Free Child of Earth by David Gerrold Page 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