Refugee (23 page)

What terrible ironies fate inflicts on us!

They were pirates, all right. We heard their guttural exclamations as they examined our women, who had gone so far as to make themselves as reasonably attractive as possible, donning dresses and loosening their hair. I hated all of this, but knew it was necessary. It was better than the violence and bloodshed that otherwise would come.

These were real brutes. It seemed they weren't interested in acquiescence. They wanted violence. I heard them hitting the women; I heard the screams. I started to get up, to go out there in a fury—but Helse held me back. She was correct, of course, as she had been before, when my mother had been out there. My headstrong reaction was sheer mischief. I settled back, shivering with rage. And I realized that Helse was doing service with the older women: it was her chore to keep me out of the action. To save my life, if nothing else, from the consequence of my adolescent folly.

One woman was thrown on the deck immediately above our cell. We heard the thump of her body and that of the pirate who bestrode her, and saw their fuzzy outlines through our ceiling panel. I wished I could slide open the panel and stab a blade upward into the pirate's body.

Then the woman screamed, and it was an ugly sound. She had been terribly hurt! Still Helse held me back, and of course I could not even get out of the cell while the bodies lay astride it. Once more I waited in silent shivering fury, while Helse clung to me and stroked my hair as she might the fur of an aggressive but imperfectly disciplined guard dog.

The pirate finally got up and moved away. We heard screams elsewhere; it sounded as if cells were being opened, children hauled out. Our program of accommodation, of pacifism, was not working!

Helse issued a stifled scream. I looked at her, startled. There was blood on her shirt.

As I watched in the dim light, I froze for the moment, and watched it dripping down from our access panel. Helse happened to be under it, so had caught the first drops. How bright red that blood was!

We exchanged a horrified glance. The blood had to be coming from the woman who still lay above us, and it could not be the result of any minor scratch. The pirate had stabbed her!

A new scream rent the air, close and loud. “Spirit!” I cried with instant recognition. The pirates were hauling her out!

This time my rage could not be constrained. I jumped for the panel, shoving it violently aside. Blood dripped down on my head as part of the woman's body sagged into our cell. I had to push her out of the way. I saw her staring eyes and the terrible wound in her side; she had been cut so deeply she had already bled to death, or perhaps her heart had been pierced.

I hauled myself up, my vision tunneling to only one thing: the pirate. His bloodstained blade was jammed in his waistband, and he was half-lying on the deck, reaching down into Spirit's cell.

He cursed, suddenly slapping his face, and I knew Spirit had used her finger-whip on him. That reminded me of my laser pistol, which I had not thought to have about me, idiot that I was. Now I needed it! Then the pirate scrambled forward, dropping into the cell as I cleared mine.

I dived after him. I caught him about the head, trying to draw it back, trying to choke him, but my strength and weight were too slight. He roared and brought a hairy hand back, catching me by the hair, yanking me forward.

“Spirit!” I gasped.

She reacted as if she were a part of my own body. She pounced on the knife at his sash and snatched it out while he was preoccupied with me. This was like our fight with the scion, so long ago—one month ago, an, eternity!—but this was more serious. This man would kill us!

I brought up my knees as the pirate pulled me over his head. I clamped my legs against his ears, resisting him. Upside down, I saw Spirit take the knife and survey her prospects. I felt a kind of chill, right through the heat of the combat, at the calculating way she considered. I have said before that I would not care to oppose my little sister when she was really angry; it remains true.

Then she gripped the knife in both hands and stabbed the pirate in the belly.

He grunted and let go of me. He grabbed at Spirit, but she drew back as far as she could in the cell, jerking out the knife so as to let him bleed. The pirate roared, stalking her, evidently not seriously damaged, or at least not sufficiently aware of it. What brutes these men were!

I knew the noise could summon his companions. They would ignore the screams of women and children, knowing they were merely victims, but the pirates might come to the aid of one of their own in trouble.

We had to shut this one up until we got him safely dead!

I tried to circle his bull neck again, but he threw me against the wall. That distraction, however, laid him open to attack again. Spirit launched herself, her feet pushing off violently from the walls of the corner, her two-handed knife spearing toward the pirate's face. He saw it coming and reared back, trying to protect his eyes—but there really is little room to maneuver in a cubed cell, and he banged into the wall, and though the knife missed, I grabbed him once more by the head.

Spirit thrust again—this time for the throat. She scored, for there was nothing weak or halting about her fighting nature, once aroused. The blade slashed into the exposed neck, cutting it open from front to side, digging deeply.

