Hella Read online

  The interview wasn’t as hard as I expected it to be. Councilor Layton’s letter was read into the record, along with recommendations from Captain Skyler, Lilla-Jack, Commander Halloran, and several other friends of the Captain. For a bunch of people who didn’t like me all that much, they sure didn’t sound like it in their letters.

  The committee asked me how I would deal with the new colonists and their questions. I said I knew I wasn’t very good with what other people call emotional subtext, but that shouldn’t matter in this circumstance because mostly my communications would be about facts and details and explanations, not social integration. But just in case, the team captain would be reviewing all my interactions anyway, wouldn’t she? So she’ll be there to help out with anything I don’t understand.

  The committee asked a lot of questions. They knew I used the noise for research of all kinds and they asked if I would use it in my work. I said yes and explained how. They seemed satisfied with that answer, all my answers, that I knew what the job was and that I was qualified to handle it. So they approved the petition two days later. With conditions. I would be on a six-week probationary period. If the team leader found my work satisfactory, my status would be for the duration. If I completed all five months on the Liaison Team, I would be eligible for Certification as an Information Specialist. It was a new category. Jamie said they were going to create it just for me—if I didn’t screw up.

  So all I had to do was what I wanted to do anyway. And if I did, then everything would work out all right. And if that happened, then Mom was right about Captain Skyler, and he was wrong about the Laytons, but if Mom was right and Captain Skyler was wrong, then she was the real loser, because she’d be losing Captain Skyler. But Mom didn’t want to be wrong. Because if she was wrong, then Captain Skyler would be right about all those things he’d said about me.

  I know I’m not normal. Normal is a delusion. There’s no such thing as normal, there’s only ordinary. And I’m not ordinary either. I am what I am and it’s fine with me, so why can’t it be fine with everybody else?

  I like being me. It’s fun to know things.

  I thought about the best way to be an Information Specialist. Nobody in the colony had ever been an Information Specialist before. Everybody always just shared their expertise. So I had to invent the job.

  I don’t like being videoed. I’m not very good at it. Most of the time I talk in a monotone, and I know that’s boring to other people. So just turning on the camera and talking about what I know was probably not a good idea. But just to be sure, I asked Jamie about it, and he agreed that some people might see me as a boring little know-it-all, his words not mine. So we talked about the best way to do what I was good at, and in the end, I wrote out a detailed game plan and gave it to the Liaison Team leader, Mz. Campobello.

  I told Mz. Campobello that I would write detailed reports on whatever aspects of Hella she thought the new colonists would need to know. Then I would edit a short video to illustrate the most important points of the report, using clips from available records. That way, those who needed all the details would have the detailed reports, and the rest of the colonists could just see the most important points illustrated. Mz. Campobello liked that idea. She said I should sign my name to every report and put it at the end of every video, so the new colonists would know who to thank when they arrived. That was very kind of her.

  Mom and Jamie reviewed my first efforts and made a few suggestions, but after a while they saw I was getting the hang of it, and then they were both so busy with their own responsibilities that I was pretty much on my own. Except once in a while, I’d get a note from Lilla-Jack or Captain Skyler, suggesting this or that or the other thing too. So I knew they were reviewing my work too whenever they had a chance.

  We sent off the first batch of reports and videos as soon as they were approved. We knew the colonists would be most interested in the saurs, so I made the first upload about the drive-around with Captain Skyler because that let me show the sea of grass and the furrows cut through it and finally the leviathans and the carnosaurs. I showed them all the most interesting details like the huge piles of dung, the thundering footsteps, the wrinkly skin, and the enormous muscles under the skin, and then all the different lichens and moss and bugs and parasites and birds that made their living on the saurs’ backs. I called them walking ecosystems, which I thought was a good way to explain how everything was connected to everything else. It still took two hours for transmissions to reach the Cascade, so I didn’t expect to receive immediate responses.

  But all of that was only when I wasn’t working on preparations for Lockdown. Everybody works at getting ready for Lockdown. The biggest leviathan herd of the Hellan year was rumbling toward us, like a monstrous grumbling tsunami of flesh. It wasn’t one herd—it was fifty or sixty separate herds, some as large as a hundred individuals, all coming through the grassy plains on our north.

  For most of the year, the different herds travel apart from one another—they have to, there wouldn’t be enough foliage to feed all of them if they tried to travel together. But once a year, to get through the narrowest part of the migratory circle, they all converge on this single bottleneck. By the time it got to our neighborhood, the migration would number thousands of lumbering leviathans.

  Before they moved on again, there would be a lot of very noisy, earth-shaking mating duels, followed by the ponderously slow mating frenzy of the victors. Then, just as quickly, they’d break up into new herds of varying sizes. The calves would follow their mothers of course, but the rest would just as likely follow whatever group was in front of them. The leviathans weren’t very smart.

  Behind them, they would leave a devastated landscape, churned up and stamped flat, swampy with their shit and piss, stinking like a vast latrine and ready for the winter storms. By spring, the land would be ripe again and all the waiting seeds would be eager to reach for the sun.

