My mother put her hands to her face, but did not speak again. She knew what the rest of us knew; it did make sense.
Once more the men considered. "It's the same deal I made as a child," Helse murmured in my ear. I had not seen her climb down to join me, since I had been distracted by the uncomfortable drama of the Commons. "I think these really are merchantmen, pirating on the side. It's not necessarily a bad life, if they like the girl. These aren't really violent men; they just don't think it is wrong to coerce a woman into sex."
"But she's not doing it because she wants to!" I protested somewhat irrelevantly.
"Yes and no. Few decisions in life are completely voluntary. She's doing it for her family. She is making a sacrifice for your benefit—and for every other person in the bubble."
I had to file this away for later digestion.
"Take this young woman aboard the ship," the officer said. "Give her decent accommodation." He reached inside his jacket and brought out a packet of vials, passing it to my mother, who stood in seeming shock.
The men left the bubble and Faith went with them. I feared I would never see her again.
The ship disengaged and jetted toward Jupiter. Faith had bought our reprieve with her body. I could only hope it was a fair deal.
My mother's eyes were glazing with the reaction, but she took a vial and opened it and tilted its liquid into Spirit's mouth, carefully, so the child would not choke. Other women did the same with their children.
I shook myself and went to the group. Several vials were left over. I opened one and put a drop on my tongue.
The fluid was completely colorless and tasteless. It could have been pure water.
I thought about that, then left without speaking. If it was only water, it meant one of two things. Either the children would die—or the drug in the candy was not truly toxic. Either way, the merchant-pirates had deceived us. But what else had I expected?
Helse rejoined me. "What is it, Hope?"
"Water," I said in disgust.
"I'm not surprised."
"You suspected? Why didn't you say something before?"
"All men are pirates at heart." She caught herself. "I mean figuratively. Some are violent, like the outright pirates. Some are disciplined and honorable, like your father. Most are in between, as I told you before. They take what they can get, but they prefer not to have too much of a fuss. They don't mind lying to get their way. If they can get a woman to submit without violence, without any real danger of hurting the children, such men consider this to be smart management. That's just the way they see it."
"But then Faith sacrificed herself for nothing!"
Helse caught my hands in hers. "No, Hope. She did it to protect her mother and sister from risk or shame. She refused to gamble with their lives."
I knew this, yet felt constrained to argue. "But if—"
"If we had called that bluff, those men could have turned savage and raped the women violently. They were armed; they could have killed anyone who tried to stop them. The danger was not just in the candy; it was in the men. Honorable men would never have used coercion. Faith understood that. So she offered them something better. Because she was beautiful and willing to deal, they accepted. They weren't all-the-way bad, they just wanted sex. She made it easy for them to be generous."
"They're still pirates!" I hissed.
"They're fallible men. There's a difference."
"But my sister condemned to horror—"
"Your sister is so lovely, I think some ranking officer will soon claim her for his own. I have told her some of the arts of pleasing men. In time—"
I turned on her ferociously. "You told her!"
Helse stepped back. "Hope, she asked me. She wanted to know. I think she suspected something like this could happen, and she felt guilty for hiding when your father was killed. She had to redeem herself. She had to make the sacrifice the others were making."
I clenched my fists, not answering.
"In time she may command an officer's love and be well treated," Helse continued. "Her future may be more secure than ours is."
"By practicing the arts of prostitution!" I gritted. "As you practiced them on me!"
I was sorry the moment I said it, but Helse only smiled. She had learned to accommodate my moods. She must have done the same as a child, with Uncle. "We do what we must to survive, Hope. Women don't have the brute power of men. Compromise is forced on us all our lives. I practiced my skills on you to help you, not because you forced me. Do not be angry with me, my lover."
I was angry, but mostly with myself. "If you taught my sister well enough, she will have the captain of that merchant ship in thrall."
"I hope so." She drew on my arm, turning me to face her as we stood above our cell. "Please understand, Hope. Faith was publicly raped. She believed she had been rendered forever unclean, worthless for marriage. This was a psychological thing, not a logical one; it was part of her self-image."
I remembered how Faith had asked me whether she was still my sister. Yes, I understood about self-image; I had been going through a similar mill myself. Logic alone is not enough to change such deep perceptions.
"All that was left to her was to do some good thing for her family," Helse continued. "She really cared for the rest of you, though she thought herself unworthy. She found the thing she could do, and she did it—and that key sacrifice may ironically bring her as much good as what she did for the rest of us. She would never have married a man she considered to be good, for fear she was unworthy of him. But a bad man is all right—and if he turns out later to be a good man, she will be able to accept that too. Because she did make her act of expiation. It was her dishonor she was sacrificing, for the best possible cause."
I was not sure I followed her logic or agreed with it, but I hoped she was right. How much better it would be for Faith to be happy than miserable, by whatever rationalization. But still I hated the way it had worked out. Helse was educating me in the real ways of men and women, and it was not an education I liked. Yet I knew, deep down, that I did have to come to terms with the realities of the human condition.
