Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  The secretary was female, of low degree, not unsympathetic, but compelled by her own employment to deliver the cruel response. “The Hubris account is three months in arrears on payments–-”

  “Of course,” my father cut in, showing at least this token of mettle. “We are all behind on payments. But I am due for a promotion to tallyman for my quadrant, and that will enable me to recover a month this year, perhaps two months if there is no sickness in the family—” He paused, disliking the sound of his own voice pleading. “The honored colonel must have some more specific reason–”

  The girl looked at him sadly. “There is another message, but I don’t think I should read it.”

  My father smiled grimly. “Read it, girl; you know I cannot.” Actually, he was partly literate, having taught himself a little by looking at Faith’s homework assignments, but he preferred not to have this generally known. Ninety percent of the peasant population was illiterate and most of the rest were not clever readers, and it seemed the big landowners and politicians preferred it that way. Literacy could lead to peasant unrest. In this, I was sure, the authorities of Callisto were quite correct. Illiteracy meant ignorance, and ignorance was more readily malleable.

  How was it, then, that Faith and Spirit and I had been permitted to enroll in one of the few good schools, expensive as it was? There had to have been a bribe, making it more expensive yet. I had never inquired about that and never would; if we children had our secrets to preserve, so also did our parents have theirs. I knew that if my father had done it, there had been no other way.

  The girl frowned. “If you insist, Señor.” She was being overly polite, for peasants were normally not dignified by the title “Señor,” or, as it is in English, “mister.” Peasants were supposed merely to be things rather than people. “It seems to be a notification of a charge of truancy and abuse against your children,” she said, looking at the document.

  “My children!” he exclaimed, baffled. “Surely, Señora, there is some mistake!”

  “B. Sierra, scion of a leading family, has lodged a charge of unwarranted aggression against the children of Hubris,” she said apologetically.

  Suddenly it made awful sense. I looked at Spirit, who nodded. We were to blame! We should have told our father, instead of concealing the episode. I had never thought the boorish scion would report us. It should embarrass him too much to have it known that a fifteen-year-old peasant boy and twelve-year-old peasant girl had balked his attempted rape of their older sister.

  “I cannot believe this,” my father said. “My children are well behaved. I have sent them to school beyond the mandatory age–”

  “The charge is that they made an unprovoked attack on him as he passed on his grav-disk. He took a fall, smashing his nose, but managed to recover his disk and get away. Because they are only children, he is not demanding criminal action, but they must vacate the city.” I wondered, as I heard that, whether that could be all there was to it. If the scion had been angry enough to make a formal complaint, he must seek more revenge than our departure.

  My father turned to look at me. He saw the guilt on my face. “Thank you, Señora,” he said to the screen. “I did not properly understand my situation.”

  “The colonel says he is sure it is a misunderstanding,” the girl said quickly. “But it is better for you to leave. It is awkward to offend such a family as this. The colonel will make a domicile available for your family at the plantation.”

  “The colonel is most kind. We shall consider.” The call closed and the screen faded.

  Spirit and I both started to speak as we returned to our house from the pay-phone station, while Faith blushed. My father silenced us all with a raised palm. “Let me see if I have this correctly,” he said, with a calm that surprised me. Now that he had a better notion of the problem, it seemed, he had more confidence about dealing with it. “The young stud floated up and accosted Faith, and you two fought him off.”

  Silently, I nodded.

  “The scion burned Hope with his laser,” Spirit said, “We had to do something.”

  My father looked at me again, and I pulled out my shirt and showed the burn streak on my left side, now bright red and painful. It was a certain relief to have this known, for I had had to keep myself from flinching when I moved my arm.

  He sighed. “I suppose it was bound to happen. Faith is too pretty.”

  Faith blushed more deeply, chagrined for her liability of beauty. She was the lightest-skinned among us, strongly showing that portion of our ancestry that was Caucasian, and which accounted in part for her pulchritude. I never understood why beauty should not be considered equal according to every race of man, and every admixture of races, but somehow fairness was the ideal. Spirit’s developing features of face and body were almost as good as Faith’s, but her darker skin and hair would prevent her from ever being called beautiful.

  I was perversely glad to see the tension relieved. “You’re not angry?”

  “Certainly I’m angry!” my father exploded. “I am infuriated with the whole corrupt system! But we are victims, not perpetrators. I only wish you had found some more anonymous way to defend your sister. We are about to pay a hideous price for this mishap.”

  I felt the rebuke keenly. How could I have saved Faith without antagonizing the scion? I didn’t know, and now it was too late to correct the matter, but I knew I would be pondering it until I came up with a satisfactory, or at least viable, answer. Actually, “hideous price” turned out to be an understatement, but none of us had any hint of that then.

  “Now I must explain our situation,” my father said. My mother had quietly joined us as we returned to our house, our forfeited house, and now she sat beside Faith and took her hand comfortingly.

