Child of Earth (2 page)

Tonight's conference started out pleasant enough. Da-Lorrin had mailed out the prospectus way ahead of time so everybody could review it. I watched it every day, over and over, especially the parts with the horses, but after two or three days of that, Mom-Lu had had enough. Instead of shutting it off, though, she plugged into the Gate Authority Library and put the big display on a random-shuffle recycle of scenery, but keyed to the time of day, so we could have a 24/7 window on Linnea. By the time of the meeting, the New Paso branch of the family were the experts on the great-horses. Especially me.

Horse World was the most interesting of all the parallel planets, because it was the most Earthlike of all the worlds. And it was the only one with real human beings on it, although that had happened by accident. But it also had a lot of its own native life too, a lot of different plants and animals that looked like they could have come from Earth. But that was because of the way the world-gate had been calculated; they designed all the gates to open up to worlds as Earthlike as possible, but it didn't always work. Sometimes one little digit at the far end of one little equation was enough to throw the whole thing out of kilter. Even the same set of equations could open up on to two vastly different worlds; it was because of something called time-congruency, but it meant that nobody was really sure yet how to predict what any gate would open up onto, it was still a big gamble. But with Linnea, they got a nearly perfect planet.

Well, I thought it was perfect. But not everybody else did. The more the family talked, the more it became clear that not everybody wanted to go to Horse World and pretty soon, it turned into a big fight. Aunt Morra got very upset, arguing that she had invested ten-ten years into this contract and if the family moved out now, her investment would be thirty-devalued. “I'll have to start over. I'll never earn senior in another cluster. I'll lose my representation. And who's going to take care of me when I get old?”

On the wall display, Lorrin shook his head. He was in Denver this week. “You knew when you signed your contract that we had a longterm plan.”

“But I thought we would be staying here! No one ever said—”

“Yes, we did,” said Mom-Trey. “We said it over and over. And every time, you kept saying, ‘No, no, we can't go. I don't want to go.' You've been saying it for ten-ten years. What did you think, Morra? That the decision was yours alone to make? That if you said no every time the subject was raised that the rest of us would change our minds? If you didn't want to go, you should have opted out before this.”

“But I didn't think you were serious—” she wailed. She left the room in tears, leaving her place in the wall display blank.

Then Auncle Irm got angry at Mom-Trey, shouting over the channel. “Now look what you've done!”

“I told the truth,” said Mom-Trey in that voice she always used when she was annoyed. “Perhaps if more of us had told the truth before this, we wouldn't have this problem now.”

Mom-Woo sighed then. A dangerous sign. She said, “I feared this would happen. I hoped it wouldn't. So many families break up over this issue.” But from where I was sitting I could see her laptop screen; she was already reviewing contracts.

“Well then, don't break up the family!” Irm snapped. “If we're really a family corporation founded on representative process, then let's respect the wishes of those who don't want to go.”

“Why do we have to respect
your
wishes,” said Cindy, interrupting. “Why can't you respect
ours?”

“Hush, son,” said Mom-Woo.

“You're
splitting
the family,” accused Irm.

“The family is already split,” Mom-Lu said quietly. And that seemed to end that part of the argument very uncomfortably. Then there was a long silence that ended only when Gampa Joan declared a recess to conference on a private channel.

That's when Mom-Woo and Mom-Lu abruptly decided it was time for all the kids to go to bed, meaning
me
, even though they'd promised I could stay up till the end of the meeting. But I didn't mind. This part was mosty boring. And listening to all the parents hollering at each other made my stomach hurt. Even though we turned the sound down on Irm.

The next day all three Moms gathered all the kids together and explained it to us. Part of the family might be going to another world, and part of the family didn't want to go. And the part of the family that didn't want to go was very angry at the part of the family that did.

“Are we divorcing?” Rinky asked. I remember it was Rinky because I was sitting on her lap. Rinky was old enough to be a parent, but had deferred puberty for a while. Probably because of the move-out.

Mom-Trey looked sad. “I don't know, honey. Irm and Bhetto have filed for temporary partition of resources. If our application to emigrate is accepted, then the partition will be finalized. Except, if our resources are partitioned, then we might not have enough to pay for our training, so we wouldn't be able to go after all.” She looked very sad; I think
she was more unhappy about the bitterness of the argument than the disruption of the plan to go to the new world. “But it might not happen anyway. Our application could be turned down again. That's part of what the meeting was supposed to be about. To make a new long-range plan if we can't move out.”

Mom-Lu explained that Da-Lorrin had filed new papers with a contracting agency with a forty shared-placement rate. I didn't understand a lot of it, but the parents thought that this time it might really happen. “We passed both the first and second reviews,” said Mom-Lu, “and the next step will be the interviews. That's why Gampa thought it was time for the family to think about what we should do if the application goes forward—or if it's turned down again.”

The reason I remember all this is because of the question I asked while I was sitting on Rinky's lap. “But if the family divorces, what's gonna happen to us?”

“That's what we're trying to figure out, sweetheart. I promise you, nothing bad will happen to the little-uns.” Mom-Woo patted me on the knee, but that still didn't make it a satisfying answer.

THE TALL AND THE SMALL

NOTHING HAPPENED FOR A LONG WHILE after that. There were more meetings about stuff I didn't understand. But except for the meetings, everything went on just like before. Mosty. Except the arguments were meaner. Us kids weren't supposed to know about the arguments, but we did anyway. Mom-Woo said not to worry, there were negotiations underway and maybe it would all work out. There might be a way to take care of everyone.

