PROBABILITY MOON

by Nancy Kress

  Slowly Pek Nagredil and the healer nodded. Some of the strain left their faces. They thought the same. Reality had been shared.

  Even with her, Enli thought, and warmth flooded her. Oh, it was so good to be part of reality again, to know as the others knew, to share the truth of the world instead of holding secrets alone in the dark. Her whole body responded to that good feeling, relaxing and letting go. Oh, so good … If only Tabor were here …

  “Sleep, little blossom,” a kind voice said, and warm hands eased her to a lying position on the wide pillow. She felt a blanket laid over her, heard the murmur of voices like the steady low music at a village dance … the cookfires burning bright and the children laughing in the warm perfumed twilight …

  Enli was asleep. She didn’t hear the government messenger rush into Pek Nagredil’s office, so agitated he did not even bring a hospitality flower. She didn’t hear him say that one of Pek Renjamor’s volunteers had collapsed and died minutes after being given an antihistamine. She didn’t hear the servant of the First Flower begin the chant for the soul of the dead, walking its blossom-strewn path to rejoin its ancestors.

  Nonetheless, the chant filled her dreams.

  ELEVEN

  GOFKIT JEMLOE

  Once again, they had left him out. David didn’t hear about the Worlder’s fatal allergic reaction to the antihistamine until Ann, Bazargan, and the increasingly detestable Dieter Gruber had already discussed it among themselves and decided what to do. Without including David. Was he or was he not a member of this team?

  To make it worse, it was Gruber who told him the decision. Gruber, who hadn’t even been at Voratur’s Lagerfeld scan because he’d been so careless of his own mind that he’d gotten blind-shit drunk at Nafret’s flower ceremony. Now the geologist had just strolled into the crelm house, looking around him with an amused expression on his face. Yes, amused. Smug. Superior. Because David worked with living children, while Gruber worked with dead rocks? The geologist probably thought David was a kitty-boy, not fully a man. And that was the person Ann had chosen to sleep with, probably …

  Stop. Wait. He was getting angry, and there was no reason to get this angry. He needed to adjust his neuropharms again. More serotonin, more activators for the left prefrontal cortex, more cortisol blockers.

  “David?” Gruber said in English. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I’m listening,” David snapped. “You said one of Renjamor’s beta-test subjects died of an allergic reaction to Ann’s antihistamine.”

  “Yes. The funeral, or whatever they call it, is at noon. Ahmed wants us all to be ready to walk there with the rest of the household about an hour earlier. Full dress uniform.”

  “It’s called a ‘farewell burning,’ Dieter. Not a ‘funeral’.”

  “My World isn’t nearly as good as yours,” Gruber said, unruffled. He gazed around the crelm house. Nafret, of course, had moved to the Voratur family court, now that he was fully real. The remaining children, including Bonnie and Ben, were playing some riotous game in the play corner David had set up. On World, toys for children were always miniatures of objects from the adult world: dolls, carved wooden bicycles with tiny wooden figures to ride them, dishes and farm animals and, of course, flowers. To these David had added something new, abstract forms such as painted wooden blocks, interlocking plastic spheres, free-form inflatable balloons tough as steel and large as the kids themselves. All these had bewildered World adults. What were they for? they asked David. What were they supposed to be?

  But after sharing the reality of the strange, nonfunctional toys with everyone, it seemed, in the entire village, a consensus had emerged as if it had always existed. The Terran playthings were harmless, if eccentric. Worlders asked only that the rectangular wooden blocks, which Ben and Bonnie’s mother had brought with her on the Zeus, be altered. They were too ugly for children. It wasn’t good for small brains to play with ugly objects. So David had a household carpenter saw and sand the blocks into circles, kidneys, parabolas, swooping curves that no longer piled neatly on top of one another but did create much more interesting towers to build up and knock down.

  From the beginning, the World children had loved them, Their unabashed imaginative reaction, turning the small blocks into wild animals and the large balloons into mountains, amazed the adults. David had made reams of notes on the presocialized infant imagination. He planned a major paper when he returned to Mars.

  Now three of the children, Uvi and Grenol and the irrepressible Ben, tumbled over the balloons, shrieking and laughing. The point of the game, insofar as it had one, seemed to be to try to land on another child. Colert Gamolin, David’s fellow tutor, watched indulgently that the play didn’t become too rough. Bonnie, thoughtfully inspecting a free-form bright yellow block, lay on her back in the center of the room, having her diaper changed by an ancient nursemaid who had probably cared for three generations of World babies. The woman, fat and comfortable, was Bonnie’s favorite.

  Gruber surveyed all this activity with indulgence. David wasn’t in the mood for indulgence.

  He said, “The farewell burning shouldn’t be happening at all! Didn’t Bazargan even try to get permission for an autopsy on the Worlder? This is a perfect opportunity to examine the effect of a fatal biochemical reaction on a Worlder brain, and maybe learn more about the shared-reality mechanism!”

  Now he had Gruber’s full attention. “You must be funning, David.”

  “I’m not ‘funning’! Please don’t patronize me!”

  Gruber studied him. “I’m not patronizing you at all. But you must realize that the situation does not lend itself to violating their death customs. Even I realize that, and Ann keeps telling me I’m insensitive as a vacuum.”

