Refugee (5 page)

I'm not sure I'm getting this across. You see, ice is as hard and stable as any other rock at the local temperature of 100 degrees Kelvin—I'm not as good at figures as geography, but that's an easy one to remember, one hundred degrees Celsius above absolute zero—but at the local noon (which of course has no relation to the Earth time we use inside the domes), it can be fifty degrees warmer, and deep down below the pressure can heat it some too, so in the course of millions of years that ice does soften and flow a little. This planet has been around for four billion years or so, so the flow obliterates the extreme features. Result: shallow, rounded craters standing, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, rim to rim, and one inside another, and overlapping: This world is made of craters, and none of them are any effort to navigate. There are no cutting edges on Callisto. You might say the features of the surface have been eroded by water: not water coursing over from above, as on Earth, but slowly squeezing out from below.

That's why we were moving along so well in our wheeled vehicle; there was very little natural obstruction.

The sky was more interesting. This was night, on the surface as well as inside the dome, but Jupiter was full, and his baleful light flooded the rolling rills of Valhalla. Jupiter was anything but dull, with his violently contrasting bands of atmosphere and the various gaseous eyes staring at us. Surely Jove was watching our puny efforts with disdain—but he was our destination. I was, of course, sorry to leave my home world, for all my experience was invested here on Callisto and all my prior hopes for success had been defined by the Halfcal culture and hierarchy. But I knew that in those bands of turbulent color on the Jovian Planet was opportunity as vast as Jupiter himself. We would certainly be better off there; we would no longer be peasants, there!

I looked directly up, trying to see the other gravity lens, the one above us, close. Such lenses don't just fix the gravity inside the domes, they govern the light we receive. This can be hard for people who don't reside on moons to understand, so I'll try to make it simple: Light is affected by gravity, technically the curvature of space that we call gravity, so a lens that bends gravity waves also bends light waves.

Properly formed, a large gravity lens can be used to focus the light of the distant sun on a smaller area, making it proportionally more intense. There's a lot of energy in light, as a magnifying glass can demonstrate when used to set fire to things. Since the sun's light is much less intense out here at Jupiter's orbit than it is at Earth's orbit, we need to focus it to match what our bodies and our plants are used to.

We are all transplants from Earth, really, though we may have been born or seeded here; a few centuries can't erase a few billion years of evolution.

So above each dome-city is a huge gravity lens that is twenty-seven times the area of the dome, and the lens focuses the wan sunlight to that amount, and it shines in through the dome's transparent roof to light and warm the city, exactly as would be the case on Earth. Well, not exactly; Earth's copious atmosphere filters out many deleterious aspects of the radiation, so our twenty-seven-times-concentrated sunlight would burn us if we took it straight. But the material of the dome is designed to filter out the harmful radiation, substituting for the missing depth of atmosphere, and so the net effect is similar.

The same is true for the agricultural domes; they are literally greenhouses. This is convenient to do on an airless planet, since nobody lives outside to complain about being deprived of sunlight. Naturally the focused brilliance at the dome is at the expense of the twenty-seven-times-as-large area around it, which receives very little light. We had not noticed any difference because we pedaled through this zone at night. But it would have been night by day also, near the dome, if you see what I mean.

It's really more complicated than that, because Callisto's day is the same as its period of revolution around Jupiter: sixteen and two-thirds Earth days. One face—Halfcal's—always faces Jupiter; the other always faces space. So we have eight and a third days of continuous light, and then a night just as long.

We humans don't like that; it doesn't match our biological rhythm. So we exchange light with a sister city around the globe: San Pedro, in the Dominant Republic. San Pedro is always in darkness when Maraud has light, and vice versa, so there's always sunlight one place or the other. We never have clouds or bad weather, of course, the way Earth does; in fact, we have no weather at all. When Maraud is in sun, we use it for twelve hours, then refract it around the planet, in the form of a concentrated light beam, using a chain of vertical gravity lenses, to San Pedro.

In this manner we have our night in the middle of the Callistian day, while they have their day in the middle of their night. When they are light, they send us twelve-hour segments of daylight. This is the most fundamental and absolute system of cooperation between the two nations of our planet, and is inviolate.

