Refugee (19 page)

“Then I must be ready,” I said. How any of us were going to choke down what the brave women were serving I didn't know, but it had to be done. Too many sacrifices had already been made for it to be otherwise.

Jupiter Rings, 3-2-'15—I choose not to dwell unduly on the following days. I did get sick, and so did Spirit, but we both came back and tried again, and again, until we were able to retain what we consumed. The meat was perfectly fresh, of course, and clean, for no spoilage occurs in space. The women served it well-cooked in very small portions, so that it was impossible to tell from what part of what animal it might have come. The women ate too, with the same affected unconcern they had evinced after the mass rape. I had always suspected the female sex of being weaker than the male, but I did not think so anymore. Strength is so much more than muscle!

After the first few meals, it was not so bad. I even started helping with the cooking, by foraging for fuel for the fire. First they had used the precious candles saved from the funeral service, but soon these were gone and other combustibles were required. There was wood in the bubble for furnishings, and the packaging for the original food packs was flammable. It was a very small, controlled fire, for we could not afford to overload the air-recirculation system with a lot of pollutants, so we did have enough fuel.

But it was always a grown woman who donned a suit and went outside for more meat; to that extent we children were preserved in our innocence.

Señora Ortega and the other women chose to accept my vision as they had interpreted it. Not one of them broke ranks on this, though I was sure not all of them really believed in supernatural visitations or messages. They knew what had to be done, and they did it without fuss or fanfare, exactly as they had throughout their married lives. What a fundament of strength was thus subtly revealed!

So we survived and even began to regain weight, thanks to the gift of our men. We all knew, I think, that had any of those men been alive to speak their wills, they would have told us to do exactly what we were doing. The bubble had been forged by necessity into one large family, as close as any other, united by a complex of vital compromises and secrets.

We navigated and studied and slept and played games of all sorts, for morale was as important as physical condition. Slowly we drew nigh the primary ring of Jupiter. Now that we knew we would make it, our attitudes improved.

We spent more time staring at Jupiter, swelling to giant size, its cloud bands more prominent than ever, violently coursing past each other with bubble-storms at the interfaces, the details constantly changing in an overall pattern that was unchanging. As we watched, the great red spot came on the horizon, like a monster eye trying to orient on us. Ah, Jove, the ruler of gods! Our hopes expanded in direct proportion to this image in our sky. All would be well once we achieved Jupiter, the kindly colossus of space!

Jupiter, within whose bands of clouds floated so many enormous bubbles, each one a great city spinning like our little bubble for internal gravity, since they could not stay afloat if they used normal gravity. The city-bubbles did not have to worry about vacuum outside, instead they faced the phenomenal pressures of Jupiter's atmosphere. Yet they were the most highly civilized cities in the Solar System, and the life style of ordinary people within them was reputed to be fantastic. We dreamed, a little afraid, and longed for what we hoped would be.

This is not to suggest that everything was smooth now. Conditions of enduring stress and confinement tend to accentuate and at times exacerbate interpersonal relations, and we of the bubble were not exceptional in this respect. All of us shared an unspoken guilt that tended to sublimate itself in those ways that were permitted expression. I have heard sublimation spoken of as a useful alternative to unsocial behavior, but I don't believe that. When an emotion is suppressed, it tends to manifest in something very similar to the forbidden thing, and perhaps sometimes it would be best simply to accept the forbidden instead. Thus we had the smaller children saving their feces and sometimes eating them, mocking the food that could not be identified. That sort of thing. I need not explicate further.

I spent time with Helse openly now, for my father had seemingly blessed our association. No one objected overtly to our sharing a cell, though perhaps there were private qualms. But she and I did fight on occasion, if only because I wanted her to love me, and she would not let herself go that far. To her, the body was a thing to be used as expedient, but the heart was special—which was one reason I wanted her heart. I suppose I was greedy, but that is the way of love.

