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

  “Varro has a hunger for knowledge so deep it astonishes me, Kaer. More than anyone else I have ever known, Varro seeks truth like a passion. He wouldn’t dare quit. Varro—and all of the rest of us who came from Linnea—we saw you first as . . . as . . . forgive me, I have to use an English word. We saw you as Gods. Your Scouts had such amazing machines, you can’t imagine the effect it had on us, Kaer. You people controlled the forces of the Mother herself. Lightning in bottles! But the more we learned of you and where you came from, the more we realized that what you have . . . we can have it too. Our people. Maybe not now, but someday. And not just all your magical toys—we like those, yes—but I’ll tell you what we hunger for as much as anything else you have, more than anything else you have—your freedom to speak as you feel!

  “We asked ourselves, Kaer—where does such wisdom come from? How do you people manage yourselves with such . . . such. . . ? Damn! I don’t have the word for it. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. But do you understand what I say here? We hungered for the way you look at the world and the responsibility you give yourselves. You don’t have Servants telling you what you can and can’t say, what you can and can’t think—why do you laugh?”

  “We do have Servants, Kzam, teaching us what we can and can’t say, what we can and can’t think. Our Servants have to do that to teach us how to come to Linnea—but yes, you speak accurately. We don’t have Servants the way you do.” And then I scratched my head, frowning and thinking. Finally, I said. “Well, not exactly. We have Servants, but nobody has to follow any Servant he doesn’t want to. Because we have different kinds of Servants of God. Some Servants say God wants us to behave this way and some Servants say God wants us to act that way and some Servants say third thing altogether. We have a lot of Servants. Too many, I think. So we have rules . . . laws . . . that no Servant can order anybody who doesn’t want to. So you get to choose which Servants you want to follow. Like the Hale-Stones have chosen one kind of Servant—”

  “Yes,” Kzam nodded vigorously. “A very mean Servant, right?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know that they want to take away everybody else’s choice. They want to make everybody follow their Servant, whether they want to or not.”

  “Trading one bad Servant for another, just as bad, doesn’t sound like a good idea to me,” said Kzam. “Not to any of us. So we’ve stayed captured. We’ve stayed with your Scouts and your scientists because we believe that Linnea needs what you have. You studied us? We studied you. Yes. Do you know what you have, Kaer?”

  I shook my head.

  “You have The Covenant of Justice. You have the Charter of the Agency. You have the Constitution. You have the Bill of Rights. You have the foundations of a whole other way of thinking.” He shifted back to English and said, “Do you know how dangerous you people really are? Your Constitution says that the authority of all government stems from the consent of the governed—and your Declaration of Independence says that people have the right to overthrow any government that doesn’t serve them! Do you know what would happen to Linnea if we could spread those ideas freely?”

  “A revolution. . . ?”

  “Yes! And freedom! The right to disagree!” Kzam pounded the table with his fist. “Won’t that be wonderful, Kaer!”

  I nodded an acknowledgment—not an agreement. Because suddenly I had the thought that Kzam’s enthusiasm for liberty might be as dangerous in its own way as the Hale-Stones’ equally blind commitment to their faith. Turning anything into a religion—even freedom—was a mistake.

  It wasn’t that Kzam was wrong. He wasn’t. He wanted what he saw we had. But he didn’t realize that it had taken three centuries to build it. He wanted it to happen on his world overnight. He believed that it could and would happen in the space of just a few years. And from the way he spoke, I had the feeling that he was willing to kill to make it happen quicker.

  I could understand his anger and his frustration. I realized that I was thinking in two worlds at the same time now. A peculiar double-vision of thought had fallen over me. I could understand why the Gate Authority made the decisions it did—I’d been trained to think that way. But at the same time, I was also thinking enough like a Linnean that I could feel shocked and upset and frustrated at all of the things happening on this side of the Gate that violated the Mother’s way of how things should be.

  The changes that Kzam wanted weren’t wrong—but the way he raged against the Servants made me wonder about the ways he wanted to accomplish his changes. Just like I wondered about the ways the Scouts wanted to act sometimes.

  It wasn’t that they were wrong.

  They just weren’t looking far enough out. All the way out to the horizon and beyond.

  And they weren’t remembering far enough back. All the way back to the time before time . . . when an old woman lived alone in the sea of grass—in a house of grass that she built herself. And she sang of the sun and the rain and the good dark earth.

  Night Flight

  After dinner, there was another delay of more than an hour. We weren’t behind schedule yet, and the mechanics wanted to dismount the number two engine on chopper-three and replace the magnetic bearings. A ninety minute job. So everybody had a bit of free time.

  Byrne found me a pair of camouflage fatigues to wear. They were a little bit too big and baggy, but she cinched them up with a canvas belt and after she put an equipment harness on me, they sort of fit. My sleeves and pants ballooned out, and da said I looked like a miniature something-or-other, but he was wearing the same thing now, so if anything I looked like a miniature da-Lorrin.