If Halfcal and the Dominant Republic went to war with each other—and sometimes, historically, it has come to that, for we are a bickering culture—neither would abrogate the light exchange. Without it, life as we know it would be virtually impossible on Callisto. We depend on the sun for almost all our energy, for we have no great deposits of oil or uranium and lack the technical and industrial base to establish a hydrogen-fusion power plant.

But my glancing was wasted, for the huge elevated gravity lens was not visible. Not only did it operate only in daylight, it was not physical at all. It was generated in space, forming between key points. There was nothing to see. Still, my eye sought it out, much as it sought the gaze of a person in a picture looking in another direction. This foolishness is inherent in my nature; I seek constantly to relate to people and things directly, even when I suspect it is unwise or impossible.

My attention wandered to the other large moons of Jupiter, all closer in than ours. Ganymede, off to the side of the Colossus, its brightness at three-quarter face; it was almost halfway in toward Jupiter, from our vantage. That is, its orbit is just over one million kilometers out, while Callisto's is just under two million. We would pass that inner orbit on our way to Jupiter, but would not pass close to Ganymede itself, because it revolved about the planet more than twice as fast as we did and would rush to the far side when our bubble passed, as if avoiding us. Just as well; the recent political revolution there seemed to have made things even worse for peasants than before. As the ancient poet Coleridge put it: “They burst their manacles and wear the name / Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain!” But of course Europa was little better, while the innermost big moon, Io, zooming all the way around Jupiter in less than two Earth days, was hardly habitable, even with terraform domes. No, no hope for us on the other moons.

Down near the horizon behind us I spied a speck of light I didn't recognize. It wasn't a star, for it was moving, shifting somewhat erratically above the landscape, as if guided by some human hand.

“Saucer!” I exclaimed. “What's it doing out here at night?” For there was very little interdome travel by night, as Callisto is essentially a hinterworld with no major industry, other than agriculture. Unlike the hyperactive denizens of major worlds, we preferred to sleep at night.

“The Maraud authorities wouldn't chase us, would they?” Spirit asked. My parents were consulting with each other, helmet to helmet, but I couldn't hear their dialogue, to my annoyance.

“Shouldn't,” I agreed tersely. “We're not breaking any law. We're just leaving the city, as ordered.”

“And the planet,” she added. “If they found out about that—and they might suspect, the way we snuck out.”

“Maybe,” I agreed uneasily. I would have disparaged the notion out of hand—since I knew the Maraud authorities did not care about us—except for the fact of the saucer. There had to be some reason for it to be out here, and we could not safely assume that reason had nothing to do with us.

The light zoomed toward us. In moments we recognized a private pick-up craft, used by explorers to collect samples of minerals from the planet's surface. Callisto was extremely shy of heavy minerals, which made them all the more valuable. Prospectors were constantly ranging out with metal detectors to search for what few nuggets there were. A lode of iron ore could make a man's fortune. Even mineral dust was far more valuable on Callisto than it was elsewhere, except on Ganymede. Most of our metals had to be imported from the inner planets of the Solar System, and even with the gravity shields, that was expensive.

This craft was typical. It had a nether power scoop and a fair-sized storage compartment and a sealed cockpit with windows looking forward, upward, and down. That meant the occupant did not have to suffer the inconvenience of wearing a space suit, the way we peasants did. Cheaper saucers were not sealed; they might be hardly more than flying platforms, and a miscue could dump the operator off. Not so this one. I envied whoever could afford this sort of vehicle: sealed afloat instead of suited and landbound like us.

The saucer came right up to us, evidently using a metal detector to spy us out. The metal was the main value in a pedal car; it could be melted down and lose only a fraction of its price, and it would be very easy to spy from the dome. However, there was not a great deal of metal here, for most of the transporter's mass was plastic; for a saucer to come out in the hope of salvaging a vehicle like this—no, that didn't make much sense.

It all came back to the original question: why would anyone be looking for us? Legal or illegal—I think our status was now hazy—we remained only refugees, nothing people, completely unimportant to anyone except ourselves.

The saucer paused to hover directly over us, putting us in shadow. That hardly mattered; we weren't trying to draw on Jupiter's pale radiance for power. Then a bright beam of light speared down at us from a unit by the cockpit, blinding to our Jovelight-acclimatized eyes. It found us and blinked off and on again, rapidly, several times.

