The interrogation began: Where were all our other people? How did we get the pirate weapons and supplies? Where were we going, since we were now spiraling away from Jupiter and out of the ecliptic? The Horse knew there was something strange about us, and he sought to turn it to his advantage. I realized that he was basically a scavenger, seeking whatever other pirates had missed.
We did not answer him. We all remembered his prior visit. We owed him nothing.
"Then we shall do it the harder way," the Horse said. "I'm not much for torture and killing, but I do like to turn a profit and I don't like being balked." He looked us over. "You," he said, pointing to me. "You're the oldest, and as I recall, you had a fine piece of a sister you've managed to hide somewhere. You will answer my questions."
I remained silent. It was the only way I could get back at him, at the moment.
He pointed at Spirit. "Strip her," he said.
The two pirates beside him went over and hauled my little sister out, untied her, and ripped off her clothing, though she struggled and tried to bite and scratch. Then they held her upright and naked before us.
The Horse studied her. "Not quite old enough," he said with evident regret. "Another year and she'll be fine, but I don't get my kicks from children. Anyway, that won't make this kid talk; it didn't before. We'll have to go the other way." He drew his knife.
I broke out in clammy sweat. I had somehow been braced for rape, much as I detested the notion, but this was worse. He was going to torture Spirit!
The Horse faced me. "This is your sister, by the look of her. Put her in your clothes and she could be your little brother. I don't want to have to hurt her, but I will if you don't talk. I ask you once: Will you tell me everything I want to know?"
"He won't!" Spirit exclaimed.
Guided by her, I remained silent. Maybe the pirate was bluffing, trying to scare me into talking.
The Horse sighed. "Okay, we'll start with a finger." He grabbed Spirit's left hand and wrestled with it until he had hold of her smallest finger, while the two other pirates held her legs and other arm, preventing her from struggling effectively. It struck me how similar this process was to rape.
Then, without ceremony, he brought the knife up and sliced into the base of her finger, near the knuckle.
Spirit screamed with ear-deadening intensity, and wrenched with all her strength, but the pirate hung on and kept carving. Blood spattered out. I rolled over, trying to break my bonds, and the children on either side of me started crying. They had been toughened to the wounds of combat, but this was different. I could not get free; I landed on my side, my head on the deck.
Something landed before my nose. I stared crosseyed at it. It was about five centimeters long and tattered at one end.
It was Spirit's little finger.
I looked up, my eyes hazed by tears of shock and fury. I saw and heard Spirit sobbing, her hand covered with her own blood.
"I ask you again," the Horse said, grinning. "Are you ready to talk?"
Now I knew he wasn't bluffing. He would keep cutting off parts of Spirit until she died. Then he would start on another child.
What did it matter, what he knew of the adventures of our bubble? We had no secrets worth dying for.
But I tried one more thing. "Kife," I said.
Suddenly I had the complete attention of all the pirates. "So you're into that, are you?" the Horse asked, licking his lips. "All right, show me the mark and I'll turn you loose."
"I have no mark," I said. I hadn't thought to mark myself, and probably that wouldn't have been convincing since it wouldn't have been a tattoo. A lie would get me nowhere, and I really didn't have much taste for lies anyway. Lies were for pirates and scions.
The Horse squinted at me cannily. "Not everyone knows this, but I do: There's always a mark. That's to stop impostors from making claims. If you can't show me the mark, you've got no claim. And even with the mark, you can't protect anyone else. You're the only one exempt. So show it, and I'll put you in that lifeboat you're towing and send you off, and I'll interrogate someone else here."
The trouble with the Horse was that he was canny. My bluff had failed. I couldn't save Spirit anyway. "Let my sister go, and I'll tell you everything." I said, capitulating.
"I won't let her go, but I'll let her be," the Horse said. He gestured to the pirates holding Spirit, and they let go her arms and stooped to bind her ankles. Crying brokenly, preoccupied with her mutilated hand, she did not try to escape, and of course it wouldn't have done any good if she had. She tried to put her fist in her mouth, but the blood was still flowing, and she only smeared it on her cheek.
