Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  We also did not have a drive system capable of getting us there. The jet we had was barely enough to move us around the Jupiter ecliptic—that is, the plane of the equator and inner moons—and Hidalgo is far outside that. The efficient Jupe workers had recharged our jet, for it, like everything else associated with this bubble, was near exhaustion, but no matter how fresh the jet was, it was grossly insufficient. We needed a powerful ion drive that would accelerate us at a significant fraction of gee, to aid our gravity lenses. To put it in simplest terms: We needed to add a more powerful motor to our sailboat. We could not simply center on a distant speck like Hidalgo and fall in to it; there was not enough gravity there to bring us in within a century or so.

  And we needed more supplies: food, oxygen, electricity, all for a much longer journey. Lots of things like that, if we wanted to get there alive.

  That was why we decided to raid an outpost on Io. That planet might not be worthwhile to settle on, but it would do just fine for a supply raid. The badlands sections had all sorts of technical facilities for monitoring the volcanoes and radiation intensity and such, and there were many study foundations there performing obscure research. They were well funded and surely had plenty of supplies to spare. Io is the most active planetary body in the Solar System, bar none, and that sort of thing is a magnet for scientists. We knew they had huge supplies of food and medicine, and surplus equipment for every type of bubble and ship. Most important, they had complete libraries of ephemeridae.

  I think it did not occur to any of us consciously at that time that what we contemplated was, in fact, piracy. All we knew was that we would die in high space if we did not float to a haven somewhere, and that the Jupe authorities had rejected us. It becomes much easier to justify strong measures, even illegal ones, when your life depends on them.

  We also could not afford to doubt that everything we required for our extended journey through space would be available on Io. For if we made our play and did not achieve our needs, we were doomed. We were, in fact, making a gamble whose boldness would have appalled us a month before. Experience had altered our horizons drastically.

  The period of revolution for Io is one and three-quarters days. You might think that would make it easy to intercept; just park for a day and wait for it to swing around. But it doesn’t work that way. We were in orbit ourselves, and as we knew, orbits are not lightly shifted. So we had to use our precious jet to jockey around, letting Io catch up to us, using its gravity to wrestle us back in line. An expert navigator could have done it in a few hours; it took us two days, but we did get there.

  Io was formidable as it loomed close. One volcano was bright shades of yellow, orange, brown, and red. The whole planet looked as if it had been recently scrambled—and, geologically speaking, it had.

  You see, Io is not like other worlds. That may be the understatement of this narrative. It resembles them as a maddened saber-tooth tiger on ancient Earth resembles a sleeping denatured pussycat. Other worlds, such as our own Callisto, may seem almost dead; Io is screamingly alive. The closer we got the more I remembered about it, and the less I liked what we planned. It wasn’t the human opposition I feared; it was Io herself.

  There’s really too much to tell here; I’ll try to touch on the essence only. Io, just over four hundred thousand kilometers from Jupiter, should have one face locked on Jupiter, the same way it is with Callisto and the others. But Europa, the next moon out, interferes, forcing Io into an eccentric orbit. That means her circuit isn’t round and her velocity isn’t constant. She moves at different speeds, and turns her face back and forth as though bothered by someone hovering just behind her shoulder. This has to do with the fundamental physics of the situation. Tidal forces develop, and these are not mere little tugs; it is more like a giant hand squashing an overripe orange, making the juices squirt and the peel buckle. That tidal action generates heat, keeping much of the interior of the planet molten. This in turn means constant change. New volcanoes keep popping up and spewing out their stuff and dying down, and the ground shifts restlessly. So maps are soon outdated, and no one can really say ahead of time what the details of the landscape will be—especially on the active face facing Jupiter. That’s the bad face, the Gorgon face, the uninhabitable one that spits sulfur in your eye and pollutes that whole region of space with radioactive debris. The one we were headed for.

  But what choice did we have?

  We glided in. It was night locally, with the inside face away from the sun, but glowing with its own savage vents. Truly, this was Hell we were coming to! Io is one terrible lady.

  We floated along at a reasonably safe elevation, looking for our target. We had to select it by night, then hide the bubble and make a foray afoot, so there would be no hint of our intent. We agreed there should be no violence. We were raiding for what we had to have, but we were not criminals. We would pretend to be a scientific party that got isolated by a vagary of volcanic activity— a completely credible story on wild Io!—and once inside the dome, we would hijack the crew, using a mock bomb, and make them provide the supplies we needed. Peaceful hijacking had for centuries been a staple tool for the impoverished desperate.

  It was indeed a desperate strategy. But if we won, it would give us our fair chance for refuge. If we lost, at least it would be quick. We had to do it.

  We spotted a dome, but it was too small; it wouldn’t have enough supplies. We moved on, and spotted another—too large. We didn’t want to tackle any more than we had to; even our minimum requirement might prove to be more than we could handle. Finally, near a massive rocky escarpment, we discovered a medium-sized observation dome with several transport bubbles docked beside it. This was our target.