The saucer was signaling us. It was, of course, impossible to communicate by sound through the vacuum when there was no direct physical contact. Saucers used radios to talk to each other and the city domes, but of course we didn't have a radio. We didn't have a flashlight either, and in any event didn't know the blinking communication code. We didn't have anything that wasn't essential to our progress across the surface or our journey through space, because everything cost precious money. We were unable to make any meaningful response. So my father just waved and pedaled on.

The nether hatch in the saucer opened. The scoop pincers descended slightly, holding something. They were going to drop us a message!

The pincers descended, in order to get below the grav-lens. It was possible for objects to pass right through it without interfering with its function; gravity does not obey ordinary rules. Once below, the pincers cranked open to release the message capsule. It was a bright-orange cylinder that seemed almost to glow, even in the shadow.

Suddenly our transporter swerved violently to the left. I was jammed into the right wall of the vehicle.

We must have hit a craterlet. Craters aren't all landscape-sized; they graduate on down to pinhead size, and some of those can be almost as deep as they are broad. They have less mass to flatten them out—no, I'm wrong, how can a hole have mass?—or maybe it is that they are fresher, so have not yet melted down to gentleness. Geologically speaking, any crater less than a million years old is an infant, born yesterday. Yet my father surely would have seen it and avoided it. Anyway, it was a bad jolt. Spirit, perched high, had to grab my head to keep from being flung out of the vehicle.

I must recreate what followed partly from logic, as my entanglement with Spirit prevented me from paying full attention. The message capsule missed us and struck the rock to our right. It exploded on contact, gouging out a new little crater. That one really was fresh! The impact of the flying debris bounced off our vehicle and the expanding gas shoved the transporter across the sand. We were very lucky no sand holed our suits.

That capsule was no message—at least, not the kind we had anticipated. That was a bomb!

Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.

Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.

The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.

The saucer swerved to get above us again. I saw its pincers, holding another bomb. There was now no doubt about its hostile intent! But, though the immediacy of the threat somehow abated the fear I should naturally have felt, my curiosity remained undimmed. Who was trying to do this to us, and why?

My father swerved again and braked, and the second bomb missed us to the left front. This time all of us were hanging on firmly, so neither the swerving nor the jolt of the ground from the explosion dislodged us.

The forward bumper took the brunt of the flying debris, and we all ducked low so the rest passed harmlessly overhead. This was nervous business, though. Sand is sharp, and while space suits are tough, they aren't that tough.

Still the saucer pursued. It was more maneuverable than we were, and faster; I knew we could not escape it long. I didn't know how many bombs it had, but all it needed was one score on our vehicle.

Each cylinder was small, and the saucer's hold could contain hundreds of them. Weight wouldn't make much difference, with the gravity shielding; a full hold weighed about the same as an empty one.

The pincers carefully lowered each bomb below the shield before releasing it, as I mentioned; otherwise, instead of dropping, the cylinder would remain in the chamber until it banged, into something there, and—

That gave me a notion. If I could somehow jam a bomb back into the hold, or set it off before it dropped—

I got out my laser and took a shot, but the two vehicles were jogging about so violently relative to each other—I'm sure it was mostly us, but it seemed at the time like the saucer, which is a useful exercise in perspective—that I couldn't aim well, and I missed. I wasn't at all sure the laser beam would detonate the bomb anyway. Light and heat were one thing; abrupt collision was another. In any event, if the bomb did explode above us, shrapnel could rain down on us and wipe us out. Even if it also took out the saucer, what good would it do us then? Maybe it was best that I had failed. I had no business depleting the charge in the weapon uselessly.

The third bomb missed behind us as my father accelerated, once more outsmarting the saucer pilot.

Actually, it is very hard to align with an erratic target; pure chance gave us the advantage, if you consider having a chance to survive such a threat an advantage. The saucer was in no danger; it was the aggressor.

These misses were too close; I knew they couldn't go on much longer.

Then Spirit jammed her helmet against mine. “Look!” she yelled. “The ice caves!”

She meant the excavations made by the city of Maraud to mine clean ice. A community of a hundred thousand people needed a lot of water, and the recyclers were always breaking down and it was too expensive to replace them with new and reliable ones, so it was simpler just to quarry the water out of the ground. If there is one thing Callisto has in abundance, it is ice! The bedrock ice is very close to the surface in some places, and here there was a combination strip-and-tunnel mine. The top ice at this site was blended with minerals, but the deep ice was as clean as nature had formed it four billion years ago.

