Phillip Jennings - The Runaways

Was this supposed to wear Peder out? It didn’t work. They sat down for reading lessons, his imagination full of the rhythms of buttocks and hips and pumping legs. Slim Michiko! Buxom Olga! Beautiful Carmen! Peder reigned back from a half dozen erections, only by concentrating and re-concentrating on the words in the story cassette Carmen gave him.

It was Treasure Island. A movie came with the cassette. After recitations Peder played it page by page on his readscreen. It made him wish Hidalgo had an ocean like Earth, something bigger than Lake Lago.

Lago was a patch of blue on a piece of sculpture next to the globe of Earth. Hidalgo was longer than round, and cratered, and wrinkled. Carmen took a short break and came back in a white tunic and skirt. She told the group all about their world.

Hidalgo would never be a big colony because it was shattered inside. This was bad for mining and other deep work, but Hidalgo had a weird orbit and that made it interesting. Now that dark matter had given it a normal Earth gravity, people didn’t have to worry about it coming apart.

“What we have to worry about is collecting too much dark matter—too many asteroids acting like real worlds in the same solar system. We’re going to have to use Higgs technology to tug problematical asteroids into huger orbits. Uh, is any of this making sense to you? They told me to push you, but I’m getting way ahead of my own program.”

Peder didn’t know what she was talking about. He glanced out the classroom window. What he saw amazed him. “ That’s Carmen! Carmen out there, and Carmen in here! Two Carmens!”

The others stood to look. Carmen rapped for attention. “Actually I’m one of three. My parents came in Year 5, because my mother was pregnant with identical triplets. On Earth that’s illegal. It’s against the population laws. She chose to emigrate rather than abort us.”

“Three Carmens!” Olga said.

She sighed. “We call ourselves Carmen. We work in relays, because the patients at the institute never got the idea of triplets. You lumped us together. Using different names got you upset. But now we don’t have to make that compromise. Now you can call me Rachel.”

Hakim raised his hand. “Who made us be patients at the institute? How did we get here?”

Rachel shook her head. “Some mysteries I’m here to solve for you, and some mysteries you’ll solve on your own. Why are you here? For each of you, that’s a separate mystery. We can’t always tell you the answer. Lots of times Doctor Moeller made promises not to tell. But none of you were born on Hidalgo. I can say that much.”

Out the window, the shadows cast by young trees began growing long again. Windbreaker-Carmen disappeared around the corner of a building. “Triplets” was a special word for “miracle,” but Rachel calmed Peder and her other students by making them count their breaths, and then they had an arithmetic lesson.

Toward the end they took a test. Question 3—“Towerblock A gets a hundred boxes of relief rations a day. If the towerblock gang steals ten, how much does that leave?”

Question 9—“If there are 1440 minutes in an Earth day, and an Earth day is one trift long in Hidalgo time, how many minutes are there in a Hidalgo day?”

Question 14—“The mass of Earth is 6,000,000,000,000,000 million metric tons. If the mass of a colony asteroid is 25,000 million metric tons, how much dark matter has to concentrate to make that asteroid the same mass as Earth?”

These questions were beyond the group even as reading exercises. In their distress they talked together, working on each problem as a class. Rachel gave them hints (“Fifty days in a trift, remember?”), and somehow they made do until classtime was over.

It was lunchday. “Do we have to eat in the commissary with those others?” Olga asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Yes.” Peder could tell that Olga’s question upset their teacher, even though she tried to hide it. As Rachel led them out of the room, she asked: “What about after lunch? Normally you have a four-day nap. Perhaps in the future you’d rather schedule time for exercise.”

“Games!” Sanjay suggested. “I’m not tired. I hate naptime.”

“Games!” Michiko agreed.

Rachel shook her head. “Not right away. We can’t change your schedules on the spur of the moment. We have to make arrangements. We have to find staff people to supervise. Naptime is normally a break for us. Next trift, maybe.”

The group ate at their separate table. Despite more protests, they were escorted to their rooms. Peder lay down in darkness. The kid next room over had P-W Syndrome. He whined constantly about being hungry. His noise kept Peder awake. Peder wouldn’t have slept anyhow. It was the medicine. Peder didn’t know how to sleep, with his mind darting among so many ideas.

The clock blinked Day 29. He got up in his rumpled clothes, and watched the sunrise. Someone in the girls’ dorm was working her window open. Michiko? Yes!

Peder opened his window. There was a wire-mesh screen. It was screwed into place. He cast around. What could he use? He had an extension lamp on springs. Peder removed one of the springs. It had a C-shaped hook at both ends. The hook was just skinny enough. If Peder worked really carefully…

He got two screws out, and pushed. There was room to slide through the gap. The sun wasn’t yet at zenith. When Peder reached the ground he looked around. Michiko bounded in circles, enjoying her freedom on an empty campus: She saw him and waved. Peder joined her.

Above the drinking fountain where they converged, Hakim pounded on his loosened second-floor screen. “Wait! I’ll use my sheets to get down!”

Michiko grabbed Peder’s hand, and tugged. She was small and slim. She barely came up to his shoulders, but there was no resisting her energy. “We’ll see you in the wildlands!” she called triumphantly. “Come on! Come on! Let’s run before they see us!”

They ran through evening, and the wind almost gave them wings. When it got dark on Gopo hill, they stopped and took off their clothes, and kissed and rubbed each other. They did more. At dawn they hurried past Persian Hole to the wildland trees where they could hide. They squeezed and did things that hurt. Some of them worked.

Peder and Michiko made sounds of pain and joy. Afterward they lay among the leaves with their hearts pounding. They heard shouts. Olga and Sanjay and Hakim came running down the slopes of Gopo Hill, still far away, with institute staff behind them in their white uniforms. Sun sank and shadows rose. It got dark again, and not safe to run, but both pursued and pursuers ran anyway. “This way!” Michiko shouted.

“Stop!” It was Doctor Moeller. They heard steps in the underbrush.

“It’s me. Sanjay.”

“Peder.”

“I’ve got stones,” Michiko whispered.

“When it gets light,” Peder told her.

At dawn they threw rocks at the staff people. Nurses ducked and yelled. One of the Carmens grabbed Olga.

Peder ran and jumped Carmen, using his size to knock her against a tree. Olga got free. The girl was exhausted, and tottered into the brush. Carmen flinched back from Peder’s kicks. “You can’t do this,” she said.

Peder relented. “Leave us alone.”

“You’ll get hungry. You don’t have food.”

“No more orders,” Michiko said. “No more classes. We’re free.”

“Think. Think what you’re doing!” Doctor Moeller said from a distance. She held a hand to her face. Blood leaked between her fingers. One of the rocks must have hit her.

“We’ll think later. We’ve thought too much. It’s hard,” Hakim told her. “We want to be free. That’s all, just free.”