Blood spurted out in a horrendous red jet. She had severed not only the jugular vein, but one of the deeply buried carotid arteries.

The pirate collapsed. There was not much else he could do, in the circumstance. I extricated myself from his body and took the knife from Spirit's lax hand and shoved her up and out of the panel exit. There was blood on her, of course—but there was blood everywhere.

It was chaos on the Commons; no one noticed us. I got us both out and slid the panel closed. Then I hauled the woman's body over, laying it across the panel, sealing off that cell. Then I shoved Spirit down with Helse and jumped in myself, and slid the panel closed. “If anyone looks, play dead!” I snapped.

We played dead anyway, the three of us. It wasn't hard to do, for we were smeared with the gore of the woman and the pirate. Spirit was sobbing, for she was not yet so hardened to the new reality that she could slaughter a man without reaction, but she was fairly quiet about it and I knew she could stifle it the rest of the way if the panel opened. She could do what she had to do; she had always been the best at that, in our family. I held one of her hands and Helse held the other, lending her what little emotional support we could. We all knew the pirate had deserved it; that he was a murderer who had raped and killed, virtually simultaneously, one of our women who had offered him no resistance; that he had then tried to get at Spirit for similar atrocity; and that she had slain him in self-defense. Still, she had killed him, and she was only a twelve-year-old female child. Justification did not make it easy for her.

Time passed and the bedlam above diminished. No one looked in, though we cringed in fear as footsteps passed close. Eventually the pirates departed and disconnected their ship. It was over.

Apparently that cutthroat crew was so disorganized that the pirates didn't even make a count of their departing number. Or maybe they were used to taking losses and simply didn't care.

I climbed out. It was even worse than I had feared. All ten women were dead. The pirates had callously raped and murdered them, apparently as a matter of course, leaving no adult witnesses. Nonresistance had been disaster this time; we might as well have fought them from the outset, at least taking more of them with us. As it was, they had made a literal wreckage of our bubble, and of our hopes for sanctuary.

Panels were broken, walls were dented, and food packs were ripped open and strewn about the Commons, the crumbs soaking up some of the blood that puddled around the equatorial region.

Helse joined me. Spirit, overcome by the horror of the killing she had done, remained in the cell. I would return for her as soon as I could; right now I had to determine the extent of our losses. I didn't know whether anyone survived, besides the three of us, or whether we had any supplies remaining, or whether our equipment still functioned. In short, whether we had any reasonable prospect for continued survival.

More of us had survived than I had thought at first. Other children had been overlooked in their cells, and others had thought to play dead. Even so, twenty-seven children had died. Our total number was down to forty-five, all children, some of them in the almost-suicidal reaction to being newly orphaned.

Only one pirate was dead, the one Spirit and I had killed.

I knew Spirit would be missing or dead now, if we had not dealt with that brute; I was shaken but had no honest regret for what we had done. As it was, we had been lucky. Lucky we had managed to kill him, and lucky we had been able to conceal his body and ourselves. It had been a narrow and ugly thing, amidst the battlefield carnage that was our bubble.

We held an impromptu, crude service of mourning, then “buried” the bodies on the hull, bagged with the men. Helse and I did most of it; we were now the two oldest survivors. In addition, we were relatively unscathed by this latest slaughter, odd as it may seem to say it. My parents and older sister had been lost before, so I had a head start on adjusting, while Helse had always been alone in the bubble. The children who had just lost their last parent had a more immediate shock to bear. How well I understood!

There is no need to dwell on what followed. When the necessary cleaning up was done and our supplies were surveyed, I assumed the leadership of the bubble. It wasn't that I was any natural leader; it was that there was no one else. Helse was the oldest, but she was no leader, and the children somehow expected the commands to issue from a man or a grandmother. They would follow me.

I assigned the most competent surviving children to navigation duty; they did know how to do it, once their shock of emotion backed off. I assigned others to mess duty, handing out the food packs. There were enough of these; though a number had been destroyed in wanton vandalism by the pirates, our diminished number more than made up the difference. But this was no casual assignment, because I knew and they knew that if the rations ran short again, these would be the ones to select and haul and thaw and carve and cook the meat. They had to be tough, realistic kids, and they needed time to prepare themselves.

The most important thing I was doing was unspoken. I was trying to establish a viable social order.

