Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  A paroxysm of horror passed through our group. The boy’s eyes were open and staring, and his chest was still. He was dead!

  Now it was apparent that the little girls had been raped.

  It seemed every man in our group launched himself at the pirates. But then the pacifier box came on again, and the charge became a shambles, its impetus gone. The broadcast interference was not psychological, it was physical; no amount of determination could overcome this paralysis of the voluntary functions.

  The pirate leader drew his sword, smiling grimly. He seemed to be enjoying this. He had wanted us to see the children, and to react as we did, and to be cut down to helplessness again. “You made trouble for us. We don’t like that.”

  My father was closest to him. The pirate raised his sword in a two-handed grip and swung it savagely. I saw, as if it were in slow motion, the blade cut into my father’s side. It sliced through clothing and rib cage and into the lung, and the blood poured out like the living thing it was.

  I knew in that moment that we should have blown the whistle on the pirates when the Jupe officer was here. We had been held passive by a threat to hostages who were even then being savaged. We had had nothing to lose, had we but known it. We had been too trusting—and now were paying the hideous price.

  Would the pirates really have dared to kill the Jupe officer? Now I doubted it, for it would have meant the end of the pirate ship, possible complete destruction by a military missile.

  Now it was carnage. Ruthlessly the pirates hacked apart our men, who were unable to resist. They left none alive. Such was the enervation spawned by the devil-box that all we could do was moan in soft horror. We couldn’t act!

  They hurled the bleeding bodies into a pile, then sheathed the swords and came after the women. Some, unsatisfied with what they saw, started rechecking the cells. I saw someone open the panel of number 75, where Faith still hid. I remembered that Helse had taken the opportunity provided by the presence of the Jupe officer to return to that cell; no one had been paying attention to her, among the pirates, so she had gotten away with it. But that minor escape had accomplished nothing, for there was the pirate at the cell.

  The man looked down, then paused as if struck. Then he closed the panel and went on. What had happened? The pacifier box prevented any attack against any pirate.

  Meanwhile, another pirate took hold of my mother, bringing my attention back to closer events. The cell, well around the curve of the Commons, was difficult to see anyway. I had positioned myself to have it in view without being close enough to attract attention to it.

  The pirate literally tore the clothing from my mother, while she tried feebly to pull away, crying. I felt a truly terrible rage— but still it did not translate to my body. My nerves might as well have been cut, so that my limbs would not respond. It was hard enough just to turn my head.

  There was a crash. My head jumped around. Spirit, possessing more volition than the rest of us, and perhaps more common sense, had reached the unguarded box, picked it up, and smashed it. Suddenly we all were free.

  I ran to help my mother, who was on her back, the pirate tearing at the shreds of her underclothing as he came down on top of her. Neither he nor she realized that we refugees had been freed to fight. I leaped to land on his back, hands reaching around to his head, trying to pull him back though my weight bore down on him. I was so crazy with grief and rage and horror that I remembered none of the precepts we had been drilled in; I just put his head in a bear-hug and shoved with my feet.

  Angrily he shook me off, half rising and reaching for his sword. He was so powerful I couldn’t possibly hold him. I realized belatedly I should have grabbed a hammer or something and smashed him on the head. Now I was in trouble.

  But the pirate grunted and collapsed. My mother had remembered one of the lessons and jerked up her knee the moment she had leverage, and scored on his crotch. The fight was mostly out of him.

  There followed an amazingly savage conflict, as the other women and children recovered their volition and sought revenge for the brutality of the pirates. They clawed at faces and bit at hands and kicked at anything in reach. The pirates were burly men, accustomed to violence and bloodshed, but they had not before been betrayed by their pacifier box. They weren’t used to having the victims fight back.

  There were a dozen pirates in the bubble; five times that many women pounced on them, like vicious harpies. I saw one woman kneel on the head of a pirate while another drove an iron knitting needle into his ear as deep as it would go. It took only a moment for the man to stop jerking and screaming. I saw another trying to castrate a pirate with a sharp letter opener, an antique that had surely been saved as an heirloom, since letters had not needed such service for centuries. An immense and truly horrifying well of violence had been tapped, and I saw that we were in our deepest essence no better than our enemies.

  Injured and bleeding, the surviving pirates beat a disorganized retreat and slammed the air lock closed. In moments their ship disengaged and fled.

  We were left with our victory—and our grief. We had had sixty grown men in our complement; all had been slain in the pirates’ orgy of killing, while we were helpless. Three pirates also lay dead in their blood, and the baby boy. The two raped little girls stood staring, not grasping any of this.

  I went to my father, hoping somehow to discover him alive, but knowing better. I looked down through burning eyes at his corpse. How terrible his fall, how ignoble the deed! Nothing in my father’s life or philosophy justified this dreadful termination. And I, by getting my family into the trouble that forced our exodus, had been the cause.

  In a moment I felt someone at my side. It was Spirit. I clutched her to me, sharing my agony with her. We had never dreamed of desolation like this.

