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

  The system was learning my moves while I was learning its responses, so it took a while longer for the synergy to happen; but after I got the hang of it, I began to feel a lot more confident. I began swooping around in circles and figure-eights, laughing and wishing Rinky and Aunt Morra could see this. “I can fly!” I sang. “I can fly!”

  “And very well too!” said da, applauding.

  “All right, wait,” said one of the engineers. He turned down the lights. “Now try it in the dark—”

  It was a little harder this way, because I was afraid I was going to bump into something, but they assured me that the flying rig wouldn’t allow it. So I practiced turning and circling, stopping and starting. “How do I go up and down?” I called.

  “Just a minute,” Barry said, “I still have to activate that routine for you. One thing at a time. First we wanted you to get used to flying before we practiced takeoffs and landings. All right, I’ve turned it on. You go up and down by tilting your body. Try it. We’ll take it slowly at first—”

  I leaned forward and dived for the ground. Byrne had to jump out of the way—I leaned back and swooped up again. I shrieked in surprise, but they didn’t stop me; they let me go until I got the hang of it. Tim shouted instructions and Barry made adjustments, and I practiced diving for the ground, each time tilting at the last moment and landing. Then I’d give a little jump and take off again, pointing myself roofward. Each time, the rig pulled me up into the air as smoothly as if I’d leapt by myself. I laughed with the sheer joy of it. This was almost as much fun as riding a horse.

  Finally, Tim and Byrne decided I was good enough, or at least as good as they needed me to be, and they told me to come down.

  I landed easily, with not even a bounce. Everyone applauded. I would have bowed, but the body-shell didn’t allow it, so I held my hands out in front of me like I was blessing them all, like I’d seen in pictures of the saints. Da laughed and applauded again.

  As Tim helped me out of the rig, I said, “I wish we had this for washing great-horses.”

  “We’ve tried it,” said Tim, “but it spooks the horses to have someone flying around them. They don’t hawkbirds.”

  “Then what do you use the flying rig for?”

  “Our mechanics use it. It lets them go right up to the top of a chopper so they can service it.”

  “Oh,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that. I wondered why I thought of the horses before I thought of the choppers. That was interesting.

  The Big Empty

  The choppers were tacking back and forth across the Linnean countryside. Da showed me on the map how we were weaving a twisty course through territories known to be uninhabited. He overlaid the satellite and spybird photos. We were now monitoring every Linnean settlement across the whole western continent. And we had detailed histories of what we knew about each one and which ones were safe to visit and which ones should be avoided. We knew the heaviest traffic routes and where most of the caravans were. We had infrared signatures, onsite monitors, and spybird tracking. So we flew north for a while, then northeast, then southeast, then northerly for a bit, then east some more. . . . Our route looked like a snake with its back broken in six places.

  This didn’t guarantee that we wouldn’t be sighted, but we were in whisper mode, we were staying high, and all the birds were painted no-reflective blue. If a lone traveler did see us, he wouldn’t be able to say what he saw, and he’d probably have to assume he’d seen one of the eufora heading off on some motherly errand of its own.

  We were number five in a string of six choppers. I missed riding the God-chopper, but it was too bright and they had decided to fly it only at night. It would arrive on station a day after us, maybe two. There were six tenders shuttling back and forth across the continent too, delivering fuel tanks and supplies to our rendezvous stations. Da said that every station had to be as well-hidden as North Mountain One, so that no Linnean would accidentally stumble on one. We would have two refueling stops before we got to the target zone.

  Da said there was a couple of heavy-lifters also moving equipment into the zone. One was ferrying “the boulder,” and the other was carrying a mobile field hospital in case it was needed. I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t like the thought that some of our people might get hurt. And that raised the other question too. “What will we do if some of the Linneans get hurt? Will we take them to our hospital too?”

  Smil shook her head. “You know we can’t do that, Kaer.”

  “I know the reasons. But it doesn’t seem right to leave an injured person to die if we have the facilities to save him. I mean, the Mother would want us to do that. The Mother created all life as sacred.”

