Hella

by David Gerrold

  I trust Jamie more than anybody. So if Jamie says that this is important, then this is important, and that’s all there is to it. Case closed. And so there.

  * * *

  —

  We ran into the second northbound convoy, two days out of Winterland. We were first to the rendezvous at Little Point, but because everybody was now a day behind schedule, it was mutually agreed that we’d skip the second Jubilee. We did spend an hour at Little Point though—mostly to give passing family members a little time to be together. I don’t think any babies got started though.

  Some women still like to grow their babies the old-fashioned way. That’s what Mom is doing, she even has a little baby bump now. Some people grow their babies halfway and then bottle them. Mom might do that if it’s a question of her health or the baby’s. But there are people who just don’t want to be pregnant at all, they bottle their babies from the beginning.

  But Jamie says everybody likes making babies and the colony needs to grow a lot more people. Class-9 Self Sufficiency requires three separate and distinct populations of thirty thousand each. We’re nowhere near that point.

  Jamie promised to call me every time he got off shift, so we talk at least two times a day. He said that everybody was working as hard as they could but they were still a day behind schedule. But not to worry, that was normal, somehow it always worked out. He said that falling behind schedule was built into the schedule, so they were actually on schedule. But the autumn storms would arrive earlier than usual, and they promised to be especially ferocious this year because of the thirteen-year weather cycle, so we had to put need in front of want.

  He asked me how my new videos were going and I told him that I hadn’t made any yet because I hadn’t finished thinking, but I was making up for it by uploading videos of our progress. Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate when the Rollagon is moving. The trucks have good suspension so the ride is smooth enough, but sometimes I want real silence and even with headphones that’s not possible. The rumbly vibration is everywhere, it comes up through the floors, through the seats—it’s in the walls, even in the windows. Sometimes I just want everything to stop for a bit and leave me alone in my head. Even the noise would be quiet by comparison. But a migration is a mad dash. We have to go as fast as we can.

  When we finally reached the southeast coast, everybody cheered. It was the last leg of the journey. Even though we’d all seen it before, and seen it even better on the big screens, everyone still crowded to the port side windows to see the ocean. Beyond the rolling hills, beyond the sharp cliffs, beneath the rocky edges—there was the dirty gray gravel of the beach, and past the beach, gray water, gray sky, and the harsh blue-white blur of the sun. It was grim and ugly, but we cheered anyway. Another long day and a half and we’d be safe at Winterland.

  In the afternoon, we saw a distant family of humongosaurs. Lilla-Jack sent out a few skyballs for a closer look, but decided not to send a tagging team. Everybody agreed that humongosaurs were simply too big to exist, but there they were anyway. Twice as tall as the leviathans, they didn’t move as much as they flowed in slow motion. First the right front leg lifted, just barely scraping forward so gradually it didn’t look like it was moving at all, until at last it came to rest just three meters forward of its previous position. Then nothing happened for a moment, then the left rear leg moved. An avalanche of muscle in the towering haunch shifting like a tectonic plate. This massive limb moved forward even more deliberately. Then another pause and the left front leg moved. And finally the right rear limb. And then another pause. The great neck, the great tail swayed like giant horizontal pendulums.

  These humongosaurs were headed toward the thick forests ahead. They would push through the willowy trees as if they were smoke in the wind. And even the Atlas trees would crack and groan and break under the pressure of a humongosaur’s passing. It didn’t matter how loudly the trees shrieked and screamed and belched out clouds of tanninoids, the humongosaurs were just too big and they moved too slowly to care. They were resistant to the tanninoids, or maybe they found them tasty, or maybe they excreted the poison in their astonishingly huge piles of poop, taller than a truck. Or maybe they just stored the poisonous parts in some gland and exuded it to keep other herbivores away. Without a proper dissection, we couldn’t know—and no one had ever gotten close enough to a humongosaur corpse to explore its cavernous interior.

