Hella

by David Gerrold

  Madam Coordinator cleared her throat. That meant she was about to say something, so I turned to her and waited. I do that when I think people are about to speak. Jamie says it unnerves them. It makes them uncomfortable.

  “Kyle,” she said. She cleared her throat again. “Kyle, I want you to know that your job is very important. You’ve done a wonderful job with the thunderfeet and the bigmouths. I know how much you love these big lumbering animals. We all do. But I have an idea about what you might want to work on when you get to Winterland. Maybe you could make some videos showing the new people how to survive on Hella. They need to know about Summerland Station and Winterland, about our own migrations, about what foods we eat and why, what clothes we wear and why, why we build our buildings the way we do, why we have a canopy over the quad, why we have outposts and where, what traditions we honor and what holidays we celebrate, why we need to do this thing and why we can’t do that, all the hundreds of little things that we’re so used to that we forget that other people don’t think the same way.”

  She shifted her parasol to her other hand and held it over the both of us.

  “The new people are going to be landing in a few months,” she said, “some of them in the winter, but most of them in the spring. It’s going to be a great shock to them after living aboard the starship for such a long time. I know that we have all the orientation videos from the previous pilgrimages, but most of them are way out of date, and to tell the truth . . .” She bent down low and whispered, “I think they’re kind of dull, don’t you?”

  I shook my head. “The ones I looked at, they were very accurate. For the time.”

  “Well, I think your new videos are much better than the old ones. And so do the colonists on the Cascade. So I want you to keep on doing what you’re doing, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

  * * *

  —

  Just before midday, a second family of bigmouths arrived at the carcass. We sort of expected it. The smell of all that meat would have been noticeable ten or twenty klicks to the west by now. The first winds of autumn were rising.

  This was a larger family of carnosaurs, one of the largest packs we’d seen, nine full-grown and three juveniles. According to their tags, they were Pack CP-016, we’d been tracking them for two decades and had detailed records showing how the older members of the family meticulously trained the younger ones. Captain Skyler called them the Slithereens because they were so vicious. They weren’t afraid of anything. They’d once circled the fence of Summerland compound for three days until they were distracted by an easier meal.

  The Sackville Bagginses were exhausted and stuffed from days and nights of gorging themselves, but they were still willing to defend their kill. They roused themselves quickly as the Slithereens approached. The two groups hissed at each other, then they started grunting and growling, stamping their feet, lashing their tails, and roaring their defiance. Some people called these ferocious threat displays magnificent. Others said they were terrifying. A few people left the catwalks and headed for the bunkers.

  I was already thinking that this would be a very good video to send to the Cascade. The people who had the time, who weren’t occupied with other jobs, would probably be watching the raw feed as it came in, and they would see everything, but I could edit my videos to show just the most important parts. We didn’t have a good record of carnosaur confrontations, so this could be important—an accurate record of bigmouth behavior might help us learn how to discourage them from coming around our stations.

  Each group of carnosaurs was trying to scare the other off. Jamie and Emily-Faith had come up to the catwalk with me and now Emily-Faith began to annotate the argument: The Sackville Bagginses were insisting that this kill belonged to them and they were prepared to defend it. The Slithereens countered that there was more than enough meat here for everybody, especially if the everybody was the Slithereens. The Sackvilles were not prepared to accept this assertion. The Slithereens argued that digestion is nine joints of the claw, and probably the tenth one as well. And so on.

  I thought Emily-Faith’s comments were silly and did my best to ignore them. It seemed obvious to me that this argument could have only one possible outcome. The Slithereens outnumbered the Sackvilles. And if it came to a fight, the Sackvilles would suffer some serious losses.

  As it became more and more obvious that they would not be able to defend their kill, the Sackvilles increased their roaring—and at the same time, began backing away, one or two steps at a time. “I know what they’re saying.” Emily-Faith explained. She mimicked, “‘Oh yeah! Well, just wait till next time! Then you’ll see!’”

  After a bit more roaring and growling, the Slithereens moved into the carcass and began feeding, tearing away their own great slabs of leviathan flesh. The Sackvilles gave a few more plaintive roars, then shambled away rumbling and grumbling and, according to Emily-Faith, saying some very nasty things in saurian about the Slithereens’ ancestry, morals, habits, and hygiene.

  By the end of the day, the carcass of White Foot no longer looked like a fallen beast. Now it was just a great bloody jumble of meat and bone.

  * * *

  —

  Locking down for winter takes most of a month. The last crops have to be harvested and processed, irradiated, dried, pickled, salted, smoked, frozen, canned, wrapped, stored, or just pre-cooked and packaged. Some of it would stay at the Summerland Station for the maintenance team. Some of it would go to Winterland to tide us over. And some of it would go into permanent storage—what everybody called the emergency box. Actually, there wasn’t one single emergency box. There were reconstructed cargo pods everywhere, even at some of the outposts. The colony rarely had to tap into those stores, but they were rotated every year, with the oldest stores being mixed in with the current ones.

