Refugee by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony [Anthony, Piers]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction; American, Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780738806938
Publisher: XLIBRIS
Published: 2006-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12 FOOD

Jupiter Rings, 2-24-‘15-I wish I could skip over this period, but it would not be honest to do so. It had seemed our situation could not get worse, but we had a cruel reeducation coming.

Our problem was composed of two things: food and travel. We were still short of food, but might have managed if we had floated to Jupiter on time. But the women didn’t know how to operate the gravity lens efficiently, so we were making little progress. That meant our food was less than adequate. We had assumed we could get by on half rations, but as the days passed and Jupiter loomed larger with appalling slowness, we knew we could not. All of us were losing mass, though we were not starving. We conserved bodily energy by sleeping much of the time, but still our food dwindled.

We cut to quarter rations, trying to stretch it out a few more days, but our progress past the rings of Jupiter seemed maddeningly slow. It was gradually apparent to even the most unwilling eye that we were not making it.

I spent a lot of time in the cell with Helse, sleeping in her arms. But hunger vitiated sex, if not love. It was enough for a time just to be with her, talking and resting and enduring-but inevitably the need for food intruded. I dreamed of discovering some hidden cache of food packs that would allow us all to glut ourselves. But it never was true.

Spirit took it worse than I did. She was a growing child, and she needed proper sustenance. She spoke of big rock-candy mountains and oceans of chocolate syrup and gingerbread houses. When she started longing for potatoes and spinach I knew it was serious. She had never liked spinach. We had to do something-but what? We could not conjure food from vacuum.

I took to staring morosely out of the portholes. The Jupiter ring system is not nearly as spectacular as Saturn’s, but it is extensive enough. It reaches out almost as far as Saturn’s rings do, but it is so diffuse it is hardly worth noticing. In fact, for many centuries the astronomers of Earth were not able to see the ring systems of Jupiter or Uranus or Neptune, so assumed there were none, with the typical logic of our species.

The primary ring is fifty thousand kilometers inside the orbit of Amalthea, and that’s where the Jupiter Border Patrol operates. Amalthea is just a rocky ball, 24 kilometers across; its gravity is so slight that no one has bothered to put a residential dome on it-there’s not enough gravity there to focus effectively, you see, since next to nothing concentrated tenfold is still next to nothing-but there is a space depot. Amalthea is just beyond Jupiter’s political territorial limit, so we had to get inside its orbit.

The rings really weren’t obvious even from up close; most of the particles were the size of large grains of dust. A ship traveling at high

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