Child of Earth (8 page)

This was one of the most serious problems Earth people faced when they crossed over. If there was no record of your family, you didn't exist
in the eyes of God. That meant you were an outlaw, a “cast-out.” And if God had cast you out, then God's Servants were obligated to cast you out too. If they didn't, it was a sin on their honor. An Obedient Community had to expel outsiders immediately—and then they'd have to have a ritual cleansing to purge themselves of any taint of sin. So communities were always skeptical of strangers.

If we went over now, we would have no way to prove we were part of a community. Our scouts sometimes used the identities of dead men, and sometimes they used forged family medallions, but it was risky. They could be executed. Birdie said we were trying to get a couple of acolytes into the church at Callo City; eventually, they would be able to forge family records for our immigrants, and if that worked we would probably be okay.

And if not, Authority had a couple of other plans to try.

Birdie told us about one of those plans. Some seventy years ago, a Linnea co-op had loaded up some big wagons and left Callo City heading west. They disappeared completely and no trace of them was ever found. Using the spybirds, Surveillance tracked the probable course of the missing caravan. They didn't find anything, but they think the missing families were swept away while trying to cross one of the great rivers. Authority's plan was to recreate the lost colony with our people. But first we had to get accurate records of who was on that caravan and who they were related to, so fictitious pasts could be created that matched the histories of the folks who'd died. Birdie said they were calling it the Pitcairn Project, and if it worked, that would probably be the way we'd cross over. We'd build a little town of our own, put up some outpost markers, and wait to be discovered.

Meanwhile, we were going to start out with three months of training in Callo City. We'd spend two hours in the morning learning the language and two more hours in the afternoon. The rest of the day would be spent learning skills like chopping wood, building fires, skinning wabbits, sewing clothes, making soap, canning fruit, milling flour and all the various rituals and prayers as well. And after we'd mastered as much of that as we could, then we'd get to build a farm.

IN TRAINING

AFTER A WEEK, they moved us to a cluster of sandbag cabins on one of the hills near the city. We had one big house where we did all the cooking and family meetings, and three little houses where everybody slept. All the kids and two of the moms were in one house, and the adults split themselves up in the others.

We forgot pretty fast that we were living in a dome. If you looked real hard, maybe you could see some lines in the sky where the cables attached, or maybe when you were up high enough, you could see that the mountains looked too close. But mosty, we felt like we were really on Linnea.

We weren't allowed to wear any clothes that we hadn't made ourselves. The clothes we had been given weren't new; they were hand-medowns. Gamma sniffed and said they made us look like refugees. She and the moms started sewing almost immediately.

I didn't like Linnean clothes. They were itchy and scratchy, especially the underwear, but we had to live totally Linnean—we had to dress like Linneans, eat like Linneans, we had to speak like Linneans, and most important of all, we had to think like Linneans. So, it didn't matter if the underwear was itchy. We just had to get used to it.

We weren't even allowed to complain in English. If somebody used an English word, everybody would pretend they didn't understand for a while before telling us the Linnean word. But there were some words that didn't translate at all, so there were some things you just couldn't say.

We had classes two days on and one day off, children and adults all together in one room; the third day, we always had church. The trainers said that we would have to forget our seven-day week, that's not how time was marked on Linnea, but most of us kids felt it wasn't fair that we didn't get any days off at all.

At first, learning the Linnean language seemed impossible—then it got harder. For instance, the Linneans didn't have the verb
to be
in their language. Words like
am, are, is, was, were
and even
become
just didn't exist. You couldn't say, “I
am
hungry,” or, “My name
is
Kaer.” You had to say, “I feel hunger,” or, “You may call me Kaer.” At first, it was hard to say anything at all, because we all had to stop and think about how to say even the simplest things.

