Refugee (3 page)

Young as I was and inexperienced as I was, I still understood that the sexual drive is superficial compared to the human need for recognition and favor. This man could have bought willing sex elsewhere, or possibly even had it from Faith had he chosen to dazzle her with some costly gift or tour of the realm of the rich. But that would have lacked the cutting edge of this little drama. The thing a person works for has more value than the thing too easily obtained. Also, it seemed to be a requirement of his need that the girl he got be inferior, someone to be coerced in an alley rather than wooed like a lady. A certain kind of upbringing fosters that attitude. To that type of perception, sex could not be enjoyable unless it was dirty.

Meanwhile I dodged again, not allowing my thoughts to interfere with the immediate business of self-preservation. The scion shifted to face me again, satisfied to bide his time while Faith watched. Now I was fielding information about him: the way he moved, the standard procedure he employed, the glances he made at Faith to be sure he was sufficiently impressing her. He was larger and stronger and healthier than I, but not actually faster, and certainly not more versatile. He was using no imagination in his attack, relying solely on basic moves. He was in fact limited by his arrogant attitude and his certainty of success.

He came at me a third time, and I ducked a third time—but this time I did not dodge aside. I launched myself at his knees, tackling him, my shoulder striking his thigh in front and shoving him back. The force of my strike and the surprise of my attack gave me an advantage I lacked in conventional combat. But this was not convention; this was the street. The rules were not exactly what the scion might have been taught, here.

The scion stepped back, surprised, but did not fall. He had maintained good balance, as he had been trained to do, and it is in fact very hard to dump a balanced opponent. But he had lost his poise. As I had anticipated, he was unprepared to deal with atypical strategy. The odds remained uneven, but not as much so as before.

I scrambled away before he could adjust and club me. I had hoped to dump him on his back, but simply lacked the force. Still, my confidence grew, and I began to hope I could after all take him. I have always been an excellent judge of people, whether that judgment is positive or negative; it is my special talent.

This was now my key to victory. An opponent understood is an opponent potentially nullified. Had this one simply gone after me with full force at the outset, he should have pulverized me; because he preferred to posture, he had given me opportunity to utilize my own strength.

The scion came at me another time, shaken and angry. He had intended on object lesson; now he was serious. I had heightened the stakes.

He feinted with his left hand as usual, expecting me to duck again. Instead I pulled back. His knee came up in a manner that would have cracked my chin, had I performed as before. As it was, it missed—and I stepped in to grab his leg.

I had learned this early: A person on one foot is largely helpless. This is a liability of such martial arts as karate or kick-boxing; blows with the feet are powerful, but if the other party gets hold of a foot, that's trouble. I hung on, preventing him from recovering his balance while staying out of the reach of his fists.

He hopped about on his other foot, absolutely furious at his loss of dignity, especially with Faith watching, but unable to do much about it. His training evidently had not covered the handling of such an exigency.

Spirit tittered, which didn't help.

I had him, but I didn't know what to do with him. I couldn't really hurt him in this position, and the moment I let go I would be in trouble. It was like riding the tiger: how does one safely get off?

Of course he could have broken my hold quickly by lying down and grappling for my own feet. But I knew he wouldn't do that; it was counter to his self-image. That was my advantage of understanding again.

But I had grown too confident myself and made an error. I had not judged what he would do if trapped in a position of indignity.

The scion reached into his shirt and brought out a miniature laser weapon. It flashed, and the beam seared into my left side, causing my shirt to smoke and burning a line across my flesh. I yelped and let go, for I had to get clear of that beam before it penetrated to an inner organ and cooked it. A laser can do a lot more damage than shows, because of the invisible heat-ray component. It doesn't have to vaporize the flesh to make it useless.

The man made an exclamation of victory and stalked me, aiming his laser. It scorched my buttock, making me leap out of the way. He laughed. I could not dodge that beam of light!

If I fled him, not only would I lose the fight, but Faith would be subject to his will. If only she had fled when I gave her the chance! If I did not depart, he would soon score on my face, perhaps destroying my vision. I was in real trouble!

Then the scion cried out and dropped the laser. I took immediate advantage of his distraction and charged in to the attack. Those burns had eradicated any faint reticence I might have had. I stiffened my fists and clubbed him on ear and neck as hard as I could.

He fell back, seeming hardly to notice my blows though I knew they stung. He bent to pick up his weapon with his left hand, and I kneed him in the nose, exactly the way he had intended to knee me before. In a moment blood was flowing across his face. The laser skittered away from his misdirected hand.

He turned, one hand to his face, cupping the blood, and jumped for his saucer. It lurched upward; it seemed he still had sufficient command of his body to control it. In a moment he was gone.

Now I looked at Spirit, realizing what she had done. “You used your finger-whip!” I cried as though accusing her.