  That produced one of those uncomfortable silences that happens whenever someone says something that other people don’t want to deal with. “Well, you speak the truth, of course. . . .” Smiller began half-heartedly, but then gave it up as a lost cause. She just sighed and shook her head. “I don’t like it either, Kaer. But I don’t have a better answer. Suppose we do save an injured Linnean—then what do we do with him? After he recovers, do we let him go back and tell the others everything he saw? Or do we keep him prisoner?”

  I shook my head. “I dunno. Maybe we could ask him to work for us?”

  “Eventually, we might try that. Again. But not for a while.”

  “Again?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I really can’t talk about that, Kaer.”

  “Oh.” Another thought occurred to me. “Well, maybe the time has come for us to just tell the Linneans the truth. ‘Hello, we’ve come from Earth and we want to make friends.’”

  “I don’t think we can sell that idea to the Administration. Not for a long time. You’ll have a hard time convincing anyone of the Linneans’ good intentions while they still hold four of our Scouts prisoner. And afterward, when Jaxin, Corda, Val, and Sykes tell their stories of how they were treated, I suspect you won’t even want to try.” She changed the subject. “How did the fittings go?”

  “Fine,” I said, noncommittally.

  “And the flying rig? You had no problems?”

  “No.” I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk anymore.

  Da said, “Kaer did very well, better than we expected.”

  “Byrne said the same thing. I just wanted to know how Kaer felt about it.”

  I turned my attention to the window. I was tired, I was bored, I was frustrated . . . and I was scared. People were going to get hurt. Someone was going to make a mistake somewhere . . . or maybe, despite all of our precautions, the Hale-Stones knew exactly what we were planning. We were flying into trouble—I could feel it. And I wished there were some way to keep it from happening.

  Outside, the orange day only made me feel more uncomfortable. It reminded me of home, our home in Linnea Dome II that we’d all worked so long and so hard to build. Suddenly I missed Aunt Morra and Rinky and Big Jes and Little Klin. We’d left so suddenly—we’d just stepped out of winter and here we were in the middle of this big emptiness.

  Beneath us there was nothing but razor-grass, tall and yellow. Da said that it was four to six meters high most places, but in the wetlands, it could grow as high as twelve meters, with stems as thick as a man’s forearm. You couldn’t cut your way through a patch of razor-grass that thick, you’d be lucky if you got a hundred meters. You might be able to put a bulldozer yoke on a great-horse and push a trail through, but even a great-horse wouldn’t go more than a kilometer a day into a forest of razor-grass.

  The Linneans had pushed a couple railroads a few klicks into the southern forests, but not very far, only far enough to harvest the taller plants. Da said that razor-grass was a lot like bamboo; as it grew, it hardened. The older and taller plants were almost as strong as trees, but a lot lighter. Da said it was great for building, so it made good sense for the Linneans to harvest as much of the thicker plants as they could—otherwise the razor-grass would grow so thick and so fast that it would eventu
ally choke off rivers and fill up lakes. Unless the boffili came through and stopped for lunch. That was all that kept the grass from taking over the whole continent. Even so . . . the grass still grew faster than a million boffili could eat.

  By the end of the summer, the grass would have dried out and the prairies would look like a browned-over doormat. Then the snows would come, piling up layer on layer until it was as tall as a great-horse, maybe taller. And still it would come floating down in silent white falls. And it would lay across the northern prairies for weeks, then months—in some places nearly half the year.

  Even into spring, the snow would remain. The thaws would come gradually, the melt seeping into the hardened ground, soaking slowly downward through the dead and matted grass. The buried seeds would soften, and eventually germinate. The first shoots would push their way up through the hardened snow, eventually cracking through the dusty crust of winter in their desperate search for the orange daylight of Linnea.

