“Oh, yes. Thank you.” Mason punched more buttons, and got the information. “She was born in ’95; that would make her twenty now, if I have not lost track of the date this year. I fear my picture is becoming dated, too.”
So the resemblance was illusory, or at least misplaced; Megan was four years older than Helse, instead of the same age as the picture showed. Still, they might resemble each other in the manner of sisters. But I saw that Megan was full Caucasian, not mixed Latin as Helse was.
Nevertheless, this was enough to reassure Helse. Mason really did have a niece, and obviously adored her, but she had never lived with him, and if she had, he would not have abused her. He reacted to Helse the way he would to a true niece; there was no untoward aspect. My talent told me this now. Sometimes experience makes us overly suspicious.
Helse was blushing, evidently pursuing a similar series of thoughts. The scientist set about providing us with what we needed, drawing on the expertise of his staff to do a far better job of it than we could have done. Our mission, it seemed, had, after all, been successful.
CHAPTER 15
WHEN WILL IT END?
We had to wait till evening for the atmosphere to freeze out so that a bubble could safely float across the dangerous landscape of Io. By day, a chance volcano could sweep it right out of space.
Helse and I ate and slept comfortably, reveling in the civilized facilities of the dome and the kindness of the scientists, who seemed rather pleased to be entertaining young folk like us. I think, in retrospect, that this was the happiest period of our odyssey, despite the recent deaths of the women, for now we had genuine hope. Not all men were pirates or callous officials. I think if I ever have occasion to do any scientist, anywhere, a favor, I will do it unstintingly.
At last, refreshed, we set off. A technician transported us along with the supplies in a small bubble. In minutes we traversed the distance it had taken us dreadful hours to cover afoot. We came in sight of the nestled home bubble.
Helse touched my arm. We were not in our space suits now; they were unnecessary. “Hope—how are we going to tell them?”
Somehow, that aspect had been suspended from my awareness for several hours. Twenty-five women were dead, the mothers and only surviving parents of so many of the children. What could anyone say to soften that tragedy?
“I’ll have to explain,” I said. The idyll of the day ended like the illusion it had been, and cruel reality returned.
We watched our small bubble close on the larger one. “When I spooked and ran, there at the avalanche,” Helse murmured, “why did you come after me, Hope?”
Preoccupied by the grimness I was about to have to convey, I answered her absently. “I had to try to save you, idiot. Without you, I might as well be dead.”
“You thought we were both dead when the slide struck.”
“Yes. Shows how much I know about avalanches. You turned out to be right.”
“Blind luck,” she said. “I panicked. You were ready to die for me.”
“And instead, the sensible women died,” I agreed. “Pure chance. Neither of us knew what we were doing.” That bothered me even in my distraction—the reminder that no merit of mine accounted for my survival. It had bothered me briefly when the woman in front of me had her suit holed; now it hit me harder, because I had no immediate distraction of danger. I was no better than any of those women who had died; only a freak of fate had preserved me. It was as though a man’s boot landed on the ground where live ants walked, and three were squashed and two were spared, without the man even noticing. At times like this I wondered whether I believed in God. Surely God was not like the booted man, heedless of human welfare or merit. But if He were not, then what was He like? If He had decreed, after due consideration, that sixty men and twenty-five women should die while trying to do the right thing, while brute pirates prospered, what kind of a Deity was He?
“I think I love you,” Helse said.
The bubble nudged into contact with the other, and the air locks kissed and held. We had arrived.
Something penetrated my distraction. “What?”
Helse smiled. “Never mind.”
“Did you say—?”
She shrugged, and now the air locks opened, and my onerous duty was upon me. I could not question Helse further. But perhaps I did not need to.
We were met at the lock by a small group of women. “Oh, they found you, Hope Hubris!” one said. I had to concentrate to remember that her name was Señora Martinez. “We were so worried, when neither party returned—”
Neither party? “I—we have bad news and good news,” I said.
Señora Martinez peered past me. “Where are the others?”
“That’s the bad news,” I said. “Only Helse and I made it. All the others—”
“Your mother did not find you?” Señora Martinez asked, her face drawn.
The cold of the outside closed in on me. “My mother went out?”
“She led another party of twenty-five. She had a premonition you were in trouble. That there would be deaths in your party if someone didn’t come to help.”
Helse turned a staring face to me. “Oh, no, Hope…”
“There were deaths,” I said dully. “My mother and her party— did not return?”
Señora Martinez shook her head. “We thought—she would be with you.”
“When did she leave?”
“At dawn.”
That meant the second party had been out on the surface of Io all day, following our route. All day in Hell.
“We could look for them in the bubble,” Helse suggested.
The station technician who had piloted us here spoke up. “Anyone traveling afoot on the surface leaves a trail. The eruptions and evaporation of the day obliterate it, but if they are still alive and moving, that new trail will show up now.”
I knew with a sick certainty that nothing would be found. The odds were against any human party surviving a full day on Io’s inner face. How well we knew that! Yet we had to look.
