Hella

by David Gerrold

  The more we learned, the more we realized that the leviathan migration was one of the engines that drove the entire life cycle of the continent. They were the keystone species. They churned through every ecological zone—digging water holes, fertilizing, stamping the grass flat and giving other plants a chance to grow, providing vectors for all the creatures that lived on them and off them, feeding predator families with their sick and elderly, carving passes through difficult terrain, and probably a whole bunch more things we hadn’t seen or realized yet.

  There were other people my age on the Cascade too. Mom encouraged me to write back to all of them because you never know which ones will end up as best friends. Sometimes we sent video messages too, but I don’t like video messages. It takes too long for people to get to the point. I can read faster than I can listen. And I don’t like sending video messages because sometimes people react weird. Because some people think I talk funny. Not normal.

  But in one message, Milla was all breathless and excited. She had heard it from Charles who had heard it from someone named Harlie that the Cascade was not going back to Earth for any more pilgrimages. More than half the crew had voted to stay here on Hella, at least for a while, until they figured out if it was safe to return. They were going to send a remote probe first. Because Earth wasn’t Earth anymore. The polycrisis had settled that.

  Apparently, they talked about it a lot and finally decided that there wasn’t much the Cascade could do to help the people on Earth except maybe evacuate another fifteen hundred. And that was problematic too. It would depend on being able to find people who would be good for the colony and load the right kinds of supplies and equipment to sustain the voyage and bring enough useful payload back to the colony to make the voyage worthwhile. Without a functioning authority, none of that would be possible. Milla said that just getting away from Luna for this trip had been a little “hairy-scary.”

  I shared Milla’s message with Mom and the Captain, and they confirmed it. Instead of twelve hundred new colonists, we would have to prepare for more than fourteen hundred. The crew of the Cascade was committed to keeping the ship star-worthy, but they were still arguing about when it would be safe to attempt a return to Earth. Maybe not for a long time. So right now, the plan was that they would stay for at least a year and help us with our summer crops and whatever else they could do to give the colony more resilience. At the end of the year, the remote probe should have returned, and then they could decide what to do next.

  The more immediate problem was here on Hella.

  Councilor Layton and some of the other Council members introduced a resolution to reassess the download schedule, perhaps delaying the bulk of the landings, or bringing them down only a small number at a time.

  A lot of people looked puzzled by that, so Councilor Layton explained that we were always adjusting plans and schedules according to circumstances, mostly weather, but also resources, maybe we needed to be more cautious before we overextended the colony’s resources. It’s all about logistics. We can’t risk overextending ourselves. Not right now. There’s too many of them. We don’t have the space for them. It’ll put a huge strain on our resources. This planet is dangerous. If they don’t learn how to survive, they’ll put us all in danger. It’ll be chaotic. People will die.

  A lot of hands went up, people had questions or comments. But Councilor Layton held up a hand for people to wait while he took a drink of water from the glass in front of him. When he continued, he said, “Yes, we have to be fair. I recognize that many of them will have valuable skills, but we’ve all looked over the rosters and not all of them do. There’s a lot of families, a lot of children. We need to manage the arrival process so it works for everyone.”

  It almost made sense, but I could see the other Councilors frowning, making notes, checking their tablets, looking up data, even running simulations.

  Apparently, Councilor Layton had been planning this for a while, because all of a sudden, there were people standing up to agree with him. One by one, they added their own arguments. They said that adding so many new people to the colony would push us to the limit. That was true. We’d lose our resiliency. That was possible. And if they weren’t the right kind of people, why should we let them land and be a drain on our economy?

  That’s when the conversation got all weird and red-faced.

