Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  Even poor Spirit, a shadow of her former vitality, was permitted to rummage for bandaging material and replacement clothing only under the eye of a pirate. She searched inefficiently, unlike her normal manner, and found nothing suitable, and finally had to settle for soft underclothing from her own belongings. She fastened these garments clumsily against the stump of her finger and anchored them to her hand with elastic so that it looked as if her whole hand had been amputated. She refused to take any pirate painkiller, for that was marked H. My heart went out to her in her misery and agony, but I was helpless. She was so pale I knew the loss of blood had hurt her. I couldn’t even talk to her, couldn’t comfort her. My little sister, was dying, in her sad way, before my eyes. The strength I had perceived in her was gone; defeat and pain had robbed her of it. Even the two halfway decent pirates seemed sorry for her.

  We slept at irregular intervals while the ice melted, though we felt the chill of it as the air in the vicinity lost its heat in the contact with the deep, deep freeze of space. There was nothing else for us to do. My mind ran over every possible plan to escape, but all foundered in the face of the reality of being both bound and watched. I wondered why they were taking the trouble to keep us alive for this period, and could only conclude it was for further questioning in case some new mystery arose in connection with the courier’s body. The Horse was a thinker, in his fashion; he did not discard things before he was quite finished with them, including lives. That made him more dangerous than the more directly brutal pirates. Once the capsule was recovered and opened, our lives would be surplus. So the thawing of Helse was in fact a countdown on our own lives, and when the chill of her body had dissipated, the chill of our bodies would commence.

  When I slept, I dreamed, and it was not fun. I seemed to march through an inchoate crowd of faceless people, all walking toward the brink of a yellow sulfur cliff, all stepping over it and falling to their doom. Only I could perceive the oncoming disaster, and I tried to talk to them, to urge them to stop and turn about, but they did not seem to hear me. I discovered that they were roped together and I was roped with them, my hands bound together; I was being carried over the cliff too.

  I woke sweating in the cold. I was indeed roped, along with the others, and we faced the slowly warming body, and smelled its faint but growing aroma. We were approaching that cliff of doom, and the dream was no fantasy, but a rendering of reality. My dreams or visions had a disturbing propensity that way. I looked covertly at the pirate guarding us, but he was alert; no chance there.

  I slept again, huddling into myself, and thought I woke to find the guard sleeping, and nudged myself over to him and managed to get my fingers on his knife. He woke then, and opened his mouth to scream, but I had the knife, and my bonds unraveled before its blade, and I brought it up and stabbed him in the face and saw the blood geysering out of his nose, splashing across my hands, which looked oddly like Spirit’s hands, and I woke, and it was only sweat on my hands, and the guard remained alert.

  Next time I dreamed I slipped my bonds and made a noose of the rope, flung it about the head and neck of the guard, and garroted him mercilessly, watching his eyes and tongue bulge out of his head, and it felt good, it gave me a feeling of power to do that to him. But I woke, and it was the head of my beloved Helse my gaze was fixed on, not the garroted pirate. Still she thawed ...

  I dwelt on that for a while, compulsively. Helse was dead and my heart with her, and now her body was becoming more of a horror to me than her death itself had been. She had at least died quickly, and probably not suffered much; decompression in space, horrible as it may look, is about as clean a demise as a person could seek. I understand consciousness is lost in the first second, so the rest is never felt. Now she was being restored in a fashion, and her restoration would destroy us all. I felt anger, frustration, guilt and grief for her death, but had to some extent confined these emotions before they ravaged me beyond recovery. I knew that any breakdown on my part could lead to death for all of us, so had not had the luxury of prolonged grieving. But as I watched her body slowly soften, it all came back with appalling and gruesome force.

  All that we had suffered in the bubble—was it worth it? Could it ever be worth it? Or would it have been better if we all had died? In that case, the Horse would be doing us a favor when he killed us, ironically.

