PROBABILITY MOON

by Nancy Kress

  Ann breathed, “Punctuated evolution …”

  “Ja! The asteroid impact was a catastrophe for World—dust thrown up to block the sun, tidal waves, earthquakes. Life changes fast when catastrophe comes. Maybe this, Ann, is where the biology for the shared-reality mechanism evolved.”

  She said, “I need your data, Dieter. Now. I have to run the computer sims.”

  “Yes, of course, Frau Professor Flower. But may I wash first? I smell, I think?”

  “Like a cesspool,” Bazargan said, and Dieter laughed. Despite his other worries, Bazargan chuckled. It was good to see a scientist filled with the joy of discovery. This was, after all, why they were here. He must try to remember that in the midst of Voratur’s anger and Allen’s grandiose hyperenthusiasms and Enli’s spying, which he was more and more sure she was doing on behalf of someone besides Voratur.

  “Dieter, before you go,” he said to Gruber, “what was your impression of the Worlders beyond Gofkit Jemloe? How did they react to you?”

  “Pretty well, I think,” Gruber said. “They had all heard of me, of course. Shared reality. I spoke little, and pretended I could not understand as much as I can. I thought that was the best way to avoid mistakes. I am not an anthropologist, you know, Gott sei Dank.” He grinned mischievously at Ann. Allen, puerile prig, bridled.

  “Also,” Gruber continued, “to pretend not to understand is to encourage talk in your presence. In the inns and pel houses the Worlders seemed to regard us as simply traders from a place farther away than most. They were not threatened by us, not alarmed, not unaccepting. Merely curious. Of course, it was all recorded, and you can see whatever you want before I send the data to the Zeus.”

  “Yes,” Bazargan said. “Go have your bath. Do you remember where your room is?”

  “In this warren? No.” Gruber laughed; Bazargan could see that the geologist’s exuberance would be good leaven for this serious team. “I can find my way through the deep sacred caves of the Neury Mountains, but I cannot find my room in this winding house!”

  “Show him the way, David,” Bazargan said, thereby ridding himself of Allen’s overheated theories about priestly self-interest. For now, anyway. He needed quiet. He had to think.

  Allen, looking sulky, led Gruber away. Bazargan went into his personal room, closed the door, and pulled close the gauzy curtains over the arched windows. In the semidarkness scented with flowers, he sat down on a curving pillow to think how to best convince Hadjil Pek Voratur that Terrans were, despite the evidence Voratur must be accumulating, real.

  It was vitally important that Voratur continue to believe that. In his weeks on World, Bazargan had accompanied Voratur to his cottage-industry “manufacturies,” to Rafkit Seloe, to friends’ homes, on various business trips. Despite the obvious gag on asking questions—why would anyone ask if they already shared reality?—Bazargan had learned much. He was now familiar with the major government departments: Processions and Ceremonies, Taxes and Donations, Annals and Sunflashers, Roads and Bridges, Gardens and Wildlands. And the most powerful of the World compound-named departments: Reality and Atonement.

  It was Reality and Atonement that determined who had committed transgressions against shared reality. It was Reality and Atonement that determined the punishment. For offenses severe enough to be declared unreal, that meant death. There were only a few types of exemption, none of which Bazargan understood as yet, although he suspected that the servant Enli might be one of them.

  One thing was completely clear to Bazargan, as it had not been clear to the hastily recalled recon team, and was not yet clear to his own small landing team. Reality and Atonement was almost surely turning its shared, cold eye on the Terrans. And if the Terrans were found to be unreal, they would die.

  In one sense, then, young Allen was right. The priests—“servants of the First Flower,” in their own eyes—with whom Voratur undoubtedly shared all the reality he experienced, were dangerous. But not to Worlders. To humans.

  Of course, Bazargan could pull his team out. Radio the Zeus, call for the shuttle. But he wasn’t going to do that. There was too much rich scientific knowledge to be gained on World, in too many different fields. Ironically, Voratur had said it best: a risk on behalf of shared good.

  But now Bazargan had better come up with effective ways to convince Hadjil Pek Voratur that humans were not perverse illusions on his beautiful, flower-scented planet.

