Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Read online

“All right. You tell me if I say this wrong, but it looks to me that you want to do the right thing—and in this situation, right and wrong look so mixed up that you can’t quite tell the difference, right?”

  “No,” I said, too quickly. And then I corrected myself. “Well, yes. Sort of. Maybe.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That clears it up.”

  I knew he was joking, but he was serious too, at the same time. So I turned around in my seat to face him. “I see the need to do this. But I don’t see the goodness in it. And even though we say we don’t want to hurt anyone, it looks like we’ll hurt everyone. It makes me wonder. Maybe we shouldn’t try to come to inhabited worlds at all. We just end up making a lot of hurt and pain and trouble for everyone, don’t we?”

  Da didn’t answer right away. He put one of his big hands on my head and stroked my hair. He looked past me into his own memories for a moment, before coming back to me with a smile. “I see that you have reached that age when the difference between right and wrong occupies much of your thoughts. I can’t say that it makes me unhappy to see you considering these questions, Kaer. Many people never do—and so they have no trouble doing very evil things.”

  “I know that, da. And you and my mothers have taught me everything you think I should know about how to behave. I guess you’ve done a good job. Everybody says so. But everything you’ve taught me only works on Earth. When we get to a new place, where we have new rules and new ways to act, everything breaks down. The old ways don’t work, do they? So how can I tell the difference between right and wrong anymore?”

  “Let me guess. You want a simple answer, don’t you, Kaer?”

  “It would help,” I admitted.

  “I’ll give you the simplest answer. And then maybe you’ll see why simplest doesn’t always work. But if you don’t mind, I’ll have to do this in English, because the Linnean language doesn’t have all the words I need.” He took a breath. “Do you know the word ‘empowerment?’”

  “Sort of.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Um, to give someone help? Reassurance? You pat them on the back and tell them they can do the job, right?”

  “It looks like that to a lot of people, yes. But empowerment means a lot more than that. The dictionary says that it means ‘to invest with power, especially legal power or authority.’ It means to ‘authorize.’ But I find that definition insufficient, because it doesn’t include the most important form of empowerment—giving someone energy. You can give someone the ability to do something; we call that teaching. And you can give someone the responsibility to do something; we call that delegating or assigning. But you can teach someone to do something and you can assign them to do it and they still might not have everything they need to do the job. What a person also needs is motivation—the energy that you create inside yourself. Only sometimes you don’t know how to get that energy started. And so Rinky or Mum-Wu or Aunt Morra comes along and gives you a little poke or a little hug or someone promises you a reward, and then you get all excited or happy or enthusiastic—like that. Or sometimes, people empower you another way. They challenge you. Remember when Mom-Lu told Mom-Trey to get off her fat butt?” We both laughed about that for a moment before da continued. “Sometimes someone will deliberately say something to make you angry, so you’ll say, ‘I’ll show you, you bastard.’ Sometimes it works. Sometimes it gets you up off your fat butt, doesn’t it?”

  “So empowerment means getting people excited enough to go to work?”

  “Um, not quite.” Da smiled as if I’d made a joke. “Empowerment means getting people energized to make a difference. It means that you take responsibility for the effect you have on others. You already exist in someone else’s life, but if you don’t do anything to help them, then you just use up their energy and your own as well. So empowerment means existing responsibly, doing things that enhance and enlarge and enliven, so that you and all the people around you can do things together that you couldn’t do alone. Like building a home together.”

  I thought about that. “Who empowered us to do that, da?”

  “Well,” he said. “We had to empower ourselves. “But I remember one night when Mom-Wu asked everyone why they wanted to go to Linnea, and someone at the table—I forget who—said, ‘I want to go to Linnea because I like the horses.’ Do you remember that, Kaer? I remember that very clearly—because the look on your face was so serious and so intense, it empowered me to keep on going, even though I didn’t feel very much like it at the time.”

  “I remember. You said a lot of angry things.”

  “I was angry for you. And for the rest of us. But what you said—well, you said the right thing. And then so did everybody else. But you made us remember why we started this in the first place. You empowered the family. You’ve done it more than once, sweetheart.”

  “I never knew that, da.”

  “I speak only the truth. Do you understand empowerment now?”

  “I think so. It means making things happen that wouldn’t have happened anyway.”

  Da laughed softly. “I’ve never heard it explained that way, but I like your way of saying it. So now, what do you think disempowerment means?”

  “The exact opposite?”

  “Mm hmm. Go on.”

  “It means hurting people. Taking away their energy? Making it hard or impossible for them to do what they want to do? Or need to do?”

  Da nodded. “If empowerment means expanding people, giving them energy to grow, then disempowerment means damaging people, keeping them from growing, keeping them from making a difference for others. It means holding them down in the gutter—and that means you have to go down there with them to keep them there. Do you know what that means? Empowerment empowers everybody, even the source. And disempowerment disempowers everybody—especially the source. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. “The more you empower, the better everybody gets. And the more you disempower, the worse everybody gets.”

  “Right. Very good. So now, do you have a better idea of the difference between right and wrong?”

