Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  We kept on working, for there was nothing else to do. We dumped a second tank, and a third and a fourth. But the awareness of those bagged bodies was on me. I wondered which one was my father. Sadness welled up in me, the realization that Major Hubris was gone, that I would never see him again. He had been my bastion against the uncertainties of life, the backbone of our family; without him we were largely formless. There was now a void in my life, an emptiness in the physical and spiritual form of my father, and out here it seemed as intense as the void of space around me. Major Hubris would have known what to do about the squeeze between travel and food.

  I saw Spirit clinging to the hull, and knew by the attitude of her body that she felt it too, and that she was crying. She might have bounced back readily, but the onus of loss had not forsaken her. I climbed across and put my suited arm around her suited shoulders, squeezing her comfortingly. We had lost our father and our sister, but we still had each other. And our mother.

  Then we went back to work, doing tanks 5 and 6, watching their contents merge with the ring system of Jupiter. Some of those particles we had sown might remain in orbit for a billion years. It was slightly awesome to realize that my frozen refuse might outlive me by that length of time. It reminded me of a facsimile exhibit I had seen in the Maraud Museum, of the fecal deposit of a dinosaur that had been ossified or petrified or whatever and preserved intact for eternity while the reptile that made it was gone. A coprolite, or fecal fossil. Maybe eventually some creature from galaxy Andromeda would come and take a soil sample from this ring, run it through his alien laboratory, and draw conclusions about my nature. Would he assume I was nothing but a big chunk of fecal matter?

  My gaze came to rest again on the bagged bodies, as if drawn by some spiritual gravity. The women had strapped the bags to the hull irregularly, using the same eyelets we were using. We had to reset our ropes for each pair of tanks, and for the last set we had to route the ropes past the field of bags. I did it, leaving Spirit clinging to the equator.

  As I brushed by one of the bags, my equilibrium suffered. Maybe it was the vertigo of shifting weight and torque as I rounded the hull toward the pole, the air lock where Helse waited. Most of the bags were near the rear air lock, but some were here. I paused to let the sensation pass—but it did not pass.

  The feeling intensified until the whole universe seemed to spin crazily about me, and I was spinning too, opposite it and opposite myself. My head and feet were curving through each other, moving without motion. I realize that doesn’t seem to make much sense, but that’s the way it was. My head seemed to be orbiting one way and my feet another, and the separate portions of my body each traveled different and mutually incompatible ways. In retrospect I conjecture that my days on half and quarter rations were taking their toll, as well as the shifting forces of rotation to which I was being subjected. I was nearer breakdown than I thought at the time. But maybe it was other than that.

  For a moment this disorientation was pleasant, but then it frightened me, for I was afraid I would fling loose of the bubble with such force the rope would snap and I would be forever lost. I was losing what little control I had over my destiny, and that was frightening. A person can bear up under a lot more stress if he believes he has reasonable control, than he can if he feels completely subject to the uncaring whim of fate. I screamed in my helmet and clung to the nearest solid thing.

  It was the body in the bag. I felt its human contour. I reacted with horror, but my clutching fingers would not let go. I felt the tears of grief and terror on my face, and was ashamed for them, but it was as if none of my body was subject to my mind anymore.

  Then the bag moved. I was so far gone I did not even scream again. I clung to it, wrestling it, perhaps trying to put it back flat against the hull where it belonged. If there is one thing more appalling than death, it is undeath—the revival of a corpse.

  But the thing pushed back against me, and got me clear, and sat up—except that up was down, here, or at least sort of sideways—and shed the bag. The frozen head turned to face me— and it was my father, Major Hubris.

  “Son, you are starving,” he reproved me. “You must not go on this way.”

  I had to answer him. “We are out of food,” I explained. His remark was so reasonable, as my father’s remarks had always been, in life.

  He shook his head. “No, Hope. You have food, if only you will use it. Shed the scales from your eyes and eat.”