  Jamie said we now had enough food stored away that we could fill the Cascade twice over if we wanted to send it back to Earth. But he was also pretty sure that no matter how much food we might send back, it wouldn’t be enough to feed all the hungry billions there. And they might not want it anyway. They would be too afraid of contamination by alien germs. Jamie and I wondered how hungry you would have to be to stop caring. Neither of us had ever been hungrier than a missed first supper.

  After the crops are brought in, then we have to secure all the buildings. Water and power and communications all have to be put on standby. Windows and doors have to be weather-sealed and locked. Hella buildings are either converted pods or dug-in bunkers. Anything that’s aboveground isn’t just built, it has to be reinforced and anchored and tied down with thick straps of graphene fiber. Then the heavy shutters are put in place, they’re made from thick slices of Atlas logs. The canopy over the quad is secured as well. It’s made of graphene fiber too. It usually survives the winter storms, but one year it shredded, nobody is sure why, maybe it was a lightning strike, so now we use multiple layers, with lots of space between them, and we have lightning rods too.

  All this is because the Hella storms of winter can have wind velocities as high as six hundred kilometers an hour and some people say that even higher velocities are possible in a super-storm. Any loose object, a rock or a branch, becomes a deadly projectile. So we build thick walls and windbreaks and we put heavy shutters around all the buildings and we hang super-strong netting everywhere. And we reinforce the fences every year, especially the verticals, because we can’t risk having any of them snap.

  Finally the compounds are scoured for anything that could be ripped up and sent airborne. That’s everybody’s responsibility—picking up everything loose. Sometimes it feels like half the work we do at Summerland is preparing to lock the station down for winter.

  Midwinter, the winds ease up and a thick blanket of snow covers everything and then just sits there and waits for months. Sometimes in the morning, there’s even a layer of carbon dioxide frost on t
op of the snow, it forms in the coldest part of the night and then whisks away as soon as the sunlight touches it. Hella is angled on its axis just a smidge more than thirty degrees, so at the deepest point of the season, a winter day at Summerland can be barely half the length of the longest summer day. It makes for serious weather everywhere, all year round. The meteorologists have been struggling to build an accurate model since even before the First Hundred landed.

  By the time the last conventions of small carrion-feeders had finished disassembling the last bits of White Foot, the Rollagons were loaded and ready for the first migration. There would be four this time. Or maybe five. It depended on the weather. Outside the fence, all that remained of White Foot was a large dark depression in the ground, a few well-gnawed bones, a scattering of well-polished belly stones, all sizes, and some unpleasant memories.

  A few of the managers had already flown ahead to prepare for our arrival. Others were scouting the route in lifters, looking for possible difficulties. The landscape of Hella likes to rearrange itself when no one is looking.

  We didn’t have enough lifters to carry everyone, so most of us would ride in the trucks. Each truck was outfitted to carry 150 people in a mostly self-sufficient environment, although no truck would load up that many. We always left extra room in all the trucks in case any broke down, and people had to be offloaded onto other vehicles.

  The road, such as it was, followed a serpentine route southward. We had three teams maintaining the biggest roads all year round, but they weren’t paved like the big highways on Earth, so the first three trucks in any convoy were always loaded with equipment for carving new tracks or laying down bridges. The Rollagons could serve as barges for river crossings, but we tried to avoid doing that as much as we could because sometimes there were bad things in the rivers. Large floating logs or even icebugs could act like battering rams, but there were crocosaurs too and huge patches of floating stinkweed to foul the wheels.

  Lilla-Jack had seniority, so she got the assignment to captain the first vehicle in the convoy, and despite Mom’s objections, I was assigned as her intern. Captain Skyler said it was a good idea because my videos were becoming an important record of the colony’s ongoing history, and we needed to show the people on the Cascade what to expect in the seasonal migrations.

  Mom says that someday perhaps we won’t need to migrate with the seasons. Someday we’ll figure out how to make both Summerland and Winterland able to withstand the extremes of temperature. That someday is a long way off, and it’s possible none of us will live long enough to see it. Other people have even bigger ideas, they want to terraform Hella.

  So far, it’s all hypothetical and theoretical and philosophical. Jamie says that means people will argue about it forever, and by the time they decide what they should do, it’ll be too late because Hella will have already done it for them. But the discussions continue anyway: how much and what kind and how soon and especially whether or not it’s a good idea because we don’t understand all of what we’re really dealing with, so maybe the safest thing to do is just keep on being careful until we have a much better idea.

  Captain says we shouldn’t rush into anything because whatever we do it won’t be undoable, so we shouldn’t take any unnecessary risks, and besides, we haven’t even achieved Class-5 Self-Sufficiency, so why are we even talking about it anyway? And what’s in the fridge for dessert?

  * * *

  —

  On the morning we were supposed to leave, we were up before dawn, everyone gathering in the caf for an early breakfast. We wanted to roll at first light. Mom didn’t say much. Neither did Captain Skyler. Jamie and Emily-Faith ate with us, even though they weren’t coming.