She smiled smugly, whirling her finger to re-coil her weapon. The finger-whip was a spool of translucently thin line that hooked to her middle finger. When she flicked her digit just so—she had practiced this diligently in private—the weighted tip carried the line out rapidly to its full length of a meter.

That, plus the reach of her arm, gave her a fair striking distance. Invisible the whip might be, but she could snap coins out of the air with it. That line could really sting, and sometimes cut into the skin. Spirit had savaged the scion's weapon hand, disarming him.

It had not been a fair tactic—but of course the laser itself had not been fair. She had rescued me from a nasty situation. This was not the first time, though it was the most significant.

I decided to drop the matter. Children were not supposed to have weapons, but Spirit had won the whip on a bet a year before and had made a point of mastering it. She had become the junior champion of the schoolyard, partly because of her finesse with her finger and partly because of her indomitable fighting spirit. Oh, yes, she lived up to her name! Once she had been tagged four times by an agile whip opponent, suffering scours on a leg, both arms, and one ear, but only came on more intensely, until her opponent, a boy of her own age, had lost his nerve and yielded the issue without being struck himself. He had realized that if he continued, Spirit would score, and her flicks had already come so near his eyes that it was obvious that discretion was the better part of valor. Pain could make her scream; it could not make her yield. Nerve, not skill, had won her that battle—but since then her skill had increased. Of course a finger-whip is a little thing, not capable of dealing death—but I knew from that time on that I never wanted to have my little sister truly angry with me. I had never betrayed her secret and neither had Faith, and we were not about to now.

“We had better not tell our folks about this incident,” I said, picking up the scion's laser and pocketing it after noting that its charge gauge read about half. Several good burns remained in it. Now I had a secret weapon too, and the others would keep my secret.

Silently, Spirit nodded acquiescence. I put my arm around her small shoulders and hugged her, my thanks for her help. She melted against me, letting down now that it was over. However tough she was in combat, she did need emotional support, and this I could offer. We understood each other.

Faith came out of her stasis. “You shouldn't have done that, Hope,” she reproved me shakily.

I exchanged another glance with Spirit. We both knew Faith's naïveté was a necessary aspect of her self-image. “I guess I got carried away.”

“Did you see his nose splat!” Spirit said enthusiastically.

“I didn't really mean to do that,” I admitted. “I was aiming for his chin, but he went down too fast.”

“All that blood!” Faith said, horrified. She seemed oblivious of what could have happened to her had we not driven the scion off, and this was just as well.

Faith had some clothing-patching material that she kept for possible emergencies in connection with her dress. She used this to repair and conceal the damage the laser had done to my clothes. The burns on my flesh would simply have to heal.

We hurried on home, and by the time we got there Faith, too, had agreed that it was best that we not mention this incident to our parents.

Maraud, 2-2-'15—They came resplendent in the military uniform of the Maraud police, delivering the foreclosure on our property. I mentioned the debt and mortgage our father took on to insure an education for his children. He was in arrears on the payments, of course, because all peasants were. That was the way of life on Callisto.

My father, Major Hubris, was an intelligent man with minimal formal education. He knew very well that the big landowners were systematically cheating the peasants, but didn't know how to stop it. I had progressed far enough in my education to have a fair notion of the situation, and was confident that by the time I reached maturity I would be able to set about reversing the downward trend for our family. But until that time, the Hubrises were vulnerable—and that vulnerability had abruptly been exploited.

Foreclosure—that finished us before we could begin to fight back.

We had three days to vacate, unless we could pay off the mortgage in its entirety before that deadline.

Of course we could not. People do not get into debt if they have the wherewithal to escape it. That clause of the contract is an almost open mockery of the hopes of the peasants. If there had been any reasonable hope of paying on demand, you can be sure the landowners would have passed a law to eliminate that hope.

My father put in a call to our creditor, who had been reasonably tolerant before. This was Colonel Guillaume, of an ancient military family, now retired to his wealth and not really a bad person as creditors went. That is, he cheated the peasants less than some creditors did, treated them with reasonable courtesy, and did seem to have some concern for their welfare. The colonel did not speak to my father personally, of course; the secretary of one of his administrative functionaries handled that matter. That was all we had any right to expect.

“Why?” my father asked, and I perceived the baffled hurt in his voice. "Why foreclose with no warning?

Have we not behaved well? Did I make some error in the tally? If I have given any offense, I shall proffer my most abject apology."

