Hella Read online

  The odor overlay on the display can get very complex because there are so many different smells in the air. The plants and flowers give off pheromones to attract insects and even herbivores of all sizes. These usually show up as pale blue or violet. But the bigger herbivores, especially the saurs, they leave orange and yellow scent trails that can hang in the air for days and be carried hundreds of klicks downwind, so the predators always know where the herds are.

  Before anyone can be trusted to go outside, they have to play a lot of simulations. Jamie told me I should think of each one as a puzzle. What problem do you have to solve? Even without the noise helping me—I wasn’t allowed to use it anyway in the simulators—I could tell how fresh a scent was and which way the herd was headed. Knowing where the herds are is important if we want to avoid the things that follow and feed on them. There are a lot of those, from the very small to the very large. The large ones usually leave bright red swaths of stink floating in the air. A lot of times you don’t need the display, you can smell it yourself.

  Wearing the mouse helmet is supposed to be a special privilege. But the job of the mouse isn’t.

  I collected dung.

  Or anything else that might have fallen off of or out of whatever made this particular channel in the grass.

  Down on the ground, we were in an amber canyon with walls that waved and rustled. We were swimmers in a dusty yellow smell, and sometimes overpowered with the occasional stink of dung. If it was from a herbivore, the dung would have a grassy smell. If it was from a predator, it had a darker stink, sometimes so bad I could smell it in the helmet. Some of the piles of dung were as tall as Marley, and still moist though fortunately not steaming. That would have meant we were way too close to something dangerous.

  It wasn’t hard work. It was methodical. I’m good at methodical stuff, so I didn’t mind. But other people do. They think it’s a dirty job. I wondered if this was the reason Captain Skyler had brought me along, so nobody else would have to do it. But I’m a scientist. I think it’s exciting. Most of science is gathering a lot of facts and looking for patterns

  And it’s not a dirty job. I would put the collection bag over my hand, grab a fistful of dung, then turn the bag inside out around the dung and slide the seal shut with my other hand. Usually, it was herbivore stuff, dryish lumps of stuff, mostly grass or even pink-tree skin, but on one of our stops we found a different kind of heap. It was dark and gooey. It had thick fragments of bone throughout. I tried not to think about where those pieces of bone had come from, but I knew that the lab techs back at the station were already getting excited in anticipation. I could hear their chatter in the noise.

  We didn’t stay on the ground too long in any one place. Fifteen or twenty minutes max. It was almost as if we were afraid that the grass would grow so tall around us we’d never get out. Some people say you can actually see the grass growing. You can certainly hear it, an endless whispering. Sometimes, you can almost make out the words. It sounds like, “What are these things? Who are these strangers?”

  Jamie says that people go grass crazy sometimes. Not the teams, they’re too well-trained. But sometimes it’s someone who just arrived on Hella and who can’t adjust. One day, they walk outside, climb over or under or through the fence, walk out into the stuff and disappear. It’s the grass, the tall smothering stiffgrass. It always wins. Knock it down, it comes back. Burn it, it comes back. The grass is forever.

  People who’ve never been out in the grass don’t get it. I didn’t understand what Jamie was talking about until I stood in the middle of a furrow, looking around at this very narrow world, a shadow valley with only a bright strip of sky above to remember there’s a horizon somewhere. I didn’t want to stumble into a gigantic footprint. It would be a fearsome reminder that something monstrous made this the topless tunnel. If I walked far enough I’d find it. And if I went the other way, following backward from the footprints, I’d be just as likely to find something even worse, something large and hungry creeping up the channel from behind.

  But Captain Skyler says you have to get down on the ground to understand. After you know how hard it is for the Rollagons to push through the stiffgrass, then you can start to imagine how big and how powerful an animal would have to be to push through by itself. It’s not that any individual stalk of grass is resistant. One at a time, they’re just a little crunchy. But when you shove against the whole bulk of all that yellow straw, it builds up into a big stubborn mass. Sometimes the grass is so stiff and dry we have to put laser cutters on the lead vehicle, but even that’s a problem because by the end of the summer the grass is so dry it catches fire. That’s why we mostly use the big rollers to crush it, and the trucks travel single file.

  One time, a team nearly did incinerate themselves until they could get upwind of the blaze, but that happened before I was born. That’s when the water-filled rollers were added to the front of the Rollagons. Now if it happens, we can use the water in the rollers to put out any fire we might start. Except now we’re a lot more careful. There’s still so much to learn about Hella.

  By 1800 the sun was at its peak, and the temperatures outside were rising uncomfortably. We stopped to release the second shift of drones and retrieve the first shift for detoxing. We couldn’t risk them picking up Hellan microbes, and we try to minimize the risk of spreading our own. We know we can’t, but we can’t be careless either.

  We were deep into the migration path now and in another week this would be one of the most dangerous places on the planet, the saurs were coming, thousands of them—but sometimes there were loners pushing ahead and we had to watch out for them. We’d planted over a hundred sensors this morning, drilling them deep into the ground at regular intervals. Maybe half of them would survive the ramming this terrain was about to experience, but we needed the monitoring.

