Refugee (2 page)

“You're no military man!”

“It's my name, not a title. Fire that laser, and the rest of us will swamp you before I fall.”

The Horse grinned humorlessly. “I can take out five or six of you first.”

“Two or three of us,” my father corrected him evenly, and I felt a surging pride at his courage. My father had always had the nerve to do what he had to do, even when he disliked it. This was an example. “And there are two hundred of us. We've already got your men. You stand to lose, regardless.”

The pirate leader considered. “There is that. All right—you release my men, and we'll leave you alone.”

My father turned to the crowd. “That seems fair enough.” He noted the scattered nods of approval, then turned back to the pirate. “But you have to leave the things you stole from us. No robbery.”

The Horse scowled. “Agreed.”

By this time I had recovered most of my wits. “Don't trust him, Father!” I cried. “These are pirates!”

“I am a pirate,” the Horse said. “But I keep my word. We will not rob you, and we will leave the bubble.”

My father, like most men of honor, tended to believe the best of people. He nodded at the men who held the pirates, and the pirates were released. They quickly recovered their weapons and rejoined their leader, somewhat shamefaced.

The Horse stood for a moment, considering. Then he indicated me. “That's your boy who floored my man?”

My father nodded grimly. “And my daughter, whom he was defending.”

As I mentioned, thoughts scurry through my head at all times, not always relevant to the issue of the moment. Right now I wondered where my little sister Spirit was, as I didn't see her. I don't know why I thought of her right then. Maybe it was because, the way my father spoke, it sounded as though he had only two children, when in fact he had three. Of course, he wasn't trying to deceive anyone; the pirate hadn't asked how many he had, just whether I was one. It was just that my meandering brain insisted on exploring surplus details.

“And when she screamed, the others rallied around,” the Horse said. “We misjudged that, it seems.”

“Yes.”

“So we'll just have to try it again,” the Horse concluded. He made a signal with his hand. “Take them.”

Suddenly the nine other pirates advanced on us again, each with his sword or club ready.

“Hey!” my father protested. “You agreed—”

“Not to rob you,” the Horse said. “And to leave the bubble. We'll honor that. But first we have some business that wasn't in the contract.” He looked at Faith and me. “Don't hurt the boy or the girl or the man,” he ordered. “Bring them here.”

Pirates grabbed the three of us. In each case, two men menaced the refugees nearby while the third cornered the victim. They were much more careful than before. It was not possible to resist without immediate disaster, for the Horse backed them up with his laser. More than that, it was psychological: The remaining refugees, rendered leaderless again, did nothing. The dynamics had changed.

That's another phenomenon that has perplexed me. The mechanism by which a few uninhibited individuals can cow a much larger number, when both groups know the larger group has the power to prevail. It seems impossible, yet it happens all the time. Whole governments exist in opposition to the will of the people they govern, because of this. If I could just comprehend that dynamic—

“Bind father and son,” the Horse said. “String them up to the baggage rack.”

I struggled, but lacked the strength and mass of any one of the pirates. They tied my hands behind me, cruelly tight, and suspended me from the guyed baggage net in the center of the bubble. My father suffered a similar fate. We hung at a slight angle, overlooking the proceedings, helpless.

Now the Horse turned to Faith. He whistled. “She's a looker!” he exclaimed. His vernacular expression may have been cruder, but that was the essence. Faith, of course, blushed.

“Leave her alone!” I cried foolishly.

“No, we won't let this piece go to waste,” the Horse said, running his tongue around his lips. “Prepare her.”

The pirates held Faith and methodically tore the rest of her clothing from her struggling body, grinning salaciously. Oh, yes, they enjoyed doing this! In my mind they resembled burning demons from the depths of Hell. Someone among the refugees cried out, but the swords of the other pirates on guard prevented any action.

When Faith was naked, they hauled a box out of the baggage and held her supine, spread-eagled across it. The Horse ran his rough hands over her torso and squeezed her breasts, then dropped his pantaloons.

There was a gasp of incredulity from the refugees. This was not because of any special quality of the Horse's anatomy, which was unimpressive and unclean, but because of the open manner in which he exhibited himself before such a company of men, women, and children. The man was completely without shame.

I am striving to record this sequence objectively, for this is my personal biography: the description of the things that have made me what I am. I strive always to comprehend the true nature of people, myself most of all. There is a place for subjectivity—or so I believe. My feelings about a given event may change with time and mood and memory, but the facts of the event will never change. So I must first describe precisely what occurred, as though it were recorded by videotape, uncluttered by emotion, then proceed to the subjective analysis and interpretation. Perhaps there should be several interpretations, separated by years, so that the change in them becomes apparent and helps lead to the truest possible comprehension of the whole.

