The Runaways

by Phillip C. Jennings

Illustration by Jason C. Exchardt

Shadows stretched across the fields, and the sun plummeted. Sunset. Darkness blanketed Hidalgo.

Peder had never been aware of the clock-calendar glowing on his bedroom wall, not like now. Numbers blinked—09 changed to 10.

10 1021 08. After all those lessons it finally meant something! It was the 10th day of the 1021st trift of year 8. Peder had memorized his numbers and letters, but now they possessed a power. They weren't just sounds in a chant. They represented concepts like the passage of time.

Nurse Carmen smiled at Peder. He saw curiosity in her brown eyes, and hope. “Do you remember coming here? It was late last trift, just after free time.”

Peder’s voice was rough. He talked seldom and his tongue wasn’t honed for speech. “I was bad. I went to the fence. We were running in the fields, and I went to the fence.”

“Yes. Never do that. It’s too close to the Higgs generator. I had to fetch you.”

“Sorry. I don’t remember after that.” Peder looked around.

Carmen touched his forehead. Her hand was cool. “Doctor Moeller gave you a new medicine. You’ll remember everything, not just special times and traumas. You’ll have a different life from now on.”

It was already different for Peder. Looking at Carmen, he got an erection.

Erections came when—what was her name?—played the rubbing game with Peder, and afterward Doctor Moeller yelled at them, and the nurses got angry and took them apart. But this time all Peder did was look at Carmen’s front.

Carmen put up her hand. “That’s not polite. You shouldn’t stare at women like that.”

Her voice dropped. “It’s going to be hard work. You have to learn everything, all at once.”

“Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry.” Outside the window, the skies were black. Peder made himself turn and look east, waiting for the colors of approaching dawn.

“I hope we did the right thing,” Carmen said after a contemplative pause. “In the long run you’ll be happier. You’ll live a more useful life. Hidalgo might become a colony, not just an institute.”

Sunrise. Long shadows. High winds rippled the buckylayer. Day 10 grew bright, and shadows fled the sweeping light. Peder watched them shrink and separate. “Is today a meal day?” he asked.

“Today we’ll see how well you learn to dress yourself. First thing tomorrow we’ll eat in the commissary,” Carmen said.

“Will there be lots of women?” Peder asked miserably. He cast his thoughts into the future, like he’d never done before. Lots of fronts. More erections. “Will they yell at me?”

Carmen sorted among answers. “Yes,” she said finally. “Call it ‘yelling’ if you want. A better word is ‘teaching.’ Here are your clothes.”

Clothes had always been tricky for Peder. All those sleeves and legs, and what was inside and what was outside, and getting the stickies lined up right. He wanted the fun of having Carmen dress him, but somehow he could tell—not today. Today he did the work of figuring out which was tunic and which was pants, and the inside-outside business didn’t seem like a problem at all. He got the stickies on his tunic wrong, but he could tell they were wrong. He fixed them so everything lined up straight.

Peder managed his socks and shoes. He felt proud. It wasn’t even sunset. Carmen smiled. “Let’s go eat.”

“Wait! That’s me!” Peder just now saw himself in the mirror. He was like the numbers on the clock-calendar, because there was more meaning in his face than he’d ever noticed before. He fingered his tousled blond hair, and studied his looks: curiosity, a smile, a frown, a blink, tongue out-and-in.

The room grew dark. Day 10 was in decline. Carmen opened the hallway door, and led the way. Peder watched her move. He sang the A-B-C song to make his new erection go away. They reached the commissary.

It was like being thrown in water to learn how to swim. Peder saw meanings everywhere, in how the institute staff looked and helped, putting on special faces to take care of—them? Who were they? Strange and chaotic and deformed, but not Peder. Grunts for words, but not Peder.

Peder went down the line to get a bowl of porridge. Carmen led him to a table. Doctor Moeller was there. So were some others. Peder had played with them, running in the fields, but he didn’t know their names. Now they looked at him the same way he looked at them. They were amazed, and fearful.

Doctor Moeller smiled. Perfect white teeth flashed in her dark face. “Trift 1021! The first trift of your new lives! Welcome. Peder, you know Michiko and Hakim and Sanjay here.” She put her hand on Sanjay’s shoulder. “We’re expecting Olga. After breakfast we’ll start you in special classes. You’ve all satisfied the requirements for Cra 103, which is how they’re naming medications nowadays, so you should all be having similar experiences. You’re in the same boat.”

“Like brothers and sisters,” Carmen explained.

“Will we keep together?” Sanjay asked.

“Yes. You have a strong need for the familiar. We’ve made a schedule for you. Things will happen by the clock.”

In another part of the room a patient started yelling at the top of his voice: “Bad boy! Bad boy!” Institute staff gathered to soothe him. He was heavy and squat and noisy, and they almost got him quiet. He yelled less frequently, anyhow. They persuaded him to lumber out of the room. Peder noticed that the people at his table looked like him. The people at another table sat in wheelchairs, and had to be fed.

People came in categories. Some categories were worse than others. Michiko and Peder and the others at this table—here came Olga to join them—were a special type. They made Doctor Moeller and Carmen happy. Nobody else in the commissary looked like people on TV, not even the staff, but Peder’s group did. They were young and trim, and there wasn’t anything physically wrong with them.

Among this select group Peder was tallest, strong and broad across the shoulders. Now he was smart, too. “Cra 103,” Peder repeated. He remembered the name. He remembered Sanjay’s name, and Michiko’s. Hakim was the black kid at the end of the table. Peder smiled. He remembered everything! He could put things together, and figure things out!

