Read Online Child of Earth by David Gerrold - Free Book Online Page A

dogthings chasing wildly through the grass, but we never saw what they were hounding after. There were probably cameras in the rocks and trees as well. Lorrin told us that we should assume that everything we said and did was recorded, that the intelligence engines were always watching and listening, so this would be a good place for us to start practicing keeping secrets, so we’d be in the habit when we got to Linnea.
    Over two thousand species of plant, animal and insect had been transplanted from Linnea and it looked like the ecology had been perfectly duplicated, but Birdie said there were probably at least ten thousand
more species that they’d missed; no place is ever as simple as it looks. I couldn’t figure out what other kinds of plants and animals there might be—maybe Birdie was talking about bugs and beetles and birds and different kinds of ground-rats and burrowing things. Critters you wouldn’t see normally.
    Mosty we were surrounded by rolling waves of razor grass. The grass was taller than a man, and on a windy day, you could see it rippling like green fire. Later in the year, it would turn brown and brittle. Here and there, the grass was spotted with those funny-looking short furry trees, and wherever there was a pond or a lake, there were also a couple of sleeping willows. Out on the prairie, travelers who needed to water their horses always looked for willows as evidence of water.
    On the second day, we all piled onto a huge wagon pulled by two great-horses for a ride across the prairie to give us a sense of what we’d find across most of the continent. Once we were out of sight of Callo City, it was pretty spooky. There weren’t any landmarks. And most trails were overgrown by razor grass in a matter of days. So cities had to put up markers for hundreds of klicks in every direction, pointing travelers the right way. We passed one of them, and an outpost tower too, with semaphore flags; but mosty, once we got away from Callo City, we were on our own. We didn’t see any sign of people.
    We headed toward the “mountains” first, so we could see what the limits of the world were. From a distance, the mountains looked white, but when we got closer, we saw the hillsides flashing with albino aspen, flickering like the noise on an old television screen. Here and there, up and down the slopes, were scattered groves of gnarly oaks, all twisted together so badly they were mosty one big wooden knot. Birdie said that some of the older cities had walls of gnarly oaks all around them, that’s how hard it was to get through an old grove—unless you were a monkli and went up into the canopy. From the crest of one of the hills, we saw a herd of boffili. Later we saw some emmos and bunny-deer.
    Later, we also saw farms. It didn’t look like there were that many here, but Birdie said that every farm was at least a kilometer from the nearest neighbor, so we wouldn’t see a lot of them. And no, not every farm had a great-horse. There were only a dozen great-horses in this dome and they all had to be shared. There were more on the way, but it was hard work buying a horse and transporting it. The problems were enormous—in more ways than one. Birdie said that every great-horse in the dome cost a million dollars or more; that’s how hard they were to bring over. And they cost another half million a year to maintain.

    Some of the farms were close to Callo City, because that’s how the city got most of its food, but most were far away, so the colonists could learn how to be self-sufficient. “You’ll have to learn how to grow your own food,” Birdie said. “And you’ll probably go hungry for a while, until you pick up the knack of harvesting and preserving.”
    â€œWhat if we don’t grow enough ... ?” Rinky asked.
    â€œWe won’t let you starve, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Birdie. “But