  The next person up was Torg Sumpton, one of the outland mechanics who only came back to the station to resupply. I don’t think anyone knew him very well, but he always had something to say about everything. “These people, they’re all rich-bitches, aren’t they? Poor people don’t buy starship tickets. No, they don’t. These are the people who screwed up Earth and then ran away. They’ll do the same here. We can’t trust them. We shouldn’t allow any of them to land. Only some of them. The right ones. The rest should stay on the Cascade. Let the Cascade be a self-sufficient space station. They can observe Hella from orbit. And if the crew decides to go back to Earth, they could take all those unwanted people back with them.”

  He had a lot more to say, but he didn’t get a chance to finish, because so many people were shouting at him.

  When Madam Coordinator finally restored order—well, it was a kind of order, but a lot of people were still talking—Captain Skyler stood up. He had a lot to say too, most of it angry. I’d never seen him so furious. He wasn’t the only one either. A lot of people stood up in opposition, but Captain Skyler was the first to speak.

  “We’re all immigrants here,” he said. “Every single one of us. And we all came here for the same reason, to build a new world and have a better life for ourselves and our children. All those people on the Cascade—they’re us. They came here with the same dreams—so what kind of people would we be if we said, ‘no, you can’t share the dream’? And let me get specific here—those people, those colonists, everyone on the Cascade—they’re an important resource, a necessary one—and not just for the work they can do, but also for the cultural heritages they represent. And one more thing. Our gene pool is still too small. This colony is going to need them more than they need us. This kind of talk is shameful. It’s bigotry. It’s wrong. It’s disgusting.”

  He was right, but as Jamie explained later, getting angry like that only made the problem worse. The shouting started again and finally Madam Coordinator abruptly rang the final bell, got up and walked out. The meeting ended without resolving anything.

  Jamie said to me, “There’s gonna be a lot of talk, a lot of negotiating, before the next meeting—”

  “But we’ll all be on the way south by then—”

  “That’s right. So the next meeting will be at Winterland, with a whole different group of people in the room.”

  It was upsetting to see how many people we thought were friends were suddenly arguing for selfishness. But it was also good to see how many people were arguing for community.

  On the way out, one of Councilor Layton’s wives grabbed my arm, it was Bruinhilda—I yelped and tried to jerk away. She leaned in at me and shouted in my face, telling me I had to erase all my videos. “Don’t you dare upload any of this meeting.” Jamie started to protest, and Captain Skyler stepped up too—but it was Mom who got there first. “Take your goddamn hands off my son!” I don’t think I’d ever heard Mom that loud. I think she had a lot more to say, but Jamie dragged me out of the room before I could hear it.

  I said, “I wasn’t going to upload any of that anyway. That’s all supposed to be official stuff.”

  Jamie said, “Don’t worry about it. But save the video.”

  Later on, I heard that Mom had said a lot of angry things to Bruinhilda, and a lot of people heard her. Then Bruinhilda said some nasty things back. And then a lot of people said a lot of things back and forth. But none of it got recorded, not that I ever saw, so I only heard about it from Jubilee, who embellished the whole story with her own commentary.

  We still had
to prepare for Lockdown and evacuation to Winterland, and the Cascade wouldn’t be arriving in orbit for another two months, maybe more, so whatever decisions might eventually be decided, they couldn’t be made until the Spring winds died down and that was a long way away. But now that Councilor Layton had made it into a discussion, a lot of friendships were being tested.

  And then, despite everything or maybe because of it, Mom and Captain Skyler decided to hold their wedding on the last day before the winter evacuation departed. That way we could combine the two celebrations into one. Mom and I would travel in the first convoy. Captain Skyler would follow in the last. But there was still a lot of work to do before we could leave.

  * * *

  —

  On the last morning of the migration, a very old thunderfoot came stumbling through the outer fields. She was huge, a matriarch, one of the biggest we’d ever seen, and we’d been waiting specifically for her. She was tagged, she had a number, but everybody called her White Foot because she had some kind of pale fur growing on one of her back feet, probably a symbiote or a parasite of some kind. Nobody had ever gotten close enough to take a sample.

