I may be presenting this as more coherent than it was. I am human; I seek to flatter myself and tend to avoid what damages my self-image, however much I try to be objective. So if this narrative is a construct of favorable distortions, it is as it must be in order to exist at all. This narrative is itself therapy, clarifying the elements of my existence and thereby enabling me to accept them with lesser abrasion than otherwise. My talent is judgment of others; to this degree I try to judge myself, however suspect my result may be. So I may record a somewhat enhanced version of my nadir, and wish it had been so. Without a certain amount of beneficial illusion, very few people would survive.
I put away my grief for necessary periods and did what had to be done, and gradually these portions of equilibrium lengthened. I helped the survivors bury the dead on the hull, all except Helse; others did that, for I could not look upon her ravaged face. They buried her in her wedding gown, saving only the little cloth tag with the name HELSE HUBRIS; that they gave to me as the final physical memento. Helse had loved me at the last; this tag was the evidence of that, and its value magnified accordingly. O my Love, my Love! It was not to save yourself you died, it was to save me, for you were not afraid of rape but of my wild reaction to it. And so I killed you, indirectly as well as directly, because you knew me too well, too well. I thought I loved you with the ultimate devotion possible, but your capacity was greater than mine, and your love was better than mine.
We cleaned up the blood and excrements of explosive decompression. Very little of it had escaped the bubble, for the aperture of loss had been narrow, not permitting the egress of substantial solid bodies. Little items like pencils and combs were lost; bodies and food packs remained. This was messy but just as well, for we needed our supplies.
Spirit, of course, had unjammed the valve in the head, and allowed the air tanks to repressure the bubble before she went out to haul me in on my line from where I dangled in space. She had cut the drive for that duration, so that she could work alone. I marvel still at her courage and competence in that adversity; I owe my life as well as my equilibrium to her. She was, in this instance, a twelve-year-old adult.
Only eight of us survived: Spirit and me and those six children who had reached their suits in time. I remember their names but prefer to leave them anonymous; I do not care to put a name to each individual aspect of my pain.
Our rehearsed plan had gone astray because of the interference of the pirates; I don’t know how we could have prevented that, since we had no knowledge of the taffy gun. Perhaps I should have anticipated the unexpected and kept my laser pistol ready. But it had very little charge left, and the crisis occurred so suddenly, interrupting our wedding rehearsal—I don’t even know whether such excuses are valid. Certainly I could have done more, had I thought it through better. Still, our final stage had been effective.
That was another part of the guilt I bore: I had killed more children than the pirates had. As nearly as we could figure it, they had slaughtered fifteen; the vacuum had strangled twenty-two.
But we had taken the pirate ship with us. Their air lock had been locked to ours, fixed open; our vacuum had become theirs. All forty-five pirates were dead. Their losses were greater than ours. Oh, yes, we had struck back—but it had been a Pyrrhic victory. We could not afford another such battle.
After we cleaned out our dead and said what perfunctory services for them we could, we did the same for the pirate dead— with less honor. We dumped them in a chamber of their ship. Then we searched that ship throughout.
Much of it was ordinary stuff, clothing, food, knickknacks.
But some of it was booty from other vessels: gold, precious stones, spices, fine watches, and small sealed containers marked with letters of the alphabet: C, H, L, A.
I considered the last, trying to figure out what the letters might stand for. But Spirit solved it. “Drugs!” she exclaimed. “Of course pirates are into the illegal drug trade! These letters stand for English abbreviations: Cocaine, Heroin, LSD, Angel Dust.”
Now I saw it. “Their real business would be shipping this stuff. They only raid bubbles like ours for entertainment.”
She was uncertain. “Why mess with poor refugees, when they can buy anything they want? They obviously are rich.”
Excellent question! It put me in mind of Helse’s QYV mystery.
O, Helse! I reeled.
Spirit steadied me, and I fought back to sanity. Helse had been used to convey a message of some kind, perhaps to a pirate— and here were pirates shipping drugs and seeking children. Was there a connection?
“We can go back to the bubble,” Spirit suggested, mindful of my fadeout.
“No, we’d better finish this job,” I said. Only two of the other children were with us here; the remaining four were sleep-suffering in their cells. All of us understood that need. They had lost siblings and close friends and most of their peer group, and the pseudo-family structure we had so carefully nurtured had been shattered. Helse had become like a mother to them—Helse, Helse!—and so they had been orphaned again, when already vulnerable. Oh yes I knew that feeling! But I had to function, and I had in Spirit a support of amazing strength, a child/woman who perhaps at this stage was more truly our leader than was I. “We need to take what supplies we need and cast loose; we don’t know how to operate this ship.”
“Supplies? We don’t need mind-zonking drugs!”
“Weapons,” I said. “We are so few, now, we must have good weapons. And replacement oxygen tanks, for ours have been depleted by the decompression.”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed, seeing it.
We located weapons, including another taffy gun—the other had been swept into the head by the decompression and broken—and brought back to the bubble several good laser pistols and a whole pile of good fighting knives. We found oxygen and nitrogen tanks, and plenty of fresh water. Then we spied food supplies, better and more varied than ours. This derelict ship was a real mine of useful things.