  It was too much. They lacked balance: Bazargan, Gruber, even Ann, whom David Allen admired. Unbalanced, all of them: so immersed in their individual scientific disciplines that they couldn’t see the big picture. Which was, for God’s sake, unfolding right in front of them, in this ridiculous ceremony!

  David shifted on his bench. It was raining, a soft warm rain that stopped none of the ceremonies in the main court of the Voratur household. Servants had spent the morning constructing canopies over the benches that ringed the court, set behind the flower beds and against household walls. Another canopy sheltered the dais built in the middle of the court over the reflecting pool. Toward that dais walked little Nafret, dressed in the briefest of tunics and a long, trailing cape woven of freshly picked flowers. Behind him—this was the part that rankled David—walked not his family but sixteen priests carrying mammoth bouquets of sacred blooms.

  David shifted again on his bench. Bazargan looked at him, one slow sideways glance from those hooded dark eyes. David was careful not to fidget again.

  But when you looked at it right, Bazargan’s careful respect for native customs was part of the problem. Yes, an anthropologist had to act neutral, had to fit in with the population he studied, or else he would be thrown out and couldn’t study it at all. That was basic. But Bazargan went so much further. He thought—they all thought, the old men of the field—that their neutrality had to extend into their private beliefs. Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism.

  Anthropology should be beyond that by now, David fumed, conscientiously not fidgeting on his bench. Anthropology had a duty to the peoples it served, both human and alien, to make life better. It was the same duty an individual had to himself, to create the best person he could be through the Discipline. You gave yourself whatever neuropharms your body lacked so that you could be free of chemical deficiencies and excesses, free for optimum functioning in the world. And a society, too, should be given whatever it needed for optimum function and freedom.

  Which was not sixteen pompous priests solemnly deciding that they would let a little boy live.

  Nafret looked scared, trailing his heavy and fragile cape of flowers. He climbed the two steps to the dais the way small children did: right foot on step one, left foot on step one, right foot up, left foot up. The priests followed. One of them—a big star in Reality and Atonement, no doubt—lifted Nafret onto a high, flower-covered chair at the center of the dais. Nafret looked frantically around, searching the benches for his mother or tutor. His gaze found David, who smiled encouragingly. The little boy still looked frightened.

  The priests sat around the high throne in a circle, facing outward, and began to chant.

  David’s World, fluent as it was, still wasn’t good enough to follow the archaic, highly inflected chant, but he knew it was the story of the First Flower, and that it would go on for at least an hour. After that would come the blessing that declared Nafret real, in which for the first, and last, time in his life unless he became a priest, Nafret would eat a flower. Then feasting and dancing inside the household, family and guests and servants alike, far into the night.

  It might have been an initiation ceremony in any society, except that it was gentle, nonviolent, and based on a biological fact which was not puberty. Worlders pretty much ignored puberty. What mattered was sharing reality, getting discomfort or headpain when you were out of belief with your community, knowing empathy for others in the physical body, not me
rely as an abstract.

  Becoming real.

  A sudden longing hit David, as unexpected as it was sharp. To know you belonged, were accepted, were in synch with your fellows … When had he last had that? He had never had that. Certainly not from his father, who never hid his disappointment in David, nor his mother, too busy with her medical career to notice her only son. Nor anyone at Princeton …

  Bazargan was giving him another sideways look. David returned his attention to the ceremony. Bazargan didn’t really respect him, either, David knew. Bazargan thought David Campbell Allen III was too pampered, too young, too excitable, too ignorant. But in actuality it was Bazargan who was unworthy of respect: stodgy, narrow-visioned, hidebound.

  David would show him. He’d show them all.

  After the ceremony, Bazargan approached David as he stood talking to Colert Gamolin. “Pek Voratur would like to see us all in his personal room, David. Where’s Dieter?”

  “I don’t know. What about?”

  “He didn’t say. You and Ann go ahead, and I’ll find Dieter.”

  As they made their way through the laughing crowd, David said to Ann, “Do you know what this is about?”

