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

  Maybe da was injured. He could have fallen, coming down out of the chopper, maybe broken a leg or something. Maybe he was unconscious and that was why he didn’t answer his call. I just didn’t feel right about pushing on through the grass when every step took me farther and farther away from him.

  But if I turned around now and headed back—Jorge would have to send someone, or even a bunch of someones, after me. You could get lost in the sea of grass too easily. Even with all of our guidance technology. As da had said, when he put his own helmet on, “Everything depends on the battery, Kaer. Without the battery, you simply disappear. So don’t take chances. Always stay in sight of one other person.”

  Mostly, we took our machines for granted. But if somebody set off a strong enough EMP-grenade, it wouldn’t matter how well our chips were shielded—all of our technology would go down. We wouldn’t know which way to go or how to find the boulder, or anything—so I had to stay close to Beck, just in case the Hale-Stones had somehow targeted us. If I went after da and they lost contact with me, they might not be able to find me at all.

  And besides, the grass was so thick and so hard to move through, I couldn’t imagine fighting through it by myself. I wondered how the adults were managing. They were carrying even heavier loads than me. The thought of fighting my way back was almost as intimidating as the thought of pushing on. The deeper we moved into the grass, the more scared and alone I felt. It didn’t matter where we were, did it? We were in the middle of the sea, and every part of it was like every other. The grass kept snapping back and slapping me in the face. Every edge felt as sharp as a razor. . . .

  I couldn’t turn back. I couldn’t search for da. I had to keep up with Beck. I kept telling myself that.

  If I got lost and they had to search for me, it would cost the mission valuable time. And that would hurt our chances of saving Jaxin and Corda and Sykes and Val. It would endanger people’s lives. We were in enough trouble already with da off the screen.

  I was tired and I wanted to stop. I was angry and I wanted to turn around and go back for da. I was scared and I wanted to switch on my helmet distress beacon and call the choppers back—please come and take me out of this. But I couldn’t. I had to trust that the Scouts and the assault team and everybody else knew what they were doing here. I had to keep pushing through the grass, step after difficult step.

  But just the same, it didn’t stop me from crying. As I struggled through the endless sea of gold and green, the tears came streaming down my cheeks in quiet sobs. I knew she heard me, but she never once said anything, not even “Shh.”

  The Longest Night

  Every fifteen minutes, the control officer gave us a beep to stop where we were and rest for five; another beep and we pushed on. We did that three times an hour, and each time we stopped the sweat was rolling down my forehead in rivulets, down my cheeks, under my arms, down my sides, down my legs. I almost believed my boots were sloshing.

  And when we did stop, we didn’t dare sit down. We wouldn’t be able to get back up. The way the grass closed over us, it was scary. So we just sort of squatted where we were, sometimes risking a rest on one knee. Beck and I stayed close to each other on our breaks so we could help each other back up.

  At every rest, I took a few sips from my canteen. I wanted to drink more, but Beck cautioned me not to, and besides I already knew better. I needed to save my water. At the time they’d outfitted me, I hadn’t believed I’d need a backpack with rations and a heavy canteen of water. Now I understood why. We might be out here for days, just trying to get to the boulder.

  I wished they’d landed us closer, but the boulder was less than a third of a klick from the rail-trail and they didn’t want to take any unnecessary risk of the chopper being seen. But obviously, they’d underestimated the height and the thickness of the grass here. We were going to be all night struggling our way to the boulder. I wondered how they’d even managed to get it assembled in this mess. Maybe we’d get there and the boulder would still be in pieces.

  Now I understood why the refugees were following the rail lines. I wondered what it would be like to try driving a great-wagon through all this. No wonder so many families disappeared in the sea. It simply swallowed them up.

  The cold air had dried the sweat on my body, leaving me feeling dirty and sticky. It didn’t help that everything around us stank of raw tarpay—the waxy coating on the grass. Pushing through the sea had left us covered with a thick layer of the grass’s sticky exudation. We were both of us gritty and grimy from head to foot. Whatever color our fatigues had been when we started, they were grass-colored now. I wanted nothing more than a hot bubble bath. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a bubble bath—yes, I could. Before we’d moved to the Dome. Right now, I’d have settled for a cold bath in our burrow.

  Out of curiosity, I lifted up my goggles and tried to see what the world looked like without image amplification. It didn’t look like anything. It was darker than the inside of a bear. If being out in the grass was hard enough with vision, it was impossible without it.

  The comm-channel beeped. Break was over.

  I flipped my goggles back into position.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” asked Beck.

  “I don’t know what I did. My goggles went off. They won't light up.” I was totally in the dark.

  “Shit,” agreed Beck.

  I tried flipping them up and flipping them back down again. No luck. I tried it again. And again. And again. It was so dark—

  “All right. Hold still.” I could feel Beck moving around behind me. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but she was fiddling around with something on my helmet. “Wait a minute.” She spoke to her microphone. “Cee Oh. Six and ten. Code black on Nine.”

  “We copy.” And then after a brief hesitation. “Code twenty.”

  “Copy that,” said Beck and switched off her mike.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I told them that your eyes went out. They told us to stay here.”

