Refugee (10 page)

We organized a meeting to discuss the situation and work out our options. Most of the refugees were in a state of disbelief; surely the crew would come back! They couldn't leave us stranded in space! Who would pilot the bubble? How would we get to Jupiter? But as time passed, more people believed. We realized that there was close to $50,000 in gold involved, and that this old bubble, converted from a retired pleasure craft, could not be worth more than $5,000. Perhaps a similar amount was invested in supplies. The crewmen had the money, so weren't bothering to carry through with their commitment.

They were thieves or swindlers—and we had been taken.

Some women became hysterical. Some people retreated to their cells, refusing to face our situation. But a solid nucleus remained to tackle the problem. After all, if we ignored it, we would all perish. We could not simply float forever in space.

Diego argued in favor of reversing our thrust and descending to Callisto and taking our chances there.

But too many people had cut their ties to the society below; return would mean harsh treatment by the government of Half-cal.

My father argued that if we could manage to operate the lenses and jet well enough to descend safely, we could use them as readily to proceed on our original mission. We could float the bubble to Jupiter ourselves!

There were arguments back and forth, but in the end we took a vote and my father was elected to be the new captain, since he had spoken for the majority. He immediately appointed Diego lieutenant captain. “If something prevents us from going forward, you will be the one to take us back,” he explained to the man. “You will need experience in handling the bubble, just in case. We are still a long way from Jupiter! Meanwhile, you're in charge of bubbleboard operations.”

Diego, who had been working up an irritation of temper when he saw the vote going against him, became mollified. My father had acted to preserve harmony in the bubble, and I noted this and learned from it. A person who opposes you does not have to be your enemy.

“Anyone who knows anything about navigation, come to me now,” my father announced. “We need all the expertise we have, because I'm no space mechanic. We're a long way from the coffee plantation now!”

“And anyone who knows anything about supplies, atmosphere, recycling, sanitary facilities, or human motivation come to me,” Diego announced. “We've got to keep this bubble healthy while it's going wherever it's going.”

I hesitated, then went to join Diego. Helse tagged along with me.

As it turned out, we were fairly well off. Diego found people to monitor the pressure and oxygenation equipment and check the funnel toilets. He glanced at me, and I was about to explain that I was good at human motivation, but he spoke first. “You're Hubris's boy, aren't you? You'll be in charge of food supplies. First thing you'll want to do is get up there in the net and make a count, just to be sure we have enough.”

“Uh—yes, señor,” I said, realizing that he was doing the same thing my father was: appointing a potential malcontent to a responsible position. My father had made Diego second-in-command, so Diego was giving recognition to my father's son. It was a mutual backscratching operation, but I suppose it did alleviate tensions.

“And take your friend,” Diego added.

Helse was glad to participate. She had been staying close to me so she wouldn't have to tell her secret to anyone else. How this suddenly critical situation would affect her personally I didn't know, but it was unlikely to facilitate her serenity.

We clambered into the webbed chamber. I profited from my reasoning about the distortion caused by our spin, but still it took me two jumps to catch the entrance aperture in the net. Our weight was much less here, for we were near the center of the bubble. In fact, some of the packages were floating, glancing off each other like molecules in motion. It was a good place for storage, since even the heaviest article could readily be moved here in free fall. This doughnut hole space was only four meters in diameter, so just by standing on the lattice net we had our heads just about banging the globe that enclosed the lens generator. It was a strange sensation: feet with trace gravity, head with none.

But we really could not conveniently stand, because the food packs and water bags and such mostly filled it. Some refugees had stored baggage up here, sensibly enough. So counting the food packs was a problem, because they didn't stay put very well. We could end up counting some several times and missing others completely. It might average out and lead to a correct count—but this was too important to leave to chance. Without food we would be in deep and early trouble.

I stuck my head down, out of the hole of the lattice. I spied Spirit, who was naturally curious about what I was doing, and tired of playing. “Tell Señor Diego we need a bag or something to count them into; a big bag,” I called to her.