After breakfast the group went on a walk. It was dawn again, shadows and ripples and the usual strong wind. The red of the sky faded to orange as the sun climbed. The wind at their backs gave length to their strides. Carmen drove them hard, so that Michiko asked “Why so fast? We’re almost running.”

“Some of you have too much energy,” Carmen explained. “We don’t want a bunch of pregnancies.”

She’d been dressed in a white nurse’s uniform. Now she wore a wind-breaker and hiking shoes, and Peder sensed a freshness about her. They passed the eastern grainfields, and climbed Gopo Hill. From this spot they could see much of Hidalgo. The north pole blinked off at a slant to their distant right. Carmen pointed out the fence she called the equator to their far left, but Peder didn’t know where to look among the ridges and trees and pylons. They were so high that the ripples gusting across the buckylayer would have been visible, but they were visible anyhow, because it was sunset.

Carmen flicked on her flashlight. They followed her lead, huffing breathlessly around Persian Hole. After this came dawn and day in the wildlands, with the winds whistling through the young trees, and then sunset and night. Dawn came again in the western grainfields, where the Higgs generator was hidden behind its fence, except they were way north of that. The skies brightened and the sun shone on the buildings of the institute. They were far enough north that the circumference of Hidalgo was a mere two-and-a-half day hike.

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.”

“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?”

“Watch out for cow pies. Sanjay—oh, too late. Yes, all humans came from Earth. I was born on Hidalgo, but I know more about Earth than I do about my own home. There’s just so much more to know.”

Carmen sighed and continued. “Earth has population laws. For the next few generations, no parents may have more than one child. There are a few exceptions, but only for endangered tribes, not for top people. Not for the rich and powerful. Certainly not in the media democracies.

“Having a smart kid is important, to carry on your name, and genes, and to be your proxy in the future. It’s a way of becoming immortal. Have I said enough for you to figure things out? Are you becoming that smart, or should I keep talking?”

Michiko spoke. “If the people on top have kids, and their kids have something wrong with them, they’re stuck. But if they send their wrong kids to Hidalgo—”

“Excellent!” Carmen said. “If the kids aren’t registered, and they’re sent to Hidalgo, those top people get a second chance. Mostly, though, the top people do what everyone else does. If they find something wrong with their baby before she’s born, they get an abortion. Otherwise, the institute would be much bigger than it is. Your parents are the rare minority who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take the abortion route. A minority of a minority, but that doesn’t make you unimportant. These are important people, and they pay for your care. The institute couldn’t survive without that money.”

“We have to understand this better,” Peder said. “Tell us about money, and about media democracies, and then explain this again. We need to know about ourselves.”

“Money is a way of storing energy for building things and getting work done. It’s based on tokens and numbers. If I tell you about money, it’ll be just like class. You’ll have to learn to add and subtract, and divide and multiply. You’ll have to learn lots of things, but you don’t have paper or pencils, or books.”

“Maybe we’ll go back to the institute,” Peder conceded. “Not yet, though. Let’s see Lake Lago first.”

“What’s that?” Hakim asked. His voice quavered. He pointed ahead. Carmen squinted down the path. “Those are llamas. We have herds of llamas and cattle, sheep, antelope, flocks of turkeys, geese—even the geese are dangerous if you get too close. We let them live wild. That means they aren’t as respectful of humans as you might like.”

“Oh.”

“Will there be more herds by Lake Lago?” Michiko asked. Her dark eyes were focused on the monster shapes blocking the downslope.

“That’s where they go to drink. It’ll be crowded,” Carmen said.

Peder took resolve. He ran at the llamas, yelling and waving his arms. The animals moved away at a moderate pace. One of them turned, guarding their retreat.

The group caught up to Peder. “They don’t want to fight,” he said, breathing hard. “Lake Lago will be big enough for all of us.”

“It’s getting dark.” Olga sounded afraid.

“We’ll rest by those trees. Then go to the lake.”

“And then back across the fence,” Olga suggested.

“I’m getting hungry,” Sanjay said. “Plums aren’t enough. Let’s go home to the institute.”

Carmen smiled. “It’s not easy being free. You guys are learning fast.” The six sheltered under a copse of trees whose lower branches were eaten away, leaving plenty of headroom. The night was darker than in the northern hemisphere, dark and long, but Michiko and Olga were nervous and lacked much relish for sex. Hakim worked on Olga, and then gave up. Only then did she change her mind. “Come behind here,” she whispered. The usual rhythms ensued until dawn, when Olga suddenly shrieked.

Carmen lunged to her feet and circled the trees. “Damn,” she swore. “I’d almost nodded off. Shoo. Shoo. Go away.”

A few meters away a half-dozen cows stared at the lovers with soft brown eyes. Carmen flapped at them with her tunic. Ignoring her objections, the cows ambled after the whole group as they walked downslope and toward the lake. The haze thickened to fog. Not much was visible.

Carmen spoke softly, as if she didn’t want to be overheard by bovine ears. “I wonder about the bull.”

“How smart would cows be if they took Cra 103?” Peder asked. “They seem curious. They want to know things, but maybe they can’t. Their brains don’t hold ideas very well.”

“Do any of you feel sleepy?” Carmen asked. She seemed uninterested in the intellectual capacity of cows. She yawned and stretched. “Am I the only one?”

“What day is it?” Peder asked. “Bedtime is Day 42.”

“It’s well past that,” Carmen said. “Past 50. This is a new trift.”

“We can’t sleep. Everything’s exciting,” Michiko said. “Cows are even bigger than llamas. Look, here are some rocks.”

