Refugee (20 page)

I was stunned. “But there is nowhere else! We used our last reserves to get here! We are out of food, our batteries for running the life-support systems are low. Our men were killed by pirates, our women raped—” I broke off, realizing that I shouldn't say that. Maybe I could qualify it. “ Some of—”

“Yes, we are familiar with the standard refugee story,” she snapped. “You people expect us to believe that all of space is infested with ancient buccaneers in pirate hats and pantaloons, holding you up at sword-point for gold. This is the twenty-seventh century, and we are not so credulous. We will give you supplies to take you to Europa or Ganymede, and we shall tow you out beyond our territorial limit. That is all. It is high time you moon folk started taking care of your own problems, instead of foisting them off on us.”

Appalled, I translated her words for the others. I could hardly believe it myself. Here we had finally arrived at the political sanctuary of mighty Jupiter, the planet of all our dreams—and were not welcome.

What had happened to the great melting pot of the Solar System!

It is a terrible thing to have one's hopes so brutally dashed. I think we were all in something like a group trance. We stood there unprotesting as the Jupiter work crew swarmed over the bubble, emptying our refuse (muttering in English they thought we could not understand that now they knew we were liars, because we could not have come all the way from Callisto, because the refuse wasn't enough for such a trip), restocking our supply of food packs, replacing our oxygenation units and the batteries for our general environment-maintenance equipment, tuning the gravity-lens generator, and replacing the water-recycling filters. They were so competent it was small wonder that they did not believe we could have made the trip we claimed; we were, after all, only incompetent refugees. They evidently assumed that some ship had towed us here and rehearsed us in the story to tell, in an attempt to play upon sympathy. They were also so efficient they hardly checked the bags tied to the outside of the bubble, assuming them to be junk storage: another evidence of our sloppiness.

Yet we needed all of their help, for only luck had prevented something crucial from failing. But we needed help less than we needed the enormous gift of sanctuary on Jupiter. They were generously giving us trifles instead of the essence. Now they could write up a report about all the good they had done for thankless refugees.

Oh, yes, they were as good as the female officer's word. (I refrain from applying the vernacular description for a female of questionable ethics, tempting as it is.) They towed us out beyond the orbit of Amalthea, to the outer ring, and turned us loose with the admonition not to return to Jupiter territorial space, on pain of being blasted out of it. Poverty-stricken foreign freeloaders, they let us know politely, were not wanted in the decent God-fearing territory of mighty Jupiter. After all, we didn't even speak the language.

Maybe they were bluffing about the blasting-out-of-space. We were unlikely to risk it. Certainly they had the physical capacity to do such a thing. The Jupiter States possessed the mightiest military force in the Solar System, excepting possibly that of the Saturnine Republic.

My mother shook her head as she absorbed my translation, looking abruptly haggard. She had been prepared for anything except this! “And we thought we had known rape!” she said.

I pondered that, and concluded she was right. I may have overstated the phrasing of the Jupiter rejection, for the female officer's speech was always politely delivered, but the essence is accurate. They definitely did not want us. So what could have been more cruel than the abrupt destruction of our aspirations? Physical rape came and went; it was possible to cover it up, to pretend it never happened; but this rejection could never be undone. Now we had, almost literally, nowhere to go. We knew that none of the major moons of Jupiter would give us safe haven. They were all overpopulated, poverty-ridden and oppressed by the autocratic governments that seem to sprout like weeds in the wilderness of the so-called Third System.

Jupiter, in fact if not in theory, hoped that we would simply disappear in space and never appear again.

We were not Jupiter's problem, and we could be ignored.

For this my father had died and my mother had submitted to degradation. For nothing!

I found Helse looking out a port, watching magnificent Jupiter whirl by, shrinking visibly as we were towed from it, like the shrinking of our dream. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she murmured, quoting from memory the historical sonnet, “The New Colossus,” whose tradition the United States of Jupiter supposedly carried on. “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...” She was crying, of course, and so was I.

