Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  Perhaps I can arrange to mail this manuscript anonymously to the scientist of Io who helped us, Mason. Anonymously, because I do not want him to be implicated in my crimes. There must be no direct connection between him and me. I believe he would understand. Maybe he would show the manuscript to his pretty niece, Megan.

  I am dreaming foolishly. But I will try to send the manuscript. In a situation as fouled up as this one, my package might get through, especially since they will not suspect a document written in English of originating in a Hispanic refugee camp. Major and Charity Hubris, my honored parents—I love you and grieve for you. Faith, my lovely older sister whom I was unable to protect—how I wish I could have served you better than I did. Helse, my love—O Helse, Helse! I dream of you yet, my woman, my bride, my all! I clip your name tag, HELSE HUBRIS, to this manuscript, hoping you would have approved. And Spirit—

  EDITORIAL EPILOG

  Here the manuscript ends. The final page is discolored, surely by tears, and a full paragraph of text has been obliterated. It is a point of curiosity what the washed-out text contained, but the words are largely beyond restoration. Only a few are decipherable; among them, twice, “Spirit.” The HELSE HUBRIS name tag is absent, long since lost.

  Hope Hubris, at the age of fifteen, had seen all his family lost or dead, and he believed he was also slated for death. It is not surprising that he was depressed, and that the poignancy of his accumulated memories overcame him.

  The official records for this period in the life of the Tyrant are scant, as the affairs of refugees were not at that time deemed important. There is no listing of his presence in the detention bubble. Yet other details of his narrative have been corroborated, such as the appearance of two Hispanic refugees at a scientific observatory on the hell-face of Io and the four-year residence of a pretty child in the mansion of a prominent politician of Callisto, so there seems to be little reason to question the general authenticity of the document.

  We take editorial license to recreate the following sequence, as the narrative seems incomplete without it. The date should have been near 6202615, two months after his arrival at Leda Station:

  An official discovered Hope Hubris at his cramped table formed from a surplus crate, his head on the last sheet of his holographic manuscript. (Clarification: Holographic is used in its sense of “wholly hand written” rather than in the more common contemporary sense of three-dimensional projection of images, though perhaps that also in a sense applies.) “Hey, kid, are you sick?” he asked in clumsy Spanish.

  Hope raised his dark head to stare dully at the man. “No, sir.”

  “You can go to the dispensary for a pill.”

  “No, thank you, sir. I am merely tired.”

  “What’s that you have there?”

  “Nothing, sir. Just some papers.” Hope tried to put them away.

  “Say, that’s English! Where did you get that?”

  “Sir, it’s unimportant. I was just writing—a letter.”

  “In English?”

  “Yes, sir. I studied your language in school.”

  “Let me have that.” The official moved to pick up the papers, thinking they were stolen.

  “Sir, please—it is mine!”

  The official paused, then tested the bedraggled young refugee. “You are fluent in English?” he asked in that language.

  “Yes, sir,” Hope answered in kind.

  “Let me see you write something in English.”

  Hope took a separate sheet, and wrote: This is my statement that I am literate in the language of the Colossus Jupiter, from whose fair and promising clouds I am barred.

  “I’ll be damned!” the official exclaimed. “Don’t you know that English-language literacy is grounds for status as an alien resident in Jupiter?”

  The eyes in the dusky face widened. “No one informed me of that, sir.”

  The official shook his head. “Maybe that form got lost in the shuffle. Happens all the time. Anyway, it’s true. Come with me; you are about to have your status changed.”

  And so this manuscript, Refugee, written in the depth of despair, saved the young life of Hope Hubris, and thereby altered most significantly the history of mankind. It is not possible to say whether it happened precisely this way, but certainly it was the chance discovery of his literacy in English that qualified him for alien residency; a subsequent reference by the Tyrant himself confirmed this aspect. The existence of this particular manuscript was not then known, and it is very tempting now to suppose that this was indeed the document that did it. There would be poetic irony in having the narrative of his failure convert that failure to success.

  This aspect, of course, also resolves the mystery of Helse’s use as a courier: She too was literate in English, having had an excellent private education, so she also would have been granted sanctuary if she had survived. Her employer surely knew that.

  We trust this clarifies the early nature of the later Tyrant of Jupiter. He was not at all the monster his political and cultural enemies have claimed. He was very much a victim of violent circumstance. The marvel is not that he emerged emotionally scarred, but that he retained his sanity and power of character.

  Conjecture is precarious, but some further speculation on the concluding, unreadable paragraph of his manuscript may be in order, as this relates to a further mystery of his character. Obviously this paragraph concerned Hope’s little sister Spirit, and great emotion attaches thereto. One must wonder why, when one short paragraph is devoted to the memory of parents, older sister, and fiancée, all dead or degraded, there should be a much longer passage devoted to the younger sister, who perhaps survived best. Objectively it would seem that Spirit was the least important figure of this number, and suffered least (though still considerably); why then should she apparently be mourned more than all the rest? It does not seem to make perfect sense.