The group armed themselves. The rocks brought back memories. “You’re the one who conked Doctor Moeller,” Hakim told Michiko. “If we go back to the institute, they won’t be so mad at the rest of us. Not like with you. We shouldn’t share your punishment. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Are you that hungry? You’d turn me in? You’d say you were sorry just for food?” Michiko asked. “What a shit! Olga can have you. I choose Sanjay.”

“Sanjay’s hungry too,” Hakim said. “I heard him say so.”

The group reached a grassy bank. Slick mud lay beyond, trodden by hooves, lavished with manure, and puddled with water. They squished another two meters and reached the true waterline. The wind didn’t reach down to this low place, and Lake Lago was mirror-still. Cottony seeds floated on the surface. The fog was very dense.

Carmen explained the buddy system. “Hold hands with your partner. Keep the others in sight. You guys can’t swim, so don’t go in above your waists.”

She held her hand out to Peder, and they splashed for a time. She relented and let him give her a kiss. He embraced her and pressed into her breasts. The rains began, cleansing the lower atmosphere of fog. Lago seemed to grow wider. Its mirror surface broke into rain-lashed chaos.

The brightening of the skies was deceptive and brief. The sun set. Suddenly everything was dark. “Back to shore!” Carmen ordered.

The six splashed in. Feeling blindly, they found each other. The cattle mooed and shuffled and snorted. Clearly they were close, and there were lots of them. The rains grew heavier. “This is a nightmare,” Carmen muttered.

“We’ll go back. We’ve had enough freedom,” Peder whispered.

“Do you understand then? You’re big in body, but you’re children until you know a lot more about Hidalgo.”

“This is Year 8, right?” Peder asked. “Eight summers, eight winters. Each winter the animals switch from south to north.”

“That’s right.”

“So each winter does the institute switch from north to south?” Peder went on.

“Yes,” Carmen said. “There’s a winter campus. The layout is almost a duplicate of the summer campus.”

“Classrooms there? Paper and pencils?” Peder bent closer. “Are you disappointed I had this thought? It means we might not have to go back.”

“I don’t know if we’ll survive these next minutes. Something big is snorting out in the dark.”

Peder straightened and cupped his hands around his mouth. “YAAAHHH!”

Instant panic. Shadows of black on black turned and climbed each other, trying to get away. Sanjay and Hakim joined the shouting. Michiko threw rocks and managed a high ululation that was incredibly irritating, even to humans. Carmen grabbed her right and left neighbors, Peder and Olga. “Let’s step back into the water. Those beasts don’t know where they’re going.”

The herd thundered off, crashing and bellowing. The rain ended suddenly. The darkness lasted longer, and then the sun rose to the north in a deep red sky. The lake reflected the buckylayer like a mirror, bending over the horizon. Its south shores were lost beneath a distant ridge.

The group left Lago and its trampled perimeters. Carmen identified a buggy trail of two parallel ruts, now overgrown. They took another four days to reach the institute’s southern campus. The buildings lay on a windy plateau that shelved from the side of a mountain.

Carmen told them that the mountain was so high it pushed through the buckylayer and into vacuum. “Spaceships can land at the South Pole without entering Hidalgo’s atmosphere.”

Carmen went to the utility building to power up the campus and open the water valves. When they entered the commissary, Peder let her make a radio call. One of her sisters spoke from the other end. Rachel talked of altered schedules and Doctor Moeller’s medical condition. “Guess where we’ve left food for you.”

“Where we dropped our clothes?” Olga called over Carmen’s shoulder.

“You got it,” the voice answered. “We’ll fuel up the buggy and bring that stuff over. We’ll use the road, but it’ll take ten or twenty days. Meanwhile, maybe somebody left emergency supplies in the cupboards. Stuff that keeps.”

Carmen signed off. The group wandered behind the buffet tables and into the kitchen. Sugar. Popping corn. Spices. Chocolate syrup. A bottle of Krinos brand grape leaves. Catnip.

“The cats went feral last year,” Carmen said. She yawned uncontrollably. “We haven’t seen them since. Let’s make some popcorn before I fall over.

After popcorn Carmen tottered off to sleep in the bed in the nurse’s office. Peder and the others went separate ways, to check if all the buildings were open, and if the classrooms had teaching supplies.

A few days later they assembled back in the commissary. “I’m not sleepy at all,” Michiko announced.

“I laid down and tried to sleep, but it didn’t work,” Olga added.

Peder rubbed his chin in thought. He felt the beginnings of a beard. “I think it’s the medicine. It’s something the medicine did to us, but they didn’t expect it. They didn’t expect us to run loose. They think it’s bad for us to have sex, but they didn’t do the right things to stop us. They didn’t expect us to want sex as much as we do.”

“If they invented Cra 103, they know all about it,” Olga said.

“I don’t think so.” Peder held up his hands against her protest. “Not if we’re the first people to take it. Somebody has to be the very first. That’s us.”

“What if this medicine does other things we don’t expect?” Sanjay asked.

Olga went over to rub Hakim’s shoulders. “We can watch ourselves, and be careful.”

Michiko shook her head. “What if the medicine wears off, and we go back to like we were before?” She answered herself, stress rising in her voice. “We have to let them boss us, if that’s what they want. Anything, just to get more medicine.”

“When the buggy comes, or when Carmen wakes up. We’ll tell them then,” Peder said. “We’ll tell them we’re sorry. We don’t want to be free anymore.”

“We could use the radio like Carmen did,” Hakim suggested. “We could talk to them right now. I saw how she did it.”

They trooped to the radio room, and Hakim got the radio working. “South station calling north. South station calling north.”

Nothing happened. They fiddled with the dial and found static. At other setplaces, the radio throbbed out noise. It sounded like pulsing engines.

