Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  Ill-timed it was, but that scream electrified the refugees in a manner no prior event had. Suddenly they were acting, all at once, as if choreographed by a larger power. Four of them grabbed the pirate beside me, stripping him from me. Others jumped on the one I had stunned with my butt. Still others went after the oncoming pirates.

  The refugee throng had been transformed from an apathetic, frightened mass to a fighting force. Faith’s third scream had done it. It remains unclear to me why her first or second screams had not had that effect. Perhaps the first ones had primed the group. I like to understand human motives, and sometimes they defy reasonable explanation.

  At any rate, in moments all the pirates except their leader had been caught and disarmed, surprised by the suddenness and ferocity of the refugee reaction and overwhelmed by our much greater number.

  The Horse stood, however, not with a drawn sword, but with a drawn laser pistol. This was another matter, for though a laser lacked the brute force of a sword, it could do its damage a great deal faster, particularly when played across the face.

  “Turn loose my men,” the Horse said sternly.

  My father spoke up. I knew he did not like this sort of showdown, but he was, after all, our leader, and with Faith and me involved he was also personally responsible. “Get out of this bubble!” he said. “You’re nothing but robbers!”

  The Horse’s weapon swung to cover my father. I tensed despite my continuing discomfort, knowing that little weapon could puncture a man’s eyeballs and cruelly blind him before he could even blink.

  “Who are you?” said the pirate.,

  “Major Hubris,” my father responded.

  “You’re no military man.”

  “It’s my name, not a title. Fire that laser, and the rest of us will swamp you before I fall.”

  The Horse grinned humorlessly. “I can take out five or six of you first.”

  “Two or three of us,” my father corrected him evenly, and I felt a surging pride at his courage. My father had always had the nerve to do what he had to do, even when he disliked it. This was an example. “And there are two hundred of us. We’ve already got your men. You stand to lose, regardless.”

  The pirate leader considered. “There is that. All right—you release my men, and we’ll leave you alone.”

  My father turned to the crowd. “That seems fair enough.” He noted the scattered nods of approval, then turned back to the pirate. “But you have to leave the things you stole from us. No robbery.”

  The Horse scowled. “Agreed.”

  By this time I had recovered most of my wits. “Don’t trust him, Father!” I cried. “These are pirates!”

  “I am a pirate,” the Horse said. “But I keep my word. We will not rob you, and we will leave the bubble.”

  My father, like most men of honor, tended to believe the best of people. He nodded at the men who held the pirates, and the pirates were released. They quickly recovered their weapons and rejoined their leader, somewhat shame-faced.

  The Horse stood for a moment, considering. Then he indicated me. “That’s your boy who floored my man?”

  My father nodded grimly. “And my daughter, whom he was defending.”

  As I mentioned, thoughts scurry through my head at all times, not always relevant to the issue of the moment. Right now I wondered where my little sister Spirit was, as I didn’t see her. I don’t know why I thought of her right then. Maybe it was because, the way my father spoke, it sounded as though he had only two children, when in fact he had three. Of course, he wasn’t trying to deceive anyone; the pirate hadn’t asked how many he had, just whether I was one. It was just that my meandering brain insisted on exploring surplus details.

  “And when she screamed, the others rallied around,” the Horse said. “We misjudged that, it seems.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’ll just have to try it again,” the Horse concluded.

  He made a signal with his hand. “Take them.”

  Suddenly the nine other pirates advanced on us again, each with his sword or club ready.

  “Hey!” my father protested. “You agreed—”

  “Not to rob you,” the Horse said. “And to leave the bubble. We’ll honor that. But first we have some business that wasn’t in the contract.” He looked at Faith and me. “Don’t hurt the boy or the girl or the man,” he ordered. “Bring them here.”

  Pirates grabbed the three of us. In each case, two men aced the refugees nearby while the third cornered the victim. They were much more careful than before. It was not possible to resist without immediate disaster, for the Horse backed them up with his laser. More than that, it was psychological: The remaining refugees, rendered leaderless again, did nothing. The dynamics had changed.