  We floated down behind the escarpment, which resembled a wrinkle in that orange I mentioned before and seemed to be an ideal place to hide our bubble. But as we closed on it, we discovered that perspective and darkness had deceived us; this was a far more massive outcropping than thought. It was a mountain range, with the highest peak some eight or nine kilometers tall. Back on Callisto we had seen no hills beyond a few hundred meters high, so this was awesome. None of us had had experience with this exaggerated type of terrain. That is probably why we erred so disastrously.

  We landed in a comfortably small niche in the mountain, tucked down well out of sight of the dome we stalked. Even an observation dome with the most powerful telescopes could not see through a mountain of sulfur. We weren’t sure we could complete our mission before dawn, so we wanted the bubble to be properly concealed.

  Helse and I were in the raiding party, because we spoke English, the common tongue of scientists in this region of space. My mother and Spirit stayed behind with thirty four women, while twenty-five women formed the raiding party, in addition to the two of us. Señora Ortega led us. I think we all felt the excitement of adventure—but also knew it was grim business. I had heard it said that a person is most truly alive when death is near, and I think there is some truth in it.

  Our first problem was getting down to the dome. We had parked near the base of the mountain—but that little ledge of a kilometer or so became abruptly gargantuan when we approached it afoot. Again, we had perceived it as it would have been on Callisto, a very gradual decline, much broader than it was tall. It was not so. It was the other way around.

  The cliff was of sulfur dioxide ice, yellow underfoot. Maybe there was other rock beneath, but that was the surface. It wasn’t slippery, fortunately, but it was unfamiliar, and we didn’t trust it.

  There were small cracks and pocks and crevices in its layout, visible in the generous light of Jupiter, but we feared these could mask more dangerous nether flaws in the structure. We traversed the more or less level portion without untoward event, headed toward the drop-off.

  The descent was horrendous. We took one look over that awesome cliff and hastily roped ourselves together like ancient mountain climbers. I think we all suffered from acrophobia in that moment. But we had to get down to the ba
se, where we could proceed on the level to the target dome. We let ourselves down the cliff on the rope, paying it out one person at a time, watching the party leaders step-slide down the steepening slope.

  Helse and I were in the middle of the party. Even so, it was one frightening descent. The projecting edges of the mountain were like the blade of a pitted cleaver. We had to chip away the sharp corner and form a niche for the rope, so that it would neither slide nor fray. We wanted it to feed through exactly where and when we wanted it to.

  Gravity here seemed to be more than on Callisto, though it is possible our time in low-gee had distorted our perception. Though Io is a smaller moon, it is far more dense. One might suppose that surface gravity would be the same for two worlds of equal mass even if their diameters differed, but that is not so; the smaller one has greater surface gravity, because that surface is closer to the center. So, though Io actually is slightly less massive than Callisto, it is almost twice as dense, and that makes the difference. Io is sized like Earth’s lonely moon, but is a little more so in diameter, density, and mass, and a lot more so in activity.

  Apart from this, the suits made us clumsy. A suit in vacuum, in a familiar region, is manageable; but in atmosphere and on an awkward surface it becomes more ungainly. There is environmental resistance. There was very little planetary atmosphere here, but we felt it nonetheless.

  But mainly, our problem was the sheer height of our start. I hesitate to repeat myself, but it is difficult even to rationalize the impact this elevation had on us. From space a niche in the foothill of a mountain may seem minor, especially when it is down near the larger plain. But one kilometer is, after all, a thousand meters, and that is awesome up close. It seemed that if we fell, we would fall forever—and somehow, perversely, my apprehension made me almost want to fall, to get it over with. A fall at quarter-gee would not be nearly as ferocious as one at full-gee, but my nervous system had evolved on Earth, and it reacted as it would have on Earth. I was almost paralyzed with the fear of that height.

  “Close your eyes,” Helse told me, helmet to helmet. “Pretend it’s only a few yards. Meters.”

  Coward that I was, I did, and it helped. But soon I was looking again, reminding myself that I hadn’t been acrophobic while in the bubble. On the bubble had been another matter—but I believe that was understandable. Out here it was the feel of weight and the uncertainty of the rope that jittered me, rather than the actual elevation. Had I, for example, been using a reliable flying suit, this same elevation and slope would hardly have bothered me. At least, this is what I now prefer to believe.

  So I scrambled over the dread ridge in my turn, just as if I felt no fear, and Helse followed me, and with that conquest of my hesitancy, my apprehension abated without actually disappearing. Commitment does seem to help. The women before and after us seemed to have no problems, though I was sure each experienced similar qualms.

  The vista below was dramatic. The surface of Io was a tapestry of orange even in the reflected light from Jupiter. Dark runners showed where some recent flow of sulfur had passed, and bright flame—or whatever it should be called, since no fire as we know it can burn in near-vacuum—showed at a roughly circular vent to the right. The observation dome was near this vent, partly sheltered by a lesser escarpment. It looked precarious to me, but I suppose there’s no way to gather significant data on a sulfur volcano except by sitting beside it for a while and making on-the-spot notes. I wondered what the life expectancy of such researchers was. Probably that was a super-strong, super-insulated dome, able to withstand what it had to. But probably, too, the researchers possessed a certain quality of courage. A person did not have to be a muscular warrior to be brave, as the women of our bubble were showing.