Spirit, especially, got difficult. She had always been close to me, and remained so, but now she came to resent the time I spent with Helse. It seemed that when Helse had masqueraded as a boy and Spirit had shared the secret, that was all right. She was part of it. But now that Helse was openly female and there was no secret, Spirit felt excluded. I should have been alert to the symptoms, but, as is so often the case, I wasn't paying attention until too late. I was caught up in my own concerns, which were more immediate but less important than the psychological welfare of my sister, until too late. I hope not to make that error again.

Spirit burst in upon us once, when Helse and I were sleeping in our cell in dishabille, though not actually making love. I had discovered that the adolescent fantasy of continuous sexual activity was exactly that: fantasy. Helse would make love any time I asked her to, and, knowing that, I found that usually it was enough just to be near her. Sex is less than love, but more than the act; often mere closeness suffices.

“There you go again!” Spirit cried as we sat up groggily. “Father's gone, Faith's gone, Mother's alone—and you're busy fooling with her!” There was a vicious freighting on the word “fooling”; it was intended as an obscenity, and in that context it became so.

There wasn't much I could say. Of course I was guilty, at other times if not this particular time, and as I just explained, the technical act was only a fraction of it and not worth arguing. I did not want to get angry, because that would proclaim my guilt, but I didn't know how else to react.

Helse handled it with better grace. Her age and experience enabled her to navigate certain difficult passages more readily than I could. “I do not take your brother from you, Spirit,” she said. “I can never do that. You are of his blood and I am not. I do not love him as you do.”

Spirit faced her defiantly. “That's space-crock! You love him more than I do!”

I started to chuckle at her miscue; obviously Spirit had not meant to say that. Prompted by Helse's statement, Spirit had reversed the emphasis, inadvertently arguing against her own interest, as can happen when a person's emotion overrides her tongue.

But Helse reacted as if she had been stabbed. “Oh!” she cried, and scrambled to her feet and up out of the cell, not even pausing for her clothing.

I stared after her. So did Spirit, her anger forgotten. “I vanquished her!” she exclaimed, amazed.

“But you misspoke yourself!” I protested.

Now it was Spirit who reacted oddly. “Oh, I shouldn't have said that! I blabbed her secret!”

“What secret? She doesn't love—”

I stopped, looking at her with a dawning surmise.

Spirit, flustered, reached for the exit panel. “I'd better go try to apologize. I lost my stupid head.”

I caught her, preventing her from going. “You mean she does love me? She always told me she didn't, and my talent enables me to know—”

“Oh, you don't know half what you think you do!” Spirit snapped. “When your emotion is tied in, your talent cuts out!”

She had stabbed me as deeply as she had Helse. I knew immediately that she was correct. I had no basis to judge Helse's state of emotion, because my own was suspect. It was as if I was trying to move a heavy suitcase in free fall: my effort moved me back as much as it moved it forward. I had to be firmly anchored before I could be sure of the effect of my effort. I think the laws of the mind are similar in this respect to the laws of matter.

“She's older than I am,” I said falteringly. “It makes sense that I am less to her than she is to me. If she felt otherwise, why should she deny it?”

“She had to deny it, dummy!” Spirit said. “She thinks men don't love women who love them back. She's always been used by men who only wanted her body, no matter what they said at the time, and when her body changed they didn't want her anymore. So she knew if she really liked someone, she shouldn't ever, ever let on, because—” She wrenched, trying to break free of my hold on her. “Let me go, Hope! I could kill myself! Helse's an awfully nice girl, and I've got to tell her—I don't know what, but I've got to!”

I let her go. I sat against the wall, meditating on what my sister had said. It explained a lot. I should have caught on to it myself, with my vaunted talent for understanding people. But, ironically, this failure was a valuable lesson for me, for it revealed the glaring weakness in my talent. I had to be objective. I resolved never again to make that error.

But I realized that I couldn't patch it up with Helse by trying to reassure her of my undying love; she was constitutionally incapable of believing me. Her past experience could not be left behind. The same thing that made her so well able to please a man made her unable to trust him. Oh, I knew the power of an emotional fixation! I had been ready to swear off sex forever after the rape of Faith, and only Helse's timely and forceful action had turned me about. But I could not reassure her about her own fixation; all I had were words, and she would not believe them. The men who had used her body during her childhood had not harmed her body; they had poisoned her mind. I was way too late to reeducate her subjectivity.

