Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  Spirit, especially, got difficult. She had always been close to me, and remained so, but now she came to resent the time I spent with Helse. It seemed that when Helse had masqueraded as a boy and Spirit had shared the secret, that was all right. She was part of it. But now that Helse was openly female and there was no secret, Spirit felt excluded. I should have been alert to the symptoms, but, as is so often the case, I wasn’t paying attention until too late. I was caught up in my own concerns, which were more immediate but less important than the psychological welfare of my sister, until too late. I hope not to make that error again.

  Spirit burst in upon us once, when Helse and I were sleeping in our cell in dishabille, though not actually making love. I had discovered that the adolescent fantasy of continuous sexual activity was exactly that: fantasy. Helse would make love any time I asked her to, and, knowing that, I found that usually it was enough just to be near her. Sex is less than love, but more than the act; often mere closeness suffices.

  “There you go again!” Spirit cried as we sat up groggily.

  “Father’s gone, Faith’s gone, Mother’s alone—and you’re busy fooling with her!” There was a vicious freighting on the word “fooling”; it was intended as an obscenity, and in that context it became so.

  There wasn’t much I could say. Of course I was guilty, at other times if not this particular time, and as I just explained, the technical act was only a fraction of it and not worth arguing. I did not want to get angry, because that would proclaim my guilt, but I didn’t know how else to react.

  Helse handled it with better grace. Her age and experience enabled her to navigate certain difficult passages more readily than I could. “I do not take your brother from you, Spirit,” she said. “I can never do that. You are of his blood and I am not. I do not love him as you do.”

  Spirit faced her defiantly. “That’s space-crock! You love him more than I do!”

  I started to chuckle at her miscue; obviously Spirit had not meant to say that. Prompted by Helse’s statement, Spirit had reversed the emphasis, inadvertently arguing against her own interest, as can happen when a person’s emotion overrides her tongue.

  But Helse reacted as if she had been stabbed. “Oh!” she cried, and scrambled to her feet and up out of the cell, not even pausing for her clothing.

  I stared after her. So did Spirit, her anger forgotten. “I vanquished her!” she exclaimed, amazed.

  “But you misspoke yourself!” I protested.

  Now it was Spirit who reacted oddly. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that! I blabbed her secret!”

  “What secret? She doesn’t love—”

  I stopped, looking at her with a dawning surmise.

  Spirit, flustered, reached for the exit panel. “I’d better go try to apologize. I lost my stupid head.”

  I caught her, preventing her from going. “You mean she does love me? She always told me she didn’t, and my talent enables me to know—”

  “Oh, you don’t know half what you think you do!” Spirit snapped. “When your emotion is tied in, your talent cuts out!”

  She had stabbed me as deeply as she had Helse. I knew immediately that she was correct. I had no basis to judge Helse’s state of emotion, because my own was suspect. It was as if I were trying to move a heavy suitcase in free fall: my effort moved me back as much as it moved it forward. I had to be firmly anchored before I could be sure of the effect of my effort. I think the laws of the mind are similar in this respect to the laws of matter.

  “She’s older than I am,” I said falteringly. “It makes sense that I am less to her than she is to me. If she felt otherwise, why should she deny it?”

  “She had to deny it, dummy!” Spirit said. “She thinks men don’t love women who love them back. She’s always been used by men who only wanted her body, no matter what they said at the time, and when her body changed they didn’t want her anymore. So she knew if she really liked someone, she shouldn’t ever, ever let on, because—” She wrenched, trying to break free of my hold on her. “Let me go, Hope! I could kill myself! Helse’s an awfully nice girl, and I’ve got to tell her—I don’t know what, but I’ve got to!”

  I let her go. I sat against the wall, meditating on what my sister had said. It explained a lot. I should have caught on to it myself, with my vaunted talent for understanding people. But, ironically, this failure was a valuable lesson for me, for it revealed the glaring weakness in my talent. I had to be objective. I resolved never again to make that error.