  After that, there wasn’t much to do here, so I walked around looking at stuff. Smiller and the pilots were arguing over flight plans and weather predictions. The Scouts and technicians were testing weapon-sighting gear, pointing little red dots at the distant crater wall—when I wandered over, they let me try on a set of goggles, which would let me see the invisible dots, the ones you couldn’t see without the goggles. And the folks who lived here at the bottom of the Hole went on about their business as if it was normal to have a dozen choppers sitting around your village, getting ready for a war.

  The village wasn’t in the exact center of the Hole, but close to one of the walls, where heavy earth-moving machinery had already begun digging out a huge cavern for the future. Someday there would be a giant hangar and associated maintenance facilities hidden in the walls of this crater. I tried to imagine it, but it was difficult.

  They hadn’t dug very far yet, but already they were installing the doors. Once the doors were in place, they could continue with the rest of the underground digging and construction and still be able to camouflage their work if some lost Linneans came stumbling this way. By the time any strangers got up to the top of the lip and looked over the edge, the doors would be closed and the installation would be invisible. As soon as they had room to keep the heavy machinery behind the doors, they’d adjust the work schedules outside so that no machine was ever more than 30 minutes away from complete invisibility.

  With the hangar doors shut, the facility would be as undetectable from the outside as North Mountain One. And with the hangar doors open, it would be like a gigantic door into a deep underground city. Eventually, the installation hidden in the bottom of the Hole would be three times as big as the station at North Mountain One, but it would be much closer to the big Linnean settlements on the east. North Mountain One could then concentrate on supplying and maintaining all the other stations, while Stopover Station became the headquarters for reconnaissance. Once Stopover Station came on online, the Scouts would be able to plant a lot more monitors and surveillance instruments throughout Linnean society. And the Agency would be better able to influence the direction of events. . . .

  On the other side of the village, three heavy-lifters waited for their crews to wake up. They’d be flying all night, so the crews were catching valuable sack-time. Next to one of the heavy-lifters was “the boulder.” I saw Alex and Jak
e climbing into it, so I went over to say hello—and to get a closer look too. This would probably be my only chance to see it in the daylight.

  “The boulder” consisted of two fat-bodied double-decker bus-tractors. Each vehicle sat on a high platform over a triad of independently mounted wheel-sets. The wheel-sets were all-terrain, but they had been fitted with heavy wraparound tread-belts to provide necessary traction over the sticky razor-grass.

  The bus-tractors could be linked together and operated as a single machine or they could be separated for independent use. Joining and separating them took less than fifteen minutes, if the team was well trained. After separation, two heavy-lifters would fly the vehicles to the target zone, where they would be rejoined. Other choppers would bring the support deck and the two halves of the camouflage shell. The operation would be reversed to bring them back. Both vehicles had identical sets of communication and scanning equipment mounted on their roofs.

  Near the buses were the two halves of the “operational armored camouflage unit” that would fit together over them like a giant, lumpy, gray coconut shell. From the backside, the armored halves looked like a couple of pieces of stage-scenery, because that’s exactly what they were. But there were catwalks all over the insides and lots of anchor-posts and mountings for equipment. Several equipment specialists were scrambling up and down, checking the mountings and the pieces hanging there. Some of the heavier pieces would be delivered by cargo-lifters, Jake said. They’d been moving all their available machinery into place since before da’s first trip, because they didn’t know what they’d need. It looked like they’d need it all.

  From the front, the shell-pieces were just a couple of ordinary-seeming granite boulders in the middle of the landscape and looking very out of place sitting at the bottom of the Hole. But not many boulders were hollow, built on a steel-reinforced polycarbonite base, with a fifty-centimeter shell of reconstituted, compressed rock to give it verisimilitude in weight and feel; in fact, when the two pieces of this one were put together, it was probably the only one.

  The mechanics had rolled the two buses together, side-by-side, and were now working on the connecting platforms between them, checking to make sure that all of the communications connections were undamaged and working properly. I walked around the vehicles, awestruck at their size, and at the implication of military authority they represented.

  The tracks of the machines were taller than I was, probably taller than da. The bus frames themselves were double-decked, with observation platforms mounted on their roofs. They were taller than great-horses, maybe even taller than boffili. On the observation platforms, you would be nearly four stories high off the ground. Collapsible ladders at the end of each bus could be raised up even higher, like the ladders on a fire truck.

  There were doors on both sides of the buses; when they were all open, you could look straight through—if you were tall enough. The buses were so high, they needed a full flight of collapsible stairs at each door. It was like boarding an airplane. I climbed the same steep steps I had seen Alex and Jake go up and peeked inside.

  It was like looking into a broadcast studio, only one with beds and a kitchen and an armory. And a shower. Very impressive. Cautiously, I edged farther inside, peeking around to see what the mechanics were doing without getting in their way. One of them was laying flat across the platform, using some kind of power tool to do something I couldn’t see. I could only hear the whirring of the device. Her partner was frowning at the readouts on a portable display—

  “Hello, Kaer! Welcome aboard.” Alex waved from above through a person-sized hole in the floor. “Come on up. We’ll show you around our happy home away from home.”