  The motives of the Tyrant, however, have always made sense, when properly understood. He was a most intelligent, forthright, and practical person, not given to emotional foolishness. He was never known for extreme subtlety or deviousness. He related with rare precision to the needs and feelings of the average man; that is one secret of his inordinate success. What he felt, everyone felt. Few, for example, failed to applaud his savage campaign against the space pirates—and this manuscript makes clear his underlying motivation there. He was fulfilling his vow. One must therefore conclude that if he wrote most feelingly about his little sister, the state of his awareness warranted it.

  It would be easy to take this as proof of the incest with which he has been charged—but again, this may be unwarranted. Direct evidence for such incest has never been presented—and there have been those who certainly would have presented it had they been able. Every investigation has foundered on uncertainty. Yet it does seem likely that Hope’s greatest emotional concern was with his sister.

  Probably the truth is this: Though Hope Hubris loved his parents and older sister in a family way, and loved his fiancée Helse romantically, his closest actual companion was Spirit. She understood him, she fought for him (sometimes with devastating effectiveness: he literally owed his life to her), she may have slept with him one time to ease his agony of bereavement, and she deliberately sacrificed herself to free him from the last pirate. She was the embodiment of blood relative, friend, and perhaps lover. She was his strength, and when he lost her, his competence as an individual suffered severely. One can be sure he would not passively have awaited shipment back to Callisto, had Spirit been with him at the end. The two of them would have found a way to compel sanctuary. Note how rapidly the manuscript concludes once Spirit departs from it; it was as though Hope’s normally acute interest in detail and personality deserted him at that point. Helse could have been his support—but he knew her only a month or so, while he had known Spirit all her life. Thus Spirit was in fact the most significant figure in Hope’s life, and it was her loss that affected him most profoundly.

  This insight may
be critical to proper comprehension of the subsequent career of the Tyrant, though no other biography has remarked upon it. Others treat her presence as incidental to his career; this was, as the following manuscripts will demonstrate, grossly in error. Hope Hubris loved, honored, and needed his sister Spirit—all of his life.

  This document is presented with compassion and pride by Hopie Megan Hubris, daughter of the Tyrant, June 6, 2670.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When we moved to backwoods Florida, we used a wood stove for heating, and my study was in the horse pasture. It had no electricity, and though Florida is a warm state, it does get cool some winter days. So in winter I would write my novels in pencil on a clipboard while sitting by the stove in the house, then when spring came I would go to the study to type the second and third drafts on my manual Olympia typewriter. The hard work is in the first draft; the rest is patching and polishing. Thus I finished typing the sixth Xanth novel, Night Mare on OctOgre 28, 1981, and the next day my fantasy On A Pale Horse moved from secondary notes place to primary writing place, and I made 1,400 words preliminary notes on a new project, BIO OF A SPACE TYRANT.

  Our home life was not easy. In that period, my wife’s father was ill in the hospital with the rare and deadly Wegener’s syndrome, with a 50% chance of survival, so my wife drove down to Tampa to stay with her distraught mother for a few days, then was relieved by her sister coming in from another state, later returned for another stint, was relieved by her brother from a third state, and so on, the three of them providing substantial continuous support for more than a month. This was a demonstration of their family unity that surely provided much solace when most needed. Daughter #1 Penny and Daughter #2 Cheryl helped me keep the home fires burning. My father in law tided through, but my wife was in Tampa much of the time, so it was a somewhat straitened time for us. I remember when Penny wanted to attend a big school dance, and I had to turn her down, because I would have had to drive her there at night, and return to pick her up after midnight, and that would mean either leaving eleven year old Cheryl alone in the house, or dragging her along. If anything went wrong, like a flat tire or engine trouble, one daughter or the other would be stranded. We had company one day and night, and it was tricky managing. I was also nervous about my thrice-weekly three-mile exercise runs through the forest; suppose some fool illegal hunter took me for a deer? Where would my children be? Single parenting is like that.

  At any rate, in due course my wife returned. Pale Horse moved along, and Refugee notes continued steadily for the next month. Jamboree was solid Pale Horse, as I completed the first draft. But winter remained, so I started writing first draft on Refugee on FeBlueberry 1 and completed the first draft in the middle of Marsh. Then I shifted back to Pale Horse for the second and third draft typings, and returned to Refugee in the middle of Mayhem for its two drafts, completing it Jejune 26. So the two novels were intertwined throughout, and each related strongly to death—and indeed, my wife’s mother died of cancer in that period. That’s right— her father was ill, but her mother died. It was a shock. I also got a kidney stone, bringing such pain as I had not felt in decades, and spent a day in the hospital; that was the start of what I call my high-water diet, and there has been no recurrence. Overall, it was not our happiest time. I sometimes wonder whether there has to be privation in a writer’s life if he is to write effectively about misery and death. I doubt it, but am not in a position to refute it.

