Refugee (4 page)

“No!” my mother exclaimed. That ended that; she would tolerate almost anything for the sake of family unity except the dissolution of it. Family is important to us of Callisto; we are, as I explained, a Latin breed, reputed to be hot-blooded, and in this respect perhaps we are. Whatever we did we would do together, as a family. It was our weakness and our strength.

My father glanced at Faith, giving the eldest child leave to speak. But Faith wrung her hands without opinion. “Whatever you decide, Father.”

He glanced next at me. I was naturally bursting with questions, but had to settle for one: “We have to get out of Maraud. The coffee dome isn't good. Where else can we go?” It was really half rhetorical, for the planet outside the domes was airless and trace-gravity. The only place to go was another dome city, in the other half of the planet, the Dominant Republic, where there would be no charge outstanding against the Hubris family. But I knew from my school studies that the Dominant Republic was just as hard on peasants as Halfcal was—and we had no connections there. No job, no friends, no residence. If they admitted us at all, which was doubtful, we might just be worse off than we were here.

There was a silence, as each of us turned the grim reality over individually.

“Jupiter!” Spirit exclaimed.

My father glanced questioningly at her.

“We can emigrate to Jupiter,” she explained. “We can bubble off from Callisto and float to the big planet where everyone is welcome and everyone is rich, and be happy ever after.”

My father did not suppress her foolish notion directly; that was not his way. Instead he asked her leading questions, letting her find her own way toward the truth. “What bubble did you have in mind?”

“Well—” she faltered. “There are tourist and trade bubbles, aren't there? And big freight bubbles.” She turned to Faith. “You've taken Contemporary Economics in school, haven't you? Don't bubbles go through the whole Jupiter System all the time?”

“Yes,” Faith said. “But the moons of Jupiter are mostly Latin, while most of the commerce is done by United Jupiter, which is mostly Saxon. We don't speak the same language—that is, our people speak Spanish and theirs speak English—and they don't like our governments, what with the Saturnian bias of Ganymede and the dictatorships of Europa and Callisto.”

“ We don't like our governments!” Spirit blurted. “That is why we want to leave!”

“And we, the Hubrises, do speak their language,” I put in, warming to Spirit's notion as I got into it.

“That's the big advantage of the schooling we had. Faith and I can write it, too.”

“But Charity and I cannot,” my father pointed out. “Still, the Colossus of North Jupiter does claim to accept freedom-seeking refugees, and there are many Latins settled there. We could probably find some bubbles there that conduct much of their business in Spanish, or at least are bilingual. But that's academic; the Halfcal government would never grant us leave to emigrate.”

“Why not?” Spirit demanded, “They want to get rid of us, don't they? They should be happy to help us on our way.”

My father shook his head. “Not so, child. They have assorted international agreements and covenants that restrict free emigration, and in any event Halfcal would hardly care to advertise that its own people are eager to leave. They may want us gone, but they won't let us go.”

“I always knew our government was crazy,” Spirit said, pouting.

“There's a way,” I murmured hesitantly.

All eyes centered on me. “What, flap our arms and fly there?” Spirit inquired skeptically.

That angered me. I made a motion of sticking someone in the posterior with a pin, and Spirit jumped, and that diluted my anger, for she always did play our little games well. “A bootleg bubble,” I explained.

“There's one hiding in Kilroy Crater, in the Valhalla complex, right now, just waiting for a full load.”

My father whistled. “You children have sources of information the government lacks?”

“Well, it's just gossip,” I admitted. “But I believe it.”

“The government knows about it,” Faith said. “They just don't care. They consider it pirate business.”

Pirate business. That suggested volumes. Callisto had first been settled by Spanish-speaking colonists five centuries ago, who brought in slave labor to work in the first plantation domes. Then French-speaking buccaneers raided Halfcal and used it as a base for their operations. The name of our great city, Maraud, is a legacy of that period. In due course the slaves revolted. There were massacres, and finally, two centuries ago, the buccaneers were expelled. But their influence remained in this area, barely covert, and it was said that modern pirates of space had influence in the Halfcal government.

