Child of Earth Read online

  And then it all started to change. First, some people came from the bureau and talked to the parents about stuff. They did that a lot. And there were a lot of papers to sign. And then we all had to fly to Houston so the doctors could take pictures of our insides. The trip was fun, but the doctor part was boring. But we stayed over an extra day and visited Mars Dome where people practice living before they go off to Mars. Gamma said we’d have to live in a dome too before we went through a gate, not like Mars or Luna Dome, but like whatever world we were going to.

  One day, some people in suits came out to our farm to visit. We didn’t grow much on our farm, mosty what we ate ourselves; but we made a lot of electricity to sell west. And a little water too. The people in suits looked at our evaporators, our windmills and our solar panels like they were inspectors from the buyers’ co-op or something. But they were really just looking to see how well we managed everything. Big Jes, who managed all of the machinery and who always let me ride on his shoulders, said that you had to know how to take care of all kinds of stuff by yourself before they’d let you move out, because on Horse World you couldn’t just pick up the phone and call for a service truck, because there weren’t any. That was why it was so important for the visitors to see that our farm was well run and that we were self-sufficient.

  One of the visitors talked with the parents for a bit and then came out to play with us kids. Her name was Birdie and she had a puppet with her, a floppy blue wabbit that hopped around on the porch. It tried to climb up onto a chair, but it couldn’t; it fell down on its butt and laughed and said, “Oh, dear. Faw down, go boom!” Then it ran around and asked all the kids to kiss its boo-boo, pointing to its waggling butt. Nobody wanted to do it. Everybody said ick and pointed to everybody else. “Ask Mikey. Mikey will do anything. Go see Shona. Go to Nona.” But nobody would kiss it, so the wabbit sat down and began weeping into its paws. That made everybody sad, so sad we almost started crying ourselves. But then the wabbit sat up and announced it was ready to play again, and began doing clumsy somersaults until it tumbled itself into Birdie’s purse, hiding itself and refusing to come out again, no matter how much we begged.

  Later, Birdie sat and talked to each of the kids, one at a time. When it was my turn, she asked me what I knew about moving out. I explained how we would go through a world-gate to another place just like Earth, only different. Did I understand about parallel development, Birdie asked. I thought I did. I said that the two worlds started out mosty the same, but then turned out different. Like Cindy and Parra were cloned from the same egg, only Cindy decided to be a boy when he grew up and Parra didn’t. Moving out would be like going to another Earth, but one with different animals and maybe even different people, if we went to Horse World.

  Birdie told me that was exactly right. She said that there were a lot of different ways to explain how the worlds on the other side of the gates worked, but her favorite description was that they’re not really different worlds at all; they’re just different possibilities of the same reality, places where Schrödinger’s cat had kittens. (Whatever that meant.)1

  Then she showed me pictures of some of the worlds that were open for settlement and asked which ones I liked. I didn’t even have to look. I told her I liked the one with the big horses best. She smiled and said she liked that one too, but there were a lot of other parts to any decision and we might not get to go to that world, if we got to go anywhere at all. We might have to go somewhere else, so I should find something on each world to like. That was good advice.

  She also asked me if I was good at keeping secrets. I had to think about that. I wasn’t sure if I should say yes, because I was the one who accidentally sorta blurted out the surprise before Mom-Trey’s birthday. But I’d never told anybody about sneaking into Rinky’s room and trying on her bra either. That was something only I knew. So after a minute, I just said, “I think so.”

  Birdie said, “Keeping secrets is very important, especially if you go to a world like Linnea, the one with the horses. See, Kaer, the people on that world, they don’t know about Earth, not yet. And we’re not ready to tell them, because—well, because they’re not ready yet. So you can’t tell them where you’re from, because they won’t believe you, they might think you’re crazy. So you have to pretend you’re one of them, born on their world. On Linnea, they still believe in witches, so if you start talking about coming from Earth, they might lock you up. Or worse. I’m not saying this to scare you. I just want you to know how important the secret is. This isn’t a secret for sharing. This is a secret for keeping.”

  I nodded and pretended to understand. I’d already figured out that if you nodded and pretended it made sense, grown-ups would drop the subject. But if you argued about it, whatever it was, they’d just keep talking until they won the argument. So mosty I nodded and pretended to understand. Except not this time. “If we don’t like it, can we come back?”

  Birdie looked as if I’d said one of those words that embarrass grown-ups. “You can, but the whole point is to stay and build a life on the new world. It’s not a vacation, Kaer. We don’t know enough about the people living over there and we want to learn. The best way to learn is to have families live with them and report back.”

  “But it’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it could be. And everyone in your family will have to be very careful, Kaer. But we’re going to train you very well, all of you, so you won’t make any mistakes. The training will take at least two or three years. And you won’t go to the new world until everybody is sure you’re ready. And this is the important thing: if at any time you decide you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.”

  I thought about it. “I’ll be ten or eleven when we go.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Will there be other families there?”

  Birdie nodded. “Absolutely. You won’t be alone. We have scouts on Linnea now. Their job isn’t just to plant cameras; they’re also learning how to mingle with the people, so they can learn the language and the history and how to behave. And from time to time, they come back to teach us. We have a whole dome just for training, and only when we think it’s safe will we start sending families over. We’ll only send a few families at first to see how they manage; and then later, if they do okay, we’ll send more after them. But we’ll spread them out so they can see things all over the world.

  “If we sent your family to Linnea, you would be in the third wave of immigrants. We already have a few families over there, working as scouts, and more are already in training. Our very best rangers will help you and your family learn the language. When it’s time for you to move out, you and your family will have had the best training possible.”

  “When do we find out what world we’re going to?”

  “That takes a while to decide, sometimes as long as a year. Your family will have to keep looking at pictures from all the worlds for a while longer. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “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 bon
es 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.”