Space, 3-5-'15—We held a group meeting in due course to discuss our situation. We were the wretched refugee refuse, yearning to breathe free, who had learned the hard way not to believe all that was quoted in the geography texts, but we still had to decide on some course. Where were we to go?

Well, we would not go hungry. We had a full supply of food packs now, courtesy of the surplus stores of rich Jove, and the bodies of our men remained anchored to our hull. I wondered whether the Jupiter Patrol workmen might actually have spotted the nature of those bags and played stupid so as to avoid the awkwardness of having to dispose of them, perhaps even giving them decent burial. It might be politically inexpedient to accept bodies while rejecting living people. Had they inspected those bodies, they would have discovered how they had died, and it would have been more difficult for the Jupiter Patrol to maintain its official ignorance of the pirate problem. Jupiter, like our women, preferred to ignore certain unpleasant realities. Probably they had the physical capacity to deal with the pirates, but lacked the political motivation. It was all understandable—in its sickening fashion.

We knew we could not return to Callisto. Starvation in space would probably be preferable to what the authorities there would do to us to cover their own embarrassment at our very existence. We were, after all, tangible evidence of the failure of their system. They might not care to correct that failure, but they would certainly labor diligently to cover it up. Everywhere, concealment seemed preferable to correction!

Ganymede and Europa were little better. Io was largely uninhabitable, and its few residential domes were reputed to be horribly overcrowded. No salvation there!

That left the outer moonlets—who would hardly be likely to welcome our motley assemblage of women and children. Yet we did have to go somewhere , for we could not live indefinitely in space.

“Hidalgo!” Spirit exclaimed.

Señora Ortega's head turned toward her, and we all paused for consideration. Out of the mouths of babes...

We discussed it. Hidalgo is a planetoid no bigger than Amalthea, in a stretched-out orbit between Mars and Saturn. But it was no ordinary fragment, for a couple of centuries ago Jupiter assumed sovereignty over it, and more recently Hidalgo had become an actual state of the United States of North Jupiter, the only nonplanetary body to be granted that status. It was now a major tourist region. Huge pleasure domes were set on it, spinning on their bases to provide the kind of gravity the tiny planetoid could not.

The population there was not Hispanic, but was polyglot and multiracial. Our kind could surely merge with their kind. There was always work for domestics, and that was one thing our women could handle.

Our children could get superior schooling there and grow up as free citizens. Hidalgo, we reasoned, was so far out from Jupiter proper that the ban against refugees might not apply. Spirit, in her intuitive fashion, had come up with a truly intriguing prospect.

But there were formidable problems. Hidalgo did swing out past Jupiter's orbit, which was the basis for Jupiter's claim in it, but that did not mean it was close to Jupiter physically. It was a tiny, tiny mote in space, virtually impossible to discover by random search with a clumsy bubble. We would need an ephemeris, a detailed listing of the locations of bodies in space and time. These locations were given as triple-coordinate sets, computer-calculated, so that it was possible to pick a precise date and time and get the exact spacial coordinates of the desired object, relative to the sun and its position in the galaxy.

Without the ephemeris, we could look until we died of old age for that grain of sand in the immensity of solar space.

We also did not have a drive system capable of getting us there. The jet we had was barely enough to move us around the Jupiter ecliptic—that is, the plane of the equator and inner moons—and Hidalgo is far outside that. The efficient Jupe workers had recharged our jet, for it, like everything else associated with this bubble, was near exhaustion, but no matter how fresh the jet was, it was grossly insufficient. We needed a powerful ion drive that would accelerate us at a significant fraction of gee, to aid our gravity lenses. To put it in simplest terms: We needed to add a more powerful motor to our sailboat. We could not simply center on a distant speck like Hidalgo and fall in to it; there was not enough gravity there to bring us in within a century or so.

And we needed more supplies: food, oxygen, electricity, all for a much longer journey. Lots of things like that, if we wanted to get there alive.