Huge chunks of it were blasted free with bombs similar to those being used against us now, and gravity shields were used to float the icebergs to the dome, where smaller pieces were cut and taken inside for melting and using. There was always an iceberg perched near the dome, our guarantee that one thing we would never suffer was thirst.

I leaned over to touch helmets with my father, who was intent on his pedaling, steering, and the saucer.

He was really working hard, but he kept his helmet still for me. “The ice caves!” I shouted. “We can hide in them!”

“Get rope!” he yelled back, and I realized he had been angling for this all along. I didn't know what good rope would do, but I scrambled out of my seat and across Faith in the back, delving for the flexible cable every outside vehicle had for towing and such.

In a moment I found it, as the vehicle swerved in crazy patterns, preventing the saucer from getting a good line on us. I realized the saucer was floating too high, so my father could see when the capsules were being released, and could dodge out of the way before they arrived. Things didn't fall very rapidly out here in quarter-gee. Faster than they would in atmosphere, of course, as the prompt settling of the dust showed; but any distance made the slower pattern of natural acceleration evident. Human reactions, geared for Earth-type acceleration, were quite ready to cope with Callisto acceleration.

The saucer, however, was catching on. First it angled toward the ice mine as if to block us off from it; then, realizing that this ploy was ineffective because we could zigzag toward the mine anyway, the saucer floated lower, so as to cut the fall time and prevent us from dodging effectively.

My father made a throw-gesture with a free arm, and I caught on. I could use the rope against the saucer! It had been floating too high for the rope to reach, before, but now it was coming down close enough. My father was still outthinking it.

I made a lasso noose as I eyed the saucer. If I could loop that extended pincers, I could put it and the saucer out of commission. The lower the saucer got, the more in reach it got.

I flung the loop, but missed. I wasn't experienced at this; I didn't know how to lasso a moving object in low-gee. The dynamics were all wrong. In addition, that hovering bomb made me excruciatingly nervous.

If it dropped now, could I catch it—and do so gently enough to prevent it from detonating? I doubted it.

Spirit climbed back to join me, moving lithely. She always had been an active type, able to fling herself about like a little monkey. She put her helmet against mine. “Dad says jump!” she cried.

“And desert the family?” I retorted. “No.”

“With the rope, dummy! Here, I'll do it.” She reached for the lasso.

Then I understood. In low-gee we could jump much higher than normal. It wasn't as simple as jumping four times as high in one-quarter gee; it depended on technique and the center of body mass. I hadn't had much practice at this either, but I had a general notion.

As the saucer swooped low, lower and closer than before, I launched myself upward, carrying the loop of rope in both hands. I imagined myself a rocket, jetting from a planetary berth with an important payload. It felt like straight up, but of course it was at an angle, with the inertia of the vehicle's forward motion slanting me. There was no atmospheric drag to slow me; I shot straight for the saucer. I was amazed, though I shouldn't have been; the power of my leap should have taken me up a meter within the dome, which translated to somewhere in the vicinity of four meters here, allowing for the uncertainties of the situation. That was how high the saucer now floated.

I came right up under the bomb, and with my two hands looped the rope around the extended pincers.

Then I fell away to the side, slowly—and saw to my horror that I had dislodged the bomb, or at least failed to prevent it from being released.

I grabbed for it, but that was futile. I was already out of reach, and it was falling at the same rate I was.

It was traveling right toward the transporter.

I watched helplessly as that terrible cylinder descended. Time dilated for me; everything was in slow motion. My family faced destruction—and I could only watch.

Then Spirit jumped up and caught the bright capsule in her hands. Still aloft, she flung it from her, behind the vehicle. She had been alert, bless her, and had done what I could not. Once again she had backstopped me, and perhaps saved us all.

The bomb exploded as Spirit and I landed on either side of the transporter. Both of us managed to get turned to face forward and hit the ground running, for we still had that forward inertia. It was rough, but I managed to keep my balance, and so did she. We jogged to clumsy stops well behind the transporter.

The rope was tied to the saucer pincers at one end, and anchored to the land vehicle at the other. The two machines were tied together.

The three oldest Hubrises were in the transporter—and who was in the saucer?

Spirit rejoined me, touching helmets. “Sierra,” she said.

“What?” My mind was distracted by more important things than her chance remarks.

“The scion on the saucer!”

