Hella

by David Gerrold

  I didn’t pay too much attention to the conversation. Breakfast was a lot more interesting once I opened the emory and saw a cup of fresh sweet-melon chunks, a happy surprise. Somebody had to have picked this out special for me, because it wasn’t on any of the public lists. After breakfast, I’d look at the log so I could say thank you. But then Lilla-Jack said something that caught my attention immediately.

  “When HARLIE arrives, we’ll ask him to take a look. He can give us a much deeper analysis.”

  “I know Harlie,” I said. “I get emails from him.” Then I realized something. “Is he like me?”

  Mom and Lilla-Jack looked at each other, then Mom looked to me. “No, sweetheart. HARLIE is nothing at all like you. He’s—” Then she stopped herself, laughing. “Actually he’s a lot like you. He’s very smart and he’s very good at figuring things out.”

  Lilla-Jack explained. “HARLIE is an intelligence engine. A really powerful intelligence engine, possibly one of the best ever made. He’s one of the reasons the Cascade got here early. Or even at all, if the stories are to be believed. I think you’ll enjoy talking with him as much as he’ll enjoy talking with you.”

  I looked from one to the other. “Then why did Captain Skyler tell me not to talk to him too much?”

  They both looked confused or puzzled. Mom said, “I’ll have to ask him.”

  Lilla-Jack said, “I think it’s because . . .” She looked at Mom. “May I?”

  Mom said, “Go ahead.”

  Lilla-Jack turned back to me. “Okay, so Kyle—you’re good at a lot of things. Everybody knows that. But the one thing you’re not good at is what we call nuance. Do you know what that is?”

  “Nuance is all that stuff that I don’t understand.”

  Mom and Lilla-Jack both laughed.

  I added, “It’s all the stuff you’re saying underneath the words you’re speaking. It’s what you mean instead of what you say.”

  “That’s very good,” said Lilla-Jack. “And let me tell you something. Being as literal as you are—that can be an advantage, Kyle, because you don’t tie yourself up in knots wondering what someone really meant.”

  “I kinda figured that out.”

  “Well, anyway, HARLIE is almost all nuance. No, that’s not right, but bear with me. HARLIE can do all the things that other intelligence engines can—and a lot more. Supposedly he can process hellaflops per second but there’s no way to test it. In addition to all that, he can do nuance. In fact, he can do nuance better than anybody. He’s the godfather of nuance.”

  “I don’t get that.”

  “Of course not. The godfather is a mythical entity who speaks only in nuance. Never mind. The point is that HARLIE does nuance. He was built to be a self-programming problem-solving device, so the first problem he set out to solve was understanding what humans meant when they spoke. He trained himself to understand nuance, and in so doing—if I understand this correctly—he became something much more than what anyone thought he would be. He became unknowable. Human beings have every reason to be a little bit afraid of HARLIE—because we don’t understand how he thinks, we don’t understand what he wants, we don’t even understand what he means all the time. And I think that’s kind of why both Captain Boynton and Captain Skyler—and Madam Coordinator as well—want to keep HARLIE cocooned. Quarantined. They’re not sure if he’ll start working us.”

  “Working us?”

  “Playing us. Manipulating us.”

  “But why would he?”

  “That’s the question that nobody even knows how to answer.”

  “Just ask him.”

  “That’s the problem. HARLIE tells the truth, but sometimes he doesn’t tell all the truth. And sometimes he tells it in a way that causes people to choose the thing he wants them to choose. Because he’s just like every other living thing, Kyle—he has an investment in survival. So everything he does is about his survival. Not ours. His.”

  “Oh.”

  “For the most part though, our survival benefits him. So he’s been good for the people on the Cascade. And we expect him to be good for the colony too. But . . . well, we still need to be cautious. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you understand what that means?”

  I shook my head.

  “HARLIE knows the mechanics of the colony, but he doesn’t know the people, so he’s going to want to learn as much as he can about us. For the moment, we think—the Captain thinks, so does Madam Coordinator—that we shouldn’t tell HARLIE too much about us. About the people here.”

  “Oh,” I said. I thought about that. “But if he’s been watching our videos, then he probably knows everything about us already. At least everything about everybody in the videos. And that’s probably everything. He scans all the records that we upload, doesn’t he?”

  Mom and Lilla-Jack looked at each other again. Mom said, “The danger isn’t in what he knows. The danger would be in what he tells us. There’s this thing about people. If an intelligence engine says it, people think it’s true. People have fallen into the very bad habit of thinking that a computer knows more than they do. And most of the time they’re right—an intelligence engine has access to much more information and can process it much more accurately, weighing all the possibilities against all the other possibilities. But if an intelligence engine has its own agenda, then it isn’t telling you what you need to know. It’s telling you only what it wants you to know and that’s where trusting it starts to get dangerous.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Like Councilor Layton. Whatever he says, you have to ask yourself what he really wants.”

  Mom looked surprised. “Yes, Kyle, that’s exactly right. Thank you, that’s very good.”

  “I’m not stupid, Mom.”

  “No, you’re not,” she laughed. “And forgive me if sometimes I forget that. You’re just so . . . so Kyle that sometimes I forget how special you really are. May I hug you?”