  My mother’s given name was Charity, and it was an apt designation, though it did not match the normal run of names any more than the rest of ours did. We were a family somewhat set apart, being, I think, more intelligent and motivated than most, and it showed in our names. Our surname, Hubris, meant, literally, the arrogance of pride; it was a point of considerable curiosity to me how we had come by it, but I also had certain arrogant pride in it, for it did lend us distinction.

  My mother, Charity, was not, and had never been, as pretty as Faith was now, but she was a fine and generous and supportive mother who, though I should blush to say it, still possessed more than a modicum of sex appeal. She was not a creature any man would be ashamed to have at his elbow. We three children were as different from our parents and each other as it was feasible to be, yet Charity’s charity encompassed all our needs. She had a very special quality of understanding, an aspect of which I believe I inherited; but her use of it was always positive, in contrast to mine. Seeing her now, her dark hair tied back under a conservative kerchief, her delicate hands folded sedately in her lap—Faith inherited those hands—her rather plain features composed—yet should she ever take the trouble to enhance herself the way Faith did, that plainness would vanish—I felt an overflowing of love that lacked, at the moment, any proper avenue of expression. She was my mother, a great and good woman though a peasant, and I sorely regretted bringing this affliction to her. Had I only known—yet of course I should have known! How could I have thought we could humiliate a scion with impunity, here in a dome on class-ridden, stratified Callisto?

  “Colonel Guillaume has offered us a place in the plantation dome,” my father said. “We must consider this offer on its merits, which are mixed. We must move from the dome of Maraud; the charge against our family can only be abated that way.” He held his hand aloft again. forestalling Spirit’s impetuous interjection. “Yes, dear, I’m sure the incident was not as the scion states it, and theoretically in a court of law both sides should be heard. But our republic of Half-cal–” Callisto, I must clarify, is actually two nations, of which ours is the lesser. Thus the other is called the Dominant Republic of Callisto. But I interrupt my father’s speech: “—is weighted towards the wealthy, and
it would be your word against his. There would be no justice there. We have been given the chance to avoid such a legal confrontation, and indeed we must avoid it, for it would surely lead to penalties we can’t pay, and therefore prison.” Spirit subsided; she grasped the distinction between the ideal and the practical when it was explained to her. No peasant ever prevailed in an encounter with the elite class. The whole system was engineered to prevent that.

  “The advantage of the plantation,” my father continued, making a fair presentation, for he always tried to be fair and usually succeeded, “is that that is my place of employment. I would no longer have to make the daily trips between domes, and that would save time and money. I could be with my family more, and perhaps begin to gain on our mortgage arrears.” He smiled tiredly. “I should clarify that even though we are being foreclosed and evicted, our debt remains as a lien against our family line, and must eventually be cleared if we are ever to achieve higher status. There will be a rental on the plantation domicile; the good colonel did not get rich by being foolish about such details. But it will be a convenient and pleasant accommodation.” He paused, and we knew there would be another side to this. There was always another side to anything in Callisto that seemed too positive for a peasant family.

  “The disadvantage is that the coffee plantation is maintained at half Earth gravity. I am not sure you children quite appreciate what that means. Half gravity may be fun for occasional play, and it is possible to spend several hours in it each day without harm, but permanent residence within it is deleterious to human health. The living bones decalcify and weaken, until it is no longer possible for a person to survive in normal Earth gravity, such as is maintained in the dome of Maraud. The process is gradual and painless, and harmless as long as residence in that gravity is maintained; it is the body’s natural accommodation to the changed environment. It would be possible to return to full Earth gravity within a year, physically, though with some discomfort, but it becomes more difficult with time, and after two years no one returns.”

  “But–” Spirit burst out.

  My father nodded. “It is, as my daughter points out, no temporary choice we are making today. If we go to live in the plantation dome, we shall have an easy and peaceful life, for we can be sure no scions reside there, but our branch of Hubris will never be anything but coffee handlers. It is not a bad employment; there is honor in doing any job well, and half our national export is coffee—but we should never again have any choice. Now, it would be possible to ferry you children to school in Maraud for the rest of the current term, but after that you would have to join us full time at the plantation, for your scholastic district will be there. Unless we arrange to have you legally separated from the family”

  “No!” my mother exclaimed. That ended that; she would tolerate almost anything for the sake of family unity except the dissolution of it. Family is important to us of Callisto; we are, as I explained, a Latin breed, reputed to be hot-blooded, and in this respect perhaps we are. Whatever we did we would do together, as a family. It was our weakness and our strength.

  My father glanced at Faith, giving the eldest child leave to speak. But Faith wrung her hands without opinion. “Whatever you decide, Father.”