  But I realized that I couldn’t patch it up with Helse by trying to reassure her of my undying love; she was constitutionally incapable of believing me. Her past experience could not be left behind. The same thing that made her so well able to please a man made her unable to trust him. Oh, I knew the power of an emotional fixation. I had been ready to swear off sex forever after the rape of Faith, and only Helse’s timely and forceful action had turned me about. But I could not reassure her about her own fixation; all I had were words, and she would not believe them. The men who had used her body during her childhood had not harmed her body; they had poisoned her mind. I was way too late to reeducate her subjectivity. What, then, could I do?

  I mulled it over, and finally worked it out. My mother, actually, had shown me the way. The reality of our inner belief does not have to match that of our external professions.

  In due course Helse returned. She remained unclothed; probably no one in the bubble had noticed or cared, since I was the oldest male in this limited community. If anyone realized that we were having a difference, that person knew enough not to interfere. She looked resigned.

  Evidently Spirit had caught up with her—it could hardly be otherwise, in such limited space—and apologized for blabbing. Spirit could be exceedingly winsome when she was contrite, and surely her apology had been accepted. But Helse believed the damage could not really be undone. She had returned bravely to confirm the disaster.

  I gave her no chance. “I must apologize for what my sister did,” I said before Helse could speak. “She said she loved me more than you do, and of course that’s true, but it was extremely unkind.”

  Helse paused, taken aback. “That isn’t what she—”

  “Oh, maybe she garbled it,” I said blithely. “But I know you don’t love me, and I’m learning to live with that. I’m sorry Spirit misinterpreted—well, she is my sister, and she has a hot little temper, and—”

  “But I’m trying to tell you—”

  “Please, Helse,” I said, holding out my arms to her. “I need you so much—don’t tease me anymore! Let me hope that one day you’ll feel about me the way I feel about you. Don’t deprive me of that one illusion.”

  “Illusion!” she exclaimed. “Hope, I—”

  I continued to extend my arms to her. She hesitated, then came to me. I kissed her passionately, and after a moment she responded in kind. We proceeded naturally to the act of love.

  Yet there was a certain difference, perhaps I should say diffidence about it, on her part and on mine, because we each knew we were deceiving the other. It may even be that that reservation made the experience sweeter. Certainly, for me, the term “love” was no euphemism for any other thing; love was exactly what it was.

  When the desperation of our merging eased, she drew apart a little, her face showing concern. “Hope, this isn’t honest. I—”

  “Don’t say it!” I cut in again. “Leave me with at least the dream that some day you’ll change your mind!” I was perhaps overplaying it, and she knew it, but this was a unique situation for me. The message I had for her was other than the one I professed, and she knew it.

  She smiled, defeated. “That one illusion,” she agreed, and kissed me softly, and in that single gesture there was more joy than in all our prior congress. We chose to share the illusion of illusion.

  Jupiter was now so big that it was no longer an object in space; it was becoming our primary, in perception as well as physics. So close, so close—our ordeal
was almost over.

  And yet—and yet! If we reached Jupiter and were saved, and found places in that great society—what then of the relation I had with Helse? She would have to report to Kife, or QYV, and who could say what would become of her thereafter? Or the new situation might simply change her attitude. She was a pretty girl and I a mere stripling; she could do better than me, in that society. The illusion of her non-love for me might turn out to be no illusion there. So I viewed our potential rescue with a certain undercurrent of apprehension, for the love of Helse had become more important to me than life itself. Right now, while we sailed the waves of gravity in space, she was mine.

  A day later the Jupiter Patrol found us. At first we feared it was another pirate ship or an opportunist merchanter, but soon we saw the big round Jove circle with the red spot in it, and recognized the lines of a ship of the Space Navy, and knew this was authentic. Contact at last!