  Ever since the humongosaurs were first seen, the biologists wanted to study them close up—but it just wasn’t safe. There were so many “camp followers” attached to the family groups the creatures existed in the center of their own personal war zones. There were insect-things that lived on their bodies, and more that crawled along behind, feeding on dead skin or dung. There were other creatures that fed on the insect-things. There were the bird-things on their backs, there were all kinds of parasites and things that fed on the parasites and even more things that fed on them. And every so often, several families of carnosaurs would come together forming a raging army that circled the humongosaurs hungrily. From above, they were a sea of gaping mouths and slashing teeth.

  Sometimes the army of carnosaurs dispersed without a kill, but sometimes they’d be so hungry they’d harry the whole family, eventually tiring out one of the younger animals or better yet, one of the older and larger ones. They’d charge in and bite, a nip here, a nip there—they’d rip off strips of flesh that were huge for them but possibly irrelevant to an animal the size of a humongosaur. And the humongosaur would just keep on going, swinging its tail around, waving its long neck, occasionally sending a carnosaur flying, occasionally stomping one into the dirt—but the other attackers, caught up in their own frenzied bloodlust would just keep charging in, just keep biting, just keep nipping and ripping, until finally, a frothing sea of blood in its wake, the great beast was streaked with dark red gashes all along its lower flanks. And then . . . and then . . . as slowly as it had lived, just as slowly it would die.

  It would sink to its knees, its head would come down, its tail would swing a few last times, but by now the carnosaurs would be all over it, thrashing and biting, sometimes so thick that the humongosaur would vanish beneath their frenzied bodies. And then, the humongosaur would be nothing more than a mountain of flesh—a great banquet for a hundred carnosaurs. The feast would go on for days, weeks, sometimes longer than a month.

  A humongosaur death was an ecological event—like an earthquake or an avalanche—because all the creatures that lived on even a single great beast would now be wandering the plain, hungry and eager for whatever opportunity they could find.

  Jamie asked me once if I ever wanted to visit Earth. I don’t think so. Parts of it look pretty—the mountains, the seas, the tropical jungles—but the big cities look crowded and ugly. All those flashing bright lights. All those giant buildings, all those animated pictures and signs everywhere. It looked infectious and nauseating. I could understand why so many people wanted to leave it and come here to Hella. I just couldn’t understand why when they got here they didn’t want to stay. Hella isn’t easy, but Captain Skyler says life isn’t easy. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Death is what you do if you’re not up to the challenge.

  It started to rain in the afternoon, heavy rain, blinding rain, and we had to cut our speed way down to navigate carefully across the muddy coastlands. The passage of our trucks would leave deep swampy furrows. They would fill up with water and whatever life liked to swim in shallow pools of water.

  All of our lights were on, forward lights, rearward lights, spotlights, dazzlers. From the roof turret, the convoy looked like a bright glittering snake of stars. The rain added its own sparkling reflections and the water drops on the windows blurred the view into a dark hallucination.

  We arrived at Winterland long after sunset, rolling through a long tunnel of decontamination sprays and into a huge service bay. Everybody was tired, exhausted from the long journey, but whe
n we pulled up to the docks, one truck after another, lining up like giant beetles, everybody poured out, hugging and yelling and cheering and shouting and greeting old friends and family members with tears and smiles and cries of, “I missed you so much!” and “Tell me everything!” and “Look how big you’ve grown!”

  But because everybody was still so weary and drained from the journey, the welcomes were short-lived. Some headed to the cafeteria, others to the showers. Most people headed straight for their winter quarters. Those who didn’t have regular rooms headed for previously assigned cubbyholes. A lot of people checked into the nearest dorm and would make permanent arrangements in the morning. But a lot of others—the nighthawks and the family members and the ones too excited to sleep—were going to stay up with the Winterland late-shifters, talking all night, making sandwiches, drinking coffee, swapping tales, and maybe even practice their baby-making.

