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

don’t plan on any pizza deliveries either. If you don’t grow enough crops to make it through the winter, I promise you, your subsistence rations will be only marginally better than starvation. You will have to deal with the consequences of your mistakes here.”
    â€œIck,” said Klin. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
    â€œWe’ll just have to make sure we grow more than enough. That’s all,” said Da-Lorrin, but even he didn’t sound too sure of himself.
    â€œDoes everybody have to learn how to farm the land?” Rinky asked.
    â€œFarming is the most important work in the world,” Birdie said quietly. “If you don’t farm, you don’t eat.”
    â€œBut here on Earth, we don’t have to farm. We have machines to do it.”
    â€œOn Linnea, you won’t have machines. When we send you over, you’ll know how to survive on your own. Or we won’t send you.” Birdie was quite insistent that all of the colonists had to learn self-sufficiency. Later, some could make their way to the cities; but so far, only scouts had been to the larger settlements. They’d come back with a lot of recordings and even a few artifacts, but they hadn’t tried to live there yet. Birdie didn’t say so, but I got the feeling there was something weird about the cities that she wasn’t ready to tell us yet.
    Apparently the society of Linnea—at least this part of it—was rigidly structured. Birdie said that not all the rules had been figured out yet. There were rules for marriage and kinship and inheritance and all kinds of conditions on contractual obligations. A lot of it had to do with their religion. Birdie said we’d start learning about that right away, because there was so much to learn. For instance, Linnean marriages were only one man and one woman, and they had to be approved by some kind of council and registered in each community. Families had to live in cooperative communities so all the children could be taught at the same school. If a family wasn’t part of a community, they were denied important rights and privileges. There was no way around it—at least not yet.
    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