Phillip Jennings - The Runaways

“I’ll stay with you,” Carmen said. “I’ll be your hostage. I’ll make sure you get food.”

“Hostage? What’s that?” Peder asked.

“It means you’re free, but I’m coming along.” She looked at Michiko. “Where are your clothes?”

Michiko came up and tore Carmen’s uniform open. “You have to be like us. Come then. Three boys, three girls. I get first choice after I try out Hakim and Sanjay.”

“You don’t have to do this, Carmen!” Doctor Moeller shouted.

“Yes I do,” Carmen called back. “Things will settle down. We’ll reach a compromise.”

“They’re out of control! We can’t track you by relay satellite. The buckylayer is opaque from space.” “Get yourself to the clinic! I’ll be okay. I have faith in these kids. I’ve watched them my whole career,” Carmen said. She tugged at her torn suit, and stumbled away from the tree.

Doctor Moeller’s wound gave some urgency to her retreat, and her staff withdrew in a confused clump, with lots of backward glances from Gopo Hill.

Peder remembered the sculpture of Hidalgo. “Where’s Lago? Can we walk there?” he asked Carmen. “Are there fences?”

“It’s in the southern hemisphere.” After so much shouting, Carmen’s voice was low and hoarse and resigned. “You won’t like it as much as you think. It’s winter there. The days at this latitude are twenty-one minutes long, with eight minute nights. Down south it’s the other way around.”

“Winter?” Hakim asked. He seemed to be hunting an elusive memory. The word made him clutch himself. “Cold winter?”

“No. Hidalgo isn’t big enough for temperature variations. It spins too fast.”

“We can hide in the dark,” Olga said. “They’ll be mad. We hurt Doctor Moeller. They’ll try to punish us. Let’s go there. Let’s go south.”

The sun set. One last band of light shrank toward the summit of Gopo Hill. It was gone. The darkness grew nearly total. Michiko grabbed Hakim and led him behind some saplings. Olga lay quietly, letting Sanjay stroke her arms. After a time they embraced.

Four of six people clung together. Peder sighed and looked at Carmen. Her black hair was tousled. She seemed new and different.

Carmen spoke against his hopes. “It’s rape if you have sex with a woman against her will. That’s breaking the law.”

“You look like Michiko and Olga,” Peder said. “Not much older. Is it the medicine? They took the medicine and now they want sex.”

“You can’t go in a straight line, Peder. Straight from wanting sex, to doing the deed. You have to think—do I want a baby? If not, what should I do? Maybe the other person has a disease I can catch from having sex.”

“Do we have diseases?” Peder asked.

“No.”

“Do you want a baby?”

Carmen thought. After a while, she smiled. “Peder, I’m too roughed up. I’ll be sore where you kicked me. Let’s wait.”

“Michiko and Hakim are making sounds. Don’t worry,” Peder assured her from recent experience. “It doesn’t mean she’s in trouble.”

“Thanks,” Carmen said dryly.

Just before dawn, Olga started making sounds, too. Peder got up and walked away, inexplicably distressed, even if Olga was okay. He came back afterward. “Let’s go south.”

The group hiked through the wildland forest, climbing the crater wall beyond Persian Hole. A fountain sprayed water into the air. The runoff became a creek. They drank and settled at the edge of the creek when it got dark. Michiko tugged at Sanjay.

Sanjay shook his head. “No. I’m worn out.”

“Hakim?” she asked.

“I’m worn out too.” Hakim took a pair of rocks. He began tapping them together, beating out a rhythm. Sanjay joined in, slapping the water with a stick. Olga clapped. Peder beat sticks, and hummed in a loud drone. After a petulant minute Michiko joined in, dancing and pounding the ground.

The syncopation grew complex. Carmen watched. At dawn they were done. “This medicine seems to have taken you beyond what’s normal,” she said. “That was pretty damned intricate toward the end.”

“Beyond? Better than smart? You’re already smart,” Sanjay said. “If you took Cra 103, you’d be super! ”

“It doesn’t always work like you’d expect,” Carmen said. She shifted her gaze. “Drugs are designed for certain conditions. They don’t work predictably, used in new ways.”

“What is it called?” Peder asked. “What are you doing? In your words you’re leading us away from a thought you don’t want us to think. Always before, you led us toward ideas, not away.”

“It’s called evasion. There’s lots of ways to use words,” Carmen said. “There’s lying. If I said the sky was blue, that would be lying. I won’t lie, not to any of you. That’s my promise, but it doesn’t mean you’re ready for all the truth. There’s too much. Remember how tired you got of your lessons earlier this trift.”

Hakim looked up. “We should be hiking. The sky is orange. Hazy orange, anyhow. Let’s use the light.”

They kept hiking. A couple days after negotiating a difficult cliff, Peder and Olga made arrangements for after sundown. Michiko called in warning. “He’s too big. He’ll hurt you.”

“You want Peder for yourself,” Olga responded.

“No, it’s Sanjay’s turn.”

“Sanjay hurt me.”

“It won’t hurt after a few trifts,” Carmen said. “But you see how this can make people feel bad and have arguments? All this changing partners?”

“Yeah. It’s just for now,” Michiko agreed. “Afterward we’ll choose husbands.”

“Are you going to create a tribe? A little socio-cultural entity in the jungles of Hidalgo?”

“That sounds good,” Peder said cheerfully.

“Tribes feed themselves,” Carmen scoffed. She reached into a branch. “You guys don’t even know what these things are called, or if they’re edible.” “What are they?” Peder asked.

“They’re plums. Go ahead. You need something to eat, and if you hide from the institute, we can’t feed you.”

The group ate. That night they had two trysts, with Hakim the odd man out. Three days later they reached the Equator.

The fence ran out of sight in both directions. “How do we cross?”

“Don’t you wish you’d kept your clothes?” Carmen asked. She seemed irritable. Perhaps it was the humidity. The sky was thick with moisture and loading for rain. “That’s barbed wire,” Carmen continued. “We make a practice of pasturing the food animals on the winter side of Hidalgo, and growing crops on the summer half.”

“There must be a gate, then.” Olga said. “Or else we can use your clothes.”

Michiko agreed. “Take them off and lay them over the wire. Are you different from us? Do you have something to hide?”

Peder intervened before this turned into a fight. “Maybe the fence gate is close by.”

Carmen sighed. “No. And I’ve got nothing to hide except the usual.”

“We should have kept our clothes, though,” Peder agreed. “We made a mistake.”

Carmen stripped and laid her tunic and skirt over the barbed wires. Peder crossed first, and held the wires down for the others. Carmen was last. She rescued her clothes, and rolled them into a bundle. “It’s too muggy to put them on. Even the wind doesn’t help. It’s going to rain in a day or two.”

“Is it like a cycle?” Peder asked. “Like day and night?”

“Yes. Very simple. Hidalgo is too small for chaotic weather. The air clouds up and rains every four-point-something trifts. It rains everywhere.”

“On Earth it’s different?” What Peder said was a question, though he was sure the answer was yes. He pressed on. “Did we all come from Earth?”