We paused for a bit while Lilla-Jack sent out drones to ping the surface of the flat, checking for stability. Normally, the Rollagon tires would sink a meter into the salt, it wasn’t densely packed, but sometimes occasional rains would sweep across the OhMyGod, creating temporary rivulets and even a few sinkholes. You really didn’t want to sink deeper than two meters. But this year it looked like we were good.
The surface of the flats crunched and crackled as we drove across them, but the trucks’ rollers were broad enough to spread the weight of the vehicles and even though the salt gave a little and complained a lot as we drove over it, there was no real danger. There would be if we passed over an underground pool of brine or maybe even a cave leached out by an underground flow. But the drones were good at probing with ground-piercing radar, lidar, microwaves, and ultrasonics, to give us a map strewn with electronic flags marking a safe route across the salt. The following convoys would do their own mapping, if they got the same results they’d parallel our tracks.
The only real problem was the glare. The actinic light of the sun dazzled everything with sharp edges. Everything had a harsh edge, everything looked like it had an ultra-violet fringe. The truck windows were polarized and that compensated a little, but up in the turrets we wore helmets or salt-goggles, polarized, color-filtered, and darkened.
We made good time crossing the flats. We pushed our speed a little, not a lot, and picked up nearly an hour. The sun finally dipped below the horizon and we were able to take off our helmets and glasses. This was the best time to cross the OhMyGod. The trucks were all brightly lit and the drones became beacons lighting the way forward. We were all different colors and we looked like an old-fashioned circus parade, like in the old movies. The night shift could maintain good speed and we were off the OhMyGod before the morning glare turned into a white-out.
From there, the route wound around some more low hills, then up into the dry country. Up there is Flat Rock Altitude Station, also called First Stop, where we expected to rendezvous with a northbound convoy. They’d be carrying Winterland crops and supplies and equipment for the maintenance teams at Summerland. As soon as they unloaded their cargo, they’d reload with the next set of evacuees and head back south.
We arrived at Flat Rock just before second supper and everybody agreed it was perfect timing. The evening promised to be mild. Clouds in the west blocked enough of the setting sun that the whole valley was filled with a warm yellow glow. Sunrise and sunset are the prettiest times of the day because the harsher blue rays of the sun are attenuated. They come in sideways and have to go through a lot more atmosphere, so they get filtered out and some people say it’s almost like Earth’s light.
Flat Rock is a kind of naturally paved area where an ancient glacier had done its best to scour everything down to the bedrock. It’s a smooth granite plain, large enough for both the northbound and southbound convoys to meet up and celebrate the migration. Northbound and southbound convoys are always carefully scheduled, but no matter how meticulously any convoy tries to stick to its itinerary, there are always surprises and setbacks, so whichever convoy arrives at Flat Rock first, it’s traditional that they host dinner for the other.
We were later than we expected because the ravine crossing had put us half a day behind, so the northbounders had taken advantage of our delay to put up tents and canopies and prepare an old-fashioned Jubilee. They wore green conical hats and purple vests. Many of them had painted their faces as well. Sometimes this made them hard to recognize.
Some of the northbound folk would be joining the Summerland maintenance team, so this would be our only chance to spend time with them in person until next year’s migration. A few couples slipped away from the celebration for some serious alone time. Five months from now we’d have Second Baby Week. There were always a few Jubilee babies. Maybe some of them would be named Jubal or Julie.
Jubilee Pershing was a Jubilee baby, although she doesn’t like to admit it, maybe because her birth parents were just a hookup, not a whole relationship, I’m not sure how that works. I don’t understand hookups, but I don’t like touching very much, so maybe that’s why. Jamie says it’s complicated. Jubilee tells people that she got her name because she was conceived at a Jubilee. Well maybe, but the math doesn’t add up. Either not enough months to her birthday or too many. But no one says anything, because that would be calling her a liar. Mom says okay, maybe Jubilee is embellishing her story, but so what? It makes her happy. Jubilee (the rendezvous) is about celebrating our lives, and Jubilee (the person) should get to celebrate her own life however she wants.