  “What food?” I asked, bewildered, much as I had been as a child when he was instructing me in some new thing. “We have searched the whole bubble! There is nothing!”

  “I will not permit your mother and sister to starve because of your ignorance,” he said firmly. “You are now the man of the family, and so it is your responsibility to see to their welfare. You will provide food for your mother and your sister and that lovely girl of yours—and yourself. You must all eat well, to restore your strength for the ordeal to come. The worst has not yet passed. You will do what is necessary.”

  “But there is no food!” I wailed.

  “Son, you know better than that,” he reproved me, becoming mildly annoyed at my obtuseness. He had always encouraged me to be intelligent, not in the sense of remembering long series of numbers, but in the sense of perceiving the obvious. “There is plenty of food. You must make a fire, of course, to cook it. You can handle that.”

  “Cook it?” I asked, bewildered. “What food? Where?”

  “Here,” he said, and extended his hand to me. But the hand was empty.

  I thought about that for a long time, but could make no sense of it. Surely my father would not suggest we feed on vacuum! Then I heard a screaming in the background; it went on and on. Then slowly the whole scene faded out, and I was blank.

  When I recovered awareness I was back inside the bubble. My mother was tending me. “Thank God!” she breathed when she saw my eyelids flicker. “He wakes!”

  I dislike sounding stupid, but this seemed to be the occasion for it. “What happened?” I asked, discovering as I spoke that my voice was hoarse.

  “You were wrestling with a frozen corpse,” my mother said. “And screaming.” I watched her face as she spoke, and saw how lean it had become; the fractional rations were costing her her health. She had been gradually becoming plump as years passed; she was losing that mass now, and, though it lent her an ethereal beauty, I knew it was not good.

  Then I picked up on the other thing. That screaming I had heard—of course it had been mine! I had really strained my vocal cords, by the feel of my throat. But why had I been doing it?

  I spoke again. “How—?”

  “Helse and Spirit brought you in unconscious,” she explained. “They thought you had overextended yourself and had a breakdown. We got you out of the suit and wiped the blood from your mouth.”

  No wonder she had worried! Then I remembered another thing. “We didn’t finish emptying the tanks!”

  “Spirit says you did six. That’s enough, for—”

  My mind was not yet clear. “For what, Mother?”

  “For the time we have,” she finished reluctantly.

  Then I remembered my father’s message. “We have food,” I said. “Only I don’t know where.”

  She asked me what I meant, and I recounted my experience outside. “It was a hallucination, I know,” I concluded. “But it certainly seemed real. He was so sure—but I couldn’t understand.”

  “Not a hallucination,” she corrected me. “A vision.”

  “But what was he showing me?” I demanded. “His hand was empty!”

  “It was never your father’s way to tease,” she said seriously. “He always spoke his mind. You still do not understand?”

  I shook my head. “It makes no sense to me. If there had been something—but there wasn’t.”

  “Then it was a true vision. Your father did not mean you to understand directly.”

  “But then why should he—”

  “Major Hubri
s spoke through you—to me. He knew I would understand.”

  “I don’t see how that can conjure food where there is none!”

  My mother only smiled sadly. “Your father has spoken. I thank you, Hope, for conveying his message.” She stroked my forehead. “Now rest, my son. You have done well. There will be food.” She got up and went to consult with Señora Ortega.

  I slept again, for I was weak. Exertion and hunger had debilitated me more than I had supposed.

  When I woke, Helse and Spirit were with me in the cell. Helse was dressed in a dark blouse and skirt, so that now her full figure showed, and her hair hung down about her shoulders. She had always kept it pegged up somehow, before, so that it looked boyishly short. She had been losing weight like the rest of us, but her youth was better able to accommodate the loss, and she was now almost as pretty as my sister Faith had been, in a different way.

