Hella

by David Gerrold

  And then the next day, Coordinator Layton told Mom that he thought I should stop making videos. He said, “Kyle has done a very good job, but now with the first people down, we’ll have them coordinate with the Cascade. So we don’t really need anything else that might confuse the issue, do we? I’m sure you’ll agree that Kyle’s time might be better spent on other efforts. Perhaps something where he won’t need to have as much interaction with other people?”

  That got Mom and Lilla-Jack very angry. I was angry that he took away my job, but they were angry because of something even worse. Lilla-Jack finally said it out loud. “He doesn’t like you, Kyle. He did it because he wants to get even with you for what happened to Marley.”

  “And he did it because he thinks I’m a freak. I know.”

  She looked at me, shocked that I would say that—shocked that I understood.

  “I’m not a freak. And I’m not stupid.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s just that—well, he doesn’t know you.”

  “Well,” I said. “That shows how stupid he is.”

  “Yes, but right now, he’s Coordinator and you’re not.”

  “Well, maybe someday I’ll be Coordinator and then we’ll see what’s what.”

  Lilla-Jack smiled. “That might not be such a bad idea, Kyle. At least you’ll focus on what’s really important.”

  But that didn’t resolve anything. I still lost my job. And I liked my job. Now I didn’t know what to do.

  I wanted to talk to Jamie about that. About everything. I wanted to talk to Captain Skyler too, and the two people I most needed to talk to were the ones who weren’t there anymore. And I couldn’t talk to Jeremy Layton. Not about his own family. Even if he didn’t like them, they were still his family.

  And somewhere in there, the Medical Team announced that the twenty-one-day quarantine for the new people was overkill. The sampler-bots hadn’t detected any unknown germs and everybody was vaccinated against all the known stuff, so after nine days the new colonists were released from the isolation units.

  One day after that, the door chimed, and when I answered it, Charles Dingillian and his friend J’mee were standing there in the corridor. For a moment we all just looked at each other. Even though we’re all the same age, they were shorter than me. I’m taller because of Hella’s lighter gravity. J’mee was light-skinned and pretty. Charles was brown. Even browner than me, and they both had big smiles. Charles held out his hand. An offer to shake. I said, “I don’t see how the mutual grasping of appendages and the consequent exchange of microbial environments represents cordiality.”

  J’mee laughed. Charles pulled his hand back. He said, “I was just trying to be friendly.”

  I said, “I don’t like being touched.”

  Charles frowned a bit, then he said, “Okay. I get it.”

  So I invited them in and started a pot of tea.

  J’mee said, “We’re happy to meet you, Kyle. We liked your videos. We wish you would make more. Maybe you could make a video of Charles’ music?”

  “I’m not supposed to make any more,” I said. “Councilor Layton made me stop.”

  “That was dumb,” said Charles.

  J’mee said, “We’ll talk to Captain Boynton. Maybe he can do something. He’s kind of a Council member.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Charles looked at me, all serious. “I was really sorry to hear about your brother, Kyle. It must hurt a lot. I know if anything happened to either of my brothers, even the stinky one, it would hurt more than I can imagine.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Instead, I blurted out, “I don’t have anyone to talk to anymore.”

  “I’ll bet that’s the part that hurts the most,” J’mee said.

  “Uh-huh.” I was already feeling the hurt again.

  “I know it won’t be the same,” she said. “But maybe you could talk to us. If you want. If it would help.”

  I nodded, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re being polite. But I didn’t know if either of them were people I could talk to. I could exchange emails with them. Even videos. That was one thing. But in person? I wasn’t sure. We still didn’t know each other very well. Not really. Not real-life know each other.

  I poured tea. We sat at the table and talked about tea and coffee—and cocoa. We don’t have cocoa on Hella. Not yet. I said, “I’ve never had chocolate. I’ve heard about it. Everybody says it’s wonderful.”

  J’mee and Charles looked at each other. They both grinned. J’mee reached into her bag and pulled out a small box wrapped in shiny red paper. “We brought you a present.”

  “What is it?”

  “Open it and see.”

  Very slowly, very methodically, I pulled off the paper. The box was deep black with gold piping. It looked very elegant. I pulled off the top and was hit with the most delicious and amazing smell. It was dark and sweet, almost fruity but something much more mysteriously wonderful. Seven little candies, arranged in a mandala. “What is that—?”

  “That’s chocolate,” J’mee said. “Real chocolate.”

  Charles said, “My second mom, Bev, is the best cook anywhere. She made these. They’re called truffles, chocolate truffles, just for you. She says chocolate cures everything—especially sadness.”

  I brought the box close to my face and took a deep deep sniff. “She made these for me? But she doesn’t even know me.”

  “Yes, she does. We all know you. From your videos, Kyle. This is our way of saying thank you for helping us understand Hella a little better.”

  J’mee added, “And it’s our way of wanting to put a little sweetness back into your life to take away some of the bitter.”

  “Go ahead,” said Charles. “Try one.”

  I held out the box to offer them. “I’ll share.”