  This particular coincidence of geography and migration made this part of the savannah uniquely fertile. It also guaranteed that there was a lot of interbreeding among the various herds, but it also put a lot of calves at risk because of the duels and subsequent mating encounters. Plus, when the migration bottled up like this, it became a target for dozens of packs of predators—and their mating duels too. For a week or longer, the savannah would be very noisy and very dangerous. We usually kept a swarm of drones overhead. Every year we learned something new about these creatures.

  Summerland Station isn’t in the direct path of the migration—we’re twenty klicks south—but sometimes the southern edge of the migration comes a little too close, and we see occasional outliers near the lookout towers. Sometimes, even the test plot at First Marker gets trampled. The Big Break-In happened because a sudden summer storm pushed the migration farther south than usual. Our fences are pretty strong, designed to take a direct hit from a determined humongosaur, but after a few hundred times of being sideswiped and bumped by thirty or forty tons of clumsiness on giant flat feet, even the strongest wall is going to groan.

  Some people think that it was a mistake to put Summerland Station so close to the path of the migration. The First Hundred knew about the migration for years before they moved out of Winterland. Summerland had been one of several outposts. It was close to six different ecological zones, so it was a good place for convenient studies of Hellan plants and animals. It was the closest site to the path of the herds and was a great place to study their behavior.

  But if you read the historical records, you know that nobody woke up one day and said, “Hey, let’s expand Summerland Station into a whole town.” No, it just grew like this over time, because it was convenient, because so many people wanted a chance to see the saurs up close, and because it had some of the best weather of the year for outdoor crops.

  After the Big Break-In, a lot of people wanted to locate Summerland farther south, but the colony didn’t have the resources to
move, and we had too much invested in this location. So instead, we built a bigger fence, instituted a whole new set of safety procedures, and hoped it would be enough. Up to the Big Break-In, it had been, but there were a lot of people—including Captain Skyler—who thought it was only a matter of time until the next big summer storm and the station found itself directly in the path of the entire herd, instead of being brushed only by its southern flank.

  This year we should be okay. That little dust storm I’d noted on the drive-around had grown to a bigger storm, headed south, but so far it didn’t represent a threat. Not a big one. Captain Skyler’s convenient test of the dazzler system on our drive-around suggested that we might be able to annoy the herd a little, maybe distract it, maybe even nudge the outliers a little. Some years the outer fence got bumped, some years it didn’t. It was too early to predict this year.

  So my second report was about the migration and how we have to manage our defenses. It takes almost two weeks for the whole herd to pass by, and it’s a very tense time because the herd could get spooked by the slightest thing—by lightning, by predators, by a change in the weather, or even by one of their octogenarians stumbling and falling. It wasn’t likely they would stampede in our direction, but we kept the trucks and lifters ready for immediate evacuation the whole time.

  Everybody knows the dangers. We even have a doomsday plan—install a field of landmines just beyond the outer perimeter. It would take less than a day to put the devices in place. There’s a special ops team that preps the armaments every year, starting a month before the migration is due. The idea is that if we can stop the first animals in the stampede, the rest will turn back—or at worst, stampede themselves into a large impassible barrier of dead bodies and hungry predators feeding on them. We’ve never tested it, we’ve never had the need to, but that’s why it’s called a doomsday plan—because if it doesn’t work, there will be nothing left of Summerland Station. After the migration passes, we do all our necessary repairs and then begin the winter Lockdown and evacuation.

  We had drones and skyballs all over everywhere now, even a few scooters and lifters. But even those things could spook the herd, so we tried to keep them high and distant. But it’s migration season, and we have to pay attention to everything. Yes, the saurs are magnificent, and I think everybody likes to watch them, but mostly we pay such close attention because we might have to get out of their way in a hurry.

  We were seeing a lot more outliers this year. A few of the animals had already been picked off by carnosaurs. Once the carnosaurs had a kill, they would be too busy feeding to care about any subsequent outliers. But the skyballs and drones showed that the herds were spread out a lot more than we usually saw, so maybe that was the reason we were seeing so many smaller groups. But as long as none of them came within ten klicks of Summerland, we stayed at condition yellow—high alert, but no immediate threat.

  Over dinner one night, Mom said that the census of the herds was showing a lot more calves. It had been going on for two or three years now. It might be an anomaly, but people on the science team think it’s part of a longer cycle, that the total population of leviathans rises and falls over a period of many years in response to a matching cycle in the vegetation. When the population of leviathans rises, the Atlas trees develop increasing tanninoid production. Does that slow down fertility among young females? A few years later, when the population levels drop enough, so do the trees’ defenses. Mom says that’s a likely explanation, but there could be other interactions as well that we still don’t know about. I put that into a sidebar report. Something extra to think about.

  And there was that other cycle too—the back and forth between the leviathans and the carnosaurs. More calves this year meant more outliers next year and more outliers meant more meals for more carnosaurs, plus the normal culling of sick and elderly, so the carnosaurs would be able to increase their own reproduction rate and that would put another kind of pressure on the herds. So if enough of the herds died, or even had a population crash—we hadn’t seen one yet, but it wasn’t impossible—a die-off would mean a corresponding die-off for the carnosaurs, and that would create a growth opportunity for the forests. Then the herds could flourish again and the cycle would start all over. Jamie says the cycles are a way of maintaining ecological balance. We have a lot of historical records, but the cycles seem to be longer than a single lifetime, so we still don’t have a complete pattern, just a lot of simulations and guesstimates.