  “Can you fix them?” This was starting to get scary. The dark was too thick. Too close.

  “I don’t know what went wrong yet. Hold still.” She resumed poking. “I’ll run a diagnostic. Wait a minute—”

  “What does it say?”

  “Nothing, damn. The screen doesn’t even light up. All right, let me try running it off my battery. Hold still.” I heard her stretching a wire from her helmet to mine. A pause. “Shit.”

  I didn’t need to ask.

  I shivered—and not from the cold. I wanted a light. Anything I could look at. I could feel the grass pressing in on all sides, and all of a sudden I was having trouble breathing. . . .

  “All right, turn around. Let me look.” She rummaged in my pack. “They wanted you to pack light, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. You don’t have any spares. All right, all right—” She sounded a little upset herself now. “Just relax. We’ll figure this out.” I could hear her shrugging out of her pack. “Hold this.” She shoved something into my arms. “Let me see what I’ve got—” I could feel things being moved around as she sorted through the compartments. “Damn—I’ll bet they put everything in the boulder.”

  “You don’t think someone sabotaged my helmet and da’s, do you?”

  “I don’t get paid to think,” she said. “Well actually, I do. But not about this.” She exhaled in frustration. “Kiddo, we’ve got a problem. Nothing we can’t handle, but we might be here for a while. At least until the sun comes up.”

  “How many hours until dawn?”

  “Eight, maybe nine. It depends on how far east we landed. Only Smiller and Jorge and the pilots knew the exact location of the target zone. You can’t believe the security we—never mind.” I heard her switch her microphone on. “Cee Oh. Mudville. Dead rabbit. Potato? Come back.” Control Officer. No joy in Mudville. No juice in the battery. Stop here and sleep? Answer please.

/>   We waited. I wondered if Jorge was thinking it over or talking it over with someone. After a moment, our headphones whispered. “Chocolate or vanilla?” You choose.

  Beck put a hand on my shoulder. “How do you feel about spending a night in the grass?”

  “All alone?” I tried not to let my voice quaver.

  “The rest of the team knows our location. If you want, they’ll form up around us, and maybe we can work out some way to move you blind. But that’ll cost us hours we don’t have.”

  “And vanilla?”

  “We wait until dawn. And then you and I push on. We’ll rope ourselves together.”

  “Why can’t we do that now?”

  “Do you really think you can walk in the dark?”

  “We can try. . . ?” And then I thought. “Don’t you have a light of any kind?”

  “We can’t risk it, Kaer. What if Linnean soldiers have camped out on the tracks? They’d see the lights in the middle of the dark sea and it would spook them. What if the Hale-Stones have put out monitors?”

  “I don’t want to stay out here—I can’t see anything!”

  Beck started to answer, and then stopped herself with an exasperated sigh. Suddenly she pulled me into her embrace. “Does this help? Hold onto me, Kaer. Close your eyes.” I did. But I was still scared, because I knew that when I opened my eyes again, it would be even darker than with my eyes closed. Even if I looked up at the sky, there would be nothing to see. The grass would block my view of the stars. I was sure she could feel me shivering.

  I knew there was nothing there. I knew there was nothing to worry about. If I couldn’t get to the boulder, then nobody could get to me. I was as safe as if I was home in my own bed. And if I were to lie down on the grass, it would probably make a very comfortable mattress. We could sleep here—

  “Can we try roping ourselves together? Could we try going on?”

  “We’ll exhaust ourselves. And we’ll probably fall down a lot. But if you want to try—?”

  “What do you think?”

  Her voice whispered comfortingly in my ear. “I think we should take advantage of this chance to rest. Wait until dawn and as soon as we have light, head straight for the boulder. We may not have as far to go as it feels in the dark. We’ve already traveled more than halfway from our landing site.” She added, “We have some food. We have water. We’ve got mylar blankets in our packs. The grass makes a nice bed. I’ll stay close. We’ll do fine. All right?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I’ll tell them.” She switched on her mike. “Cee Oh. Six and Nine potato.” We’ll take root here.

  “Copy that. Brahms.” Lullaby. Sleep tight.

  Beck didn’t say anything for a minute. I heard her moving around, fiddling with her pack. I heard the rustling of a mylar blanket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making the bed. Here.” She put her hand on my shoulder to guide me down. “Sit. All right, lie back. Good. Put your feet out. I’ll wrap my blanket around you. That will keep you warm. Comfortable? Can you sleep that way?”

  I grunted. “I don’t know if I can sleep. I don’t like the dark. But I don’t have any discomforts.”

  “Well, you’ll try, all right? I’ll stretch out right here next to you. If you want, I’ll hold you close until you fall asleep. Will that help?”

  I grunted again. I didn’t want to be treated like a baby, but I didn’t want to push her away either. Her touch was nice.

  “You sleep first,” she said, “and I’ll keep watch. I’ll wake you in four hours, and then you’ll keep watch until dawn. All right?”

  “How will you stay awake?”

  She rapped her helmet. “I’ll listen to some music. I’ll watch my displays. I’ll manage. And if I fall asleep, don’t tell anyone. . . . All right?”

  “All right.”