Okay, I guess so. Jamie says I don’t have to understand everything. Especially not people. But if I have to live with other people, don’t I have to understand them? I don’t know. It’s something I’m still thinking about.
Anyway, the feast was a big one. We put the trucks in a big circle around the tents and the huge colored awnings that covered the assembly areas. Beneath the awnings, strings of colored lights had been hung and everything dazzled in different shades and hues.
Every truck unpacked a dozen or more picnic tables. You went to the cook tent to get your tray, then you circled until you found a group of people you wanted to join. Every time you went back for anything else, whether it was a second helping or a drink or even dessert, you had to go to a new table. Many people circulated in couples or in family groups.
The northbounders surprised us. Winterland had built six new protein tanks and brought them online a month early. They arrived with the first production run of beef and pork and they prepared a Texas-style barbecue for us. They even had potato salad and corn. Lilla-Jack and the northbound convoy leader each ordered a round of beer for everyone and everybody cheered.
Managing all the logistics of supplying the various colony stations is a complex job and it requires a lot of people paying close attention to all the different inventories. Right now, we’ve built up a enough backlog to cover two years of famine, so we’re only one year under our eventual target. But when the new colonists arrive, they’re going to put additional strain on our resources, and I was hearing a lot more people talking about Councilor Layton’s proposal as if it was a sensible idea. We’d have to dip into our reserves before we could expand our productivity. There were a lot of different data models floating around, but all of them had one large unknown variable—the new colonists. So some people were afraid. With their mouths full, they worried aloud about running out of food.
Flat Rock Altitude Station has monitors and scanners and netcams all the way out to ten klicks. It’s rare that any wandering dinos interrupt a Jubilee. There’s not enough to eat in this neighborhood to attract any of the bigger herbivores, so we don’t see hungry carnivores around here either. But we still take precautions. We put out armed teams on scooters and in power suits. In ten years, they haven’t seen anything bigger than a family of ground-monkeys. We think ground-monkeys migrate, but we’re not sure. We know that the hoppers store roots and nuts and slow down their metabolisms until they’re almost hibernating, but the winter is so long they have to wake and eat every few weeks.
Flat Rock Altitude Station is permanent but not large, only ten people at most; sometimes as many as twenty but only during the migrations to help with various management protocols. The rest of the time they’re watching to see what effects our Jubilees are having on the surrounding area.
As careful as we are, we aren’t always perfect. A spilled tray, a gust of wind, a forgotten napkin, any of these things can carry enough microbes and bacteria to start an ecological avalanche. At least that’s the theory.
The rose garden, however—we know how that happened but we learned it only after the fact. One year, someone from the convoy discovered a whole cluster of rose bushes growing halfway down the slope on the eastern side of Flat Rock. They were hard to miss, three and four meters tall, with roses the size of basketballs. But the bushes were also sma
ck in the center of a large circular dead area. And there were dead insects and the bones of small animals all around too. Apparently, the Hellan ecology really didn’t like these bushes. For a while, there was a whole uproar about it, with everybody blaming everybody else for not being more careful about ecological contamination. I was too little to understand what was going on, I just thought the roses were pretty.
Some of the people wanted to rip out the rose bushes immediately and sterilize the area. Others wanted to leave them as an experiment, to monitor how they survived the conditions on Hella. Some people wanted to plant netcams to monitor them. But others said, “Leave the rose bushes alone. They’re pretty. They’re a bright spot on a long journey.” And eventually, that’s what most people voted for.
What happened was that just before the vote, a woman named Martha-Bob came forward and begged the Convoy Committee not to rip out the roses, because they marked the spot where she and her lover had sex every migration. When she was going south, he was headed north. When he was headed south, she was going north. They saw each other only six times in three years. When he died, she wanted to do something special, so she planted the rose bushes where they made love. A lot of people said it was very romantic.
