Probability Sun (21 page)

Pek Sikorski said, “Now, please, don’t be startled or frightened. This is just an
elevator.
A machine to move us. We will only be in it a few moments.”

The
elevator
—the word was Terran, of course—closed its door, trapping them in a windowless box. Then it began to move sideways. Pek Voratur clutched at the smooth wall. Essa Pek Criltifor’s eyes widened. Then she smiled. “Why, it’s just a cart.”

“A cart with no one to pull it,” Voratur said, nervously jaunty. “How interesting a new thing!”

The elevator stopped and opened its door. The three Worlders exclaimed aloud.

They stood in a garden—a garden aboard the flying boat, a garden in the sky. There were plants under glass, and small plants in bubbling vats, and beds of flowers. Strange, beautiful, perfect flowers never seen on World, all heights and colors, their petals shining with dew and perfuming the air. The beds surrounded small village greens set with chairs and little tables. The flowerbeds and greens, unlike anything else on the flying boat, curved into pleasing shapes. A few Terrans sat at these tables, drinking from plain cups; more Terrans tended the flowers. Everyone stopped to stare at the Worlders.

Voratur boomed, “May your blossoms rejoice the souls of your ancestors!”

Pek Sikorski said to the Terrans, “Our guest says hello.”

“Hello,” the closest Terrans responded, smiling, and Pek Sikorski said to Voratur, “They welcome you to our garden.” She broke off a yellow flower and handed it to Pek Voratur. A Terran gardener looked as if he were going to protest, but at a look from Pek Sikorski, did not.

She said, “Our blossoms rejoice that you visit us.”

“We praise the blooms of your heart. May we walk in the garden?”

“Yes, certainly.”

The three Worlders started timidly forward. They stopped in the middle of the first village green. Enli was wondering how there could be village dancing in it, it was so small, when the two human children they’d seen before ran out from between trees. The smaller threw her arms around Pek Sikorski’s knees. “Dr. Ann! Marbet’s here!”

A Terran followed the children, a small brown woman with short red headfur that curled prettily. She was much closer to the size of Worlders than any Terran Enli had ever seen. Her eyes were a startling color, the green of glassy rocks worn bright and smooth by river water.

Pek Sikorski said in World, “Pek Voratur, this is Marbet Pek Grant. And these children are named Amanda and Sudie.” She switched to Terran. “Marbet, three of our guests: Pek Voratur, Pek Criltifor, Pek Brimmidin. Pek Brimmidin speaks and understands English.”

Pek Grant said in World, “May your blossoms flourish.” Pek Sikorski looked surprised. Pek Grant added in Terran, “Learned it from Lyle.”

Sudie said, “You have hair on your necks!”

“What did the child say?” Voratur asked Enli, who hesitated before answering.

“She says that Worlders have neckfur and Terrans have headfur.”

“True enough,” Voratur said.

Amanda said with childish formality, “Would you like to tour the garden?”

Enli translated, and Voratur agreed. They began a slow walk through the garden in the sky. Pek Grant and Pek Sikorski walked beside Pek Voratur, with Pek Sikorski translating. Enli saw that his fear had lessened; he appraised everything with the shrewd eyes of a trader. Enli walked beside Amanda, talking with the pale human girl, who had beautiful manners.

Not so Sudie. No Worlder child would have behaved, or been permitted to behave, as she did—not even those too young to be real. Sudie ran ahead, hid behind bushes, climbed trees, lagged behind, called, “Come find me!” And to make it worse, the girl Essa Pek Criltifor began to do the same thing. Here she was, a guest and a few years older than the well-behaved Amanda, and she was disgracing them all. And Pek Voratur, whose household she belonged to, was too preoccupied to even notice!

Finally Enli caught Essa’s eye and frowned. Essa stood still for a moment. And then she crinkled her skull ridges at Enli and scampered after Sudie.

Essa had disobeyed her elder. And there was no head pain to stop her.

For just a moment Enli glimpsed what the loss of shared reality could mean.

“Enli,” Pek Voratur said, suddenly beside her, “we can plant a very profitable bargain for some of these flowers and the healing doses that are made from them. Pek Grant tells me that garden there”—he pointed to a covered glass bowl inside which grew tall plants dense with brown pods—“contains plants which have been manufactured by seed-altering machines. The seeds contain tiny potions that will dry up many body growths people now die of.”