  I drifted to sleep again and dreamed of my family alive, as they were at the beginning of this travail, and I was explaining to my father how I wanted to marry Helse, but he was perplexed because he thought she was a boy. “No, she is a girl,” I said, not even wondering how it was he did not know, when he had known before and had told my mother, and I drew off her clothing so he could see. But what was revealed was not the sweet soft shapely flesh of the living woman, but the cold hard horror of the corpse, and I stared in shock—and was awake again, my eyes fixed on the reality. Waking was no escape from nightmare

  Where had it all gone wrong? How could I have avoided the unmitigated horror of this outcome? I knew the answer: I should have avoided contact with the scion in Maraud. That had been the start of the whole terrible chain of events. Had I only drawn my sister Faith aside, hidden her from view—yet this scion had come looking for us, having seen Faith before. How could I have prevented that? I simply was not competent to deal with the problem I had faced.

  Incompetence. There was the root of it. Had I had competence, I would have found a way to alleviate the situation. Had I had more experience, or had a more knowledgeable person been there to guide me—

  But now I realized that if I had somehow dissuaded the scion without offending him, so that the crisis had never occurred, it would have solved only part of the problem. We, the Hubris family, would have survived, never having to take the bubble off-planet—but all the other refugees would have proceeded as before. Helse would have been aboard, and had to seek another roommate, and perhaps had trouble from the outset, and the pirates still would have raided and raped and murdered, and the Jupiter Patrol still would have rejected the refugees. The end would have been the same: death for all on the bubble, including Helse, one way or another. And I would never have met her and loved her, and she never would have loved me. A fantasy that saved my family without saving Helse was no good. It was not the scion I had to settle with, it was the pirates.

  I slept again, and dreamed of the end of this dread sequence; the thawing was complete, and the fell pirate Horse reached his gross dirty hairy hand up between Helse’s spread thighs into her soft body, raping her with his hand, for raping was his business, and rammed his gross fist around and around inside there while she struggled against the pirates holding her arms and legs, and at last with a gloating gasp of satisfaction pulled out what was inside her. It was large and green and shaped like a baby, the baby I had planted in her, but no, it was not mine, it was Kife’s, he had raped her first, putting in her the seed of her destruction, putting his brand on her tender body. I had a vengeance to make against QYV, could I but survive to pursue it. This whole pirate trade, using and abusing innocent people—

  Now the capsule, as the Horse held it up to the light in lustful victory, was small, its proper size; in my dream I was not concerned about such superficial changes of reality. The pirate’s small eyes gleamed as he viewed the prize, the ultimate pirate treasure, the burden of the courier. What did that container contain? And I was curious too, and guilty for that curiosity, for by experiencing it I seemed to be supporting the death of my beloved, even as my bodily reaction at the time of the rape of Faith had seemed to support that act. Even in my private mind, where I could conjecture freely, I could not find an answer to my guilt. How much better to have Helse alive and leave the mystery intact! I had no right to want to see the content of that capsule. Yet I did.

  The Horse broke it open and an object fell out, a blob of something, soft like mud, green mud. It fell on the body and spread out across the flesh like taffy. The Horse, fearing to lose it, tried to pick it up, but it broke apart
and part of it adhered to his fingers.

  He stared at his hand, watching his fingers dissolve, and I realized that the green blob was a living thing, some kind of alien being that fed on human flesh and now was consuming both the corpse and the pirate. It had been quiescent until freed from the confining capsule; now there would be no stopping it. It would gorge until they were both gone, the dead woman and the living man, and then it would start on the rest of us. Already a pseudopod of it was extending across the deck toward me.

  I woke in a new sweat, and nothing had changed. The body still thawed, the odor of it slowly intensifying, the dread cold still reaching out to touch me, and the pirate guard still watched. The Horse and one of the other pirates had returned to their ship, no doubt preferring to rest well away from the grim scene there. Spirit slept fitfully to one side, sometimes moaning faintly, the bloodstained undergarment enclosing her hand. She looked so wasted and frail! Would this slow horror never end?