But it wasn’t hard for them to figure out who her mysterious lover was. All anyone had to do was check the records of who had been on what migration and who had died. Within an hour, everybody knew: A year before, a terrible storm had ripped the roofs off three buildings that hadn’t been properly secured. Three people were killed by flying debris, a man and two women. The two women were married to each other, so the rose bushes had to be a memorial to the man, Nathan Eaves.
That’s when things got complicated. Nathan Eaves had a wife and two children permanently stationed at Winterland. And when Martha-Bob came forward and revealed that he had been having sex outside his marriage, it made everybody look bad. Martha became an “other woman.” Nathan hadn’t honored his vows to his family. And what was wrong with Nathan’s marriage in the first place? That was an unfair embarrassment for his wife.
Oh, and Martha-Bob had a two-year-old baby from her last liaison with Nathan. Not exactly an accident. She’d gone off birth control without telling Nathan because she believed that if she gave Nathan a son, he’d leave his wife for her. The baby—that was Jubilee. She was eventually adopted by the Pershings and everybody pretended that she had been theirs all along.
In the end, the committee decided to leave the rose garden—not because Martha-Bob begged them to, but because of an angry speech by Kaddir Haddad. He broadcast it on the public channel and it was less than thirty seconds long. He said, “Leave the goddamn rose bushes right where they are—as a permanent reminder of how stupid people can be and how selfishness can screw up a plan!”
That suited everybody. At least for a while. The committee decided to leave the bushes alone. They were an interesting if unplanned experiment. If it turned out later that they created serious negative effects, or started spreading uncontrollably, then we’d send a team in to incinerate the whole area. As pretty as they were, we couldn’t allow a strain of giant mutant rose bushes to spread poisonously across Hella.
But for now, just before heading out again, every convoy held a brief ceremony at the rose garden. It wasn’t to honor the bushes, nor to remember the adulterous affair of Martha-Bob and Nathan Eaves. It served a much more important purpose—to remind everyone that none of us had the right to assault the Hellan ecology, not as individuals, not as a species. The rose garden stands as a terrible reminder that selfishness is always beautiful and attractive, while destroying so many other things around it.
But despite that, sometimes during a Jubilee, couples would sneak off and secretly visit the rose garden. Sometimes, they’d come back with rosebuds tucked behind their ears, their way of quietly bragging that they had just had sex in the sunset. Mom said she knew which of these two traditions was more likely to survive.
* * *
—
I uploaded several videos about the Jubilee rendezvous to the Cascade, starting with the music. Jubilee is an opportunity for all the different bands to show off. This year, there were eight, so I videoed them all. I sent the complete performances and I used as much of the music as I could as soundtracks for my videos, thinking the Cascade colonists might appreciate it. I had a lot of video of all the different costumes and even more of everyone dancing.
There were also puppet shows for the children and an acknowledgment ceremony for the adults. But at Mom’s suggestion, I shot a whole video focusing on the longtables, all of them piled high with delicious celebration foods—fresh baked bread, crisp green salads, roast tankmeats of all kinds, pasta with red sauce, tower cakes and berry pastries, and especially huge plates of fresh fruits and vegetables. Mom said that after nearly a whole Earth-year in space, this is what the colonists would most appreciate seeing, a welcoming feast. She said she was speaking from experience.
Mom also insisted that I post the videos of our emergencies.
We had two.
The first emergency was the dragon-birds. A huge V-wing came flying south, part of their regular migration. Normally, the monitors would have seen them coming from twenty klicks away, but they came over the mountains to the east. They must have been feeding there, so they caught us by surprise. We only had a few minutes warning. But the sirens went off and everyone grabbed the nearest child and went directly to the nearest truck, whether it was their own or not. Almost everybody was secured and the trucks locked down in less than three minutes. The only people not accounted for were the three couples who’d gone down to the rose bushes.