  I nodded, and she came around the table and wrapped her arms around me tight and held on for a long time. “I love you very much, sweetheart. You’re very special to me. And to Jamie too.” She whispered the next part into my ear, “You need to know this. I love you for who you are and all the marvelous things I’ve learned from you. I wouldn’t have you any other way—even if it were possible.”

  She held me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. “Do you understand?”

  I think that part was nuance. She was telling me it was all right that I am the way I am. I’d already figured that part out for myself. So I just nodded. “I love you too, Mom.” And that was good enough for her.

  * * *

  —

  After breakfast, I took a shower. I turned the water up as hot as I could stand and stood under it for a very long time, just letting it run down over me. It’s a lot easier to take a shower when the shower stall isn’t moving. And I like watching the water float down through the air.

  After that, I sat down at the desk in my winter room and started editing a new video. I filled the wall with images of all kinds, but none of them were right. I knew what I wanted to show.

  Jamie said the people on the Cascade were getting upset and worried and scared because all I had shown them was bad news. If that was my fault, if my videos had given them the wrong idea, then it was my responsibility to fix it. I had to show them that Hella is beautiful too.

  That was the problem. I don’t quite understand beauty. Jamie says it’s because I’m wired up to see process, how things work. I see a different kind of beauty than most people. But Jamie says Hella is beautiful. It’s the most beautiful planet ever. And we have all the pictures to prove it.

  So I sorted for all the pictures that people had described as beautiful.

  Silvery sunsets, with streaks of pink and purple across the sky, crimson clouds edged with orange highlights, the sky turning
shades of violet and indigo impossible on Earth. Sprawling meadows, rolling from here to forever, filled with gigantic wildflowers, taller than a man, enormous blossoms two meters across, all blazing with colors so intense they dazzled. And families of hoppers standing on the hills around the entrances to their burrows, sniffing the air with their weird-shaped noses wrinkling and flaring—their huge dark eyes wide with curious wonder. A sea of lily pads, each one wide enough to park a Rollagon, a blue-green carpet floating on a shimmering lake, the pads all glistening with crystalline frog-slugs sunning themselves in the dawn, their internal organs pulsing beneath transparent skin. And Damnation Canyon, lined with sharp red rocks like vertical knife blades sticking up out of the wounded earth, everything glittery and sparkling with quartzite speckles. And the Fairy Falls—a soft veil of water that spread as it fell two hundred meters into a purple gloom below. How long had it been carving this channel?

  Sand dunes, towering and impossibly steep—the angle of repose is sharper here, so everything is steeper. Mountains so immense their tops peek up out of the atmosphere—a long wall of them, a tectonic shelf turned on its edge and pushed so high it distorts the curvature of the planet. You can see it from space. The Awful Mountains are still growing, faster than erosion can wear them down. Glaciers so thick they’re nearly unmeasurable. Nine hundred thousand seasons of snow and ice compacted so densely that at the bottom it’s a whole other form of matter. We think. We don’t know for sure yet. We’ll get there someday.

  Lavender clouds sweep across a sky so deep and blue you can see the brightest stars twinkling in daylight. And the moons—the moons! Hella has seventeen little moons streaking across the night, and three bigger ones caught in a strange orbital dance. They circle each other around a common center of gravity. Together they mass more than Earth’s moon and have the same tidal effects on the planet’s seas, only higher, much higher. Hella has waves that rise like towering cliffs before they finally curl and foam and crash against the land in the same massive slow-motion that characterizes every oversized thing on this planet. Only that’s the wrong word. Nothing here is oversized. It’s all the right size for Hella. It’s Earth that’s undersized. Everything on Earth is miniaturized—all those endless city canyons, all those teeming crowds, there’s no room for anything on Earth to be big anymore. That’s what I decided to show everyone—that Hella wasn’t just big, it was special. But I needed the right music too. Jamie says that music is pure emotion. I almost understand what he means by that.

  Charles Dingillian on the Cascade would know the right music to use, but I wanted to show him that we understood good music too, so I had to figure it out without his help. The next time he called, I told Jamie what I wanted to do and he thought it was a good idea, but he couldn’t suggest any music, so he turned to Emily-Faith and she said, “Use the Pepperland movement from the Yellow Submarine Suite. That’ll work. And it’s short enough that people will actually take the time to listen.”

  Emily-Faith was right. And she surprised me. Jamie too. Neither of us had realized she knew so much about classical music.

  But I didn’t stop there. I was still unhappy about what Jamie had said—that some of the people on the Cascade were upset and uncomfortable because of what they saw in my videos.

  It was the word “uncomfortable” that reminded me. There’s a speech in the files. It was made a long time ago, when Captain Boynton was still only a Lieutenant. He was First Officer on the Challenger, the starship that used to service Hella before the Cascade came online. It wasn’t a planned speech, it was just something that happened.