  Migration time is kind of like an extended holiday. Everything stops while we wait to see if the passing saurs are going to come too close. Most of the time, we never see them, not even from the towers. At their closest, they’re still ten or twenty klicks away. Occasionally, one or two outliers will cross the open spaces near the outer perimeter and everybody will rush to the fences or the lookout posts to watch.

  But most of the time, it’s just an excuse for an end-of-season party. The cafeteria serves dino-shaped cakes and some folks dress up in dino costumes or wear dino-hats. It’s all very silly and fun. The Summerland Band plays monster music and everybody dances the dino dance. The only thing we don’t do is set off fireworks or shine lasers into the sky. That might be something that could spook the herd and nobody wants to find that out the hard way.

  And five Hella months after migration time, there are always a few babies born, sometimes more than a dozen. So that’s another holiday—Baby Season. There are over three hundred people in the colony all with the same birthday, or within one or two days of each other. So we have birthday season five months after migration season. Hella months. Some people speculate that if we were to keep that up for a few hundred years that eventually humans would evolve a yearly mating cycle too.

  That was another sidebar report. It would be good for the new colonists to share the migration holiday, even vicariously. Mom said that it would help them understand the cycles of life on Hella, not just the saurs, but the human calendar too.

  I was getting pretty good. I could write out a whole report in the morning, finishing before midday nap, then put together a video summary before second dinner. If I turned it in early enough, Mz. Campobello would have notes for me the following morning. Sometimes though, she would just approve my work as is and upload it straight to the Cascade.

  For the longest time, I didn’t get any response at all from the starship about any of my reports. They were too busy figuring out orbits and trajectories and their eventual download schedules. Plus they had to work out what crops to plant in their own starship farms, so they could sustain themselves for those extra few months in space. But they did send us a lot of music from the Dingillian Interstellar Orchestra and also biographies of the entire contingent of colonists so we could start planning how best to assimilate their population into ours.

  We plugged their social network into ours and every night, our people would scour through their biographies, looking to see who was hot and who was not, who was weird and who was interesting. We assumed they were doing the same with our bios. By the time they actually started dropping pods in the spring, a lot of people would be good friends.

  I knew that I would be happy if I could find a friend like myself.

  * * *

  —

  And then, finally, the saurs arrived. The entire herd. A little closer than we liked, but not so close that we were unpacking the landmines. Despite the distance, several klicks, we could hear them very well. They were a distant chorus, very faint and far away, like something just below the edge of the horizon. Something spooky and disturbing. It went on all day and all night. They moaned and grumbled and growled in such low frequencies that we felt them as much as we heard them. The ground vibrated with a relentless rumble, like an unsettling earthquake that wouldn’t stop.

  We smelled them too. Even before the morning dew evaporated, the grassy, sweaty, beefy miasma came rolling in—a great stinky cloud, like a silent-but-deadly fart f
rom some giant sky-god. People wrinkled their noses and waved their hands in front of their faces, but they smiled too because after all the annoyances, it was funny.

  Migration time is my favorite holiday. It’s one of the biggest. We hang colored banners and flags above the quad and paint our faces with green and yellow stripes. I made a video and uploaded it to the Cascade, so they’d know how we celebrate.

  On the third day, several outliers crossed the fields just beyond the outer perimeter, and one of them even sideswiped the outer fence, a slow grinding movement. The fence groaned and creaked, but it held and everybody breathed a great sigh of relief and said things like “whew” and “good job.” Sensors showed that despite their overall flexibility, a couple of the outer mid-logs had cracked under the assault and would have to be replaced, but the total integrity of the fence remained high. We had extra logs laid out over the warehouse trench, so a crew would get out there tonight, working under the lights to repair the damage. The cracked logs wouldn’t be wasted, we’d use the lumber elsewhere.

  Later in the day, when three more animals came wandering through, Captain Skyler drove out and tried his “Go Away” system on the beasts, all the lights and sounds and smells, but while it had startled the carnosaurs, the leviathans were a lot less responsive to the flashes and noise and stinks. They grunted. They moaned a little louder than usual. One of them made as if to rear back, then decided that was too much effort. Instead, it just “trotted” away. How do you know a leviathan is trotting? Instead of going boom boom boom, it goes boom boom boom! Old joke, but still true.

  Several teams on scooters waited at the gate. Every so often one team or another rode out to tag the passing animals. It was a routine operation, but everybody watched just in case it wasn’t routine. It was our own Hella-rodeo, an exciting competition between the teams. We all cheered every time a dart was fired and cheered again when the signal came in green. Once, before I was born—but everybody still talks about it—two outliers actually mated just on the other side of the fence. Everybody with a camera took videos. All of that, plus the official recordings, were some of the most viewed files in the library. Look it up under, “So that’s how they do it!”