Hella

by David Gerrold

  “Jamie! What about me? What am I going to do all winter without you?”

  That stopped him. He faced me. He put his hands on my shoulders. I shook them off. I didn’t want him touching me now.

  “Kyle,” he said. “You’re my brother. You’re always going to be my brother. We’ll see each other every day, we’ll talk to each other just like now. Only it’ll be—you know, on the phone.”

  “It’s not the same. It won’t be the same.”

  “Kyle, you’re almost five years old.” On Earth, that would be thirteen and a third. The noise automatically gives me that calculation. “You have a job. You’re going places. You’ve already had your first outing. All you need is a little practice being on your own, and you’ll be fine.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “Jamie, you’re the only real friend I have in the whole world. And now you’re leaving me. You’re not going to be there when I need you. That’s not fair. It just isn’t.” I could feel an upset building up inside.

  “Kyle? It’s a very big opportunity for me. I can get credentialed. Do you want me to turn it down?”

  I wanted to say yes, please turn it down, I wanted to yell at him, I wanted to throw something at the wall and stamp out of the cafeteria. But I didn’t have anything to throw and even if I did, I knew I shouldn’t do any of those things. Instead, I made myself count my breaths. I could have used the noise, but I didn’t. Instead, I counted and counted and breathed as slowly as I could. Jamie never took his eyes off me the whole time, and I think maybe that’s how I was able to bring myself back. As mad as I was at him I still didn’t want to disappoint him.

  At last I looked at him, straight on, and I said, “Jamie, you’re always teaching me how to be careful, how to watch what I say so I won’t be selfish. This is one of those times, isn’t it? I have to do what’s best, yes? Not what I want, but what you want?”

  “Kyle, that’s right. This is one of those times. And I’m proud of you for recognizing it. See? That proves you’re ready to be on your own.”

  He was right, but it didn’t change anything. I wanted to cry. And I hadn’t done that since my dad died.

  * * *

  —

  I’m not allowed to act out anymore. Jamie says I have to find something else to do instead. He calls it “sublimation.” I don’t see anything sublime about it at all, but Jamie says that’s a different word even though it looks like it comes from the same root.

  So I went home and took a shower and washed myself for a long time, then I put on a soft longshirt and nothing else, closed the door to my room, and started editing a longer video about the leviathans and their annual migration. It was something to do, so I wouldn’t have to think about things I didn’t want to think about.

  Jamie knows I don’t like being touched. It’s even more than that. I don’t even like wearing clothes, it’s like being in a portable cage. Most of the work clothes we have to wear feel too rough, and when I have to tighten the belts and the straps and wear all the necessary tools and survival kits, I feel confined. So when I’m alone, I wear a kilt or a longshirt and nothing else. When I was little, Marley teased me that I was “girlish,” which didn’t make sense at all to me, because I stopped being a girl before I was three, when I wanted to be a boy like Jamie. Besides, Marley was tall and burly and only wore workshoes and jumpsuits. If I wore a heavy jumpsuit like her, would that be “girlish?” And why was “girlish” an insult anyway? I told Marley she was stupid and she punched me.

  Mom says it’s all right to wear whatever makes you happy, that’s why we have lots of dress-up holidays all year long. But the fabbers and weavers and cutting machines and sewing bots are always so busy with other things that we really don’t spend a lot of time on costumes. Mostly it’s face-painting and silly hats and the occasional old robe pulled out of storage and repurposed. Migration time, everyone wears something silly. It’s a tradition that started with the Big Break-In when everyone had to evacuate in whatever they were wearing. So now we wear whatever.

  It’s the mid-party that gets the most attention because it’s the halfway point, at least we hope it’s the halfway point. Everyone says that if nothing bad has happened by the halfway, nothing bad is going to happen at all because more than half the herd has passed.

  But that’s not really true, because after most of the migration passes, there’s another few days of prowling bigmouths trailing the slower members of the herd, so people have to stay close to the station and concentrate on preparations for our own migration. Sometimes the carnosaurs will gnaw at the outer fence or even throw themselves at it. We think they’re trying to get at our cows. So if anything really bad is going to happen, that’s the most dangerous time.

  We have a lot of videos of the Big Break-In. I love watching them, because they’re some of the best close-ups we have of leviathan calves. Most of the time we can’t get close to them, the moms are very protective. The Big Break-In started with a crush of leviathans bringing down a whole section of outer fence. Three of them were so badly injured in the stumble that they couldn’t get up again. And two of them had calves who stayed with them, moaning pitifully. It’s really sad, because the bigmouths moved in that night and killed the calves first. The moms could only watch and screech.

  The Council voted to euthanize the injured leviathans, they were calling them thunderfeet in the video, I think that’s where that name got started. That was merciful, but then they started talking about taking down the carnosaurs too until someone pointed out that if they did that, the pile of meat would just get bigger and attract even more predators, so they had to “let nature take its course” which mostly translated out to “do nothing,” watch and wait.

