Hella

by David Gerrold

  Dinner in the caf that night was subdued. A lot of people were unnerved by what they had seen close up. Despite years of recordings, despite all the colony’s experience observing the saurs, having a leviathan brought down just outside the perimeter fence unsettled a lot of people. Even under the canopy, even in the main rooms, we could still hear the wet ripping noises outside, the deep gulping sounds, the occasional grunt and growl. It was difficult to eat anything, even a salad, with all the terrible grinding noise so close.

  I left the cameras to record and went back to our pod, back to my room. I put on my headphones and edited videos until midnight. I had worked out a whole system. First I’d find a fact. Then I’d find all the facts around it. Like this: “When a full-grown leviathan takes a step, its foot hits the ground with thirty tons of force.” I’d put that fact on a slide, just simple white text, Helvetica font, on a black background. Then I’d go to a really good close-up of a leviathan foot hitting the ground, showing the little cloud of dust jumping up into the air around it, lifting again, leaving a truck-sized crater in the dirt. I’d show a front foot, a back foot, over and over, I’d show big feet and little feet, matriarchs and calves. A full minute or more. Sometimes two or three minutes. Then I’d go to the next slide. “When a herd passes through an area, they flatten the grass.” And I’d show that. “When the leviathans urinate, they leave a swamp behind.” And I’d show the soggy muddy furrows. “Leviathan dung feeds the savannah.” And I’d show all the little creatures that swarm around the droppings. “When a herd arrives at a water hole, they dig it deeper. They carve a lake.” On that one, I showed an aerial map of how many lakes existed on the migration path. Then, “Many creatures live on the backs of the leviathans.” And so on. Until I reached the final point. “The leviathans are a walking ecosystem.”

  It was a good way to work, because everything explained itself. All I had to do was take all the facts I knew about anything and list them carefully. Then I’d search for video records that demonstrate the fact and edit them in, closer to wider or wider to closer, depending on the fact I wanted to illustrate.

  I’d try to find a rhythm in the records. If I couldn’t find one, I’d figure out what rhythm I thought was best. Then I’d look for a piece of music that matched the rhythm. The display would list them all, and I could sort them for mood. The biggest creatures got the most ponderous and important music. Smaller creatures got lighter happier music. Some of my videos were as short as thirty seconds; the longest I’d ever made was almost ten minutes long. I didn’t like sitting through a long show myself, so I kept them as short as possible.

  I had made videos of the leviathans, and the carnosaurs, then the hoppers and the ground-monkeys, and the things at Bitch Canyon too, then the lesser-mouths, the crow-birds, the humongosaurs, the crocosaurs, the scuttle-bugs, the grinders, the grumpies, and the slow-walking night fungi. I’d already edited and uploaded most of those. But now I wanted to go back to the leviathans and the carnosaurs, only different this time. I wanted to show the families, all the leviathans we had tagged and named and tracked, the calves, the moms, the juveniles, the matriarchs, the octogenarians, all the ones we knew.

  Then the carnosaurs. I showed how big they were, how hungry—how many tons of meat they needed to eat in a week, how they birthed their young, how they attacked and killed. How many times they’d attacked the fences and the damage they’d done. And then I showed who had been hurt and who had been killed and not just the humans—everybody already knew that—but the thunderfeet we’d been watching for most of the last fifty years and had come to think of as friendly mountains.

  I hardly ever see the clock tick over to 0:00, but tonight I didn’t want to go to bed. Exhaustion finally caught up with me at 02:30. Mom has this very soft longshirt she brought all the way from Earth. When I was little, when I cried so much I couldn’t be comforted, she’d wrap me in it and I’d fall asleep. The softness always felt so nice I felt safe. Eventually, she put it in my bottom drawer for me, and ever after that, whenever I had a very bad day, I’d put it on and feel safe again. I hadn’t worn it in more than a year, but I put it on now, crawled into bed, and fell asleep in minutes.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up at dawn, feeling very strange. The carnosaurs were still eating, I could hear the grunting and all the other horrible noises, and I could feel the thumping coming through the floor. Still wearing Mom’s longshirt, I wandered into the kitchen where the screens were still showing the scene outside the fence. The lights had been kept on all night, and the carnosaurs had carved a good-sized wedge into the belly of the dead leviathan. Great strips of flesh had been pulled away from her flanks, but she was still recognizable as the grand old lady. They would be at her for days.

  Captain Skyler looked at me oddly when he saw me in Mom’s longshirt, but he didn’t say anything about it. “There’s coffee.”

  “Okay,” I mumbled. I poured a cup. It was hot and bitter. I went looking for milk.

  “You were up late,” he said. “I looked at your videos. They are very good.”

  I grunted something that was supposed to be thanks.

  “Hey, Kyle. Are you okay?”

  I shook my head.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He pushed a plate of toast toward me.

  I took a slice. I buttered it slowly. I took a bite.

  Finally. “They killed White Foot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She was my favorite.”

  “She was everybody’s favorite.”

  “I wish we could have saved her.”