That was why we decided to raid an outpost on Io. That planet might not be worthwhile to settle on, but it would do just fine for a supply raid. The badlands sections had all sorts of technical facilities for monitoring the volcanoes and radiation intensity and such, and there were many study foundations there performing obscure research. They were well funded and surely had plenty of supplies to spare. Io is the most active planetary body in the Solar System, bar none, and that sort of thing is a magnet for scientists.

We knew they had huge supplies of food and medicine and surplus equipment for every type of bubble and ship. Most important, they had complete libraries of ephemeridae.

I think it did not occur to any of us consciously at that time that what we contemplated was, in fact, piracy. All we knew was that we would die in high space if we did not float to a haven somewhere, and that the Jupe authorities had rejected us. It becomes much easier to justify strong measures, even illegal ones, when your life depends on them.

We also could not afford to doubt that everything we required for our extended journey through space would be available on Io. For if we made our play and did not achieve our needs, we were doomed. We were, in fact, making a gamble whose boldness would have appalled us a month before. Experience had altered our horizons drastically.

The period of revolution for Io is one and three-quarters days. You might think that would make it easy to intercept; just park for a day and wait for it to swing around. But it doesn't work that way. We were in orbit ourselves, and as we knew, orbits are not lightly shifted. So we had to use our precious jet to jockey around, letting Io catch up to us, using its gravity to wrestle us back in line. An expert navigator could have done it in a few hours; it took us two days, but we did get there.

Io was formidable as it loomed close. One volcano was bright shades of yellow, orange, brown, and red. The whole planet looked as if it had been recently scrambled—and, geologically speaking, it had.

You see, Io is not like other worlds. That may be the understatement of this narrative. It resembles them as a maddened sabre-tooth tiger on ancient Earth resembles a sleeping denatured pussycat. Other worlds, such as our own Callisto, may seem almost dead; Io is screamingly alive. The closer we got the more I remembered about it, and the less I liked what we planned. It wasn't the human opposition I feared; it was Io herself.

There's really too much to tell here; I'll try to touch on the essence only. Io, just over four hundred thousand kilometers from Jupiter, should have one face locked on Jupiter, the same way it is with Callisto and the others. But Europa, the next moon out, interferes, forcing Io into an eccentric orbit. That means her circuit isn't round and her velocity isn't constant. She moves at different speeds, and turns her face back and forth as though bothered by someone hovering just behind her shoulder. This has to do with the fundamental physics of the situation. Tidal forces develop, and these are not mere little tugs; it is more like a giant hand squishing an overripe orange, making the juices squirt and the peel buckle. That tidal action generates heat, keeping much of the interior of the planet molten. This in turn means constant change.

New volcanoes keep popping up and spewing out their stuff and dying down, and the ground shifts restlessly. So maps are soon outdated, and no one can really say ahead of time what the details of the landscape will be—especially on the active face facing Jupiter. That's the bad face, the Gorgon-face, the uninhabitable one that spits sulfur in your eye and pollutes that whole region of space with radioactive debris. The one we were headed for.

But what choice did we have?

We glided in. It was night locally, with the inside face away from the sun, but glowing with its own savage vents. Truly, this was Hell we were coming to! Io is one terrible lady.

We floated along at a reasonably safe elevation, looking for our target. We had to select it by night, then hide the bubble and make a foray afoot, so there would be no hint of our intent. We agreed there should be no violence. We were raiding for what we had to have, but we were not criminals. We would pretend to be a scientific party that got isolated by a vagary of volcanic activity—a completely credible story on wild Io!—and once inside the dome, we would hijack the crew, using a mock bomb, and make them provide the supplies we needed. Peaceful hijacking had for centuries been a staple tool for the impoverished desperate.

It was indeed a desperate strategy. But if we won, it would give us our fair chance for refuge. If we lost, at least it would be quick. We had to do it.