  “You made it very clear, da.”

  “So now you know why sometimes I tell you that you have to choose for yourself, don’t you . . .”

  “Yes. And I always find that really frustrating.”

  “Mm hmm. It usually shows on your face.” He was grinning at me. That grin. The one that meant I was about to step into a bear trap. “So now that you know the difference between empowerment and disempowerment, do you think you might a better way to judge your choices?”

  I considered the question. “It seems like it.”

  “I told you I’d give you the simple answer.” But he was still grinning, so I knew he hadn’t snapped the bear trap shut on my foot yet. “Now you think about Linnea and all that stuff you talked to Smiller about. Yes, she told me. She didn’t think you’d mind. So you think about it, and you tell me—what do we have to do to empower ourselves and the Linneans in this situation?”

  “Uh—” The trap snapped shut, and it had very sharp teeth.

  “You don’t have to answer now,” he said. “I just want you to think about it for a while. Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes, da.”

  “Good.”

  He pointed at the screen. “Oh, look. We’ve arrived at Stopover.”

  “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “Watch.”

  On the forward display, there were still three choppers in a line ahead of us. We were all close to the ground, racing toward a distant hill. One by one, each of the choppers ahead reached the hill, went over the rise, and dropped down into the prairie. They disappeared into the ground as if there was nothing beneath them.

  Then it was our turn—we came over the rise and I saw it wasn’t a hill at all, but the lip of a giant crater! Bigger than the Barringer meteor crater in Arizona! I turned to my window as the steep walls rose around us. We were dropping down into a giant bowl. At the bottom w
as another little wooden village, just like the one at Sky Station. Except that there were half a dozen choppers parked on around it—heavy-lifters and tenders. The choppers in our squadron were just touching down in the landing area now, one after the other. Except for the aircraft, there was nothing else to suggest that this was anything but just another Linnean settlement.

  “You can’t see the crater from the prairie, not until you get right up onto the lip of it,” said da. “And the razor-grass hides even that. The Linneans haven’t discovered this place yet. Eventually, they will. By then, we’ll have the underground installation finished and the town will probably disappear. But right now, we’ve got a great little hideaway, close and convenient to the main caravan routes, less than an hour’s flight away. What are you smiling at?”

  “One hideaway sits on top of a big rock, the other crouches at the bottom of a deep hole. I wonder if you could put the rock into the hole. . . ? Does the rock have the greater size? Or the hole?”

  Da laughed with me. “I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Smiller or Byrne. Or maybe Alex. It looks to me like you could probably stick the rock into the hole if you turned it on its end, but that would probably leave a big piece of it still sticking out the top. Like one of Rinky’s dumplings in a soup bowl.”

  “But more edible,” I said.

  Da laughed and patted my hand. “Don’t let Rinky hear you say that.”

  “Da. . . . Rinky cooks by ear.”

  “Rinky tries very hard.”

  “Trying does not equal doing. You taught me that. Rinky’s dumplings make starvation look good.”

  “Kaer—as I recall, your own efforts didn’t exactly float in the soup.”

  “Da. Rinky doesn’t serve dumplings. She offers you a career.”

  “All right, all right. I give. Who told you all these horrible jokes at Rinky’s expense.”

  “Big Jes and Little Klin.”

  “Mm hmm. It sounded like their kind of humor. Well, I hope you like the food here at Stopover.”

  “What do they have?”

  “Boffili stew. What else?”

  Winning

  When we got out of the chopper, da said, “Look up.”

  I did and immediately regretted doing so. It was spooky to see the sky so dark above, surrounded by the rim of the crater. And a little scary too. Even though the crater was bigger and deeper than Barringer, it still felt like an enclosure. It felt claustrophobic. Da put a hand on my shoulder and that helped. I guess he understood, because he said, “Okay, don’t look up.”

  We crossed to the town—except for the scenery, it could have been the exact same town we’d left behind on top of Surprise Rock. It felt like we’d been traveling all day and we hadn’t gotten anywhere. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to try to cross the plains in a great-wagon. Just digging a house had been adventure enough. The more I learned about the Linneans, the more I respected them. These were not weak people.

  I guess the conversation with Varro had hit me harder than I realized. I didn’t know half as much about Linneans as I thought I had. I’d been so full of my own dreams back in the Dome I hadn’t given any thought beyond them. But it wasn’t just me, it was all of us—we patted ourselves on the back and we told each other how other how good we were all doing. I suppose we were empowering each other, but maybe we were also fooling each other too.

  Maybe we’d all fooled ourselves into believing that we were just going to cross through the Gates and into Linnean society and be instantly accepted with no one asking questions. No matter how many times the Scouts had reminded us of the difficulties we would face, I couldn’t remember anyone believing it. Instead, we talked about the farms we would build or the jobs we would do. We talked about the things we intended to study. We talked as if we would never make any mistakes, never get any funny looks, never be questioned—and of course, never be the subject of an Inquiry. . . .

  We didn’t talk about failure.

  Maybe we should have.

