Hella

by David Gerrold

  But she was right that the music fit the videos.

  So I guess it was beautiful.

  Great creatures breaching from the depths of the sea. A sky-darkening flock of kites, sailing the air currents with enormous wingspans. Nervous hoppers digging a new burrow, alternating bursts of dirt with sudden watchful stares into the distance. Glitterflies sparkling through a twilight forest, filled with purple and amber contrasts, and something deep in the shadows beneath, staring out with crimson eyes. All of this and so much more.

  Questions, all the questions, everything was a question and there were so few answers. Hella was more beautiful than we could ever know.

  * * *

  —

  The last convoy from Summerland was cancelled. The weather was too ferocious. The winds were scouring the landscape as hard as we’d ever seen. Nobody was leaving, not for a long time. Even Coordinator Layton’s flight was postponed. Which meant Captain Skyler wouldn’t be arriving anytime soon either. And the wedding was postponed again.

  There are a few rough-weather rigs that could go out in heavy winds, but unless there was a compelling reason, like a rescue mission, they were kept securely locked down.

  I hadn’t walked around Winterland much yet. I usually hid out during the first few days of migration madness anyway. My way of dealing with it. But after a few days, when things started to settle down, I was ready to come out of the apartment and see what changes had happened in all the months we’d been at Summerland. There was almost always a new tunnel to explore.

  Winterland is carved into the side of a dead volcano. The whole coast had been formed by a string of gigantic magma fountains. The magma had flowed for tens of thousands of years, so the slopes were tall and steep—not as high as the Awful Mountains, the ones that pushed to the very top of the atmosphere, but still high enough to be impressive—another effect of Hella’s lighter gravity. The view from the higher levels was spectacular. We had an observatory and weather station at the top of High Peak and if you made your reservation early enough, you could ride the cable lift up for a visit. It was a long ride and a little bit scary, but whenever the weather permitted it was a chance to get out of the caverns.

  Winterland was the first permanent outpost of the First Hundred. It started as an emergency station built inside a giant lava tube. The First Hundred moved into it to wait out the biggest storms. It was so convenient that they decided to keep the station as a permanent facility and expand it. They dug new tunnels to connect to other lava tubes. After that, they began digging giant caverns deep into the mountainside. Volcanic rock is soft enough that it’s easy to create large spaces. We don’t haul away the rock we remove. We compress it into hard bricks and harder support beams and even decorative wall tiles.

  The colony has been expanding Winterland for almost forty years. The levels are dug in a giant helix around the elevator columns to equalize the weight. The biggest chambers are the farms. A lot of the farm workers live on the garden levels. If you don’t like people very much, it’s a great job.

  In addition to all the farm levels, Winterland also has huge storage caverns. Several of them hold fresh water, others hold reserve food stores, and still more hold all kinds of supplies like ore and lumber and processed biomass. We even have deep junk holes for our broken machines and bots. Nothing ever gets thrown out. All the parts get catalogued and stored. Some machines get rebuilt, others get recycled, still others get cannibalized for spare parts. Jamie says the engineering team has more fun than anyone—because they get all the bots, so the junk holes are filled with weird jerry-rigged machines that look like nothing else on Hella. Jamie says whenever you need something, whatever you need, go down to the junk hole with a fresh apple pie.

  I think the junk holes are fun, Jamie and I used to go there with his dad, his dad is an engineer, but most people prefer the garden levels for their off-hour breaks. The school is on the garden level and during recess, we’d all play hide-and-go-peek beneath the towering sunflowers. The gardeners ran the lights in a pattern to duplicate the movement of the sun and all the flowers would turn to face the light as the day progressed. I uploaded a time-lapse video of that to the Cascade as part of my garden series.

