Hella Read online

  That night, after second supper, Captain Skyler came to see Mom. They hadn’t spoken since the evening of the big argument and things had gotten very tense, so Jamie went to stay with his dad, which made his dad happy. Jamie asked me if I would be okay and I said yes I would, he should go be with his dad for a while. Mostly I hid out in my room, writing reports.

  Some people can dictate easily. I think better when I type. I can type very fast, sometimes even faster than I can think of what to type. Sometimes I have to stop and think about what to say next. That’s what I was doing when the door chimed.

  “I’ll get it,” Mom called. I heard her say, “Cord,” as if she meant “turd.” And then she said, “Come in.” I tried to hear what they said next, but they were talking very softly, so I dug out the toy mouse ears Mom gave me when Jamie did his first ride-along, so I could feel part of the mission too. I put them on and turned the volume up. I’m not supposed to do that, it’s impolite, but that’s what everybody does with outside-ears anyway. I still had to strain to listen.

  “I came to apologize.”

  “That’s not necessary. You said what you said. You can’t take it back.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you. You know how I feel about you. You know how I feel about the boys. I’m trying to protect you. You’re so busy in your laboratory that sometimes you don’t see what else is going on. This place—it’s gotten big enough to have real politics. The worst kind. Selfish. And selfish people—they don’t care who they hurt. I don’t want you getting hurt. And I don’t want the boys getting hurt—”

  “Cord,” she said. “Shut up.”

  “If it’s over between us, just say so—”

  “Cord! Shut up and listen.” There was a loud silence while the Captain shut up. Then Mom said, “I’m pregnant.”

  And then they didn’t say anything else for a long while, but it sounded like Mom was crying.

  Most pregnancies are planned. You do all the tests, all the genetic mapping, and if you’re satisfied with the result, you reserve a bottle, you wait five Hella-months, and you have a baby. But sometimes, people get pregnant by surprise. Sometimes the pills don’t work the way they’re supposed to. It happens. And sometimes, people actually decide to have a baby the old-fashioned way. I don’t know why. It looks messy and painful and ugly to me. But that’s another of those things I don’t understand.

  Mom is old-fashioned about babies. Maybe it’s because she was born male, but changed so she could experience her own pregnancy with Jamie, and then with me. I asked her why she never changed back and she said she was having more fun this way, but she said I should make up my own mind. Mom says it’s a good thing for people to know both sides. It makes people happier. It also makes them better partners, but she didn’t explain that, she said I’d understand it better when I got older. Sometimes I wonder how old I will have to be to understand everything. But I think she meant that people who’ve been both male and female usually have better sex. That’s what the noise said.

  Mom says that all the genetic testing and bottle-growing will likely have an evolutionary effect over time, and she’s not sure that’s a good thing. What if we’re throwing away genes we need and don’t know yet why we need them? Mom says that the worst kind of ignorance is that we don’t know what it is that we don’t know. But that’s why Mom thinks babies should be homegrown, not bottle-grown, because as good as the bottle-babies are, there’s a whole different mother-child relationship in an old-fashioned pregnancy. Mom has very strong feelings about babies.

  I don’t even understand why anyone wants to have children in the first place. I certainly don’t. They’re loud and messy and they usually smell funny. And they’re kinda stupid about everything. But if Mom was going to have a baby, then I was going to be a big brother. Like Jamie. So that meant I’d have to be the best big brother possible. Like Jamie.

  I thought about that for a bit, then after I was through thinking, I came out of my room. Mom and Captain Skyler were sitting quietly on the couch, holding hands. Mom’s eyes were red.

  “Kyle,” she began. “We have something to tell you—”

  “I know,” I said. “And I can help. I’m Class 3 on child care, and I can get certified Class 4 in time to help.”

  Mom and the Captain looked at each other, smiled, then looked back to me. “No, that’s not what we want to tell you. We’ve decided to get married.”

  “Oh. Okay. But I still want to help with the baby, okay?”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, there were even more outliers passing through the outer fields. The overnight team had laid extra layers of logs on the outermost fences, and that would be enough for a normal season, but this season wasn’t normal anymore. We were seeing a lot more leviathans than at any time since the Big Break-In, and people were starting to get concerned. As strong as the fences were, they wouldn’t stop an entire migration.

  After the Big Break-In, the Council had declared an X-Prize for whoever came up with the best defense system. The X-Prize would be a private suite at Winterland. A lot of people suggested a lot of ideas, some of them impractical, like digging a big moat around the station, and some of them were just impossible, like spraying the whole perimeter with carnosaur urine. Carnosaur urine would work, but the bigger problem would be collecting it. No thanks. We could synthesize the key odor ingredients but anyone who’s smelled carnosaur urine would know they wouldn’t want to live inside a great big circle of the smell.