These orphans had to have something tangible and social to relate to, to replace their lost families. Now we had a group family, much tighter than before, because the need was greater than before, with discipline and caring and stability, and that helped them to survive emotionally as well as physically. It was my talent, coming into its own at last, exerted as a life-promoting force. I tried to come to understand the specific needs of each member of our family, and to accommodate that need as well as was possible. When a child cried, someone was always there to hold his hand or hug him or talk to him; when a child stumbled, someone always came ta help him up. When he laughed, someone laughed with him; when he mourned, someone mourned with him. When he went to the head, someone accompanied him, for the accommodations were sized for adults, so a child alone could have trouble. Helse and I took turns telling stories, inventing whatever fantasies seemed most to appeal, for there is immense comfort in group story-telling, as our prehistoric ancestors knew. Many of us took to sleeping on the Commons floor, for it got lonely at night in the individual cells. Sometimes we formed big circles, and slept holding hands in a sort of daisy chain. Even for me, that helped; my dreams were less nightmarish when I felt the touch of other hands in mine.

It worked amazingly well. In hours, it seemed, we had become fused into a desperately close community. We knew this was all that lay between us and the physical and social void beyond.

We survived. But what would we do when the next pirates came? When would it end?

3-17-'15, Jupiter Ecliptic—We planned cynically for the next pirates. We knew, now, that pirates were as random and savage and uncaring as sulfur volcanoes and should be treated with similar dispassionate respect. If we wanted to live and to reach sanctuary at Leda, we would have to accommodate that reality. We had a gauntlet to run, and we could not avoid it, so we had to prepare for it.

We were children—but we had lost our parents and siblings to pirates. The realities of space had forced themselves upon us in most brutal fashion. We were children who had been bloodied. I repeat this point, perhaps, in a kind of explanation or apology for the cynicism of the things we contemplated, which may disturb people who have not experienced what we had. We had, I believe it is fair to say, as fair a notion of necessity as any space crew of any age could.

We concocted plans, discussed them, and acted them out in little playlets, searching for flaws, for we knew any error or oversight could be fatal. This became, really, part of our therapy; instead of telling stories, now we were developing scenarios. The important thing is that we did this together, giving respect to all views, making even the smallest child feel important—for, indeed, the smallest was important.

We considered attacking pirates with knives, but realized that only a few men would get cut before the others destroyed us. We were, after all, children, and could not fight adults on any even basis, and any delusion that we could would be fatal. We thought of poisoning their food and/or water—but had no poison, and anyway, pirates didn't come to eat and drink, they came to rape and kill.

In retrospect, I marvel at the psychology of the pirates. Apparently, civilized restraints break down the moment civilized enforcement ends, at least for certain types of men. They raid and destroy simply because they enjoy pillaging and hurting, and in space the refugees are easy targets. I find it very difficult to sympathize with such an attitude, but at least I think I understand it now. The pirates are that dreg of society that is least civilized, and that mankind as a whole would be best off without. Mighty Jupiter preferred to treat the refugees as if they were such dregs, but that was because the refugees were easy targets—helpless—while the pirates would have been more difficult to deal with.

I was to spend long hours considering mechanisms to rid our species of the pirate trash, and if ever I have the means to implement any such notions, I shall do so, to whatever extent I am able. This is my promise to myself.

We went over every kind of defense, both likely and unlikely. We finally settled on a three-stage program.

Stage one: We would present ourselves as sweet, innocent orphan children and beg the pirates not to hurt us. If they were nice, or at least not homicidal, all would be well. After all, the scientists on Io had been nice; we could not assume with absolute conviction that every man in space was evil. Many of the children did not really believe that, but they grudgingly accepted the hypothesis because Helse argued the case so feelingly, and Helse in her female dress was very pretty. I had thought appreciation of prettiness was an adult trait, but revised my thinking when I saw how she swayed even the smallest children. In fantasy tales the pretty girl is always good, and children do seem to take that on faith though it is of course suspect.

Stage two: If they were not nice (as seemed the overwhelming likelihood) and sought to kidnap, rape, or kill any of us, or got angry when we rejected their candy (we had learned that lesson well!), Spirit would give a signal. She would blow a whistle provided her, at which point every child would instantly draw a knife or nail or other sharp instrument and plunge it at the eyes or nearest other vulnerable region of the nearest pirate. If that succeeded, every pirate would be blind or castrated and presumably helpless; then we could consider what to do next. Maybe we would have to kill them, but we didn't have to make that decision right now. We drilled on this, stabbing at pirate-shaped-and-sized dummies; even our smallest children could run a mean spike into a crotch. This was not the same as fighting pirates, which we knew to be hopeless; this was to be a surprise maneuver, occurring explosively. Two seconds after that whistle blew, a dozen or more pirates would be hurting, and normally no more than that came aboard at one time.