Manufactured plants? Seed-altering machines? It made no sense to Enli. Pek Grant was now in earnest conversation with Pek Sikorski. Enli saw Pek Sikorski’s eyes grow wide and her face even paler than usual. What was Pek Grant telling her?

Voratur said, “I want you to translate when I plant the bargains for the flowers and other things I want in exchange for coming here,” Voratur said. “You, Enli, not Pek Sikorski. How do I know she translates the same words I say?”

Enli stopped watching the Terran women’s intense conversation. Pek Voratur had her full attention. He was saying that he believed the Terrans might not be sharing reality … and yet he was still willing to trade with them. He had not instantly decided they were unreal.

Voratur caught her intense gaze. Quickly he said, “And you will get your share of the bargain, of course, Enli. So we want to make it a profitable one.”

“All of us who came here will get our share.”

“Yes, of course. Although…” he suddenly looked thoughtful. “Up here, the others do not know how much we will plant in our bargain … and it was, after all, only you and I who gave brain pictures. There isn’t as much reason to share with the others, who only came and sat like logs in that bare room. Not as much reason to share at all.”

Enli stared at him. “Pek Voratur…”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. We will have to share. As soon as we return to World, shared reality will return to us. We will have to share.”

He closed his eyes, calculating silently. Enli went on staring at him, while Essa ran past, searching for Sudie, who erupted in a flurry of noise from behind the low bushes beside Pek Sikorski and Marbet Pek Grant.

SEVENTEEN

IN THE NEURY MOUNTAINS

C
aptain Heller reported to Kaufman by comlink the return of the shuttle to base camp, even though Kaufman had just heard it screaming through the atmosphere overhead. “Shuttle has returned, sir.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Just now he didn’t want one of the military briefings so dear to Heller, status quo report and procedural report and deployment report. The second test on the artifact would begin any moment.

“Disembarking were nine natives, who will be immediately escorted to the perimeter, and—”

“Give them a minute to recover, Captain. They’re not used to hurtling on and off their planet.”

“Yes, sir,” Heller said frostily. “Also disembarking were Dr. Sikorski and Ms. Grant.”

Marbet? Why had she come down? No point in asking Heller, who had started on her meticulous reports.

“Lyle!” called Dieter Gruber. “Come, we are ready to begin!”

“—No signals received of any—”

“Yes, thank you, dismissed,” Lyle said, and broke the link.

At the edge of the meadow the scientists waited impatiently. Again the detection equipment had been set up, including the robot to depress setting prime two. Boulders and other objects, of various compositions, sat at various distances from the artifact. Sensors had been programmed in orbit. The difference was that setting prime one had produced a phenomenon predicted to a fairly high confidence level. No one had any idea what setting prime two would produce. Nor what would be required to shield against it, although they had done their best.

Shields up, the small group waited tensely. When the orbitals were in the right position, Capelo said, “Now!”

Nothing happened.

“No changes in radiation level at any detection site,” Albemarle said, studying his displays, and one by one the rest of the detectors reported the same thing.

“No change anywhere,” Gruber said. “Why not?”

Rosalind Singh said, “I doubt they’d build in a setting with no effect.”

“How do we know what they’d do?” Albemarle said. “Maybe the setting’s broken, somehow.”

Gruber said, “Nothing has ever malfunctioned anywhere in any space tunnel. Their equipment does not seem to break.”

“But there’s a first time for everything, Dieter.”

Only Capelo said nothing. Kaufman watched him curiously. The physicist stood with his eyes closed and his arms crossed on his chest, the same posture Kaufman had surprised him in before. A black hole … everything about him seemed concentrated inward, cut off from communication with the outer world. Albemarle was watching Capelo carefully, and it seemed to Kaufman that Albemarle’s expression was a strange combination of curiosity, disdain, and wistfulness.

The others resumed running programs that might find some change in something, somewhere, as a result of activating setting prime two. Capelo abruptly came out of his trance and walked rapidly away. Kaufman didn’t try to stop him.

It was half an hour before he returned, dirty from climbing rocks. Without preamble he said, “Set up to test setting prime three.”

