Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  Helse restored herself to her boyish state, resetting the band about her chest and pinning her shirt together. “You sure are pretty when you show,” Spirit remarked to her. I had to agree, silently; this was the first time I had actually seen Helse’s breast.

  “You will be too, very soon,” Helse told her, patting her strapped bosom as if it were a thing to be allocated impartially among females. “Thanks for helping me.”

  “I had to. My crazy brother would have gotten us all killed.”

  I was silent. They were probably correct.

  We climbed down. I expected to find the women disheveled and sobbing and hiding their faces, and I was afraid to face my mother, but it had to be done.

  I was completely surprised. All the women were in good order, clothing intact, hair brushed out, eyes clear. No one was crying or hiding. It was as though nothing had happened.

  Helse caught on before I did. “Say nothing!” she whispered in my ear. “Nothing about—you know.”

  We found my mother. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said, smiling at us.

  “We were sleeping in the loft,” Helse said.

  My mother glanced at her with the merest suggestion of irony, knowing it was a lie and thankful for that lie. “Of course, young man,” she agreed.

  Was my mother really still ignorant of Helse’s sex? Or was she competent at keeping secrets? Perhaps she had seen more of our struggle in the loft than we realized. If we honored her privacy, she honored ours.

  Later, in our cell, Helse explained it to me in more detail. “Degradation is mainly in the mind. She doesn’t want you to share her humiliation, because that could further hurt the family. The kindest thing you can do is to forever refuse to acknowledge that any man but your father ever touched your mother. There must be no stain on the honor of Hubris.”

  “Is the whole universe made of hypocrisy?” I demanded, hurting anew.

  “Sometimes it seems so,” she agreed. “But it is a good thing your family does for itself. I wish I had belonged to a family like that.”

  “So soon after Faith sacrificed herself to prevent this very thing!” I exclaimed.

  “What Faith sacrificed herself for has been preserved,” Helse reminded me. “Never say otherwise.”

  I was blind at that moment to the significance. “And you— you told me you loved me, just to keep me quiet! You’re a woman too!”

  “I’m a woman too,” she agreed.

  I was perversely furious at her, but I loved her too, and maybe for much of the same reason. “And will you do what you did before, just to keep me quiet? Will you give me your body, and pretend to like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, damn!” I cried, and then it was literally crying, the tears flooding from my eyes. Helse held me and comforted me, and in time we did make love, and she had the grace not to profess love, only caring, and it was wonderful. I couldn’t accept what she was doing, in one part of my conscience, but in another part I knew it had to be and that I couldn’t live without her. So I accepted what had to be accepted: her sacrifice, and mine.

  CHAPTER 12

  FOOD

  Jupiter Rings, 224’15—I wish I could skip over this period, but it would not be honest to do so. It had seemed our situation could not get worse, but we had a cruel reeducation coming.

  Our problem was composed of two things: food and travel. We were still short of food, but might have managed if we had floated to Jupiter on time. But the women didn’t know how to operate the gravity lens efficiently, so we were making little progress. That meant our food was less than adequate. We had assumed we could get by on half rations, but as the days passed and Jupiter loomed larger with appalling slowness, we knew we could not. All of us were losing mass, though we were not starving. We conserved bodily energy by sleeping much of the time, but still our food dwindled.

  We cut to quarter rations, trying to stretch it out a few more days, but our progress past the rings of Jupiter seemed maddeningly slow. It was gradually apparent to even the most unwilling eye that we were not making it.

  I spent a lot of time in the cell with Helse, sleeping in her arms. But hunger vitiated sex, if not love. It was enough for a time just to be with her, talking and resting and enduring—but inevitably the need for food intruded. I dreamed of discovering some hidden cache of food packs that would allow us all to glut ourselves. But it never was true.

  Spirit took it worse than I did. She was a growing child, and she needed proper sustenance. She spoke of big rock-candy mountains and oceans of chocolate syrup and gingerbread houses. When she started longing for potatoes and spinach I knew it was serious. She had never liked spinach. We had to do something—but what? We could not conjure food from vacuum.