Soon she was back with a voluminously bulging armful of the kind of netting used to sweep rooms clean in free fall. She scrambled up with it, using this pretext to get in on the fun. It was all right; we were able to use her help. Spirit could be extremely helpful when she wanted to be.

We counted food packs into the net. There were quite a number, but in time we got a close enough figure: about 2,800.

“How many will we need for ten days' travel to Jupiter?” Helse asked.

I did some quick computations. “Three per person, per day, for two hundred people—that's six hundred. Times ten days—” I broke off. “Oops!”

“That's not enough!” Spirit said.

I worked it out another way. “We've already had one meal, so that's two hundred. We must have started with three thousand. That's enough for a normal load of one hundred people—but we're overloaded. So there's only half enough.”

“Why didn't they pack more?” Helse asked.

Suddenly it all fitted together. “They must have planned for one hundred, but twice as many refugees showed up, so they took us all. Because of the money. Then they realized they couldn't feed us all, so they took the money and flew.”

“Leaving us to starve in space!” Spirit exclaimed angrily.

“So it seems,” I agreed wearily. “They planned a legitimate venture, but greed overwhelmed them, and we are left to pay the price. We'd better make a private report to Señor Diego, so the people won't panic.”

We glided down, hitting the Commons deck running so as not to be swept off our feet by its higher velocity. I noticed this time that there was a constant movement of air, for it had the same problem we did: differing velocities at different elevations. It tended to drag at the floor and to rush at the net ceiling.

Well, that helped circulate it, so the purifiers could operate effectively.

We approached Diego. “How many?” he asked.

“Twenty-eight hundred,” I murmured.

He leaned against the curving wall. “You sure?”

All three of us nodded solemnly.

He led us to my father, who was at the control section of the bubble. “Tell him,” Diego said to me.

“There're only half enough food packs,” I said.

My father considered the implications. “I'll call another meeting,” he said grimly.

Soon it was done. My father summarized the situation. “So it seems we don't have enough food to make our journey,” he concluded.

“How do we know the count's correct?” a man demanded. “Diego doesn't want to make the trip, so he could have—”

“My son made the count,” my father said. And I realized how neatly Diego had arranged it. He must have suspected that the supplies would be short, so made sure no suspicion would attach to him.

Regardless, it was true; we didn't have enough food.

“What about oxygen?” the man asked.

“There's enough,” Diego replied. “Another crew checked that. And most of the water is recycled. It's only food we're short.” And I realized that, whatever his preferences, Diego was trying to do an honest job. Had I interacted with him longer and paid more attention, I would have perceived what I now did; he was an honest man, expressing honest judgments. He had not urged our return to Callisto because he wanted to be a leader, but because he truly believed that was the best course. Snap judgments are treacherous.

“We could travel on half rations,” my father said. “We would be hungry, but we wouldn't starve, and for ten days it should be bearable. If it were longer, we could try to use our refuse to grow edible plants, but we really aren't set up for that, and in ten days that won't work. But we can do it on what we have—if we wish to make the sacrifice. I won't insist on that unless there's a clear consensus.”

There was debate. The democratic process does take time! Then we took a vote. It was about four to one in favor of going on to Jupiter. Diego, amazingly, voted with the majority. “We have better leadership than we had before,” he explained wryly to those who looked askance at him. “I think we can make it now, with Don Hubris.”

My father smiled. “Thank you, Don Diego.” And there was a minor ripple of appreciation, for there is this about that polite title of Don in our language: It is generally used with the given name, not the surname.

They should have said Don Major and Don Bernardo—and indeed, thereafter they did so. I am not sure why they elected to misuse it this one time; there are aspects of adult humor and interaction I have not yet mastered. Perhaps Diego had simply not known my father's given name before.

The navigation crew had a fair notion what it was doing. Señor García explained it for those of us who were interested, and at this point most of the refugees were. All of us wanted reassurance that we were not traveling into doom. The details were somewhat technical for me, but here is the way I understand it.