  Mom sometimes says that Hella is a lot like me. “We’ll never really tame this girl. We’ll just learn how to live with her.” She used to say that a lot, even after I kept reminding her, “I’m not Kylee, I’m Kyle! I’m not a girl anymore. I’m a boy now.” Maybe she said that because I still slept in one of her old nightgowns some nights. But maybe it was because she didn’t take me seriously that I got so stubborn. It took a while, but eventually she got used to my name change and she stopped saying Kylee.

  Jamie was born a girl too. When I was three, he decided to be a boy and Mom arranged for him to grow a penis. We used to take showers together. When I saw how he was different, that’s when I said I wanted a penis too. “If Jamie gets a penis, so do I. I want to pee standing up too.”

  I don’t know why Jamie wanted to change, I think it’s because he wanted to be like his dad. I know I wanted to change because I wanted to be like Jamie. I whined and fussed a lot until Mom finally agreed, but I had to promise I wouldn’t ask to change back for at least a year. Jamie had to make the same promise. She said we had to learn how to be boys before we could be girls again. I told her I wasn’t ever going to change back, no matter what. Mostly I said that just to make her wrong, because after a while it wasn’t about having a penis as much as it was about having my own way. For a while, whatever she told me, I did the opposite. Jamie used to say it was a good thing I was so cute, because for a while there I was a real monster—but that was before I had the noise installed.

  Sometimes I think about changing back, but I’m happy this way, and I can’t think of any reason to change back. It’s just something to think about sometimes. A lot of the colonists are male, almost two-thirds, because male bodies tend to be physically stronger, and that’s useful for a lot of jobs. That and the peeing-standing-up thing too. Mom says I’m a misogynist, but I say I’m pragmatic. Mom says that in my case, it’s the same thing. I’m not sure what she means by that. I’m not stupid, I’m just—focused differently.

  When Mom was a boy, she looked a lot different. I saw some old pictures once of my dad, and he had his arm around a boy who looked a little like Mom, but his hair was longer. Mom doesn’t say much about life on Earth, so I guess it wasn’t a very happy home for her. Like most everybody else, she and Dad left because they thought they could have a better life somewhere else. Mom did say once that too many people change themselves for all the wrong reasons—because they think it’ll be an adventure or maybe because they want to have the sexual experience or because they think it’ll make them transhuman or because they want to grow their own baby inside (or because they don’t) or because they think they need to do it to save their marriage or worse, because they’re trying to make someone else happy—but whatever the reason, unless you realize how big a shift it’s going to be, and unless you really want it just for yourself—because that’s who you really need to be—then it just isn’t emotionally healthy and can lead to all sorts of behaviors . . . And that’s as far as she ever gets with that. She says, “You’ll understand when you get older, but if you’re really really lucky, you won’t have to.”

  Mom isn’t a prude. She just thinks there are more important things to do on Hella than being a gendernaut. She knows what I do in the shower, she says it’s normal and I should enjoy myself having a healthy wash. Which I would anyway, the shower is my personal time.

  I think she has a lot of history that she wished she didn’t. As near as I can tell, Earth is a terrible place, and I’m glad we don’t live there.

  * * *

  —

  The trucks left early for the landing site. I wanted to go with, but it was strictly a team-only mission, no observers, no interns. So I had to watch like everybody el
se through the monitors. But Lilla-Jack had given me a remote control, so I could focus some of the cameras on anything I found interesting.

  The highland desert, where the pods would land, is mostly gray sand and huge blue-brown puffer-bushes, taller than the trucks. The puffer-bushes have a lot of empty space between them, each one is at least twenty to thirty meters from the next. It’s because there’s not enough water in the desert to support any more plant life, and once a puffer-bush gets rooted it sucks all the water out of its immediate radius. They all have deep taproots, so they’re mostly resistant to the terrible winds that sweep across the flats when the seasons change. There are some areas of the desert that are nothing but puffer-bushes and the bug-things and lizard-things that live inside and under them.