I did not like hearing my father speak this way. To me he had always been strong, the master of the household, a column of strength. Now his darkly handsome face showed lines and sags of confusion and defeat, as though the column were cracking and crumbling under a sudden, intolerable and inexplicable burden. His newly apparent weakness frightened and embarrassed me and made my knees feel spongy and my stomach knot. I saw little beads of sweat on his forehead and shades of gray in his short, curly hair. But his hands bothered me more, for now the strong fingers clenched and unclenched spasmodically behind his back, out of the view of the secretary in the phone-screen but in full view of my eyes, and the tendons flexed along the back of his hand as if suffering some special torture of their own. But most of all it was his voice that bothered me: that cowed, self-effacing, almost whining tone, as if he were a cur submitting to legitimate but painful discipline, sorry not so much for the strike of the rod on his flesh as for the infraction that caused this punishment to be necessary. I had never before seen him this way and wished I were not seeing it now. A bastion of my self-esteem, rooted ineluctably in my perceived strength of my father, was tumbling. This is an insidiously unpleasant thing for a child. It is as if he stands upon bedrock and then experiences the first tremor of the earthquake that will destroy his house.

The secretary was female, of low degree, not unsympathetic, but compelled by her own employment to deliver the cruel response. “The Hubris account is three months in arrears on payments—”

“Of course,” my father cut in, showing at least this token of mettle. “We are all behind on payments. But I am due for a promotion to tallyman for my quadrant, and that will enable me to recover a month this year, perhaps two months if there is no sickness in the family—” He paused, disliking the sound of his own voice pleading. “The honored colonel must have some more specific reason—”

The girl looked at him sadly. “There is another message, but I don't think I should read it.”

My father smiled grimly. “Read it, girl; you know I cannot.” Actually, he was partly literate, having taught himself a little by looking at Faith's homework assignments, but he preferred not to have this generally known. Ninety percent of the peasant population was illiterate and most of the rest were not clever readers, and it seemed the big landowners and politicians preferred it that way. Literacy could lead to peasant unrest. In this, I was sure, the authorities of Callisto were quite correct. Illiteracy meant ignorance, and ignorance was more readily malleable.

How was it, then, that Faith and Spirit and I had been permitted to enroll in one of the few good schools, expensive as it was? There had to have been a bribe, making it more expensive yet. I had never inquired about that and never would; if we children had our secrets to preserve, so also did our parents have theirs. I knew that if my father had done it, there had been no other way.

The girl frowned. “If you insist, señor.” She was being overly polite, for peasants were normally not dignified by the title “señor,” or, as it is in English, “mister.” Peasants were supposed merely to be things rather than people. “It seems to be a notification of a charge of truancy and abuse against your children,”

she said, looking at the document.

“My children!” he exclaimed, baffled. “Surely, señora, there is some mistake!”

“B. Sierra, scion of a leading family, has lodged a charge of unwarranted aggression against the children of Hubris,” she said apologetically.

Suddenly it made awful sense. I looked at Spirit, who nodded. We were to blame! We should have told our father, instead of concealing the episode. I had never thought the boorish scion would report us. It should embarrass him too much to have it known that a fifteen-year-old peasant boy and twelve-year-old peasant girl had balked his attempted rape of their older sister.

“I cannot believe this,” my father said. “My children are well behaved. I have sent them to school beyond the mandatory age—”

“The charge is that they made an unprovoked attack on him as he passed on his grav-disk. He took a fall, smashing his nose, but managed to recover his disk and get away. Because they are only children, he is not demanding criminal action, but they must vacate the city.” I wondered, as I heard that, whether that could be all there was to it. If the scion had been angry enough to make a formal complaint, he must seek more revenge than our departure.

My father turned to look at me. He saw the guilt on my face. “Thank you, señora,” he said to the screen.

“I did not properly understand my situation.”

“The colonel says he is sure it is a misunderstanding,” the girl said quickly. “But it is better for you to leave. It is awkward to offend such a family as this. The colonel will make a domicile available for your family at the plantation—”

“The colonel is most kind. We shall consider.” The call closed and the screen faded.

Spirit and I both started to speak as we returned to our house from the pay-phone station, while Faith blushed. My father silenced us all with a raised palm. “Let me see if I have this correctly,” he said, with a calm that surprised me. Now that he had a better notion of the problem, it seemed, he had more confidence about dealing with it. “The young stud floated up and accosted Faith, and you two fought him off.”

Silently, I nodded.

“The scion burned Hope with his laser,” Spirit said. “We had to do something.”

My father looked at me again, and I pulled out my shirt and showed the burn streak on my left side, now bright red and painful. It was a certain relief to have this known, for I had had to keep myself from flinching when I moved my arm.

He sighed. “I suppose it was bound to happen. Faith is too pretty.”

Faith blushed more deeply, chagrined for her liability of beauty. She was the lightest-skinned among us, strongly showing that portion of our ancestry that was Caucasian, and which accounted in part for her pulchritude. I never understood why beauty should not be considered equal according to every race of man, and every admixture of races, but somehow fairness was the ideal. Spirit's developing features of face and body were almost as good as Faith's, but her darker skin and hair would prevent her from ever being called beautiful.

I was perversely glad to see the tension relieved. “You're not angry?”