  I looked around in confusion for stairs. I didn’t see any. “Uh, how—?”

  Alex rapped a shiny metal pole. “Use the elevator. Look down.” On the floor at the base of the pole was a platform just bit enough to stand on. A meter and a half above it was a handhold. “That’s it. Stand on it. Twist the handle.”

  I did as he directed and it bounced me up to the top level like a little rocket. “Hey! That’s fun!” I stepped off and the platform sank down again. “How do you get back down?”

  “Rap the pole twice, like this—” Rap, rap. “—and the lift will bounce back up. Just step on it, no need to twist or squeeze, and it’ll drop you down safely. But most of us just slide down the pole like firemen. It’s quicker.”

  I glanced around. This level of the bus was a lot like the lower level—more screens, more equipment, a stack of bunks, a table, another galley, and a lot of stuff I didn’t recognize. There was a door up here too, opening across to one in the other vehicle so you wouldn’t have to go down and up again to cross over.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you could live in here for a long time.”

  “Exactly right. Six months. A whole team could live in here very comfortably if they had to—although we don’t ever expect we’ll ever have such a situation, we built it this way just in case a team ever got trapped for a whole winter.”

  “What would you do for food and water?”

  “We have large water tanks, and we can recycle indefinitely if we have to. And if we have rain or snow or access to a river or a lake, we can pump fresh. Believe it or not, we have a three month supply of emergency rations under the floorboards of each vehicle. If we ever had to go on half-rations, we could make them last even longer.” He used both hands to shake his pudgy belly. “I could probably stand to lose a little of this. I have too much boffili under my belt already.”

  “Doesn’t it get dark and stuffy in here with the shell on? How do you get air?”

  “You’ll see how it works once we get onsite. The shell has outlets for sensors and vents. It has three doors and six windows. You can’t see them from the outside, but we have them clearly marked on the inside. We designed the shell as carefully as the vehicles. The whole thing looks clumsy and complicated, but it works very nicely. You’ll see.”

  In the forward part of the bus, I saw that Jake was flipping switches, activating various displays. The different cameras started showing views all around the Hole, including close-ups of people doing various tasks. One of the camera views scanned the lip of the crater, slowly and steadily. Another tracked with Smiller as she paced around the dismantled chopper, arguing with Byrne about something.

  Jake noticed me studying the various displays and began to explain. “Once we arrive onsite, it’ll take us an hour to bring everything properly online, but then we’ll have a complete installation with everything we need, right where we need it the most. We even have a surgical bay on the lower level, although I hope we won’t need that.” He exhaled loudly, a sound of impatience; he shook his head grimly as he considered the possibilities ahead. “Apparently, the Linneans have treated our Scouts very badly. They may even have tortured them. We got a report from Jorge, just before he left Callo and he didn’t sound happy. So I’ve packed the medical bays with extra supplies and I’ll pray that we won’t need them.” He looked at me sharply. “How did you do in your first aid classes?”

  “I got a ninety-three final score. And they invited me to take the advanced classes.”

  “Good. I like to hear that. Tell you what—when we get onsite, if we have time, I’ll show you how the surgery works. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, I would. Thank you.”

  Abruptly, someone called from below. “Are you fellows done yet?”

  “We finished fifteen minutes ago. We’ve got green boards, up and down, both sides. All signals five by five.”

  “All right. Then lock down and lock up. The buses lift in ten. The rock lifts in twenty.”

  Jake and Alex walked down the line, switching off every display one after the other. We slid down the pole to the lower level where they repeated the process.

  “The other bus?” I asked.

  “Already checked,” said Alex. “Before you showed up.”

  Next to th
e door was a bright red panel. Jake opened it up and flipped the master power switch. The bus went dark. I glanced out the center door. The door was closed, but through the glass panels, I could see that the two mechanics had finished their job, folded up the connecting panels, and disappeared off somewhere. We climbed down the steps of the opposite door and Alex pushed the sliding door shut behind us. The stairs folded up automatically.

  Jake glanced at his watch. “We have a minute. Alex, you go ahead. Come here, Kaer. I’ll show you how the armor works.” He walked me around to the back side of the two halves of the shell. “See, we’ve set the doors a little way up the side. You’ll have to climb up to get in or out. Notice how we molded the inside stairs right into the rock. That saves a lot of trouble, doesn’t it?”

  “Once we drop it in place, the boulder will withstand all but the most vigorous attacks on its integrity. Only a determined geologist might question its presence in the middle of the sea of grass and examine it closely; but the Linneans haven’t invented geology yet, so we don’t worry about that—yet. Someday, though.” He grinned at me. “But even when the Linneans do invent geology, if someone climbs up on the top of this boulder, he still won’t find any reason to suspect the reality of the rock he stands. Unless he begins hacking at it with a pickaxe.” Jake told me to knock on the shell. I did. It was as hard as it looked—harder. It felt as solid as the real thing.

  “We had to make it thick and heavy to get that feeling,” said Jake. “You can’t fake that. It should fool even a trained geologist. I hope to get one out here soon to see.” He lowered his voice. “Can you keep a secret?”