Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  But anything becomes tedious or tiring in time. My pack became heavier, my suit started chafing in awkward places, the burns I had received from the scion’s laser in the dome chose this time to make themselves felt more insistently, and I wished I could stop, but of course I couldn’t. The alien creature I had imagined had more freedom and fewer pains; it deserted me the moment it tired of this quest and went to some more interesting site. I think it used instantaneous matter transmission to jump to another galaxy, a technology mankind has not yet developed and probably never will. That’s the problem with alien creatures; they make us look inadequate.

  Our pace slowed, not because of me but because of my mother. She was not used to sustaining such high exertion. If I found this travel uncomfortable, how much worse it must be for her! I went to help her, but she shrugged me off. It wasn’t foolish pride on her part—there has never been anything foolish about Charity Hubris—so much as awkwardness; two could not jump as freely as one. Then Spirit came and took her right elbow and I the left, and after a few stumbles we were able to move together and boost her along fairly expeditiously.

  Still, we had 160 kilometers to go in less than a day. We were traveling a good ten kilometers per hour, so theoretically we had time—but we did need to rest, eat, and even sleep, some time, and that cut us down. It was foolish to reckon without the fatigue factor, I now realized. We had been busy all day, getting ready to travel, and would ordinarily have been sleeping now.

  After three hours, we had indeed covered over thirty kilometers, by my reckoning—but that was the first flush of energy. I was no longer sure I could make the full distance at all, let alone in the time remaining. Certainly my mother could not.

  That damned scion in the saucer had succeeded after all in wiping us out. That must have been why there was no further pursuit; he knew we could not make it afoot. My brain seethed with impotent rage. If we missed the bubble because of him, if the foul scion won after all—

  Then what? We would have nowhere to go, and no way to get there. We could not return to Maraud, and no other dome was within our range. We would die in the barrens of Valhalla.

  I smiled with my private gallows humor. Our Ragnarok was at Valhalla.

  We sat on a rock, resting. Eating was complicated in the suits, and so was elimination. We knew how to do both, but the whole business did take attention and time, and wasn’t much fun.

  We started off again, at a slower pace because of my mother. I didn’t know whether to be glad for the relief it gave me or sad, because it made it ever less likely that we would reach the bubble in time. We were locked into our situation; what would be would be.

  It was doom that we contemplated, but I found myself too busy just keeping moving to suffer proper gloom. In literature I had learned that work was supposed to be an answer to doubt, and this seemed to be the case. It takes effort to doubt, and I did not have effort to spare for such a nonessential. Still, some of it did leak through to my consciousness.

  We traveled another three hours. By this time it was obvious to us all that we would not make it. We stopped again, weary, and my father beckoned Spirit and me to him for a helmet conference while Faith and my mother helped each other.

  “We’ll camp here,” my father said. “The two of you will stand watch while the women sleep.”

  “Watch?” Spirit demanded. “What for?”

  “Other refugees,” my father said succinctly.

  Spirit and I exchanged glances through our helmets. I suffered another surge of admiration for the foresight of my father. Of course there would be other people traveling to the bubble, from Maraud and other domes; it would hardly fill its load with just the five of us, assuming it even knew we were coming. We were now far enough along so that those other families should be converging on our route. If any of them had goodsized vehicles, and certainly some should—

  Spirit and I, abruptly recharged, got on it with a will. We were not dead yet!

  We not only watched, we ranged out in an expanding circle, she going one way, I the other. We leaped as high as we could from the surrounding ridges, though these weren’t really very high, trying to spot any moving thing.

  I must say this about Spirit: She was twelve, a child, but she was always great to work with. She had enthusiasm and competence, and enough savvy to operate effectively. I liked doing things with her; such shared tasks always seemed to have more meaning than those I did with other people, or alone. Maybe she was just trying to live up to her name as she interpreted it; if so, she succeeded admirably. She was a child, but I hardly knew her like among children or adults. I fancied her dark hair flinging out as she bounded, though of course there could be no such effect out here in the vacuum or in the space suit; it was just the way I saw her in my mind. I realize it is not fashionable to remark about one’s little sister in this manner, but I decline to let fashion interfere with truth.

  We spied nothing. More hours went by, and the glare of Jupiter seemed to turn baleful, and our enthusiasm was slowly replaced by dread. We came in to report—and discovered that Faith’s suit had sprung another leak. Actually, it was the same leak; the patch wasn’t holding quite tight. It was intended for temporary use, to hold an hour or two until the suit could be brought in for permanent repair, and now it was giving out. She had her hand on it, holding it closed, but that only slowed the leakage, and it was obvious she would not be able to travel well. We couldn’t even return safely to Maraud, now, even if it happened to be politically feasible, which it didn’t; that patch simply would not make it that far. We did have other patches, but it is bad business trying to patch a leaky patch, and the effort tends to be wasted.

  Spirit and I went out again. We had to find transportation to the bubble.

  She spied it first, with her sharp eyes and intense juvenile attention for detail: a shape floating over a distant ridge. She waved frantically, attracting my attention, and then I saw it. At first I felt dread: was it the scion’s saucer, coming to finish us off?