Olga reached a tentative finger, and pushed AUTOSEEK. The radio reverted to static, but the static didn’t obscure a voice. Someone with an odd accent talked about economic outlooks, evidence in a murder case, and the anniversary of an important NASPAC education loan bill. There was something about a Lunar lesbian spokeswoman seeking entry to UNETAO, and something about the Hidalgo question. More mudslides were expected following torrential rains in Nepal.

The voice spoke on.

“What’s the Hidalgo question?” Michiko wondered.

“What’s all this noise?” Carmen stumbled into the room.

“We’re sorry,” Peder said. “We were trying—”

“To listen to the news?” Carmen seemed surprised. “How would you know there’s such a thing as news?”

“There’s a Hidalgo question,” Michiko persisted. “They were talking about it, but they didn’t say much.”

“No.” Carmen sank into a chair. “No, they wouldn’t. One arrested soccer hero gets ten times the airplay. I’m surprised they mentioned us at all.”

“We were trying to reach the institute,” Hakim said. “We wanted to apologize for running off and throwing stones and hurting Doctor Moeller.”

“We’re going to be good now,” Michiko said.

Carmen looked at her. “Something’s happened.”

“We don’t want to become stupid again,” Peder explained. “Maybe we need more medicine, or else that will happen.”

“And in your simple honesty you want to make a deal.” Carmen smiled. “I feel lots better. Even a short nap makes a difference. I hope I wasn’t too grumpy toward the end of our trek.”

“None of us can sleep,” Olga said. “I tried. We just can’t.”

“It’s the Cra 103,” Carmen agreed. “It’s a side effect. Your brain cells are fuzzing out with new connections, and it’s too stimulating. Maybe after they stop growing—do you understand? The growth is permanent. You’ll plateau and stay intelligent.”

The group sighed in simultaneous relief.

“It might be best for you to stay here, though. To keep you separate from the others.”

“Can’t those other kids take Cra 103 and get smart?” Peder asked.

Carmen reached and tousled his hair. “You’re generous! You even want smart cows! Are you happy then? Is it good to be smart?”

“Yes!” “Yes!” “It’s very good!”

“What if I took this medicine?” Carmen asked. “Or maybe Doctor Moeller?”

“You said it might not work on people like you,” Peder answered.

“We don’t know. We think it’ll work. It might be me who gets chosen. I’m one of triplets. It’s like having two spares. And Doctor Moeller is recovering from her injury. You heard the radio. She’s had stitches, and she’ll need dental repair.”

“I’m sorry about the rock,” Michiko said. Her eyes grew wet. “It’s my fault.”

Carmen patted her arm. “If I take the medicine, maybe I’ll get wild like you were at first. That makes me nervous. You guys used your new brains to get into a trap. Stampeding cattle could have killed you. That makes me nervous twice over.”

“Why take medicine?” Peder asked. “You’re smart already.”

Carmen sighed. “Hidalgo has problems. Half the settled asteroids use Higgs generators to gather dark matter. Having more gravity helps them collect air under their buckylayers, but they don’t like too much gravity. The colonists have adapted to light conditions. By Earth standards, the people on Ceres and Vesta and Iris are very weak. One gee would kill them.”

She leaned back in her chair. “We’re different. Until our troubles began, Earth leaders felt okay about sending kids here, because we have Earth normal gravity. To achieve that gravity, we became dark matter hogs. We started something that’s hard to stop. Dark matter keeps falling in of its own accord. It can’t all concentrate inside Hidalgo. It’s layering outward in an invisihle sphere that keeps growing and growing. It’s already ten thousand kilometers across. We’re starting to create anomalies in the orbits of everyone else in the inner system.”

“Anomalies? What’s that?” Peder asked.

“Bad kinds of changes.” Carmen shook her head. “Here’s the deal. We’ve got to go into exile. We’ve got to pull Hidalgo far into the outer system. But then we won’t get more customers for the institute. We’ll be too far away. It takes a long time to fly from Earth to the innermost asteroids. Then too, when we’re far from the sun, even our bucky-black albedo won’t keep Hidalgo warm and Earthlike. We’ll depend on solar mirrors in inner system orbits, and they can be sabotaged.”

Carmen sat forward and sighed heavily. “We’ve got to move, but moving will cripple our independence and put us out of business. We can’t figure a way out of our trap. Maybe the best thing is to give all our kids Cra 103, declare you cured, send you to other asteroids, and switch off our Higgs generator. That’s it, unless I think of something when I’m smarter than I am right now.”

“We could go to Earth,” Peder suggested.

“Immigration is forbidden. Immigration by kids whose parents went ahead and had seconds—you’d be put to sleep. It’s a gentle injection and a gentle euphemism. The fact is you’d be killed. Being on Earth makes you criminals.”

“We’d be super strong on other asteroids,” Michiko said.

Carmen agreed. “They’ll put you in quarantine until you adapt. It’s in the interests of public safety not to have bodybreakers on the loose. In ultra-low gravity one of two things will happen. You’ll waste down and become Ectos, just skin and bones. Or else you’ll put on masses of fat and become Endos. Either way you’ll live long unhealthy lives, with lots of medical intervention. Women don’t menstruate when they’re too thin or too fat. Sex can be difficult. Endo-Endo sex is often impossible. During your quarantine you’ll have your ovaries removed to save eggs for artificial reproduction. Have I said enough?”

“These are our only choices?”

Peder spoke up. “What’s wrong with closing the institute? When everybody’s smart we won’t need it anymore. We could move Hidalgo, and make it a colony, and just—well, farm or something.”

“Solar mirrors cost money,” Carmen said. “What can our colony produce to earn money to position a few dozen mirrors, so we don’t freeze?”