  They locked on and boarded us. The officer who spoke to us was a sleek, neat, brisk, correct woman. There would be no sexual solicitation here. “Please identify your origin,” she said in English.

  Naturally the representative of the mighty Colossus did not bother to learn the language of mere refugees. But we were in no position to complain. I spoke up, since my English was as facile as any. “We are refugees from Callisto, fleeing the oppression of our government. We seek sanctuary at Jupiter.”

  The woman frowned. “Perhaps you people are not aware that there has been an election on Jupiter, and extra-planetary policy has shifted. Political and/or economic refugees are no longer being accepted. You will have to go elsewhere.”

  I was stunned. “But there is nowhere else! We used our last reserves to get here! We are out of food, our batteries for running the life-support systems are low. Our men were killed by pirates, our women raped—” I broke off, realizing that I shouldn’t say that. Maybe I could qualify it. “Some of—”

  “Yes, we are familiar with the standard refugee story,” she snapped. “You people expect us to believe that all of space is infested with ancient buccaneers in pirate hats and pantaloons, holding you up at swordpoint for gold. This is the twenty-seventh century, and we are not so credulous. We will give you supplies to take you to Europa or Ganymede, and we shall tow you out beyond our territorial limit. That is all. It is high time you moon folk started taking care of your own problems, instead of foisting them off on us.”

  Appalled, I translated her words for the others. I could hardly believe it myself. Here we had finally arrived at the political sanctuary of mighty Jupiter, the planet of all our dreams—and were not welcome. What had happened to the great melting pot of the Solar System?

  It is a terrible thing to have one’s hopes so brutally dashed. I think we were all in something like a group trance. We stood there unprotesting as the Jupiter work crew swarmed over the bubble, emptying our refuse (muttering in English they thought we could not understand that now they knew we were liars, because we could not have come all the way from Callisto, because the refuse wasn’t enough for such a trip), restocking our supply of food packs, replacing our oxygenation units and the batteries for our general environment-maintenance equipment, tuning the gravity-lens generator, and replacing the water-recycling filters. They were so competent it was small wonder that they did not believe we could have made the trip we claimed; we were, after all, only incompetent refugees. They evidently assumed that some ship had towed us here and rehearsed us in the story to tell, in an attempt to play upon sympathy. They were also so efficient they hardly checked the bags tied to the outside of the bubble, assuming them to be junk storage: another evidence of our sloppiness.

  Yet we needed all of their help, for only luck had prevented something crucial from failing. But we needed help less than we needed the enormous gift of sanctuary on Jupiter. They were generously giving us trifles instead of the essence. Now they could write up a report about all the good they had done for thankless refugees.

  Oh, yes, they were as good as the female officer’s word. (I refrain from applying the vernacular description for a female of questionable ethics, tempting as it is.) They towed us out beyond the orbit of Amalthea, to the outer ring, and turned us loose with the admonition not to return to Jupiter territorial space, on pain of being blasted out of it. Poverty-stricken foreign freeloaders, they let us know politely, were not wanted in the decent God-fearing territory of mighty Jupiter. After all, we didn’t even speak the language.

  Maybe they were bluffing about the blasting-out-of-space. We were unlikely to risk it. Certainly they had the physical capacity to do such a thing. The Jupiter States possessed the mightiest military force in the Solar System, excepting possibly that of the Saturnine Republic.

  My mother shook her head as she absorbed my translation, looking abruptly haggard. She had been prepared for anything except this. “And we thought we had known rape!” she said.

  I pondered that, and concluded she was right. I may have overstated the phrasing of the Jupiter rejection, for the female officer’s speech was always politely delivered, but the essence is accurate. They definitely did not want us. So what could have been more cruel than the abrupt destruction of our aspirations? Physical rape came and went; it was possible to cover it up, to pretend it never happened; but this rejection could never be undone. Now we had, almost literally, nowhere, to go. We knew that none of the major moons of Jupiter would give us safe haven. They were all overpopulated, poverty-ridden and oppressed by the autocratic governments that seem to sprout like weeds in the wilderness of the so-called Third System.