But in this case I find I cannot adequately perform the first requirement. My hand balks, my very mind veers away from the enormity of the outrage and hurt. I can only say that I loved my two sisters with a love that was perhaps more than brotherly, though never would I have thought that there was any incestuous element. Faith was beautiful, and nice, and I was charged with her protection, though she was a woman while I was a mere adolescent. I had in fact never before witnessed the sexual act, either in holo or in person, and had never imagined it to be so brutal.

It was as if that foul pirate shoved a blunt dagger into my sister's trembling, vulnerable body, again and again, and his face distorted in a grimace of urgency that in ironic fashion almost matched her grimace of agony, and his body shuddered as if in epileptic seizure, and when he stopped and stepped away there was blood on the weapon.

And I—I with my absolute horror of that ravishment, my hatred of every aspect of that cruelty—I found my own body reacting, as it were a thing apart from my mind, yet I knew it could not truly be separate.

There was some part of me that identified with the fell pirate, though I knew it was wrong and more than wrong. My innocent, lovely sister Faith possessed certain attributes of Heaven, while now I knew that I possessed, at least in part, an attribute of Hell. I looked upon the foul lust of Satan, and felt an echo of that lust within myself.

I cannot write of this further. It is no pleasant thing to confess an affinity to that which one condemns. I can only say that I swore a private oath to kill the pirate Horse: some time, some way. And the pirates who followed him in the appalling act. I tried to note the details of each of them, so that I would not fail to recognize them if ever I encountered them again. I saw that several of the pirates, however, did not participate; they obeyed the Horse in all other things, but would not ravish a helpless woman. Even among pirates, there were some who were not as bad as others.

Apart from that effort of identification, my mind retreated from what was happening. My sister, I think, had fainted before the second pirate readied his infernal weapon, and that was a portion of mercy for her.

She, at least, no longer knew what was being done to her body. I knew—but chose not to see.

I fled into memory, into that sequence that was the origin of my feeling of déjà vu , for it related directly to the present situation. Probably I should have commenced my bio there, instead of with the shock of Faith's violation, for I see now that the true beginning of my odyssey was then. This bio is more than a record of experience; it is therapy. Biography, biology, biopsy—all the ways to study a subject.

Bio—life. My life. Not only do I seek to grasp the nature of myself, I seek to strengthen my character by reviewing my successes and my mistakes with an eye to improving the ratio between them, painful as this process can be at times.

Therefore I will now illumine that prior sequence, demarking it with a new dateline, and will try to keep my narrative more coherent hereafter. I would perhaps dispose of my “false start,” but my paper and ink are precious, as is my evocative effort. After all, if once I begin the process of unwriting what I have written, where may it end? Every word is important, for it too is part of my being.

Maraud, Callisto, 2-1-2615—My sisters and I walked home together after school, because there was a certain safety in numbers. Faith, eighteen years old, resented this; she claimed her social life was inhibited by the presence of a skinny fifteen-year-old little sibling. The vernacular term she was wont to employ was less kind, and I think not completely fair, and does not become her, so I shall not render it here. Yet she smiled as she said it, deleting much of the sting, and I think there was some merit to her complaint. It is true that a fifty-kilo sibling is not much company for a fifty-kilo girl. Our weights were similar, in full Earth gravity, but the distribution differed substantially. Faith was about as pretty a girl as one might imagine, with the rich ash-blond tresses and gray eyes that made her face stand out among the darker shades that predominated in our culture, and a generously symmetrical figure and small extremities. I was young and not versed in social relations between the sexes, and I was her brother; even so, I understood the impact such physical qualities had on men.

Faith was not really intelligent, as I define the concept, though she did well enough in scholastics. It was said that a single look at her was enough to raise her grade before any given class commenced, and that may not have been entirely in jest. She lacked that ornery attitude that passes for courage in others; these qualities of intelligence and courage were reserved in healthy measure for her sister. Spirit was as bold and cunning a gamin as could be found on the planet. Technically Callisto is merely the fourth Galilean satellite of Jupiter, a moon, but its diameter is almost 5,000 kilometers, the same as Mercury and greater than Pluto, so only the accident of its association with the Colossus of the System prevents it from being accorded the dignity of planetary status, and so I think of it as a planet, though the texts disagree. But I was describing my little sister, Spirit, who even at age twelve was a person to be reckoned with. I fought with her often, but I liked her too and envied her survivalist nature. Theoretically I was the guardian of our little group, for I was the male, but my appreciation of the complexities of people was too great for me to perform this duty as well as Spirit might, had she been me. Once she set her course, she pursued it with an almost appalling efficiency and dispatch.

On this day, precisely one month following my fifteenth birthday, we experienced what is termed an

“incident.” How I wish I could have foreseen the consequences of this seemingly minor event! We have on Callisto a society of classes arising somewhat haphazardly from the turbulent history of our satellite.

