Then after that, both the suit and I had to go through a routine decontamination. Decon works both ways. We don’t want strange bugs coming in and we don’t want any of our Earth bugs getting out. As curious as we are about the way that Terran biology will interact with Hella biology, we’re still taking it slow and careful. We don’t want to discover the hard way what happens when staphylococcus marries Hellacoccus. Nobody wants to be the asshole who betrays the First Hundred, even though they weren’t really a hundred, only eighty-seven. They landed forty Hella-years ago. Fifteen more pilgrimages had followed the first one. We’re not doing too badly, although we’re nowhere near what all the initial projections had promised—because we’re being meticulous and methodical. That was the mantra.
Anyway, I got scrubbed inside and out, so did the suit—it came back in a sealed bag, with a green tag that certified all its tools and appliances were working in high confidence. I wished I could have done it myself, but you have to be Class 9 to work on outer-gear, and I wouldn’t be that for a long time yet. I wouldn’t put the suit on again until just before boarding, and that would be in a decon chamber. The suit also came back programmed with my personal color codes, seven stripes making a gradient of blue. So it was officially mine now.
After dinner, I went to see Jamie. He was staying overnight in med bay so they could buzz his broken leg and make the bones heal faster. He looked annoyed. “This was stupid, huh?”
“What happened?”
“I took a bad fall.”
“You don’t fall.”
“This time I did.” There was something he wasn’t saying, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe later.
I pointed at the splint, with all its little colored lights blinking red and yellow and green. “Doesn’t that noise make it hard to sleep?”
“I can turn them off. I just like knowing that the buzzbox is doing its work.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Nah. But Dad made a big fuss. He pissed off the staff. He wouldn’t let the robots set it without a doctor supervising.”
“He wants it done right.”
Jamie made a face. “I don’t need him to micromanage—”
“You’re his only kid.”
Jamie reached for my hand. I let him take it. I don’t like being touched. Jamie is the only one I let. Not even Mom. He gave it a squeeze. “Hey, Squirt?”
“Yeah?”
“Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“It’s your first ride-along. Don’t get killed.”
“I won’t.”
“They’ll put you in a middle car. That’s the safest place.”
“I know.”
“Don’t talk too much. Don’t say, ‘Oh, wow. Look at that!’ And you’re going to want to. But whatever it is, they’ve already seen it lotsa times, so don’t annoy them. Just do it the way you’ve been trained, and you’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t stress out. There’s nothing for you to screw up. The monitors are recording everything, telemetry is total, and mission control will be sniffing every little fart anyway. You’re redundant. This is just a test—to see if you can handle going outside. So it’s not about the mission, it’s about you. Don’t screw it up.”
“Okay. I won’t.”
“Does my gear fit you okay?”
“Well enough.”
“Yeah, you look like a big wrinkly toad in it.”
“Mom sent you a picture, didn’t she?”
Jamie grinned. “Have fun. Watch out for booger-jacks.”
I don’t know why Jamie says that. There’s no such thing as booger-jacks.
* * *
—
Hella Colony is almost forty years old. That’s in Hella-years, of course. Over one hundred Earth-years old. Some people argue that we should count either from when the first robot probes touched down or from when the first humans landed. But the Hella calendar actually starts with the day the Charter was signed by the First Hundred. The Norteamericanos wanted that day to be May 5 or July 4. The French arrivals wanted July 14. The Brits wanted June 15 and the Chinese wanted October 1, but they’d settle for January 1. Unfortunately, the Hella-year is eighteen months and three days long, so the Earth calendar just doesn’t work here.
Eventually, to make everybody equally unhappy, the First Hundred decided to start history with no cultural baggage left over from the past. They signed the Charter on Summer Solstice Day, which falls on the fifteenth of Darwin. All the months are named after great scientists, each representing a different field of study. I was born on the eleventh of Curie. Jamie was born on Mendel 22. Mom’s birthday is the third of Turing. We go through the calendar twice, alternating years of male scientists and female scientists. The three days at the end of the year are always dedicated to someone who didn’t score a whole month, a different person every year.
Some people are still arguing about which disciplines should have months and which people should be represented. Mom says that’s a good thing. It keeps them from arguing over more important issues.
We have over 7,300 people in the colony, split half-and-half between immigrants and here-born. There have been sixteen pilgrimages from Earth. Approximately one every three years. Hella-years. A pilgrimage costs over nine billion caseys, so the funding corporations spread their investments across seven different livable planets. Hella is the most Earth-like so it’s maybe the most promising. That’s one reason why the expansion has been so slow and cautious.
There’s another reason why the expansion has been so careful. Nobody knows what surprises might be waiting for us outside the fence. Nobody wants to be the first to find out. Impatience can be fatal. Too many people learned that the hard way. The best it gets you is your name engraved on the Big Black Wall. And there’s a lot of empty space on that wall—so everything we do has to be meticulous and methodical. Help is a long ride away.
Hella wasn’t supposed to be named Hella either, but that’s what the First Hundred started calling it, and it stuck. There’s an official name, but nobody uses it, not even on official documents. I looked it up. It’s a silly name.
Hella is nine percent bigger than Earth, but it doesn’t have as big an iron-nickel core, so it only has ninety-one percent of Earth’s gravity. That means the magnetic field is weaker too, so it can’t deflect as much radiation from the primary star. But because the Goldilocks zone is a lot farther out, about 250 million klicks, it sort of balances, and that’s why Hella has an eighteen-month year. But the lesser gravity and the greater oxygen levels make it possible for everything to grow a lot bigger. Hella bigger. Even people.