Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

As she worked her way through the narrow gap between benches, back toward her seat, she saw Rachel Brown twisting about in her place, her face set in a scowl. “I don’t like this stuff!” she said. “Don’t they have any milk, or soda, or anything?”

“No,” her father told her, “they don’t. Just coffee.”

“They have water,” someone-Lampert, Amy remembered his name now, Ben Lampert-said from across the table. “Would you like me to get you some?”

Pel looked down at his frowning daughter.

“Well, it’s better than this stuff,” Rachel said, pushing her cup away and spilling coffee onto her tray.

Pel caught the cup and righted it while it still held half its contents; Amy stopped watching and proceeded back to her own seat.

The food ran out before everyone had eaten his or her fill, but Amy no longer heard stomachs complaining; everyone had at least eaten something . Now they sat, looking about, talking quietly with their neighbors.

Amy had Susan on one side, and an unfamiliar middle-aged man on the other; across the table were strangers, save for Bill Mervyn, one seat to her right.

“Any idea what’s going on?” she asked Susan.

Susan, lips tight, shook her head no. She clutched at her purse.

Mervyn looked up from his empty coffee cup, at Amy. “I don’t know if…” he began, then stopped.

Amy looked back at him. “You don’t know what?”

“Well,” Mervyn said, reluctantly, “I think I can guess what’s going on, but you won’t like it. You’d probably be better off not knowing.”

“No,” Susan said. “We would not.”

“Especially not now, now that you’ve said anything,” Amy added.

Mervyn sighed and looked back at his cup; the coffee had run out, as well as the food.

“Well,” he said, “when I was on Devastation -that’s I.S.S. Devastation , Captain Morley, that was my ship before Ruthless …”

Amy nodded. “Go on.”

“When I was on Devastation , we did a run on one of the rebel worlds out on the fringes of the Empire. They’d been supporting pirates, same as these people here, and they used the people the pirates brought back as slave labor. Auctioned them off. And about half a dozen ships got away-these might even be the same people.”

“So you think…”

“I think they’re feeding us because hungry slaves don’t look as good to the buyers, and hungry people are more likely to do stupid, desperate things, like trying to escape.”

“Only at first,” Susan said. “Go without food long enough and you don’t have the strength any more. You need to choose your time carefully.” She adjusted her purse on the bench beside her.

“Well, that’s true,” Mervyn acknowledged, “but they want us healthy.”

Amy and Susan nodded reluctant agreement. “At least we have that much,” Susan said. “I’ve known worse.”

Amy glanced at her attorney, startled, but Susan was not looking in her direction.

She had known worse?

Amy decided not to pursue that. For a moment, the two of them sat, contemplating their situation. Amy was, once again, finding it all hard to believe; slavery? She, Amy Jewell, was going to be sold into slavery by pirates?

That was something out of stories, something out of the past…

Then she stopped and glanced at Susan again.

“I’ve known worse,” Susan had said.

Susan was Vietnamese, and her family had escaped to Thailand by boat when she was a child. Amy didn’t know any of the details; she had never asked, and Susan had never volunteered anything.

Still, Amy had heard stories about the boat people. Robbed, raped, murdered by pirates; stuck in camps and abandoned by civilized governments on all sides-to Susan, this might well seem all too real and familiar.

To most people outside the United States, Amy supposed, this wouldn’t seem so outrageous. The world was full of cruelty and injustice, it always had been; why should this other world be any different?

She told herself that, and she knew enough history to know it was true, but still, she didn’t really believe it, in her heart and her gut. All her life she had been safe, had been protected, had known what the rules were. She didn’t walk through certain neighborhoods at night, she generally kept her doors locked, she stayed out of bars, and that was enough; her world was safe and serene.

It wasn’t perfect; she’d had her bad moments when her marriage fell apart, when her dorm room was broken into her long-ago junior year of college, when she wrecked her car on that trip to Phoenix, but those seeming disasters looked pretty trivial in retrospect. She had worried that Stan would walk out, would leave her broke, would take the house away from her, might even slap her; she had feared that she might lose all her things, all her money and mementos, that she would never be able to sleep again without worrying; she had wondered how long it would take to get home without a car, where she would stay, how she would pay for everything, what would happen to her insurance rates.

Stan had done worse than slap her, but she had survived it, and it hadn’t been so very bad, she hadn’t wound up broke at all, or anywhere near it. And when it was over she was rid of him and that was all right.

She hadn’t been robbed again, she had burglar alarms, all her things were safe at home waiting for her.

She had flown home, bought a new car, paid her bills off eventually.

So she had worried about all those things, and they had all turned out all right in the end-but she had never, in all her life prior to the crash of Ruthless , had to worry about where her next meal was coming from, or whether she would be alive to eat it; never worried about whether she would ever again see her house, her family, her friends, her entire world .

She had sometimes feared rape, robbery, and murder-but piracy? Slavery?

And in another universe ?

It was absurd, it was crazy.

And it was true, wasn’t it?

Or would she be rescued at the last minute? Would the cops come, the neighbors, the lawyers, the way they had after the robbery, the way they had after Stan had beat her? Prossie Thorpe was still alive, Amy had seen her; had she called the cops, the Imperial soldiers, this time?

And would they come?

“Your attention!” someone shouted above the room’s babble. “Your attention, please!”

The hum of conversation and general hubbub faded. A man in a blue uniform was standing on a chair against one wall, his arms spread wide.

“Next step is hygienic,” he announced. “I’m sure most of you haven’t had a good bath in days, and you may have… well, you could probably use one.”

Amy threw Susan a glance; the lawyer shrugged. Other people were also trading looks, worried or questioning.

“We don’t have facilities for individual baths,” the announcer continued. “Instead we have showers, one for the men, one for the ladies. If the men would please leave the cafeteria through that door…” He pointed. “…And the ladies through that one…”

“Now?” someone asked.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the announcer replied.

Showers.

They were prisoners being herded into mass showers.

Amy tried very hard not to think of what that immediately brought to mind.

Did any of these other people, the ones not from Earth, have anything like that in their histories? Had this monstrous, inhuman Shadow that they talked about ever sunk to the level of the Nazis? Had the Galactic Empire ever faced an evil to equal the one the Allies had conquered?

Very probably, she thought; after all, Stalin had killed as many as Hitler, and Pol Pot and a dozen others had tried. There had been murderous dictators all through history. The people of the Empire, and the people of Shadow’s world, all looked human enough; they probably had plenty of murderous dictators in their own histories.