“Certainly I'm angry!” my father exploded. "I am infuriated with the whole corrupt system! But we are victims, not perpetrators. I only wish you had found some more anonymous way to defend your sister.

We are about to pay a hideous price for this mishap."

I felt the rebuke keenly. How could I have saved Faith without antagonizing the scion? I didn't know, and now it was too late to correct the matter, but I knew I would be pondering it until I came up with a satisfactory, or at least viable, answer. Actually, “hideous price” turned out to be an understatement, but none of us had any hint of that then.

“Now I must explain our situation,” my father said. My mother had quietly joined us as we returned to our house, our forfeited house, and now she sat beside Faith and took her hand comfortingly.

My mother's given name was Charity, and it was an apt designation, though it did not match the normal run of names any more than the rest of ours did. We were a family somewhat set apart, being, I think, more intelligent and motivated than most, and it showed in our names. Our surname, Hubris, meant, literally, the arrogance of pride; it was a point of considerable curiosity to me how we had come by it, but I also had a certain arrogant pride in it, for it did lend us distinction.

My mother, Charity, was not, and had never been, as pretty as Faith was now, but she was a fine and generous and supportive mother who, though I should blush to say it, still possessed more than a modicum of sex appeal. She was not a creature any man would be ashamed to have at his elbow. We three children were as different from our parents and each other as it was feasible to be; yet Charity's charity encompassed all our needs. She had a very special quality of understanding, an aspect of which I believe I inherited; but her use of it was always positive, in contrast to mine. Seeing her now, her dark hair tied back under a conservative kerchief, her delicate hands folded sedately in her lap—Faith inherited those hands!—her rather plain features composed—yet should she ever take the trouble to enhance herself the way Faith did, that plainness would vanish—I felt an overflowing of love that lacked, at the moment, any proper avenue of expression. She was my mother, a great and good woman though a peasant, and I sorely regretted bringing this affliction to her. Had I only known—yet of course I should have known! How could I have thought we could humiliate a scion with impunity, here in a dome on class-ridden, stratified Callisto?

“Colonel Guillaume has offered us a place in the plantation dome,” my father said. “We must consider this offer on its merits, which are mixed. We must move from the dome of Maraud; the charge against our family can only be abated that way.” He held his hand aloft again, forestalling Spirit's impetuous interjection. “Yes, dear, I'm sure the incident was not as the scion states it, and theoretically in a court of law both sides should be heard. But our republic of Halfcal—” Callisto, I must clarify, is actually two nations, of which ours is the lesser. Thus the other is called the Dominant Republic of Callisto. But I interrupt my father's speech: "—is weighted toward the wealthy, and it would be your word against his.

There would be no justice there! We have been given the chance to avoid such a legal confrontation, and indeed we must avoid it, for it would surely lead to penalties we can't pay, and therefore prison." Spirit subsided; she grasped the distinction between the ideal and the practical when it was explained to her.

No peasant ever prevailed in an encounter with the elite class. The whole system was engineered to prevent that.

“The advantage of the plantation,” my father continued, making a fair presentation, for he always tried to be fair and usually succeeded, “is that that is my place of employment. I would no longer have to make the daily trips between domes, and that would save time and money. I could be with my family more, and perhaps begin to gain on our mortgage arrears.” He smiled tiredly. “I should clarify that even though we are being foreclosed and evicted, our debt remains as a lien against our family line, and must eventually be cleared if we are ever to achieve higher status. There will be a rental on the plantation domicile; the good colonel did not get rich by being foolish about such details. But it will be a convenient and pleasant accommodation.” He paused, and we knew there would be another side to this. There was always another side to anything in Callisto that seemed too positive for a peasant family.

“The disadvantage is that the coffee plantation is maintained at half Earth gravity. I am not sure you children quite appreciate what that means. Half gravity may be fun for occasional play, and it is possible to spend several hours in it each day without harm, but permanent residence within it is deleterious to human health. The living bones decalcify and weaken, until it is no longer possible for a person to survive in normal Earth gravity, such as is maintained in the dome of Maraud. The process is gradual and painless, and harmless as long as residence in that gravity is maintained; it is the body's natural accommodation to the changed environment. It would be possible to return to full Earth gravity within a year, physically, though with some discomfort, but it becomes more difficult with time, and after two years no one returns.”

“But—” Spirit burst out.

My father nodded. “It is, as my daughter points out, no temporary choice we are making today. If we go to live in the plantation dome, we shall have an easy and peaceful life, for we can be sure no scions reside there, but our branch of Hubris will never be anything but coffee handlers. It is not a bad employment; there is honor in doing any job well, and half our national export is coffee—but we should never again have any choice. Now, it would be possible to ferry you children to school in Maraud for the rest of the current term, but after that you would have to join us full time at the plantation, for your scholastic district will be there. Unless we arrange to have you legally separated from the family—”