The pods were scheduled to land ten seconds apart. They were all targeted to the same one-klick drop zone and we expected them to come down in a line. Two of the pods had their own wheels. We could hitch them up to a truck and tow them. The other three would need to be put aboard trailers. But we took six trailers just in case, two with isolation pods for the new colonists. They’d be under quarantine for twenty-one days while the Medical Team ran tests and supplied all the appropriate vaccinations on both sides. Even an outbreak of the flu could turn deadly.
The pickup teams hadn’t had much time to practice, but none of them were inexperienced either. Twenty scooters flanked the trucks with armed rangers watching for any wandering saurs. It was unlikely that a carnosaur would be interested in a pod, but a lumbering leviathan family could complicate retrieval of the pods. We just wanted them to keep out of the drop zone.
The leviathans weren’t the only things to watch out for. The desert teemed with stinging and biting creatures of all kinds, many of them poisonous. Unlike the grasslands or the forests where prey is more easily available, desert predators need an extra advantage. If a hunter can sting its victim and paralyze it, it gains an advantage over creatures many times its size. What surprised the First Hundred was that some desert insect-things actually hunt in packs. But that makes sense. Bringing down even a small saur gives you enough food for a whole season. Even better, if you can burrow inside its skin, you have shelter as well against the worst storms.
HARLIE was riding in on the last pod. His analysis of the landing risks suggested that was the best vehicle for him. Although each pod had its own pilot-brain, HARLIE had been given oversight authority for all of them. The largest mass landing we’d ever done had been twelve pods at a time, so this wasn’t the logistics challenge it could have been, but the rising winds were a concern to everyone.
The telescope array at High Peak picked up the pods as soon as they came over the horizon. The image shimmered with atmospheric distortion. The pods shone bright against the dark, they hung in space and didn’t look like they were moving at all, but the readouts said they were coming in fast.
It felt like the longest time. Streaks of molten air flared out around the ballutes, making the pods look like orange stars. Then the stars faded and after a bit longer, the chutes popped open and caught, one-two-three-four-five, and as they descended they angled into the wind, all in unison like a team of synchronized skydivers.
It suddenly struck me—this was HARLIE showing off what he could do, his way of impressing everybody, his way of convincing people that he could handle complex problems that required a lot of fast processing. I typed a quick note to Jamie telling him what I’d realized. He replied almost immediately: “Yup.” And a moment later: “But I’m not sure it will change anyone’s mind.”
“Why not?” I typed.
“Because people don’t like changing their minds no matter how many good reasons you give them.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Yup.”
The pods deployed their second chutes. They were visible from the pickup vehicles now. The truck cameras showed them as a spectrum of bright-colored pinpoints. All their lights were on and the chutes glowed in the morning glare.
Another message from Jamie. “Don’t forget to breathe. Breathing is good.” That one made me laugh.
And after another long while, the pods stopped being pinpoints and started being pill-shaped capsules, hanging beneath a sparkling rainbow, each enormous chute a different color—red, orange, yellow, green, blue. It made me laugh again. How wonderful! What a glorious landing!
The skyballs and drones angled around now and the wall filled with a dozen more images. It looked like a party in the air. All we needed were fireworks—
And then the fireworks began! The pods blasted their braking tubes, bright dazzling flares of light against the sky. The aerial views from the skyballs showed great shadows passing over the ground—and a bright orange-yellow reflection as well. There was a quick glimpse of a truck as the capsules passed over it, and then, as the jets stopped firing, all the anchoring feet extended and the landing balloons inflated—like doughnuts around each pod—and each one bumped softly down and settled to the ground, one-two-three-four-five, exactly as promised.
Great cheers erupted from the trucks, from the people gathered in the caf, from the caf at Summerland. I cheered too, alone in my room, surrounded by walls of beautiful glorious joyful pictures. The giant chutes collapsed gently around the landing pods. The view from the skyballs showed a fallen rainbow, both beautiful and somehow sad at the same time. But it was wonderful, just wonderful. The first of the new people had arrived. I could hardly wait to meet HARLIE!
* * *
—
The rest of the morning was spent with mechanical things. The pods had landed upright, they had to be lowered onto trailers. They were almost as big as the trucks, so the logistics were tricky. The pickup team spent a half hour running the math on the two pods that were designed to work as trucks, but their wheels weren’t suitable for crossing the dry sand, so finally the team decided that it was more practical to put them on trailers too. So the next few hours were methodical and meticulous as one pod after the other was lowered to a horizontal position and pulled up onto a trailer.
Meanwhile, the people aboard the pods were already sending messages back up to the Cascade, telling friends and family that they had landed safely. Then they started answering all the welcoming messages they were getting from people all over Hella.
Once the pods were on the trailers, the pickup team connected passenger tubes from the isolation bays to the pods’ airlocks. They spent a few moments checking the seals, then finally opened the interior hatches and welcomed the arriving colonists to what would be their homes for the next three weeks—Hella-weeks, not Earth-weeks. The isolation bays had medical access for our doctors, and exercise equipment so the colonists could start getting acclimated to Hellan gravity. Adjusting to lighter gravity can be just as big a problem as adjusting to heavier. Even though the colonists had spent a lot of time in the centrifuges of the Cascade, Jamie says an hour or two of practice every day is not the same as 36/7 hours of actually living in gravity.