  Jupiter, in fact if not in theory, hoped that we would simply disappear in space and never appear again. We were not Jupiter’s problem, and we could be ignored.

  For this my father had died and my mother had submitted to degradation. For nothing!

  I found Helse looking out a port, watching magnificent Jupiter whirl by, shrinking visibly as we were towed from it, like the shrinking of our dream. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she murmured, quoting from memory the historical sonnet, “The New Colossus,” whose tradition the United States of Jupiter supposedly carried on. “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…” She was crying, of course, and so was I.

  CHAPTER 14

  HELL PLANET

  Space, 35’15—We held a group meeting in due course to discuss our situation. We were the wretched refugee refuse, yearning to breathe free, who had learned the hard way not to believe all that was quoted in the geography texts, but we still had to decide on some course. Where were we to go?

  Well, we would not go hungry. We had a full supply of food packs now, courtesy of the surplus stores of rich Jove, and the bodies of our men remained anchored to our hull. I wondered whether the Jupiter Patrol workmen might actually have spotted the nature of those bags and played stupid so as to avoid the awkwardness of having to dispose of them, perhaps even giving them decent burial. It might be politically inexpedient to accept bodies while rejecting living people. Had they inspected those bodies, they would have discovered how they had died, and it would have been more difficult for the Jupiter Patrol to maintain its official ignorance of the pirate problem. Jupiter, like our women, preferred to ignore certain unpleasant realities. Probably they had the physical capacity to deal with the pirates, but lacked the political motivation. It was all understandable—in its sickening fashion.

  We knew we could not return to Callisto. Starvation in space would probably be preferable to what the authorities there would do to us to cover their own embarrassment at our very existence. We were, after all, tangible evidence of the failure of their system. They might not care to correct that failure, but they would certainly labor diligently to cover it up. Everywhere, concealment seemed preferable to correction.

  Ganymede and Europa were little better. Io was largely uninhabitable, and its few residential domes were reputed to be horribly overcrowded. No salvation there.

  That left th
e outer moonlets—who would hardly be likely to welcome our motley assemblage of women and children. Yet we did have to go somewhere, for we could not live indefinitely in space.

  “Hidalgo!” Spirit exclaimed.

  Señora Ortega’s head turned toward her, and we all paused for consideration. Out of the mouths of babes...

  We discussed it. Hidalgo is a planetoid no bigger than Amalthea, in a stretched-out orbit between Mars and Saturn. But it was no ordinary fragment, for a couple of centuries ago Jupiter assumed sovereignty over it, and more recently Hidalgo had become an actual state of the United States of North Jupiter, the only non-planetary body to be granted that status. It was now a major tourist region. Huge pleasure domes were set on it, spinning on their bases to provide the kind of gravity the tiny planetoid could not. The population there was not Hispanic, but was polyglot and multiracial. Our kind could surely merge with their kind. There was always work for domestics, and that was one thing our women could handle. Our children could get superior schooling there and grow up as free citizens. Hidalgo, we reasoned, was so far out from Jupiter proper that the ban against refugees might not apply. Spirit, in her intuitive fashion, had come up with a truly intriguing prospect.

  But there were formidable problems. Hidalgo did swing out past Jupiter’s orbit, which was the basis for Jupiter’s claim in it, but that did not mean it was close to Jupiter physically. It was a tiny, tiny mote in space, virtually impossible to discover by random search with a clumsy bubble. We would need an ephemeris, a detailed listing of the locations of bodies in space and time. These locations were given as triple-coordinate sets, computer-calculated, so that it was possible to pick a precise date and time and get the exact spacial coordinates of the desired object, relative to the sun and its position in the galaxy. Without the ephemeris, we could look until we died of old age for that grain of sand in the immensity of solar space.