  According to the records, some people, my dad included, wanted to torch the carcasses. All of the saurs are afraid of fire. But the Council didn’t want to spare the fuel and some of the scientists wanted to gather samples of leviathan meat. Some of the others just wanted to watch the carnosaurs eat, because they thought it might be important to know. But some people, I think Mom was one of them, said they just wanted a close-up seat for the gore-fest.

  A special emergency team had to stay at Summerland to repair the broken fences. It took most of the Winter. Everybody else had to evacuate. It wasn’t until after we got settled in at Winterland Station that Mom told me that my dad wouldn’t be joining us. I was very young, not even two. All the youngest and their moms had been evacuated first. We were lifted out, Mom said I slept the whole way, they might have sedated me, Jamie said I could be difficult, but that was before I got the noise, but anyway Mom didn’t know how to tell me what had really happened to my dad and how I might react, so she just said that he couldn’t come with us. Of course, I didn’t believe her, I wanted to walk all the way back to Summerland because I knew she was lying to me, but she wasn’t. If it wasn’t for Jamie staying with me all the time, I don’t know what I would have done. He says it was hard because he knew what Mom wasn’t telling me, but that’s when Jamie and I started being friends.

  I put as much of this as I could into my own videos. If you just access the raw video, there’s a lot of boring stuff, animals just plodding along or munching grass or standing around not doing anything at all. What I like to do is focus in on all the little details, the way the skin wrinkles when a leviathan shifts its weight just before it lifts a huge foot, the way the ground quakes when that same foot comes down again, the way the dust leaps up around every booming thump, the way the huge tail lifts when the leviathan starts dropping its big manure-bombs, all the little insect-things that come scurrying out of the dirt attracted by the droppings, all the creatures that live on the backs and sides of the giant beasts.

  I especially like to show how the great shovelmouths work—that’s another thing we call them. You have to see them eat to understand. Grass doesn’t have a lot of nutritiona
l value in it, so the leviathans have to gather in as much as possible with every bite, that’s why they have such wide faces. They’re not very neat eaters either, they pull up great clumps, but as much falls back to the ground as they gather in. They chew and chew and chew. They also pick up gravel from the gravel beds, because the grinding of the stones in their guts helps break up the stiff grass so the bacteria in their intestines can convert the cellulose to glucose. Wherever you find a pile of time-rounded stones, you’ve found a place where a leviathan died. A lot of times, carrion-eaters drag the bones away, but not the belly stones.

  The migration goes in a great clockwise circle, although for a couple years it was a lopsided hourglass shape because a series of crushing storms pushed the migration in on itself. I wonder if the migration is clockwise because of the direction the planet rotates, like the way water circles the drain in the northern hemisphere, or is it just the way the animals have evolved to make the most of the availability of food across the changing seasons. And how much of it is the weather? Someday we’ll get around to modeling all the different factors, but Jamie says we still don’t know what all the different factors are.

  There’s a place on the southwest end of the migration, even farther south than Winterland Station, where the spring floods make for some very dangerous river crossings. The water rushes fast, the river is deep, the footing is slippery, and the crocosaurs come rushing in to attack the leviathans. When the rivers shrink to streams during the driest part of the summer, there are bones everywhere, and layers and layers of rounded stones, thousands of years of belly stones. Some of the explorers call it “bellystone park.” I think that’s supposed to be a joke, but I don’t get it. It must be an Earth-joke. We seem to have a lot of those. I put that into the video because if it was an Earth-joke, the new colonists would probably get it. Maybe one of them would explain it to me, but Jamie says when you explain a joke, it stops being funny.

  According to the clock, I worked twelve hours and missed a few meals. It wasn’t until Jamie hobbled in that I realized how long I’d been working. “Come on, Kyle. I checked. You’ve missed three suppers.” I didn’t want to go, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I followed him back to the caf where Mom and Captain Skyler and Emily-Faith were all chattering happily over late night pie and coffee. Apparently, I had missed a lot of conversations.

  I got myself a cheese and mango sandwich and a couple of hard-boiled eggs and a bowl of fruit salad and a limonade fizzy. I’d go back for pie and coffee later, if I still had room. I sat down at the end of the table without saying anything. Everybody said hello, and I grunted hello back.

  “Hey, Kyle,” Captain Skyler said. “I see you got a lot of good work done. Very nice job today.”

  “Thank you,” I said, without looking up from my sandwich.

  “Listen, Kyle—” He moved his chair around so he was closer to me. “I want to tell you something. It’s all right if you don’t ever want to call me dad. You can keep calling me Captain if you want. But I’d like to know if it’s all right for me to call you son?”

  “I don’t care.”

  Mom and the Captain looked at each other. Then both looked back at me. “Are you unhappy about something?”

  “No. Yes. Jamie’s not coming with us. I’m going to be all alone.”

  “No, you won’t, you have lots of friends—” Mom started to argue, but Captain Skyler put a hand over hers to stop her. Amazing—it worked.

  He turned back to me. “Yes, Kyle, you will be alone. More alone than ever before. Because that’s part of growing up. That’s what it means to be a grownup, being able to be on your own. But your mom will be there. And I will too. So you won’t always be alone.”