  Now the women were scattered across the Commons, suffering their separate reactions. No trace of their violence of a moment ago remained. The departure of the pirates had excised the savagery in us. Some had found their husbands and were keening their grief, kneeling and bending their torsos forward and back, letting out part of their pain. Others were standing absolutely still and silent, just looking down. I realized that there is no set formula for the abatement of intolerable loss.

  “We must do something,” Spirit said.

  I wrenched myself away from my horror, realizing she was correct. We had suffered an appalling disaster—but disorganization would only exacerbate our situation. We had to have a new leader who would see to whatever had to be done. But who, with no men remaining among us?

  “Use your talent, Hope,” Spirit told me.

  She sounded so practical that I looked at her. Her eyes were staring out of her head like those of a little automaton, but she was right again. Her shock simply had not yet progressed to her vocal cords. How she would react when the full impact affected her I did not know. Some horrors, like some joys, seem to be too massive to grasp all at once.

  I thought a moment, then recalled a woman of grandmotherly age, huge and ugly and competent. She was Concha Ortega, a dark-skinned widow who was traveling with her three grandchildren. Not one of those children ever misbehaved. None of them had been among those taken hostage by the pirates, which perhaps would enable her to be more objective than she might otherwise have been.

  I saw my mother making her way toward us. She was an awful sight. Her hair was ragged, her clothing shredded, and there was a glazed look about her. “Take care of Mother,” I murmured to Spirit, and departed. I knew my little sister would do what little could be done.

  I made my way to Señora Ortega, who was hauling the body of a pirate toward the air lock. “Excuse me, Doña Concha,” I said to her. “I am Hope Hubris, Major Hubris’s son. You must be our new leader.”

  She viewed me contemplatively. “By what authority, Don Hope, do you appoint me to such office?” She was extremely imposing, with half-cropped gray hair, line-encased eyes, and much mass of body, and I felt like the stripling I was as that gaze fell
on me.

  “It’s just that I know,” I said. “All our men are gone, and you are the best woman. You understand discipline, you know what to do. You must lead, or we shall be leaderless, and perish in space.”

  She pondered briefly. “You are right, little man,” she said. “It must be done. I have suffered no recent losses; I can put my mind to this problem.”

  “Thank you, Doña,” I said, retreating.

  Señora Ortega raised her voice, addressing the entire bubble. “We must provide proper burial for our dead,” she announced. “We must show proper respect.”

  Proper respect—she had hit a note that resonated. Grief was piercing, but respect was vital. It was the dues paid the dead.

  Under Señora Ortega’s direction the bodies were moved to the vicinity of the rear air lock and laid out there in such style as was possible, considering the absence of facilities and the scantness of gravity in that region. The survivors closed the eyes of the men, washed the bodies with sponges from the heads, and re-clothed them for burial. The signs of devastation were removed as much as possible, so that the men appeared to be sleeping.

  There was a problem with the bodies of the three pirates. No one wished to do them honor. We hauled them to the front air lock and dumped them unceremoniously. We closed the lock and made ready to use the override control to open the outer port without first decompressing the lock. That would hurl the bodies into space unburied, unlamented.

  “No,” my mother said, looking up from my father’s body.

  “Speak, Charity Hubris,” Señora Ortega said. “What would you do with this rubbish?”

  “I would use it to greet the next pirates who come,” my mother said, and there was a note in her voice that sent a chill through me.

  There was a murmur of surprised agreement among the women. How confidently would a pirate enter if he discovered three of his kind, mutilated and dead, in the air lock of the bubble supposedly waiting to be fleeced?

  “Excellent notion, Doña Charity,” Señora Ortega agreed. I noticed how careful she was to employ the ceremonial address, providing respect to the living as well as to the dead. She was indeed the proper leader. “We shall save those bodies for such use. We shall post the warning of the skull on the stake.” For in Earth’s past, savage tribes had demarked their ranges by such means, plain warning to intruders. Then she paused in thought. “Should we evacuate the air from that lock?”

  Even the children knew the consequence of leaving bodies in air and warmth. There would come a horrendous stench.

  Grimly, the women decided to leave the air in the lock.

  That ugly business done, we returned to the rites for our gallant men. Normally death is a family affair in our culture—but not all the men had adult kin here in the bubble, while some families had made this trip without men, so everything was awkward, and it seemed best to handle it as a community effort. We arranged to have all the men suitably prepared, and we tore up one black gown donated for the purpose into strips for black armbands of mourning for all. Even though we were all Hispanic, there were differences in the details of our customs, so again we compromised on the single uniform service. There were suggestions of the Roman rite and the Gothic rite, with our scant and precious incense burned and the lips of some men anointed with oil. Doña Concha led us in singing the psalm De profundis: “Out of the depths have I cried to Thee, O Lord ... I trust in the Lord, my soul waits for His word...” Oh, it moved me; I had to believe that the Lord would accept my father and treat him kindly. Then a few complimentary words were spoken for each dead man, and there was general praise for the group of them. Doña Concha did a good job; she had been through it with her own husband, who had died some years before, so understood the needs of the families though she had not herself been touched this time.