  For a while, neither of us said anything. I skrooched backward so I could feel her even closer. She put one arm around my waist. The dark was as close as ever. And the smell of the grass was overpowering. And my butt itched.

  “Beck?”

  “Yes, Kaer?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever wondered about Linnea? About things here—?”

  “In what way?”

  “Um, well everything. The grass, for instance. We don’t have anything like razor-grass on Earth. The grass here grows higher and thicker and stronger—”

  “That’s because Linnea has less gravity than Earth. Nine percent less. The planet has a lighter core, not as much heavy metal. It happens.”

  “I know that. But the animals grow larger too. The great-horses. The boffili. The badgerines, the emmos. Everything.”

  “Everything grows bigger in lighter gravity. Not just plants. Animals too. You know that from the Lunar settlements. Given enough time, the Lunar animals will evolve in some interesting ways.”

  “I know. But here on Linnea, it feels—I don’t know. Different. Inconsistent. Like we’ve shrunk and everything else has gotten bigger. Do you ever get that feeling?”

  “All the time.” She shifted her position against me and we settled ourselves again.

  For a while, neither of us spoke. The darkness and the grass pressed in closer.

  “Beck?”

  “Yes, Kaer?”

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “What?”

  “How come, if everything else has grown bigger on Linnea . . . how come the people haven’t?”

  She didn’t answer for a minute.

  So I said. “I mean, if the lighter gravity here has affected the evolution of everything else, why not people too?”

  After a heartbeat, she patted my shoulder. “Congratulations, Kaer. You’ve realized the fundamental mystery of Linnea. Lots of people have wondered about that very question. We don’t have an answer yet.” She took a breath, as if preparing to talk for a bit. “The Linnean people have essentially the same DNA as us. How could that happen? Parallel evolution? Very, very unlikely. We know that they can grow as much as a meter taller than us—but most of them don’t get that high because they don’t get adequate nutrition. So they get big and burly and brawny, but they stay within the range of what we consider normal—and we look mostly normal to them. But it doesn’t make sense, does it? If everything else evolved differently here, if the animals and plants have all grown bigger, then why should the people turn out so similar to us?”

  “Do we have any idea yet?”

  “We have two theories. You can choose which one you like best.”

  “Tell me.”

  “All right. Theory one says that it has to do with the way we open the doors. The origin point of the gate, the shape of it, the equations that define the target—even the instant we activate the gate—all determine the kind of world it will open to. When we build a world-gate, we don’t just open a hole in space. We design a locus of congruency—kind of like the automatic focus on a camera. When we activate the gate, we create an unfocused chaotic possibility that can’t resolve itself until it finds a match somewhere in the universe. When it does, it focuses itself and the locus of congruency snaps into existence. And the Gate creates itself. It can only exist here and there—nowhere else—so we have a direct access to the new world that we can step right through. Follow so far?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, when we build a new gate, we have to start by designing the chaotic possibility for a specific locus of congruency. We want to go to an Earth-like world, so we put all possibilities into the definition—what kind of sunlight, how much gravity, what kind of atmosphere, how long the day, even what kind of DNA we want to find. But no matter how detailed our description, it remains only a chaotic possibility. The different pieces can fit together a lot of different ways—and we have to leave a little wiggle room too. We’ll accept gravity ten percent less to five percent heavier. We’ll accept sunlight this much redder or this much bluer. We�
�ll accept atmosphere that has this much of this or this much of that. We have a lot of different definitions that go into the mix, and each of them makes a difference. Still with me, Kaer.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Good. Now, I know we’d like it if we could just write a very precise definition and go directly to a perfect world; but we’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work. We get really ugly places. We think it happens because the chaotic possibility can’t find a match, so it snaps to the closest world that matches anything. We don’t know for sure. You can’t predict chaos, can you? But when we loosen up the definitions, we get worlds that almost, but not quite, match our needs. And we give the greatest priority to matching our DNA, because where our kind of DNA can thrive, we can probably thrive. So far, we’ve had it work that way.” She gave me a reassuring squeeze, kind of like a hug.

  “So the Gate opens to the closest possible world . . . ?”

  “Mmm, no. The Gate doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t even open to the closest possible match. Let me try it a different way. All right, think about lightning over the sea of grass. It can strike anywhere. It has to strike somewhere. All that electric potential builds and builds. Suddenly it strikes the ground along the path of least resistance that exists at precisely that moment. A nanosecond later, a nanosecond earlier, the lightning would have struck somewhere else—maybe kilometers away. The Gate is like that. When you activate a Gate for the first time, it creates an enormous unresolved tension. That tension has to resolve itself before the next tick of the cosmic clock. Out of all the possibilities in the entire universe, it doesn’t matter what matches as long as something matches. And so the lightning strikes wherever it can at that instant. The highest convenient point, the path of least resistance, whatever—in G-space, time and distance don’t exist the same way as in N-space—the locus crystallizes where it can. Not where we want, not where we need, but where it can. Got it now?”

  “I think so. Yes.” But it was still too dark, and the grass was still too close, and my original question still hadn’t been answered. “But I still don’t see why Linnea should have so many things that don’t match Earth—and still have people that do match.”