  The two girls had evidently been talking, but they stopped when I started hearing. I almost wished I had feigned sleep a little longer, to listen; but I rebuked myself immediately. I had no need to spy on my friends. “What’s up?” I asked. “You look serious.”

  “We have food now,” Spirit said gravely. “You can smell it.”

  I sniffed, and caught the odor of roasting meat. “That’s great!” I said. “Why aren’t you eating it instead of sitting here with me?”

  Spirit looked meaningfully at Helse. “We’re not sure we should use it.”

  My mind came fully clear. “Where is it from?”

  Helse laughed somewhat abruptly. “From your vision, Hope.”

  I scowled. Hunger had not improved my sanguinity. “You think I made that up?”

  “No,” Spirit said. “I saw our father sit up and talk to you.”

  “I hauled him up,” I said. “He couldn’t have moved or talked in the freezing vacuum of space, even if he had been alive. I must have gone crazy. I can’t even say for certain it was Major Hubris; it could have been any of them.”

  “But I do believe you,” Spirit said. “Father gave you a message, and Mother understood it. We’re a family; that’s the way we work together.”

  “He showed me an empty hand!”

  “He showed you his hand,” she agreed, her eyes now fixed as if she were going into a trance herself.

  I turned to Helse. “What does she mean?”

  Helse gazed at me with a kind of translucent horror. “Your father offered himself—for food.”

  Something awfully cold closed in on me then, as if I were still in space and the heating element in my suit had quit. I felt the screaming working up again, like a rising gorge. “His—hand?”

  “That was your vision.”

  “To eat his—but I never—that’s cannibalism!”

  “Your father expressed to you his will. He told you to feed your mother and your sister and that lovely girl of yours and yourself. Are you going to go against your father’s expressed will?”

  Something else jarred. “Lovely girl?” I asked. Then I realized. “Oh, no! I told my mother the whole vision! I gave away your secret!” I hung my head in chagrin. “I’m sorry, Helse! I never intended to—my word is sacred—I was so overwhelmed by the vision that I never thought—”

  “I know,” Helse said. “You kept my secret, Hope, and so did Spirit. It was your father who told on me. He never gave his word.”

  “But he didn’t know! He died before he—”

  “His ghost knew,” she said. “You can’t hide truth from a ghost.”

  “But—”

  “Your mother asked me,” Helse said. “So I changed my clothing. I would not try to make a liar of your father. He was a good man.”

  “That’s how Charity Hubris knew it was really Major Hubris speaking,” Spirit said. “He knew something the rest of us did not.”

  “You knew!” I said.

  “But I never told. Anyway, Mother consulted with Señora Ortega, who suggested this was a test of the vision, and when they saw that Helse really was a girl, they agreed it was a true vision, and we would have to do as Father said. So now we have food, as Father intended. He probably mentioned Helse deliberately, so everyone would believe.”

  I thought about the way Concha Ortega, that too-knowledgeable grandmother, had remarked on my improved attitude; surely she had suspected, and she was clever enough to play her hunches competently. I thought about the way my mother had submitted to rape to preserve her children from the threat of rampaging pirates, and then pretended that rape had never happened. Now she was taking my vision at face value, though it was logically suspect. We had gone along with her before, because family pride was better than the reality. Now Helse and Spirit were going along with her again—because we needed the food. It was, after all, pointless for us all to die when there was food available. So there was sense behind my vision, and sense behind their endorsement of it. Yet it seemed to me that more than sense was operating here.

  “Are you ready?” Helse asked.

  “You sacrificed your secret—for this,” I said to Helse.

  “How could I seek to refute your vision, Hope?” she asked innocently.

  “You stand by me the way my mother stands by my father.”

  “Women do what they must. You know that.”

  “And you too,” I told Spirit, taking her hand.

  “I saw him sit up, out there,” Spirit said. “I saw him hold out his hand to you.” And, perhaps she had, or believed she had. Spirit was always my staunchest supporter when it counted.