  One of the behavioral researchers suggested that we could mount super-brights on top of the fences to display rapid blinking, hyper-ugly, dazzler patterns, like Captain Skyler’s Go-Away lights out in the field, only more intense. A lot of people thought that might work, and the Council agreed, so the engineering team fabbed an array of multiple displays, each one brighter than the sun, designed to flash all kinds of disturbing colors directly at the animals. From inside the station, all those lights would certainly add to the party atmosphere of migration time, but on the outside—if having dazzlers flashing before your eyes annoyed the creatures as much as it annoyed humans, it would be one of the most efficient solutions possible.

  Some people also wanted to add high-pitched screeches, or low-frequency booming to the displays, but the Council put those suggestions on hold, because we still didn’t know if the lights would deter or spook the herd. We’d know better after an actual test.

  I made videos for the colonists on the Cascade. One of the best had lots of closeups of their heavy feet pummeling the ground, raising clouds of dust and small insects, showing why the leviathans are called thunderfeet. Some people like the way they make the ground shake as they lumber along. They think it’s fun. I don’t. It’s hard to sleep with the ground booming.

  By mid-morning, there were half a dozen thunderfeet plodding heavily through the outer fields and Madam Coordinator gave the go-ahead to turn on the dazzlers. From inside the fence, it looked as if the whole world outside had gotten brighter, more colorful and even a little flickery, a whole lot more unreal-looking, like something in a fantasy movie. It was almost too bright to look at. Most interesting, the leviathans shone with new colors, as if they had all turned into an HDR video.

  From their side, it should have been painful. It should have disoriented them—but it didn’t. The leviathans have thick eyelids that they close against the big dust storms that scour the dry regions. They closed their eyes now and kept blindly on, waving their great shovel-shaped heads back and forth, following their noses and paying no attention at all to the dazzler lights. No X-Prize there. Carnosaurs, maybe. Leviathans, no joy.

  But we still had our fences, strengthened by the overnight crews, so as much as we were all disappointed, we weren’t anxious. Jamie and I went to the outer fence and peered through the spaces between the log rails. We watched the monsters shamble east, each ponderous footstep rumbling through the ground, a
feeling more than a sound. Jamie called it the kettledrums of the underworld. The dust was vibrating and leaping with every thump. Tiny creatures scurried back and forth, unsettled by the trembling.

  At sunset, the migration slowed. All the different things we called them—leviathans, thunderfeet, longnecks, shovelmouths, Hellathings, and dammitalready—had mostly settled down for the night, huddling together in groups to preserve their body heat against the cold wind. The night winds hadn’t gotten dangerous yet, but they were starting to get uncomfortable. Already some people were beginning their preparations for winter. Mom was shutting down the parts of her lab that wouldn’t be moving to Winterland. Other people were loading the trucks with important equipment and as much produce from the summer harvest as we could carry.

  The rule was to always have enough food stored at Winterland for at least three years of famine. Even though we had sufficient grow-tanks at both stations now, nobody wanted to risk a repeat of the Great Winter Famine of the Ninth Year. The colony had been caught by surprise then. Never again.

  After sunset, the cafeteria always serves first dinner and a few hours later, second dinner. It’s not a major meal for most people, but a lot of teams are still out when first dinner is served, so second dinner is just as big. During migration week, both dinners are heavily attended because a lot of young people stay up late to party.

  After I finished uploading the day’s video, I found Jamie at our regular table, sitting with friends. Sometimes Jamie gives me a signal to sit somewhere else, but not tonight. Jamie explained it to me once. Sometimes he wants to have a private conversation with a girl or with a buddy, and a third person—any person—would make that difficult or impossible. He said it was just like sometimes how I like to be alone in the shower. When he explained it that way, I sort of understood, so I don’t mind too much when he gives me the signal. But this time he waved when he saw me and called me over to join them.

  Emily-Faith sat next to Jamie. She was his sometime-girlfriend-but-not-quite. Jubilee and Malik and Farron were there too. They looked very happy. They were laughing very loudly.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked, putting my tray down on the table.

  Jamie helped himself to some of my fries. “Marley Layton is funny.”

  “I don’t understand.” There were a lot of jokes I didn’t understand. Jamie always did his best to explain them to me.

  “Marley has been sent to Bitch Canyon to do her community service.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s the joke. It’s so appropriate.”

  Farron said, “It’s not like they don’t already have enough bitches there. Why do they need one more?”

  “Oh. I get it. I guess.”

  Farron patted the table next to my hand, her way of almost touching me. She said, “Kyle, you are so cute.” She turned to Jamie. “You know, one day, I am going to pop his cherry.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Jamie. “First you’ll have to find it.”

  It took me a few seconds to figure out what they meant. I had to visit the noise. When I did get it, I frowned slightly. Or maybe I blushed. Or maybe I did both at the same time. I opened my mouth, then I closed it again. The last time I said what I thought about sex, that it’s kind of icky, everybody laughed. Jamie said, “Someday you’ll feel different. You’re weird, little brother, BUT not that weird.” Jamie is the only person who can say things like that to me because I know he means well and those are friendly jokes, not mean ones.