Our bubble was now floating inside the orbit of Callisto—that is, closer to Jupiter—but moving ahead of Callisto because of the increased velocity of the inner orbit. We continued to jet in the reverse direction, with the paradoxical effect of increasing orbital velocity. In less than five days we would be a quarter of the way around Jupiter from our starting point. Then we would use the gravity of the sun to slow us, for we would be swinging away from the sun. That would slide us closer yet toward Jupiter. We would also try to use the gravities of Jupiter's inner moons, until we were close enough to orbit in the range of Jupiter's innermost rings. At that point the Jupiter Border Patrol would intercept us, and we would claim our status as refugees from the oppression of our homeland. They would take us in, of course. Jupiter had a standard policy of absorbing refugees in search of freedom.

Ah, but life is seldom as neat and simple as it appears! It was Hell we were so blithely floating into!

Jupiter Orbit, 2-10-'15—I need not repeat the sequence of the pirate raid that occurred two days before this dateline, and the horror that befell my sister Faith. It was a brutal awakening for all of us; we had not before believed in the reputed savagery of the outlaws of space. Yet for me especially it was a turning point; my belief in the fundamental goodwill of all men had been destroyed by the Horse.

The Horse! Damn that pirate for what he did to us all, to our minds as much as to Faith's body. It was necessary for me to reconstruct my philosophy of life, to cope with the ugly new reality. I did not agree with this reality, or even understand it, but I had to live with it. I am not sure I can successfully present the tides of my changed awareness, so this may be disjointed or fragmentary, but I will try.

On Callisto, in Maraud—ah, that name had a changed relevance now!—I had succeeded in defending my sister from the lust of a strange man. Here in space I had not. True, my entire family had paid a gross penalty for my prior defense, having to flee the planet—but what was the penalty for my failure this time?

I simply could not grasp it. Would it have been better to let the scion have his way? Could anything he might have done to Faith have been worse than what the foul pirate had done? I had to ask myself whether my victory over the scion had been illusory, and I was uncertain of the answer. Of course I could not have let the scion have his way—yet how could I have reacted to truly preserve my innocent sister? I had a deep and terrible guilt to settle in my own mind, apart from the other present problems of existence.

I was jogged to awareness by friends—they had been only casual acquaintances, but suddenly now they were friends who were lowering me from my prison of suspension and untying my hands. Oh, it hurt as the circulation returned, for even my trace weight had caused the bindings to constrict—but it was in my mind that I deserved such pain, as part of my punishment for my failure.

The pirates were gone. The Horse had kept his word, such as it was, departing with his crew, leaving our valuables behind. He had not promised not to rape, merely not to rob or kill, and to leave us alone.

There was, it seemed, a kind of honor among criminals, but it was subject to a savage interpretation. It galled me anew that I could not entirely condemn the Horse; he did have some spark of humanity in him, though he was a bad man. I would much rather have cursed him absolutely.

Faith lay as she had been left, not even trying to cover her shame. I think she was still unconscious. My mother rushed up to minister to her, and the other women closed in, as though whatever they might do was no fit matter for the eyes of males. Perhaps they were correct. The men, in turn, clustered around my father and me, as we stood chafing our hands and wrists and wincing from the pain. “We didn't know,”

they murmured. “We couldn't know!” “The pirate gave his word!”

“He kept his word,” my father said, his voice oddly calm. “The agreement wasn't tight. Maybe he did us a favor—teaching us the reality of space without killing us.” He turned to me, and there was something blank about his countenance. I had been concerned with my own horror—what, then, of his? He had watched his daughter ravaged! “My son was right. We should not have given up our advantage.”

“But that laser—” another man protested, then halted. The deal with the pirates had, in fact, traded the lives of several men, including my father, for the violation of my sister.

An aspect of reality laid siege to my awareness at that point. Which was worse: the death of my father or the rape of my sister? If I had had the power to choose between the two, knowing...

Helse came up and took me by the hand and led me to our cell, and no one objected. They knew I needed to be out of it for a while.

She put me on the floor as a nurse might place a non-resisting patient on a bed, then jumped up to close the panel in the ceiling, separating us from the rest of the bubble. Then she kneeled beside me. “I understand,” she murmured. “I can help you, Hope.”