Oh, Spirit! Better had they raped you!
One of the pirates who had tied us went over and gave her a bandanna, and she wadded it against the stump. All the fight had gone from her. They put a blanket over her and let her sit down, and she huddled in it. The pain was evidently diminishing—but never again would she have that finger.
I swore again, to myself, to kill the Horse, who had savaged both my sisters—but until I had the chance to do that, I would have to cooperate. I could not watch Spirit be tortured any more.
I talked. I told the pirates everything, summarizing our entire misadventure in the bubble. The Horse was especially interested in the QYV aspect. "And the body of the courier is frozen on the hull?" he asked.
"Yes," I agreed shortly.
"So you were the one who killed her, not a pirate."
"Yes."
"Which means you will have to settle with Kife."
I hadn't thought of that. "I suppose so," I said, resenting the very fact of agreement with him. If I ever encountered Kife, however, I knew it would not be amicable.
The Horse smiled. "I will make sure you go free, then. I wouldn't care to be the one to deprive Kife of his vengeance. He's an ugly one." He pondered. "Still, I understand those couriers carry some really good stuff. We'd better take a look at it."
"No!" one of the other pirates exclaimed. "It's death to mess with—"
"With a dead courier?" the Horse asked. "Whose body will be lost in space, tied to a drifting bubble? I think even Kife knows where to cut his losses. He'll deal with her killer and let it go at that."
"I don't know," the other pirate said.
"That's why I'm the leader here," the Horse said. "I'll take the responsibility. I'll never have another chance to see exactly what a courier carries."
It occurred to me that if the Horse let me go and Kife caught up with me, Kife would learn from me of the Horse's part in this. Then the Horse would be marked for vengeance too. I had killed Helse to save the bubble; the Horse would be interfering with the privileged material itself. Surely the Horse realized this. Therefore he probably intended to kill me and the other children, once he had all the information we could provide, so we couldn't implicate him. If Kife tracked the bubble, without any living witnesses, he would discover that the great majority of the refugees, including Helse, had died in prior encounters with pirates; there would be no evidence that the Horse had ever intercepted the bubble a second time. He could probably get away with it.
It all depended on our being dead. I had to kill him—to save us all. But still I had no way.
Under the Horse's direction, two pirates suited up and scrounged on the hull for Helse's body. It took them some time, for there were many bodies there and they had to inspect each one naked for the mark. I had told them Helse was female, but evidently they weren't sure of me, so checked males too, just in case. Actually, it was probably hard to tell until the corpses were pretty well stripped, anyway.
They found her and brought her inside the bubble. I had never looked at Helse after her death; now I had to. This, I think, is the most visceral grievance I have against the Horse: I had known Helse was dead, intellectually, but some part of my romantic mind had remained hopeful that she might live. Now no part of my mind could doubt any longer. My last faintly fond illusion had been banished. The utter bleakness
of reality took its chill hold on my soul, I looked, terribly compelled. It was appalling. They had cut away her wedding dress and brought her in naked. She was not pretty at all in this state; she was frozen like a statue, her eyeballs and tongue protruding grotesquely, her body bloated by the decompression that had occurred before it froze. I would not have recognized her at all, if I had not known it was her. But it was; the aspects of familiarity loomed larger as I slowly perceived them. Her brown hair, her breasts, the QYV mark at her thigh—oh, Helse, the woman I had loved!
They tried to cut her open, but she was like rock. They had to thaw her—and that was the worst thing of all. We had thawed the bodies of our men for food—but the adult women had handled that, concealing it from the children as much as possible, and I had not cared to watch. But I understood that they had selectively heated only those portions they intended to carve, leaving the main part of each body intact. A leg, for example, could be heated and even cooked to a certain extent while on the bone, and when it was soft enough to carve, the edible flesh was stripped and the still-frozen remainder of the body was taken back out to the hull. Helse, in contrast, was being thawed entire. This was a much slower and uglier process, for they did not use fire for fear of destroying what it was they sought: the container anchored to her intestine.
