Politician

by Piers Anthony

  I settled back with obvious resignation, one hand supporting my body partially upright. It was almost impossible to get comfortable here, physically, which was part of the point. Break a man down physically and you’re on the way to breaking him down emotionally. The linkages are stronger than many people choose to realize. But I had experienced privation before; this really wasn’t that bad.

  My fingers slowly traced the scratches. I found where they began—I hoped. The first six were as follows:

  That was twos, a, a, and twos, one with an X in it. Probably orientation and the addition of an X made them different symbols, so only two were really the same: the first and sixth. What did they mean?

  Now I remembered. My little sister Spirit and I had had a code game we had learned from a friend when we were children on Callisto. The letters of the alphabet were charted in grids, and segments of those grids became the representations of those letters. I think such games have been around for centuries. One grid had nine combinations, so that it translated into nine letters, in this manner:

  The second grid had dots in the figures, for the next nine letters, and a third grid, with Xs in the figures, finished out the alphabet. A fairly easy translation had produced a marvelously hierographic rendition, fascinating us. We had had quite a fling with it, in English and in Spanish, when I was twelve and she was nine. Somehow it was usually Spirit I was closest to, rather than my older sister Faith. Spirit always joined me in childish pastimes while Faith found them—and us—beneath her. I had evidently drawn on that old code for this occasion.

  For a moment I paused, savoring the strengthening memory of Spirit. What an engaging child she had been. Not beautiful like her older sister but spunky, always full of fight and humor, always there in my support. Some boys have contempt for their little sisters; not me. Spirit had always been my complementary aspect, a girl who was a better friend than any boy had been. Where was she now? My memory did not say, but surely she was looking out for me as she always had.

  If I had used that code, translation would be easy. I pictured the grids in my mind; the pattern of them made visualization feasible.would be the second grid, fourth section, or the thirteenth letter of the alphabet: M.was in the first grid, the fourth square: D. And so on, spelling the word MDGYBM. I considered that, disappointed. Obviously that wasn’t it. Yet I was sure I was on the right track. Well, perhaps a direct translation was too simple; the captors could intercept it too readily. What else was there?

  An indirect translation, of course. One that required an additional key, that no other person had. Something I carried in my head. A key phrase or sentence—that was the way my mind worked.

  Somewhere along the way I had learned about binary code systems in which two elements were required to encrypt and decrypt messages. One part might contain the letters of the words, and the other part the mechanism for putting those letters and words in proper order. That’s an oversimplification, but it suffices for now. If you have a mere jumble or a simple listing of thirty As, five Bs, eight Cs, ten Ds, one hundred and four Es, and so on, you are hard-put to interpret the message. But if all you know is the order, not the letters—one letter from the fifth group followed by one from the sixth and so on—and the sample is brief, you can’t decipher it, either. I knew that the first and sixth letters of this hieroglyphic message were the same, but which letter might that be? It could be almost anything. I needed both parts of the code, and all I had was one. I had MDGYBM—how did it translate?

  Where was the other part? It had to be accessible to me or the exercise was pointless. I pondered a while and concluded that it had to be in my head. Some key that only I would know, that would survive a memory-wash. The hieroglyphic code was an example: a person who lacked my childhood experience with that code would not be able to make sense of those symbols. Even so, I had made only partial sense of them. The letters could be filled into that pattern in any order, and my sample wasn’t large enough to analyze for any recurring pattern, not even if I translated all the characters on the floor.

  Recurring pattern? There might not be any! Now another aspect of coding came back to me: the variable displacement. The first and sixth symbols might not stand for the same letter! There could be a translation key that said the first symbol stood for the tenth letter of the alphabet, and the second stood for the fifteenth. Yes, this was the way I would have done it. I could not remember when or where or from whom I had learned of this type of coding, but I remembered the fact of it. I definitely needed the key to that translation.