  The two novels sold to different publishers, and they and their series continued on into bestselling status, doing very well. One oddity was that when I finished the first draft of Refugee and returned to Pale Horse, Refugee faded from my consciousness. Then when I returned to it, I was amazed by its power. How could it have disappeared so completely in the interim? I guess it was that when I focus on a novel, it blots out most else until it is done. Both wore published the same month, OctOgre 1983, Pale Horse in hardcover, Refugee in original paperback, and they have always been linked in my awareness, though they are of quite different types apart from the death theme. Both were examples of my expanded definition of the genre; you may have noticed that Refugee has what I call mainstream level characterization, with main characters who are not black and white, but many shades of gray, and the nature of right and wrong can be difficult to fathom. Even the pirates are not universally evil. Thus both novels were savaged by some ignorant reviewers, which is par for that course. But I believe in both, and as I proofread Refugee after we scanned it into the computer I was impressed all over again by its competence and depth of feeling. Yes, it is downbeat, but that does not make it a bad novel, any more than the upbeat nature of Xanth makes it good; the best writing puts a reader into the story and makes him feel it, positive and negative.

  After Refugee I returned to Xanth, starting Dragon on a Pedestal. I gave Penny driving lessons, for she was 15 and eager to get on the road. Those were sometimes harrowing, as other parents surely understand. Just after Refugee, Cheryl and I attended the Science Fiction Research Association’s annual meeting in Kansas, where I got to meet the author of one of by favorite stories of all time, “Breaking Point,” James Gunn. It turned out that his son was a big fan of mine, but because of a schedule mixup I never got to meet him. I also met Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the finest stylist the genre has known; he was much taken by Cheryl, who was then a nascent woman of just 12. Later I met Sturgeon’s own daughter, who wanted to collaborate with me; it can be a small world. Thus life continued unabated.

  Refugee was the first novel we scanned, after struggling for three months to get our scanner working. The problem turned out to be a conflict between the scanning software and the modem software. When the modem card was replaced, lo, the scanner worked at last. Then we had to figure out how to fix all the misreadings. Words could look like thIS, some with @ symbols embedded in them, in font sizes ranging from 8 to 12, and bits of text misplaced in other text. It takes a while to let any computer related program know who is boss; like unruly animals, they do test you. But we gradually got it down reasonably well, with my wife doing the scanning, and I the proofreading. So this novel becomes a marker of a sort, the first of my 100+ plus novels to be scanned for Internet republication. At least at this time our lives are more peaceful than they were when the novel was written; we live comfortably on our tree farm, and both daughters are established elsewhere. Penny is married and farming in Oregon, and is a doula, assisting expectant mothers in childbirth, and Cheryl is with the local newspaper. (Small world indeed: as I edited this paragraph, Cheryl phoned: she’ll be here for lunch. Tomorrow she and I will go see the movie The Mummy which I understand has rare special effects.) Our most scary recent adventure has been our investment in Internet publishing, where small fortunes can be made or lost. We do it not for money but for ideology: to make it possible for all writers to get published, rather than being subject to the tyranny of what I call Parnassus: the regular publishing establishment that is motivated primarily by profit rather than literature, and ensures that 99 of every 100 writers will not make it into print. So just as Hope Hubris battled the pirates, I am in my fashion battling the powers that be in publishing, and it’s no easy course. I do mean to do my bit to change the realm of publishing for the better. Time, rather than the critics, will be the arbiter of my effort.

  Meanwhile, I hope that those of you who thought all I wrote was funny fantasy were not too upset by Refugee; I know it is painfully downbeat. But there’s a reason: it’s a direct analogy of the Boat People. These were poor folk who fled Viet Nam in the east, and Haiti in the west, in the early 1980’s, seeking better lives. Unfortunately what they often found was much worse. There was a news item about the Vietnamese Boat People who started out with 200 crammed onto a boat designed for 100, and were raided by pirates who killed the men, raped the women, and enslaved the children. Only two women made it to a better shore—that’s a 99% attrition—and when they complained to the authorities, the response was “Where are your witnesses?”
and nothing was done. Meanwhile the Reagan Administration policy in America was to tow the boats back out to sea rather than let these non-Saxon freeloaders land. Does all this seem rather familiar? Now you know the basis of this novel. It is ugly because the story of the Boat People is ugly. I have some sensitivity to the plight of immigrants because I am myself an immigrant. I had the luck to be the child of parents of approved types—American and British—with relatives here, so we were not barred. But we did brush uncomfortably close to the horror or World War Two in Europe. My father was doing relief work in Spain, and was arrested by the dictatorship there, and we were expelled from the country. We came to America in 1940 on the last passenger ship to make it before the war shut down such commerce. So though my case was hardly as extreme as that of Hope Hubris, I do have feeling for his situation. Atrocities are by no means limited to such periods; there was a recent newspaper feature tracing the fate of a shipload of Jewish refugees that was turned away from the United States just before World War Two; most of them died at the hands of the Nazis. Even today we are seeing a similar formula in Africa and Europe, as troops march in to some innocent village, systematically kill the men, rape the women, and enslave many of the children. The Western hemisphere is hardly clean; the full ugly story of the Mayas of Guatemala, for example, may never be known. It just goes on. Refugee is not brutal because of invention, but because of the way it reflects human or inhuman reality.