Albemarle said, “Without knowing what prime two does? Why? To go to a greater strength because you can’t crack a lesser one is—”

Kaufman said, “What are you thinking, Tom?”

Capelo said, “I’m not sure yet. But we need to test setting prime three first.”

“Why?” Rosalind Singh said.

“I can’t tell. But I’ve been going through the situation … there’s a gap. No, not a gap, a … an unmade connection. It feels right to test prime three now.”

“Oh,” Albemarle said, with a flash of the old jealousy, “if we’re going by
feelings
now … I thought we were doing science.”

Kaufman studied Capelo. After a moment Kaufman said to the others, in the voice he reserved for situations requiring unarguable authority, “Do it. Set up to test setting prime three.”

Rosalind Singh began giving orders to the techs. Kaufman waited until everyone else was similarly occupied to say quietly to Capelo, “Is it like chess, Tom?”

With effort, Capelo focused on Kaufman. “Chess?”

“I’m not a scientist,” Kaufman said, “but I play a fair game of chess, and I’ve read about the great players. They don’t logically reason out the possibilities as much as see them whole … no, not see, apprehend them in some inexplicable way, all the possible outcomes a few moves ahead. Do you do something like that with the physics of the artifact, with the equations?”

“Something like that,” Capelo said. All at once he smiled, the kind of smile Kaufman had never seen from him. Not sardonic, not bitter, not amused. Happy. “We’ll get them yet, Lyle.” He walked off.

“
Them
?” Kaufman wondered. The equations? The doubters like Albemarle? The builders of the artifact? There was no way to tell.

Setting up for test three didn’t involve much work; the remote robot was repositioned and the calculations done to receive feedback from different orbital sensors. When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing.

There was a two-hour wait for the orbitals to reach position. In the middle of it, Ann Sikorski and Marbet Grant, clad in s-suits, emerged from the tunnel into the meadow. Marbet walked over to Rosalind, and Ann made straight for Kaufman.

“Ann, I—”

“You can’t do it, Lyle.”

“Do what?” he said, although he already knew. He’d watched Ann’s recordings, and Ann had obviously talked to Marbet.

“You can’t remove that artifact from World. Not to test it in space, even. It generates the shared reality mechanism. Without it, Worlders can’t share reality. Their entire society will fall apart. On ship—”

“Slow down a minute, Ann. Just listen a minute. You found out that something on World generates some sort of mechanism that enables shared reality. You don’t know that something is the artifact.”

“Come on, Lyle! What else could it be?”

“I don’t know. But you don’t, either. You’re proceeding on assumptions, not facts.”

“Marbet told me you’d discovered a prime setting already permanently activated! That’s a fact!”

Kaufman had obviously told Marbet too damn much, without specifying that she keep the information from Ann. Which, since Ann was a member of the team, wouldn’t have occurred to Marbet. Anyway, Ann would only have learned the same thing from Dieter.

Ann said, “You’re planning on experimenting with these people’s
brains
, Lyle. They evolved in this probability field. You don’t know what will happen to them physically if they lose the field permanently, or even for longer than the nine Worlders spent aboard ship. You’re experimenting with a whole planetful of people’s brains!”

“I don’t have any choice.”

“Of course you do! You have total discretion on this project!”

“I have military objectives.”

She stared at him. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you? Take the thing first into space, and then if it’s useful enough, out of the star system entirely?”

“Yes. If I can.”

She gazed at him a moment longer, then turned and walked away. Kaufman hadn’t thought her gentle face could look like that.

He didn’t want to talk to Marbet, now inspecting the artifact up close with Rosalind. He said abruptly to a tech, “Sergeant, clear the field immediately of nonessential personnel.”

“Yes, sir.”

When the orbital sensors registered proper position, Capelo said, “Now!” The command was unnecessary; everything of course was preprogrammed. But Kaufman saw that Capelo couldn’t help himself.

This time the displays registered all kinds of results. When Kaufman could sort out the technical discussion among the scientists, he said, “It’s the same effect that Syree Johnson got when she activated setting prime one on the bigger artifact, isn’t it? A spherical wave destabilizing everything above atomic number seventy-five, and obeying the inverse square law.”