  He glanced next at me. I was naturally bursting with questions, but had to settle for one: “We have to get out of Maraud. The coffee dome isn’t good. Where else can we go?” It was really half rhetorical, for the planet outside the domes was airless and trace-gravity. The only place to go was another dome city, in the other half of the planet, the Dominant Republic, where there would be no charge outstanding against the Hubris family. But I knew from my school studies that the Dominant Republic was just as hard on peasants as Half-cal was—and we had no connections there.

  No job, no friends, no residence. If they admitted us at all, which was doubtful, we might just be worse off than we were here.

  There was a silence, as each of us turned the grim reality over individually.

  “Jupiter!” Spirit exclaimed.

  My father glanced questioningly at her.

  “We can emigrate to Jupiter,” she explained. “We can bubble off from Callisto and float to the big planet where everyone is welcome and everyone is rich, and be happy ever after.”

  My father did not suppress her foolish notion directly; that was not his way. Instead he asked her leading questions, letting her find her own way towards the truth. “What bubble did you have in mind?”

  “Well” she faltered. “There are tourist and trade bubbles, aren’t there? And big freight bubbles.” She turned to Faith. “You’ve taken Contemporary Economics in school, haven’t you? Don’t bubbles go through the whole Jupiter System all the time?”

  “Yes,” Faith said. “But the moons of Jupiter are mostly Latin, while most of the commerce is done by United Jupiter, which is mostly Saxon. We don’t speak the same language—that is, our people speak Spanish and theirs speak English—and they don’t like our governments, what with the Saturnian bias of Ganymede and the dictatorships of Europa and Callisto.”

  “We don’t like our governments!” Spirit blurted. “That is why we want to leave!”

  “And we, the Hubrises, do speak their language,” I put in, warming to Spirit’s notion as I got into it. “That’s the big advantage of the schooling we had. Faith and I can write it, too.”

  “But Charity and I can not,” my father pointed out. “Still, the Colossus of North Jupiter does claim to accept freedom-seeking refugees, and there are many Latins settled there. We could probably find some bubbles there that conduct much of their business in Spanish, or at least are bilingual. But that’s academic; the Half-cal government would never grant us leave to emigrate.”

  “Why not?” Spirit demanded. “They want to get rid of us, don’t they? They should be happy to help us on our way.”

  My father shook his head. “Not so, child. They have assorted international agreements and covenants that restrict free emigration, and in any event Half-cal would hardly care to advertise that its own people are eager to leave. They may want us gone, but they won’t let us go.”

  “I always knew our government was crazy,” Spirit said, pouting.

  “There’s a way,” I murmured hesitantly.

  All eyes centered on me. “What, flap our arms and fly there?” Spirit inquired skeptically.

  That angered me. I made a motion of sticking someone in the posterior with a pin, and Spirit jumped, and that diluted my anger, for she always did play our little games well. “A bootleg bubble,” I explained. “There’s one hiding in Kilroy Crater, in the Valhalla complex, right now, just waiting for a full load.”

  My father whistled. “You children have sources of information the government lacks?”

  “Well, it’s just gossip,” I admitted. “But I believe it.”

  “The government knows about it,” Faith said. “They just don’t care. They consider it pirate business.”

  Pirate business. That suggested volumes. Callisto had first been settled by Spanish-speaking colonists five centuries ago, who brought in slave labor to work in the first plantation domes. Then French-speaking buccaneers raided Half-cal and used it as a base for their operations. The name of our great city, Maraud, is a legacy of that period. In due course the slaves revolted. There were massacres, and finally, two centuries ago, the buccaneers were expelled. But their influence remained in this area, barely covert, and it was said that modern pirates of space had influence in the Half-cal government. Certainly there was a lot of pirate money around from the illicit drug trade, and we all knew the corrupting power of money. So it was not surprising that officials winked at innocuous or even illegal activities. I doubted that pirates were actually involved in refugee bubbles, for there could not be much money in that, but certainly individual entrepreneurs could be.

  “You would go on such a bubble, rather than to the coffee dome?” my father asked, and I grasped now that he had not really been surprised by the suggestion.
Adults, too, had their private sources of information.

  “Oh, sure” Spirit agreed immediately. “It would be fun!”

  Oh, my Lord, how little she knew!

  “There could be danger and discomfort,” my father warned.

  “But if the family stayed together—” my mother said. That was, I believe, the turning point. After that we found ourselves committed to the exodus.

  We would flee Callisto.

  CHAPTER 4

  FLIGHT INTO VACUUM

  I have only an inkling of what my father did to organize for our horrendous trek across the surface of Callisto. (I have not run a dateline for this entry because it follows the last without change of locale. A foolish consistency, as Señor Emerson said many centuries ago, is the hobgoblin of little minds.) Probably he did not want us to know, for it could hardly have been completely legal. Officially, we were preparing to vacate the premises; actually, we meant to vacate the planet.

  All of our private holdings were liquidated on the gray market and the money used to buy thirdhand surface suits for each of us, together with compact food packs and water filters. There was enough left over to cover the down payment on a junky low-gravity transporter.