One of the mistakes a lot of new colonists make—I have this from the history records, it’s been true for every pilgrimage since the First Hundred—is thinking that time spent in the centrifuge at 1.35 gee will help them build up enough muscle tone that adapting to their new planetary environment will be easy. Well, yes and no. There’s nothing wrong with building up muscle tone. But the difference in gravity has other consequences. If your reflexes aren’t tuned to Hellan physics, you will be clumsy at everything. Things will fall just a little bit slower than you’re used to, your sense of balance will be affected, and you’ll have to learn how to walk all over again.
Walking is different in every gravitational field. On Earth, you walk by leaning forward and starting to fall—then you put a foot forward to keep from falling. You keep leaning and you keep putting feet forward. On Luna, that doesn’t work, so you have to lean too far, and that doesn’t work, so instead you bounce with one or both feet. On Mars, you bounce too, but not the same way—you bounce with one foot, then the other, what they call the Martian skip.
On Hella, you either trot or skip or run, depending on how much of a hurry you’re in. If you just want to walk, you have to lean farther forward than you would in a one-gee field. It’s called a groucho. Watching babies learn how to walk is funny. Watching new colonists learn how to groucho is even funnier. They’re either clumsy, afraid to move, or they fall down because they’re over-compensating. What’s funny isn’t the tumble, but what they say as they fall and what they say again when they get up. I know how to swear in six different languages now, I learned it when the last pilgrimage landed. Jamie thought it was funny. Mom did not approve at first, but even she laughed when I called Marley La
yton a shtick dreck.
I wasn’t sure what a shtick dreck was, I had to look it up, but after I did I used the phrase a lot—until Jamie told me to stop because it wasn’t funny anymore.
Midday, everyone takes naps, usually. Well, not everyone. Too many people were too excited to sleep. They’d pay for it later, but right now the adrenaline was flowing and the new colonists were eager to connect and a lot of people were just as eager to get to know them better. Some of them were already making plans for the time after quarantine.
But the pickup team knew there was a long journey ahead of them, so they retired, leaving only a skeleton team and a few bots on watch. They wouldn’t start back for Winterland until Lilla-Jack said go. And she wouldn’t say go until her crew had rested. A few of the new colonists complained—they were eager to get moving, but Lilla-Jack didn’t even acknowledge the messages. Getting enough sleep is part of the job. The new colonists would learn that fast enough.
I logged off and climbed into bed. Nothing else important was going to happen for a while. Not until the new colonists got out of isolation.
* * *
—
I overslept. I do that sometimes. I think it’s a reaction to over-excitement. When I wake up, it takes me a while to figure out where I am, sometimes even who I am. Usually, I go straight to the shower. Soap and hot water and a blast of hot air to dry off always clear away the fog in my head.
I pulled on a clean longshirt and wandered back to my room. The walls had changed to images of the pickup convoy trundling back across the desert flats, following its own trail, winding through the huge blue-brown puffer-bushes and even an occasional cluster of taller spikey-trees. A few aerial images completed the triptych.
But there were also a few other pictures that didn’t concatenate. I didn’t have the sound on, so all I saw was a blur of people running around, talking excitedly to each other or to the camera, lots of pictures of the storm pummeling Summerland, a lot of lightning flashes, and some aerial views of a small forest fire. There were shots of a lifter taking off, one of the heavier transport disks. I’d seen all this before. Every storm was a news event. After a while, it was just the same storm over and over again. I didn’t feel like making a video of it.
Mom hadn’t filled the pantry yet, but there were some emories on the shelf. That was standard. The prep team always put food into all the apartments, suites, and dorms before the migrations arrived to help take some of the strain off the cafeteria. I heated a macaroni plate and poured some fruit juice.
I felt weird. Like something important had happened, and I’d missed it by staying home instead of joining everybody in the caf. Except I had a better view of everything on my walls than I would have had anywhere else. The caf had bigger screens, but everybody would have been talking all the time. It would have been cacophony with most of the emphasis on the caca but still enough phony for everyone. I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything, let alone concentrate. No, staying in my room, I wouldn’t miss anything. So why did I feel left out?
I thought about making another video, but I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel like anything. Very strange. I get these moods sometimes. I don’t want to read, I don’t want to do anything at all. I can’t concentrate. I don’t want to search the web, there’s nothing there I’m interested in. I don’t want to scan through the videos from the skyballs and the drones and the scuttle-bots and the trucks, I can’t stay focused. It’s like my brain has overloaded. I’m restless, but I don’t want to move. I’m not tired and I’m not excited, but I’m both at the same time.
Jamie knows about these moods. He recognized them in me even before I did. He always had good advice. Usually, he’d tell me to take a walk around the station, a long walk, and most of the time that would help. Once he told me to go take a shower. On his water ration. We don’t ration water all the time, only during the driest part of the year and only when the farms need rain. That’s something else we need to build, more storage tanks and sterilizers.