Stage three: If for some reason we failed to incapacitate the pirates—and, realistically, we deemed our chances to be no better than fifty percent—and the situation was critical, we would back off and Helse would say to me “Do it!” and I would go out the second air lock, with Spirit, or whoever else was handy, standing by to cut off the drive for the few seconds I'd need to get past the ring of fire. I would make my way around the outside hull to a particular refuse-tank release bolt that had been weakened, and knock it off. That would not only release the refuse, it would empty the bubble of air—because we would have jammed the automatic safety valve open.

That would finish the pirates. It would also finish any of us who weren't in suits. So at Helse's signal, all others would have to go to their cells and get suited in a hurry. Since the pirates wouldn't have their suits in the bubble (we laughed uproariously at the joke we adapted about the pirate trying to rape a girl while in a space suit; what kind of attachment would that suit have to have?—juvenile humor gets quite fundamental), even if they caught on, they wouldn't have time to stop it. Their only recourse would be to flee immediately back to their ship and slam the air lock closed. We would try to block the lock open—just a few seconds delay in closure would be all we would need—but if we failed in that, we still would have saved ourselves from a larger disaster.

We liked this plan so well we almost hoped for an early chance to test it. We spent hours perfecting the details. Spirit had to be suited from the outset, because, though she could cut off the drive from the inside—there was a simple make/break switch—to let me put, she would not be able to do it again to let me in unless she herself survived the vacuum inside. I had to use the rear lock, because the front one might be encumbered by the pirate ship. I really didn't want anyone else performing this particular office, because if there were any error of timing and the drive came on again while I was crossing its deadly ring, I would be cleanly sliced into pieces. I trusted Spirit to make no error; I wasn't quite sure of anyone else.

Spirit had always been my most reliable support, even before we started this terrible voyage.

We rehearsed all three stages until we had them down pat. We timed the last stage, so we knew exactly how long people would have to get into their suits once I used the air lock. We all got very quick about suiting up. Those suits now hung on hooks in each cell, perpetually available, and nobody touched another person's suit. We had to play it close enough to take out the pirates, and that was close indeed.

A thirty-second delay in suiting could prove fatal.

There were fairly sophisticated wrinkles that we worked out. Chief among these was my physical position. I had to have my suit on and stand by the lock, so that Helse could give me the signal from the Commons. To conceal my presence, we made a baffle before the rear lock and decorated it with colored tassels lovingly fashioned of waste paper, so it looked as if we were playing a childish game. My suit, too, was decorated so that it looked fake. Some of the littlest kids showed surprising ingenuity in the details.

So we were ready—while those of us with most sense ardently hoped that we would never come to stages two or three. If the pirates missed us, and we made it unscathed to Leda—but few of us really believed that would happen.

For a time, however, it seemed we would indeed be lucky. We floated on for several days, passing the orbit of Callisto, and no pirates came. Our rehearsals became precise, then perfunctory. We were now departing the Jupiter ecliptic, following the schedule set up by the Io scientists. Almost, I resented the time we had spent, planning and rehearsing, instead of finishing our mourning. But it would certainly be best if we never saw another pirate.

We relaxed by gradual stages. Helse, as the oldest surviving female, became a den mother, seeing to the needs of the smaller children within the framework of the community family and counseling some of the larger ones. And I, as the oldest male, found myself becoming a father figure. I resisted this aspect at first, until Helse explained to me the need of these children for someone to play this role. We could not have a group family without a father; the thing did not set right. “Do it,” she told me. “It must be done, and you are the one. You set up the community family, you labored to make it work; you are indeed the father of it.”

“How can I be a father, when I'm not even married?” I temporized, half in humor. But as I said it, I felt a catch in my being. Marriage...

Things were going smoothly—almost too smoothly, since the distractions of our serious preparations tended to abate our horror of recent losses—and there was no present need for us to be on duty. The crew of kids was performing well enough, and it was important that they be permitted to exercise this responsibility. None of us could know who might be eliminated in the next pirate raid, so the skills had to be distributed throughout our group.

We were not needed, at the moment, on duty. Helse guided me to our cell. “You could be,” she said when we were private.