  The sequence was interminable, but in two, perhaps three days, perhaps more—I really don’t know how long it took that body to thaw completely, everything is conjecture—it ended. As we watched dully, knowing the end was coming in more than one sense, that the reprieve Helse had provided us by taking as much time as she could to thaw was over, the Horse returned from the spaceship. He inspected the now limp and discoloring corpse, nodded approvingly, and took out his knife. He cut carefully into Helse’s abdomen, as if performing surgery. The cutting was largely bloodless, and I could not see all of it—indeed, I did not want to see any of it, but couldn’t control my eyes—but I saw enough. They had set her on a table, raised a meter or so, so the Horse wouldn’t have to squat down awkwardly. The curve of the floor of the Commons lifted me somewhat, but still I had no clear line of sight to the incision.

  He laid her open like the carcass of an animal, severing skin and muscle and linings to get at the intestines. This was just as bad as my dream! Then he drew out the guts of her in dark lengths, intact, squeezing and peering until he found the position of the capsule. He made an incision in the intestine at that point and cut free the prize. It was not as messy an operation as my horrified imagination had hinted, but was more horrible in other respects. Maybe this was because my dream had portrayed it as a kind of rape, while this was surgical. My abhorrence of rape had been muted somewhat by the education Helse herself had provided me, but my reaction against the onslaught of the knife remained unabated, for I had seen my father killed by the sword and the finger of my sister cut off. But mainly it was the actual cutting of the flesh of my beloved. Had she been alive it might have been an operation. We tolerate much more profound violations of our bodies in the name of medicine than we do in the name of pleasure.

  The pirates crowded close, intent on the capsule as the Horse proudly held it up. It was about two centimeters long and half a centimeter in diameter. Not impressive,, physically—but its content could be invaluable.

  The child next to me nudged me. Slowly I turned my head, interrupting my own morbid fascination with the proceedings. Spirit was looking at me, seeming much more alert and alive than before, and when my gaze met hers, her eyes flicked down to her bandaged hand. I looked there—and saw she had a tiny blade, hardly more than a sliver from some razor blade the women used to remove hair from their legs when they were allergic to depilatories.

  When she saw that I had seen, she hid the knifelet. I realized that she had cut her bonds during the recent distraction of the pirates. She must have picked up the blade while foraging for bandaging material and hidden it in the gore from her finger. No wonder she had had so much trouble finding what she needed in the way of bandaging—it had been this she was really looking for. The pirates, thinking her completely broken, had not considered her any real threat, so had not watched her as closely as they had the rest of us. Even in her shock and pain right after the loss of her finger, my cunning little sister had been alert for some way to free herself and us. No wonder she had fooled the pirates; she had even fooled me! Now Spirit was ready for action, and she knew it had to be soon.

  The children between us fidgeted as if uncomfortable. Then the one beside me presented the tiny blade, shoving it toward me with his bound hands. The children between Spirit and me had not taken time to free themselves; they knew I needed to be freed first. They had the discipline of desperation. We would have only one chance, and we had to make it good.

  I moved slowly, using the blade to saw through the rope about my feet. Then I realized this was foolish; the hands had to be first. I nudged my companion, and he moved his bound hands to mine, and I sawed at his rope. The blade was sharp, for these items are fashioned in the factory bubbles of Jupiter to last almost forever, and my leverage was good. The strands parted, and in a moment his hands were free. Then he took the blade and severed my rope. My hands, too, were free. While I had dreamed vainly of such an escape, Spirit had taken practical action to make it possible. But I could not move my hands freely, lest the pirates see. I arranged the rope so it looked tied, and moved as slowly as before.

  Meanwhile the pirate awe of the QYV treasure abated enough to get practical. “We have it, but we have a problem,” the Horse said. “We don’t know what’s in it. Could be a diamond—or could be an ampoule of Quintessent H, worth two million—or could be a deadly virus Kife means to use to wipe out a major bubble. Do we gamble, or don’t we?”

  “Where’d she come from?” a pirate asked, glancing at Helse’s body. “Do they have virus labs there?”

  “Callisto, the boy says,” the Horse replied. “No advanced technology there. No precious minerals either.”