  Bitch Canyon is nearly a thousand klicks west. It’s a deep chasm that started as an earthquake fault and ended up with a rapid river carving a series of deep gullies through layers of shale and sandstone. The walls of the canyons are pitted with countless caves, each one with its own personal ecology of things that look like insects or reptiles, and even a few things that might one day be mammals. There are creatures that look like spiders and crabs and centipedes and scorpions and lizards and snakes and scuttlebugs and rats and birds, all sizes, but aren’t really any of those things—just things that took advantage of a convenient evolutionary path.

  The outpost there is a year-round station. Less than thirty people live there. Their job is to study a very weird ecological phenomenon, an isolated population of creatures that look like they’re going to evolve into flying mammals. Kind of like bats, only bigger. And meaner. But they haven’t quite mastered homeostasis yet, so they’re still limited to a region where the weather is mostly uniform. They’re almost all females. A female can give birth to only one pup a year. If it’s a male, she might reject it or even kill it. Only a third of all male pups survive to reproduce. I read that in the reports.

  Mom says that this behavior should produce females who are hormonally or genetically designed to produce more female pups than males. Already, the local population produces six female pups for every four males, and the best projection has it that sometime within the next thousand generations, that ratio could rise to 7:3. At some point, that would favor the parent that produces male cubs, because a single male could distribute its genes to many females in a single mating season. We don’t know yet because the ratio of females has been rising for as long as we’ve been monitoring the populations.

  Mom says it’s difficult work, trapping, tagging, measuring, sexing, dissecting, and evaluating. It requires a lot of patience. Marley Layton will probably hate it. But Mom says it’s important because it’s a remarkable evolutionary laboratory. We’ve never had the chance to observe anything like this before, and it’s important that we do, because Hella isn’t Earth, it isn’t even Earth-like. As the geologists tell us, don’t take anything for granite. Jamie had to explain that one to me, too. And other people think I’m weird.

  Jubilee said, “What if Marley has a natural affinity for all those little bitches? Maybe she’ll discover why they eat their children.”

  “It’s too bad Marley’s mom didn’t feel the same way,” Malik said. Everybody laughed.

  Jamie looked across the table at me, he could see my expression was pinching up.

  “Guys?” he said. “We gotta change the subject. Kyle doesn’t like ugly talk like this. Even when it’s aimed at someone who deserves it.”

  “You’re right,” said Malik. “Sorry, Kyle.”

  I said thank you back to him. Most of Jamie’s friends understand how I feel, but sometimes they forget. Jamie says they’re good people and that they like me, so it’s all right for me to like them.

  I turned back to Jamie. “When are you coming back home?”

  “Is Mom still mad?”

  “I don’t think so.” I looked at his friends, then back to him. I didn’t know if it was all right to say anything in front of them. “She said she was going to call you and talk to you if you didn’t come back tonight.”

  “Is it important?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that question. Different people have different interpretations of the word “important.” Some people mean important-to-the-colony, some people mean important-to-me, some people mean important-to-you. Some people mean important even when it isn’t important to anyone. “I think it’s important to Mom.”

  “Oh,” he said. “One of those kinds of talks.”

  “No. This is not one of those kinds of talks. It’s something else.”

  Jamie looked around at his friends, then back to me. “Okay. Do you want to tell me privately?”

  “It can wait,” I said. I bent to my soup.

  Jamie grabbed his crutches and levered himself to his feet. He nodded toward the side of the cafeteria and hobbled away from the table. I followed him off to the west wall where no one could hear us. He anchored himself and leaned toward me. “Kyle. Tell me. Did she find out?”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “You can tell me. Did she find out?”

  “Find out what?”

  “I’
m not going to Winterland.”

  “Huh? You’re not? Where are you going instead?”

  “Nowhere. I’m staying here at Summerland Station with the maintenance crew. So is Emily-Faith.”

  “But who decided that? You didn’t tell me.”

  “I haven’t told anyone. You’re the first. My dad arranged it this morning.”

  “Without talking to Mom?”

  “I’m almost six years old! That’s old enough for me to make my own decisions. Dad agreed. I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  “I guess I am. I mean, but I thought we were going to be together at Winterland.”

  I’m not very good at eye contact, especially when I get surprised or confused, I look away, so Jamie had to turn me to face him. “Kyle, please don’t be upset. I was going to tell you tonight, even before I told Mom. Except you said that Mom wants to talk to me. How did she find out?”

  “She didn’t. I mean, I don’t think she did. That’s not why she wants to talk to you. She’s having a baby. We’re going to be big brothers, both of us. Oh—and she’s marrying Captain Skyler too.”

  “Oh, that’s no surprise. I knew they were going to get married. That was obvious weeks ago. But a baby? What is she thinking?”

  “Um. It’s already started. I don’t think you can change your mind after you’ve started, can you?”

  “Uh—” Now Jamie’s expression got really bad. “Um. Yeah, actually. Sometimes you can. But—it would have to be really serious. I’ll explain it later, kiddo. Or you can look it up for yourself. Argh. This complicates everything.” He turned away, turned back to me, turned away again, in that little dance of frustration he does sometimes when he isn’t sure what to say or where to go or what happens next.