Child of Earth (24 page)

Pleased with himself, Blue Jacket turned and began crunching through the snow back toward the chopper. The senator followed close behind. I wanted to wave my hand and call “Thank you,” in English, but Rinky must have read my mind; she put a hand on my shoulder. Birdie looked
at us, at our merriment, and realized there was nothing she could say.

“Wait,” said Mom-Woo, touching Birdie's arm. “The babies need medicine. We need help out here—”

“Yes, we know. But you know the rules. You agreed to the rules. We cannot bring you help. You have to survive on your own. Or not at all.” Mom-Woo hung her head, dejected, but Birdie caught her before she could turn away. She pointed toward a stack of boxes the pilot had unloaded while we were all below. “But we have imposed on your winternap, so we have brought you gifts of gratitude. Administor Rance sends her most gracious appreciation for your help and cooperation. And we hope you'll find the contents a lot more useful than ... all that toilet paper. Toilet paper, yes. Big Jes has the right attitude.” Shaking her head bemusedly, she followed the senator back to the aircraft. A few moments later, it clattered up into the air, turned in the wind and headed back toward Callo City.

REAL

IT TOOK TWO OR THREE TRIPS, even with each of us carrying one or two boxes at a time, but we got them all safely downstairs. Da wouldn't let us open any of them until everybody was unwrapped and warming themselves with soup. The first package was the smallest, but it was filled with medicines, all kinds; a note was included. “The red syrup is for the babies. One spoonful every morning for three days. Everyone else should take one yellow pill every day for three days. This is an update to your vaccinations.”

Da made a face, and muttered something under his breath. Something about God arriving in a constructed tool. Whatever.

The bigger boxes contained slow-burn logs. Enough to last for two months, if we were careful. Two others had warm blankets and some clean clothes.

“I thought they weren't supposed to help us,” said Bhetto, grumpily.

“This isn't help. It's a gift. There's a difference.”

“A difference of words, not results.”

“Maybe this is their way of admitting that they scheduled winter too soon, that we did not have enough time to properly prepare, starting from scratch,” said Rinky. “By the time we finished digging our burrow, we had no time left for anything else.”

“It will be that way when we get to Linnea,” said Big Jes. “Now we've learned our lesson.”

“When we get to Linnea?” asked Cindy. “I thought we had decided to quit.”

“I dunno,” said Little Klin. “After all those stupid things those stupid visitors said, I'm just angry enough to stay. They insulted our
home.
”

“I feel the same. Who wants to stay on the same planet with that ugly old bitch in the red jacket? She had a face like an elbow wrinkle.”

“And a mouth like a torn pocket,” said Morra. “Even worse than me.” Everybody laughed. Even Irm looked at her in surprise. Big Jes went a little pale. “Uh, I didn't know you'd overheard that—”

“Oh, hell, dear—I hear everything. This family has no secrets. I thought you knew that.” She patted his arm. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to use that axe. You certainly polished it hard enough.”

“If he didn't sharpen the axe, he would have had to use his bare hands. And I don't think he wanted to dirty himself.”

“Um, there is that,” said Mom-Trey. “For all their shiny cleanliness, they felt like the dirtiest people I'd ever met. I wanted to wash the whole nest as soon as they climbed out—to get rid of their stink. That awful perfume. I still want to wash this room. I can still smell it.” She wrinkled her nose and put her bowl aside. “It makes the soup taste soapy.”

“Poor Birdie,” I said. “She tried so hard.”

“I thought she would choke when Blue Jacket handed Big Jes all that money. How much was it, Jes?”

Big Jes shook his head. “I didn't even bother to count it.” He took it out of his pocket and handed it to Da. Da riffled through it, then laughed. “Two hundred and sixty. Even their generosity is stingy. Here, Kaer. Next time you see Birdie, tell her to send this back to them.”

“
After
we use it as toilet paper ...?”

Da laughed. “Imagine the looks on their faces.”

“They wouldn't see it as an insult, you know,” Mom-Woo pointed out. “They'd just think we're too stupid to recognize money.”