Quickly we transferred the supplies and installed the new drive-jet. This one was much larger and heavier than the old one, and was fashioned in a circle. It would blast a ring of fire, or more properly a tube of fire, surrounding the rear air lock. It was securely fastened in place; we would not be able to move it to the bubble equator to institute spin in space. But for that we still had the old, little, single-jet drive, which we could store near the lock inside when not in use. “Be careful not to short the lead wires when it’s inside!” the technician warned us. “It will jet in air as readily as in space, and you wouldn’t want that to happen.” Yes, we were sure we wouldn’t!
The technician finished and bade us farewell. The locks sealed and the two bubbles separated. Then both took off and floated low across the hellish surface of the planet, looking for a trail.
There was nothing. Our own trail of the morning had been obliterated, of course, and no other evidence of life showed. Sulfur was condensing on the mountain slopes and settling like snow on the plains below, leaving clear spaces around the active volcanoes. New tracks should have been evident in that fresh snow. The second party of women was gone with no more trace than the first. Killer Io had had another feast.
“We did not know how bad it was!” Señora Martinez said tearfully.
None of us had known.
At length the second bubble parted company with us, having done what it could.
My memory of this period becomes hazy. Spirit and I sat in the cell our mother had used, trying vainly to comfort each other, to ease our common loss. Helse brought us food from time to time, but left us mostly alone. It had been terrible when our father died, and numbing when Faith sacrificed herself, but this was the worst—because our mother, Charity Hubris, was all that we had left of our family, except each other. There was an amorphous, intangible ambiance of emotion that had to coalesce somewhere, like sulfur dioxide precipitating at night, and now, for each of us, it had no object except the other.
That settling out had to be accomplished, but it took time.
When we came out of it a few days later, like two survivors of holocaust, we went about the bubble and took stock. It was a disaster area. We had hardly been alone in our mourning; the children of those other forty-nine women had been coming to similar terms.
Some of them hadn’t made it. I had never thought of children as suicidal types, but I could not condemn them for it. Spirit and I had had each other; some of the others had had no siblings. To be entirely alone—I had come near enough to that abyss to comprehend its nature, and I understood. The bodies of those children joined their fathers in cold storage on the hull of the bubble.
So we were spiraling out toward Leda, our only remaining hope, using our strong new jet to accelerate our orbital velocity, which in the normal paradox of such travel caused us to proceed outward at reduced velocity. We knew where we were going, thanks to the spot ephemeris the kindly scientist Mason had printed out for us, and had only to follow instructions to take advantage of the gravity wells of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to boost us to much better outward progress. So, even though Leda was a tiny mote, far out from Jupiter, we expected to reach it in a month of floating. This would have been impossible for us before, for Leda’s sidereal period is 24 days, and we could have taken that long just to catch it once we reached its orbit. But a good drive unit makes a tremendous difference. When one adds a powerful outboard motor to a sailboat, one ceases to worry as much about the wind. We had really become a crude spaceship. In fact, the trip might have been impossible, regardless of schedule, without that new drive. This was because the gravity lenses kept us within the Jupiter ecliptic, the disk of space extending outward from its equator, where the rings lie. But Leda, like all the outer moons, has an inclined orbit, twenty-seven degrees tilted instead of falling within one degree of that plane like the inner moons. So we had to go that far out of the ecliptic or we would never have a chance to align. The scientists had plotted it out for us; otherwise we should have been lost.
Our bubble complement was now ten grown women and seventy-two children, counting Helse and me as children. The women had done an excellent job, but they had been under strain, piloting the bubble and caring for the majority of us who had sunk into the depression of new orphanism. I would have grieved longer, but I saw how selfish that would be. It was time for me to pull my weight.
Helse had been helping all along. Now Spirit and I moved in, taking instruction from Helse, and helping her teach the other children. We learned to take sightings on Jupiter and Ganymede and Callisto, three-dimensionally triangulating our relative position by using the little hand computer the scientists had provided for this purpose, then modifying the gravity lenses to correct our erring course. For our course was never precisely on target by itself; it always had to be adjusted. Naturally we could not simply orient on Leda and jet toward her; Leda not only was not visible from here, she wasn’t there. She would be there only at the precise date and moment the ephemeris indicated. So we had to take triple sightings on familiar objects in space, get our angles precisely, check the time to the second, use the ephemeris to pinpoint exactly where those three objects were, so we could calculate exactly where we were, then calculate how far that deviated from where we should be. Fortunately the scientists had also provided idiot sheets that spelled out the steps in very simple bite-sized statements, complete with blanks for the new figures. We learned to set the degree of thrust of the drive unit, again according to computations. It was a challenge, and in its fashion it was fun; we felt like little spacemen, and we were. Soon the grown women were able to retreat into purely nominal supervision and get some needed rest.
But now we were passing through the mid-reaches, and pirates still clogged the ecliptic. We spied a ship overhauling us and knew it was trouble. We held a quick council of war, and decided to offer no resistance. Normally sex was all the pirates really wanted, and it no longer seemed like a prohibitive price to pay. We would have been glad to have any of the lost women back from Io, if sex was the price of her rescue. What is one act, compared to life?