In fact, it took several days, as I reckon it, for the body to thaw to their satisfaction, for the ice in the central body cavity melted very slowly. For all that time we had to wait and watch, tied and guarded by the pirates. They released us periodically to eat and drink, one at a time, and to use the head, but watched us so closely that we never had a chance to escape.
Even poor Spirit, a shadow of her former vitality, was permitted to rummage for bandaging material and replacement clothing only under the eye of a pirate. She searched inefficiently, unlike her normal manner, and found nothing suitable, and finally had to settle for soft underclothing from her own belongings. She fastened these garments clumsily against the stump of her finger and anchored them to her hand with elastic so that it looked as if her whole hand had been amputated. She refused to take any pirate pain-killer, for that was marked H. My heart went out to her in her misery and agony, but I was helpless. She was so pale I knew the loss of blood had hurt her. I couldn't even talk to her, couldn't comfort her. My little sister, was dying, in her sad way, before my eyes. The strength I had perceived in her was gone; defeat and pain had robbed her of it. Even the two halfway decent pirates seemed sorry for her.
We slept at irregular intervals while the ice melted, though we felt the chill of it as the air in the vicinity lost its heat in the contact with the deep, deep freeze of space. There was nothing else for us to do. My mind ran over every possible plan to escape, but all foundered in the face of the reality of being both bound and watched. I wondered why they were taking the trouble to keep us alive for this period, and could only conclude it was for further questioning in case some new mystery arose in connection with the courier's body. The Horse was a thinker, in his fashion; he did not discard things before he was quite finished with them, including lives. That made him more dangerous than the more directly brutal pirates. Once the capsule was recovered and opened, our lives would be surplus. So the thawing of Helse was in fact a countdown on our own lives, and when the chill, of her body had dissipated, the chill of our bodies would commence.
When I slept, I dreamed, and it was not fun. I seemed to march through an inchoate crowd of faceless people, all walking toward the brink of a yellow sulfur cliff, all stepping over it and falling to their doom. Only I could perceive the oncoming disaster, and I tried to talk to them, to urge them to stop and turn about, but they did not seem to hear me. I discovered that they were roped together and I was roped with them, my hands bound together; I was being carried over the cliff too.
I woke sweating in the cold. I was indeed roped, along with the others, and we faced the slowly warming body, and smelled its faint but growing aroma. We were approaching that cliff of doom, and the dream was no fantasy, but a rendering of reality. My dreams or visions had a disturbing propensity that way. I looked covertly at the pirate guarding us, but he was alert; no chance there.
I slept again, huddling into myself, and thought I woke to find the guard sleeping, and nudged myself over to him and managed to get my fingers on his knife. He woke then, and opened his mouth to scream, but I had the knife, and my bonds unraveled before its blade, and I brought it up and stabbed him in the face and saw the blood geysering out of his nose, splashing across my hands, which looked oddly like Spirit's hands, and I woke, and it was only sweat on my hands, and the guard remained alert.
Next time I dreamed I slipped my bonds and made a noose of the rope, flung it about the head and neck of the guard, and garroted him mercilessly, watching his eyes and tongue bulge out of his head, and it felt good, it gave me a feeling of power to do that to him—but I woke, and it was the head of my beloved Helse my gaze was fixed on, not the garroted pirate. Still she thawed...
I dwelt on that for a while, compulsively. Helse was dead and my heart with her, and now her body was becoming more of a horror to me than her death itself had been. She had at least died quickly, and probably not suffered much; decompression in space, horrible as it may look, is about as clean a demise as a person could seek. I understand consciousness is lost in the first second, so the rest is never felt. Now she was being restored in a fashion, and her restoration would destroy us all. I felt anger, frustration, guilt and grief for her death, but had to some extent confined these emotions before they ravaged me beyond recovery. I knew that any breakdown on my part could lead to death for all of us, so had not had the luxury of prolonged grieving. But as I watched her body slowly soften, it all came back with appalling and gruesome force.