Certainly there was a lot of pirate money around from the illicit drug trade, and we all knew the corrupting power of money. So it was not surprising that officials winked at innocuous or even illegal activities. I doubted that pirates were actually involved in refugee bubbles, for there could not be much money in that, but certainly individual entrepreneurs could be.

“You would go on such a bubble, rather than to the coffee dome?” my father asked, and I grasped now that he had not really been surprised by the suggestion. Adults, too, had their private sources of information.

“Oh, sure,” Spirit agreed immediately. “It would be fun!”

Oh, my Lord, how little she knew!

“There could be danger and discomfort,” my father warned.

“But if the family stayed together—” my mother said.

That was, I believe, the turning point. After that we found ourselves committed to the exodus.

We would flee Callisto!

I have only an inkling of what my father did to organize for our horrendous trek across the surface of Callisto. (I have not run a dateline for this entry because it follows the last without change of locale. A foolish consistency, as Señor Emerson said many centuries ago, is the hobgoblin of little minds.) Probably he did not want us to know, for it could hardly have been completely legal. Officially, we were preparing to vacate the premises; actually, we meant to vacate the planet.

All of our private holdings were liquidated on the gray market and the money used to buy third-hand surface suits for each of us, together with compact food packs and water filters. There was enough left over to cover the down payment on a junky low-gravity transporter.

That was all. We could not keep our toys and dolls and treasured books. Surface suits had very little room for extra things, even if we hadn't needed the pittances the sale of those things brought. Spirit tried hard to conceal her tears, no longer quite so thrilled about the journey, and I went bleakly about the business of cashing in. We knew what was at stake.

I kept the laser pistol, however, squeezing it into an exterior pocket, and I knew Spirit kept her finger-whip.

As far as I know, no final payment was made on the mortgage. It was not that we sought to cheat Colonel Guillaume, who had done the best he could for us within the limits of his philosophy, but that the foreclosure already represented a fair profit for him, since we had built up a fair equity over the years which he would not have to transfer to the coffee-plantation residence. Perhaps he knew what we intended and did not report us to the authorities for that reason. As long as his hands were technically clean and he made a fair profit, he did not mind our effort to seek a better life elsewhere. Certainly he could have stopped us, had he wished to.

We left at night, in order to avoid any police watch. Again, it would not have been possible to escape the dome of Maraud if the authorities had really cared to prevent us. But we were only peasants; they were hardly concerned if we took it upon ourselves to depart the good life we supposedly had here.

I should explain that leaving a dome is no simple matter. Callisto is an airless world, terraformed only in particular spots. It is the same with all the moons of Jupiter, and indeed throughout the Solar System other than Earth. The domes are made of huge bubbles grown in the massive atmosphere of Jupiter, floated to the local surface by means of standard antigravity shields, cut in half, and cemented to surface plates. The fit had to be strong and tight, or the pressure of the air inside would blow the dome apart and right off Callisto. So entrance and egress were only by air locks, and these were not carelessly supervised. The city-dome of Maraud is 1.3 kilometers in diameter, so that each of its 100,000

(approximately) inhabitants can have a floor space of at least ten square meters. Of course family units like ours increased their effective floor space by living in two-story homes. Anyway, there were only two locks big enough for vehicles, and only one of these functioned at night, so that part of our course was set.

Mother and the girls bundled down in the cargo cage, while I got to sit up front with my father. I know this is teen-age foolishness, but it made me feel important, and I felt as if I were a real adventurer in the control cabin of a sleek Jupiter Navy spaceship, copiloting through the starry galaxy. Of course Navy ships do not cruise the galaxy; the relativistic limitation confines mankind largely to his own Solar System.

Still, this was the way my imagination went. Imagination allows more leeway than does reality, which is perhaps why we come equipped with it. What a horror it would be to be forever restricted to reality!

“Special order of garbage,” my father called out to the technician in charge of the lock. That damped my fantasy somewhat; garbage is not exactly the stuff of high adventure. Still, this too was a kind of fantasy.

At least I prefer that description to the alternative of calling my father a liar.

My father proffered a folded paper. The technician took the paper and glanced at it. It was a standard twenty-dollar bill, an obvious bribe. “The authorization seems to be in order,” the man agreed, pocketing it. “Get that garbage well away from here.” He pressed the buttons and the air-lock panel slid clear.

