grass all the way out to the end of the world. Da said it was called razor grass and it covered half the continent, all the way from the Rainbow Ridges in the east to the Desolation Mountains in the west, which were like a big wall that stretched from the far north almost all the way down to the equator. On the other side of the mountains were the broken lands and the long deserts, full of wild howlers and swarms of biting things, and then another mountain range that fell into the Ugly Sea.

But I didn't care about any of that, I liked the horses and I asked if we could go there. Da-Lorrin grinned at meâthat big grin of his that made me want to marry him when I grew up; except we were already married, sort of, because of the family-contract; but I meant the old-fashioned kind of marriage, two people onlyâand said, “Maybe we could. But only if everybody else in the family agrees. Because if we go there, we'd have to stay.”

I said that was okay with me, and he rumpled my hair affectionately and told me to go set the table for dinner.

So I asked Mom-Lu, “Da-Lorrin says we might go to Horse World. Will we really?”

She said, “It's not decided yet, honey. And if we do go, it won't be for a long time. First, we have to see how everyone in the family feels about it.”

That meant a family meeting. Uh-oh. Most of the time, family meetings were just an excuse for a big party, and folks would phone in from all over, wherever they were. But sometimes there were important things to decide, like whether or not to start a new baby or offer someone a contract. And once even, before I was born, whether or not to divorce someone. Mom-Lu said she'd tell me about that when I was older. I didn't pay attention to a lot of the discussions, partly because most of them weren't very interesting, and partly because nobody listened to the kidlets anyway. Not until after you're thirteen do you get a real vote. But this time, because it was about the great-horses, I made sure to do all my chores and extra too, so I'd at least have merit points to spend.

The meeting didn't happen for two weeks. It took that long for everyone to arrange their separate schedules. There were more than twenty voting adults, and everyone had to attend, even though we were scattered across four continents. Mom-Lu had to coordinate all the time zones, and she spent a lot of time sending messages back and forth, because Cindy was in Paris and Parra was in Sydney. Cindy and Parra were clone-twins, except Cindy was a boy now. All the little-uns lived in New Paso with the moms, so most of them were put to bed at their normal times, but I cashed in my merit points and Mom-Lu agreed I could stay up past midnight for the conference, but only if I took a long nap in the afternoon.

According to Da, a contract family is a corporate entity, with every member holding an equal share of common stock but unequal shares of voting stock determined by age and seniority, parentage and reproductive status. Which meant that Mom-Trey, who came into the family after Mom-Lu, actually had more voting shares, because she'd borne three babies and Mom-Lu had only borne one. And Cindy and Parra, because they were purchased babies from before my time, had different shares because that was part of the terms of the adoption. So even though it's supposed to be equal, it isn't. Not in voting, and not in distribution of resources. And that always makes for arguments. Mom-Woo used to say, “That's why you should never marry a lawyer,” which was her own little joke, because she was a lawyer and she was the one who negotiated the various member-contracts every time we married someone new.

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