  So the landscape is a maze of huge round plants scattered across a sandy floor. Sometimes it feels like it just goes on forever and there’s no way out. Only the distant wall of the Awful Mountains hints at an end. Because the puffers are so huge and so randomly placed, the trucks have to weave back and forth around them while trying to maintain a consistent heading. For some people, it can feel very claustrophobic.

  Up north, at Summerland, the winds were still rising. Jamie called to tell me not to worry. He said the wind was like that video of a hungry craptor trying to get at a family of hoppers in a hollow log, sniffing and picking and plucking and clawing, pulling and tugging whatever it could, sticking its nose first in one end, then the other, scratching and scraping, looking for a way to get at all the fat little prizes inside. But so far, most of the tie-down cables were holding. Only one had snapped and that was one of the older ones that had never been serviced. So now they were sending crews up into the rigging to check on the rest of them. They expected the peak of the storm to hit before midnight and after that perhaps a couple days of easier weather before the next storm came howling in. They’d use those two days to restring and tie down and secure everything the wind had torn up or torn down.

  Then the Cascade sent down some very upsetting weather advisories. HARLIE had been studying Hellan weather since before they’d arrived at orbit. He’d gone back through fifty years of recorded weather patterns, trying to make sense out of all the different cycles, warming and cooling, sunspots, winds, tides, ocean currents, and so on. Based on his observations, measured against the past, he projected that we were going to see a very severe season, possibly the worst winter ever since the colony was founded—what he called “a perfect storm,” a horrible collision of cycles, all piling together to create an aggravated condition far beyond predictability. His report had a lot of math attached, stuff I’d never seen before.

  Something called chaos theory says that there’s a place on the curve of rising conditions, call it a tipping point, where the slope approaches its limits and becomes unpredictable. The result is a collapse of multiple conditions and the technical term for the collapse is “catastrophe.” HARLIE said we were headed for catastrophe conditions—in both senses of the word “catastrophe.”

  Attached to HARLIE’s weather advisory was a list of recommendations. Some of them seemed pretty harsh. HARLIE recommended pulling back or shutting down any outpost that wasn’t secured for at least Category Six conditions. He attached a list. That started a lot of arguments. Teams that were in the middle of long-term observations—like Bitch Station, for example—protested that any interruption would seriously upset their research. The Management Team at Winterland argued that we didn’t have enough trucks to bring back all the teams, let alone housing space for them once they got here—unless they were willing to live in unfinished tunnels or even just stay in the trucks. The Farm Teams said that if we shut down the outposts, they’d have to increase winter production to feed the extra people coming in, which meant changing our long-range plans for feeding the twelve hundred new colonists and two hundred crew members of the Cascade who would start landing as soon as they could.

  All of that meant we’d certainly have to dip into our reserves, and while it wouldn’t put us close to the edge, it would certainly hurt our margin. As it was, Resource Management was already worrying about having to send additional stores north to Summerland because Summerland’s own resources were going to be severely stressed now that the last convoy had been cancelled and nearly seven hundred more people would have to bunker in up there.

  Some people argued that we couldn’t trust HARLIE and we should stay the course. Our own plans and projections had worked for forty Hella-years, why were we going to trust an outsider? Others argued that HARLIE was the most advanced intelligence engine ever and if it hadn’t been for him, the Cascade wouldn’t have gotten here at all, and if we didn’t listen to his recommendations, we were being stupid and human-arrogant.

  The Council held a lot of meetings, all of them broadcast everywhere—and some of the comment-threads got ferocious. Councilor Layton was saying a lot of stuff that was making a lot of people angry. Mom told me not to waste my time reading or listening. It would just upset me. Too many people speak or type without thinking, without doing their research, without knowing what they’re talking about, without stopping to consider what kind of effect their words might have on others.

  Jamie says it’s because people don’t hear what you say, they hear what they hear—what they thought you said, what they wanted you to say, what they were afraid you said, what they didn’t want you to say. And the whole time that they’re pretending to listen, they’re already preparing their reply. And that’s how all the problems in the world get started—from people not really listening to each other.