Peder looked at Carmen. “This problem is new to us, but it’s old to you. You and Doctor Moeller and all the others on the staff, you had this same talk. You wanted to find a way to make money. That’s why we’re here!”

“What are you talking about?” Hakim demanded.

Peder explained. “Now and again some medicine comes from Earth that the doctors don’t know about. They know how it’s supposed to work, but they need to try it on people. So which people? Us! They test it on us, and you watch to see what happens.”

“We don’t test every medicine that comes along,” Carmen said, looking from face to face. “We’re careful. Just medicines that promise good things for you. Now you’re smart, so that phase is over. Otherwise you’re right. You’ve been test subjects. That’s been your job for the last five hundred trifts. We got paid so much per head. Does this upset you?”

“We’ve got to move to other asteroids and become Ectos or Endos. Or else we test medicines for money. Or freeze. Or go to Earth where they want to kill us,” Olga summarized. “You should take Cra 103. Get smart enough to give us more choices.”

“It only seems fair,” Carmen agreed.

“One thing,” Peder persisted. “Us being upset? Why did you sound worried about that?”

“You can guess,” Carmen said. “Certainly Earth’s upset. You have important parents. We get money from them. We need more. We’ve needed more ever since business slacked off. We tried to be sneaky about the drug testing program, but some of those parents found out. From Earth’s view there are two Hidalgo problems. One; we’re getting too massive. Two; we’re being bad and victimizing innocent kids. Maybe we’re willing to do worse things to get money. It’s called survival, but on Earth it’s called blackmail.”

“You aren’t bad,” Hakim said.

“I’m glad you think so. Obviously we’re not perfect. There are ethicists on Earth calling for a rescue fleet to get you. The radio talks about musterings and activated units. We’re actually supposed to be worried!” She shook her head. “They’re too damn cheap. For a fraction of the cost of a fleet, they could subsidize us and we wouldn’t have a problem. That’s all we ask for.”

“Do we have guns?” Peder asked. “If they send a fleet we can fight them, like on those TV shows. We’re strong and we’re smart.”

Carmen reached to pat his butt. “Better a lover than a fighter. No, our armory is small. Cattle prods, kitchen knives—laughable. Anyhow, we’d be outnumbered.” She stood up. “Come along, Peder. All this nude pessimism is making me want to have a baby. Let’s go back to the nurse’s office.”

Behind the locked door of the nurse’s office, Carmen and Peder balanced on a narrow hospital-style bed. Eight minutes of daylight winked by, and twenty-one minutes of night. Another day came and went. Peder spent himself and rolled off to recover his energies. Despite the popcorn, his stomach growled with hunger.

Outside the window, a buggy puttered up to the commissary door. Carmen sat up and looked for her clothes. “Wash and go collect the others,” she told Peder.

The group helped unload the buggy. Back in the kitchen, Rachel provided an on-the-spot lesson in making hot porridge. “There’s been another final ultimatum from Earth,” she told Carmen.

“I’ve told the kids everything,” Carmen answered. “I can’t believe they understand it all, but that’s okay. I don’t either. They make the right noises.”

“Are they ready for schooling? Will they rebel again?”

“Yes. No. We want to learn,” Peder told Rachel. “We want to help Hidalgo.”

“Amazing,” Rachel said. “Quite a change from throwing rocks.”

“We’re sorry,” Michiko said. “It’s my fault.” Unexpectedly she started to cry.

“Could we have clothes again?” Olga asked.

“In less than a trift they’ve gone from preschool to late teens, in terms of the socialization of violence,” Carmen went on. She patted Michiko. “They’ve volunteered to fight any Earth rescue force. I think they’d try, if we let them. Maybe even if we don’t.”

“We could take Cra 103 twice, and get really smart,” Sanjay said. “Then we’d invent weapons like Doctor Zul-tar of Sky Force 9 on TV.”

“Uh-huh,” Rachel said. “It’ll be interesting seeing you try to enjoy your favorite videos, now that your intelligence has gone up so much.” She turned. “Olga, I’ll fetch clothes next trip.” She turned back to Sanjay. “No more medicine. Too many neural connections and your brain might get wired solid. Signals might jump every direction at once.” “If it’s dangerous for us, it’s dangerous for Carmen.”

Rachel looked to Carmen. “You told them about that too? This crazy ambition of yours? Jesus!”

To Peder, watching smart people argue was an education. Carmen answered: “I didn’t say I was going to take a dose, not unless it seems safe. But I’m not scared off by your ‘solid-brain’ metaphor. We’ve got a CD library of every kind of neural problem known to humankind. Where do you see these solid brains? You’ve made them up.”

“You call it invention,” Rachel said. “I call it extrapolation. In any case you promised to wait a hundred trifts. That’s minimum time for observing these kids.”

“Is Earth going to give us a hundred trifts?” Carmen asked.

“Who knows? Their diplomats talk so carefully we can’t be sure of anything. All the fire they’ve breathed hasn’t burnt us yet.” Rachel looked at the group and lowered her voice. “Watch their eyes. They’re taking all this in. It’s such a change.”

“Our parents might send spaceship-soldiers to rescue us,” Peder said. “You don’t want us to fight them, but we could talk to Earth on the radio. We could tell them you’ve made us smart. They should be happy about us. We’ll tell them you’re not bad people.”

Carmen pondered. “This actually might be a good idea. We could put you on TV, so they’d know you were speaking your genuine thoughts. Rachel, what do you think?”

“I think they haven’t plateaued yet,” Rachel said. She shivered. “It’s frightening, almost. Two trifts ago Peder couldn’t reliably dress himself.”

“Frightening?” Peder asked. “Oh, I see. Like with dark matter.”