  That’s another phenomenon that has perplexed me. The mechanism by which a few uninhibited individuals can cow a much larger number, when both groups know the larger group has the power to prevail. It seems impossible, yet it happens all the time. Whole governments exist in opposition to the will of the people they govern, because of this. If I could just comprehend that dynamic—

  “Bind father and son,” the Horse said. “String them up to the baggage rack.”

  I struggled, but lacked the strength and mass of any one of the pirates. They tied my hands behind me, cruelly tight, and suspended me from the guyed baggage net in the center of the bubble. My father suffered a similar fate. We hung at a slight angle, overlooking the proceedings, helpless.

  Now the Horse turned to Faith. He whistled. “She’s a looker!” he exclaimed. His vernacular expression may have been cruder, but that was the essence. Faith, of course, blushed.

  “Leave her alone!” I cried foolishly.

  “No, we won’t let this piece go to waste,” the Horse said, running his tongue around his lips. “Prepare her.”

  The pirates held Faith and methodically tore the rest of her clothing from her struggling body, grinning salaciously. Oh, yes, they enjoyed doing this! In my mind they resembled burning demons from the depths of Hell. Someone among the refugees cried out, but the swords of the other pirates on guard prevented any action.

  When Faith was naked, they hauled a box out of the baggage and held her supine, spread-eagled across it. The Horse ran his rough hands over her torso and squeezed her breasts, then dropped his pantaloons.

  There was a gasp of incredulity from the refugees. This was not because of any special quality of the Horse’s anatomy, which was unimpressive and unclean, but because of the open manner in which he exhibited himself before such a company of men, women, and children. The man was completely without shame.

  I am striving to record this sequence objectively, for this is my personal biography: the description of the things that have made me what I am. I strive always to comprehend the true nature of people, myself most of all. There is a place for subjectivity—or so I believe. My feelings about a given event may change with time and mood and memory, but the facts of the event will never change. So I must describe precisely what occurred, as though it were recorded by videotape, uncluttered by emotion, then proceed to the subjective analysis and interpretation. Perhaps there should be several interpretations, separated by years, so that the change in them becomes apparent and helps lead to the truest possible comprehension of the whole.

  But in this case I find I cannot adequately perform the first requirement. My hand balks, my very mind veers away from the enormity of the outrage and hurt. I can only say that I loved my two sisters with a love that was perhaps more than brotherly, though never would I have thought that there was any incestuous element. Faith was beautiful, and nice, and I was charged with her protection, though she was a woman while I was a mere adolescent. I had in fact never before witnessed the sexual act, either in holo or in person, and had never imagined it to be so brutal.

  It was as if that foul pirate shoved a blunt dagger into my sister’s trembling, vulnerable body, again and again, and his face distorted in a grimace of urgency t
hat in ironic fashion almost matched her grimace of agony, and his body shuddered as if in epileptic seizure, and when he stopped and stepped away there was blood on the weapon.

  And I—I with my absolute horror of that ravishment, my hatred of every aspect of that cruelty—I found my own body reacting, as it were a thing apart from my mind, yet I knew it could not truly be separate. There was some part of me that identified with the fell pirate, though I knew it was wrong and more than wrong.

  My innocent, lovely sister Faith possessed certain attributes of Heaven, while now I knew that I possessed, at least in part, an attribute of Hell. I looked upon the foul lust of Satan, and felt an echo of that lust within myself.

  I cannot write of this further. It is no pleasant thing to confess an affinity to that which one condemns. I can only say that I swore a private oath to kill the pirate Horse: some time, some way. And the pirates who followed him in the appalling act. I tried to note the details of each of them, so that I would not fail to recognize them if ever I encountered them again. I saw that several of the pirates, however, did not participate; they obeyed the Horse in all other things, but would not ravish a helpless woman. Even among, pirates, there were some who were not as bad as others.

