Hella

by David Gerrold

  Jamie said that the only solution would be to carve out a suite for everyone—but even if we put a whole year’s worth of resources into doing only that, people would still find reasons to be unhappy. Then he spoke in different voices, sometimes imitating people we knew: “My suite is too far from the caf, it’s too far to walk.” “My suite is too near the caf, there’s too much traffic.” “I’m too far down.” “I’m not down far enough.” “Everything is fine, but I’m not happy unless I have something to complain about.”

  Then he imitated Captain Skyler with a deep voice and a dark scowl: “If complaints produced results, we’d be there already.” Then: “Stop acting like a Terran. Be a Hellan.” That one was usually good for stopping any complaint. It was a kind of unwritten rule that you weren’t allowed to argue with that. It was a linguistic anvil dropped on your head. That was a metaphor I understood. I’d seen enough cartoons to get it.

  Jamie said that anvils had other uses besides dropping on people’s heads. When I asked him what, he told me to look it up. I did, and I learned about blacksmithing. We don’t have blacksmiths. We have bots and fabbers. We use the fabbers to make more bots. We use the bots to assemble the fabbers. And then we make parts for everything else we need. The only problem, the fabbers need source materials—mostly carbon and silicon, but also copper, aluminum, silver, gold, various rare earths and assorted other elements. We also fabricate chips on a q substrate, so we have intelligent monitors everywhere. Jamie says we’re trading personal privacy for the optimization of our resources.

  I never thought privacy was all that useful. It seems to me that we need to know everything about everything. Only emotional people think they need privacy. The only time I want privacy is when I’m in the shower, and that’s only because I might be washing my penis. And that’s only because other people would get all weird about that. It’s that nuance thing again. I still don’t understand why a penis has nuance, but Jamie agrees with me. Anything connected to sex should be private. But the rest? I don’t see any value in privacy. When people start keeping secrets, it always ends up making more trouble than telling the truth.

  Anyway, I edited a whole bunch of new videos and uploaded them to the Cascade. She’d been chasing Hella around the sun. They’d expected to achieve orbit only a few days after we arrived at Winterland, but they’d had to make an orbital correction to avoid a flare, so now they weren’t due to catch up to us for another two weeks.

  The plans for who would be in the first landing still hadn’t been confirmed. Jamie said that they were arguing whether or not to bring HARLIE down or keep him on the starship. If he came down now, Charles Dingillian would have to come with him, because Charles was his . . . I guess the word is “liaison.” I didn’t understand how that worked, but it had something to do with how they had jumped off Earth and bounced off Luna and leapt across the big dark to Hella.

  The new videos showed the greenhouses and all the different foods we were growing. We had huge indoor orchards at Winterland. We had strawberries the size of handballs, apples and oranges as big as basketballs, avocados like footballs, and melons too big for any sports analogy—two meters or more in diameter. We had huge indoor fields of wheat so tall it brushed the ceiling, the corn as well. Flats of rice filled another cavern. We had aeroponic nets for growing tomatoes as big as my head and potatoes the size of a chair, beans like baseballs and carrots like bats. We had Earth foods like Earth had never seen—at least not until they started farming on Luna.

  Another video showed the protein tanks, long rows of glass cylinders where meat and other protein cakes were patiently layered and fed and continually exercised for texture and marbling, so they could grow fat and delicious. We had beef and pork and chicken and lamb and turkey. Growing them was easy, the hard part was finding all the right nutrients for the tanks. We could use Hellan biomass, but it had to be processed first, and by the time it was reduced to its component elements, we had used up so much time and energy it wasn’t really cost-effective. That was something else that Mom and the engineers were looking at—a better way to process Hellan biomass and make it safe for the tanks.

  I showed them the fish farms too. We had shrimp so big they were terrifying, almost the size of a baby. A single one of these monsters could feed four people—or eat four people if it got out. That was a joke. I didn’t think it was funny, but other people did. But shrimp and other fish were a whole other problem—because you couldn’t just farm fish, you had to farm a whole ecology, all the things that the fish need to thrive, and then building the colossal tanks for all that requires a lot of work and after that a lot of maintenance. But the shrimp were delicious.

  Just about the time everything finally settled down, the second convoy arrived from Summerland, and we had the second round of migration madness. The third convoy would be following in another few days, but they’d have to hurry—the autumn winds had picked up enormously and three huge storms were forming up in a line over the Boiling Sea. By the time they arrived, they could be Category Six, Seven, Eight. The sea wasn’t really boiling, but a large part of it sprawled across the equator, so it stored a lot of heat and the monitors showed vast walls of not-quite steam rising up into the air on hot days.

  Jamie said that the last convoy was on hold. With the storms building up, it might not be safe to roll. The last convoy was always engineers and maintenance crews and their families, the ones who turned off the lights and locked up before leaving, so if they had to ride out the storm season at Summerland, they’d be okay. Summerland had the resources to support the extra people over the winter. It was part of the planning. An alternate plan was to wait until the worst of the autumn storms had passed and make a run for it during the quiet cold weeks that followed. But in the meantime, they were prepping for the worst, tying down everything with extra nets and cables. As much as the Summerland fences had been rebuilt and reinforced, they’d never been tested in a Category Eight.