  She bit her lip. “I’m afraid I do. This morning I did inventory, and some antihistamine is missing from my room.”

  “Antihistamine? Who—”

  “May your flowers bloom forever,” Voratur boomed. He had come out to meet them. He was magnificently dressed in light, embroidered spidersilk, and his neckfur had been tied into a hundred small bunches decorated with tiny flowers. Voratur’s broad flat face was flushed. Drinking a lot of pel, David guessed.

  He smiled at the Worlder. “I rejoice in your blossoms on this happy day, Pek Voratur.”

  “Ah, we will do it for Bonnie and Ben one day, too. A wonderful flower ceremony!”

  From a Worlder, it was an unbreakable promise. And not a cheap one; David estimated that today’s feast cost Voratur half a year’s revenue. Including, of course, huge payments to the parasitic priests. David managed to smile. “Thank you on behalf of Ben and Bonnie.”

  “Yes, Pek Voratur, thank you,” Ann said, more warmly. “Your flowers gladden my heart!”

  Bazargan came up to them, leading Dieter Gruber. Gruber had grumbled about losing a whole day of rock analysis to the flower ceremony, but now that he was here, he looked as if he was enjoying it more than the other humans. His face was as flushed as Voratur’s, David noticed with disapproval. Although not with pel; Ann had vetoed the intoxicant for humans. “It won’t actually cause physical damage,” she’d said, “but each local brewery adds so many additives that I can’t be sure of the net effect on our nervous system.”

  Gruber must have taken a fizzy he’d brought down from the ship. Or several fizzies. David didn’t see how people could deliberately upset their brains like that. If he were a religious man, he’d call Gruber’s condition a sacrilege.

  “Pek Bazargan! Pek Gruber!” Voratur cried. “May your flowers bloom forever!”

  “And yours, on this happy day,” Bazargan said.

  “Come in, come in.” Voratur led them past his personal room, which was filled with select guests clustered around Alu Pek Voratur. Nafret sat miserably still in his clumsy cape while the other children darted in and out of the adults’ legs, shrieking and laughing. Voratur took them into a small antechamber, the purpose of which David couldn’t guess. It had painted walls, no windows, and no pillows or tables. In the middle was a high domed object of woven cloth stretched over thin struts of metal or wood. The dome hummed softly.

  “I would like to bring a bargain to bloom between us,” Voratur said, still flushed and smiling. But more focused, David thought. Voratur was not as drunk as he’d first thought.

  Gruber was. “Anything in exchange for your firstborn daughter,” he said, in English. Voratur ignored the rudeness of using words he did not understand. Bazargan gave Gruber a look so cold that Gruber, even in his current state, grew quiet.

  Bazargan said, “What bargain is this, Pek Voratur?”

  “The one we spoke of before. A picture of my brain for antihistamine to market.”

  Bazargan said calmly, “That antihistamine, some of it, was missing from Pek Sikorski’s quarters this morning.”

  “No, not this morning,” Voratur said. “Although perhaps you noticed it only this morning. But it was missing a tenday ago. I had it stolen.”

  Not a trace of guilt appeared on Voratur’s face. The pel? Or because stealing for business advantage was a part of shared reality? Maybe both, David thought.

  Bazargan said, still calm, “I see. But what I told you before, Pek Voratur, is still shared reality. The antihistamine may be dangerous to bodies on World. We cannot bring a bargain to bloom with the antihistamine.”

  “No, my friend,” Voratur said cheerfully. “Reality has shifted, and I share reality now with you. The antihistamine is not dangerous to bodies on World. I know because I have eaten the antihistamine, and I am fine!”

  Ann said quickly, “How long ago did you eat it?”

  “Ten days ago, nine days ago, and the rest, a big bite, seven days ago. And I have a flower sickness, Pek Sikorski. To fakim. You notice my household grows no fakimib. I am fortunate that it is not a ritual blossom. But four days ago I rode to a friend’s house and spent an afternoon in a garden of fakimib, and I was not sick. You notice that not once have I had to braid my neckfur in atonement. Your antihistamine is safe, Pek Sikorski, for Worlders. And it will make all of us very rich.”