We were now well set, except that at this point we were just a few children, ranged against what seemed like a universe of pirates. The great majority of our refugee companions who had set out for a better world had found death instead. Even if we arrived at Leda and gained sanctuary without further difficulty, it would hardly be worth it for the survivors, let alone the non-survivors. True success was now beyond our reach, thanks to the pirates.
I remembered my oath: to extirpate all pirates. They surely deserved obliteration.
We also discovered a holo projector and a small library of cartridges. This was an excellent find; we could have entertainment to distract us from the horrors of our memories. We trundled the projector into the bubble.
Finally we found a lifeboat, fully stocked. We could certainly use this! We lacked the expertise to operate it, but we would have time to study and experiment. We couldn’t move it by hand, so we used rope to tie it to the bubble, hoping to haul it clear of the pirate ship when we separated. We had to string our lines so that they did not intercept the blast of the drive unit; we used three, hooked all around our equator, each trailing back a hundred meters to intersect at the lifeboat. If that didn’t work, then it didn’t work.
At last we cut loose. The pirate ship was now adrift, its life-support facilities repressuring it automatically and warming it when the air lock sealed, but with no living men aboard. There would be a stink in there soon enough. Maybe it would drift forever in space, or maybe some other ship would discover it. Then they might ponder the mystery of an operative ship that had lost its entire crew to suffocation. We knew that such mystery ships had been found before, for we had seen stories about them; now we had an answer. In this one case, the rabbit had killed the wolf.
We moved on through space alone, trailing the life-craft on its triple tether. I had to do more of the work of maintenance and navigation, for we had lost key personnel. I had a lot of learning to do, but that was good, for it kept me almost too busy to think.
Th
e kids eagerly set up the holo projector and tried a cartridge marked Animal Fun. We thought it might be a juvenile fantasy about animals, or a documentary on the ways of wildlife as it once had been on unspoiled Earth. Either way, excellent distraction for children.
The scene formed, a three-dimensional image in air that could be viewed from any side. It was a comely young woman and a donkey. Good enough; the riding of animals was a popular subject with children; the few equine animals on Callisto were always in great demand for two-minute rides.
But in a moment the kids’ delight turned to dismay. I left my position by the lens control to see what was the matter.
The woman in the image had stripped naked, and—well, no need to detail it further. It was a porn show. I should have realized that pirates would stock that sort. If our bubble had been filled with animals instead of people, the brutes would have been raping and killing the animals, hardly noticing the difference. “Turn it off,” I said, disgusted. “Check all through the cartridges. Maybe there are some regular family shows in the pile.”
But now that the children realized that this was supposed to be forbidden adult material, they got interested. They wanted to know exactly how a woman could do it with a donkey, and why she would bother. I gave up and returned to my station, not caring to admit that I was curious too.
Actually, I needed no hardcore holos for my forbidden entertainment. It came to me unbidden when I slept. Some dreams were inchoate, almost formless fragments of horror that seeped out of the locked chambers of my mind like oozing blood and invaded that lonely illuminated spot of consciousness where I huddled. It had been bad when my father died, and when my mother died, but Helse had braced my equilibrium. Now Helse herself was dead, and all the shock of loss she had shielded me against, by interposing her marvelous love, now swept down on me in an avalanche of sulfur.
I tossed about and scrambled and woke—and found the waking nightmare was as bad as the sleeping one. I had come to depend almost completely on Helse, on the love we shared, and she was there no more. I retreated from that reality into sleep— where the oozing blood and sulfur lava were assuming shapes more awful than the shapelessness had been. I screamed again.
I don’t know how many times I cycled through it before Helse came. I must have been in an in-between state of consciousness, for I knew she was dead. But she was welcome any way she chose to appear. “What brings you back?” I inquired almost socially.
“Hope, I finally realized,” she said.
“Realized what?” I asked, knowing this was crazy, that it was no more than a vision like the one involving my father, but so eager for her presence that I clung to whatever shred of interaction it offered.
“About the tattoo. Why it protected me. It identified me as a courier.”
“A courier?” I didn’t follow her line of thought.
“I was conveying something to Kife. Something very valuable and secret. So I had his name and the mark, so no one would interfere with me. It is death to mess with a courier, and every criminal knows it. Kife must be very high in the hierarchy of thieves. So I was safer than I thought; I probably didn’t need to masquerade as a boy.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “That way, I got to room with you, and to love you.”
“You are the first I loved,” she said. “But about the tattoo— you can protect yourself too, Hope. Draw the letters on your thigh, and when a pirate attacks you—”
“But I’m no courier!” I protested.
“They won’t know that. They won’t dare take the chance. I think Kife would destroy anyone who bothered even a fake courier, just to make his point. Of course, then the fake would have to settle with Kife. That might not be fun.
