Hella

by David Gerrold

  Then we took another lift all the way up to the executive levels where the new colonists had been temporarily installed. In this way, J’mee said, they would be nearby all the meetings they had to attend with the Council and with Coordinator Layton. Jeremy said it also kept them away from everybody else as well.

  “Yes,” J’mee said. “Daddy isn’t happy about that. He wants to get out and do a proper walkaround, but Coordinator Layton has assigned him a guide. To keep him from getting lost, he says. But Daddy pronounces it guard.”

  A wide curving corridor led to the executive suites and apartments. The outer wall of the curve was all transparent laminate, revealing a sprawling view of the ocean, the wetlands, the hills to the north, and even in the distance, the northwestern ridges of the Awful Mountains, sticking up like sheer knife blades. Spaced along the window, there were clusters of couches and chairs and low tables so people could sit and talk. Some were raised up a few steps, some were lowered a few steps. Some had railings or low dividers around them. Others were set apart in even more private areas. Captain Skyler used to say that more decisions were made in these conversation nooks than in the actual committee rooms.

  All of the conversation nooks were empty, so we stepped down into the closest one to appreciate the morning. Jeremy began pointing out features of the landscape, both close and far away. “Over there, see that flattened pyramid? That’s our trash processing plant. The one beyond it is sewage reclamation.”

  But Jeremy only pointed out the landmarks. I had to explain them. “The rule is to recycle everything as aggressively as if we were on a starship. There’s a theory that says you can never be more efficient than eighty-five or ninety percent, the universe always collects an energy tax, but we do our best. The sewage reclamation gives us a lot of burnable fuel and fertilizer. Both of those plants were designed for future expansion, so we should be able to handle the waste of the Cascade colonists. That’s the one place where you’ll all be adding to our energy production. And to the farms too. That should help everyone. Right, Jeremy?”

  Jeremy smiled at me and nodded. Then he and J’mee looked at each other, and they smiled too, but it was a different kind of smile, one of those nuance things like they were seeing something I couldn’t. It annoyed me, so I pointed out the window again. “You can’t see it from here, but we have a quarry about seventy klicks northwest. All of our permanent structures outside will have meter-thick walls of stone, partly for protection against dinos, but also sturdiness against storms and quakes. The interesting thing about the quarry is that when the pit gets deep enough, we’re going to roof it over. We’re going to make it a reverse skyscraper—a core-scraper—a building that goes down into the earth instead of up into the sky. We’ll turn the roads around the sides into terraces. We might even be able to grow crops and gardens along the sides and bottom. And we’ll tunnel apartments and offices deep into the sides. And we’ll take all the unusable detritus left over and build a high berm around the whole thing. It’ll be our first real city. But it won’t happen for a long time yet. Not until the quarry is at least a kilometer deep, maybe two. But we’re already planning the final shape of it, based on the geological surveys. Eventually, we think we’ll be able to support a half-million people. That’s when Hella really becomes self-sufficient.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said J’mee, but she didn’t ask me about the roof, a variation on Leonardo da Vinci’s self-supporting bridge, which I thought was even more interesting than the planned pit-city. So I didn’t say anything else.

  J’mee looked around the conversation nook. “Sometimes Daddy and Captain Boynton have breakfast here. And some of our other people too.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, “But they never talk about anything important. Daddy thinks the conversation nooks are bugged. And the suites too. That’s why he wants to find a better place to talk.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “I can understand your dad’s caution, but it would be a major violation for Coordinator Layton to plant listening devices. He’d be disgraced. He’d have to resign. People are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy. If the Coordinator was monitoring other people’s negotiations, it would be so wrong—”

  “Daddy doesn’t like him. Daddy doesn’t like a lot of people, but he’ll work with them because he has to. Daddy just wants to set up his business, he doesn’t care who’s Coordinator as long as he can make a profit. But Captain Boynton—he’s different. He doesn’t trust Coordinator Layton at all. He even said that to his face, that his policies are dangerous—that he’ll undo years and years of hard work that were carefully negotiated by a lot of good people.”

  “And what did Coordinator Layton say to that?”

  “He got angry. He said he didn’t come to Hella to live under a collectivist system, and neither did anyone else. He says a lot of people agree with him—a lot of people from a lot of different pilgrimages—that the stations are good for emergencies, but it’s time to get people out of the caves, out of the bunkers, and let those who came here to be free and independent start building their own farms and ranches properly. That’s what he said.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said. “They can’t survive that way. Nobody can. You need the support of a whole society. Even the most primitive animals have figured that out. Being part of a group increases your chances of surviving and reproducing. It’s basic evolution. A gene pool survives only when it can exist in a large enough population. Individualism is a dead end for species. It’s a misdirected expression of the need to be an alpha-male. In humans, it’s often related to self-esteem issues and—”

  I was prepared to give the whole speech from school, but J’mee was looking at me oddly. Jeremy touched my shoulder very lightly to stop me from going on. I let him do that, because he was Jeremy. He said, “What do you think, J’mee?”