The dragon-birds must have smelled the food on the tables—or maybe it was us they smelled. Most of them flew on, but a smaller wing broke off and began circling, lower and lower. Dragon-birds are always hungry, so even if they had just been feeding on the carcass of some unfortunate beast only a few minutes before, they were already looking for their next meal.
Some people think dragon-birds are beautiful, I don’t. I think they’re big and ugly. And I think my videos prove it. Three of them came screeching in. They caught at the awnings and ripped them away. Four more landed and began scrabbling at the longtables. There weren’t going to be any leftovers from this Jubilee.
We had rangers at all the gun turrets, but they weren’t going to fire unless the birds attacked the trucks. It wouldn’t have done any good to shoot them. More would have landed to feed on their corpses. We were going to have to wait them out.
Dragon-birds are big. Everything on Hella is big, but mostly we don’t get to see how big until we get close to it or it gets close to us. These birds weren’t the biggest we’d measured, but they were big enough—three or four meters long from beak to tail. They looked like flying lizards with flat leathery tails. They’re long and slithery and covered with very fine fur, brown and gray and black, but in no particular pattern, like some kind of natural camouflage.
These were tall enough to flatten themselves against the side of a truck and peer sideways into the windows of the bridge, and one of them did just that. I got a really good close-up of its face. Dragon-birds have crinkled-up faces like some Earth bats. When they’re not screeching, they’re hissing. We all backed away from the windows, just in case the glass wasn’t as strong as we believed.
But these birds weren’t interested in the trucks. They were curious enough, but their real interest was the tankmeats. They snapped and gobbled at everything on the tables—but it wasn’t normal feeding, not like we’d seen in the wild. Something here was triggering them, this was a feeding frenzy. They whirled and slashed and smashed at everything, flinging tables and chairs everywhere, they knocked down the support beams, they banged against the closest trucks. Without support, the awnings floated down on top of them, momentarily netting them under various colored draperies, but they ripped and clawed their way free. They snapped at the strings o
f lights as well, plucking at them angrily—and all the time screeching and hissing and grunting like pigs.
And then, just as fast, they were gone. They looked up and saw the others still circling. They flapped themselves up into the air and everything went silent again. We didn’t know if they could digest the human food or if it would poison them. And if it poisoned them, would it poison the other birds that fed on their carcasses? Would the toxicity work its way up or down through the Hellan food chain? Lilla-Jack ordered a few drones after them; maybe we could track them, which might give us a clue.
We stayed in the trucks for almost an hour. Even after the sky was clear and the radar said there were no more dragon-birds anywhere around, nobody wanted to go out again. The rangers were the first, and they were all armored. There wasn’t much to salvage, everything had been pretty well shattered, but we still needed to clean up the area. We couldn’t leave any contaminating debris behind.
But only a few of us went out, only the people on the cleanup teams. Everyone else went back to their specific vehicles. I got permission to join Lilla-Jack’s team, so I could get close-ups of the damage. We’d have to compile an inventory of what replacements we’d need to fab, but it was clear that we’d lost a lot of useful furnishings.
The rangers went out and brought back two of the three unaccounted-for couples who had gone to see the rose bushes. One couple (I didn’t know them except by sight) survived by hiding in the local station’s storm-bunker. The other couple had dug into the ground under the biggest rose bush. They spent the whole time covered with dirt and leaves. That might have been smart. Or stupid. A lot of Hella life doesn’t like Earth plants. But some Hella life does. We’re still finding out which. But they survived, so maybe they were smart.
The rangers brought back the third couple on covered stretchers. The drones had found them, but Lilla-Jack wouldn’t let me see the footage. It was okay. I didn’t want to anyway. I knew who they were, Beth Palmer and John Gingras, they were bunnymooning, which is something else Jamie had to explain to me. He says it’s like a hookup, but it’s more like a personal picnic that two friends have, sometimes with sex, but not always. He says I’ll understand better when I get older. Beth Palmer was from the northward colony and John Gingras was local to Flat Rock Station, so I didn’t know them very well. I think it would have hurt more if I had.
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