  “No,” said J’mee. “These are all for you. Please, try one. We want to see your face the first time you eat chocolate.”

  “Okay.” I picked up one of the candies. Very gently. I took a small bite. Something smooth and astonishing melted across my tongue, sending sweet warmth everywhere at once. “Oh my,” I said. “That’s . . . the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my whole life. Oh my, oh my.” I reached for a napkin and when my eyes finally stopped watering, I said, “Please thank your mom for me, Charles. That’s very—oh my.” I put the rest of the truffle back into the box. “I think that’s enough chocolate for the first time.” The taste was still spreading across my tongue, down my throat, into my stomach, flooding my body with delicious heat. My hands were trembling.

  J’mee looked to Charles. “Do you think she overdid it?”

  Charles said, “Bev says it’s impossible to overdo chocolate. Remember, he’s just a beginner.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I pushed the box away from me. Not a rejection as much as an acknowledgment of its mysterious power. “I think I’ll save the rest for later. For my Mom and Lilla-Jack. And maybe Jeremy too. Is that all right?”

  “It’s more than all right. You’re supposed to share chocolate with people you care about.”

  I thought about that for a moment. I looked at the box. I looked at Charles and J’mee. Back and forth. “Are you saying you care about me?”

  They looked quickly at each other as if I’d just asked something very stupid. Then J’mee said, “Yes, that’s what we’re saying. You’re very important to us, Kyle, and we want to be friends.”

  “I’d like that,” I said. “I’ve never had a friend before. I mean, other than Jamie.”

  “Well, now you have two friends.”

  “Is there something . . . I don’t know . . . something you do to make it official?” I asked.

  “You tell us. What do friends do on Hella?”

  I got up and walked around the table. I kissed them. On the mouth. First Charles,
then J’mee. I think it startled both of them, but not as much as it startled me. “Now, we’re friends,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  The next few days, Charles and J’mee and I went everywhere together. I showed them all around Winterland. I took them down to the farms and introduced them to Jeremy.

  I brought the box of chocolate truffles with me and made a show of opening it for him. Jeremy leaned in and sniffed—eyes closed, he sniffed deeply, but then he opened his eyes and closed the box in my hands. “That smells good,” he said. “So good. That’s wonderful, Kyle. Thank you for sharing that.”

  “Don’t you want to eat one?”

  “Of course I do. But these truffles are special—they’re too good to eat casually. You have to save them for a special moment. Like your Passage Ceremony.” He put the box in the center of the table. “There, now it’s the fanciest thing in the room.”

  Charles and J’mee knew all about Passage Ceremonies. I’d made a video about it, but we didn’t know when I would have mine. Mom said it was too soon—she meant too soon after the crash. But I’d heard that Coordinator Layton didn’t want to authorize it.

  Jeremy stopped us before that conversation could go too far. “My treat now,” he said. “This way.” He led us to one of his test gardens. “Breathe deep,” he said. “Smell that? That’s the future.”

  He grabbed a basket and began filling it. First, a fresh sweet-melon, then a handful of strawberries, a couple of kiwis, four apricots, and two fat peaches. Then we went back to the kitchen where he sliced up the juiciest parts for us.

  Charles and J’mee bounced up and down in delight as he filled the bowls. They were like little kids. They hadn’t had fresh fruit in a year. An Earth-year. Not since leaving Luna. Yes, there were farms on the Cascade, but nothing like this, mostly just tomatoes and lettuce and bean sprouts and other things that could be grown in no-grav. They gobbled up the unexpected extravagance excitedly and even held the bowls to their mouths to drink the last of the juice from the bottom. I always did that too.

  “That was so good,” cried J’mee. “Tell me you eat like this all the time.”

  “I wish I could,” said Jeremy. “But right now, it’s only when the fruit is ripe. We don’t have enough orchards yet to do this every day. But we manage enough that we can do fresh fruit once or twice a week and processed jellies and juices a little more often than that. With all the new colonists coming down, we’ll either have to dig more caverns or cut way back on the fresh. If we dig new caverns, we’ll need at least a hundred people to prep them, maybe more. And we’ll need at least twenty new bots too.”

  I looked at Jeremy, very curiously. I’d never seen him so chatty. Whatever way he tested people, obviously Charles and J’mee had passed. He actually smiled at them.

  Charles and J’mee looked at each other. They did that a lot. Like they were sharing some kind of secret conversation. I knew that J’mee had an implant. Did Charles have one too? Were they telepathing?

  Next, we went to visit one of the air-plants. This one ran the length of a huge lava tube, and it had giant fans spaced along its length. Air was sucked in from the outside and passed through a series of intense sterilizing fields. The natural temperature within the caverns varied, so when we piped in fresh air, it had to be heated or cooled, depending on the season, so maintaining temperature used up a lot of power. Winterland had two geothermal vents, and we were already digging a third one, but the work was going slow. That was another problem.