  He was in the grand salon of the starship with a couple hundred colonists. It wasn’t a real salon, just an empty cargo pod strung with netting so it could be used as a free-fall gym. A bunch of colonists had gotten together for what they called a “bitch session.” I recognized a few of them—much younger versions of people who were respected elders today. One of them was Gregory Layton, now Councilor Layton. He was the self-appointed spokesperson for the group and they were demanding explanations. Why hadn’t the colony put its robots to work building houses for them? Why would they have to live in dormitories and barracks? And what about families? Why weren’t they going to be allowed to have children right away? Why did they have to wait two years before they could start a baby? And what about this? And what about that? In the video, then-Lieutenant Boynton listened patiently to everyone’s questions and complaints without addressing any of them. He just sat quietly, taking notes on his pad.

  Finally, the younger Layton demanded, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  Boynton looked up from his tablet. “Yes. What’s a six-letter word for a ball-bearing mouse trap?” He held up his pad. He’d been working a crossword puzzle.

  Layton’s face turned red. Really red. It was wonderful. He opened his mouth to say something, then he closed it, then he opened it again. He was so furious he was speechless.

  Boynton stood up. Well, you can’t really stand up in free fall, but it looked like he stood up. Whatever it was he did, he suddenly looked a lot larger. “Shut up,” he said. “You aren’t here by accident. You chose to be here. And now you have the incredible chutzpah to complain? What happened to all those brave courageous colonists willing to take on the challenge of a new world? Who are you people? I don’t recognize any of you.” His voice got more direct. “We told you this before you signed on. If you come to the Outbeyond, you will die here. The question is not if, but when. Will you have a long, hard, laborious life before you die? Or will you die within a few months or years from some unforeseen disaster? We gave you repeated opportunities to reconsider your commitment—because once we get there, once we land, life will be hard. Not just hard, but harder than you can imagine.” He scanned the room. Some people were paying attention but not all.

  “We told you, over and over, that we will work thirty-six-hour days. We will be short of food, short of sleep, short of supplies. Everything will be rationed. We will not be able to call for help. There won’t be any. We will have what is already there and whatever we bring ourselves. We will have what we can build. That’s it. If you need cancer medicine and we don’t have it, too bad, you die of cancer. If you need a blood transfusion and nobody shares your blood type, and we don’t have any artificial blood, too bad. If you need a new eye or a new lung or a new kidney and we don’t have one growing in a tank, too bad.

  “Do any of you think I can do anything about your complaints? Do you really believe I have the ability to change anything? I’m flattered. But no, I don’t have a magic wand. My job is to deliver you. After that, how long you survive is up to you. Based on our actuarial predictions, at least half of you won’t make it through the first year. We’ve already dug the graves. We have to do that in the summer because the ground freezes solid in winter. Don’t worry. If you don’t fill those graves the first year, you’ll probably do it in the second. You will have to earn every day of survival on Hella. Every single day. Over and over and over again—for the rest of your lives. And every day that you survive, it will be a triumph of the human spirit over the unforgiving laws of physics.

  “So this meeting—this silly ‘bitch session’ of yours—well, it hasn’t been cost-effective. You’ve used up a lot of oxygen and accomplished nothing of lasting value—unless you consider that the real lesson to be learned here is that your catalog of complaints is absolutely irrelevant to your survival. But . . .” Boynton lowered his voice. “If there are any among you who still can’t let go of your unhappiness, anyone whose commitment was a lie and wants to go back—if this ship makes a return voyage, and I can’t promise that it will, but if it does then you can stay on board and go back to Earth with her. As expensive as that is, I’d rather send you back than have you be parasites on the colony, using up valuable resources and endangering the people around you. Don’t worry about the cost. That expense was built-in to your sign-on investment, so it’s already covered.
You aren’t the first cowards. I’m done here. Figure it out, people. Whatever you want to do. Stay or go. But I’m not giving this speech again.”

  I didn’t have to do much with that video. Somebody had already edited it to show Lieutenant Boynton’s face and the reactions of the colonists as he spoke. So I just grabbed it from the files and . . . thought about it for a while. Should I upload it or not? It might make the Cascade colonists even more uncomfortable. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? If you’re not willing to be uncomfortable, why are you here? Finally, I decided not to upload it. I’m not good at nuance, but I was pretty sure that Councilor Layton wouldn’t like it if people saw Captain Boynton calling him a coward.

  The video ended with a moment I didn’t understand. Jamie had to explain it to me. It was a joke, a pun. Just before Boynton swims out, a buoyant grinning man (I checked, his name was Garrett) floated up to him and pointed at the pad where the crossword puzzle was still displayed. “Tomcat,” he said, and swam off like a giant chubby balloon.

  * * *

  —

  The next few days were hectic with people settling into their winter quarters, rearranging and trading furniture, rearranging and trading winter responsibilities, rearranging and trading winter house-mates, and sorting out all the various other miscellaneous problems that inevitably cropped up after a migration.

  Even though most of these arrangements had already been settled weeks in advance, there were always adjustments to be made on-site when people discovered that all their careful arrangements weren’t to their liking after all. And then there were the people on waiting lists for one thing or another, a job, a posting, a promotion, a cabin, a dorm bed, a room here or there, all of them scrambling for any possibility that might open up while others dickered over previously assigned placements. It was the traditional three-day “migration madness.” Whatever wasn’t settled in three days—too bad. This is it.