All that we had suffered in the bubble—was it worth it? Could it ever be worth it? Or would it have been better if we all had died? In that case, the Horse would be doing us a favor when he killed us, ironically.
I drifted to sleep again and dreamed of my family alive, as they were at the beginning of this travail, and I was explaining to my father how I wanted to marry Helse, but he was perplexed because he thought she was a boy. "No, she is a girl," I said, not even wondering how it was he did not know, when he had known before and had told my mother, and I drew off her clothing so he could see. But what was revealed was not the sweet soft shapely flesh of the living woman, but the cold hard horror of the corpse, and I stared in shock—and was awake again, my eyes fixed on the reality. Waking was no escape from nightmare!
Where had it all gone wrong? How could I have avoided the unmitigated horror of this outcome? I knew the answer: I should have avoided contact with the scion in Maraud. That had been the start of the whole terrible chain of events. Had I only drawn my sister Faith aside, hidden her from view—yet this scion had come looking for us, having seen Faith before. How could I have prevented that? I simply was not competent to deal with the problem I had faced.
Incompetence. There was the root of it. Had I had competence, I would have found a way to alleviate the situation. Had I had more experience, or had a more knowledgeable person been there to guide me—
But now I realized that if I had somehow dissuaded the scion without offending him, so that the crisis had never occurred, it would have solved only part of the problem. We, the Hubris family, would have survived, never having to take the bubble off-planet—but all the other refugees would have proceeded as before. Helse would have been aboard, and had to seek another roommate, and perhaps had trouble from the outset, and the pirates still would have raided and raped and murdered, and the Jupiter Patrol still would have rejected the refugees. The end would have been the same: death for all on the bubble, including Helse, one way or another. And I would never have met her and loved her, and she never would have loved me. A fantasy that saved my family without saving Helse was no good. It was not the scion I had to settle with, it was the pirates.
I slept again, and dreamed
of the end of this dread sequence; the thawing was complete, and the fell pirate Horse reached his gross dirty hairy hand up between Helse's spread thighs into her soft body, raping her with his hand, for raping was his business, and rammed his gross fist around and around inside there while she struggled against the pirates holding her arms and legs, and at last with a gloating gasp of satisfaction pulled out what was inside her. It was large and green and shaped like a baby, the baby I had planted in her, but no, it was not mine, it was Kife's, he had raped her first, putting in her the seed of her destruction, putting his brand on her tender body. I had a vengeance to make against QYV, could I but survive to pursue it. This whole pirate trade, using and abusing innocent people—
Now the capsule, as the Horse held it up to the light in lustful victory, was small, its proper size; in my dream I was not concerned about such superficial changes of reality. The pirate's small eyes gleamed as he viewed the prize, the ultimate pirate treasure, the burden of the courier. What did that container contain? And I was curious too, and guilty for that curiosity, for by experiencing it I seemed to be supporting the death of my beloved, even as my bodily reaction at the time of the rape of Faith had seemed to support that act. Even in my private mind, where I could conjecture freely, I could not find an answer to my guilt. How much better to have Helse alive and leave the mystery intact! I had no right to want to see the content of that capsule! Yet I did.
The Horse broke it open and an object fell out, a blob of something, soft like mud, green mud. It fell on the body and spread out across the flesh like taffy. The Horse, fearing to lose it, tried to pick it up, but it broke apart and part of it adhered to his fingers.
He stared at his hand, watching his fingers dissolve, and I realized that the green blob was a living thing, some kind of alien being that fed on human flesh and now was consuming both the corpse and the pirate. It had been quiescent until freed from the confining capsule; now there would be no stopping it. It would gorge until they were both gone, the dead woman and the living man, and then it would start on the rest of us. Already a pseudopod of it was extending across the deck toward me.
Anthony, Piers - Tyrant 1 - Refugee Page 27