  I pondered some more and was interrupted for another outside session. I was cleaned and conducted to the torture chamber, but this time they did not use the box. Instead a new man was there to ask questions. I knew that if my answers did not satisfy him they would use the pain-box again; that was a powerful inducement for me to provide acceptable answers.

  “What is your name?” the man asked. He was moderately heavyset, with musculature remaining in the upper arms; he might have been an athlete in youth but was so no longer. There were old scars on his arms, neck, and face, including one that nicked his left ear; he had fought with blades and had a close call. Maybe he had been a pirate. I did not know his name and did not intend to inquire; I simply thought of him as Scar, for private convenience, and let it go at that.

  “Hope Hubris,” I answered promptly enough.

  “How do you know?”

  “The guard called me Hubris, and then I remembered.”

  Scar nodded. “What else do you remember?”

  I shrugged. “My childhood on Callisto. We fled in a bootleg bubble, but my parents died—” I broke off, the memory hurting again.

  “What do you remember after your arrival at Jupiter?” I concentrated, but it wouldn’t come. “I—don’t think we ever got to Jupiter. They—they turned us away. Everyone died—”

  “Where did you go then?”

  Again I concentrated. “I—think to—to Leda. The Naval station. They—they let me stay because I was literate in English. Not all Hispanics are. Then ...” I shook my head; it wouldn’t come.

  “You are not cooperating,” Scar said. He nodded to the other man in the chamber, who picked up the pain-box.

  “I don’t remember!” I cried. “It—I need more time! I didn’t remember even this much before!”

  “Where did you work?” Scar demanded.

  Yet again I concentrated. As in a fog, I perceived something. “I—the farm-bubbles—migrant labor!” I exclaimed. “The only work I could get at that age. I was—fifteen.”

  “And after that?”

  “It’s blank. I just don’t know-”

  The pain came on, deep in my abdomen, making me nauseous. It was as if my gut were rupturing. My hands became damp with cold sweat, and I started to shiver, though I was sweating.

  “How do you feel?” Scar inquired as the agony abated.

  “Intoxicado !” I gasped.

  “You’re not drunk,” he snapped. “Don’t try to play games with me, Hubris!”

  “I—I spoke in Spanish, my mother tongue,” I explained quickly. “It means nauseous. From the pain.”

  “Oh.” Scar half-smiled. “That figures. We gave you a stone.”

  A stone. The effect of a gallstone or kidney stone. Such blockages could generate a certain nausea in addition to the pain at the site, whether the obstruction was real or phantom, as in this case. “But why?” I asked plaintively. “When you know I can’t answer your questions?”

  “Do you not remember joining the Jupiter Navy?” he asked.

  “The Navy!” Suddenly I did remember—and, indeed, I had realized before that I must have been in it. “Yes, there was trouble among the immigrant workers, and I was drafted—” I shook my head. “Basic training, I think. But it’s misty.”

  “Try to clarify it,” he suggested.

  When I hesitated, the pain came on again, worse than before. This time I did retch, regurgitating on my body.

  The pain e
ased. “Do you remember now?” Scar asked.

  “I wish I could,” I gasped.

  He nodded, satisfied. He walked to a counter and picked up a cup of fluid. He brought it to me. “Drink this. It will make you feel better.”

  I didn’t even question its nature. If they wanted to poison me they could do so anytime they chose. I took the cup with a shaking hand and brought it to my mouth and drank. It was some kind of beverage, pleasant enough, with a tangy aftertaste.

  Then I was conducted back to my filthy cell and locked in. I was alone again, my new vomit only adding to the stench.

  I returned to my reflections. Evidently my captors had merely been verifying the effect of the mem-wash. I had not been prevaricating; my direct memory beyond the migrant-labor period was hopelessly fogged. If they had mem-washed me to prevent me from testifying about some scandal of which I had had knowledge, this had been effective; certainly I could not remember it. Yet still it seemed simpler to kill me or to hold me incommunicado until the time for testimony was over. Evidently they wanted more from me than my silence.

  Despite my isolation and physical discomfort, I experienced a burgeoning sense of well-being. Why was this? My suspicious mind wanted a reason.