“What do you know of rape?” I flared.

She took my unresisting hand and squeezed my fingers gently. It was foolish, I told myself, but I was reassured. The cell was deeply shadowed, since only a little light filtered through the translucent panel from the Commons, and that was just as well, for admixed with my horror was the shame of unmanly tears. “I know a lot about it,” she said.

“Oh, sure!” My pain was turning on her, the nearest object. I knew this was unfair, but I had little control. The savagery to which my awareness had been subjected was too much for me to control; I could not react in an intelligent manner.

She leaned down, wrapped her arms around me, and lifted me in the partial gravity and drew me close to her, my head against her chest. She wore a tight band to flatten her breasts, to make her torso look masculine; now she paused to release this, and cradled my face to her abruptly feminine bosom, and it was marvelously compelling. She was indeed a woman, and soft in the way only a woman could be, and I felt her measured breathing and heard her steady heartbeat, and I was pacified.

“I'll tell you about me,” she said, speaking in a low and even tone so that others would not overhear. I think she was talking in order to distract me from the raw shock of what I had just seen, to give my soul a small time to heal, but before long the nature of what she was saying penetrated, and I really was distracted. Of course her monologue was not as succinct as I render it here from memory, but it was as important. I listened, and was slowly amazed.

Helse came from a family larger and poorer than ours, living in one of the smaller city-domes. She had been a pretty child, and in order to gain money on which to survive, they had rented her at the age of six to a middle-aged bachelor landowner as concubine. This was legitimate, socially, in that dome, though it has no legal status. There was merely an understanding that permeated that limited society from the poorest to the wealthiest; it had existed thus covertly for centuries, and it seemed no one really wanted to change it.

This landowner had never married, because he was unable to relate to adult women; he liked children, and had the wealth and power to indulge his propensities. His appetite was generally known but never openly bruited about, and he was generous to those who indulged him. Thus Helse's family, possessed of a pretty female child, had not been directly coerced to put their daughter into his hands; they had seized upon the opportunity to alleviate their poverty for the few years during which they had something worth selling.

Helse had called him “Uncle” and he had called her “Niece.” This was to facilitate a nonexistent relationship that would satisfy any question that might arise among occasional visitors or business acquaintances. Uncle was not a bad man, and he did not brutalize her. Far from it! He fed her well and gave her nice clothing and toys and presents. If she expressed an interest in something, she would have it the next day. He also provided her with a series of excellent tutors who set about giving her a proper upper-class education. Yet this was not an adult-child relationship; it was a courtship.

He courted her, and she was delighted. She regarded her position in his mansion as the privilege of being desirable; other girls her age had vied for it, but she had been chosen. But she knew she had to submit to whatever he chose to do with her body, and not all of that was fun. This was the price of her gifts and good life. If she ever once said no, or intimated that she objected, it would be over. She had the constant option of returning to her family—and this was not a promise, it was an unspoken threat. It was not that she didn't want to go home, but that it would be disaster to be sent home. She had to succeed. The kissing and fondling was easy enough, but the culmination was painful. He was a mature man and she was a child; no amount of gentleness could completely alleviate that.

Yet there were physical and mental devices, and she knew he did not mean or want to hurt her. He was driven by adult urges she did not understand, but he wanted to believe that she liked what he did. She learned to take relaxant medication and to dissemble her real reaction, for Uncle was most generous when most pleased. Experience made it easier, and in time she developed a certain pride in her competence. She became proficient in pleasing this man.

She was no prisoner. She was able to visit her family, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a night. She brought them nice gifts that made all of their lives better. This was done with the approval and cooperation of Uncle, who wanted her to be happy. It seemed she pleased him more than others had, and now reaped commensurate rewards. But no direct word was ever spoken of her real place in Uncle's household; she was his niece, with certain poor relatives she liked to help.

In fact, she was now the principal provider for her family. Her father found work only intermittently, but Helse's work was steady. She became important in her own eyes, and perhaps she became arrogant, but this was her right.