But Helse took the precaution of changing to her boy costume, and she set up half a dozen of our oldest girl-children, including Spirit, similarly. Then most of us retreated to our cells and left the ten women to do what they had to do. With luck, no one would be hurt, and each women would not have to service more than two or three or four men.
It came to me then how far our attitudes had progressed, or regressed, in the course of our savage experience. We no longer even expected anything other than piracy and forced sex from strangers, and hardly considered any course of action other than that which would get us through with the smallest loss. The children of the surviving mothers took it for granted that prostitution was the proper course, just as they accepted the cannibalistic consumption of their fathers to abate their hunger. We had suffered more than physical degradation. Yet at the time it seemed right—and in retrospect it still seems right. We did what we had to do. How can that be wrong?
“I should be out there,” Helse muttered as we heard the lock open. “I’m old enough, and God knows I’ve had experience.”
I reacted with horror. “Never you!” I breathed. “I love you!”
“And did you love your mother?” she asked.
I swung my arm up, hitting her. The action was unpremeditated and the position awkward, so my arm only grazed her head in passing, but I was immediately chagrined. Of course I knew what she meant, as my second thought caught up with my first. I had loved my mother, and let her prostitute herself; why should it be otherwise with Helse? There was an inconsistency in my philosophy.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She smiled wanly and put her arm around me. “I understand, Hope, I understand. But you must accept that it is not only your family that can make sacrifices for you. That woman at the lava flow threw away her life for us. Those women meeting the pirates now are not our relatives, but they are doing it for us. You must permit me to do for you what I can, and for the others of this bubble.”
She was right, but I could not say it. The thought of some foul pirate embracing her, treating her as the Horse had treated my sister Faith, filled me with a blinding horror. “I love you!” I repeated, as if that had any logic.
“I know you do, Hope. And I love you. There need be no pretense between us anymore. I know you are the one man who would never hurt me.”
Her words filled me with a blaze of emotion that I felt physically in my chest, radiating through my body. I know the biologists say the heart is not the true font of love, that it is all in the mind; I sometimes think biologists doubt that love exists at all. But what I felt was in my breast and brain. I leaned over and kissed her, and fire seemed to play about our touching lips.
Then we had to break, for we heard the tramp of pirate feet along the Commons, and if anyone saw us kissing, Helse’s masculine ruse would quickly enough be discovered. “I will never hurt you,” I agreed passionately. And I believed it.
What terrible ironies fate inflicts on us.
They were pirates, all right. We heard their guttural exclamations as they examined our women, who had gone so far as to make themselves as reasonably attractive as possible, donning dresses and loosening their hair. I hated all of this, but knew it was necessary. It was better than the violence and bloodshed that otherwise would come.
These were real brutes. It seemed they weren’t interested in acquiescence. They wanted violence. I heard them hitting the women; I heard the screams. I started to get up, to go out there in a fury, but Helse held me back. She was correct, of course, as she had been before, when my mother had been out there. My headstrong reaction was sheer mischief. I settled back, shivering with rage. And I realized that Helse was doing service with the older women: it was her chore to keep me out of the action. To save my life, if nothing else, from the consequence of my adolescent folly.
One woman was thrown on the deck immediatel
y above our cell. We heard the thump of her body and that of the pirate who bestrode her, and saw their fuzzy outlines through our ceiling panel. I wished I could slide open the panel and stab a blade upward into the pirate’s body.
Then the woman screamed, and it was an ugly sound. She had been terribly hurt! Still Helse held me back, and of course I could not even get out of the cell while the bodies lay astride it. Once more I waited in silent shivering fury, while Helse clung to me and stroked my hair as she might the fur of an aggressive but imperfectly disciplined guard dog.
The pirate finally got up and moved away. We heard screams elsewhere; it sounded as if cells were being opened, children hauled out. Our program of accommodation, of pacifism, was not working.
Helse issued a stifled scream. I looked at her, startled. There was blood on her shirt.
As I watched in the dim light, I froze for the moment, and watched it dripping down from our access panel. Helse happened to be under it, so had caught the first drops. How bright red that blood was!
We exchanged a horrified glance. The blood had to be coming from the woman who still lay above us, and it could not be the result of any minor scratch. The pirate had stabbed her!
A new scream rent the air, close and loud. “Spirit!” I cried with instant recognition. The pirates were hauling her out!
This time my rage could not be constrained. I jumped for the panel, shoving it violently aside. Blood dripped down on my head as part of the woman’s body sagged into our cell. I had to push her out of the way. I saw her staring eyes and the terrible wound in her side; she had been cut so deeply she had already bled to death, or perhaps her heart had been pierced.
I hauled myself up, my vision tunneling to only one thing: the pirate. His bloodstained blade was jammed in his waistband, and he was half-lying on the deck, reaching down into Spirit’s cell.
He cursed, suddenly slapping his face, and I knew Spirit had used her finger-whip on him. That reminded me of my laser pistol, which I had not thought to have about me, idiot that I was. Now I needed it! Then the pirate scrambled forward, dropping into the cell as I cleared mine.
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