  Captain Skyler phoned Mom to let her know when he’d be flying Madam Coordinator to Winterland, so she should start thinking about a date for the wedding. That should have made Mom happy, but it didn’t. It was just more to worry about.

  By the time the Cascade arrived in orbit, the first storms were already scouring the northeastern coasts. Captain Boynton put the ship into a geostationary position so it would have direct line-of-sight with both Summerland and Winterland.

  After a lot of back and forth discussions, most of which had to do with things like accommodations and assignments and who had authority over whom, they decided to drop five cargo pods. But the bigger argument was about who should be in the first landing. The more they argued, the more people insisted on being included. Finally, both Captain Boynton and Coordinator Layton ended the arguments by mutual agreement. A committee of thirty would ride the pods down, no more. After some negotiation, the list was published. The committee would include J’mee and her father. Another pod would carry Charles Dingillian and HARLIE, Douglas and Mickey Dingillian-Lowe, and the rest of the Dingillian family too, two moms and a little brother—otherwise the ultimatum was that Charles and HARLIE refused to leave the Cascade. Apparently, HARLIE had a lot of bargaining power. But if HARLIE was as smart as everyone said, then having him dirtside would be an asset to planning the logistics of assimilating twelve hundred new people. HARLIE was supposed to be very good at understanding complex interrelationships.

  Because geostationary is a very high orbit, bringing the pods down would take some careful planning. First, the pods would move to low orbit where they would wait for a good landing window. The weather was the problem. The southern edge of the storms had generated some powerful winds that would seriously affect the pods’ ability to hit the target zone. The pods were going to drop in over the ocean and let the resistance of the wind help them burn off speed, but if the winds accelerated, then the pods would have a harder time making a safe landing. The pods had fins and chutes and Palmer-e
ngines and inflatable bubble wrap, and they could adjust their trajectories to land almost anywhere inside a target zone several hundred klicks in diameter, but the lower they got, the smaller that target zone became. With the sudden unpredictability of Hellan weather, the onboard brains were going to have to pilot hard all the way down.

  Dirtside, we’d send out a convoy of a dozen trucks to meet the pods and that was an additional problem in logistics. We’d be three days getting the trucks serviced and ready, attaching trailers to tow the cargo pods, isolation modules for the landing parties, and finally getting the vehicles out onto the flats where the pods were targeted to land. If the pods came down too far from the target zone, the trucks would have to go and get them. If they were too far out or if the terrain was impassible, we’d have to send lifters—heavy-lifters—and we didn’t like to fly those in heavy winds or rain.

  When I was little, Jamie and I used to watch movies every Sevenday, almost all morning long. Sometimes we’d have friends over. We liked the old movies best because we could make it a contest to see who could find the most mistakes. The obvious one was the “Earth-like planet.” You didn’t get any points for that one, it was too obvious. Jamie liked to say, “There are no Earth-like planets. There are only lazy writers.”

  But the less obvious mistake was the one that neither of us realized immediately. The movies make everything look fast and easy. Everything happens immediately. Nobody takes time to figure out a careful plan. Everybody always knows exactly what to do. And nobody makes mistakes. They always get it right the first time.

  But real life isn’t like that. In real life, everything takes time and everything has to be planned and nothing ever works out like it’s supposed to and you have to make new plans and then you have to adjust them as you go, and sometimes it takes two or ten or twenty tries to get the job done and even then it doesn’t always turn out like you thought it should. In real life, you don’t magically get into a truck and then arrive a few minutes later—the movie doesn’t show you the ten days of hills and canyons and deserts and swamps in between. In real life, people don’t punch each other to solve their differences—they talk things over and they keep talking and talking and talking until they find an answer, or until one side or the other gives up. In real life, there are no magical happy endings in the last five minutes. And in real life, people don’t live happily ever after. They just keep on living until they stop living. And in real life, every day is a new set of challenges you have to deal with so that you can keep on living until you stop living. That’s real life. And that’s why I stopped watching movies. Because most of them were wrong. And if the people who made them knew that they were wrong when they were making them, then they were liars and their movies were lies.

  I didn’t want my videos to be lies. I wanted them to tell the truth so people would understand that real life on Hella isn’t a movie. It isn’t fast, it isn’t easy—it’s hard and frustrating and wonderful and amazing.

  And sometimes it’s even beautiful too.

  Jamie tried to explain beautiful to me, more than once.

  I asked him. “Beauty is perfection, right?”

  He frowned. He thought about it. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you. What does the noise say?”

  “The noise says a lot of things. Not a lot of them make sense.”

  “Well no, I guess not. Everybody has their own opinion about what’s beautiful.”

  “Well, then how does anyone know what’s beautiful?”

  “You’re trying to come at it scientifically, aren’t you?”

  “You mean logically.”

  “Okay, yes.” Jamie frowned again. “Try it this way. I read this once. Beauty isn’t perfection. It’s almost-perfection. It’s the little bit of imperfection we see that makes us recognize that something is beautiful.” He stopped. “I’m not the best person to ask, you know.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re the best person for me to ask. Tell me what you think is beautiful?”