“How? Explain what you mean,” Carmen said.

“You used this Higgs thing to start collecting dark matter inside Hidalgo, and now the dark matter collects itself.”

“A runaway process,” Rachel agreed. “You’re saying you’ve got runaway intelligence.”

“Isn’t that what you’re afraid of?”

“I’m afraid it may go so far that—yes. Dark matter could ruin the inner system. Intelligence could ruin you as a human being, if we can’t teach you fast enough to keep up.”

“We’ll have classes right after porridge,” Carmen said. “While Rachel goes north for clothes.”

In reading class Hakim complained about the absurdities of English orthography. Sanjay agreed. “Even the language has bad logic. There’s ten times too many rules, and none of them work completely.”

Carmen gave them Esperanto cassettes. “Try this, just for fun. It was a great idea, but it never caught on.”

They page-flipped through the first exercises. “This language is bona,” Hakim said. “Why didn’t people like it?”

“Imagine you’re flying an airplane. You’ve got a radio headset on, but the plane is noisy, and you’re bumping through a storm. Someone down in the control tower is talking to you, trying to guide you. You can’t hear her very well. She’s using a verb: rapidas. Or is it rapidis? Or rapidos? Present, past and future tenses. In English it’s much more distinct. Am hurrying, hurried, will hurry. All the illogicalities of English make it easy to sort out what might have been said. In real life there’s static in all our headsets. When you’re used to English you escape that static.”

“But if we were used to Esperanto, and if we fixed the endings, couldn’t we keep the beautiful logic?”

Carmen sighed. “Since we’re so interested in logic, let’s switch to math. After a day or two let’s introduce some algebra.”

Lunchday followed math. After lunch the six paired off in three directions.

Rachel returned to the south campus in her buggy, and found the commissary empty. She went to the girls’ dorm. Michiko and Sanjay responded to her shouts. Peder watched through the window blinds of a boys’ dorm bedroom. “She’s upset. She’s telling them not to have sex anymore,” he reported to Carmen. “She’s telling them about babies.”

“Babies are a lot of trouble,” Carmen admitted. “Come along. Apparently my sister wants everybody to assemble out there.”

The group assembled. Rachel handed out clothes. “Let’s check the herb garden,” she said. “We put up netting to keep the geese and turkeys away, and the bigger animals can’t climb over the fence. I want to teach you some practical food-lore. See, knowledge goes in all directions. Each of these herbs has a place in human history. Every plant was first discovered somewhere, or bred, and then carried off to new places. Now even to new worlds!”

Rachel’s herb lesson introduced the group to places like Egypt, Greece and Persia, Central Asia, the Celebes Islands and Mexico. They went inside and she handed out picture-story cassettes that talked about ice-age people and the first civilizations. Peder was amazed at how big Earth was, and how much history it had.

Rachel agreed. “People devote lifetimes to studying just one little island, or a few generations of some medieval family.”

Carmen bid goodbye to Rachel and took over the classroom. She opened a closet full of musical instruments. “Let’s see how fast you can learn notation,” she said.

Peder glanced outside. Rachel emerged from the commissary carrying a hatchet. She strode toward a corner of the campus, boxing in a pair of retreating turkeys.

“Blow.” Carmen handed Peder a worn plastic trumpet. He let out a blat. He experimented with the finger-holes, developing a range of blats. Outside, he saw Rachel twirling a headless turkey by its feet, spraying rings of blood. The turkey kept flapping and pulled a leg free of her grip, even though it was dead. Rachel gave up and let it go, and it tumbled in the long campus grass. By the end of this short day, it was still making convulsive movements.

Peder played his plastic horn through the night. Musical notation came easily. The group’s next lesson was anatomy. Then astronomy. Smelling of soap, Rachel came in and took over. “Thank God,” Carmen said. “I feel like they’re wringing me dry. Soon we’ll have to hand them over to the CD library and stand aside.”

“You’ll find work to do in the commissary,” Rachel said. “I’ve killed a turkey for next trift.”

Carmen left. Rachel taught sex education, and then sketched out the history of life on Earth; evolution, disaster, more evolution, more disasters. The accompanying movies were spectacular. Continents floating around! Dinosaurs! Comets!

“Seven million years ago, some plants learned to extract a third again as much energy from sunlight as the others. We call these ‘carbon-4’ plants,” Rachel said. “They spread over the Earth. Their hunger sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and reduced the greenhouse effect. After a while Earth started having ice ages. The ice was hard on the old kind of forest vegetation, but carbon-4 grasses adapted, so for them this was a good disaster. Birds and mammals adapted too. Carbon-4 plants had more food value. Soon they were cropped so much that their advantages over the old forests were almost nullified. We humans are a product of this new environment of grass and ice ages.”

Peder latched onto the phrase “a good disaster.” He raised his hand. “You say there are changes that hurt most things, and can’t be turned around, but a long time later we learn they were good.”

Rachel nodded. “You’re correct in the abstract. Earth is going through disaster right now. Many varieties of life are becoming extinct. The loss is in front of our eyes. The eventual gain is something we can only guess at. This disaster is caused by too many people, so we’re responsible, but we don’t dare say we’re doing a good thing. We’re breaking down a system of life just to make more room for our favorite carbon-4 plants. That’s called hunger. For a while human hunger was a runaway monster. We’re still not sure Earth’s population laws can stop the destruction.”

Peder caught Michiko’s eye. She nodded. She’d noticed too. Runaway processes led to disasters, but some disasters could be good. They’d get a chance to talk after supper, about the good of too much dark matter, and the good of too much intelligence. Peder raised his hand again. “We need to learn how to use the library.”