  “But she could have been a second-stage courier. It could have started anywhere. Maraud is a center for bootleg retransfer. The Jupiter Patrol is watching for drugs on the regular ships from the inner worlds, but pays no attention to refugees. So it figures Kife would use one of them for something really important.”

  “But Jupe’s bouncing refugees now,” the Horse pointed out. “Why use a courier who can’t get through?”

  The other pirate shrugged. “I don’t know. He must’ve figured she would get through, for some reason, and it fouled up. She would have been pretty enough, alive.”

  Pretty enough. Yes, that figured. Faith might have gotten through, and Helse too, if some male Jupe officer spotted them. Regulations could be bent or ignored for that sort of thing. Yet I wasn’t sure. I had seen no evidence of corruption in the Jupiter Patrol, and it had been a woman who turned us away. So the mystery of Kife’s strategy remained.

  I freed the hands of the girl on my other side and passed the blade on. Covertly, we all worked on our foot-ropes, though the pirates were now so engrossed in their debate over the capsule that they were paying no attention at all to us.

  But I knew it would take more than our bare hands and one tiny blade to overcome these rough pirates. We had no real weapons, and the men were so much larger and stronger than we were they could have overcome us barehanded. There were weapons farther around the Commons, but we would be caught long before we could reach them, assuming the pirates had left them in place. What could we do to save ourselves?

  I worked it out as my feet came free: Someone would have to distract the pirates while someone else reached the weapons. We had no chance to plan this out before we would have to act, so I had to hope our minds ran in similar channels. I could make the best use of the weapons, but I was farthest from them; Spirit was closest.

  I looked again at Spirit, making a little signal with a finger. She should go for the weapons. She nodded.

  “To hell with that,” the Horse exclaimed, settling the pirates’ dispute. “We could debate it for years and never decide. I’m going to open it.” And, while the other pirates shrank back apprehensively, he twisted the two halves of the capsule.

  It burst apart and an object fell out, giving me a shock of deja vu relating to my recent dream. The pirates shied away as if afraid the thing would explode, but it bounced harmlessl
y on the deck. The Horse stooped to pick it up.

  When should we make our move? Now, while the pirates were distracted? Or should we wait till we had no choice. I decided that sooner was best. But we did have to give the remaining children time to get free. The more of us who burst loose at once, the better.

  “A key!” the Horse said, disappointed. “A stupid little plastic key!”

  “A key to what?” one of the others asked, edging back toward it.

  “How should I know? Maybe to a safe that got shipped by some other route and has a booby trap to blow it up if any key but this is used on it. Probably a magnetic pattern imprinted in it, no way to fake it. But we don’t have that safe!”

  “Then what good is this to us?”

  “No good at all!” The Horse threw down the key in a fury. “We sure ain’t going to Kife with it! Three damn days gone—for this! For nothing!”

  Spirit got up and started walking toward the weapons.

  For a moment the pirates did not even notice. Spirit walked exactly as if she were going to the head. She had marvelous composure. All the time I had thought she was broken, she had been planning this!

  Then the Horse spied her and caught on. “She’s loose!” He started for her. “Who forgot to tie—”

  I launched myself toward him.

  We didn’t have a chance, of course. There were eight of us and five pirates in the bubble at the moment—but each of them was a match for two of us unarmed, and there were more in the pirate ship that would come at the sound of the commotion. But we were desperate; we had nothing left to lose.

  I plowed into the Horse, who wasn’t looking at me. My impact spun him around. In a moment he recovered, grabbed me, and threw me aside. Scowling, he drew his laser pistol.

  Why hadn’t I grabbed for that pistol first? I might have gotten it, if I had concentrated on that alone. I had bungled, my only chance! Now, as if it were in slow motion, I saw the ongoing panorama of the action. The Horse, drawing his weapon. The other pirates, turning to face the rushing children. One of the bad ones reaching for Spirit at the fringe of the group. But no, he wasn’t catching her, he was clapping his hands to his face. She had flicked him in the eye with her finger-whip!