“Could be what?” I knew she had something in mind, but I wanted her to express it.

“A father.”

I smiled. “A father? I'm only fifteen!”

“You have proved you are old enough. I could be pregnant.”

“Pregnant!” That particular aspect had never occurred to me. I shared the ordinary adolescent's self-imposed unawareness of the natural consequence of sex. Nature does not require awareness, merely performance.

She laughed. “I didn't say I was, Hope. Just that I could be. That it is possible. You could be a father.”

She was right. “I'm not ready,” I said. “But for you—oh, Helse, I want you forever!”

“And I want you,” she said. “Hope, I've never dared to love before, but now I do. Now I do! I don't care that you're younger than I am, or that we were thrown together randomly. We've been through more together than any regular couple, and when you risked your life for me on Io I knew, really knew, that I could trust you, and—”

I realized that she was leading up to something, and I had a notion what, and I wanted very much to have it, but still I wanted her to say it. “What do you mean?”

“Hope, I want to get married.”

That was what I had waited for but still I reacted carefully. “You mean an ad hoc marriage, like the ones in the military service?”

“If you want.”

That was her way of suggesting I try another tack. “This isn't the military service.”

“True.”

“I'd prefer a civilian marriage.”

“Yes.” That was her way of agreeing.

“We could arrange a suitable term—”

“If you wish.”

I cut it short, unable to hold back any longer. “What do you want, Helse? I want anything you want.”

“Till death do us part.”

When Helse loved, I realized, she loved completely. Now she was testing my love. I hardly, felt worthy, but I was willing. I knew I loved her absolutely, and would never love another like this. “Till death do us part,” I agreed, and suffered a momentary spell of dizziness, awed by the profundity of the commitment.

There were all kinds and lengths of marriages, and this was the most binding.

“Oh, let's do it now!” she exclaimed.

“Well, it wouldn't be official without a priest,” I said.

She kissed me, and my head spun again. “We'll do it by common law,” she said. “We can have a wedding. It will be like a party for the children. They can rehearse it and take parts—and it will entertain the group while we travel, and—” Here she stopped and kissed me again, passionately. I had never before seen her so turned on, and I liked it. Her love had been well worth waiting for. “Maybe I had to love a younger man,” she said. “I've always been used by older men, so I can't relate to them the same way. But you—you're a virgin boy, and you're all mine.”

“I'm yours,” I agreed, overflowing with love for her. I suppose her description of me as a virgin boy might have been taken as uncomplimentary, yet I knew she didn't mean it to be so, and it was true. She had introduced me to love, in all its forms outside the family love I had grown up with. I don't know whether the harshness of our situation in the bubble had the effect of intensifying my emotion or whether I would have loved her as ardently anyway, but certainly this was the most positive emotion of which my being was capable. Helse was older and far more experienced—but I was the first man she had loved this way, and that was enough.

“And I'm yours,” she said. “I will be Helse Hubris.” The cumbersome double surnaming of our culture had gradually faded out in favor of the Jupiter custom of using the masculine surname only.

“Helse Hubris,” I agreed, liking the alliteration, liking the meaning, liking every aspect of it.

You might think we would have made love then, but we did not. It could only have distracted us from the greater excitement of our engagement. Sex had always had a different meaning for us; this was more vital.

We fetched Spirit and put her in charge of operations. She was delighted to participate. She had, it seemed, gotten over her earlier jealousy of Helse, realizing that Helse was no threat to our brother-sister relationship. Indeed Helse was not; she had stabilized me during each crisis, so that I was better able to help others, including Spirit. Yet I suspect I misjudged the nuances of Spirit's acceptance, though I doubt I will ever be certain in what way. The same emotional involvement that prevented me from using my talent to judge Helse properly also interfered with my judgments of Spirit. Of course I knew Spirit; she was my sister and closest companion, and would never betray me in any way; that was never in question.

Still, there may have been something.

The kids set it up with gusto. They assembled stray bits of cloth into a wedding gown for Helse, and they made plans for a big cake. These seemingly simple things were not simple in the bubble! A choir formed and practiced singing the wedding march. The problem of the lack of a priest was solved by working out a ceremony in which the two of us would exchange vows ourselves, in the manner of the old Quaker religion, each speaking his or her piece, and sealing the vow with a kiss. That public kiss was very important; the children planned to applaud it. I found myself getting genuinely nervous; they were making it too real!