  I took to staring morosely out of the portholes. The Jupiter ring system is not nearly as spectacular as Saturn’s, but it is extensive enough. It reaches out almost as far as Saturn’s rings do, but it is so diffuse it is hardly worth noticing. In fact, for many centuries the astronomers of Earth were not able to see the ring systems of Jupiter or Uranus or Neptune, so assumed there were none, with the typical logic of our species.

  The primary ring is fifty thousand kilometers inside the orbit of Amalthea, and that’s where the Jupiter Border Patrol operates. Amalthea is just a rocky ball, 24 kilometers across; its gravity is so slight that no one has bothered to put a residential dome on it— there’s not enough gravity there to focus effectively, you see, since next to nothing concentrated tenfold is still next to nothing—but there is a space depot. Amalthea is just beyond Jupiter’s political territorial limit, so we had to get inside its orbit.

  The rings really weren’t obvious even from up close; most of the particles were the size of large grains of dust. A ship traveling at high relative velocity through the rings might suffer abrasion, but our gravity-sailing bubble just nudged through the diffuse field harmlessly. Some particles were large enough to spot from some distance, just hanging there in their orbit blithely minding their own business, and I would trace them with my eye as long as I could.

  Was this an analogy of the human condition, I wondered? Every individual traveling alone, going his own way, yet caught in the gravity well of some huge primary. Each person thought he was unique, and perhaps he was, differing as much from his neighbors as each particle differed in outline from other particles. Yet in the aggregate we were indistinguishable. Did it really matter which of us survived and which did not? No single particle made a perceptible difference to the ring.

  Helse came up beside me and touched my shoulder. She never did more than that when in her boy disguise, but it was enough. It carried the implication of all she was when we were alone.

  “We can’t go on this way,” she said.

  I looked at her, startled. “We can’t?”

  She smiled. “Not we you/me. We the-whole-bubble. The food is almost gone.”

  I was foolishly relieved. I had come to depend on Helse’s love, whether real or feigned. It was like a beneficial drug to which I was addicted. But of course the problem of the food was critical. We had all known a crisis was coming but none of us had any solution except to hope that we would be spotted by some random swing of the Jove Patrol and rescued. Woe betide the pirate ship that got in our way this time! We would not again allow our rescue to be balked that way. But we knew we weren’t far enough in yet. Space is huge, and Jupiter is huge, and we were a mote among motes, lost. We still had to clear the outer ring, pass the orbit of Amalthea, and reach the primary ring, the territorial limit. At the rate we were proceeding that would be at least another week—and we had food, at quarter rations, for two more days.

  Spirit arrived. “Another head’s clogged,” she announced brightly. She looked drawn, as we all did, from slow undernourishment, but her spirits remained reasonably high. She had always been that way, venting her angers and griefs rapidly and stabilizing at an optimistic level, and I had always liked her for it. She was generally good company. Most
brothers and sisters fight a lot, but we fought less than most, and now not at all.

  “That cuts us down to three heads,” I said. “The tanks are full, probably. If we’d had full rations, there’d be no heads left working now.”

  “Why not change the tanks?” she asked.

  “We have no replacements. It’s usually done planet-side. The full tank gets traded for an empty one, and the contents go to the organic soil bank. Valuable stuff, you know; you don’t find fertilizer like that floating around in space.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I should hope not! But we ought to do something about—”

  She broke off as if realizing something, then elevated a finger. “Floating in space! Why not?”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded. Spirit’s foolish notions were likely to have some sense to them.

  “Why not just dump the stuff into space? Then the tanks’d be empty, and the heads’d work again, and we wouldn’t have to double up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you just volunteer to suit up and do that?”

  “Okay, I will!” she said defiantly, and pushed off.

  “She will, too,” Helse said.