  The maintenance teams would be up all night too and well into the next day. The trucks had to be cleaned and serviced—especially cleaned. They came in caked with mud and dirt, the windows grimy with dust, the rollers stained with grass and leaves and studded with thorns and prickles. First thing, the septic tanks would be pumped and scoured, the waste sent down for recycling. Then the cleaning crews would go through the vehicles, picking up trash and everything else as well, knives and forks, plates, teakettles, napkins, sheets, pillows, blankets, cushions, all the conveniences of life. The trucks would be stripped and scoured, sanitized, sterilized, detoxed, and decontaminated from top to bottom.

  Some of the trucks were scheduled for overhaul, others would need repairs—a few even needed critical work. It was a big job. When two dozen Rollagons all pull into the docks one after the other, it puts a lot of stress on the work force, so during migration season, extra crews get drafted to the maintenance teams. Each crew would have its own set of responsibilities. There was a lot of work to be done, checking the internal monitors of each vehicle, examining every moving part, testing all the pumps and hoses and circuitry for integrity, aligning and calibrating, poking and prodding, tightening, repairing, replacing everything from deck panels to seat cushions, all the monitors, sensors, scanners, and communications gear—all the cameras and microphones and sniffers, all the network connections and all the information processors. Everything.

  As soon as each truck passed its service inspection, it would be refueled and reloaded. The living quarters would be stocked with clean sheets and blankets, fresh food and water, everything needed for the comfort of the crew, everything necessary for the next mission. Weapons too—every weapon system would be tested, calibrated, serviced, recharged. The cargo bays would be restocked with skyballs and scuttle-bots and extra armaments if necessary.

  The rule was that every truck had to be kept in a state of immediate readiness. As soon as a vehicle came in, it was unloaded, serviced, reloaded, checked, checked again, certified, and made ready for operation. And as soon as there were enough trucks ready, another convoy would head north to bring back another thousand colonists.

  And for those who’d just arrived, migration madness wasn’t over yet. Arrival put enormous pressure on the receiving station, whether it was Summerland or Winterland. As soon as you got off the truck, you had to get to work.

  Systems that had been dormant for nearly half a year would have been brought back online before the arrivals, water, power, air filtration, heating and cooling, lighting, food production and preparation, waste removal and recycling, reopening and restocking additional medical facilities, laundry, and even a few things not so obvious, like fabbing new furniture, painting, repairing infrastructure, even preparing new manuals and orientation kits letting the arrivals know exactly what had been changed since they’d left nine months previously.

  First arrivals had to get the apartments ready not only for themselves, but also for all of the arrivals on the convoys still to follow. So most of us would spend our first sleep shift and sometimes our second on the truck, but we had to get off the trucks before the service teams came in to ready the living quarters for the return trip.

  Every arrival was the same, every arrival was different—a weird mixture of familiarity and strangeness. Nothing quite matched memory. Things were smaller, darker, larger, brighter, uglier, prettier—or gone altogether. And the things that replaced them were momentarily unsettling until you figured out if they were improvements or disappointments—like the corridors leading to our apartment. New lights had been installed, making them brighter. They walls had been painted a pale gray and all the doors and cabinets and fixtures were trimmed in white. It looked old-fashioned and modern at the same time. Every year, the Winterland hospitality teams redecorated the public spaces. They rearranged and remodeled, every year a different theme. It was a tradition, their way of creating an extra bit of adventure, an incentive to get out and explore and be an active part of the community. But right now, I was too tired to appreciate the effort.

  I thought about taking a shower, but the showers were going to be crowded for a while, so I headed to Mom’s suite. As head of her science committee, she was entitled to a three-room apartment but without Jamie, we were going to have to share that third room with a tenant, I didn’t know who. Mom had a late night meeting with her on-site staff, so I went down by myself.

  I slept long, but I still woke up in time for pre-dawn breakfast. Mom and Lilla-Jack were sharing coffee in the little kitchen attached to our suite. “Want some?” Lilla-Jack pushed a cup at me. “They’re trying a new growing cycle in the greenhouses here. This is fresh Kona. What do you think?”