  I fancy myself as being not superstitious or overly emotional, but that quiet, sincere service helped me tremendously. When she praised my father, calling him Don Major and describing in a few words his integrity and bravery in leading our group toward Jupiter, tears of sheer joy mixed with those of grief in my eyes, and the terrible burden of his loss eased significantly. It is truly bad to lose one’s father, but it is best that he suffer a hero’s demise. I’m sure the others felt the same as she spoke of their own men.

  It was of course impossible to bury them in a sanctified cemetery or to place them in crypts with flowers or to kiss the earth as it was thrown into the coffins, and we elected not to use the few simple candles we possessed, not wishing to tax the air-recycling system with so much open flame. We decided to do the best we could: to bury them temporarily outside on the bubble. A select crew donned space suits and took the bodies one by one out the rear lock. We were not relegating them to space, but securing them to the outside of the bubble in plastic wraps and whatever else could be made to serve, so that they would be preserved by the cold and vacuum until the time they could be properly interred on planetary ground. We could not keep them inside the bubble, of course, and outside was as perfect a deep-freeze as exists. They would be preserved intact for Eternity, out there.

  So it was done, and we sang the canticle Benedictus with the antiphon Ego sum resurrectio et vita, I am the resurrection and the life. The earth had, figuratively, been thrown into the graves, and the necessary formalities were over.

  Señora Ortega explained gently that though we all should normally be permitted to retire to our justified grief, it was nonetheless necessary for us to keep the bubble functioning and on course; we would never be able to give our men proper burial if we did not survive ourselves. So she declared an end to formal grief, leaving only the armbands, as if a year had suddenly passed. She asked those of us who were able to function to join her in operating the bubble. This would not, she assured us, signify any lack of feeling or any affront to the dead, but rather our recognition of what had to be done in a most difficult situation. The way she expressed it, it was easy to agree. We had chosen well in this leader.

  When a small crew of those women who had some grasp of the principles of gravity-shield navigation had been assembled, Señora Ortega dismissed the rest of us to our cells. “The best thing you can do right now is mourn your dead in privacy,” she said “Send them to heaven with your prayers. I know what you are feeling; my own grief is long behind me, and it occurred in better times than these you suffer now, but I remember.” In this way she returned informally what she had denied formally: the timely expression of grief.

  We went to our cells, but it was not a simple retirement. I realized abruptly that my mother should not be alone in her cell. I spoke to Faith, who had remained in her own cell throughout, thus missing much of the horror of the pirate encounter. It was not that she lacked feeling for our father, but that the full appreciation of his death added at this time to her existing state could have destroyed her. Yet I feared for the welfare of our mother too. “Please join her,” I asked Faith. “You can understand and comfort her better than I could, for you are a woman.”

  Faith looked at me with a head-tilt of startlement, then swept back her hair and climbed to the next cell. She knew her own dismay had been preempted by a greater one.

  But now Spirit was alone. I hesitated, knowing this was not right for her either.

  Helse arrived. “Go with your sister, Hope,” she said. “I am not bereaved, except to the extent I knew and respected those members of other families who died. I will try to help someone who needs it.”

  I felt a warm surge of gratitude toward her. “Thanks.” I joined Spirit in her cell.

  Spirit abruptly flung her arms about me, buried her face in my shoulder, and bawled. It was at that moment of letdown that the enormity of our tragedy struck me. Until then the continuing exigencies of our situation had caused me to hold much of the horror at bay, except when I thought specifically of my father.

  Now it overwhelmed me too. I clung to my crying little sister and sobbed as vehemently as she.

  CHAPTER 10

 
; TO LOVE AND BE LOVED

  Jupiter Orbit, 214’15—But a person cannot cry forever. Spirit bounced back first, somewhat wasted, having washed much of the first rush of grief out of her system. I knew she still suffered, but already she was coming to terms with it. I had to follow her in that recovery, for I was now the oldest (and only) male in our family, and that is a thing of special significance. I would not presume, of course, to order my mother around, but it would be my position to formulate family initiatives and make suggestions that I knew my mother and older sister would take seriously. So I forced my own continuing agony of soul into a compartment, like the cell I slept in, closed the panel on it as well as I could, and required myself to function. My mother and sisters could grieve; I would have to endure.

  There were meals to be fetched and distributed, though our shortage was now, ironically, less acute because of our diminished number. Señora Ortega asked me to resume my prior capacity as food distributor, and to expand my activities as necessary, since I was now the oldest male in the bubble. Oh yes, that woman knew how to make a young person do her bidding! I agreed and got to work, and found that there was indeed reprieve from grief in work.

  We had to reorganize the heads, for it was senseless to reserve half the bathrooms for males who no longer lived. I asked Spirit to explain to women how they might be able to use the male facilities by assisting each other as I had assisted Helse—but cautioned her that she should present this as her own idea, and to leave Helse out of it, as Helse was still considered a boy. If Señora Ortega suspected that Helse was older than I, or that she was female, Señora Ortega did not say. I think she did suspect, and did us both the quiet favor of assuming that Helse was a boy a few months younger than I. Women of grandmotherly age can be discreet; they have had a great deal of time to learn that art.

  There was further cleaning to be done, removing bloodstains from the floor and walls of the Commons. Helse and Spirit and I helped with it all, keeping ourselves constantly busy.