Refugee Read Free Page B

change in them becomes apparent and helps lead to the truest possible comprehension of the whole.
    But in this case I find I cannot adequately perform the first requirement. My hand balks, my very mind veers away from the enormity of the outrage and hurt. I can only say that I loved my two sisters with a love that was perhaps more than brotherly, though never would I have thought that there was any incestuous element. Faith was beautiful, and nice, and I was charged with her protection, though she was a woman while I was a mere adolescent. I had in fact never before witnessed the sexual act, either in holo or in person, and had never imagined it to be so brutal.
    It was as if that foul pirate shoved a blunt dagger into my sister's trembling, vulnerable body, again and again, and his face distorted in a grimace of urgency that in ironic fashion almost matched her grimace of agony, and his body shuddered as if in epileptic seizure, and when he stopped and stepped away there was blood on the weapon.
    And I—I with my absolute horror of that ravishment, my hatred of every aspect of that cruelty—I found my own body reacting, as it were a thing apart from my mind, yet I knew it could not truly be separate.
    There was some part of me that identified with the fell pirate, though I knew it was wrong and more than wrong. My innocent, lovely sister Faith possessed certain attributes of Heaven, while now I knew that I possessed, at least in part, an attribute of Hell. I looked upon the foul lust of Satan, and felt an echo of that lust within myself.
    I cannot write of this further. It is no pleasant thing to confess an affinity to that which one condemns. I can only say that I swore a private oath to kill the pirate Horse: some time, some way. And the pirates who followed him in the appalling act. I tried to note the details of each of them, so that I would not fail to recognize them if ever I encountered them again. I saw that several of the pirates, however, did not participate; they obeyed the Horse in all other things, but would not ravish a helpless woman. Even among pirates, there were some who were not as bad as others.
    Apart from that effort of identification, my mind retreated from what was happening. My sister, I think, had fainted before the second pirate readied his infernal weapon, and that was a portion of mercy for her.
    She, at least, no longer knew what was being done to her body. I knew—but chose not to see.
    I fled into memory, into that sequence that was the origin of my feeling of déjà vu , for it related directly to the present situation. Probably I should have commenced my bio there, instead of with the shock of Faith's violation, for I see now that the true beginning of my odyssey was then. This bio is more than a record of experience; it is therapy. Biography, biology, biopsy—all the ways to study a subject.
    Bio—life. My life. Not only do I seek to grasp the nature of myself, I seek to strengthen my character by reviewing my successes and my mistakes with an eye to improving the ratio between them, painful as this process can be at times.
    Therefore I will now illumine that prior sequence, demarking it with a new dateline, and will try to keep my narrative more coherent hereafter. I would perhaps dispose of my “false start,” but my paper and ink are precious, as is my evocative effort. After all, if once I begin the process of unwriting what I have written, where may it end? Every word is important, for it too is part of my being.

Bio of a Space Tyrant 1 - Refugee
    Chapter 2 — FAITH AND SPIRIT
    Maraud, Callisto, 2-1-2615—My sisters and I walked home together after school, because there was a certain safety in numbers. Faith, eighteen years old, resented this; she claimed her social life was inhibited by the presence of a skinny fifteen-year-old little sibling. The vernacular term she was wont to employ was less kind, and I think not completely fair, and does not become her, so I shall not