“What were you carrying?” I asked. “The man gave you no message—”
“Now I remember something I heard once,” she said, becoming more real and lovely moment by moment. She wore her patchwork wedding dress, and oh, I loved her with an agony of intensity. “They do not tell the couriers what they carry, so the couriers can’t give away the secret. It is carried in little bags that they swallow, which adhere to the lining of the intestine and can only be detached by a certain formula in solution. So when the courier arrives, he or she is given a drink, and the bag is freed and passes on out harmlessly. The bags can hold anything—diamonds, secret code messages, concentrated drugs— but whatever it is, Kife wants it, and only he has the formula to collect it without hurting the courier.”
Now my own memory confirmed what she was saying. I had heard about this long ago and forgotten it. “So you were engaged in criminal activity,” I cried, appalled. “Perhaps drug-running!”
“Hope, I didn’t know!” she protested.
“Of course you didn’t,” I agreed immediately, hating to hurt her even in death. “Kife used you, exactly as the pirates used the others.”
“They must have fed me the bag while I was unconscious,” she said. “And when I got to Jupiter, Kife would have collected— ” She cut that off. “I’m glad he won’t collect. Don’t let him get my body, Hope.”
“I won’t let him get your body,” I promised.
“Thank you.” She began to fade.
“Wait!” I cried. “I must apologize! I promised never to hurt you—but I killed you!”
“I forgive you,” she said, smiling. “I know you didn’t want to kill me.” She faded further.
“Don’t go!” I cried, leaping to catch her. “Stay with me, Helse, to love and be loved!”
That got to her, of course. In life or in death, in reality or in vision, she lived to share love. She reversed her fade and intensified, and became preternaturally natural, and suffered herself to be drawn in to me. I kissed her, and she hesitated, as she often had, being afraid to confess love.
But I kissed her more passionately, and then she melted, as was also her way, knowing she could trust me not to betray her.
Not to betray her? I had killed her!
But she caught my mood, and took me in her arms as I started to draw away, and comforted me. “I told you to do it, Hope, to let the air out,” she said. “We had rehearsed it. It had to be done. I love you, Hope.”
“And I love you,” I said. We proceeded to the natural act of love, and she was a little unresponsive, as though it was harder to do this in death, but I took it slowly and it finished well enough. Her body did not even feel cold; it was warm and soft, and in the end she was moving with me, hugging me as if there had never been any gulf between us. Then I slept, and the turmoil of my dreams eased, as it always did when Helse comforted me.
I woke alone, of course. But I knew I had not been alone. My vision-dream had become too real, the culmination too complete. One of the distinctions between illusion and reality is the element of surprise, of things happening not precisely as expected, and I had had that experience. Helse had been with me.
I lay there and thought about it. Helse had been with me in spirit, of course, but not in body. Her body was frozen in a bag on the hull. Yet there had been a body; I was sure of that. A man may dream of love, and of sex, and his body may respond to the point of nocturnal emission—but the experience Helse had given me while she lived enabled me to know the distinction between fantasy love and reality. For one thing, there was no stain of emission in my clothing, as there should be in fantasy sex. There had been a physical girl with me. I thought.
Helse was dead, and I surely had not visited her on the hull. So if not Helse, who? Who had shared that physical expression of the longing of the spirit?
Spirit? That was my sister’s name!
I recoiled, from the thought, disgusted. But it seeped back at me, refusing to be banished merely because it was detestable. Had Helse been with me—in Spirit?
My nightmares of darkness paled as the nightmare of day came forward more strongly. In my agony of loss I had suffered a vision, as it seems I was wont to do. I could have acted out that vision physically. I should have known there was something wrong about
it while it was happening, but reason is not my strong point when I’m hallucinating. I had not understood the message from my father at the time, and I had not understood the significance of Helse’s warmth and solidity and seeming unfamiliarity with the act. I could not entirely condemn myself for my ignorance of the moment.
Spirit, however—how well did I understand her motives? If she had been present, as she could have been, she would have been awake. She loved me as a sister, but she had been jealous of Helse. She had inquired about the nature of what Helse and I did together. I had explained to her the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sex—but did she appreciate the distinction between woman and girl, or between romantic love and family love? If she saw me hallucinating and heard me crying out for Helse, and she thought she saw a way to come to my rescue, as she had when I fought a man—what would she do?
I fought against it, but could not completely deny the conclusion that Spirit could have done it. I was not sure that she had done it, just that she could have, emotionally and physically. That perhaps she would have. I really could not judge her reaction in this respect; she was inscrutable, opaque to my talent. The only way to know was to ask her.
I sat up—and Spirit heard me and came to the cell. I opened my mouth to ask her—and could not speak. I was abruptly aware how preposterous my question was.
“Are you all right, Hope?” she asked solicitously. She was neatly dressed in blouse and pants, her fine dark hair brushed out, and she seemed well rested. I realized that she had not suffered the loss I had, once she had come to terms with the fact of our orphaning. My support had been Helse, who was now gone; Spirit’s support was me.
Had she or hadn’t she? I had to know, yet could not ask.
She landed lithely on the floor of the cell. Low gravity made such acrobatics easy, yet she seemed healthy enough.
And she was maturing; her blouse did not conceal her nascent breasts, and her pants fit her tightly enough to reveal a developing posterior. She had a distance to go, yet she was definitely on the way. She would be a handsome girl in due course, perhaps not beautiful the way Faith had been, but certainly enough to please any man.