Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  I must have slept, because suddenly the ship was moving, accelerating from its dock. My head still hurt; the vertigo of initial motion didn’t help. I lay on my back and listened.

  They sang songs. Each man really did have his song, and he sang it with assurance, though few people had good voices. That didn’t seem to matter; enthusiasm was what counted, and the assertion of possession. No one interrupted when a man started his song; then, after a few bars, they joined in, following his lead. The songs were unfamiliar to me, but I knew I would pick them up readily enough. I was, perforce, now a member of this culture; I would adapt.

  Then, abruptly, it was my turn. “This is Hope’s maiden voyage,” Joe said. “We must select his song.” He turned to me. “First we have to know about you. How did you come to leave Callisto?”

  “That’s a long story,” I said. “You probably wouldn’t be interested in—”

  “We love long stories,” Joe said. “They fill our tired evenings when the songs give out. But right now we’re only doing your song, not your story. Can you summarize your life in one hundred words?”

  “I can try,” I said, realizing that this was not a joke. Now that I was active, my headache was fading. “My family had trouble with a scion, and we had to flee the planet in a bootleg bubble powered mostly by a gravity shield. Pirates came and—” Suddenly the horrible memories overwhelmed me, I choked up and could not continue. Only five months ago my family had been united and reasonably happy. Now—

  “I think I understand,” Joe said. “They killed your family?”

  I nodded.

  “And you alone survive?”

  “My—my sisters—” I said.

  “Survive? Raped and taken as concubines for private ships?”

  “One. The other, younger, she’s called Spirit, and she’s twelve. Got a, a position on a ship, concealed as a boy—”

  “And you don’t know where she is now,” Joe finished. He looked around at the bunks. “I think we have enough of the picture. You Hispanic refugees come through a hardball game.”

  There was a general murmur of agreement. “A kid sister hiding among pirates,” Rivers said. “He’s got reason to worry.”

  “But his name is Hope,” Gallows said. He was the foreman, but he was evidently also part of this group.

  “Hope is a worried man,” Rivers said, looking around.

  Slowly the others nodded.

  I looked up, perplexed. “What?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Joe said, as if surprised. “You don’t know our songs. We’ll have to teach you. Anybody want to do this one?”

  “I’ll do it,” Rivers said. He turned to me. “With your permission, Hope, I will sing your song.”

  “Sure,” I said doubtfully.

  “This time only, I lead Hope’s song,” Rivers said formally. “The Worried Man Blues.” And then he sang, in his fine deep voice:

  It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

  It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

  It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

  I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.

  I had to smile. The words did speak to my mood and my situation, and it was a pretty melody. Because the lines repeated, it was easy to remember.

  “Now you try it,” Rivers said.

  Singing was not my forte, but I knew my voice was as good as those of a number of the other folk I had heard here, and I realized this performance was necessary if I was to be accepted into this group. I took a breath and sang, somewhat tremulously. “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song—”

  At the second line, the others joined in, and it became much easier. They were careful not to drown me out; it was necessary that I be heard, that I set the cadence. By the time we got to the fourth line, it was rousing, and I felt it uplifting me. I really did feel better, physically and emotionally. I was part of the group, participating in a performing art. Surely this rendition would never be recorded as great music, but it was great, nevertheless.

  Then Rivers sang the second verse—or maybe it was the first, for what we had sung before turned out to be the refrain, repeated after every regular verse.

  I went across the river and I lay down to sleep ...

  When I awoke, there were shackles on my feet.

  I had gone across the Jupiter Ecliptic—and lost my joy of life along with most of my family and freedom. I was shackled, yes.

  Twenty-nine links of chain around my leg ...

  On every link, an initial of my name.

  Twenty-nine initials. I pondered that and realized that my name was legion. My initials were H. H., but there were many others like me, and their initials were on the chain, too. I liked the symbolism, painful as it was. Perhaps my father’s initials were there,

  M. H., and my mother’s, C. H., and my two sisters, F. H. and S. H., and my lost love, H. H., Helse Hubris, for I had married her, almost. I liked that idea.

  I asked the judge what might be my fine ...

  Twenty-one years on the migrant-labor line!

  That was, I learned later, adapted to the present situation; historically, back on Planet Earth, where all these songs had originated, it had been the Rocky Mountain Line. That was a mountain range in Earth’s North America, said to be fairly formidable; presumably the line—which would then have been a locomotive or railroad line in which cumbersome steam-driven vehicles were propelled along metal rails laid on the ground—required hand labor for its initial establishment. I dare say it would have required a great deal of work to lay those rails properly in a mountain district, as the locomotives needed to operate on fairly level terrain. The technology of ancient times has always intrigued me. So the migrant laborers must have had back-straining work—as I would surely find out.