  No, it was too large. Anyway, even if it had been the scion’s saucer or that of one of his companions, we still would have had to approach it. We would perish out here alone, so we simply had to take the chance. We bounded after the shape.

  We caught it, for it was traveling slantwise past us so that we were able to intercept its path without matching its velocity. It slowed and hovered in place, waiting for us. What a lovely sight!

  I stood bathed in the light of its headlamp and pointed the direction of the rest of my family. The floater moved in that direction. It was a large vehicle, a supply transport, presumably bringing food and water and fuel to the bootleg bubble. In that case, we were really in luck.

  My guess turned out to be correct, but our luck was imperfect. The pilot held up a sign with a figure printed on it: the payment they demanded for the service of transporting us to the bubble. Truly has it been said: There is no free lunch.

  We had to pay; we had no choice. But it left us no margin, after allowing for the thousand-dollar entry fee to the bubble itself. We were now, essentially, all the way broke.

  Yet the ride itself was fun, and not merely because it represented our salvation from death in the vacuum. They didn’t let us inside; we clung to handholds atop the vehicle and floated in its onion field of null-gee over the terrain. In three more hours we were there.

  Could we have made it on our own? I like to think we could have—but I really am uncertain. What counts is that we did get there.

  CHAPTER 6

  BUBBLE, BUBBLE

  Callisto Orbit 2515—We stood before the bubble at last. I was excruciatingly tired, but excitement fended off my fatigue for the moment. The bubble most resembled a cratered planetoid, only the craters were actually recessed ports sealed with tough space-glass.

  The globe sat on the ground, but I knew its gravity lenses abated most of its weight so it was actually feather-light; it was about ten times my height; I’m less than two meters tall, but still growing.
Call it a good sixteen meters for the diameter of the sphere; it’s hard to judge with the naked eye, but that’s a standard size for small space bubbles. They aren’t uniform, actually, because their patterns of growth differ, but they do run pretty true to form.

  The idea was that such a sphere would be halved, with one section reserved for equipment, supplies, baggage and such, and the other half providing eight cubic meters of living space to each of one hundred passengers. It all worked out mathematically; I had studied it in school. But it was different, seeing the great dull hulk of it looming before me, blotting out part of the horizon.

  The air lock opened, and we scrambled in. The supply vehicle had a separate lock, designed for things that didn’t need oxygen or air pressure for survival; my father had had to deposit our short-hop payment there before we got our ride. The bubble lock’s outer panel slid closed behind us, and our weight decreased to about half its prior amount because of the effect of the shielding.

  The pressure came up, making our suits go slack. Faith was finally able to relax her hold on the leaky patch and straighten up. That must have been a tremendous burden off her mind.

  “How many?” a voice demanded from a speaker. It was good to hear normal speech again.

  “Five,” my father said, lifting back his helmet. The rest of us did the same.

  “Fifteen hundred dollars, cash in advance,” the voice said.

  My mother gasped. “We were told two hundred apiece,” my father said evenly.

  “The price has gone up. Pay or leave.”

  We knew we couldn’t leave. But we didn’t have the money. It had been all we could do to raise what we had. I saw the little lines of desperation form in my father’s cheek, but his voice was admirably steady. “We haven’t got it. You should have sent word.”

  “Then get out. No freeloaders here.”

  My father paused, signaling us to silence. Then he said: “Put your helmets back on, folks. They don’t want our money. We’ll have to take another bubble.”

  In shock, I fumbled at my helmet. Faith’s face was as pale as death; she knew she would die if she had to go out again. But at the same time, I knew my father was bluffing; he would not let us all go out.

  I looked at Spirit, and knew the same thought had come to her. If the fee was now three hundred dollars each, only three of us could go. Two would have to return to Maraud. My father and mother would sacrifice themselves to get the three children aboard. But that wasn’t right.

  Slowly, her little face set with unchildish intensity, Spirit nodded, answering my unasked question. We were the youngest, and most adaptable; we would volunteer to return, so that our parents could go. After all, we were the ones who had humiliated the scion and brought this trouble upon our family. We were the ones most deserving of punishment. We could conceal our identity, somehow, in Maraud, or maybe go to the coffee plantation. The notion was not pleasant, but it was viable.

  “You really don’t have the fee?” the voice asked, sounding disgusted.

  “Only the fee we were told,” my father replied. “One thousand dollars in gold. The supply vehicle took the rest, to carry us here.”

  “In gold?”

  “In gold. We had to liquidate everything we had.”

  “That’s enough for three, and some for extras.”

  I opened my mouth, but my father put his hand out to silence me without even looking. How well he knew me! “There will be other bubbles,” he said. “We can wait for the next, and perhaps its fee will not have changed. Our family travels together.”

  There was a sigh. “Well, for good gold, it will have to do. Hand it over.”

  “Not without guarantee of passage for our whole family,” my father said firmly. “We must stay together. Unity is more important than schedule.” I knew my mother felt that way, but with Faith’s suit leak, compromise seemed essential.