  Ann looked at Bazargan. Obviously the two of them had already discussed what to do. Why was he, David, left out of these discussions so much? They said it was because he was relatively isolated in the crelm house. But they could walk over to the crelm house if they wanted to include him. Obviously, they didn’t.

  Another small resentment was added to the store David Allen was accumulating.

  Bazargan said, “Pek Voratur. Hear me well, my friend. We still cannot bring a bargain to bloom with the antihistamine. I am sorry, but we cannot. This is why: Even on World, bodies differ. This is shared reality. You have flower sickness for fakimib. Another may have it for rafirib. Still another for pajalib or trifalitib. In the same way, one man may eat antihistamine and be cured of flower sickness. Another may eat it and become sick in another way. Another may die. It is not safe.”

  Voratur’s smile vanished. He walked over to the domed object in the middle of the small closed room and stood beside it. “Then share this reality, Pek Bazargan. If World bodies differ so much from each other, Terran bodies must do so, too. Is this not shared reality?”

  “Yes,” Bazargan said.

  “Yet one Terran, Pek Sikorski, takes the antihistamine. Why does she do so, if it is not safe because of different bodies? And if it is safe for one Terran, then it will be safe for one Worlder.”

  “No,” Bazargan said. “Let me share this reality with you, Pek Voratur. On Terra there are … healers who make the antihistamines. Then our government tests it on many, many sick Terrans. In this way, we see how many are made sicker by the potion, and if any die. Only if none die and a very, very few are made sicker, does the potion come to bloom in a bargain for market.”

  “What government department makes this test?”

  David saw Bazargan consider. Finally he said, “Reality and Atonement. The drug must be declared real.”

  Voratur nodded. It made sense to him. “Then we, too, will have Reality and Atonement make a test. With many Worlders.”

  Ann said, “But Pek Voratur—”

  “Enough,” Voratur said, and now his voice was cold. “We will make these tests.”

  Ann looked helplessly at Bazargan.

  “You cannot treat us like unreal children in the crelm house,” Voratur said. “That is not sharing reality. We are not children. Do you share reality with us about the antihistamines, or do you not?”

  David felt his throat seize up. Voratur was issuing an ultimatum. If the Terrans di
d not share reality, then the Terrans were not real. If they were not real … Suddenly he remembered the retarded little girl who had run up to him his first day on World, the unreal child he had mistakenly spoken to. What had happened to her?

  He knew what must have happened to her.

  Bazargan said, “You are right. Forgive me; I will braid my headfur in atonement. Yes, we share reality. Tomorrow I will send Pek Sikorski to the healers of your choice to show them how to make antihistamines, and to conduct the tests on many, many Worlders.”

  Immediately Voratur was again all smiles, all warm host, all jovial business partner. “Wonderful! May our flowers bloom together for a long time, and their fragrance rise to the clouds!”

  “May our flowers bloom together forever,” Bazargan said. To David he didn’t look dejected, despite having lost. Well, Bazargan was an old politician, among other things. He would always sell out an ideal for a compromise.

  Although David was elated over this particular compromise. They would get an actual Lagerfeld scan of a World brain! Along with the DNA and other data Ann already had, surely that would be enough to understand the biological mechanism that permitted shared reality. Perhaps even to duplicate it physiologically? He’d ask Ann. And then, with genetic engineering …

  “When may Pek Sikorski take the brain picture?” David said.

  “As soon as you like,” Pek Voratur said expansively. “Tomorrow. But now I must return to my guests.”

  “The petals of your blossoms delight me,” Bazargan said.

  “I rejoice in the flowers of your heart,” Voratur said. All at once he let out a great laugh and thumped on the dome beside him. The humming inside swelled to a strong buzz. Lifegivers, David realized, the small insect-equivalents that pollinated flowers. Come to think of it, he had seen no lifegivers at all during the long hours of Nafret’s ceremony, no lifegivers buzzing annoyingly in front of guests’ eyes or tickling their hands. How the hell had the Worlders gathered them all up?