  Anyway, I now had my song and my culture-nickname; I would have to answer to either Hope or Worry. They were much the same, really; opposite faces of the coin, depending on whether anticipation was positive or negative. I did like the song, and especially I liked the belongingness it made me experience. Singing together—there is something special about it. I believe every experience in life, of any nature, has some value to a person; this one had a great deal of value to me. Deprived of my family and my culture, I desperately needed new ones, and now it seemed I had them. Not as good as the old ones, but much, much better than drifting alone.

  The songs continued as each man had his turn presenting his own, staking out his position in the group. But I was tired and hurting, as the exhilaration of my own song faded, and I lay on the bunk and listened and then slept. I suspected I was taking Joe’s turn on the bunk, but he didn’t say anything.

  I woke with a start as the gravity abruptly cut off; acceleration was over. But Joe’s hand was on me, holding me to the bunk, so I didn’t float away. I had forgotten to strap myself down this time, since the acceleration had provided weight. Now he was putting the strap across. “Finish your nap,” he advised me.

  “But it’s your bunk, too,” I protested groggily.

  “Not to worry, Worry,” he said with a smile. “I can sleep floating while we’re coasting.”

  “But when deceleration starts—”

  “Kid, it’s a fifteen-hour trip. I won’t sleep that long. You’re the one with the hurting head. Relax.”

  I followed his advice. I had been in free-fall before and could handle it. In fact, I think the free-fall helped, for it relieved my body of the ordinary strain of gravity, allowing it to concentrate on healing. Free-fall does not help all people, but it helped me. When I woke again, several hours later, my head was virtually clear.

  Joe was sleeping in air, one hand gripping a bunk rail. He looked perfectly comfortable.

  Now the waking workers were swapping yarns and playing poker for pennies. I was satisfied just to listen, familiarizing myself with their qualities. These were generally uneducated folk, illiterate or partially literate, but canny enough in their limited fashion. Lite
racy does not equate to intelligence or humanity, after all. I was not familiar with their game of poker, but figured I could learn it in due course.

  Meanwhile, as a mental exercise, I calculated, in the unfamiliar Jupiter units of miles, the location of the agricultural bubble we were traveling to. I had been raised on the superior metric system, but I knew I would have to become conversant with the system of the Colossus if I wanted to convert my alien residency to proper citizenship. Also, my lost love Helse had used the Jupiter system of measurements, so I felt closer to her with them, foolish as this may seem.

  Acceleration measured in this fashion came to 32 feet per second squared, for one gee. 3,600 seconds in an hour meant—this was pretty good mental exercise, because of the irregular intervals between units—about 115,000 feet per second in an hour of gee, which seemed to be what we had experienced. There were--I strained to remember—5,280 feet in a mile. That meant we were traveling about 22 miles per second now, or close to 80,000 miles per hour. Fifteen hours at that velocity would be about 1,200,000 miles. But we would not be traveling straight in toward Jupiter; we would angle back to intercept the bubble as it overhauled Leda in its smaller, faster orbit. The bubble was probably about ten million kilometers out from Jupiter, compared to Leda’s eleven million— oops, I had slipped back into the metric system.

  At any rate, I was satisfied that the bubble was about 90 percent of Leda’s distance out, in this miniature Solar System that was the Juclip, and that we would not be carried far from Leda in the ten days Joe said we would be picking. That reassured me; I didn’t want to get lost and not be on hand to recover my identification.

  We did indeed arrive on schedule, decelerating at gee for an hour and docking on the bubble. Our ship simply hooked onto a rack awaiting it and hung nose-out, suddenly upside down as the gee resumed. The bunks were made to take it; they could be used from either side. The bubble was rotating one complete turn every minute and a half, so that centrifugal force brought our weight at its surface to almost gee, Earth-normal gravity.

  We climbed the ladder-tube up into the bubble. Inside, we stepped out of the lock onto the great, curving inner surface. I stood, dazzled by it.

  The bubble was a virtually hollow sphere about a thousand feet in diameter. From a mirror in its center shone the sun; or rather, the twenty-sevenfold magnified image of the sun, projecting the hellish intensity of Earth-normal solar radiation to the broad, curved expanse of green plants. I knew I would not be able to tolerate that very long; the radiation would soon blister my skin.

  The bubble was, of course, oriented so that its pole pointed to the sun. Otherwise the light would have been flashing on and off in sub-two-minute cycles, not good for the plants. This way, the bubble’s rotation was irrelevant; the mirror moved independently, beaming the light to cover one third of the inner surface, rotating in the course of twenty-four hours to complete the circuit. Earth plants preferred the Earth cycle, and produced most abundantly with it, and so they got it. That, in addition to the absence of all Earth diseases and predators and inconstancies of nature, meant that these plants were many times as productive as they could have been on Earth itself.

  “Get over to the harvest station,” Gallows told us. That turned out to be a pavilion a short distance away, on a terrace up the slope. Gee was only full and vertical at the bubble’s equator, of course; the terraces became increasingly steep as the poles were approached. Otherwise, the plants and soil would simply have tumbled in a jumble to the equator. We hastened to comply, scrambling up the path.