  Apart from that effort of identification, my mind retreated from what was happening. My sister, I think, had fainted before the second pirate readied his infernal weapon, and that was a portion of mercy for her. She, at least, no longer knew what was being done to her body. I knew—but chose not to see.

  I fled into memory, into that sequence that was the origin of my feeling of deja vu, for it related directly to the present situation. Probably I should have commenced my bio there, instead of with the shock of Faith’s violation, for I see now that the true beginning of my odyssey was then. This bio is more than a record of experience; it is therapy. Biography, biology, biopsy—all the ways to study a subject. Bio—life. My life. Not only do I seek to grasp the nature of myself, I seek to strengthen my character by reviewing my successes and my mistakes with an eye to improving the ratio between them, painful as this process can be at times.

  Therefore I will now illumine that prior sequence, demarking it with a new dateline, and will try to keep my narrative more coherent hereafter. I would perhaps dispose of my “false start,” but my paper and ink are precious, as is my evocative effort. After all, if once I begin the process of unwriting what I have written, where may it end? Every word is important, for it too is part of my being.

  CHAPTER 2

  FAITH AND SPIRIT

  Maraud, Callisto, 2-1-2615—My sisters and I walked home together after school, because there was a certain safety in numbers. Faith, eighteen years old, resented this, she claimed her social life was inhibited by the presence of a skinny fifteen-year-old little sibling. The vernacular term she was wont to employ was less kind, and I think not completely fair, and does not become her, so I shall not render it here. Yet she smiled as she said it, deleting much of the sting, and I think there was some merit to her complaint. It is true that a fifty-kilo sibling is not much company for a fifty-kilo girl. Our weights were similar, in full Earth gravity, but the distribution differed substantially. Faith was about as pretty a girl as one might imagine, with the rich ash-blond tresses and gray eyes that made her face stand out among the darker shades that predominated in our culture, and a generously symmetrical figure and small extremities. I was young and not versed in social relations between the sexes, and I was her brother; even so, I understood the impact such physical qualities had on men.

  Faith was not really intelligent, as I define the concept, though she did well enough in scholastics. It was said that a single look at her was enough to raise her grade before any given class commenced, and that may not have been entirely in jest. She lacked that ornery attitude that passes for courage in others; these qualities of intelligence and courage were reserved in healthy measure for her sister. Spirit was as bold and cunning a gamine as could be found on the planet. Technically Callisto is merely the fourth Galilean satellite of Jupiter, a moon, but its diameter is almost 5,000 kilometers, the same as Mercury and greater than Pluto, so only the accident of its association with the Colossus of the System prevents it from being accorded the dignity of planetary status, and so I think of it as a planet, though the texts disagree. But I was describing my little sister, Spirit, who even at age twelve was a person to be reckoned with. I fought with her often, but I liked her too and envied her her survivalist nature. Theoretically I was the guardian of our little group, for I was the male, but my appreciation of the complexities of people was too great for me to perform this duty as well as Spirit might, had she been me. Once she set her course, she pursued it with an almost appalling efficiency and dispatch.

  On this day, precisely one month following my fifteenth birthday, we experienced what is termed an “incident.” How I wish I could have foreseen the consequences of this seemingly minor event! We have on Callisto a society of classes arising somewhat haphazardly from the turbulent history of our satellite. The government has changed often, but the mass of the populace has sunk slowly into the stability of poverty and dependence. Interactions between the classes are fraught with complications.

  My father had mortgaged his small property and gone into debt to insure a decent education for all his children. Thus the three of us, unlike the vast majority of those of our station, were literate and well informed. Faith and I could speak and read English as well as Spanish, and Spirit was learning. We had applied ourselves most diligently throughout, aware of the sacrifice that had been made for us; but for me the pursuit of knowledge of every kind had become an obsession that no longer required any other stimulus.

  We hoped this good education would facilitate Faith’s marriage into a more affluent class and my own chance to enter some more profitable trade than that of coffee technician. Then we could begin to abate the debts of our education, bettering the situation of our parents who had toiled so hard for our benefit.