  “Anything that’s nice to look at.”

  “So anything I like to look at—that’s beautiful?”

  “It is for you. Yes.”

  “So if I’m hungry enough, even breakfast is beautiful.”

  “Breakfast is always beautiful.” Jamie laughed. “So is lunch. And especially dinner.”

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “So are you, Kyle.”

  So that was my definition of beautiful. Things I like to look at.

  So my next video was going to be everything I liked to see. I didn’t know if anyone else would see the beauty, but there was only one way to find out. I sat down and started editing.

  The triple rainbows at dawn as the sun flickers and blurs and burns its way up over the foggy sea—those are beautiful. The violet clouds piling high into the deep purple sky, always different, are even more beautiful. The sweet-salt smell of the sea cabbages and the strange groaning noises of the giant sea-badgers that feed on them—it’s worth the nighttime trip to the shore. All the strange things that flicker and flutter and float through the air, the gliders and flyers and drifters—Mom says there’s magic there. I don’t see magic, but I see how beautifully complicated everything is, how it all fits together, and I guess that’s a kind of magic too.

  Strangest of all are the zeppelin-bugs—they sail on the wind like balloons, feeding on dust and water vapor, storing hydrogen in glistening translucent sacs. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to their size, they grow as big as our Rollagons and sail high into the atmosphere where they spread clouds of eggs so light they stay airborne for weeks. The larvae hatch on leaves, they feed, they mate, eventually they get airborne, they grow. Those that reach the upper atmosphere spread more eggs and the cycle begins again. Sometimes the zeppelin-bugs die and their transparent bubble-skins float to the ground. Sometimes they don’t die—they explode in fiery bursts. A flicker of lightning can trigger a quick and violent spread of flashing death across the sky.

  Everything is photographed, the cameras are on 36/7. We have hellabytes of pictures that nobody has ever seen, all sorted and catalogued and filed away. Hundreds of thousands of different species, land and air and water. We have info-walls everywhere displaying all the strange and different animals, but there were just too many to know, let alone understand. We’d need a million scientists—a hundred million—all spread across the surface of the world before we could begin to assemble a comprehensive picture of the Hellan ecology. All we have now are just some very good guesses.

  But when I look at it—it’s beautiful. Because it all fits together somehow. And that’s beautiful. I think that’s the part of beautiful that Jamie didn’t say. Beautiful is mysterious. It tells us that there’s so much more than what we’re seeing or hearing. And that’s why we’re drawn to it. Because we want to know the part we’re not seeing and hearing.

  When I finished editing, I went to see if anyone else was awake. Mom was working on a report, but she pushed her keyboard aside when I came in. “You miss talking to Jamie?”

  “Uh-huh. I had an idea about why we see some things as beautiful. I wanted to share it with him.”

  “Do you want to share it with me?”

  “I’d be interrupting your work.”

  “You’re more important than my work.” She pushed herself back from her desk. “Let’s have some tea. And I think there’s some cake in the fridge too.”

  While we ate, I told her what I was thinking—that what we call beauty is really the mystery of what we’re seeing.

  Mom nodded. “That is a very interesting idea. I’ve never heard that before. And that’s your own thought? Not the noise?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I am impressed. I will be thinking about that for a long time. How did you come up with that?”

  “I was making more videos for the people on the Cascade. Lilla-Jack said I was
scaring them. So I want them to know the good things about Hella. The beautiful things. The mysterious things too.”

  Mom said, “Yes. That’s a good thing to do. May I give you a suggestion?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Think about this. We’re still trying to explain everything in Earth terms. So we have bird-things and fish-things and dino-things and flower-things—except what if none of those things are anything at all like the things on Earth we think they resemble? What if we’re letting the resemblance fool us into a lot of false and dangerous assumptions? What if the plants aren’t really plants, but some kind of rooted animal like the pink-trees? What if the animals aren’t really animals, but vast colonies of symbiotes and organisms all working together? What don’t we know yet?”

  She looked across the table at me. “This is what you’re good at, Kyle. You see things that nobody else does. We only see what’s in front of us. But you see what’s under-beneath it. It’s impossible to put all that into your videos, but you can show them how much there is to learn, how much we still didn’t know. That’s your job, Kyle. Show them the mysteries of Hella, that’s the real beauty of this world.”

  I looked back at her. “I don’t know how to put all that into a seven-minute video.”

  “You’ll figure it out, you always do.” She looked at the time. “Do you need anything else? I need to get back to work.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  As I walked back to my room, I realized—Mom had been talking to me like an adult. That was a good thing.

  I sat down at my desk and stared at nothing.

  Emily-Faith had sent me a list of music I might want to use: Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World.” Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, “The Pastoral.” Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sea Symphony.” Camille Saint-Saëns Symphony number 3, “The Organ Symphony.” She said that when the colonists on the Cascade heard the music of Earth, it would awaken their emotional memories and help them see Hella as a new home. It was that nuance thing again.