Our teacher told us one day—in English—that this actually represented an interesting philosophical problem. If you can't say something, you can't think it, because words are the bricks out of which we build thoughts. If the language didn't have the appropriate conceptual foundation, then whole domains of thought were impossible. You can't go somewhere that isn't on the map. So, it wasn't just a matter of learning how to speak like Linneans, we had to learn how to think like them—to live in their conceptual map, not ours. Some days, we'd suddenly get an
Aha!
—and we'd understand another piece of what we were struggling with, but most days it just felt like a lot of struggle without anything going klunk.

What made it even harder was that the language wasn't spoken as much as it was sung. Kind of like French, only worse. Everything had to have a specific rhythm, which conveyed emotional context. “I feel hunger” could mean six different things depending on how you sang it—hunger for food was only one kind of hunger. There was also hunger for news and hunger for friendship and hunger for courtesy and even hunger for something that was translated as “connection,” but nobody was quite sure what kind of connection. Even the simplest sentence could be a trap. “You may call me Kaer” might be a pleasant invitation to friendship or a dreadfully arrogant and offensive dismissal—the context was even more important than the content. You can't grunt your way through life on Linnea like you can on Earth.

For the first two or three weeks, the language classes felt like torture. They were exercises in frustration. There wasn't one of us who didn't break down in tears or get angry at the difficulty of the language. Big Jes said it best: “I feel like my mouth has a big bite of something that I can't chew. I just turn it around and around in my head, trying to find a place
to crunch, but all I get are corners, biting me back.” But the instructors persisted. They wouldn't give up. And by the fourth week, we weren't allowed to speak in any language except Linnean. If we did, we got ten demerits.

This turned out to be a good idea. There were folks from all over the world there. At any given moment, there were fifty different families in training, and at least a thousand people were going through language classes. For the kids, learning Linnean gave us a chance to play together. We were able to play with the Africans and the Asians and the Europeans and make ourselves understood, so real quick, we felt like the language was opening up doors to new friendships.

None of the Asian families would be going to the same continent we were, because they looked so different from what we were now calling the native Linneans; but some of the Africans might. Apparently, some of the Linneans held slaves. And that was really horrifying, because if they were descended from Earth people, then how could they have backslid so badly? Nobody even wanted to try to answer that question. The only way to find out what was happening would be to insert some people who could pass as slaves.

The Asian families would be going over to the “Asian” continent, as soon as an appropriate scenario could be worked out. One plan was to set them up as a parallel civilization, but the eastern continent was difficult to get to from the Linnean side of the gate, so the scouts weren't completely sure what kind of conditions obtained there. Maybe after the satellites were up. We knew there weren't any people there, because we'd had flyovers, but the terrain was very different over there, almost all mountains. But it had to be done, and it had to be done quickly, because the Linnea gate had been cofinanced by a Japanese-Chinese consortium, and the terms of their investment entitled them to at least one continent, so the Linnean Gate Authority was working to provide that access as quickly as possible before the whole thing turned into an international incident and a hundred years of lawsuits.

Every so often, some family or other would quietly disappear from the dome, and then we'd hear later that they'd dropped out of the program. Sometimes a family would try to say good-bye before they left and explain to their friends why they were leaving, but usually Authority tried to get them out quickly.

Sometimes their reasons for leaving made sense, sometimes not. They'd say that it wasn't what they'd expected, or that it was too hard for them, or they were worried about the conditions on Linnea: the lack
of electricity, communication, entertainment, supermarkets, hospitals and all the other stuff they missed. Living on Linnea was going to be very hard work.

And yes—we were starting to have our own doubts too. Nobody said it aloud, of course, but there was a lot of sighing about stuff that we missed. This wasn't a vacation anymore, this was forever.