  By mid-summer the last of the snow would have vanished from the prairies, except perhaps for a few cold drifts in sheltered gullies. But the water would still be there, just below the surface. The growing shoots of grass would send their roots deep, seeking every fugitive drop. And as the grass reached into the warm summery days, the heat of the sun would evaporate the liquid out of the grassy fields and back into the air, back into the sky. So the shoots of grass would send their roots down deeper, ever deeper, thirstily digging for water. When the water was gone, the grass would die and dry and harden; and deep in the ground, the new seeds would patiently wait for the snows to come again.

  The grass fed the great boffili herds. They grazed across the prairies in a grand circular migration. South and west in winter, north and west in spring, east in summer, and southeast in autumn. A hungry boffili would eat an acre of razor-grass every week—that might not sound like much, until you realized the razor grass was often as high as the boffili’s hump. And so thick it took an animal with a boffili’s strength to push through it.

  The moisture that the boffili got out of the grass was mostly stored in its hump. If you lived on the prairie, and you killed a boffili, the hump was the most valuable part—not just for the fat and the meat, but for the liquid you could strain out of it too. We’d had boffili soup sometimes in the Dome. It was a little too salty for my taste, but it wasn’t bad. Smiller said it was better fresh.

  The boffili herds were spread out across hundreds of kilometers—sometimes you couldn’t tell where one herd ended and the next one began. When they were grazing, they tended to spread out and give each other a lot of room; but at night, they closed up into clusters. Da said that the research teams thought the clusters were family groups, but no one had had the time to study the herds that carefully yet.

  I studied the endless plains passing below us. There were no boffili to be seen yet, but I didn’t mind. The land fascinated me in its infinite beauty. It seemed like a promise, waiting to be opened.

  In the warm yellow light of Linnea’s sun everything looked soft and golden, always the same, always different. The ground rolled by steadily. From this height, we could see how the razor-grass rippled in long slow waves. For just the briefest moment, it looked as if the world beneath us had grown the softest blond fur. And then it made me think of a snuggly feather bed covered by a fluffy down quilt. I just wanted to roll around in it and smell the crisp dusky flavor of the grass.

  Now we passed across an area where the ground was churned and the grass was flattened. A boffili herd had passed this way not too many days before. Most of the grass was either eaten or trampled. The herds cut great swaths across the prairies; the lines they carved would be visible from space.

  But on the ground, the earth would be churned as if by ten thousand plows and there would be tons of boffili dung everywhere—and dung beetles frantically swarming.

  The boffili swath was an opportunity for every species. Without the ground cover of the razor-grass, a whole other ecology immediately took over. Little creatures of all kinds could be found scurrying through the soft dark earth. Squat rodent-like things whose burrows had been destroyed would be hard at work digging new ones—but without the protection of the grass, they were now prey to the circling hawks. Smaller birds, long-legged and gangly, would pick their way across the suddenly flattened grass, abruptly pecking or scratching to feed on the fat worms and tasty beetles and other choice bugs turned up by the passage of the herd.

  Soon, fresh shoots of razor-grass would start growing here. Other plants, their seeds dormant for years, would struggle for purchase too—blooming for only a short time before the razor-grass eventually choked them out again; but in that short time, they’d flourish, they’d blossom, and they’d drop their seeds for the next generation, no matter how many years away.

  The boffili left behind opportunities for every species. Soon the rabbit-deer would come stepping daintily through, picking at the fresh shoots—and later the badgerines would follow, digging for roots. And the jackalopes too. There were hundreds of species of herd-followers, each one appearing at its own particular moment before moving on. We hadn’t begun to catalog them all.

  And of course, the kacks—always the kacks. The kack-packs followed the boffili too, preying on the other creatures that benefited from the endless churning of the ground.

  Beneath us now, a vast flock of silvery emmos picked their way across the ground, pecking for seeds and beetles and whatever else they might find. Emmos looked like ostriches, only bigger. They had enormous legs, taller than a man, bodies the size of small cars, and necks as long as their legs. But their heads were only the size of a basketball, and they didn’t have very big brains. An emmo stomach often had as much gravel as anything else.