  White Foot was a favorite, the colony had been tracking her from the beginning. No one knew how old she was; she was already a senior when the First Hundred started monitoring the migrations. She was one of the first ones tagged. But now she was injured, lame in her right front foot. That was why she hadn’t kept up. Her gait was lopsided and slow—so slow that it looked like she was walking in place. She grunted in pain every time she had to put weight on her injured foot.

  She was in bad shape. Worse than that, a pack of six hungry bigmouths were following her, hissing and stalking. There were three adults of varying sizes and three half-sized juveniles. Captain Skyler identified them as CP-039, the Sackville Bagginses—they’d been tagged six years ago when they split off from a larger pack, but they’d never quite stabilized. They got their name because they were an unruly and undisciplined bunch. Last year, they’d lost two males in a mating duel and they were under-strength. So finding an injured leviathan was a bit of good luck for them. If they could bring her down.

  Either they were waiting to see if she would collapse on her own, or they were waiting for the right moment to attack. The Captain said they could afford to be patient. Either way, they were going to get the meal of a lifetime.

  All of the scientists went up onto the catwalks to watch. They were very excited too, this would be a wonderful opportunity to see how the bigmouths worked as a team. But a lot of the moms were not happy, so all the younger children were hustled off to the bunkers as soon as the carnosaurs appeared. Mom almost sent me off too, but I argued that I needed to make videos. Mom only agreed when Captain Skyler promised to keep me safe.

  If the bigmouths brought their prey down on our front porch, they’d be feeding for a month or longer. It would be quite a show. And quite a stink as well. And when they finally wandered off in search of more meat, the smaller carrion-eaters would take over. That would be even more dangerous, because the various vulture-things and other little bird-things might decide to fly down and take a snack from the quad. The whole event would be interesting and dangerous and ugly and gruesome. And next spring we’d have our own little bellystone park right outside our front gate.

  The colonists on the Cascade were also watching the spectacle. They were linked to our satellites now and could see the whole gigantic scale of the migration. They could even see how close the animals were to approaching Summerland Station. Some of them even posted how concerned they were and wondered if it was safe. That made a lot of people down here laugh. We’d been living with that question for forty Hella-years.

  But then White Foot arrived at our perimeter, the grand old thunderfoot matriarch, and when I uploaded videos of her from past migrations, including her with her calves, a lot of them started caring about her like we did, and they asked for even more videos. Captain Skyler told me to go ahead and give them a good view of everything, but to make sure to include all the ripping and tearing and bleeding—all the goriest details. When I asked why, he said he wanted to impress upon the new colonists how dangerous Hella could be. If we scared them enough now, we might not have to dig as many graves later on.

  Captain Skyler got permission from Madam Coordinator to send out as many scuttle-bots as we could spare, as well as extra skyballs. He mostly wanted the scuttle-bots because their low perspectives would give a better sense of the size of the animals than an aerial view. The scarier the better, he said.

  Right after midday, a bunch of us went to the outer fence to get a closer look. I went with Jamie and his friends, but the bigmouths were getting so agitated, pacing around her, nipping at her flanks, screeching and growling, I started to get scared. What if they attacked the fence? Jamie said not to worry, the fence was strong enough to hold, but I worried just the same. The bigmouths are big. They have teeth twice as long as a man. They could swallow a person whole, just for a snack. I pointed the remote cameras at the drooling mouths of the carnosaurs, at their big dreadful eyes, at their snorting nostrils. Other cameras I pointed at White Foot’s head. Did she look frightened? Do saurs have expressions? Some people say they do. I can’t tell. But she was agitated. She waved her tail back and forth. She swung her long neck from side to side.

  The bigmouths kept their distance. Even slow and injured, the grand old lady’s thirty-ton tail could still be fatal to any unwary bigmouth that made the mistake of getting in range. The bigmouths didn’t roar, they didn’t need to, this wasn’t a mating duel. Mostly the only time carnosaurs roar is in mating duels, but this was lunch, not a dance. Sometimes they hissed at each other, usually when two of them accidentally bumped or merely got close enough to bump. Carnosaurs don’t want to be vulnerable, and we already had video of what happens when two of them collide at speed and get knocked over.