“There is that,” said Da. “Kaer, just give the money to Birdie and tell her to buy herself something nice.”

“Speaking of Birdie,” Parra added, “I liked what she told them. She called us
real
Linneans.”

Cindy poked him. “Well, we are real Linneans. Thanks to the visitors, we now distrust Earthers.”

“And that brings up another reason why we have to stay,” Mom-Woo said. “If we quit now, it would certainly embarrass Birdie. And I think she has already suffered more than enough embarrassment for one day. Perhaps we should wait and embarrass her next week.” Everybody laughed at that. Mom-Woo didn't really tell jokes, but many times the things she said had the same effect.

Then she looked at me. “Kaer, what's that look about?”

“We can't quit next week either. We can't quit
ever
. If we did ... we'd still have to work off our contract. And they'd probably give us Birdie's job. Or one just like it where we'd have to spend all our time with people like the stupids.”

Everybody looked at everybody else—and then everybody laughed out loud. It was funny. Uproariously funny. And that was the last time we ever talked about giving up. Now that we knew who we were, we knew where we belonged.

Inside the last box we opened, we found packages of spices, all kinds. More than anything, that brought cheers from everybody. And even a few short arguments what we should prepare for dinner that evening. Sweet butter pudding? Bean pie? Jerked boffili savory stew? Mom-Lu ended the argument when she said, “All of those things would bring us great delight. And more. But if we make the food too delicious, we will eat more of it, and we will run out of food before spring. We must make it last.” She took the box of spices and put it away on a shelf. “We shall give ourselves a hint of flavor, just a bit, but we shall delay the real feast until we have something to celebrate.” And then, just to make sure that everybody understood that she was not inviting them to argue the point, she added, “I have spoken.” And even though everybody laughed, it was a laughter of agreement. It was what a
real
Linnean family would do.

After that, life in the hole didn't get easier, but it stopped being hard. It was just life in the hole. We were still cold and hungry and cramped, but we weren't crazy anymore.

And something else, too.

We were Linneans now,
real
Linneans. Not just because Birdie said so, but because we did. And that made everything different. We felt different. We acted different. Even the way we talked to each other changed; we stopped acting the various rituals and started
meaning
them. Even the blessings over tea became important. The Old Woman in the Grass became a real person to us. When we celebrated Winter Solstice, when Da actually got up from the table and opened the door to the world and invited the Old Woman to join us, I half-expected to see her come toddling down the stairs wearing a long grass cloak and a happy smile. I felt her spirit arrive, but I was genuinely disappointed she had not sent her corporeal self as well.

Now that we had become
real
Linneans, our studies also became more serious. There was still too much to learn, so many things that you could only know if you had lived all your life on Linnea—like knowing
to look both ways before crossing the street, that red means stop and green means go; like knowing that the black beetle colonies are mosty harmless, but the bright red ones have a nasty bite; like knowing how to find your way through the grass when it's taller than you. That last one—well, I never really figured it out. The best I could ever do was backtrack along my own trail of crushed stalks until I got back to my starting point.

Sometimes, it felt like we had double vision. We had to learn about Linnea from the inside, as if we had always lived there; but at the same time, we had to learn about Linnea from Earthside too. It felt like an avalanche of facts, as if all that information was pummeling us. It seemed the more we learned, the more we had to learn.

Like all gate projects, the design for Linnea had started with the design parameters for Earth; then the scientists widened the criteria. You couldn't find an exact duplicate, but if you widened the criteria to allow for slight differences in gravity and atmosphere, you would increase the likelihood of actually finding a useful world. They knew the planet would need a moon, not just for its tidal effects, but because the gravitational influence of a moon would keep the planet stable on its axis, instead of wobbling like a top losing its momentum. The planet would have to circle its star at a livable distance and exist within a specific temperature range. The star couldn't be too old or too young and it had to have a usable spectrum of light. The planet would have to have a strong magnetic field, useful metals, available water, not receive too much radiation, and would have to be old enough to be geologically stable. It couldn't be all volcanoes. Everything had to be the right age, the right size, the right color—or close enough that it wouldn't kill you. Linnea had turned out better than most.