  “It won’t be the same,” I said. Then I took a big bite of my sandwich so I wouldn’t have to say anything else.

  “Well . . .” The Captain said gently, “I don’t think you have any choice in the matter, Kyle. No, wait, that’s wrong. You do have a choice. You can grow up—or you can just grow older without growing up. Like Marley Layton. Do you want to be like Marley?”

  “No.” I muttered it into my sandwich.

  “I didn’t think so. Kyle, you’re very smart. You’re one of the smartest people in the colony. You’re even smarter than you think you are.”

  “So what?” I took another bite.

  “So this.” He slid a memory card across the table.

  “What’s this?” I said it with my mouth full.

  “It’s a whole bunch of messages from people on the Cascade, thanking you for all the videos.”

  “Really?” I looked at the card in front of me.

  “Really. And they want you to make more. They’ve got all kinds of questions about all the things that live in the savannah. They want to know about the crow-birds, the hoppers, everything—the swimmers, the flyers, the crawlers, the mud-bugs, the night-grumblers, everything. They want you to make more videos.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really!” That was Jamie. “See? You’re already making new friends.”

  “But you’re my best friend. And I’m going to miss you.”

  “You’re my best friend too, Kyle. And I’m going to miss you a whole lot. More than you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, you numble-butt! Really!”

  “Am not a numble-butt! What’s a numble-butt?”

  “You are.”

  “Jamie! I don’t want to lose you—” The words came out before I could stop them. “My dad got killed staying at Summerland!”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Now I understand.” He came over and sat beside me on the bench. He put his arm around my shoulder. I let him. He leaned in and whispered into my ear. “I’ll be careful. I promise. I’ll be super-careful.”

  “My dad was super-careful.”

  “Uh-huh. And you’re scared that you’ll lose me. That you’ll be alone.”

  I nodded.

  “Hey, don’t you know how hard this is going to be on me, not having you around? You’re my best friend.”

  “Um.” That’s one of the things about my syndrome. I don’t think about other people enough.

  Jamie said, “Kyle, I don’t have to tell you how big an opportunity this is. Maintenance engineers are some of the most important jobs on Hella. They make things work. They build things. They design things. They run the fabbers. I almost didn’t apply, because I didn’t want to leave you, but—” He looked across to Emily-Faith, then back to me. “—but Emily-Faith said that you needed to find out that you could do things without me. You’re growing up, Kyle. You’re turning into a really interesting person. I am so proud of you. Part of me wants to stay and see what you’re going to do next. And part of me wants to know what you can do on your own. But just like you have to figure out what’s next for you, I have to figure out what’s next for me. Otherwise we both stay stuck. So here we are and I’m already so unhappy I can’t even think right.” He stopped then, out of breath.

  “Oh,” I said. “But we’ll still be able to talk to each other, Jamie. Every day. You won’t have to worry. I’ll be all right, I know that. I’m just going to miss sharing sandwiches with you and sitting on your bed and talking over the whole day with you.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to miss that too.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “Really.”

  Emily-Faith looked at Jamie. “See? I told you.”

  * * *

  —

  The memory card was filled with messages from a lot of people on the Cascade. It took me several days, but I read all of them, each and every one. There were a lot, but I answered all of the questions that I could. Each time I opened a note, I also looked at the biography of the sender. A lot of the notes were from people who planned to research the plants and animals of Hella, but a lot more were from people my age.

 
A girl named J’mee Cheifitz wrote that she loved all kinds of animals. She hoped that we had dogs. I told her that we do have some dogs working lookout, but we don’t have any dogs for pets yet. But we have stem cells in cryo, so maybe someday.

  A boy named Trent had lost his father on the voyage. He still had his mother though, a little brother named Jason and a littler sister named Willa. He asked a lot of questions, mostly about the kinds of trees and plants and flowers that grew on Hella.

  I also heard from Gary Andraza, Chris Pavek, and Milla Nomor. Milla wanted to know about recipes and cooking and painting. Chris wanted to know more about the drive-arounds, he wanted to explore Hella. Gary wanted to know everything.

  And then there was Charles, he was the one who had organized the band that played the music that they broadcast to us when they popped out of hyperstate. Charles was my age, almost five Hella-years. He had an older brother who was married to his boy friend, and a younger brother too. He asked if we had people in the colony who played instruments. Did we have a band or an orchestra? I told him that I knew several people who played instruments, and they played as a band for holidays. I promised to introduce him to them.

  They all asked about the leviathans, of course. Then I surprised them by telling them that the leviathans weren’t the biggest animals on Hella. The humongosaurs were almost twice the size of leviathans. But they didn’t form gigantic herds. The land couldn’t support such an ambulatory biomass. The largest humongosaur family we’d ever tracked had only fifteen members, mostly moms and calves. But if a group ever got larger than that, it would have to split into two families. We’d seen that happen twice already.

  Occasionally, we saw a few humongosaur families traveling with the leviathan migration, but for the most part they had a different path across the continent, because they could eat higher up on the trees. But as curious as we were about the humongosaurs, the leviathans were of much greater interest.