Child of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

so a new set of probes had to be designed and built for each world, depending on what conditions existed on the other side.
    Birdie showed us all the different kinds of probes. My favorites were the ones that looked like transparent airplanes. They were sort of like city monitors, only better. These were built to stay up in the air for years if they had to, high enough so that you couldn’t see them from the ground, but with cameras that were so good they could read license plates from a mile up—that is, if there were any license plates to read.
    Birdie said that all the probes were set to self-destruct automatically at the first hint of danger or failure, vaporizing themselves so completely that there wouldn’t be any pieces big enough to interfere with local life-forms; this was especially important on Linnea where the pieces might be found by people who weren’t supposed to know they were being watched.
    One of the factory guides explained that all the probes talk to each other. They’re a stochastic network, reforming on the fly; they relay their signals back through the gate, back to New Mexico or Houston or Australia or wherever. There, the intelligence engines process everything, correlating and calculating and analyzing. “We know more about the weather on Linnea than the Linneans do,” Birdie said.
    That’s when Rinky asked, “Do you ever find a planet with intelligent life already there? I mean aliens .”
    Birdie looked like she wished Rinky hadn’t asked the question. “Well, yes and no. The Australians found a world once that looked promising, but it was filled with different species of—we don’t even know what to call them. They’re so different we have nothing to compare them to. They looked like two-legged termites. Or naked mole rats. About Kaer’s size. They dig deep tunnels into the earth or they built giant mounds
above the ground. We’ve studied them for years now, but nobody is willing to say if they’re sentient or not. Their behavior is sophisticated, but so is the behavior of termites and ants. We’ve tried sending over contact robots—but every time, they immediately dismantled them. So we’re definitely not going to risk human beings. We’re not sure if they don’t recognize other lives or what, we just don’t know yet. It’s an interesting world, but its very existence raises scientific and ethical questions that we’re not prepared to address; there’s even some talk about shutting down that gate.”
    Birdie went on to say that for every good gate that gets opened, there are at least five more that can’t be used for one reason or another. In addition to the sixteen gates open to good worlds, there are fifty-seven more that are open but unusable, and nine gates that are permanently locked for security reasons—and these are the ones that they just don’t talk about. Plus there are all the gates that were attempted, that were deemed unacceptable, and dismantled and rebuilt to new specifications. Gates are a big industry. We need them for the import of metals, water, fuels, electricity, gases and other necessary resources—even agriculture. Four of the worlds already have successful farming communities. According to Birdie, at the present rate of growth, gates will provide nine percent of all global mining resources within ten years, and within a hundred years, maybe 100 percent. She wouldn’t say how much food, though; they hadn’t yet decided if alien crops were safe.
    After that, we saw a bunch of other buildings. Most of them looked like factories or schools. There were a lot of places where folks were studying the language of Linnea and watching videos of Linneans talking to each other. It all sounded like mish-mash to me. I didn’t see how anyone could learn it, let alone speak it, but people did.
    And then after that, we went over to the