For four years Helse was a little princess in Uncle's mansion, her every wish catered to by his other servants. He had an excellent staff, and they too understood their situations perfectly; there was no covert unkindness to her or embarrassing leaks of information. They were, in a fairly real sense, an extended family, each concerned with the welfare of the group. When a high official of the city visited, expressed a certain curiosity about rumors he had heard, and spread some money privately to confirm them, the staff members accepted the money and assured him with absolute sincerity that there was nothing to the rumors. When he questioned the naïve child Helse, she gave him similar assurance with marvelous innocence. Yet he knew, for he had other sources of information. “I'd like to know your secret,” he confessed ruefully. “How do you compel their loyalty?” And Uncle had smiled and not answered. This official was known to beat his own servants. The fact was that, apart from his sexual aberration, Uncle was a good and kind man, and his staff protected him because all its members genuinely cared for him.

Wealth alone could not purchase that.

But at age ten Helse was getting too old, past her prime, as it were, and had to make way for a younger girl. She stifled her savage jealousy, knowing there was no percentage in it. She had known this would happen from the start; the staff had made it clear. She had to master adult grace in the face of the inevitable, and if she was unable to stifle a genuine tear in parting, this was not objectionable. Uncle gave her a generous separation bonus, and it was over. She was retired.

“You liked it!” I exclaimed, appalled. “You wanted to stay with the child molester!” For, though I have rendered her narration as politely as I can, I have no sympathy with it. My family upbringing simply does not provide me with much tolerance for this sort of abuse of children.

“I liked the life, and I respected the man,” she qualified. “I wish I could have been his real niece. He was not a molester, merely a person with a specialized taste. Some men like young, nubile women; some like fat women; some like other men, or boys; this one liked children. Uncle never raped anyone.”

That shut me up. Obviously her “uncle” was a better man than the pirate Horse. I had to broaden my definitions.

There were, however, openings for experienced intermediate-aged children, Helse continued, and her family always needed money. So she went to work for a new employer. But this one had more violent tastes. For him there had to be humiliation and pain. It was not exactly rape, for he had paid for what he wanted and obtained prior acquiescence; it was more like submitting to necessary surgery with inadequate anesthetic. The money was good, however, and she learned to endure this too. The one thing she insisted on was that no injury be done that would leave a mark or scar on her face or any portion of her body that normally showed.

I expressed curiosity, so she showed me some of the scars she did have, on her abdomen and back. I shuddered; the origin of those must have been painful indeed. She certainly had had experience being tormented by men.

“But finally I got too old for any of that stuff,” she concluded. "I could no longer earn enough to support my family. Not without risking my health or life. I had no better prospect than a life of formal prostitution.

So I squandered my nest egg on this voyage and concealed my nature, so there wouldn't be any more trouble. I've had enough sex, especially painful sex, to last me a lifetime."

That I could appreciate. I knew she was telling me the truth. Her ploy had been effective; the pirates had never even thought of raping Helse.

“But my point is, a girl can survive it,” she said. “What happened to your sister is terrible, because she wasn't prepared for it, but there are worse things. I have survived worse.”

Again I believed her. Obviously she had prettied up her story for me. Helse was a nice girl—but she had had experiences I had never dreamed of. She maintained her emotional equilibrium; her mind had not been devastated. I realized that if Faith could adjust her thinking similarly, she would suffer far less. “I wish you could talk to Faith,” I said.

“I will—if you want me to.”

I reconsidered. “No, that would give away your secret, and I don't know that it would help her. I'll talk to her myself.”

“She could learn to pass for male,” she suggested. “That could save her a lot of trouble.”

“Faith just isn't the type,” I said. “But Spirit—”

“Your little sister is in danger too,” Helse said. “This time the pirates went after the obvious, and were satisfied. Your sister Faith stands out in a crowd; every man's eye was on her from the start. You tried to shield her, but it was impossible. Next time they could go after the rest. There are men like that. I know.”

She certainly did! I thought of my little sister getting raped in the manner of my big sister, and a kind of blackness clouded my mind's eye. “Spirit's a good kid. She can fight, and she can keep a secret. Will you teach her how to pass?”

“If you ask me to.”