  There was a thing that da said to me once. It was just after my eighth birthday and I was feeling small and worthless. I was getting into a lot of fights, and I was crying back to Mom-Wu all the time, demanding that she make things better. And of course, she wouldn’t—she’d just send me back outside. And then when I went to Mom-Lu, she’d say things like, “If you don’t run, they can’t chase you,” which makes real good sense to an eight year old, right. And finally one night, I just broke down crying in da’s arms, wailing that life stunk, and I wished I’d never been born because I never won at anything, not any of the games at all, and I didn’t want to live here anymore anyway because Rinky was a pig and I hated everybody.

  Da listened to everything I had to say, without ever once stopping me or arguing with me. Instead, he said things like, “Uh-huh. Okay, I got it. You’re angry about Rinky. What else?” He kept on asking, “What else?” until there was nothing else. And finally, I said, “So. . . ?” And he said, “Oh, you want me to do something about it?” And I said, “Yes!” And he said, “All right, let’s start at the beginning. You said that you think you never win at anything, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “Yes. I never win at any of our games. I never win any of our races. I never win.”

  “Mm,” he said. “I can see why it feels that way. Actually, there is a race that you won once, but you probably don’t remember it.”

  “When? Tell me!” I demanded.

  “Well, it was before you were born.”

  “Huh? How could I win a race before I was born.”

  “Do you remember the book on how babies are made—?”

  “Oh, da—you’re not going to tell me all that again?”

  “No, I’m not. But do you remember how all those little sperm cells go racing up the vagina, up the fallopian tubes, looking for the egg?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Do you remember, I told you that millions of sperm cells start out, but only one of them gets in to fertilize the egg.”

  “Yeah. . . ?”

  “Well, that’s you. That’s the race you won. There were ten million—no, twenty million other little sperm cells all charging madly after the egg. But you’re the one who got there. Don’t you remember the checkered flag and the cheering and the big silver cup you won?”

  “You’re making this up, aren’t you?”

  “Nope. Come with me.” I followed him into his office and he sat down at his desk. He opened up a new page and began typing. A moment later, a plastic certificate was rolling out of his printer. “I guess we forgot to give this to you when you were born. Well, it’s never too late. Here you are. Go ahead, read it.”

  “‘First Place Winner. Spermatozoa Gran Prix.’”

  I guess I didn’t understand at first, so he said, “What it means is that you’re special, Kaer. You are the only you. No one is like you, no one will ever be like you. You’re the best possible Kaer. That makes you the winner at being Kaer. And no one can ever take that away from you. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. I didn’t really, but in a way I did. Sort of.

  He took the paper back from me and signed it on the bottom. “Now we’ll just get Mom-Wu to sign it and it’ll be official.” I followed him into the dining room where Mom-Wu was just setting the table. She looked up curiously. Da said sternly, “I’m surprised at you. Do you know what we forgot to do? We forgot to give Kaer the prize certificate. No wonder Kaer’s been so upset lately and feeling so bad.”

  Mom-Wu took the certificate and read it carefully. “Hmm,” she said. And the corners of her mouth twitched into a smile. She looked at da in that way she did when he’d just done something very very, but she wasn’t going to laugh out loud because Mom-Wu just didn’t laugh out loud, because she was Mom-Wu after all. Shaking her head, because that’s what she did instead of laughing, she took the proffered pen and neatly calligraphed her name into the place for it. “There,” she said
, handing the certificate to me. “You take good care of that. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that there will never be another winner of this particular race.” And she looked at da meaningfully. He looked at the ceiling.

  For the next few days, I carried that certificate with me everywhere. I made a point of showing it to everyone, especially the adults in the family. I interrupted them in the bathroom, woke them up in the morning, stopped them during meals, and generally made a pest of myself. And of course, I showed it to all the other kids, which resulted in half of them sneering at it and the other half running to da demanding certificates of their own. Da spent a lot of time at his printer for a while, and Mom-Wu said to him, “Now see what you started.”

  And finally, da had to take me aside and tell me that it was time to put the certificate away for a while because it was really a private thing and not supposed to be bragged about to everyone, did I understand? Yes, I did. It probably had something to do with that phone call from my teacher. “Would you please tell Kaer to stop bringing that certificate to school. . . ?”

  Da said, “Let me explain it a different way, Kaer. See, you don’t really need a certificate to prove anything. You are your own certificate—just by being. Everybody who gets born is a winner in that race.”

  “So why isn’t everybody excited about being alive?”

  “Good question,” he laughed. “I guess it’s because when everybody is a winner, it doesn’t look all that special to win.”

  “It’s special to me.”

  “Yep. And it should be. And you’re special to me and Mom-Wu too. You don’t need a certificate to know that, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said grumpily. I felt very frustrated and confused by the whole discussion. “I want to be special—I mean, really special, for everybody—not just you and Mom-Wu. Everybody.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “That is the hard part, isn’t it?” He pretended to think about it. “Well, it’s too late for you to be born heir to the throne of England. That job’s been taken. And it’s too late for you to be the first baby born on the moon, that’s been done too.” He scratched his head. “So what else could happen to make you special?”