What, then, could I do?

I mulled it over, and finally worked it out. My mother, actually, had shown me the way. The reality of our inner belief does not have to match that of our external professions.

In due course Helse returned. She remained unclothed; probably no one in the bubble had noticed or cared, since I was the oldest male in this limited community. If anyone realized that we were having a difference, that person knew enough not to interfere. She looked resigned.

Evidently Spirit had caught up with her—it could hardly be otherwise, in such limited space—and apologized for blabbing. Spirit could be exceedingly winsome when she was contrite, and surely her apology had been accepted. But Helse believed the damage could not really be undone. She had returned bravely to confirm the disaster.

I gave her no chance. “I must apologize for what my sister did,” I said before Helse could speak. “She said she loved me more than you do, and of course that's true, but it was extremely unkind.”

Helse paused, taken aback. “That isn't what she—”

“Oh, maybe she garbled it,” I said blithely. “But I know you don't love me, and I'm learning to live with that. I'm sorry Spirit misinterpreted—well, she is my sister, and she has a hot little temper, and—”

“But I'm trying to tell you—”

“Please, Helse,” I said, holding out my arms to her. “I need you so much—don't tease me anymore! Let me hope that one day you'll feel about me the way I feel about you. Don't deprive me of that one illusion.”

“Illusion!” she exclaimed. “Hope, I—”

I continued to extend my arms to her. She hesitated, then came to me. I kissed her passionately, and after a moment she responded in kind. We proceeded naturally to the act of love.

Yet there was a certain difference, perhaps I should say diffidence about it, on her part and on mine, because we each knew we were deceiving the other. It may even be that that reservation made the experience sweeter. Certainly, for me, the term “love” was no euphemism for any other thing; love was exactly what it was.

When the desperation of our merging eased, she drew apart a little, her face showing concern. “Hope, this isn't honest. I—”

“Don't say it!” I cut in again. “Leave me with at least the dream that some day you'll change your mind!” I was perhaps overplaying it, and she knew it, but this was a unique situation for me. The message I had for her was other than the one I professed, and she knew it.

She smiled, defeated. “That one illusion,” she agreed, and kissed me softly, and in that single gesture there was more joy than in all our prior congress. We chose to share the illusion of illusion.

Jupiter was now so big that it was no longer an object in space; it was becoming our primary, in perception as well as physics. So close, so close—our ordeal was almost over!

And yet—and yet! If we reached Jupiter and were saved, and found places in that great society—what then of the relation I had with Helse? She would have to report to Kife, or QYV, and who could say what would become of her thereafter? Or the new situation might simply change her attitude. She was a pretty girl and I a mere stripling; she could do better than me, in that society. The illusion of her nonlove for me might turn out to be no illusion there. So I viewed our potential rescue with a certain undercurrent of apprehension, for the love of Helse had become more important to me than life itself. Right now, while we sailed the waves of gravity in space, she was mine.

A day later the Jupiter Patrol found us. At first we feared it was another pirate ship or an opportunist merchanter, but soon we saw the big round Jove circle with the red spot in it, and recognized the lines of a ship of the Space Navy, and knew this was authentic. Contact at last!

They locked on and boarded us. The officer who spoke to us was a sleek, neat, brisk, correct woman.

There would be no sexual solicitation here! “Please identify your origin,” she said in English.

Naturally the representative of the mighty Colossus did not bother to learn the language of mere refugees! But we were in no position to complain. I spoke up, since my English was as facile as any. “We are refugees from Callisto, fleeing the oppression of our government. We seek sanctuary at Jupiter.”

The woman frowned. “Perhaps you people are not aware that there has been an election on Jupiter, and extra-planetary policy has shifted. Political and/or economic refugees are no longer being accepted. You will have to go elsewhere.”