  That wasn’t long in appearing. Obviously I had been drugged. That drink Scar had served me—not straight alcohol but something sinisterly potent.

  Still, why? Why drug a helpless captive? That didn’t make sense, unless—

  Unless it was addictive. Hook a man on a drug, make him an addict, when you control the source of supply, and that man is yours. What had I fallen into?

  I experienced rapid panic, then quelled it. The drug was making me emotionally unstable. Whatever was happening to me was happening, and I could not prevent it. They could dose me with the drug by force if I tried to resist; repeatedly, until the addiction was complete. I wasn’t really worried, and though I knew this was probably false optimism sponsored by the drug and by my resignation to the situation, still I felt all right. For one thing I had a secret weapon: the coded message. Maybe that had the answer to my problem.

  I concentrated on that. My mind seemed preternaturally sharp; my sensation of well-being seemed to extend into the brain tissues themselves. Was this a genuine enhancement of mental prowess or a hallucinogenic illusion? I tried multiplying numerical figures in my head and seemed to be facile at it. My more important challenge was to solve the riddle of the coded message. If the enhancement were real, this would be the best time to do it. If not—what did I have to lose?

  —like a diminishing progression, one element of the figure deleted with each repetition. Then added again—no, that wasn’t it. My original childhood chart did seem to be the likely key. Three grids could cover the alphabet, but what about spacing and punctuation? I checked further along the message and found some figures with little Os in them. So there was a fourth grid, making thirty-six representations. The alphabet, plus ten spots for other marks.

  Then I had another notion. There was my alphabet—not in any direct ratio but in my head! A through Z and ten punctuation marks. There needed to be no symbol-letter connection; the symbols merely could be instructions on how to select the letters of the mental font. A simple displacement could do it, the symbols standing for numbers that showed how far to count for the proper letter:

  And so on. The first, second, and third letter of the alphabet. So the message would be 13 4 7 25 11 13, translating to the corresponding—

  Um, no. That was still a direct translation. It was pointless to interpose numbers if they only stood for letters. That was too easy to crack and needed no input from my unique experience.

  Still, I felt that numbers were part of the answer. Displacement—not from a set alphabet but from a random one-that would be tough indeed to crack.

  And, in my drugged brilliance I fathomed the next stage of the answer. That random alphabet—it didn’t have to be an alphabet at all, just a series of starting points. P, Q, X, Y, Z—anything would do. Then the coded numbers could count off from those points. 13 4 7 25 11 13—count off thirteen from the first starting point, four from the second, seven from the third. Thirteen from the P would be off the end of the alphabet, into the punctuation. Did that make sense? Perhaps not, but that only meant that P wasn’t the proper starting point; it was just my random guess. Find the correct starting points and the rest would follow.

  How could I discover a random series of starting points? The answer was that I couldn’t. So, they probably only seemed random. They could be represented by a key phrase or sentence—one that only I would devise. There was the true virtue of such a system: its personification. No one else could crack the code because no one else could think of my key sentence.

  All well and good, but what was the sentence? I had no idea. Maybe too much of my memory had been washed, and the sentence was gone. Yet shouldn’t I have anticipated that problem? I was an intelligent person, wasn’t I? Surely I had allowed for it.

  I pondered longer, but here at last I seemed to be balked. I was in a kind of hell, and part of that hell was my ignorance. What, in the period of my memory, would I have devised for my period of amnesia to recover?

  Then I remembered the message on the wall: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Could that be it? It would be just like me to plant the message of success under the noses of my captors, in the form of a message of defeat. Delicious irony!

  I tried it. The first letter was A; count off thirteen, to N. Four from the second letter, B; it came to F. And so on, seven from A for H, twenty five from N—oops! That ran way off the alphabet. Well, skip that for now and go on to the next: eleven from D for 0, and thirteen from 0 for punctuation. NFH?0? This couldn’t be right, yet it had seemed like such a promising lead.