Long after supper, and after Rachel and Carmen went to bed, the group used their sleeping shift to study history, molecular biology and physics. Next trift the odors of roasting turkey drifted out of the commissary building. Around Day 25 their appetites drew Peder, Michiko, Olga, Sanjay, and Hakim from the library.

They were waiting in line with their silverware and trays when soldiers from Earth pushed in through the lunchroom door. Carmen and Rachel submitted to arrest and were brought from the kitchen to stand with the others. “Don’t attract attention,” Carmen whispered to Peder. “They think you’re mentally retarded. Maybe that’s useful.”

Peder nodded. The soldiers handed out pressure suits the same blue-and-silver colors as the ones they wore, minus unit insignia, badges of rank and weapon packs. I*eder didn’t have to feign stupidity after putting on the helmet. As for the rest of the suit, he let Carmen and Rachel dress him as they dressed the others. The two nurses whimpered. “They’re going to de-activate the Higgs generator. Our atmosphere will expand. We’re not like the other asteroids. Our buckylayer isn’t heavy enough to keep the air dense. Without suits we’d die.”

“Hidalgo is being shut down,” Peder said.

“Yes. We’ll be taken to a light-gravity asteroid. Some of us will be put on trial.”

After dressing their patients and themselves, the nurses were led to a separate room and locked in. Peder and the others sat at a table. A couple of soldiers eased into place nearby, apparently stationed to keep an eye on them. They could be expected to consider themselves more protectors than guards.

Peder bent close to Michiko. “Their spaceship is on top of the south pole mountain. Hidden above the buckylayer.”

“Maybe.” She passed him a lunchroom fork. “You’re strongest.”

Peder hid it under his glove. “All those poor cows.”

“If we don’t do anything, we won’t have our good disaster.” Michiko said.

The sun rose to the north outside, visible in the lunchroom window. Moments later the window cracked. Air keened out. The fabric of their pressure suits ballooned. The sky darkened from orange through brown to black around the sun, and filled with stars. Most of the stars were crystals of snow. The snow was slow to fall.

The soldiers stared at these sights with the rest of the group. In exultant terror Peder stepped toward the two men. Already Hidalgo’s gravity was less than normal, and he bumped into his targets. He used the clumsy collision to good purpose. Air hissed from the first soldier’s suit. The man doubled over and convulsed around the floor like Rachel’s dead turkey. Peder stabbed the second, digging tine-holes into the fabric of his suit.

Olga ran to the locked door, and freed Carmen and Rachel. Peder and Michiko donned the dead soldiers’ weapons packs. They waved guns. “You’re going to play prisoners,” Michiko shrilled. “We’re leading you up the mountain.”

“What?” In thin air nobody could hear well. Michiko acted out the message, gesturing again with her weapon. For all Carmen and Rachel might know, they were prisoners. Prisoners of a gang of uneducated lunatic geniuses.

The seven exited the commissary and bounded uphill through snow-dusted grass that crumbled to the touch. Beyond the campus, the climb grew steep. More and more of Hidalgo grew visible. In one starlit night they reached altitudes beyond the peak of Gopo Hill. An oily line marked where the buckylayer had formed a ceiling above the sky for so many years. The rocks showed color below and gray sterility above—but now the buckylayer was kilometers higher and thinner, straining to hold Hidalgo’s depressurized atmosphere.

With each step, the group leapt to new heights. Below to the right, they saw Lake Lago boiling into thin air, the base of a massive spouting plume of snow. On the far side of the equator, figures flashed into the sky like atoms of silver as they tried to head south to the ship. The patients of the institute were being “rescued,” but how could they cope with such unfamiliar conditions? By now their weight must be less than one-tenth normal, but that didn’t mean severely retarded kids in wheelchairs could be taught to walk.

The forces of Earth had three places to go: north campus, south campus, and the Higgs generator. The north campus was now the focus of everyone’s attention. Everyone except the guard stationed at the foot of the spaceship entry ramp.

The group bounded into view. The guard pointed his gun, and raised his left hand to tap his helmet. At a loss, Peder tapped his helmet in answer. Michiko fired. The guard flew back violently. The group ran for the ramp, all but two. Carmen and Rachel twisted free of Sanjay’s grip, and backed away.

Sanjay was last in through the ramp. Peder nodded, and they climbed the central shaft. One of the pilots fired down. Michiko returned fire at almost the same instant, and the man tumbled over the rail.

Peder leapt in urgent hope of success and hurried toward a closing bulkhead. He thrust his blooded fork into the crack. On the far side, someone struggled to secure the door. In moments that person was outnumbered four to one. The bulkhead swung open. Michiko fired again.

Her victim was a woman. Hakim and Olga pulled her body out of the way. “Go down and shut the ramp,” Peder shouted. “We’ve got to learn how to fly this thing.”

This far toward the south pole, Hidalgo’s day was a brief gleam of light, followed by twenty-eight minutes of darkness. It took Peder an entire extra-long night to figure out the sequence of events culminating in liftoff. When one bank of controls turned out to be nothing more than a “master light control panel,” he decided the designers of Earth had gone out of their way to make piloting a spaceship daunting and complex.

Restraining his temper, he set every complexity aside. In the end it was simple. You told Computer Display 1 what you wanted. Someone else told Computer Display 2 the same thing. That freed the control stick.

Take-off! The spaceship shot up. It cut through the attenuated buckylayer, a film of soot on top of the atmosphere, composed of giant hollow molecules. The film healed shut behind them, holding in a small world’s air.

“Now all we have to learn to do is steer. Let’s get the ship pressurized first,” Peder said. “I want to take off this stupid helmet.”

“Hurry. I’m hungry,” Michiko said.