  We were step-sliding down the steep slope at about five kilometers per hour, so we had a half-hour descent to do. That was all right. But what, I wondered, about the return trip? And how much rope did we have? Not any kilometer length, for certain!

  Sure enough, the rest of us had to set ourselves against the slope, clinging to sulfur-ice, while our end-person separated herself and us from the anchor at the top. She left a trailing length, so that we could use it to haul ourselves up the vertical portion of the slope and over the lip, but that was all. On our return trip we would have to climb unaided to that point. I didn’t like it.

  Now that we were no longer anchored, we proceeded more swiftly. Too swiftly—I tried to brake, for safety, but the onrush of sliding women hauled me along. In moments we were out of control. Inexperience was telling.

  I think someone screamed. As I mentioned, it is not a complete vacuum on Io; the sulfur dioxide gas is around, especially near the hot vents where it can’t freeze out, so sound is theoretically possible. Maybe it was conducted along the ground, or the rope. Anyway, there was reason to scream. We were sliding toward a sharper drop-off—and, judging from our present angle, this one had to be virtually vertical.

  I dug in my feet with renewed desperation, chewing up a mass of chips and dust. So did Helse and the women. But the drag of those in front, who were completely out of control, was too great. We were all being hauled to that dread brink.

  Then a woman toward the front drew a knife. She sawed at the rope, and in a moment it parted. Then she dug in her heels, and the rest of us did likewise, and this concerted effort was effective at last, and slowly we slowed.

  But as we crunched to a nervous halt, we watched the first five women tumble over the brink, led by Señora Ortega.

  Maybe it was just an irregularity, leading to a gentler slope below. In that case they would be all right, just bruised and perhaps angry at the rest of us for cutting them loose. It was an anger we could accept.

  We worked our way sidewise, finding a better slope, avoiding the ledge. We each jammed our heels in at each step, making sure we would not get out of control again, though this slowed us enormously. Then we moved down. When we got below the level of the ledge we looked across anxiously, to see what had become of our leading segment.

  There was nothing. The ledge overhung a developing crevice that widened into a channel for an avalanche, almost vertical. Those women might as well have fallen straight down.

  What could we do but go on? We could not even see the lost women, let alone reach them, let alone help them, in the highly unlikely chance they survived. Even the time it took to make the effort would prejudice the success of our mission.

  All of us had known this trek would be dangerous; now we had the proof. A similar fate would befall the rest of us if we didn’t complete our mission.

  So we paused, helmets bowed in silent mourning for Doña Concha and the others. That was the best we could do.

  Io had taken her first victims. I was very much afraid they would not be her last ones.

  We continued down. There were other ledges and other crevices, none of them having been evident during our approach in the bubble. We proceeded slowly and avoided them. Once bitten, thrice shy. This mountain had a great deal more character than we had anticipated, and now every trace irregularity loomed monstrously. Had we had any inkling of the enormity of the challenge the descent would represent, we would have landed elsewhere and avoided such a hazard. But that was most of our problem: ignorance and inexperience. Both were being rapidly abated, and we did at last make it to the base. But it took us almost an hour, twice as long as budgeted.

  We untied ourselves and marched across the orange surface. The woman who had cut the rope was now our leader. I didn’t know who she was, and suspect most of the others shared my ignorance, but it didn’t matter. She had tried to decline the title, but the rest of us insisted, by gestures. She had saved herself and the rest of us by her quick action. Her snap judgments promised to be most reliable. There is indeed a place for hasty decisions, and that place is the surface of Io, for there simply is not time to consider all aspects of many alternatives at comfortable leisure.

  Our new leader sought the ridges, not trusting the snow-filled re
cesses. But these ridges, though only a few meters high, were irregular and fragmented, so our firm footing exacted a price of devious routing. We had to jump over crevices, and some of them were pretty wide and deep. Even with low gravity, this was nervous business.

  Sure enough, one of our women slipped as she jumped over an especially bad one and fell down into it. The crack was about thirty meters deep, closing into a dark crease. She was wedged down there unmoving.

  We started to lower a rope to her, to pull her out. Then we saw her suit: It was deflating. The fall had punctured it; perhaps it had snagged on a sharp projection. Her air was gone. Further effort on our part was pointless. We could not reach her in time to do any good.

  As it happened, I recognized the suit of this woman. She was the mother of one of the smaller children. Her loss became more poignant in that moment, as I thought of what we would have to tell that child.

  Señora Ortega’s grandchildren, too, would have to be told. There was a grim business coming after we returned to the bubble, even if we completed our mission without further casualties. These were real people, not strangers, who were dying.

  After that we avoided the worst cracks, though this meant risking the yellow snow. From some of the low areas fumes sprayed up, making little domes of frozen gas and particles like decorative waterfalls. These were really miniature volcanoes, I realized, harmless as long as we didn’t step in them. This was the land of volcanoes.

  We tramped on for hours, sacrificing time in favor of safety. Dawn came, as the moon’s rapid orbit brought it a quarter circle around Jupiter in ten hours—which hours we had used up in our pre-landing survey and then in our suiting-up and organization and slow descent and march. We had grossly underestimated the time such routine required.