  “Then I must be ready,” I said. How any of us were going to choke down what the brave women were serving I didn’t know, but it had to be done. Too many sacrifices had already been made for it to be otherwise.

  CHAPTER 13

  REFUGEES’ WELCOME

  Jupiter Rings, 32’15—I choose not to dwell unduly on the following days. I did get sick, and so did Spirit, but we both came back and tried again, and again, until we were able to retain what we consumed. The meat was perfectly fresh, of course, and clean, for no spoilage occurs in space. The women served it well-cooked in very small portions, so that it was impossible to tell from what part of what animal it might have come. The women ate too, with the same affected unconcern they had evinced after the mass rape. I had always suspected the female gender of being weaker than the male, but I did not think so anymore. Strength is so much more than muscle.

  After the first few meals, it was not so bad. I even started helping with the cooking, by foraging for fuel for the fire. First they had used the precious candles saved from the funeral service, but soon these were gone and other combustibles were required. There was wood in the bubble for furnishings, and the packaging for the original food packs was flammable. It was a very small, controlled fire, for we could not afford to overload the air-recirculation system with a lot of pollutants, so we did have enough fuel.

  But it was always a grown woman who donned a suit and went outside for more meat; to that extent we children were preserved in our innocence.

  Señora Ortega and the other women chose to accept my vision as they had interpreted it. Not one of them broke ranks on this, though I was sure not all of them really believed in supernatural visitations or messages. They knew what had to be done, and they did it without fuss or fanfare, exactly as they had throughout their married lives. What a fundament of strength was thus subtly revealed!

  So we survived and even began to regain weight, thanks to the gift of our men. We all knew, I think, that had any of those men been alive to speak their wills, they would have told us to do exactly what we were doing. The bubble had been forged by necessity into one large family, as close as any other, united by a complex of vital compromises and secrets.

  We navigated and studied and slept and played games of all sorts, for morale was as important as physical condition. Slowly we drew nigh the primary ring of Jupiter. Now that we knew we would make it, our attitudes improved.

  We spent more time staring at Jupiter, swelling to g
iant size, its cloud bands more prominent than ever, violently coursing past each other with bubble-storms at the interfaces, the details constantly changing in an overall pattern that was unchanging. As we watched, the great red spot came on the horizon, like a monster eye trying to orient on us. Ah, Jove, the ruler of gods! Our hopes expanded in direct proportion to this image in our sky. All would be well once we achieved Jupiter, the kindly colossus of space. Jupiter, within whose bands of clouds floated so many enormous bubbles, each one a great city spinning like our little bubble for internal gravity, since they could not stay afloat if they used normal gravity. The city-bubbles did not have to worry about vacuum outside; instead they faced the phenomenal pressures of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Yet they were the most highly civilized cities in the Solar System, and the life style of ordinary people within them was reputed to be fantastic. We dreamed, a little afraid, and longed for what we hoped would be.

  This is not to suggest that everything was smooth now. Conditions of enduring stress and confinement tend to accentuate and at times exacerbate interpersonal relations, and we of the bubble were not exceptional in this respect. All of us shared an unspoken guilt that tended to sublimate itself in those ways that were permitted expression. I have heard sublimation spoken of as a useful alternative to unsocial behavior, but I don’t believe that. When an emotion is suppressed, it tends to manifest in something very similar to the forbidden thing, and perhaps sometimes it would be best simply to accept the forbidden instead. Thus we had the smaller children saving their feces and sometimes eating them, mocking the food that could not be identified. That sort of thing. I need not explicate further.

  I spent time with Helse openly now, for my father had seemingly blessed our association. No one objected overtly to our sharing a cell, though perhaps there were private qualms. But she and I did fight on occasion, if only because I wanted her to love me, and she would not let herself go that far. To her, the body was a thing to be used as expedient, but the heart was special—which was one reason I wanted her heart. I suppose I was greedy, but that is the way of love.