Child of Grass by David Gerrold

Author:David Gerrold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939529589
Publisher: BenBella Books

The Empty Sea

By the time I had pushed my way to Beck, the eastern sky was already showing a faint white tinge. But only in the goggles. Without the goggles, everything was still dark. The sticky grass closed in so tightly, that even when the sun was directly overhead, I’d still be in deep shadow.

Beck was still sleeping. I almost tripped over her. The only way I knew where she was, the rope grew taut in my hands. I pushed the grass aside and found a place by her feet that had been mashed down a little—where I’d been sitting before.

I sat down next to her again and looked at my watch. Should I wake her or not? I flipped up the goggles. It was still too dark to do anything. Might as well let her sleep. I flipped the goggles down again. I adjusted the ears on the helmet and listened to the grass. It crackled and stretched, but all the little voices had gone silent. I wondered about the old woman. How many other crazy people lived out here in the grass?

One of the Scouts had told us once that it was possible to survive in the sea. If you knew what you were doing. You could eat grass seeds and grass roots and young grass shoots. You could suck water out of grass stalks and you could collect the dew every morning. You wouldn’t get fat, but you could keep going for a long time. They didn’t recommend it as a way of life, they said you would go mad real fast, and most people who tried it were dead within a few weeks, but some people survived in the grass. And every so often, somebody reported meeting someone who seemed to be thriving in the grass, so that was probably how some of the stories got started about strange folks living in the sea. Still, it was kind of an interesting coincidence to meet anyone in such a vast wilderness. . . .

One of the Trainers had once said that we suspected the Linneans might be able to see deeper into the ultra-violet and the infra-red than we could, so that might give them an enhanced ability to see in the grass. Or maybe their hearing was different. Certainly, it wouldn’t be unlikely that over time, they would evolve and adapt to their lives in the sea of grass. Or maybe there was something else at work.

Whatever it was, the Linneans seemed to be better equipped to surviving in the grass than we were. And not just the people, the animals too. How could a nesting bird find her eggs again? How could a badgerine find its burrow? We knew the badgerine left a trail of urine and pheromones, but the badgerines often traveled tens of klicks from their burrows—so how pungent was their urine trail and how good were their noses that they always found their way back. And what about the birds? A bird couldn’t do the same thing.

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