Worse was to come. Hardly six hours passed before we were raided again. We saw the ship bearing down on us, and it was no merchant vessel. This time we hid all the children in the cells with orders to remain there until the pirates had gone, no matter what. Helse and I were included, but we were sent back to the doughnut hole with the remaining food packs. Perhaps the women did not realize how well we could see what was going on from that vantage. Spirit, still groggy, went with us, as it didn't seem wise to confine her alone.
The pirates burst in with drawn daggers, and it was obvious from the outset that resistance would be futile. Evidently news had spread that this was a helpless bubble, and they were flocking in to take advantage of it. That, too, caused me to seethe with suppressed outrage. Why couldn't they have flocked in to help, or at least signaled the Jupe authorities where we were so they could fetch us? I was ashamed for my species—the male species.
The women fell back, cowed by the blades. They had no equivalent weapons, and there were too many men to overwhelm by force of numbers.
"It's submit—or die," Helse murmured. "And if the women die, the children are alone, and maybe dead too. They know that."
"That's my mother down there! My sister just sacrificed herself to prevent—"
"Yes. It is ironic. Don't blame your mother for what she does."
A week before, I never would have understood. Now I did. Whether I would have without Faith's recent sacrifice or Helse's present help I don't know. But now I understood that the women had to do what they had to do, to stay alive and protect their families.
I understood, but my revulsion overcame me as I saw a hairy, dirty, pirate strip the clothing from my unresisting mother. I launched myself toward them, determined to kill the foul rapist.
Helse caught me around the shoulders, her inertia shoving me into the containing net. I tried to
fight her off, but she clung with a strength in that moment equal to my own, and even in my desperation I could not bring myself to apply real force on her. Still, I managed to achieve a partial disengagement, and soon would get away from her.
"Spirit!" she whispered. "Help me hold him!"
My sister snapped out of her remaining stupor, throwing off the lingering effect of the drug. She bounced across and caught me about the legs. In this trace gravity I could move her about by flexing my body, but I could not dislodge her. "But our mother's getting raped!" I hissed. None of us dared talk loudly, for fear we would only bring the knives of the pirates to bear against ourselves.
"I know it," Spirit said, and did not yield.
I continued to struggle, and Helse was tiring. She was as big as I, and weighed as much, but the distribution differed. I had more muscle and better leverage, because I was male, and now my advantage was telling.
But Helse managed to get hold of my head. Her shirt had torn open, and her chestband had slid askew in the struggle. Now she hugged my head to her half-bared breast. "If you go, I will follow!" she rasped.
There is something uniquely compelling about the breast of a woman. My will to fight was sapped. I lay with my face half against the net, half against her breast, and did not move.
But in that position I could see a woman below. Probably she was not my mother; I could not tell, for most of her naked body was obscured by that of the pirate on her. Even if her whole body had been clear except for her face, I might not have been sure, for I had never seen my mother naked. Only by the face could I recognize her, and that I could not see. Yet if she was not my mother, she was someone else's mother, and she was getting raped. It did not matter that she was not resisting, for to resist was to die. I struggled again, determined to do something to stop it. But Spirit took a tighter hold on my legs, and Helse nearly smothered my face. In retrospect, I think that might be the nicest possible way to die, smothered by a breast, but at the time I was almost tempted to free myself by biting her. Thank God I did not!
"Let it be," Helse whispered. "Let it be, Hope. Those women are trying to save our lives!"
"At the expense of their honor!"
"Their honor is not of the body! It is of the spirit!"
That coincidental use of the word that was also my sister's name had a strange effect on me. Suddenly I knew that if there was one person I had to protect more than my mother, it was my sister.
Helse took my silence for negation. "Please, Hope! Give over! It must be!"
It was a woman getting raped, and here were two girls urging me to let it proceed. They should have protested more vehemently than I did—but they were more realistic than I was. A man fights, a woman compromises: It was true in this microcosm as in the macrocosm.
The pirate thrust, and the woman's body jumped. I tried again to launch myself.
Helse clung to me with her divine death-hug. "I'll tell you I love you!" she breathed pleadingly.
She didn't love me; I knew that. She was older than I, and more mature in more than the physical sense; I was beneath her. But she cared enough to pretend she loved me, in order to protect me from myself. That small share of love seemed inordinately precious. Why should I struggle, here, as if indulging in my own rape, when I could please her by relenting?
I relaxed and turned my face in to her. Helse squirmed about, sliding her breast down, and met me with a kiss. It was savagely sweet. I wanted to believe that she loved me, at least a little, for I surely loved her.
But at the same time I knew that I was forcing Helse to do something untrue, to sell a profession of love as another woman would sell her body. That wasn't right. And this acquiescence of ours was permitting my mother to get raped. Now my other thought, comparing our situation to that of my mother, returned more strongly. In an ugly transmogrification, my love for Helse seemed to identify with my mother's horror. It was as though the flesh so tightly against me was my mother's. As though I was participating in that rape. I knew it wasn't literally so, but it was figuratively so, and the stigma was there, emotionally.
I'm sure the time was not long, but it seemed an eternity. Then the pirates were gone, and the air lock was closed, and we children were free to return to the Commons.
Helse restored herself to her boyish state, resetting the band about her chest and pinning her shirt together. "You sure are pretty when you show," Spirit remarked to her. I had to agree, silently; this was the first time I had actually seen Helse's breast.