We spotted a dome, but it was too small; it wouldn't have enough supplies. We moved on, and spotted another—too large. We didn't want to tackle any more than we had to; even our minimum requirement might prove to be more than we could handle. Finally, near a massive rocky escarpment, we discovered a medium-sized observation dome with several transport bubbles docked beside it. This was our target.

We floated down behind the escarpment, which resembled a wrinkle in that orange I mentioned before and seemed to be an ideal place to hide our bubble. But as we closed on it, we discovered that perspective and darkness had deceived us; this was a far more massive outcropping than thought. It was a mountain range, with the highest peak some eight or nine kilometers tall. Back on Callisto we had seen no hills beyond a few hundred meters high, so this was awesome. None of us had had experience with this exaggerated type of terrain. That is probably why we erred so disastrously.

We landed in a comfortably small niche in the mountain, tucked down well out of sight of the dome we stalked. Even an observation dome with the most powerful telescopes could not see through a mountain of sulfur. We weren't sure we could complete our mission before dawn, so we wanted the bubble to be properly concealed.

Helse and I were in the raiding party, because we spoke English, the common tongue of scientists in this region of space. My mother and Spirit stayed behind with thirty-four women, while twenty-five women formed the raiding party, in addition to the two of us. Señora Ortega led us. I think we all felt the excitement of adventure—but also knew it was grim business. I had heard it said that a person is most truly alive when death is near, and I think there is some truth in it.

Our first problem was getting down to the dome. We had parked near the base of the mountain—but that little ledge of a kilometer or so became abruptly gargantuan when we approached it afoot. Again, we had perceived it as it would have been on Callisto, a very gradual decline, much broader than it was tall.

It was not so. It was the other way around.

The cliff was of sulfur dioxide ice, yellow underfoot. Maybe there was other rock beneath, but that was the surface. It wasn't slippery, fortunately, but it was unfamiliar, and we didn't trust it. There were small cracks and pocks and crevices in its layout, visible in the generous light of Jupiter, but we feared these could mask more dangerous nether flaws in the structure. But we traversed the more or less level portion without untoward event, headed toward the drop-off.

The descent was horrendous. We took one look over that awesome cliff and hastily roped ourselves together like ancient mountain climbers. I think we all suffered from acrophobia in that moment. But we had to get down to the base, where we could proceed on the level to the target dome. We let ourselves down the cliff on the rope, paying it out one person at a time, watching the party leaders step-slide down the steepening slope.

Helse and I were in the middle of the party. Even so, it was one frightening descent. The projecting edges of the mountain were like the blade of a pitted cleaver. We had to chip away the sharp corner and form a niche for the rope, so that it would neither slide nor fray. We wanted it to feed through exactly where and when we wanted it to.

Gravity here seemed to be more than on Callisto, though it is possible our time in low-gee had distorted our perception. Though Io is a smaller moon, it is far more dense. One might suppose that surface gravity would be the same for two worlds of equal mass even if their diameters differed, but that is not so; the smaller one has greater surface gravity, because that surface is closer to the center. So, though Io actually is slightly less massive than Callisto, it is almost twice as dense, and that makes the difference. Io is sized like Earth's lonely moon, but is a little more so in diameter, density, and mass, and a lot more so in activity.

Apart from this, the suits made us clumsy. A suit in vacuum, in a familiar region, is manageable; but in atmosphere and on an awkward surface it becomes more clumsy. There is environmental resistance.

There was very little planetary atmosphere here, but we felt it nonetheless.

But mainly, our problem was the sheer height of our start. I hesitate to repeat myself, but it is difficult even to rationalize the impact this elevation had on us. From space a niche in the foothill of a mountain may seem minor, especially when it is down near the larger plain. But one kilometer is, after all, a thousand meters, and that is awesome up close. It seemed that if we fell, we would fall forever—and somehow, perversely, my apprehension made me almost want to fall, to get it over with. A fall at quarter-gee would not be nearly as ferocious as one at full-gee, but my nervous system had evolved on Earth, and it reacted as it would have on Earth. I was almost paralyzed with the fear of that height.