  “Don’t I know it!” I headed off after my impetuous sister. Sarcasm can be dangerous with Spirit.

  In this manner all three of us ended up volunteering for the tank-evacuation detail. We suited up, and Helse handled the safety ropes while Spirit and I went out onto the hull. You see, the bubble was spinning, one revolution every ten seconds or so, so what was partial gravity inside was like partial repulsion outside, as the same centrifugal force tried to hurl us away at a tangent. So we had to be guyed, and that meant someone had to pay out the rope, or take in the slack when necessary, so we could operate without snagging or tangling. It was the sort of job the regular crewmen would have been good at—but of course there were no experienced people among our remaining number.

  We used the front lock, since the merchant-pirates had cleared it out. I carried a bag of tools from the bubble toolshed, while Spirit clambered out with juvenile agility to catch the first rope in the question-mark-shaped eyelet provided, for it. Bubbles have sets of such projections for just such emergencies; now I appreciated the foresight of the design. Even a child could figure out these things, and that was a good thing for us. We were actually better fitted to come out here than the women were, because of our size and alertness, which was part of why we were permitted to do it. My mother’s natural protectiveness had to yield to expedience, as it had in other cases.

  Once the line was secure, Spirit waved me on, and I handed myself along to join her. It was a bit like mountain climbing in my fancy—naturally, I have never climbed a mountain, there being none on Callisto—for the moment I left the null-gee region of the lock the outward pull began. The farther I progressed toward the bubble’s equator the stronger it got, tugging me at an angle. Of course it was slight, even at its worst, but I was not at peak strength because of the reduced food, and the psychological effect was considerable. The whole universe was down and turning; that made my perch seem precarious indeed.

  I paused at the first eyelet, hanging on and looking out. First I saw the bright distant sun, really a super-brilliant star I could readily block out with my smallest finger at arm’s length. Still, it emitted enough light to make it day in space. That light might be only one twenty-seventh as intense here as it was at Earth, but we were used to it the way we saw it, and it was quite enough for all normal purposes.

  Then there was Jupiter, so vast my whole spread hand could not block it out. Yet I knew that the enormous planet was subservient to the little star. I could hardly blame my primitive ancestors, thousands of years ago on Earth, for believing otherwise. I understood that from Earth, Earth’s nameless moon looked the same size as the sun. That meant that each looked, very roughly, half again as big in diameter as Ganymede looked from Callisto when it was closest. The moon I could understand, but I had no mental picture of the sun seeming that size. What a brilliantly blazing ball it must be!

  Spirit nudged me out of my reverie. I get that way sometimes, thinking too much at a time, and have to be corrected. I nodded, and she scampered on around to the next eyelet, while I made sure the rope did not snag. Now the curve of the bubble concealed Spirit from Helse, though I could see both. I waved to Helse, who waved back; then I followed the rope to Spirit.

  The location of the refuse tanks was clear enough, as they were intended to be serviced from the outside. There was an effective airlock-type mechanism in each that prevented any direct aperture through the hull from being opened. All I had to do was release the pressure of the tank-enclosure chamber, then unbar the tank itself and slide it out. It seemed simple enough. Yet I knew that things were seldom as simple in practice as they were represented to be in the instruction manuals.

  I hooked my toes—that reminded me, for no obscure reason, of the manner I used the head inside—and got to work on the first one. It didn’t matter whether it was one of the working ones or one of the clogged ones; they all would need cleaning out soon enough. I brought out the big wrench, hooked its safety line around my wrist—everything had its own safety line out here!— and adjusted it to the pressure-release valve. You see, the matter in the tanks is deposited at close to the same pressure as the interior atmosphere; the suction of the tubes is mainly forced ventilation. That pressure can’t be released from inside; even if the bubble were opened to space and all its air puffed out, the toilet locks would prevent the tanks from exploding into the interior. That’s a necessary safeguard, for an obvious reason. These bubbles are pretty sophisticated devices, when you think about it, safety-rigged in so many ways that it is literally possible for a crew of ignorant refugees to sail in space for some time with little to fear from error. Of course their ineffective piloting could lead to an extended trip and starvation, and they could be at the mercy of merciless pirates, but the bubble itself was pretty safe.