  We could also achieve higher status and greater economic leverage to benefit our own children, when they came. It was a worthwhile ambition.

  But such aspirations were fraught with mischief, as this episode was to demonstrate.

  As we three walked a side street of the city of Maraud—named after the days when the Marauders of Space had made Callisto a base of operations, a quaint bit of historical lore that was not so quaint in its remaining influence—a mini-saucer floated up. It bore the scion of some wealthy family. He was handsome and wore jewelry on his quality coat, steel caps on his leather shoes, and the sneer of arrogance on his face that only one born to the manner could affect. I disliked him the moment I saw him, for he had all the ostentatious luxury of situation that I craved, yet he had been given it on the proverbial platter, while my family had to struggle constantly with no certainty of achieving it. He was about twenty years old, for he looked no older and could not have been younger; that was the minimum age at which a person could obtain the license to float a saucer.

  “You’re Hubris,” he said to Faith, hovering obnoxiously near, so that the down-draft from the saucer’s small propeller stirred the hem of her light dress and caused more of her legs to show. Here within the dome, the climate varied only marginally and was always controlled, so that heavy clothing was unnecessary. This was fortunate, for we could not afford anything more than we had. Still, the untoward breeze embarrassed Faith, who was of a genuinely demure nature in the presence of grown men.

  “I’ve seen you in school,” the scion continued, his eyes traveling rather too intimately along her torso. He must have meant that he had watched her at her school, for he would not have attended school at all; he would have had hired tutors throughout, and computerized educational programs and hypno-teaching for the dull material. “You look pretty good, for a peasant. How would you like a good kiss?” Only “kiss” was not precisely the term he employed. Our language of Spanish has nuances of obscenity that foreigners tend to overlook
, and translation would be awkward. Something as simple as a roll of bread can become, with the improper inflection, a gutter imprecation. He surely had not learned such terms from his expensive tutors.

  Faith blushed from her collar to her ears. She tried to walk away from the insulting man, but he coasted close and took hold of her arm. I saw the several rings on the fingers of his hand, set with diamonds and rubies, displaying his inordinate wealth. The hand was quite clean and uncallused; he had never performed physical labor. “Come on—you low-class girls do it all the time, don’t you? I’ll give you two dollars if you’re good.” The Jovian dollar that was our currency too had been revalued many times, and currently was worth about what it had been seven hundred years ago, back on Planet Earth. That was one of the things I had learned in the school it had cost my father so many of those same dollars to send us to. I also understood the ancient vernacular significance of the two-dollar figure. It was an allusion to the old traditional fee of prostitutes.

  My anger was building up like pressure in the boiler of a steam machine, but I contained it. Slumming scions could have foul mouths and manners, but it was best to tolerate these and stay out of trouble. All men are not equal, in the domes of Callisto.

  Faith tried to wrest her arm free, but the man hauled her roughly in to him. She screamed helplessly. I suppose it would have been better if she had kicked or scratched him, but she had practiced being the helpless type so long it was now second nature.

  Then Spirit did what I had lacked the nerve to do: She put her foot against the rim of the saucer and tilted it up. Its gravity lens made it and the man aboard it very light so it responded readily to her pressure. The shield was partial, so that the saucer would not float away when not in use. About 95 percent of the weight of vehicle and user was eliminated, enabling the propeller in the base to lift and move the mass readily. The null-gee effect was narrow and limited, so that the air above was not unduly disturbed. The first saucers, when gravity shielding was new, had borne their users along in perpetual clouds of turbulence, and minor tornadoes had been known to form above them, contributing to the awkwardness. But the refinement of the shield to make a curving and self-limiting null-gee zone had solved that problem, and the saucers were now quite common. (I use “shield” and “lens” interchangeably here; I should not, but the technical distinctions are beyond my expertise, so I go with the ignorant majority in this case. As I understand it, there is no shield, but the lens performs the office admirably.) The saucers use very little power, and, though they aren’t generally fast, they are fun. Larger saucers can do considerably more, of course.