  Anyway, everybody was arguing and the arguments got loud and ugly. Everybody was talking about what they wanted, how hard the changes would be and how it would affect their own plans and why they didn’t want to change and why they didn’t want to listen anymore and some of the arguments were so fierce they didn’t make sense anymore. But Jamie said it was easy to understand. “They’re arguing because they think all their things are more important than other people.” He leaned forward like he wanted to lean out of the screen. “This is important, Kyle. You gotta remember this everywhere. People are not things. When people forget that, that’s how wars get started.”

  We’ve never had a war on Hella and I guess that’s something we should be proud of. But Jamie says that the only reason we haven’t had a war yet is that we don’t have enough people or resources yet to have a war. There’s a critical mass we’d have to reach first, and he says we could even reach it in our own lifetime. He says that when you have too many people and not enough resources, war is inevitable—except that war is a lousy investment. You never really win a war, because you always use up more resources than you ever gain from a victory. It’s a lose-lose game. And anybody who doesn’t realize that is either stupid or insane or both at the same time.

  That’s why Jamie says that letting Councilor Layton start a second colony on the eastern continent is a bad idea. The competition for our limited resources and production abilities will inevitably create serious tension and eventually the conditions for open violence. We can’t afford the investment, not yet. We might have hit critical mass in population, but we haven’t hit critical mass in production to support the construction and maintenance of a second colony installation. Not yet.

  During all of these arguments, HARLIE continued to send down updated predictions and advisories and even specific plans for how we could maximize the use of our available resources and facilities. He predicted that we could lose as much as twenty percent of our structures, even some of the secured ones, but if we made specific preparations now, we could minimize the risk of casualties. The real danger wasn’t just the storm damage, but the loss of productivity and the subsequent stress on our remaining resources, which would leave us even more vulnerable to subsequent storms.

  Even worse, it was very possible that the routes between Summerland and Winterland could become impassible for possibly half a year. Both
stations would have to survive on existing resources. Neither would be able to depend on aid from the other. When I read that sentence, it made me think about what Jamie had said about the reasons wars start. We might not need to start a second colony to have a war. We already had the conditions for one right now. Add the new colonists and their uninformed and inexperienced opinions about the way things should be and we could expect a lot of uncertainty and unrest. Even I could figure that out.

  That was why Mom didn’t want me listening to all the arguments. She said she didn’t want me getting nervous and scared and upset. HARLIE kept insisting we had to start preparing now. Everybody else wanted to talk about it instead.

  * * *

  —

  The view from the telescopes wasn’t clear enough, but the view from the nearest satellites gave us a much better picture of the Cascade. The starship was a huge spiky framework built around a very long axis, with a feathery tractor drive at one end and six long spokes supporting a huge hyperstate ring at the other. The whole affair was studded with cargo pods and living modules, so many that it looked like an arrow stuck through a giant shiny raspberry. It rotated slowly on its axis, giving all its inhabitants a centrifugally simulated gee field.

  When the pickup trucks were within a half-day’s travel to the target zone, five landing pods separated from the Cascade and began de-orbiting. Because a geostationary position is nearly the distance of the planet’s circumference, it’s a long process to bring a lander in. You have to burn off a lot of height and speed.

  We were monitoring the pods all the way down. They started by firing Palmer-tubes to put themselves into a decaying orbit. When they hit atmosphere, they’d inflate ballutes to aerobrake, occasionally firing thrusters to adjust course, until they’re finally low enough and slow enough to deploy landing chutes. When they get down to the last few hundred meters, they fire braking thrusters, extend landing feet, and inflate cushioning balloons to soften the impact if the feet fail or the ground is uneven. If everything works right, the landing is a gentle thump. If not, it’s a crater. Cratering has only happened once, but even once is too many. We don’t need any more memorial craters.