  The thing is—as dangerous as Hella can be, sometimes it’s us, the invaders, who are even more dangerous. Jamie says we’re the most dangerous species on the planet. Especially to each other. That’s what happened on Earth and if we’re not careful, it’ll happen again here. Jamie didn’t figure that out for himself. He was telling me what he overheard Captain Skyler say about Councilor Layton, Marley’s dad. Mom doesn’t like the Councilor for a different reason. She thinks he’s a bad parent.

  Captain Skyler ordered the trucks into a starfish shape, back ends touching, noses pointed outward. “Four hour nap,” he ordered. “Three on watch in each truck.” He pointed at me. “You take first watch port side. Wake Sergeant Orion in an hour. Call me if anything larger than a lizard farts.”

  I climbed up into the port side turret and settled myself in a huge comfortable observation couch, way too big for me. I had to adjust the back and foot rests. The display in front of me showed a 360-degree view, spread out in a horizontal strip with the rear view split at the edges. All the trucks were linked together, so the image was a correlated composite, high dynamic range, overlaid with augments and readouts. I could scan the horizon at various magnifications, and I could slide the image right or left across the display to look closer at any part of the surrounding terrain, but it all looked the same. Just a flat sea of rippling yellow waves. Nothing else was moving that I could see. Nothing was moving in the infra-red either. No heat signatures.

  I did see a few hoppers perched on a nearby rise. They took turns, lifting themselves up, standing erect to look around, their long snouts pointing and sniffing. You can tell how old a hopper is by the color of its fur. The pups are brownish, the adults fade to yellow and eventually some color that isn’t white or pink or anything else, but it is bright. Every few minutes, one or another would notice us. It would stiffen and stand tall on its hind legs. Its head crest puffing up tall, a warning I guess. Then all the hoppers would peer out into the distance, ears wide, noses wiggling. After a bit, the first one’s crest would flatten, the ears would droop, and most of the others would drop back down and res
ume digging for whatever it was that hoppers dig for. Insects and grubs probably. If they could find a nest, the whole family would eat.

  The hoppers were a good sign. Hoppers will leave the savannah long before the migration passes through, probably as soon as they feel the first ground-tremblings or hear the saurs’ subsonic grumbles or maybe just smell the first smells. Or maybe something else. All of our different monitors showed the main bulk of the herd was still over a hundred klicks away, but in ten days or less, all this tall grass would be flattened to a sodden mess by hundreds of giant feet. Maybe thousands.

  The herd would spend a day or two at the Big Muddy River drinking and wallowing, consuming and regurgitating, flushing their systems, cleaning themselves inside and out—and also widening the river channel even more. They’d drink up tens of thousands of gallons of sluggish brown water and piss half of it back into what would end up as a slowly rolling syrup. Downstream of the crossing, the water would reek for weeks.

  Then, as they moved eastward again, they’d continue pissing and crapping, poisoning the present but fertilizing the future. They’d leave an ugly brown swath wide enough to be seen from space, and the plain would stink even more than the river, but the land would be rejuvenated and the winter grass would flourish for a few weeks until the ice storms swept down from the north.

  But before the storms arrived, most everyone at Summerland would have evacuated south to Winterland, leaving only a maintenance team in place. Winterland Station was on the dry southern shore of the continent. It was cold and windy, but it wasn’t buried under ten meters of snow on a good day and thirty on the worst.

  I noticed a smudge of dust on the horizon. A cloud? Maybe. I zoomed in for a closer look. I couldn’t tell. Too much haze in the air. I sent the nearest drone to loop around. From above, the view was just as vague. Haze or cloud or maybe something else? I frowned at the screen. Was this bigger than a lizard fart? I had to go deeper into the noise to find out.

  I told the drone to swoop in lower, but not too low. All that dust didn’t necessarily mean there was something underneath. It could have been a windspout, something that aspired to be a tornado when it grew up. I switched to infrared, maybe there was a heat signature. Not enough. Hard to tell at midday when everything was hot. Okay, one other thing to try—scan for a tag. Not every animal was chipped, we didn’t have the resources, but we did track the biggest troublemakers. Finally, I asked the drone to show me any odor trails hanging in the air. It was unlikely, but sometimes you get lucky.

  Better to be careful. I rang the Captain. “There’s a dust cloud twelve klicks due west. Can’t tell what it is from here and aerial surveillance is inconclusive. No confidence on the heat signature. No chip signal. Sniff test inconclusive.”

  “Copy that,” he said. Then the link went silent while he double-checked my log. A moment later, he came back online. “Okay, you win the bonus. First sighting of a leviathan. Nicely done. Finish your watch and catch some Z’s.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  I lay awake in my bunk for a while, waiting for sleep to come. The others on watch were a lot more experienced. Why didn’t they spot the smudge of dust on the horizon? Or did they? Was this another test? But I didn’t spot a leviathan, I only reported a smudge of dust that I couldn’t confirm. So how did Skyler know it was a leviathan? Unless he already knew it was there and parked us in the path of it to see if I could spot it. Was this to make up for all the dung? Or maybe it was one more way to annoy Marley and her dad. And somewhere in there I fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later, Lilla-Jack shook me awake. We were rolling again.