Suddenly it came clear! The one we had humiliated! Naturally he was out to get revenge, and he had not been satisfied with our departure from the dome of Maraud. Out here at night he could destroy us and get away with it! We had fled the dome of our own volition, leaving the protection of its law, such as it was; we had become fair targets. There wouldn't even be any inquiries.

Sierra must have been keeping track of us, unsatisfied without the taste of blood. The arrogance of scions was almost beyond belief; a personal humiliation by a peasant was justification for murder, in this person's view. But not open murder, for then it would be known that he had acted in a cowardly manner, bombing a pedal-powered vehicle from a saucer. The nature of his humiliation might also become known.

So his revenge had to be private and complete. Yes, it made sense at last.

The saucer wrenched upward as its pilot realized that something was wrong—and it skewed crazily as it snapped on the end of its tether. The rope provided with out-dome vehicles is tough, for it has to stand up to the abrasion of sharp rocks and the stress of hauling a vehicle out of a mine cave-in. That saucer could not break free!

With a gravity lens, a saucer can lift any amount that will fit in its hold, because the load has no weight—provided the lens is between the load and the planet. But the rope anchored the saucer to the transporter below the lens, with its full quarter-gee weight. This was too much to lift. The propulsive rockets (no propeller out here in vacuum, of course) weren't designed for significant lifting, only forward thrust. What a lovely trap!

With its pincers unit immobilized, the saucer couldn't drop any more bombs. We had muzzled it as well as tethering it. Because the pilot was sealed inside, he couldn't go to the airless cargo hold to untie or cut the rope. Not unless he had a space suit—which was unlikely. Trying to scramble into one of those bulky things in the confines of a cockpit was so awkward as to be something a scion would not consider, anyway.

On the other hand, we couldn't let the saucer go without being in trouble again. It was similar to the way I had grabbed the scion's foot, really incapacitating us both. Only then he'd drawn the laser—

Oops! If he had a laser now—

No, that seemed unlikely. No laser cannon was mounted on the saucer itself, as lasers weren't very useful for cutting this ice of the mine. It simply melted, flowed, and refroze in an instant, absorbing an enormous amount of energy in the process. It takes as much energy for a laser to do its work as it does to do the work any other way; there is no such thing as free power, other than what we draw from the sunlight. So the ice had to be cut physically, without wasteful heating.

Anyway, if the scion had had a laser, he would have used it instead of the clumsy blasting cylinders. So it seemed we really had evened the odds.

Then my mind, which never knows when to stop, brought up another thought: The scion could have a laser in the cockpit, but not have used it because that would have holed up our suits and killed us without destroying the evidence of the murder. A person or a family could run afoul of blasting cylinders by error, perhaps, but there had to be another party to fire a laser at five separate people. So I could not afford any complacency on that score.

The transporter reached the ice mine, hauling the saucer along on its tether. On the shallow-crater region of the planet the saucer had the advantage, when it was loose, for there was no place for a vehicle to hide or avoid it. But the mine was deep, convoluted, and jagged, not having had the necessary billion years or so to melt into anonymity. This terrain was no picnic for a ground vehicle, but it was downright dangerous for a low-flying saucer on a tether. If we let the scion go here, he would probably just have to float home.

But if we did that, and the saucer did not go home, we would be trapped in the mine, unable to proceed to our rendezvous with the bubble. Safety in the mine was no good when we had a time limit for crossing the landscape. The saucer could hover indefinitely, outwaiting us. We had no great supplies of food or water, and in any event had to reach the bootleg bubble before it departed without us. So we had to hang onto the saucer. But could we haul it all the way to the bubble? That was unlikely—and if we did, the operator of the bubble might decide to take off before we arrived, fearful that the saucer represented the authority of an official. Our predicament had changed its nature, but not its urgency.

My father was no expert driver, since few peasants ever got much practice with vehicles of any type, and his legs had to be tired from all that pedaling, but he was strongly motivated. Spirit and I came to the brink of the mine and watched the action. There were roads winding around and down past tiers of blank ice walls, and the whole cavity was like a giant inverted dome, with high ridges of ice-rock projecting between many of the levels and spires rising where there were turnarounds. Any of these could smash up the saucer pretty badly, if it happened to be unlucky enough to collide with them. The gravity lens made the saucer light, but it could not change its mass; a crack-up would be just as devastating as one in full gravity.