But the best advice Jamie ever gave me was that I should go downstairs to the farms and walk slowly through the gardens, sniffing the flowers, touching the skin of the trees with my fingers, pressing my face into the leaves, and then finally close my eyes and breathe deep, breathe in all the deep green smells of all the growing things—the grass and the blossoms and the woody branches of the canopy overhead. “Just keep your eyes closed,” Jamie said. “Count if you have to, take the deepest breaths you can, and just listen to what all the smells of Earth have to say. They have something to tell you.”
When nothing else works—
So I followed Jamie’s advice and headed down to the gardens. The corridors were strangely silent, as if everyone had evaporated, as if I was the only one left in the caverns. But there wasn’t normally a lot of traffic down here anyway. Growing things don’t need much company, just an occasional drink of water, a little Mozart, and some warm-colored light to thrive. That’s supposed to be good for people too.
Stepping inside, it’s always startling. Everything looks strange because the light is Earth-yellow, not Hella-blue. And the simulated sky is mysteriously deep and always cloudless. Is that how it is on Earth?
Stepping down into a vast cavern, there are paths to explore. I like to go to the left where the rose bushes tower over my head. They’re studded with flowers two meters or larger, and their petals are silky to the touch, but much more fragile than they would be on Earth because the individual cells grow so much larger. The effect of Hella’s lesser gee-field is to inflate everything, especially plants. Things grow bigger and faster here, especially small things and young things. They don’t need the same density of mass in this lighter gravity, so a lot of Earth’s smaller things are puffed up like popcorn.
The roses have the sweetest fragrance of any flower in the garden. And they have the most beautiful colors too, delicate peach and subtle violet, mysterious azure and blazing vermilion—and yellow, a dazzling glare of the most delicious color of all. There are midnight roses too, deep purple so dark they’re almost black. And there are new species—the metallic roses, ebony flecked with silver or copper or gold. Those were genetically engineered—like the rainbow roses, the ones with each petal a different color. The rose garden is a wondrous rainbow of giant blossoms. I feel enchanted here.
I went to a secret thicket that I like to consider my own private place. I pulled off my longshirt and sprawled naked on the lawn, the grass so thick it was a sweet green bed. I stared up into the lazy afternoon and let myself drift. I tried to drift—but this time it took longer to focus. Or maybe unfocus. My head was chattering with more noise than usual. Even though it was turned off, the noise was still buzzing for attention.
The garden was warm. The day smelled bright. I lay on my back and stared at the cold blue sky above. It could have been a real sky—except for the strange dark color of it. A faint breeze rustled through the leaves, bringing in all kinds of other smells. As the breeze shifted, so did the scents. Tangy pine gave way to sweet plumeria gave way to lilac and then basil and then just grassy smells again. Sometimes when I’m down there I listen to music, but this day I just wanted to listen to the sounds of the garden. That was a kind of music too.
Stingless bees, each the size of my fist, buzzed overhead. Of all the insects we brought from Earth, I like bees the best. They seem almost friendly. And they make honey, great slabs of golden flavor. I like to visit the hives and watch them work. They have such singular purpose—each one knows its job and goes about its business with a steady sense of purpose. Bees don’t have councilors, they don’t have captains or coordinators, so they don’t have politics and they don’t fight each other. They just do what’s necessary. I like bees. Sometimes I wish people could be more like bees. More honey, less drama.
After a while, I closed my eyes and let myself listen to the smells. I opened my mouth to taste the air. After a bit, the flowers o
f Earth began to speak to me. Jamie always told me I should just shut up and feel everything around me—all my senses. The garden is the best place for that. Here the grass under my skin caressed me, the high trees overhead reassured me, the rustling silence soothed me. I lay naked on the lawn, pressing my palms against the green blades beneath me, and finally I understood something I would never have known if I had not felt it directly.
All these smells and tastes of Earth, all the feelings, are comforting because they’re hard-wired into us.
Millions of years of evolution—we’re designed for grass and flowers and trees and all the things that grow in them and on them. And it doesn’t matter how many beautiful or wondrous things we might discover on Hella, whatever is here—it’s still not us. Earth is us. And we are Earth.
Earth is in every cell of our bodies, our chromosomes, our genes, our DNA, the very way the molecules of our proteins are assembled and folded, the very substance of our selves. We are Earth, and it won’t matter how many thousands of generations will ever live here, it doesn’t matter how completely we terraform this world or how ferociously we adapt ourselves—we will always be of Earth. This world may be our home now and maybe forever, but it will never be a home to humans the way Earth is. Was. Will always be.
The gardens here, with all their oversized trees, the leaves like sheets, the flowers like globes, the knee-high grass, as different as all these things are from the way they would be on Earth, they too are of Earth. And when I lie naked among them, they speak to me. “Breathe in and breathe deep. Here in this garden, you are returned, once again part of Earth. Breathe in and breathe deep the good green grass of home.”
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