Child of Earth (3 page)

“Nuh-uh. But I still want to go to the world with the big horses.”

“Would you like to see some of those horses in real life?”

“Really—?”

“We have them at a special place in New Mexico. We brought some over and we've been learning how to breed them at the big ranch. We're going to arrange a visit for your family. When you come, I'll take you to see them. Maybe we can even go riding. Would you like that?”

“Oh, yes!” I was ready to leave, right then. “When can we go?”

“How does next month sound?”

“I have school—!”

“It's all right. You can miss it,” Birdie said.

“Really? Mom-Woo never lets me miss school.”

“This time, I think she will.”

NEW MEXICO

—WAS HOT AND BRIGHT. Too bright. The sky looked so high it was scary. We had to wear sunglasses and hats and smear ourselves with lotion. But inside it was too cold. Gamma Joe complained that the air-conditioning made her bones hurt.

Almost everybody was there. It was like Celebration Day, only without presents. Cindy and Parra both flew in. Da-Lorrin came down from Montreal. Even Morra and Irm and Bhetto showed up, so I guess they'd patched up their quarrel somehow. I stayed close to Rinky and held her hand everywhere. Shona and Nona hugged Mom-Lu's side. Jerre and Klin and Marle also took time off from school. And there were three relatives I didn't recognize and whose names I forgot as soon Mom-Woo told me.

There were other families visiting too, so there were lots of kids and it was pretty noisy for a while. The Kelly family came in from Florida; the second-eldest child was Patta. She was here to see the horses too. Patta still dressed like a boy, but she'd already become a girl. When I asked her about it, she said it felt better than she expected, and she was glad she did it.

Finally, after everybody was registered and badged, we all got on air-conditioned buses and went for a tour around the whole campus. They called it a campus, but it was really a town, with domes and towers and tube-clusters everywhere. Our guide was Birdie; she was our caseworker now, and she said that every building was connected
to every other building by underground tunnels, because the winter storms were as bad as the summer heat. She said there was an enormous amount of work to do and not enough people to do it, and they couldn't just go out and hire more people because everybody had to be trained and the training took a long time, so they had to train people just to do the training. Except the only people who could train other people were also needed to do their own work, so everybody was always working two jobs at a time, which was sort of good news if you were applying for work, because it meant that there were a lot of placements available.

Birdie told us that there were sixteen active world-gates: three in New Mexico, with two more coming online next year; plus two in Canada, six in Australia, two in China, three in Russia—she didn't count any of the gates that weren't open for traffic—and there were seven more under construction in India and Africa, plus four more scheduled for Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Plus a whole bunch more proposed, but not yet funded. She didn't count the gates that opened onto uninhabitable worlds, even though some of them were open for mining. I already knew most of this from shows on the net, but Birdie told us a lot of stuff that hadn't been posted yet.

Not all the world-gates went to viable worlds, she said. Despite all the very best calculations of what kind of a world they were targeting for, there were too many time and energy variables that couldn't be controlled beyond the initial parameters, so it was always a surprise what they'd find on the other side when the gate was opened. The world might not be very good for our kind of life. Some worlds were too hot. Some were too cold. Most had the wrong kind of atmosphere. Some worlds had life, but it was the wrong kind, things that we definitely could not share a planet with. And then there were some worlds that no one talked about. I couldn't imagine how bad a world like that would have to be.

“When they find a bad world, do they shut the gate down and try again?” Mom-Lu asked.

“It's not that easy,” said Birdie. “Once a world-gate is calculated, they have to build the gate specifically to that world. It's not like television where you can change the channel. Every gate is unique to its own destination. You can only build one gate to a world. The physics are very rigid. And as carefully as we plan, as carefully as we target, every time we power up, it's still a Heisenberg event.”

“What's that?”

“A surprise.” She smiled. She told us about a gate they'd just opened in Canada. That world was in the middle of an ice age so bad that even the carbon dioxide had frozen out of the air.

“So what do you do if you don't like what's on the other side? Just turn it off and forget that gate?”

“Sometimes, yes. We tear down the operative part of a nonviable gate and build a new one in the same frame. But it always depends on what's on the other side. We have a checklist of over a hundred different standards that a world has to meet before we consider it viable. Gravity is first on the list, then atmosphere. Length of day, length of year, what kind of light the star puts out. The angle of inclination of the planet's axis. Whether it has a moon or not—if it doesn't have a moon, it wobbles on its axis; it can end up with one pole pointing directly toward the sun. Magnetic field. Heavy metals in its mantle. Radiation levels. Meteor and asteroid bombardment. Those are the obvious ones. The not-so-obvious things are where the planet is in its geologic cycle. Are tectonic plates active or settled? How much volcanic activity is there? Is it in an ice age or a temperate period? And so on. If a planet passes all these tests, then we send through robots and science teams. It's never routine. Every world is different. Even if we start out with the same criteria, we can get wildly divergent results; and when we try to compensate in advance for those results, things get even more chaotic.

“I know that this isn't very exciting to some of you,” Birdie interrupted herself. “But this is what the tech teams live for. It's all about probability theory. The more gates we open, the more information we have. So each time, we should be getting better and better, right? But so far it hasn't worked that way—and that's because, at least some folks think this, that our attempts to predict what we're going to get affect the prediction in ways we can't predict. So that no matter what we do, every new world will be a surprise.

“Most of the worlds, they're not very livable, but they've got a lot of easily accessible heavy metals, nickel, iron, copper, silver, gold, so we've got mining and smelting operations. A few places, we've sealed the access, but we haven't turned off the gates, because even though we might not want to go to those places right now, maybe later we might change our minds. We're still considering those possibilities.” And then she added, “Of course, you do know about the one gate that self-destructed, because it opened into a star. That was very bad news. But that was a long time ago when the gates were first invented and we don't make mistakes like that anymore.”