  “We’ll let you in. But you’ll have to work, to make up the difference.”

  “Agreed,” my father said, his face relaxing. I realized that the bubble pilot’s lust for our money was greater than any principle he might have had. Gold was universal currency, unlike the chronically deteriorating scrip of the various moons. By threatening to leave, taking our gold with us, my father had bluffed him out. Even if we had perished on the surface of Callisto, that gold would not have gone to this bubble, so it was take it or lose it. The man had taken it. So we would have to work; why not? It was only a ten day trip to Jupiter. How much better this was than the alternative Spirit and I had tried to offer.

  “Shuck your suits,” the voice said.

  We were happy to oblige. We helped each other get out of our space suits and folded the bulky things and stacked them on the floor. We should have no further need for them, as the bubble would not again dock in vacuum, and the bubble personnel would have a storage room to store them. This, more than anything else, gave me a feeling of relief. A person could relax when he took off his space suit. We did, however, detach our packs and carry them in our arms.

  My father produced our two bright gold coins. The inner panel slid aside. The panels were designed to move readily when the pressure was equal at either side, but to balk when it was not: an automatic safety factor to counter human error. Hard experience in space has taught our species many useful little things.

  There stood a man in a grubby pilot’s uniform, his hand out. “Cells 75 and 76,” he said as he took the gold. “They’re consecutively numbered; you can find them. Get in them and stay; keep the Commons clear.” He brought first one coin and then the other to his mouth, bit each and tasted it, and smiled with satisfaction as he put them away. I had not realized it was possible to identify a metal that way; I would have tried an immersion test for density, as gold is the most dense of the common metals, and anything with greater density is bound to be more valuable. The fact is, you can tell pretty well whether gold is authentic merely by glancing at its size and hefting it in your hand. But I’m not a trader or space pilot.

  The man did not introduce himself or offer any other advice, so we moved along the passage. It really didn’t matter where we stayed, so long as we were aboard the bubble when it lifted for Jupiter.

  The passage angled up at forty-five degrees, then debauched immediately into what appeared to be a torus-shaped chamber. That is, we stood within a giant doughnut, only it was hollow while the hole was solid. Its outer wall curved down on one side and up on the other. I should clarify that the outer wall of the torus was not the outer wall of the bubble.

  We walked downward into this torus, since the upper side curved until it was vertical. The lower side curved level in just a few meters—and just at that point the floor converted to a latticework of squares, each square two meters on a side, with a sliding panel in the center. Some panels were open, showing cells below, about two meters cubed.

  “Numbers!” Spirit exclaimed. “See here’s 28 and 29 next to it. Is this a prison ship?”

  “These are the passenger rooms,” my father said dryly. “Eight cubic meters apiece.”

  “But we’re only assigned two numbers,” I protested. “We should have five cells. Or at least three, for our entry fee.”

  A head poked out of one chamber, startling us. “They have doubled up,” the man explained. “They make twice as much money that way.”

  “But that’s wrong!” my mother said.

  “What law does an illegal craft follow?” the man inquired sardonically.

  “What law indeed,” my father agreed. I realized that we— except for my father—had been naive. Of course the refugee-smugglers would seek the greatest profit, by jamming as many people as possible into the bubble and overcharging those.

  “We have cells 75 and 76,” Spirit said. “Do you know where they are?”

  “Opposite side of the bubble,” the man said, pointing up. “You’ll have to climb. It’s not hard, in this one-eighth gee, and there are handholds. Better hurry, before the next load comes. There’ll be people s
crambling every which way, stepping on each other’s faces.”

  So many refugees! I had supposed our situation was more or less unique, but apparently many others were as desperate to leave the planet as we were. It was a sad commentary on the nature of our society.

  We thanked the man and hurried. We followed the numbers up and around the torus chamber. The handholds were really the ceiling lattice, which seemed to be formed of sturdy netting. The ceiling was close to four meters from the floor, but not hard to reach at eighth-gee. So we climbed it readily enough, and when it curved around toward the topside, we walked on that netting until we spied cells 75 and 76 in the new ceiling, which was really part of the same surface that had been the floor below, if that’s clear.

  It occurs to me that a verbal or written description isn’t enough, so I will make a map of the complete bubble, as I came to know it. Turn to the next page for that map, and don’t blame me if it does not match the standards of Space Navy specification blueprints.

  “How ever are we to stay in those?” Faith demanded irritably.

  “When we are in space, we’ll rotate, and the cells will all be ‘down,’” I explained, feeling very educated.

  “Idiot!” she snapped. Fatigue and nervous tension had worn out her temper, understandably. “I know that. I mean now.”

  Faith is a very pretty girl, but she was not very pretty now. I was about to make some sarcastic retort, but before I could work out something cutting enough for this occasion, my father interceded. Adults seem to handle fatigue better than do juveniles; maybe they are more accustomed to it. “We’ll manage,” he said mildly. “As you can see, others are doing well enough.”