"You will be too, very soon," Helse told her, patting her strapped bosom as if it were a thing to be allocated impartially among females. "Thanks for helping me."
"I had to. My crazy brother would have gotten us all killed."
I was silent. They were probably correct.
We climbed down. I expected to find the women disheveled and sobbing and hiding their faces, and I was afraid to face my mother, but it had to be done.
I was completely surprised. All the women were in good order, clothing intact, hair brushed out, eyes clear. No one was crying or hiding. It was as though nothing had happened.
Helse caught on before I did. "Say nothing!" she whispered in my ear. "Nothing about—you know."
We found my mother. "Oh, I'm so glad you're safe," she said, smiling at us.
"We were sleeping in the loft," Helse said.
My mother glanced at her with the merest suggestion of irony, knowing it was a lie and thankful for that lie. "Of course, young man," she agreed.
Was my mother really still ignorant of Helse's sex? Or was she competent at keeping secrets? Perhaps she had seen more of our struggle in the loft than we realized. If we honored her privacy, she honored ours.
Later, in our cell, Helse explained it to me in more detail. "Degradation is mainly in the mind. She doesn't want you to share her humiliation, because that could further hurt the family. The kindest thing you can do is to forever refuse to acknowledge that any man but your father ever touched your mother. There must be no stain on the honor of Hubris."
"Is the whole universe made of hypocrisy?" I demanded, hurting anew.
"Sometimes it seems so," she agreed. "But it is a good thing your family does for itself. I wish I had belonged to a family like that."
"So soon after Faith sacrificed herself to prevent this very thing!" I exclaimed.
"What Faith sacrificed herself for has been preserved," Helse reminded me. "Never say otherwise."
I was blind at that moment to the significance. "And you—you told me you loved me, just to keep me quiet! You're a woman too!"
"I'm a woman too," she agreed.
I was perversely furious at her, but I loved her too, and maybe for much of the same reason. "And will you do what you did before, just to keep me quiet? Will you give me your body, and pretend to like it?"
"Yes."
"Oh, damn!" I cried, and then it was literally crying, the tears flooding from my eyes. Helse held me and comforted me, and in time we did make love, and she had the grace not to profess love, only caring, and it was wonderful. I couldn't accept what she was doing, in one part of my conscience, but in another part I knew it had to be and that I couldn't live without her. So I accepted what had to be accepted: her sacrifice, and mine.
Chapter 12 — FOOD
Jupiter Rings, 2-24-'15—I wish I could skip over this period, but it would not be honest to do so. It had seemed our situation could not get worse, but we had a cruel reeducation coming.
Our problem was composed of two things: food and travel. We were still short of food, but might have managed if we had floated to Jupiter on time. But the women didn't know how to operate the gravity lens efficiently, so we were making little progress. That meant our food was less than adequate. We had assumed we could get by on half rations, but as the days passed and Jupiter loomed larger with appalling slowness, we knew we could not. All of us were losing mass, though we were not starving. We conserved bodily energy by sleeping much of the time, but still our
food dwindled.
We cut to quarter rations, trying to stretch it out a few more days, but our progress past the rings of Jupiter seemed maddeningly slow. It was gradually apparent to even the most unwilling eye that we were not making it.
I spent a lot of time in the cell with Helse, sleeping in her arms. But hunger vitiated sex, if not love. It was enough for a time just to be with her, talking and resting and enduring—but inevitably the need for food intruded. I dreamed of discovering some hidden cache of food packs that would allow us all to glut ourselves. But it never was true.
Spirit took it worse than I did. She was a growing child, and she needed proper sustenance. She spoke of big rock-candy mountains and oceans of chocolate syrup and gingerbread houses. When she started longing for potatoes and spinach I knew it was serious. She had never liked spinach. We had to do something—but what? We could not conjure food from vacuum.
I took to staring morosely out of the portholes. The Jupiter ring system is not nearly as spectacular as Saturn's, but it is extensive enough. It reaches out almost as far as Saturn's rings do, but it is so diffuse it is hardly worth noticing. In fact, for many centuries the astronomers of Earth were not able to see the ring systems of Jupiter or Uranus or Neptune, so assumed there were none, with the typical logic of our species.
The primary ring is fifty thousand kilometers inside the orbit of Amalthea, and that's where the Jupiter Border Patrol operates. Amalthea is just a rocky ball, 24 kilometers across; its gravity is so slight that no one has bothered to put a residential dome on it—there's not enough gravity there to focus effectively, you see, since next to nothing concentrated tenfold is still next to nothing—but there is a space depot. Amalthea is just beyond Jupiter's political territorial limit, so we had to get inside its orbit.
The rings really weren't obvious even from up close; most of the particles were the size of large grains of dust. A ship traveling at high relative velocity through the rings might suffer abrasion, but our gravity-sailing bubble just nudged through the diffuse field harmlessly. Some particles were large enough to spot from some distance, just hanging there in their orbit blithely minding their own business, and I would trace them with my eye as long as I could.
Anthony, Piers - Tyrant 1 - Refugee Page 17