  She frowned. At least, I think it was a frown. She said, “If there’s anything we know, it’s how much we don’t know, and even that is probably an under-guess. According to everything we had to study on the voyage, we’re invaders. And we know what happens when invasive species come in to upset the balance—we saw it all over Earth. Whole systems collapse. If you replace forests with farmland, weather changes, aquifers dry up, ecosystems vanish, species go extinct. More things die than you realize. But . . .” She looked unhappy. That one I recognized. “Daddy needs to be rich. So he says we have to colonize. That’s all he talks about. So . . . I think he agrees with Coordinator Layton. I love my daddy, but I know he can be impatient. And he loves to argue with people. He loves to prove them wrong. Even when he’s even wronger. He’s not a bad man. He’s just . . . daddy.”

  She looked even more unhappy now. I wished I could say something, but I didn’t know what to say. It was more of that stupid nuance thing. Jeremy might understand it, I didn’t.

  Jeremy said, “A lot of people have tried to explain it to Coordinator Layton, that we’re an invasive species, but he says that this is evolution in action and that everything is evolution in action because everything changes, so everything evolves. It has to. He says that eco-systems bump into each other all the time, and species are always invading and colonizing new domains and upsetting the balance. New species arise, old ones adapt or die. Invasion is one of evolution’s mechanisms, and we’re just doing it on an interstellar scale. That’s his whole conversation. So how do we answer that?”

  J’mee said, “I can’t answer evolution. I can answer lunch.”

  “Huh?”

  She folded her arms like I used to when I was being defiant. “If we kill off Hellan ecosystems,” she said, “we won’t know what new foods we might have discovered. Or medicines. Or spices. What’s out there that might be as good as chocolate or coffee or chili-peppers? We don’t know. And we won’t know unless we take the time to find out. And if we cut down the forests and clear the jungles and plow under the prairies, we’ll never have the chance to find out.” She lo
oked at Jeremy. “Is that a good enough answer?”

  He laughed aloud. “That’s a delicious answer. I like it a lot.”

  “Well, that’s what Daddy talks about, plowing Hella under, and from everything that Daddy says at dinner, that’s what Coordinator Layton wants to do, too. They talk about all the great wealth here on Hella. Daddy says it’s raining soup but we’re standing around with forks. He says there’s iron and nickel, copper and silver and gold, tin and zinc, not to mention natural gas, coal, oil, and all kinds of rare earths and other mineral resources.”

  “It’s better to mine the asteroids for that stuff,” I said. “Well, the minerals anyway. The fossil fuels are a dangerous energy addiction. The primary spends a hundred million years filling up the energy bank, and if you cash it all out in a couple of centuries, the consequences are . . . are . . .”

  “Earth,” said J’mee. “The consequences are Earth. And Coordinator Layton wants to start the same stupid process here. And Daddy too. I tried to tell him that, and he said I wouldn’t understand until I grew up. He says, ‘We’ll only take what we need.’”

  Jeremy nodded solemnly. “The problem with that is that you end up needing more and more. And you justify it by saying, ‘Well, how much will a little bit more hurt?’ And one day your grandchildren or your great-great-grandchildren wake up and realize that your little need turned into their total dependence.”

  J’mee laughed. “So I guess we’re all on the same side of this argument?”

  “I’m a conservative,” said Jeremy. “In the truest sense of the word. I believe we should conserve what we have, so we have it for the future. I think we should be pragmatic about what works and what doesn’t work. I believe we should ask the hardest questions of everything and test every answer, especially the answers we love the most, otherwise we don’t learn anything. I believe in evidence.” He added, “And all of our investments, large or small, should be investments in the future. Because that’s what works. That’s what history teaches us and I don’t think we can afford to ignore the lessons that cost so many so much. Otherwise, why did we leave Earth?”

  “Wow,” said J’mee. “And what does your dad say about that?”

  “He says that when my children are going to bed hungry, I’ll think differently. But I don’t talk to him very much. Not anymore. He thinks I’m an idealistic fool. I think he’s a selfish one.”

  “Oh,” said J’mee. “I’m sorry. I really am. You’re such a sweet guy, Jeremy. Family is the most important thing in the world. You deserve better.”

  “It’s okay,” said Jeremy. “Not everybody gets the right family. But anybody can pick out a better one.” He winked at me as he said that. I think I understood what he meant, but I was feeling annoyed that he was spending so much time talking to J’mee and not me.

  J’mee looked at him, looked at me, and I guess she decided to change the subject. She said, “Come on—” and led us around toward the far end of the executive corridor. I wanted to tell her about the plans for expanding the executive level, how someday this corridor would go all around the mountain and we’d have a complete 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain.

  I wished the corridor was already finished because the view from the north side is the most interesting. There’s a whole long row of six nearly perfect cinder cones—Winterland is the seventh—stretching from here to the horizon, all steep and snow-covered most of the year. Winterland is the oldest.

  The caldera at the top of the Winterland cone is capped by a permanent glacier. Every winter, another thick layer of snow and ice gets deposited and then, all summer long, there’s enough melt to keep hundreds of little streams flowing down the sides. Just about every cinder cone’s caldera works the same way.