And then it all started to change. First, some people came from the bureau and talked to the parents about stuff. They did that a lot. And there were a lot of papers to sign. And then we all had to fly to Houston so the doctors could take pictures of our insides. The trip was fun, but the doctor part was boring. But we stayed over an extra day and visited Mars Dome where people practice living before they go off to Mars. Gamma said we'd have to live in a dome too before we went through a gate, not like Mars or Luna Dome, but like whatever world we were going to.

One day, some people in suits came out to our farm to visit. We didn't grow much on our farm, mosty what we ate ourselves; but we made a lot of electricity to sell west. And a little water too. The people in suits looked at our evaporators, our windmills and our solar panels like they were inspectors from the buyers' co-op or something. But they were really just looking to see how well we managed everything. Big Jes, who managed all of the machinery and who always let me ride on his shoulders, said that you had to know how to take care of all kinds of stuff by
yourself before they'd let you move out, because on Horse World you couldn't just pick up the phone and call for a service truck, because there weren't any. That was why it was so important for the visitors to see that our farm was well run and that we were self-sufficient.

One of the visitors talked with the parents for a bit and then came out to play with us kids. Her name was Birdie and she had a puppet with her, a floppy blue wabbit that hopped around on the porch. It tried to climb up onto a chair, but it couldn't; it fell down on its butt and laughed and said, “Oh, dear. Faw down, go boom!” Then it ran around and asked all the kids to kiss its boo-boo, pointing to its waggling butt. Nobody wanted to do it. Everybody said ick and pointed to everybody else. “Ask Mikey. Mikey will do anything. Go see Shona. Go to Nona.” But nobody would kiss it, so the wabbit sat down and began weeping into its paws. That made everybody sad, so sad we almost started crying ourselves. But then the wabbit sat up and announced it was ready to play again, and began doing clumsy somersaults until it tumbled itself into Birdie's purse, hiding itself and refusing to come out again, no matter how much we begged.

Later, Birdie sat and talked to each of the kids, one at a time. When it was my turn, she asked me what I knew about moving out. I explained how we would go through a world-gate to another place just like Earth, only different. Did I understand about parallel development, Birdie asked. I thought I did. I said that the two worlds started out mosty the same, but then turned out different. Like Cindy and Parra were cloned from the same egg, only Cindy decided to be a boy when he grew up and Parra didn't. Moving out would be like going to another Earth, but one with different animals and maybe even different people, if we went to Horse World.

Birdie told me that was exactly right. She said that there were a lot of different ways to explain how the worlds on the other side of the gates worked, but her favorite description was that they're not really
different
worlds at all; they're just different possibilities of the same reality, places where Schrödinger's cat had kittens. (Whatever that meant.)
¹

Then she showed me pictures of some of the worlds that were open for settlement and asked which ones I liked. I didn't even have to look. I told her I liked the one with the big horses best. She smiled and said
she liked that one too, but there were a lot of other parts to any decision and we might not get to go to that world, if we got to go anywhere at all. We might have to go somewhere else, so I should find something on each world to like. That was good advice.

She also asked me if I was good at keeping secrets. I had to think about that. I wasn't sure if I should say yes, because I was the one who accidentally sorta blurted out the surprise before Mom-Trey's birthday. But I'd never told anybody about sneaking into Rinky's room and trying on her bra either. That was something only I knew. So after a minute, I just said, “I think so.”

Birdie said, “Keeping secrets is very important, especially if you go to a world like Linnea, the one with the horses. See, Kaer, the people on that world, they don't know about Earth, not yet. And we're not ready to tell them, because—well, because they're not ready yet. So you can't tell them where you're from, because they won't believe you, they might think you're crazy. So you have to pretend you're one of them, born on their world. On Linnea, they still believe in witches, so if you start talking about coming from Earth, they might lock you up. Or worse. I'm not saying this to scare you. I just want you to know how important the secret is. This isn't a secret for sharing. This is a secret for keeping.”

I nodded and pretended to understand. I'd already figured out that if you nodded and pretended it made sense, grown-ups would drop the subject. But if you argued about it, whatever it was, they'd just keep talking until they won the argument. So mosty I nodded and pretended to understand. Except not this time. “If we don't like it, can we come back?”

Birdie looked as if I'd said one of those words that embarrass grown-ups. “You can, but the whole point is to stay and build a life on the new world. It's not a vacation, Kaer. We don't know enough about the people living over there and we want to learn. The best way to learn is to have families live with them and report back.”

“But it's dangerous, isn't it?”

“Yes, it could be. And everyone in your family will have to be very careful, Kaer. But we're going to train you very well, all of you, so you won't make any mistakes. The training will take at least two or three years. And you won't go to the new world until everybody is sure you're ready. And this is the important thing: if at any time you decide you don't want to go, you don't have to.”

I thought about it. “I'll be ten or eleven when we go.”

“That's about right.”

“Will there be other families there?”

Birdie nodded. “Absolutely. You won't be alone. We have scouts on Linnea now. Their job isn't just to plant cameras; they're also learning how to mingle with the people, so they can learn the language and the history and how to behave. And from time to time, they come back to teach us. We have a whole dome just for training, and only when we think it's safe will we start sending families over. We'll only send a few families at first to see how they manage; and then later, if they do okay, we'll send more after them. But we'll spread them out so they can see things all over the world.

“If we sent your family to Linnea, you would be in the third wave of immigrants. We already have a few families over there, working as scouts, and more are already in training. Our very best rangers will help you and your family learn the language. When it's time for you to move out, you and your family will have had the best training possible.”

“When do we find out what world we're going to?”

“That takes a while to decide, sometimes as long as a year. Your family will have to keep looking at pictures from all the worlds for a while longer. You don't mind, do you?”