Child of Earth Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY DAVID GERROLD

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE OLD WOMAN WHO LIVED IN THE GRASS

  A FAMILY MEETING

  THE TALL AND THE SMALL

  NEW MEXICO

  DINOSAURS

  JINKER

  SCOUTS

  WORLDS

  LINNEA DOME

  IN TRAINING

  CHURCH

  MERDE

  A CHOICE

  MOUNTAIN

  THE DAY OF THE SEA

  THE OLD WOMAN AND THE WIND

  GOD’S THUMB

  CHOCOLATE CAKE

  ONE HUNDRED PERCENT

  HOME

  CULTURE SHOCK

  SUPERSTITION

  A HOUSE

  WINTER BEGINS

  SNOW

  MORE SNOW

  DECISIONS

  REAL

  KACKS

  MOCKS

  THE OLD WOMAN AND HER PROMISE

  THE RIDE HOME

  NEWS

  THE MAN WITH THE SILVER EARRING

  THE MEETING THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

  THE DECISION

  EVEN MORE SNOW

  AUNCLE IRM

  THE RETURN

  CROSSOVER

  AIRBORNE

  REINVENTING THE WORLD

  Copyright Page

  ~ PRAISE FOR 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.”

  —PAUL 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.”

  —SPIDER 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.”

  —BEN BOVA

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

  —GREGORY 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.”

  —JOHN 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 evening—but 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 much—much 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 w
as 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 me—that 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 only—and 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.

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.