The government has changed often, but the mass of the populace has sunk slowly into the stability of poverty and dependence. Interactions between the classes are fraught with complications.

My father had mortgaged his small property and gone into debt to insure a decent education for all his children. Thus the three of us, unlike the vast majority of those of our station, were literate and well informed. Faith and I could speak and read English as well as Spanish, and Spirit was learning. We had applied ourselves most diligently throughout, aware of the sacrifice that had been made for us; but for me the pursuit of knowledge of every kind had become an obsession that no longer required any other stimulus.

We hoped this good education would facilitate Faith's marriage into a more affluent class and my own chance to enter some more profitable trade than that of coffee technician. Then we could begin to abate the debts of our education, bettering the situation of our parents who had toiled so hard for our benefit.

We could also achieve higher status and greater economic leverage to benefit our own children, when they came. It was a worthwhile ambition.

But such aspirations were fraught with mischief, as this episode was to demonstrate.

As we three walked a side street of the city of Maraud—named after the days when the Marauders of Space had made Callisto a base of operations, a quaint bit of historical lore that was not so quaint in its remaining influence—a mini-saucer floated up. It bore the scion of some wealthy family. He was handsome and wore jewelry on his quality coat, steel caps on his leather shoes, and the sneer of arrogance on his face that only one born to the manner could affect. I disliked him the moment I saw him, for he had all the ostentatious luxury of situation that I craved, yet he had been given it on the proverbial platter, while my family had to struggle constantly with no certainty of achieving it. He was about twenty years old, for he looked no older and could not have been younger; that was the minimum age at which a person could obtain the license to float a saucer.

“You're Hubris,” he said to Faith, hovering obnoxiously near, so that the downdraft from the saucer's small propeller stirred the hem of her light dress and caused more of her legs to show. Here within the dome, the climate varied only marginally and was always controlled, so that heavy clothing was unnecessary. This was fortunate, for we could not afford anything more than we had. Still, the untoward breeze embarrassed Faith, who was of a genuinely demure nature in the presence of grown men.

“I've seen you in school,” the scion continued, his eyes traveling rather too intimately along her torso. He must have meant that he had watched her at her school, for he would not have attended school at all; he would have had hired tutors throughout, and computerized educational programs and hypno-teaching for the dull material. “You look pretty good, for a peasant. How would you like a good kiss?” Only “kiss”

was not precisely the term he employed. Our language of Spanish has nuances of obscenity that foreigners tend to overlook, and translation would be awkward. Something as simple as a roll of bread can become, with the improper inflection, a gutter imprecation. He surely had not learned such terms from his expensive tutors!

Faith blushed from her collar to her ears. She tried to walk away from the insulting man, but he coasted close and took hold of her arm. I saw the several rings on the fingers of his hand, set with diamonds and rubies, displaying his inordinate wealth. The hand was quite clean and uncallused; he had never performed physical labor. “Come on—you low-class girls do it all the time, don't you? I'll give you two dollars if you're good.” The Jovian dollar—that was our currency too—had been revalued many times, and currently was worth about what it had been seven hundred years ago, back on Planet Earth. That was one of the things I had learned in the school it had cost my father so many of those same dollars to send us to. I also understood the ancient vernacular significance of the two-dollar figure. It was an allusion to the fee of prostitutes.

My anger was building up like pressure in the boiler of a steam machine, but I contained it. Slumming scions could have foul mouths and manners, but it was best to tolerate these and stay out of trouble. All men are not equal, in the domes of Callisto.

Faith tried to wrest her arm free, but the man hauled her roughly in to him. She screamed helplessly. I suppose it would have been better if she had kicked or scratched him, but she had practiced being the helpless type so long it was now second nature.

Then Spirit did what I had lacked the nerve to do: She put her foot against the rim of the saucer and tilted it up. Its gravity lens made it and the man aboard it very light, so it responded readily to her pressure. The shield was partial, so that the saucer would not float away when not in use. About 95

percent of the weight of vehicle and user was eliminated, enabling the propeller in the base to lift and move the mass readily. The null-gee effect was narrow and limited, so that the air above was not unduly disturbed. The first saucers, when gravity shielding was new, had borne their users along in perpetual clouds of turbulence, and minor tornadoes had been known to form above them, contributing to the awkwardness. But the refinement of the shield to make a curving and self-limiting null-gee zone had solved that problem, and the saucers were now quite common. (I use “shield” and “lens” interchangeably here; I should not, but the technical distinctions are beyond my expertise, so I go with the ignorant majority in this case. As I understand it, there is no shield, but the lens performs the office admirably.) The saucers use very little power, and, though they aren't generally fast, they are fun. Larger saucers can do considerably more, of course.

