Refugee (31 page)

Here the manuscript ends. The final page is discolored, surely by tears, and a full paragraph of text has been obliterated. It is a point of curiosity what the washed-out text contained, but the words are largely beyond restoration. Only a few are decipherable; among them, twice, “Spirit.” The HELSE HUBRIS

name tag is absent, long since lost.

Hope Hubris, at the age of fifteen, had seen all his family lost or dead, and he believed he was also slated for death. It is not surprising that he was depressed, and that the poignancy of his accumulated memories overcame him.

The official records for this period in the life of the Tyrant are scant, as the affairs of refugees were not at that time deemed important. There is no listing of his presence in the detention bubble. Yet other details of his narrative have been corroborated, such as the appearance of two Hispanic refugees at a scientific observatory on the hellface of Io and the four-year residence of a pretty child in the mansion of a prominent politician of Callisto, so there seems to be little reason to question the general authenticity of the document.

We take editorial license to recreate the following sequence, as the narrative seems incomplete without it.

An official discovered Hope Hubris at his cramped table formed from a surplus crate, his head on the last sheet of his holographic manuscript. (Clarification: Holographic is used in its sense of “wholly hand written” rather than in the more common contemporary sense of three-dimensional projection of images, though perhaps that also in a sense applies.) “Hey, kid, are you sick?” he asked in clumsy Spanish.

Hope raised his dark head to stare dully at the man.

“No, sir.”

“You can go to the dispensary for a pill.”

“No, thank you, sir. I am merely tired.”

“What's that you have there?”

“Nothing, sir. Just some papers.” Hope tried to put them away.

“Say, that's English! Where did you get that?”

“Sir, it's unimportant. I was just writing—a letter.”

“In English ?”

“Yes, sir. I studied your language in school.”

“Let me have that.” The official moved to pick up the papers, thinking they were stolen.

“Sir, please—it is mine!”

The official paused, then tested the bedraggled young refugee. “You are fluent in English?” he asked in that language.

“Yes, sir,” Hope answered in kind.

“Let me see you write something in English.”

Hope took a separate sheet, and wrote: This is my statement that I am literate in the language of the Colossus Jupiter, from whose fair and promising clouds I am barred.

“I'll be damned!” the official exclaimed. “Don't you know that English-language literacy is grounds for status as an alien resident in Jupiter?”

The eyes in the dusky face widened. “No one informed me of that, sir.”

The official shook his head. “Maybe that form got lost in the shuffle. Happens all the time. Anyway, it's true. Come with me; you are about to have your status changed.”

And so this manuscript, Refugee , written in the depth of despair, saved the young life of Hope Hubris, and thereby altered most significantly the history of mankind. It is not possible to say whether it happened precisely this way, but certainly it was the chance discovery of his literacy in English that qualified him for alien residency; a subsequent reference by the Tyrant himself confirmed this aspect. The existence of this particular manuscript was not then known, and it is very tempting now to suppose that this was indeed the document that did it. There would be poetic irony in having the narrative of his failure convert that failure to success.

This aspect, of course, also resolves the mystery of Helse's use as a courier: She too was literate in English, having had an excellent private education, so she also would have been granted sanctuary if she had survived. Her employer surely knew that.

We trust this clarifies the early nature of the later Tyrant of Jupiter. He was not at all the monster his political and cultural enemies have claimed. He was very much a victim of violent circumstance. The marvel is not that he emerged emotionally scarred, but that he retained his sanity and power of character.

Conjecture is precarious, but some further speculation on the concluding, unreadable paragraph of his manuscript may be in order, as this relates to a further mystery of his character. Obviously this paragraph concerned Hope's little sister Spirit, and great emotion attaches thereto. One must wonder why, when one short paragraph is devoted to the memory of parents, older sister, and fiancée, all dead or degraded, there should be a much longer passage devoted to the younger sister, who perhaps survived best.

Objectively it would seem that Spirit was the least important figure of this number, and suffered least (though still considerably); why then should she apparently be mourned more than all the rest? It does not seem to make perfect sense.

The motives of the Tyrant, however, have always made sense, when properly understood. He was a most intelligent, forthright, and practical person, not given to emotional foolishness. He was never known for extreme subtlety or deviousness. He related with rare precision to the needs and feelings of the average man; that is one secret of his inordinate success. What he felt, everyone felt. Few, for example, failed to applaud his savage campaign against the space pirates—and this manuscript makes clear his underlying motivation there. He was fulfilling his vow. One must therefore conclude that if he wrote most feelingly about his little sister, the state of his awareness warranted it.

It would be easy to take this as proof of the incest with which he has been charged—but again, this may be unwarranted. Direct evidence for such incest has never been presented—and there have been those who certainly would have presented it had they been able. Every investigation has foundered on uncertainty. Yet it does seem likely that Hope's greatest emotional concern was with his sister.

Probably the truth is this: Though Hope Hubris loved his parents and older sister in a family way, and loved his fiancée Helse romantically, his closest actual companion was Spirit. She understood him, she fought for him (sometimes with devastating effectiveness: he literally owed his life to her), she may have slept with him one time to ease his agony of bereavement, and she deliberately sacrificed herself to free him from the last pirate. She was the embodiment of blood relative, friend, and perhaps lover. She was his strength—and when he lost her, his competence as an individual suffered severely. One can be sure he would not passively have awaited shipment back to Callisto, had Spirit been with him at the end! The two of them would have found a way to compel sanctuary. Note how rapidly the manuscript concludes once Spirit departs from it; it was as though Hope's normally acute interest in detail and personality left him at that point. Helse could have been his support—but he knew her only a month or so, while he had known Spirit all her life. This Spirit was in fact the most significant figure in Hope's life, and it was her loss

that affected him most profoundly.

This insight may be critical to proper comprehension of the subsequent career of the Tyrant, though no other biography has remarked upon it. Others treat her presence as incidental to his career; this was, as the following manuscripts will demonstrate, grossly in error. Hope Hubris loved, honored, and needed his sister Spirit—all of his life.

This document is presented with compassion and pride by Hopie Megan Hubris, daughter of the Tyrant, June 6, 2670.