One day, Shona fell down and broke her leg. And Mom-Woo burned her arm on the stove. And Big Jes and Da-Lorrin and Klin and Parra all got sprayed by a stink-badger while they were out learning how to plow a field, and that meant that their clothes had to be burned and they had to go and do penance in the stink-house for a week. And Rinky and I said a whole bunch of bad words where the trainers could hear us and they penalized the family twenty-five work points. And finally Mom-Trey just broke down and started crying and nobody could get her to stop. The other two moms had their hands filled with washing and cooking and dirty little-uns who needed baths, and everybody was all short-tempered and angry, and Mom-Lu started yelling at Mom-Trey, telling her to save her crying for some other time and get off her fat butt and help—so of course, Mom-Trey just bawled into her hands all the more. “I don't like it here, I'm not having any fun, I want to go home. Look at my hands, my face. I look like a hag. I feel like an old woman. I just want to go home again and take a hot bath and have my hair done, and feel like a real person again—”

And that's when Irm and Bhetto and Morra came in. They'd heard everything. I thought they were going to tell us (again) what a bad idea this was and that we should just call the trainers and tell them to pull us out of here. Everyone knew they didn't like it in the dome—but instead, Morra said something I couldn't hear and pushed Irm in one direction and Bhetto in the other. Irm grabbed the little-uns and hustled them off to the bath. And Bhetto went over and started chopping up meat and potatoes for the stew. And then Morra grabbed the three moms and made them all sit down at the table for a good bawling out. I got up to leave, but Morra said, “No, Kaer, you need to hear this too.” She said, “All of us have worked too damn hard for this. I'm not going to let you quit. Not after all we've been through already.”

Mom-Trey started to say, “Oh, shut up, Morra. You've been against this from the beginning,” but Morra said a very bad word I'd never heard her use before, and before Mom-Trey could respond to that, Morra said, “Don't even think it, Trey. I'm not going to have you or anyone else blaming me for your failure. So I'm not going to let you fail.” She took
Mom-Trey by the shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. In English, she said: “This is the biggest damn thing this family has ever tried. If we don't beat this, then this family is going to fall apart—and this family is all we have. And I'm not going to let it go. Not just because you're going through menopause or anything else. Yes, I know. So what? You'll get over it. I did. We all do. But don't you know how inspiring you all are to Irm and Bhetto and me? We made a commitment to you, Trey—
our
commitment is to see you succeed in yours. You might feel like quitting today, but tomorrow you'll regret it. So go ahead, have your cry; cry as much as you want, as long as you want, until you're through crying. But save it for later. Right now, we need you to get off your fat ass and help us get dinner on the table.”

Mom-Trey sniffed and said, “My ass is not fat.” But she got up anyway. And she grabbed Morra and hugged her tight. And so did all the other moms too. And that's when I knew everything was going to be all right. We were going to make it.

CHURCH

AFTER THE SIXTH OR SEVENTH WEEK, our skill with the language was good enough so that the classes began to include discussions of how things worked on Linnea and how they were different from Earth. That's when things got really interesting, because just like Birdie said, everything we knew was wrong. Nothing on Linnea was like we thought.

Our teacher was this old, rumpled, scruffy-looking guy with a potbelly and a tendency to spit, so nobody sat in the front row. His name was Novotny; he'd been on the linguistics team studying the very first videos of the Linneans after the gate was opened. He was famous for figuring out large parts of the language; and later, he was one of the first people to cross over and visit a Linnean town.

Novotny had a funny way of teaching. He would say stuff about Linnea and let us react to it and then he'd say some other stuff and we'd start arguing about it, and then he'd grin at his assistant and sit down and listen to us for as long as we kept arguing—always in Linnean. Finally, when we'd exhausted ourselves, arguing about the way things should work, he'd get up and tell us the way things
really
worked over there. And then he'd tell us the annoying part, that we didn't get a vote on it. Deal with it, he said.

The biggest argument was about the Linnean Church. Linnea actually meant
mother
or
mother-world
or
mother-goddess
. The Linneans believed that the world was the living body of God, and that God had given birth out of her own flesh to everything that walked, crawled, slithered,
swam or flew. Therefore, they divided all life into two categories: life which honored the Mother, and life which despoiled the Mother—and life which honored the Mother had a sacred duty to wipe out life which despoiled the Mother; that meant outcasts, hostiles and nonbelievers.