  Suddenly the valve let go. These things were corrosion-proof, of course, and reliable; they worked as they were supposed to work, even on an ancient bubble like this. A jet of vapor shot out, catching me in the chest and shoving me away from the hull. Even a small shove is effective when you’re not braced for it. I sailed out, turning end over end until my safety rope brought me up short.

  Helse reeled me in; that was what she was there for. But though I had been in no actual danger, I was shaken. Had I not had the rope, I would have been flung into deep space and no one could have recovered me. Outside space was dangerous, in its completely passive way, and now I experienced the fear of it. This did not incapacitate me; I shoved it into that corner of my mind required for unpleasant refuse, my emotional toilet tank, and proceeded with my job. But the new, enhanced awareness of space remained with me, and now I felt vulnerable. I think, in retrospect, that this was more significant than I was aware of at the time.

  Helse brought me to her, reeling me in hand over hand, put her helmet against mine, and made a kissing expression. Then she hugged me clumsily in the suits, spanked me, and sent me back to finish the job.

  I got back to my location. The pressure had been depleted; now the tank was conveniently loose in its socket. I slid aside the retaining bars and drew it out. Spirit helped, for the thing was large and awkward. I held it pointed at space, while she took the wrench and loosened the emptying lid. This was a matter of turning a nut, then swinging out a bar; nothing came all the way free, because of the danger of losing it in space. The tank itself had a tether chain, long enough to give us sufficient freedom to operate. Perhaps the designers had anticipated this need to dump in space also.

  When we had the lid off, we had to get the refuse out. This was a dense brown mass. There are chemicals or enzymes in the tanks that commence the processing of the matter the moment it enters, so this was already part of the way composted, but it remained fecal matter. I saw Spirit wrinkling her nose inside her helmet, though of course there was no smell here in the
vacuum. Odor, like sound, requires atmosphere or some other direct conduit.

  Now, how were we to get it out of the tank? We had no tool for this, and neither of us was inclined to reach in with our hands.

  But the problem solved itself. As I clung to the tank by its base, the far end of it swung out centrifugally, and the matter in it was drawn by that same force into space. I almost thought I heard a sucking sound as it escaped the tank, but of course that was illusion. Such a sound could have been transmitted to me via metal and suit, but no sound existed. Vacuum does not have to move about the way air does; vacuum is—or perhaps it is more correct to say vacuum is not. I can picture someone reading this and protesting, “But how did the vacuum squeeze in from space?” That person is a fool.

  As soon as the mass emerged, it fragmented. Tiny bubbles of gas shoved it apart. The large chunks sundered into small ones, which in turn broke into smaller ones. In moments it became a cloud of particles, drifting slowly away from us. Even if there had not been some remaining internal pressure, it would have fragmented because of the tidal force of this orbit, causing that portion of it closer to Jupiter to move marginally faster than the portion more distant. The tide—it was the same thing we experienced within the bubble, I think, in reverse, our feet being carried around faster than our heads.

  Spirit put her helmet against mine. “Jupiter rings!” she exclaimed.

  And of course it was so. We had initiated a new ring system— of base material. Very base. That might be a real surprise for some party scavenging for ice or minerals in space. Just let him bring it into warmth and atmosphere ...

  We reloaded the empty tank and bolted it tight, then went on to the next one. The job was easier and faster, now that we were familiar with it.

  The eight tanks made a double circle beside the equator, four to the north (whichever pole that was), four to the south. As we worked on the ones farthest from our air lock, we could see the bags containing the bodies of our men. Nothing showed, for the bags were tied, but even that much instilled in me a certain quality of dread. We were alone with our dead.