The “garbage” of course was my mother and two sisters, hunched in the cage with our limited supplies. I wondered whether they appreciated the humor.

My father drove on. It was a pedal car, of course, as few motors operated conveniently in a vacuum and very little power was needed on the airless, low-gravity surface. Inside the dome the pollution of ordinary motors was unacceptable and distances were short, so the pedalers made sense there too. It occurred to me that the dome of Maraud was very like an ancient walled city, small and crowded but secure from the enemies without. In this case the enemies were vacuum and low gravity and terrible cold. This was also one reason that projectile weapons were not used inside the dome; the substance of the dome could reflect a laser beam fairly harmlessly, but a powerful enough projectile just might make a hole, and such a nightmare was not to be risked.

We secured our suits, which hung on us awkwardly, made sure the three in back were secure, and sealed our helmets. The lock panel slid closed behind us, the warning klaxon sounded, and the air pressure dropped. I had been outside the dome before, of course, on field trips in school, so I knew what to expect. But this time it was excitingly real, for we planned never to return. There was no hospital tank along to rescue us if we suffered a suit blowout, and no home for us to relax in if we turned back.

They might not even open the lock for us. We were committed with an uncompromising finality that awed me in a somewhat squeamish manner.

Faith sat up suddenly in the cage, pointing to her left leg. That leg was not very shapely in the suit, but that was not the point. A thin plume of vapor jetted from a pinhole there. Hastily my mother slapped a seal patch on it, pressing it tightly in place. These were old, battered suits, which was why we had been able to afford them. Some problems were to be expected—but this served to remind me, as if I needed reminder, that the danger was real and immediate. If any of us suffered a full-scale blowout, that person would be lost.

Our suits inflated and grew taut as the last of the air went, without any other problem. Fortunately there is not much actual force behind a pinhole leak, and an external patch can readily contain it. I gave a silent sigh of relief.

The outer panel on the lock slide open and we pedaled out onto the barren surface of Callisto. We were truly on our way!

The distaff contingent of our spaceship (as I fancied it) sat up and more or less joined us once we were clear of the lock. We could not readily talk with each other, for these primitive suits lacked radios, and of course there was no atmosphere to conduct our sound. But there was sound; it was conducted through the vehicle and our suits. We heard, as it were, through the seats of our pants. It wasn't very clear, since there was also the rattling of the pedal car, but it was better than silence.

Spirit leaned forward over the top of the cage and touched her helmet to mine. “Isn't this fun?” she cried, so loud that I jerked my head away. Head-to-head conduction was much more efficient! “Valhalla, here we come!” That last was through the seat, much dimmer.

Valhalla is the monstrous system of concentric rings associated with a huge old crater, extending out about fifteen hundred kilometers from its center—a significant fraction of the planet's surface. Maraud is about one hundred kilometers outside that formation, and the bootleg bubble was hidden in an old crater hangar about two hundred kilometers within it, so we had a good three hundred kilometers to go. We could travel up to forty or fifty kilos per hour in this trace gravity, however, so that was all right.

The city domes, you see, use gravity lenses to concentrate gravity inside them, bringing it up to Earth norm, what we simply call gee. This is actually another aspect of the gravity shielding used to make saucers float above ground and bubbles float between planets. There is no such thing as blocking out gravity, but it can be diluted or intensified in limited regions by the lenslike shields, somewhat the way light itself can be affected by a properly curved lens. That's a considerable oversimplification; the actual science of gravity manipulation is far too complex for an amateur like me to comprehend. But I am sure that gravity variation is the key to the human colonization of the Solar System, because it makes both travel and residence feasible anywhere in space. Not easy, understand, but feasible, because of the enormous savings in energy required for these activities.

My mind reviewed what I had learned in school, for it was suddenly more relevant to my immediate existence. The human species had originated on the Planet Earth, but population had expanded voluminously until there really wasn't room for everyone. For reasons that weren't entirely clear to me, this caused people to react violently, and they were afraid there would be a bad nuclear war that would destroy everything. But then the discovery of gravity shielding, popularly and not too accurately called antigravity or null-gee, had enabled the extra people to emigrate to the other planets and moons of the Solar System, and the threat of internecine war had faded for a while.