  Wait—suppose the count started at the original letter, not next to it. That would change the displacement by one. I reviewed it in my mind, painstakingly recounting the letters. I had a good visual memory, but this was tricky to do. MEG?N? That was more like it. The final character could actually be a space, separating the word from the next; most words in the English language were short. The missing middle one—

  Suddenly I had it. There were not thirty-six but thirty-seven characters in the original sentence, counting the space at the end. That might show how many there were in the alphabet/punctuation key. That brought the missing letter back around to A, and I knew that word.

  MEGAN.

  CHAPTER 2

  NYORK

  As gawky as any tourist, I looked at the large screen in the dayroom of the passenger ship. Spirit, beside me, was similarly fascinated. All the others watching were children. Normal adults, jaded by experience, were reading, sleeping, watching entertainment holos or indulging in other pursuits or appetites in private chambers.

  Of course, the approach to mighty Jupiter required several hours if I disregard the fact that the entire journey from Leda was an approach. No one could sit and watch the orange Colossus constantly without losing the edge of excitement. But my sister and I tried.

  We had never before been closer than the orbit of Amalthea, and that had been a bitter occasion: the Jupiter authorities had towed our refugee bubble back out to space rather than accept us as immigrants. That action had cost me my mother Charity, my fiancée Helse, and the rest of my companions. The mighty Colossus had not cared. I had been fifteen years old then, and Spirit had been twelve; now we were thirty and twenty-seven, our military careers abruptly behind us, and we were returning. How much better it would have been if we had made it the first time!

  “Say, aren’t you Captain Hubris, the Hero of the Belt?” a gangling Saxon boy abruptly inquired of me.

  Startled by this recognition, I smiled. “I suppose I am.”

  “Gee! That’s great!” he exclaimed, and wandered away, his attention span and interest exhausted.

  The phenomenal bands of Jupiter fuzzed as we came close. We had first seen the planet as a kind of giant face, with white eyeballs cross
ing from west to east in the north, and the Red Spot gaping like a mouth in the south. Now we were spiraling down above the great equatorial band that was occupied by the United States of Jupiter, the most powerful political entity in the Solar System. None of the giant city-bubbles was visible yet; they were on a plane at the five-bar level of atmospheric pressure; that is, five times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at Earth’s surface where the ambient temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and clouds of water droplets precipitated from the gases there.

  I should explain that there is no human development on the surface of Jupiter, or on any of the gas giant planets, for a number of reasons. First, there is no surface in the Earth sense, merely a series of somewhat arbitrary boundary levels, such as the translation from molecular to metallic hydrogen. We know hydrogen, which composes ninety percent of Jupiter’s atmosphere, as a gas; but as the depth and pressure increase it becomes a kind of liquid and then a kind of solid, stripped of its electrons. The pressure of that metallic stage is about three million bars, and the temperature there is about ten thousand degrees Kelvin. These extremes would not be comfortable for human beings, to understate the matter significantly. Jupiter has been considered, historically, as a cold planet; in fact, it is a hot one. Had it been larger, the internal temperature might have triggered nuclear fusion, making a third star in our System. As it is, Jupiter has more mass than the combined mass of everything else in the Solar System, excluding Nemesis and the Sun itself. Not for nothing is Jupiter called the Colossus.

  It is a colossus economically and politically, too. The Jupiter Navy, from which I had just been released, dominates space from the Belt almost to the orbit of Saturn, and the planet is the richest in resources of any in the System. The government of the United States of Jupiter hauls other governments about as arrogantly as the planet hauls other matter in the vicinity. The Jupiter standard of living is the highest in the System. This, of course, makes it the planet of choice for refugees throughout the System, refugees it repels with increasing determination that at times borders on savagery. Spirit and I were now being admitted—after a fifteen-year apprenticeship in the Jupiter Ecliptic region of space. We were now legal citizens of Jupiter, entitled to all prerogatives of citizenship, thanks to certain hard-nosed negotiations and the intercession of a special agency, QYV.