  I sipped. It tasted like coffee. But good coffee. I nodded. “I like it.”

  Mom said, “Lilla-Jack is our new roommate. She’s taking Jamie’s room.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is that all right with you?” Lilla-Jack asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  Both Mom and Lilla-Jack laughed at that. “He’s still sleepy,” Mom explained. “You want some breakfast? The cafeteria sent over some emories. I’ll heat one for you?”

  I shook my head. An emory is a “Meal Ready to Eat.” MRE for short, emory for long. The caf prepares food stocks for the trucks and the outposts. And whenever there are extra portions, the caf freezes them. So the emory-menu has all kinds of surprises in it. Because Winterland and Summerland specialize in different crops, the cafs trade a few truckloads of emories every migration. Winterland uses greenhouses, Summerland is open fields. Some people think that it’s dangerous for us to raise Earth crops in open fields, but the ground behind the fences has been irradiated, the canopies provide ninety-nine percent aerial protection, and lasers zap any insect-things that still get through. A lot of people say the Summerland fruits and veggies taste fresher. More important, we need to know that we can survive off the land.

  We also have some Hellan things on our menu too. That’s another part of learning how to live off the land. That’s one of Mom’s jobs. She and her team are continually testing all the different grasses, fruits, nuts, berries, roots, leaves, herbs, peppers, and whatever else looks like it might be edible. So far they’ve identified nearly a hundred things that won’t kill us, twenty-three that will, and a few that will just make us wish they had.

  I like the sweet-melons, but we don’t get those a lot. The leviathans like them too, and their migrations seem to be perfectly timed; they arrive at the lowlands just when the melons are at their best. Winterland has dedicated a whole greenhouse to the vines, but they’re slow to ripen, so we don’t get them a lot. Not yet anyway. We’re going to have to expand our greenhouse space soon, so maybe we can plant more melon seeds.

  Sometimes I get frustrated enough to wish that I weren’t so . . . whatever it is I am. I don’t see the surface of anything. I see the under-beneath. I see the connections. I see the evolutions and the elocutions—all the conversations and reasons and stories and histories. I see the chords and t
he discords, the wise and the whys. The only thing I don’t see is what other people really mean. Especially mean people. That’s what Jamie meant by my super-power. But it’s not just because Jamie explained it to me—I looked it up myself. I’m not the first person with a syndrome. And I’m not the first with the noise either.

  But all the explanations are from their side, people who aren’t like me, so it’s their conversation, not mine. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d have to be one of them to understand why I’m not one of them. And most of the time, I don’t see any advantage to being like any of them. I like the way I think. Even when it’s frustrating. Because I get to know things that other people don’t.

  That’s one of the things I don’t talk about to anyone. Except maybe Jamie. A little. But not a lot. Because it makes him frown. I don’t know why. He says it’s complicated. He says you have to kill something before you can dissect it. I said I didn’t want to be dissected. He said it was a metaphor. Metaphors are something else I have trouble with.

  Mom and Lilla-Jack were discussing plans. Mom wanted to reorganize her labs for a new set of nutritional studies. There were some grasses that might be bred into a useful grain. But with the migrations, Mom couldn’t plan any project lasting longer than eight months—unless she wanted to stay over for a season. She had talked about it with me a few times, but until I was old enough to be on my own, those projects had to wait.

  Lilla-Jack had to see to maintenance on the trucks. Even though most of the vehicles had arrived without any worry-lights on, she still had to manage the maintenance and service for every vehicle before the convoy could return. Other convoys were already on their way, but Lilla-Jack’s would be the last one before the weather made any more journeys impractical. And with the Cascade people landing in the spring, we’d need at least another ten to twelve trucks for future convoys, so Lilla-Jack had to prep the big fabbers for chassis and axles as soon as possible. Winterland didn’t have enough raw material on hand, so that would mean processing a lot of biomass to extract the carbon.