For a while—that is a significant qualification. According to my history texts, the crush of overpopulation on Earth and diminution of resources had been set back by some five or six hundred years. As it happens, those years have passed, and we are now back to the point, population/resource-wise, where we were just before the discovery of the technique of gravity manipulation. So we face the problem again—only this time grav-shielding isn't enough to abate it. That makes me nervous, when I think about it.

The early colonization of the Solar System proceeded rapidly, for the shields enabled man to hoist huge masses into space. The problem of air and food and water remained, however, so there were limits. It was like man's discovery of the lever: It enabled him to multiply his force, but not indefinitely. One enterprising company had fitted a gravity lens to an ocean liner and sailed it through the air. But it was clumsy outside its natural element, subject to errant winds, and when it sailed too high, the passengers suffered from the thinning of the air. Airplanes had similar problems, actually, as they flew beyond the normal atmosphere. Efficient as an airplane may be in air, it becomes clumsy in vacuum, for its wings cannot plane through nothing. So in the end the compact, simple, tough bubble became king of space.

From the outside a bubble most resembled a planetoid with portholes, or a little round meteor with craterlets on it, but inside it was a temporary world.

Bubbles floated out to all the other planets and moons and fragments, carrying gravity lenses and construction equipment that could operate in a vacuum. Bases were established throughout the Solar System in the course of the first century following the null-gee discovery. New nations sprang up in the likeness of old, as individual Earthly governments operated competitively to establish their domains in space. The American continents of Earth centered on the richest prize, the gross planet Jupiter and its moons, while the Asians settled for the next-greatest prize, beautiful Saturn, with its rings and many small moons. The smaller or more distant planets, considered less desirable, were left to the lesser powers of that day: the Africans, who got the hot inner worlds of Venus and Mercury; the Europeans, who got Uranus; the Moslem states, who got Neptune and its oil-rich satellite Triton, and the remainder somewhat haphazardly distributed among other special interests. A number of the other powers claimed shares of frigid Pluto and its satellite Charon, hoping eventually to discover and exploit rich resources there. There was no established population on Charon or Pluto, however; they were just too far out, and the sunlight there was too dim to be usable for power.

This was part of the education I had suffered in school, which I now parrot back as if it represented original thinking on my part. Would it were so! I happen to have a flair for geography, so I did well, but most of my fellow students professed to find it boring. I could make fairly precise matchings of each planet or moon with an equivalent political entity of six hundred years before on Earth; no one else saw any point in such a game, and I can't honestly claim it is more than idle entertainment.

Oops—did I write that the Moslems of Earth took Neptune? I would have flunked that question on an exam! Already my school learning fades and becomes confused. It was Mars the Moslems took; Neptune was—let me think now—that went to the Australians. Yes, now I have it straight!

I experienced queasiness that interrupted my chain of thought described above. I tend to think too much, as I may have confessed before. “Say, fun!” Spirit exclaimed brightly against my helmet. “We're passing out of the lens!”

True enough. The lens concentrated gravity in Maraud to Earth normal, but outside the dome gravity thinned out, since this was the depressed area three or four times as broad as the dome. Gravity doesn't come from nothing, after all. Now we were coming into the true natural surface attraction of Callisto, which was a little more than a quarter Earth norm. From one gee to one-tenth gee to one-quarter gee—it was vaguely like riding ocean waves. I have not had direct experience with any large body of water, but can imagine it. Maybe we were riding gravity waves.

The outer surface of Callisto is bleak, barren, and frankly, dull. Our world is the most heavily cratered significant body in the Solar System, for the past billion years of new meteoric strikes have only replaced old craters with new ones, not changing the total number. One might suppose this would make for a singularly variegated terrain, but that is not so. Right here on the surface it simply wasn't that interesting.

On other planets there may be deep oceans and high, jagged peaks; not so Callisto and our sister planet Ganymede. These are two iceball worlds, of low overall density because of the ice, and, though the surface is crusted with rock and dust, the thick mantle of ice below prevents any really spectacular mountains from forming.