  I wiped the sleep from my eyes with a damp cloth and joined the others on the bridge. We were heading west toward the dust smudge. Only it wasn’t a smudge anymore. The displays showed it as a young leviathan male, plodding slowly and steadily forward, lifting one ponderous leg at a time. It swayed its body as it moved, swinging its great ribcage and belly from side to side to assist its heavy gait. Its enormous tail swung in weighty counterpoint. Even from this distance we could see how big it was, a huge mountain of walking meat.

  Jamie says that calling a leviathan big is to stretch the word beyond its breaking point. Other words, like large and big and ginormous are also insufficient. A full-grown leviathan can mass a hundred times more than our biggest Rollagon. It’s at least five times taller. Both the neck and the tail can be longer than a football field.

  But this one wasn’t one of the big ones. It was a juvenile male, exploring ahead of the rest of the herd. That’s kinda risky. Sometimes there are small packs of predators moving ahead of the herds, waiting for them to arrive. They wouldn’t hesitate to bring down a lone juvenile. Of course, then they’d be too satiated to attack the rest of the herd when it came through.

  We’d argued about this in class. We were watching an old mission video and Marley Layton said it didn’t make sense for a youngling to put itself at risk. If it was killed before mating, it couldn’t pass on its genes.

  “Well, think about it,” said Mz. Kinnar, our biology instructor. There were nine of us in the class. The youngest was three Hella-years, the oldest wasn’t yet five. “What are you assuming?”

  “It’s not an assumption,” Marley said. “Evolution is about survival of the fittest. The strongest animals survive.”

  “Yes, that’s the assumption.”

  “Huh?”

  “Evolution isn’t about the survival of individuals. It’s about the survival of populations. It’s about the species that can best adapt to changing conditions. It’s about the success of the gene pool. So let’s reframe the question. What’s the evolutionary benefit of having an occasional outlier eaten by predators?”

  I raised my hand. Mz. Kinnar pointed at me. “I know this one—I think. Let’s say a pack of predators brings down a lone juvenile leviathan. That’s enough meat that they can eat for a week or maybe even two. And when they’re not eating, they’ll be so stuffed and torpid they’ll spend most of their time sleeping. That one animal will be enough meat to keep the pack from hunting for ten or twenty days. That’s enough time for the rest of the migration to pass. By the time the pack of predators are hungry again, ready to track the herd, it’s the sick and old at the rear of the migration who will be culled.”

  “Okay,” said Mz. Kinnar. “So what’s the evolutionary benefit to the herd?”

  “The ones who get eaten—they’re . . . I guess you could consider them necessary sacrifices. The predators are feeding on the animal they caught, they’re not going after any of the mothers and calves in the rest of the herd. One dies so that many can live.”

  Mz. Kinnar nodded. “Thank you, Kyle.”

  “No. There’s more.” I took a deep breath. “The advantage to the rest of the herd is obvious. The mother that produced offspring with that behavior is now more likely to survive to produce more offspring with that same genetic expression. Males to be eaten, females to make more males in the future with that behavior.”

  “Yes,” she said. But I don’t think she was happy about my answer. She must have thought I got it from the noise. But I didn’t. I got it from Jamie. He wanted me to learn things for myself, without the noise, so every night before bedtime we’d talk about all kinds of stuff, especially stuff that I would have to know for school.

  “Thank you.” I said thank you a lot. I wasn’t always sure where it was appropriate, so I said it everywhere. Maybe that’s why some people thought I was stupid. But I’m not. I’m just slower than other people. That’s why I have the noise.

  Then Mz. Kinnar said, “Thank your brother, too.” So maybe she didn’t think it was all the noise.

  “That’s not all of it,” I said.

  “But that’s all we have time for today. We have to move on.”

  I don’t like it when people tell me to stop before I’m
finished. I have to tell the whole story. I think we need to know the whole story before we can understand any of it. But most people don’t want to hear it. They think it’s boring.

  But I had to say it anyway. “It’s like a contest. Every time a herd develops a new way to protect itself, the predators have to develop a new method of attack. And every time the predators come up with a new way of hunting, the herd has to develop a another defense. New behaviors are always being tested. If they work, then new behaviors have to develop on the other side. So whatever it looks like right now, maybe a hundred or a thousand generations from now, it could become something else. It’s evolution. Nothing is ever really finished, it’s all part of a much larger process. Everything is always being tested. Like us, here on Hella.”

  Mz. Kinnar thanked me again and this time we did move on.

  That was one of the times when Marley punched me after class. Jamie said it was because my answer made her answer look stupid. So maybe it would be better for me to just be smart on my test papers and not raise my hand so much. The more you listen, he said, the more you hear what everybody else doesn’t know.

  Jamie understood stuff. I can know stuff, lots of stuff, but I don’t understand things like Jamie does. That’s the kind of smart you can’t get from the noise. I asked Jamie once, “Why does Marley hate me so much?”

  He said, “Because she’s stupid.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Every time you show how good you are, she feels even more stupid. So she blames you for how she feels.”

  “That’s stupid.”