  The emmo flocks also followed the great boffili migrations, dining on the smorgasbord turned up by the sharp boffili hooves. The choppers must have startled the birds, because suddenly they broke and ran, bounding away in great leaping strides. There must have been thousands of them; the flock poured across the land like water, bounding and leaping in a shimmering display. The flock swirled and broke and reformed. The avalanche of birds poured up the swath of broken dirt toward the distant boffili herd. Eventually we outpaced them and they faded into the distance behind.

  The emmos wouldn’t run far. If they didn’t remember what they were running from, they’d lose their momentum soon enough. Soon, they’d be pecking their way across the ground again, their heads bobbing up and down in the golden grass.

  Sometimes lightning would start a range fire. Because the prairies extended six thousand kilometers east to west and almost as far north to south, a range fire could be a continental disaster. But . . . razor-grass was hard to ignite, hard to burn unless it was completely dried out. We discovered that with our first few fuel bricks. Hardened grass wouldn’t ignite from a few sparks, it needed direct exposure to high temperature. So even if a range fire did get started, it would move slowly—even during autumn, the very-dry season. Even strong winds didn’t always guarantee a holocaust, because the air was usually too wet. Linnean air generally had more humidity than the air of Earth. So conditions for starting a fire had to be just right—and sometimes they were. Any fire that did get started was likely to burn its way outward in all directions until the snow started falling. Sometimes that would be months.

  The herds would stampede ahead of the fire. And those that weren’t trampled or injured or burned to death by the flames, would often find their migration route scourged. Many would starve as they crossed the burned out prairies. Others would be too weak to survive the long migration south, or the meager forage of winter.

  And the people who lived on the prairie—they’d lose their crops too. And then their livestock. And without food, they wouldn’t survive the winter either. . . .

  But some would survive a range fire. And after a while the prairie would recover, and so would the herds. And then the farmers would come back. And everything would return to the way it was
before.

  At least until the next fire.

  I was glad that Smiller had shot down that idea. In flames.

  Surprise Rock

  Linnean days are only three hours longer than Earth days, but they feel a lot longer than that, especially in summer when the days are so long you get twenty hours of sunlight and seven hours of darkness. After a while, you start to wonder—doesn’t the sun ever set? You finally give up and go to bed while the sun is still high in the western sky. In the winter, it’s just the opposite. You wake up hungry in the middle of the night, your stomach growling like a rabid kack, and you ask yourself—doesn’t the sun ever rise?

  In the Dome, we’d lived on the Linnean calendar, so I was as adjusted to it as I was ever going to be; we’d all learned to take two-hour naps after lunch, unless we were working on something critical, like brick-making. But all the time spent traveling through the gates, and across all the different time zones, always traveling east—and then all the sleep I’d missed—had left my body-clock so confused I didn’t know what time of day it was anymore. I kept dozing off and waking up fitfully, not sure if it was midday, afternoon, or evening—or if I’d slept through the night and it was morning again. So when we finally landed at Sky Station, I felt like I was stepping into a hallucination. Maybe I was.

  Da woke me up before we got there. I grumpled awake and he pointed up at the big display at the front of the cabin. At first I couldn’t figure out what he was pointing at. Mostly the display showed yellow land under yellow sky—a bright rectangle with a horizontal dividing line separating one shade of gold from another—but this time, there was a thing sitting on the horizon that looked like the back of a giant red whale.

  “The Linneans call it Surprise Rock. Because it sits out here like a giant surprise, bigger than Manhattan.” It just kept growing and growing until it filled the screen. Da said a billion years of wind and rain and dust storms had scoured it into a big smooth lump; the sides were as steep as walls and the rounded top was more than 350 meters above the surface of the prairie. Da said it was next to impossible for someone to reach the top from ground level, our Scouts had surveyed it completely; but he expected that sooner or later, some Linnean explorers would try climbing it anyway—just because that’s the way people behave around big rocks, mountains, trees, or anything else bigger than they are. In the meantime, it was a good place for a major observation site.