  One of the other challenges of the air-plants was generating enough carbon dioxide for the farms. Plants need CO2. They extract the carbon and use it to assemble cellulose to build their stems and leaves. They release the oxygen they’re not using into the atmosphere. But because Hella is already so oxygen rich, we have to augment the CO2 levels to give our immigrant plants a little help, so we have CO2 extractors everywhere, piping as much as we can to the gardens. But even Hellan plants respond well to extra CO2. There’s a lot we’re still learning. We also extract a lot of CO2 from the protein farms where we grow all our meat. The meat breathes while it grows.

  Summerland only has a few sealed environments, but almost all of the caverns at Winterland are sealed against the elements, so we can actually keep the oxygen levels inside a little closer to Earth-normal. That’s another thing the Council debates every year—whether or not to bring the oxy levels in the caverns up to Hella-normal. There are good arguments on both sides.

  Charles and J’mee said how much they were impressed with the air-plants. Charles shared about how he and his brothers had grown up in a tube town in El Paso. So he really didn’t like tubes all that much, not any kinds of tubes, but the air-plant was definitely impressive.

  Then I took them to see the machine shop, where the big fabbers worked night and day. This week, the fabbers were churning out parts for bots. Bots of all sizes scurried around the floor of the cavern, gathering raw parts from the fabbers and delivering them to other bots who sorted them into bins and delivered them to various assembly lines where still more bots assembled the pieces into sub-assemblies that would eventually become parts of new bots. As we watched, new service bots were already rolling off the end of the line and into the certification bays.

  After lunch in the caf—salad and rice, noodles and fish cake—we went to the motor pool, so they could see the Rollagons. They were very curious about the migrations. We found Lilla-Jack working with one of the maintenance teams. They were replacing a bent axle, but she stepped away from the job to show Charles and J’mee the bridge of the truck and the living module behind. They both wanted to climb up into the turrets, of course. Lilla-Jack said they’d have to be certified before they could go on a ride-along. I promised to help them study for the tests, but they’d have to rack up a hundred hours in the simulators too.

  As we headed back to the main tunnel, J’mee asked, “Is there a theater here too?”

  “We use the caf, mostly. Why?”

  “Well . . . Charles and his orchestra will need a place to perform, won’t they?”

  Charles made a face. “The acoustics in the caf are pretty bad. It’s shaped all wrong and the walls are too bright, sonically I mean—the whole thing rings like a bell. We’d have to hang damping curtains and then tune the whole space—it’d be a big job.” He thought for a moment. “You know what would be a better place? One of those gardens that we saw this morning. The rose garden maybe. We could put up a stage against one of the empty cavern walls. We wouldn’t need as much damping. Do you think Jeremy would let me test that?”

  “Jeremy doesn’t like to have a lot of people trampling through his caverns,” I said. “But we could ask him. Let me talk to my mom first. She understands nuance.”

  By then it was midday and the tunnel began to fill up with people.

  “Where’s everybody going?” J’mee asked.

  “They’re going home. It’s nap time.”

  “Nap time?”

  “Midday siesta.”

  “I still haven’t got used to that,” Charles said.

  J’mee said, “On the Cascade, on the last leg of the journey, Captain Boynton lengthened the day-night schedule a little bit every week to get us ready for Hella-time. But it seems like a lot of people ignored it and just kept on the way they were going. Captain Boynton told them, ‘Pay now or pay later.’ But it’s hard to go against your biological time. I couldn’t do it. And I tried.”

  “Me too,” said Charles. “It was hard. A lot of people who tried to time-shift were cranky all the time. They had trouble sleeping. They had bad dreams, too.”

  I said, “Every migration has the same problems adjusting to Hella-time, but after a while everybody settles in. You don’t really have a choice. It’ll be okay.” Then I corrected myself. “Most people anyway.”

  “Most people,” Charles repeated, laughing. “Yeah. Most peo
ple.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you something.”

  I led them down the tunnel and up to a nearly deserted burrow. A big gloomy chamber, dimly lit and partitioned with curtains.

  “Here,” I said.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s one of the family dorms. It’s empty now. It would have been full, but the last migration was cancelled, so a lot of people had to hunker down at Summerland. It’s not too bad, the station has what you’d call a tube-town—”

  Charles made a face. “Ugh.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, “We had to stay down there once for a few weeks during a really bad fire season. Anyway, that left seventy apartments empty here, apartments that were assigned to families that had to stay behind, and a lot of people who were assigned to family dorms or barracks moved into those empty apartments. So nobody’s using this dorm now.”

  I pulled aside one of the curtains. There were three foam beds, some shelves, a couple of chairs and a table.

  “People live like this?” J’mee asked.

  “If you gotta, you gotta,” I said. “It’s not so bad. We had to stay here one year when I was little, when some of the apartments weren’t ready. This is okay. You get used to it.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” said Charles. He pulled the dust cover off one of the beds and sat down on it, bouncing a little to test it for softness.

  “Was your tube-town really that bad?” J’mee asked.

  He shrugged, the way that people do when they don’t want to talk about something. Instead, he stretched out. “I could nap here.”

  J’mee walked around to the other side and sat down next to Charles. After a moment, she lay down next to him. “This is nice, this is comfortable.” They smiled at each other, and he reached over and held her hand. I sat down on the bed opposite.