  At the last minute, Captain Skyler had to change his plans. He didn’t say why. He just said that he couldn’t go with the convoy. He wanted to, he’d been looking forward to it, but something had come up, he couldn’t explain right now, maybe later, but he needed to stay behind so he could fly Madam Coordinator to Winterland after the Summerland Lockdown completed.

  “I know it’s disappointing, but this is something nobody else can do.”

  Mom gave him a look. “Well, maybe it’s time to train more people.”

  “You’re right, but there isn’t anybody. Not for this.” He put his hand on hers. “I need you to trust me. This is important. Very important.”

  Mom took a deep breath and nodded. “I do trust you.”

  “Dora, there’s been so much extra work this year—and we lost a lot of hours because so many people wanted to watch the saurs, we just kept adjusting and adjusting the schedules until we ran out of time.”

  “Not even enough time for a wedding.”

  “I’m sorry. Yes, you have a right to be angry.”

  “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed.”

  “I’m disappointed too. But look at the upside. We can have a better wedding at Winterland, a bigger wedding, and then we’ll have time for a real honeymoon.”

  “We’ve already had the honeymoon. I’m ready for the marriage.”

  That didn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t ask anyone to explain.

  “Jamie won’t be there.”

  “I can’t promise anything, but maybe we can fly him in.”

  “Cord . . . ?”

  “You’re a good man. And I love you. And we’re going to get married. Yes. But after we’re married, I want you to get your priorities straight.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Stinky promise?”

  “Stinky promise.”

  That part I did understand.

  “All right,” said Captain Skyler. “Let’s everybody stop looking so serious. Let’s eat!”

  It was a big meal. It would be our last big meal until Winterland. We’d be eating rations and sandwiches for the next two weeks. At least, we hoped it would be only two weeks. We knew where some of the obstacles would be, we had aerial surveillance and skyballs constantly checking the route, and so far we hadn’t seen anything too daunting. And we would have roller-bots running ahead of the convoy, checking immediate road conditions and sniffing for animals, but if a herd of anything decided to cross the road, or even worse, follow it, it wouldn’t be much of a road anymore. And there would certainly be the usual share of fallen branches and piled up tumblebergs. Road conditions could change overnight and there were always unexpected delays. If the weather was bad or if the road was bad, a convoy could be on the road for as long as a month.

  When we finished eating, I stacked the trays and cleared the dishes. When I got back to the table, everyone was hugging everyone, and Mom looked like she was going to cry. Jamie was the only one I would let hug me, but I was upset with him all over again because now it was real, he really wasn’t coming, so when he opened his arms before me, I didn’t move, but Jamie never took no for an answer and grabbed me hard. “I’m going to miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. Sometimes I do that. I just stop talking. I can go a week or longer. It’s because I don’t have anything to say. And sometimes, nothing that anyone else says seems important enough to deserve a response. But Jamie wasn’t letting go and finally I had to say something back. “You can let go now.”

  He looked at me hard. “I know you love me, Kyle. You don’t have to say it, but I know you love me.”

  “Okay.”

  Twenty trucks were lined up neatly at the loading docks, and clusters of people were hugging and kissing, loading last minute luggage, hugging some more, and finally boarding. The crowd thinned as we watched. Finally, Mom and Jamie hugged again. Mom and the Captain hugged again. Jamie made as if to hug me, then just patted me on the shoulder, and then we were done. All we had to do was walk across and board.

  This would be one of the largest convoys ever. But we said that every year, because the colony kept growing. This year, a dozen of the
trucks were towing trailers with extra gear and equipment. The second convoy would be twelve or fifteen trucks, the last one the same. Twenty trucks were already on their way back from Winterland station, having delivered much of the summer harvest, we’d probably pass them in a few days. That would be an excuse for a quick stop, an almost-party, a little celebration, and probably even some baby-making too while all the drivers met to trade information about the road conditions.

  Almost a thousand people would be traveling in this convoy. There would be three or four more convoys after this one. Nobody liked putting so many people on the road at once, but the migration of the leviathan herd and the death of White Foot had delayed the exodus of our human herd, and the weather was closing in faster than we’d like, so we had to push a little harder this time. We would have sent the first convoy before the leviathan herd arrived, but nobody likes to miss the big migration, so every year it gets a little bit harder to evacuate everyone on time. That’s why the Council is talking about expanding the bunkers and increasing the size of the stay-behind team. We’re certainly going to have to do that after the Cascade unloads.

  Lilla-Jack pointed me up to the port side turret. We wouldn’t need any gunners this close to Summerland, and even if we did, she had enough targeting software that she could have managed our defenses all by herself if she had to. She boarded, checked her displays, went through her checklists, and gave the signal to launch the “umbrella”—the drones and skyballs that would travel the whole route with us, orbiting the convoy and watching for anything we might need to know about.

  Jamie waved from the dock and called, “Watch out for booger-jacks.”

  Normally, I would have shouted back, “There’s no such thing,” but I was in my no-talking space, so I just lifted a hand to show that I saw his wave. Below me, Lilla-Jack was checking the readiness lights for all the other trucks. Two were still yellow, while their drivers finished their checklists. While I watched, they flickered green.