Anthony, Piers - Tyrant 1 - Refugee

by Anthony, Piers

  "We did not know how bad it was!" Señora Martínez said tearfully.

  None of us had known.

  At length the second bubble parted company with us, having done what it could.

  My memory of this period becomes hazy. Spirit and I sat in the cell our mother had used, trying vainly to comfort each other, to ease our common loss. Helse brought us food from time to time, but left us mostly alone. It had been terrible when our father died, and numbing when Faith sacrificed herself, but this was the worst—because our mother, Charity Hubris, was all that we had left of our family, except each other. There was an amorphous, intangible ambience of emotion that had to coalesce somewhere, like sulfur dioxide precipitating at night, and now, for each of us, it had no object except the other. That settling out had to be accomplished, but it took time.

  When we came out of it a few days later, like two survivors of holocaust, we went about the bubble and took stock. It was a disaster area. We had hardly been alone in our mourning; the children of those other forty-nine women had been coining to similar terms.

  Some of them hadn't made it. I had never thought of children as suicidal types, but I could not condemn them for it. Spirit and I had had each other; some of the others had had no siblings. To be entirely alone—I had come near enough to that abyss to comprehend its nature, and I understood. The bodies of those children joined their fathers in cold storage on the hull of the bubble.

  So we were spiraling out toward Leda, our only remaining hope, using our strong new jet to accelerate our orbital velocity, which in the normal paradox of such travel caused us to proceed outward at reduced velocity. We knew where we were going, thanks to the spot ephemeris the kindly scientist Mason had printed out for us, and had only to follow instructions to take advantage of the gravity wells of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to boost us to much better outward progress. So, even though Leda was a tiny mote, far out from Jupiter, we expected to reach it in a month of floating. This would have been impossible for us before, for Leda's sidereal period is 24 days, and we could have taken that long just to catch it once we reached its orbit. But a good drive unit makes a tremendous difference. When one adds a powerful outboard motor to a sailboat, one ceases to worry as much about the wind. We had really become a crude spaceship. In fact, the trip might have been impossible, regardless of schedule, without that new drive. This was because the gravity lenses kept us within the Jupiter ecliptic, the disk of space extending outward from its equator, where the rings lie. But Leda, like all the outer moons, has an inclined orbit, twenty-seven degrees tilted instead of falling within one degree of that plane like the inner moons. So we had to go that far out of the ecliptic or we would never have a chance to align. The scientists had plotted it out for us; otherwise we should have been lost.

  Our bubble complement was now ten grown women and seventy-two children, counting Helse and me as children. The women had done an excellent job, but they had been under strain, piloting the bubble and caring for the majority of us who had sunk into the depression of new orphanism. I would have grieved longer, but I saw how selfish that would be. It was time for me to pull my weight.

  Helse had been helping all along. Now Spirit and I moved in, taking instruction from Helse, and helping her teach the other children. We learned to take sightings on Jupiter and Ganymede and Callisto, three-dimensionally triangulating our relative position by using the little hand computer the scientists had provided for this purpose, then modifying the gravity lenses to correct our erring course. For our course was never precisely on target by itself; it always had to be adjusted. Naturally we could not simply orient on Leda and jet toward her; Leda not only was not visible from here, she wasn't there. She would be there only at the precise date and moment the ephemeris indicated. So we had to take triple sightings on familiar objects in space, get our angles precisely, check the time to the second, use the ephemeris to pinpoint exactly where those three objects were, so we could calculate exactly where we were, then calculate how far that deviated from where we should be. Fortunately the scientists had also provided idiot sheets that spelled out the steps in very simple bite-sized statements, complete with blanks for the new figures. We learned to set the degree of thrust of the drive unit, again according to computations. It was a challenge, and in its fashion it was fun; we felt like little spacemen, and we were. Soon the grown women were able to retreat into purely nominal supervision and get some needed rest.

  But now we were passing through the mid-reaches, and pirates still clogged the ecliptic. We spied a ship overhauling us and knew it was trouble. We held a quick council of war, and decided to offer no resistance. Normally sex was all the pirates really wanted, and it no longer seemed like a prohibitive price to pay. We would have been glad to have any of the lost women back from Io, if sex was the price of her rescue. What is one act, compared to life?

  But Helse took the precaution of changing to her boy costume, and she set up half a dozen of our oldest girl-children, including Spirit, similarly. Then most of us retreated to our cells and left the ten women to do what they had to do. With luck, no one would be hurt, and each women would not have to service more than two or three or four men.

  It came to me then how far our attitudes had progressed, or regressed, in the course of our savage experience. We no longer even expected anything other than piracy and forced sex from strangers, and hardly considered any course of action other than that which would get us through with the smallest loss. The children of the surviving mothers took it for granted that prostitution was the proper course, just as they accepted the cannibalistic consumption of their fathers to abate their hunger. We had suffered more than physical degradation! Yet at the time it seemed right—and in retrospect it still seems right. We did what we had to do. How can that be wrong?

  "I should be out there," Helse muttered as we heard the lock open. "I'm old enough, and God knows I've had experience."

  I reacted with horror. "Never you!" I breathed. "I love you!"

  "And did you love your mother?" she asked.

  I swung my arm up, hitting her. The action was unpremeditated and the position awkward, so my arm only grazed her head in passing, but I was immediately chagrined. Of course I knew what she meant, as my second thought caught up with my first. I had loved my mother, and let her prostitute herself; why should it be otherwise with Helse? There was an inconsistency in my philosophy.

  "I'm sorry," I whispered.

  She smiled wanly and put her arm around me. "I understand, Hope, I understand. But you must accept that it is not only your family that can make sacrifices for you. That woman at the lava flow threw away her life for us. Those women meeting the pirates now are not our relatives, but they are doing it for us. You must permit me to do for you what I can, and for the others of this bubble."

  She was right, but I could not say it. The thought of some foul pirate embracing her, treating her as the Horse had treated my sister Faith, filled me with a blinding horror. "I love you!" I repeated, as if that had any logic.

  "I know you do, Hope. And I love you. There need be no pretense between us anymore. I know you are the one man who would never hurt me."

  Her words filled me with a blaze of emotion that I felt physically in my chest, radiating through my body. I know the biologists say the heart is not the true font of love, that it is all in the mind; I sometimes think biologists doubt that love exists at all. But what I felt was in my breast and brain. I leaned over and kissed her, and fire seemed to play about our touching lips.

  Then we had to break, for we heard the tramp of pirate feet along the Commons, and if anyone saw us kissing, Helse's masculine ruse would quickly enough be discovered. "I will never hurt you," I agreed passionately. And I believed it.

  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.