They pressurized, stripped off their pressure suits, and ate from ship’s stores, regretting Rachel’s lost turkey.

Without a Higgs generator to concentrate it, Hidalgo’s dark matter had expanded to a sphere forty thousand kilometers in diameter. Their ship swam through invisible ghost-stuff. Peder knew there was no way to orbit the asteroid very long inside this sphere, not so the spaceship wouldn’t be dragged toward the center, but the opposing factor was that the sphere began dissipating around the edges. Left to its own, un-Higged dark matter didn’t pack tightly.

“Well, we can afford to fall for a while,” Peder decided. He canceled thrust and weathered the vertigo of zero gravity. “Now let’s learn to use the radio.”

“I’ve got it figured out,” said Hakim.

“That’s what you said the last time,” Michiko answered.

Hakim flicked a switch. A voice filled the control room. “—to Queen Marguerite. Rendezvous South to Queen Marguerite. Please answer. Over.”

“Are you talking to us?” Hakim asked. “We’ve got the spaceship. Is that its name? Queen Marguerite?”

“Who the hell are you?” came the answer. “What’s going on? Why the radio blackout? We’re at Rendezvous South and waiting. We’ve got hungry kids here.”

“Take them back to the institute,” Hakim said. “Turn on the Higgs generator. There’s a lot of dead cows you can butcher for food.” After a pause he said “Over.”

“That’s not on the program. Over.”

Hakim grinned at Peder. “We control the program. We’ve got your spaceship. You’ve got no choice.” He remembering a line from Sky Force 9. “We’re your worst nightmare. Do what we say. The longer you wait, the deader Hidalgo gets, and it’s going to take Earth a hundred trifts to send another ship.”

“Trifts? That’s a local term. Are you locals?”

Hakim made a gesture of disgust and switched off the radio. “I wonder if we’ve got a CD library on this ship,” he said. “We need to polish our educations.”

“And all by ourselves. We can’t talk to Carmen and Rachel,” Michiko said. “They’ll tell us to stop being bad, and we won’t know. Is that really what they think, or are they being forced?”

“We’re being bad,” Peder said. “We killed five people. We’re runaways. Like carbon-4 plants, we have to be bad first so we can be good later. But you’re right. Let’s stay off the radio. To have Carmen tell us she’s against us—that would hurt too much.”

Half a trift later, Hidalgo’s buckylayer collapsed toward its former diameter, and grew darker as it thickened. “Things can start getting back to normal,” Peder said.

“They’re going to use a Higgs generator parked out past Jupiter to collect enough dark mass to tug Hidalgo into the outer system,” Olga said. “We’ve guessed that they’ve already started, and Hidalgo’s natural orbit will take it to the tugging place. Let’s go there. Anywhere else in the solar system, we’ll be arrested.”

“They could lose us,” Peder said. “I’m not kidding. If we keep radio silence, and change course by increments, how will Earth keep track of us? Besides, they won’t expect us to go to the supermass.”

“We have supplies to feed the whole population of Hidalgo for a hundred trifts,” Sanjay said. “Fuel, too. And exercise equipment to keep soldiers strong in zero gravity.”

“We’re set then. Let’s go.”

Peder’s group spent the next hundred fifty trifts in radio silence, studying the reference works in the Queen Marguerite’s CD library, especially the sections relevant to the planet Jupiter and orbital mechanics. After an initial period of intellectual triumph they grew bored, and invented new sex games. They returned to their computer displays to study oddball subjects like law, sewage treatment, chamber music, and religious heresies of the European Reformation. They skipped workouts and drifted in Endo-and-Ecto directions, then rebuilt their muscles in frenzies of exercise.

They played computer games and wrote novels. The games were easier to score, and provoked fewer arguments. They developed a “perfected” version of Esperanto. Hakim and Sanjay went on to create a perfected version of the perfected version. Olga and Peder coined new slang words and idioms. Michiko and Sanjay talked to each other entirely in rhyme.

Sanjay wrote a program to generate names for 237,677 prospective worlds, each not quite a thousandth the size of Earth, and therefore considerably bigger than the biggest asteroid. Of course, Jupiter was excessively gassy, and lots of hydrogen would just plain dissipate when they started pulling it apart.

Olga shook her head. “They’re too sonorous, your names. They sound too much alike.” She wrote her own program, biased in the direction of wicked consonant clusters. The group agreed to alternate Sanjay-names with Olga-names.

“It all depends, of course, on whether we can get Earth to build 237,677 Higgs generators and send them out,” Peder said.

Michiko smiled. “We’re going to make an awful mess of the solar system, if all Jupiter’s mass isn’t confined into an orbital ring. Only dark matter can maintain a permanent necklace of pearls sharing the same path. Only Higgs generators can confine dark matter.”

“We’ll be old before this project is over,” Peder said. “We’ll sacrifice our health. We may never set foot on real ground again.” He listened to an inner voice and spoke again. “Well, that’s some punishment for the bad things we’ve done.”

The Higgs supermass loomed ahead, a patch of empty space to normal eyes, with a robot station in the middle. The Queen Marguerite dropped through, tangenting past the station, and out the other side. It slowed, stopped, and fell in reverse, less energetically. With each pendulum swing, Peder braked. After another trift they came to a stop. “Okay, we’re here. This is the biggest thing ever contrived by human hands, and we’re going to use it to make something even bigger.”

Michiko ran out cables to take the robot station in tow. Hakim was designated to do the talking. He composed himself in front of his microphone and began his broadcast. At the speed of light, hours had to pass before the people of Earth learned that the solar system was no longer theirs.

Content

The Runaways
by Phillip C. Jennings