  “I do too.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “If we were to kill the bigmouths every time a favorite leviathan was in danger, then pretty soon there wouldn’t be enough bigmouths, and there would be too many thunderfeet, and there wouldn’t be enough food for all of them. The calves would starve first, then the old ones. Then a lot of the breeding stock. It’s called a population crash. The bigmouths are a necessary part of the Hella cycle. They keep the leviathans from overbreeding.”

  “I know that. But couldn’t we have saved White Foot?”

  “And if we’d saved White Foot this time, then what? Next time, someone else would demand that we save Little Face. And then after that, Big Stinky or Grumpy Butt or whichever.” He slid his chair closer to mine and spoke softly. “It was her time, Kyle. This is how leviathans die. Most of them anyway. White Foot had a good life, she had a lot of healthy calves. And her death serves a purpose too. The carnosaurs will be working at her for a long time, they won’t be chasing the herd, and by the time they’re hungry again, most of the herd will be too far away for them to catch up. By dying here, White Foot keeps them here. So this is one last way for her to protect the lives of her daughters and her granddaughters—so they can have more calves of their own. Even in death, White Foot helps her family.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t think anybody does. The best we can do is . . .” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “. . . appreciate the horrible design of it.” He added, “It’s how life works. Everything feeds on everything else. Except for the very smallest and lowest of all organisms, the ones that feed on light and rust. Everything alive survives by eating other living things. Everything becomes food for something else. White Foot was beautiful in her time, and we’re all going to miss her. I’m so glad we have so many wonderful pictures of her. But it was her time to pay her debt forward to the next generation, and as difficult as it is to say goodbye—it’s a part of life.”

  He waited to see if I was going to understand. Eventually, because I didn’t say anything, because I was still thinking about it, he got up and poured himself more coffee. He put the pot down and looked at me seriously. “Kyle, it’s this simple. Life is about saying goo
dbye. The older you get, the more goodbyes you have to say. It doesn’t get easier. If anything, it gets harder.”

  I took a bite of my toast and chewed silently, so I wouldn’t have to say anything.

  “But, maybe . . .” he started to say.

  “What?”

  “Maybe every time you have to say goodbye, it’s another chance to say hello to someone new.”

  I looked at him skeptically.

  He laughed. “Okay, there’s no fooling you. But it does sound good, doesn’t it?”

  I shook my head. “No. It doesn’t. It sounds stupid.”

  “Well, then, let’s pretend I didn’t say anything at all. You look pretty in your nightgown. Are you thinking about changing back?”

  “No. It’s just more comfortable.”

  “It must be or you wouldn’t wear it. You used to wear it all the time when you were little, even around the quad. But you might want to put on a heavier longshirt if you want to come up to the lookouts with me. It’s starting to get windy.”

  Jamie told me once that back on Earth there was—or is, I don’t know if they’re still there—a group of people called Arabs. They lived in a very hot climate, and their longshirts were called robes. When humans first landed on Hella, they wore sealed suits at first, then lighter bio-hazard suits, then later on, just bio-conditioned suits. But all those had to be custom fitted, which was time-consuming. If you had to go outside for anything at all, it could take as long as twenty or thirty minutes to suit up.

  Robes were easier. You only needed three or four different sizes and whoever needed to go out could just pull on a robe, and a hood if necessary, and go. The thermal controls and bio-monitors could be woven into a robe a lot easier than a shirt and pants or a jumpsuit. Plus all the other sensors and scanners and gear as well. After a while, as the First Hundred figured out what was safe and what wasn’t, robes became longshirts. And after that, they just became convenient. Longshirts were available in ankle-length, knee-length, and thigh-length, whatever you want. You could wear shorts with them or not, depending on how you felt or what you had to do. Lots of people still wore pants and jumpsuits and worksuits of all kinds, but the longshirt is a permanent part of Hella’s culture. It’s traditional, like skirts and sarongs and hats shaped like a wedge of cheese. I should make a video about Hella cheese, sometime.

  The colony isn’t totally isolated from Hellan ecology. We try to maintain what we call “a cautious isolation” while we figure out what’s safe for us to be exposed to. And vice versa. We’re an invasive species. No, we’re an invasive ecology. Everything we brought with us, from the tiniest microbes all the way up to ourselves and our animals, is alien and dangerous. I never thought of us that way, but Mom says we’re an invasive presence of enormous magnitude, so we have to watch what we introduce into any Hellan ecosystem or we could trigger a massive bio-collapse.

  On the other side of that argument, some people say that it’s specifically because we are an invasive presence that we should introduce the Earth species that are most useful to us and let the Hellan ecology adapt or die. We’re going to be here forever, we might as well get on with the business of terraforming the planet.

  But if we do that, we lose Hella and everything that makes it special. It’s very confusing.

  One of the things that people learned back on Earth about ecology and evolution—and they had to learn it the hard way—is that not only is everything connected to everything else, it’s always in a state of flux. Everything cycles, everything adjusts, everything rearranges itself, there is no steady state, there is only change. Invasive species are not the exception, they’re the norm.