Patta Kelly raised her hand. “I heard you have to keep the gates open for a million years before you can use them.”

Birdie laughed. “Sometimes even longer than that.” She looked around to the rest of us. “Every world exists in its own set of realityrules. We have to compensate for all the different space-time energy levels; sometimes it takes years to stabilize a gate. Sometimes we get flickers of discontinuity. And that produces time-slips. On this side, normal time continues; but on the other side, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of years slip by in a single flicker.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“No. Not after a gate is stabilized. But sometimes we trigger a deliberate time-slip. Sometimes we find a world that's almost, but not quite, right. So we terraform it. Rather than wait ten thousand years, we just slip it a little. It's kind of like cooking. You add a few ingredients, you simmer for a while, you take a taste and add a few more things. We start out with anaerobic bacteria, then aerobic, then plankton and lichens and fungi; eventually kelp and grass. The great thing is that terraforming also gives us a marvelous evolutionary laboratory. We get to see how life-forms adapt and change. That's what we did with Linnea. We worked on that planet at least a million years.” She stopped to smile at Patta and me. “Yes, those are Earth horses, only three hundred and fifty thousand years later.”

“But how come they're so big?”

“Everything on Linnea is bigger. It's because the gravity on Linnea is a little bit less than Earth. So that changes the physics of growth.” She frowned. “Let's see. How do I explain this in simple terms? Try it this way. Do you know what the angle of repose is? No. All right, I'll explain. I apologize for the science lesson, but it's necessary. The angle of repose is the maximum angle at which a pile of material remains stable. Like a sand dune. You can only pile up so much sand before it starts sliding. Well, that's a function of gravity. On Linnea, there's less gravity, so the angle of repose is steeper. The sand dunes are taller and sharper. Now imagine that every plant and every animal also has a physiological angle of repose. It's the way that all the different parts of the body fit together and interact.

“On Linnea, plants grow taller—but not too much taller or they're more susceptible to wind, so they have to grow thicker stems and trunks as well, but that affects how much water they have to pump out to their leaves—see how everything has to fit together? It's the same for animals. Bones can grow longer, but then they have to grow thicker to be strong enough to support the length. Then the heart and lungs have
to get larger because they're pumping oxygenated blood farther than before. But because gravity is different, the rhythm of walking is different and that means that the stress falls differently on all the joints, and that means that the skeleton has to adapt to compensate. Everything is connected to everything else.

“Linnea's sun is harsher, a lot more radiation than Sol, so we see a lot more mutation. That plus the ecological pressure to adapt to a profoundly different environment produced some very rapid changes. Rapid on an evolutionary scale, that is. Everything we introduced over there expanded to fill every available ecological niche. On this side, we worked on it for ten years. On the other side, three hundred and fifty thousand years of evolution reshaped wolves, buffalo, horses, ostriches, cats, mice, rats, rabbits, birds, ants, bees, beetles, worms, grass, wheat, bamboo, potatoes, trees of all kinds, you name it—everything. It's been a remarkable laboratory. Even human beings have been affected.”

“Is that how long people have been on Linnea? Three hundred and fifty thousand years—?”

“Oh, dear, no. Humans have only been on Linnea for three thousand years, Linnea time. And that was an accident. It wasn't supposed to happen.” Before anyone could ask how, Birdie said, “We had a timeflicker, an unscheduled discontinuity. The gate was restabilizing. We had several exploration teams on the other side. In that brief instant of disconnect, more than three thousand years passed. We could tell that by the difference in the recorded star positions. When we felt it was safe to send teams back in, we found that there were settlements on Linnea—the umpty-umpty-great-grandchildren of the lost explorers.”

“Weren't they glad to see you?”

“That's the bad news. They'd forgotten all about us. They must have had a rough time those first few generations, and somewhere along the line, Earth stopped being history and became myth.”

“Didn't you just tell them the truth?”

“It wasn't that easy. They didn't believe us. They killed the contact teams.”

“Huh—?”

“Would you believe it if someone came up suddenly and said you were really the great-grandchild of alien explorers?”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess not.”

“That's the problem. They don't want to hear it. It sounds too outlandish to them. That's the problem with a lot of us—we don't want to hear anything that will unsettle us.”

“Are we going to see a gate today?” That was Parra, changing the subject.

“Not today. There's a lot of other stuff that you need to see first.”

Birdie was right; there was so much to see I couldn't remember it all. A lot of it was pretty boring. There were these big buildings where hundreds of intelligence engines worked night and day. The intelligence engines monitored all the hours and hours of video coming back from the different worlds, looking for interesting stuff. If they found anything really important, they posted it for people to review, only there weren't enough people to look at all the things they found.

Birdie said that the primary goal is to develop new Earths, places where people can just drive through the gate and go right to work, planting farms and building cities. Lots of farms and lots of cities. But opening a gate is a very expensive proposition; it costs three billion dollars to build the nexus itself, and at least a hundred million a year to maintain. And that's just for the physical plant. It costs three times that much to pay for all the people necessary to run the operation. See, the first thing they do when they open a gate is send over probes to bring back samples. Hundreds of thousands of samples. So opening up a new world also means building a whole city to service the gate traffic, and that means training thousands and thousands of people for all the different kinds of access and analysis and follow-through.

The most important thing to find out is whether or not the world can support human life; but if it can, it probably already has life of its own, so then the gate scientists have to see what kind of life it is; and eventually, what they really want to know is how hard will it be for humans to live in such an environment.