But I digress, as is my fault. The point is, it does require fair balance and skill to ride such a saucer, for the passenger's weight reduction is proportional to the amount of the body within the region of shielding and the angle of the shielding disk. It is a common misconception that a grav-shield angled sidewise abates gravity sidewise; of course that could never be true. Such an angle merely reduces the size of the null-gee region. Thus a person floating too high can always bring himself down by tilting the shield.

Properly managed, the saucers provide precisely controlled individual flotation, with the rider drawing his body into the shielded region to increase lift, and extending it beyond that region to increase weight and make a gentle descent.

So when Spirit tilted the saucer, two things happened. Its cross section intercepting the planetary gravity diminished slightly—and the man aboard it found himself angled to a greater extent outside that field.

Naturally the saucer sank under his increasing weight. It also threw him off balance, so that yet more of his body projected from the shielded zone.

Balancing on a gravity lens has been described as similar to balancing on a surfboard or skateboard—which provides modern folk a hint of the fun the ancients had—and a slight miscue could quickly become calamitous.

It was so in this case. Only the man's grip on Faith's arm steadied him, enabling him to jump off the saucer instead of being dumped on his face. Shaken and furious, he whirled about—just in time to spy the burgeoning smirk on my face.

I had not done the deed, but I was certainly guilty of appreciating it. “I'll teach you!” he cried angrily in that idiomatic expression that means the opposite. He released Faith and concentrated on me. Behind him the vacant saucer righted itself and hovered in place, as it was programmed to do. It had not failed him; he had failed it, with a little help from Spirit.

The scion was substantially older and larger than I, for five years can be a tremendous distinction in this period of life, and I was afraid of him. I did not want to fight him. I have never regarded myself as a creature of violence in the most propitious circumstances, and this one was least propitious. At the same time, I was aware that this development had distracted his malign attention from Faith, and that it would return to her the moment he settled with me. Therefore I could not seek to elude him. Not until my sister was safe. That was the onus attached to my privilege of being male.

“Get on home, girls,” I snapped peremptorily.

Spirit started to go, knowing it was best, though she didn't like leaving me. By herself she would have stayed, but she was aware that the real threat was to Faith, who had to be moved out of danger.

But Faith, less perceptive of the realities of the situation, had the endearing loyalty of the Hubris family.

She did not go. “You can't fight him, Hope,” she protested, her voice quavering with reaction and fear.

“I won't fight the twerp,” the scion snarled. Again I take a liberty with the translation, ameliorating the essential term. “I'll only jam his head into a wall to teach him his place. Then I'll deal with you.” And he made a small gesture of universal and impolite significance.

Emboldened by my awareness of the peril of our situation, I never paused to see the horrified blush I knew was crossing Faith's face. I punched the scion in the stomach.

It was a foolish gesture. He was not only larger than I, he was in better physical condition. He looked clean and soft, but he had access to expensive complete-nutrition foods tailored to his specific chemistry, while my stature had been somewhat retarded by sometimes inadequate diet. He could go regularly to a private gymnasium for expertly supervised exercise crafted to be entertaining and efficient, while I got mine playing handball in the back alleys. Even if I had been his age and size, I could not have matched his training and endurance. This was a gross mismatch.

The scion smiled grimly, well aware of these aspects. He might not have completely enjoyed the various facets of his training, since he might have preferred at any given time to be out slumming in the city, as he was now, but he had nevertheless profited from them. He assumed a competent fighting stance, body balanced, fists elevated. I had hit him; I had not hurt him, but I was committed by the convention of our culture that transcended the difference in our stations. A person who hits another had better be ready to fight.

The scion stepped forward, leading with his left fist, his right cocked for the punishing follow-up. In that moment I saw Faith standing frozen to my right and Spirit to my left. My older sister was terrified, but my younger one, who now had a pretext to stay, was intrigued.

I ducked and dodged, of course. Fights are an integral part of youth, and though I never sought them—perhaps I should say because I never sought them—I had had my share. I am a quick study on most things, and pain is a most effective tutor. I had been hurt so many times that my response had become virtually instinctive. It was not that I had any special competence in fisticuffs or any delusion about winning, but I could at least put up a respectable defense, considering the disparity in our forces.

Like the scion, I had been an unwilling student, but I had mastered the essentials.

The scion turned with a sneer, unsurprised at his miss. Only a complete fool stands still to take a direct hit. He retained his poise. He had only been testing, anyway. He stepped forward again, jabbing with his left, still saving his right for the opportunity to score. He was too smart to swing wildly; he knew he would catch me in due course unless I fled, in which case he would have undistracted access to Faith. This was, in its fashion, merely a preliminary to that access. He was, perversely, showing off for her, impressing her by beating up her little brother. He had no need of her pleasure or her acquiescence, just her respect, to feed his id. He was the dragonslayer who would get the fair maid—in his own perception.