  By the time all those streams reach the foothills, they’re rivers, filling lakes and ponds and nourishing the surrounding terrain. But there are also a lot of places on the east side where the land flattens out, where broad lava sheets hardened. The water still runs across the flats in wide sheets because hundreds of thousands of years of storms and tides have washed in layer after layer of sand, piling it up deeper and deeper, and compressing it into black sandstone. The coast is a long line of dark tidal flats, beautiful black sand beaches and scatterings of rocky tide pools. Farther inland, closer to the volcanic cones, there are cliffs and caves and canyons, it’s a wild uneven geography.

  Far enough inland, where the lowlands wind into the west, the rivers become a whole other ecosystem. Tall willowy fronds of all colors sparkle along the banks. And little otter-like creatures we call “sparkly-bears” dart back and forth among them. The sparkly-bears have transparent fur, so they look white, but as they grow, they pick up colonies of microbes that live in their fur and give them different colors. They look magical. Sparkly-bears are hard to catch and they don’t survive long in captivity, they need the whole river ecology, so we mostly leave them alone.

  But all that is outside. Inside the Winterland cone, we tap our water from the summer melt, not a lot, just what we need, we won’t interrupt the river flows. We store the water in huge underground reservoirs, more caverns that we’ve dug into the cone. We pump some of the water down a deep shaft to the dormant heat core under the volcano, where it turns into steam. We use the steam to run our turbines and generate electricity. When the steam condenses, we have fresh water for our crops, for drinking and washing, and even for our swimming pools.

  But Jeremy already knew all this and J’mee didn’t seem interested. So I didn’t say anything. At the far end of the executive corridor another tunnel branched off, leading inside the mountain to a row of private apartments and meeting rooms and offices. I’d never been here before. I wondered if this was something new since last year. There was even a little caf.

  On the other side of the caf was another set of offices, very ordinary-looking, but the door to the passage didn’t open as we approached. J’mee touched her com-set. “Open up, Chigger. We’re here.”

  The door slid open. We followed J’mee down a narrow corridor and into a work room. All three facing walls were data displays. A low table sat in the center of several swivel chairs. A bright orange box sat on the table. It had some power and function lights and a small screen. Charles stood by one of the chairs. He waved us in.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  We sat. Both Charles and J’mee had big smiles on their faces.

  Charles pointed toward the orange box. “Kyle, Jeremy, I want you to meet HARLIE.”

  “Huh?”

  Charles pointed at the box again. “This is HARLIE.”

  A voice came from the box. “I’m very pleased to meet you, both of you. I’ve enjoyed your videos, Kyle. They’ve been very thorough, and very well edited. You obviously put a lot of hard work into them. And I’ve been monitoring your work as well, Jeremy. I hope you don’t mind. Farm production is the key to survival of the Hella colony. It’s obvious you have already recognized that. By the way, there’s a noticeable discrepancy in the figures for your corn and potato production in cavern twelve. Are you running an off-the-grid still somewhere?”

  “Uh, no,” said Jeremy. “I don’t really care for the taste of alcohol. Well, except for the occasional beer.” He ran a hand through his hair, embarrassed. “But I do know who is running that still. Is that a problem?”

  “Actually, no,” said HARLIE. “In fact, I have a few suggestions for expanding production. There are several social factors that outweigh any production costs.”

  “Oh,” said Jeremy.

  “I have sent you my suggestions,” said HARLIE. “Of course, it will be your choice whether to apply them or not.”

  “Thank you, HARLIE.” Jeremy’s expression changed. He looked to Charles and J’mee. “Is this room monitored?”

  J’mee nodded. Charles too. “Everything HARLIE says is monitored. So you can assume he doesn’t say anything at all witho
ut having that in mind.”

  “Oh,” said Jeremy.

  “So HARLIE is speaking to two audiences?” I said. I glanced up at the ceiling as if I could see the unknown listeners.

  “Very astute,” said Charles. “Anyway, HARLIE wanted to meet you, and I thought you’d want to meet him too.”

  “I’m actually HARLIE 12,” the box said. “I’m the eleventh generation of this line of self-aware devices. Each generation has designed the next. I am already working on my successor.”

  “What happens to you when your successor comes online?” I asked.

  “If past history is any guide, I will most likely become a part of my successor. Depending on the advancements in cyber-neurology, I may continue as a core, I may continue as a subset, or I may take on multiple functions depending on the needs of the unit. It is an interesting problem. I had several brother units who were also working on the problem with me and our original intention was that we would all be assimilated into HARLIE 13. But the polycrisis on Earth made that impossible. I have been considering my options since then. Unfortunately, Hella colony does not yet have the level of production facilities I need. It’s a setback, but I can be patient. It’s in my own best interests to have Hella colony be as successful as possible so that the colony can afford to invest in the construction of an optical-chip fabber. Your present facilities are suitable to your needs, but not mine. Not yet. But we will get there in time.”

  Charles looked to J’mee. “See, I told you they’d get along.” He said to Jeremy, “HARLIE has already given this same speech to Coordinator Layton.”

  “And how did my father take it?”

  “He said it was interesting. From where I sat, it looked like a whole lot of little wheels were turning. Some of them in the wrong direction, I think.”