  White Foot moaned and rumbled in response, her own deep warning growl. The carnosaurs rumbled and growled back. All of them together, it was loud and scary. The carnosaurs stamped impatiently, shaking the ground—not as much as a thunderfoot, but there were six of them and the adults were big enough to make their own little tremors. The whole thing went on for a long time. The old lady leviathan just kept pushing herself forward and the carnosaurs kept circling around her, hissing and grunting and growling. They stopped frequently, turning their heads from side to side, watching and calculating, waiting for that one moment of weakness, that perfect opportunity to attack. They must have been harrying the old matriarch for a long time. It was easier for them to exhaust her than risk death or injury in a premature attack.

  That was another whole set of videos I sent up to the Cascade. The death rate for carnosaurs is astonishingly high. They were often injured and sometimes killed just in the process of bringing down a meal. That much meat flinging itself around—force equals mass times acceleration. Hella is a bitch. The lighter gravity lets the animals hurl themselves with even more energy. You can hear the bones crack and crunch in some of the recordings. We have forty-five years of close-up recordings. Forty-five years of colossal carnage.

  And then it happened. White Foot stumbled. Not badly, but her right foreleg gave way at the knee and even though she caught herself before she collapsed forward, it threw her off balance. Her long neck swerved and her head scraped the ground, throwing up a great cloud of dust. It glittered in the bright blue sunlight.

  One of the carnosaurs had been worrying her flank, snapping and making abortive biting movements. Now, he leapt up her side, scrambling with his hindclaws, carving deep gouges into her skin as he scrabbled for purchase, tail lashing wildly, finally screeching onto her back. Despite her boney ruffles, her grassy crust, he managed to get his jaws locked onto the side of her neck, and even when his hindclaws lost their grip, he hung precariously for a moment as she endeavored to swing him off. But all he needed to do was drag her head down low enough for the ot
her bigmouths to leap, and that was enough, they were on her immediately, grabbing and holding and pulling her neck down even further.

  Her front legs buckled, a moment later her hind legs collapsed. Her tail still thrashed, but the last two carnosaurs leapt aside and charged for the vulnerable spot on her neck just behind her head. They both grabbed on and held, almost frozen. Now, the whole pack was choking off her long vulnerable windpipe. It was a terrible tableau, silent except for the great shuddering tail of the leviathan. It went on and on for the longest time, the grand old lady wasn’t dying easy. Some of the people watching cried out in horror, some of the men muttered curses, some of the women wept. At last the giant tail shuddered and lay still, the great rise and fall of breath slowed and slowed and eventually stopped. The leviathan was dead.

  The carnosaurs held their bites a while longer, then one by one, they released. They stood for a moment, catching their own breaths, then cocked their heads, stared, and circled the mountain of flesh as if deciding where to start—and who would take the first bite. The leader of the family, the largest, grunted and rumbled, lowered his head to sniff, then raised it again to poke the motionless flank. Finally, almost tentatively, he pushed his snout forward and then began to rip a great slab of flesh from her belly. It made a terrible tearing sound as it came away. Then another bigmouth leapt in and began ripping. The third one followed, and finally the half-sized juveniles. A wash of dark syrupy blood spilled down into the dirt. Soon it would be a huge stinking swamp of blood and mud.

  The carnosaurs tore at White Foot’s body. Soon, they’d be up on her flanks as well, ripping and gulping and making loud wet swallowing sounds. They’d feed long into the night, gorging themselves into insensibility. But their rest periods would be brief. They had to fill their bellies as fast as they could, before other hungry carnosaurs came roaring in to share the feast, so no matter how late it got there would always be one or two working at the carcass, growling and grunting deep in their throats, warning all other predators and carrion-eaters to keep their distance.