  Organization did not take long. We were issued broad-brimmed hats, gloves, and heavy shirts to protect us from the concentrated sunlight, and each of us was given a large plastic bucket on a belt. This was a pepper dome; we were to fill our buckets with the red peppers. About one hundred peppers filled a bucket. When we brought a filled bucket to the foreman, he would issue a ticket worth a dime. The more buckets we filled, the more dimes we earned. It was a remarkably simple system.

  Theoretically the average worker would fill one bucket in five minutes, twelve per hour, and squeeze it up to about a hundred buckets in the full eight-hour working day. The overall mathematics of it generated a schedule for our thirty-man crew to complete the full harvest of three million peppers in ten days. That seemed simple enough.

  But the polite math did not take much account of the human element. I discovered that harvesting is indeed not light work. I was assigned a terraced segment of the acreage to harvest that seemed huge but was probably small. The entire acreage of the bubble might have been seventy-two, though the terracing and loss of usable area toward the poles may have caused me to misjudge it. Only a third of it was lighted, and we were working on only part of that this day. In fact, I now realize that the average man had to harvest less than a quarter acre per day—but that was ten thousand peppers, and it was an enormous task.

  The plants were spaced in wide rows, so there was plenty of room to walk between them without brushing, and that was important, because I saw that these were long-term producers. We had to pick only the ripe peppers, not damaging the greater number of developing ones; other crews would harvest those in other months.

  I went to work on my segment, and Joe Hill had one adjacent. I watched him picking, to get a clear notion of how it was done, then proceeded. Each plant had one ripe pepper, readily distinguishable by its bright red color; I took hold of it and broke it free of its stem with a quick twist and set it in the pail. That was important, too, we had been cautioned; we were not to bruise the peppers by tossing them in. There were farmhands patrolling the rows, watching to see that no plants or fruits were abused. They did no harvesting, they just watched.

  I thought I was making good time, but I was last to bring my first bucket in to Gallows for my ticket. I resolved to do better, and I hurried back to my section. I did speed up, but now I was getting hot in the heavy shirt, and the clothing was chafing. It was necessary to hunch over to reach the plants, and my back began to feel it. I sweated profusely and had to take gulps of water from the fountain every time I delivered a bucket, to alleviate dehydration. Within an hour the work became unpleasant; in two hours it was torture. But I had to keep picking, for everyone else was, and I was falling behind.

  There was no break for lunch; we had to keep picking feverishly to make the quota. I hardly felt hunger, anyway; the fatigue of my limbs and discomfort of my body drowned it out. The curving landscape blurred; only the nearest bushes remained in focus. I was no longer concerned about future days, or even future hours; my life was measured only by the bucketful. My two hands moved of their own volition, grasping, twisting, carrying, depositing. Now each pepper was a challenge.

  “This is no life for you, Hope,” a voice said.

  Dazedly, I looked up. A young woman stood before me, brown-haired and pretty. Her eyes were immeasurably sad.

  I blinked the blur away and recognized her. “Helse!” I cried, and lurched forward to embrace her. Helse, my love, my bride—

  But she faded into nothingness, and I fell face-first to the ground. Now I remembered what I had never forgotten:

  Helse was dead and butchered for the key she carried. The key of QYV. “Kife, I’ll kill you!” I cried in blind, hopeless rage.

  “Worry! Come out of it!”

  It was Joe, heaving me off the ground. I shook my head, realizing that I had suffered some sort of seizure.

  Joe made me stop picking for the day, though I had filled only forty-five buckets. That put me further in trouble, for the morning and evening meals cost two dollars each, and the bunk two dollars per night. Most workers also bought a jug of rotgut for a dollar, and some paid another two dollars for fifteen minutes in a shed with the bubble prostitute. One more dollar was withheld each day for the return bus fare, until that five-dollar charge was met. The foreman didn’t want any worker stranded without bus fare back to Leda. As they put it, Gallows didn’t want anyone hanging. It was said, not quite jokingly, that a
fellow could have “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou” each day and come out even. Many of the men did exactly that.

  Joe carried me. He was able to pick more than the minimum, and he gave me enough chits so I could eat and sleep. I was embarrassed to accept his further largesse, but I had no choice. Next day I was more careful and did not faint, but only picked sixty-five buckets. So it went, day by day; I was literally in debt to Joe, and could never quite catch up to it.

  At night, in the ship, it was better. I rested and recovered, and gave Joe his turn on the bunk while I worked on my song and learned to play poker. I refused to play for money, since I was already in debt, and this dampened things somewhat, but I did learn the game, and my special perception of people enabled me to grasp their bluffs. Soon I was playing well enough so that they were glad it wasn’t for money.

  There was a good deal of time when everyone was awake in the ship, as we were not permitted to wander the bubble freely when off duty. Naturally enough we were crowded and bored, which was why a game like poker was important. Trouble was easy to come by. I was, to my shame, responsible for some of it.