  But even if we were to introduce Earth bees and bunnies and whatevers, we don’t know what will happen to them when they start reproducing in Hellan gravity and under the Hellan sun. Will they get bigger? Certainly. We know that from our sealed greenhouses. But what other adaptations or mutations will we see out in the wild? When they interact with Hellan life forms, what else will they become? And how will Hellan life forms respond? Whatever we start, it’s not going to be undoable, so nobody wants to start anything at all. It’ll be like the prickly pears in Australia. And rabbits. And cane toads. Those are the obvious ones. But there’s a lot more examples too. Africanized bees and lionfish and Burmese pythons. It’s a long list.

  We know that there’s already been some crossover events. Some Hellan bugs have taken up residence in the quad and we’ve been watching them carefully for a long time, there are mini-bots everywhere, not just cleaning, but analyzing too. We think that some of our bacteria may be responsible for a rash of deaths among the ground-monkeys. Those things aren’t quite primates, but one winter several nearby colonies died out almost overnight. The samples we gathered suggested a staph-like infection. So did somebody sneeze in the wrong place? Did an opportunistic virus find a new vector? Did it kill those colonies so quickly it didn’t have a chance to spread? If so, we were lucky. The ground-monkeys were lucky. But whatever it was, did it die out, or is it lying dormant somewhere? How long till a new family of ground-monkeys settles here and gets exposed? We don’t know. We did go in and irradiate the suspect areas and maybe that will be enough, but we just don’t know.

  The whole thing is very complex, much more complex than we’re really equipped to know. So, as Mom says, we just take it one day at a time and do our best to keep out of the way of whatever might be coming. Which is kinda why I don’t know why Mom and Captain Skyler want to marry each other. Captain Skyler is one of those people who like to go out and get in the way of whatever might be coming, take pictures, and tag it. But it doesn’t matter if I don’t understand. They want to get married and they will.

  Anyway, Captain Skyler said I could come with him to the lookouts. They’re up on top of the fences, lookout towers connected by broad catwalks. I don’t know why they call it a catwalk, we don’t have any cats in Summerland. They don’t want to risk it. Cats would get curious about what’s beyond the fence, and who knows what would happen out there? Would we end up with giant carnivorous cats? Or would they be fatal snacks for the littlemouths? Anyway, the catwalks are very rugged, so whenever there’s something to see outside the perimeter, a lot of people go up to watch. Today, the crowd was there to see the carnosaurs feeding on what was left of White Foot’s carcass. Much of her belly had been ripped open and there were raw scars on her flanks as well, but she was still identifiable. She was still our dead friend and not yet a jumble of raw meat and bones.

  Madam Coordinator was up on the catwalk too. Most people wore hats to protect themselves from the actinic sun, but she held a parasol. It made her easy to spot. She saw us and called us over. “Captain, I hear congratulations are in order.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  She indicated the tableau below us. “How long do you think this will go on?”

  “Worst case, ten days. And another week after that for the lesser carrion-eaters.”

  She sighed. “I can’t fault people for being curious. And I know we allowed for this possibility in our work schedules. But we’re going to have to find a way to get people back to work soon or we’re not going to make our deadline for Lockdown.”

  “I could make more videos,” I offered. “So people could watch them later.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Your editing has been very skillful. You’ve done a good job, Kyle. Everybody has been impressed.” She looked to the Captain. “I think you made your point. I hope so. But . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, she said, “We’ve used up our margin. How do we get back on schedule?”

  “I was thinking perhaps a couple of X-Prizes. Carve out a few more private rooms at Winterland?”

  Madam Coordinator closed her eyes. She did that sometimes when people asked her for a decision. Just like sometimes the software will show you a little whirligig while it sorts something out, she did the same thin
g only without the little whirligig. Maybe she had her own little noise inside her head, chattering and humming until it finally resolved itself. That would explain it. She opened her eyes again and said, “All right, we can afford it. We’ll carve six new apartments. One for the most valuable player on each evacuation team—but only announce we’re carving five, so the team that comes in last will have to do without. Then if we make schedule, we’ll surprise them and give them the last one. And that’ll be good for morale.”

  “And if not? If we don’t make schedule?”

  “Hm.” She smiled. “I know a couple of newlyweds who might want it . . . You figure it out.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair, ma’am, and you know it.”

  “Then we’ll carve seven. If we make it, you can have the seventh. If we don’t—both will go for storage.”

  “I can work with that. I’ll set it up immediately.” He stepped off a bit to talk on his phone, leaving me with Madam Coordinator.

  I didn’t have anything to say to her, she didn’t have anything else to say to me, so we both turned to watch the carnosaurs below. Two of them were eating—not as ravenously as yesterday, but slowly and steadily. What some people might even call thoughtfully. Although I don’t really understand that word—thoughtful—the way other people do. To me, it means that someone is distracted. Kind of. Because when I’m thoughtful, it’s the noise that’s doing the thinking.

  The other carnosaurs were lying torpid in the tall grass, but not so far away they couldn’t come back to defend their meal. Carnosaurs stayed with their kills. Probably by tomorrow, we’d stop seeing White Foot below us and just see . . . I don’t know. Meat.