From Earth's point of view, the best thing about Linnea was that it could be terraformed. You drop in some anaerobic bacteria, close it up, and come back in a hundred thousand years; next you add aerobic bacteria and wait another hundred thousand years. Now you've got the beginnings of an atmosphere. And if evolution has done its job, you might even start seeing some lichens and fungus; but if not, you add some. You can start putting in other ingredients too; maybe some plankton and diatoms. Maybe even some grass seeds. Put the top back on, shake well, and come back later. The time-slip effect made it possible to do real-time evolution on a whole world.

Eventually, Linnea had a whole subset of Earth's ecology: basic bacteria of decomposition to feed the grass and trees, the flowering shrubs,
the vines and ferns; then insects and spiders and beetles, bees and ants, worms and mollusks and slugs, lizards and mice and birds, all the little creatures that lived off the plants. And finally, the animals. Wolves, buffalo, horses, antelope, emus, camels, dogs and cats. And in the ocean, cod and mackerel, yellowtail and tuna, salmon and sharks. And eventually dolphins and whales too. The oceans on Linnea were almost as salty as the oceans on Earth; most fish would survive.

But Linnea wasn't Earth. It was different—just different enough that life had to adapt. Because Linnea had a slightly lighter gravity, plants could grow taller, animals could grow larger; but that meant that all the other parts of the ecology had to adjust as well. A taller plant means that water has to rise higher to nurture the leaves or blossoms. That affects the composition of the stems. And that ultimately affects the teeth of the creatures who feed on the plants. Insects could grow larger, but that would affect their ability to “breathe.” Insects don't have lungs; their ability to take in oxygen is a function of their size. If they get too big, they need bigger hearts and that means more oxygen and that affects the shape of their chitinous shells. The larger animals too—they could leap higher on Linnea, but coming down put a different kind of stress on bones and muscles.

Earth animals are designed for Earth gravity, for Earth sunlight, for Earth atmosphere; on Linnea the stresses occurred differently. And sometimes, those stresses would occur in ways that put more strain on different parts of the system. Until the necessary muscles grew and the reflexes adapted, Earth-born creatures could be at serious risk for broken legs.
This means you, stupid
.

Earth gravity requires Earth-walking. You have to lean forward, shifting your center of gravity, almost falling, and put your foot out to catch yourself, shift your weight onto that foot, continue almost falling, and put the other foot out to catch, shift your gravity forward again, and so on. On Linnea, with less gravity, you have to lean farther to walk. You walk with a different gait. An Earth gait won't work, because you aren't shifting your center of gravity far enough forward. Running is a whole other problem. On Linnea, you have to run falling down.

But that part was still theory for us. We wouldn't know it until we actually got to Linnea. Even the few days we spent in simulators wasn't enough; it only gave us a sense of how much different our physical activities would become. The good news was that we'd be able to lift heavy things with less effort. The bad news was that all our muscles would ache in unfamiliar places for the first two or three weeks until we adjusted.

Some of this interested me, some of it bored me to exhaustion; but the arguments and discussions over dinner always held my attention, because I not only got to hear what different members of the family thought, I got to hear a lot about their past lives and experiences, things I never knew before. Aunt Morra had been a dancer. In a club. Earning money for school. That's where she met Irm and Bhetto, who were also students, already in a partnership contract. Rinky, who was my favorite sister, had been adopted by Big Jes and Little Klin before they joined the rest of the family. Big Jes and Little Klin had been in Little Klin's family, they met Rinky in the system; when their previous family rejected her adoption, they moved out and started a new family, but they couldn't get the adoption approved without guarantees of continuity, so they joined Da's family. Da only had two wives then, and only Gamma and Gampa—except Gamma and Gampa had never been partnered. Gamma was Mom-Lu's mother, and Gampa was Mom-Woo's father. Mom-Trey came along later, with Cindy and Parra from her previous marriage.