  It was said with a smile, but David didn’t accept the conciliation. What was it, after all, but more patronization? Plus a not-so-subtle flaunting of Gruber’s relationship with Ann. But David forced himself to calm.

  “Look, Dieter, I know there’s a death ceremony prohibition on autopsy. I’m the anthropologist, remember? But this is unique opportunity. Bazargan could tell Voratur that the autopsy was necessary to find out … oh, I don’t know … something crucial about the antihistamines to make them work over the long term in Worlders’ brains. Ann could help him invent something. And think what we might learn about the shared-reality mechanism!”

  Dieter’s gaze grew more intense. “You want Ahmed and Ann to lie to Voratur? Aren’t you the one who admires shared reality because it eliminates lies?”

  David felt himself flush. “This is different! The potential gains are so enormous, so … so unprecedented …”

  He was floundering. Damn, in front of Gruber, too. David wasn’t at all sorry when Bonnie, diapering completed, toddled up to him and clutched his legs.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” David said in English.

  She answered him in World, holding up a red circular wooden blocks. “Mine flower.”

  David bent to her level. “No, Bonnie. That is not a flower.” It was the only prohibition with the abstract toys that the Worlders insisted on. They were never flowers. Only flower toys were flowers.

  “Mine flower!” Her small pink mouth set in stubborn lines.

  Gently David pried the block from her fingers. He picked up a flower toy from the floor, a stuffed and intricately sewn allabenir, and handed it to her. “This is a flower, sweetheart,” he said in World.

  The child looked at the wooden block in his hand. Keeping his face stern, David moved the hand behind his back. With the other hand he offered her the stuffed allabenir. After a moment’s hesitation, she took it. Her mouth relaxed.

  “Mine flower.”

  “Yes, that’s Bonnie’s flower. What a pretty flower!”

  Bonnie nodded and toddled away to offer the flower to her beloved nursemaid. David stood.

  “They make no distinction between World and human,” Gruber observed.

  “Of course not,” David said. “That’s
the point. Dieter, an autopsy would—”

  “It’s impossible, David. Give it up.”

  “Damn it, nobody here even sees the potential that World offers to the whole human race!”

  “Nobody but you,” Gruber said, smiling. “See you at the funeral procession.” He left before David could even offer him a farewell flower. And Bonnie was watching. Damn it, didn’t the man even know that mimicry was how children learned, and that adults had an obligation to be consistent in what kids were supposed to mimic?

  “Pek Allen,” the old nursemaid said, coming up to him. “Do your flowers bloom in good soil?” She meant, was he feeling all right? David looked at the kindly old face, neckfur gray and sparse, and his anger at Gruber drained away. Desolation took its place. He couldn’t get any of them, his own people, to see. Either they were blind or he was.

  “The soil is poor today,” he said to Pek Fasinil, and tried to smile. Always David was courteous to Worlders.

  “You must go lie down, Pek Allen.” She nodded three or four times, a vigorous old woman too sure of her worth and her place to fear giving him orders. “Go now.”

  “I will. May your flowers bloom and flourish.”

  “May your flowers bloom,” she said, and waddled toward a child who had fallen off a huge inflated balloon and started to wail.

  David went to his personal room and closed the archway curtains. He unlocked his biomonitor from its safebox and set it on the low, free-form table. Settling on a comfortable pillow, he stuck his finger inside the machine. When the display lit, David’s eyes widened.

  No wonder he was feeling so irritable! The hormone and transmitter mix was almost in the red range of the graph for calmness, security, nonimpulsiveness. Plus, the sex-suppressant dose was only doing a borderline job of damping desire. That probably accounted for his jealousy of Ann and Gruber. Although not completely. Why an intelligent and kind woman like Ann Sikorski would want a Neanderthal like the tunnel-visioned Gruber …

  There. Those thoughts proved the dose’s inadequacy.

  David reset the controls for a supplementary neuropharm mixture to be injected now, with a revised daily mix starting tomorrow morning. Again he stuck his finger into the machine to receive the injection. Even as he relocked the biomonitor into its safebox, he could feel the neuropharm calming him down. Complete bodily adjustment to major neurotransmitter changes took about a week, of course, but the computer recognized that and added quick-acting calming agents in the meantime.

  Already he was feeling much better. He could attend the farewell burning with appropriate tranquillity, since apparently it was going to take place. And maybe another Worlder would die from the antihistamine trials. Not, of course, that David wished anyone to die! But if anyone did, an autopsy should be performed. David would have time to work on Ann about that, now that he knew the possibility existed.

  All problems had solutions. You just had to approach them in the right spirit, with all possible help from modern technology. After all, that was what technology was for.

  The farewell burning was the most moving ceremony Ahmed Bazargan had ever seen.

  He was a little surprised at himself. He had attended so many funerals in his life, beginning with his father’s when Ahmed had been twelve years old. At first those proceedings had filled him with fear: his mother wailing and tearing at her hair; his father’s body borne by his own soldiers on a plain wooden pier toward its elaborate tomb; the endless eulogy in the mosque jammed with the odorous bodies of too many men. But then the twelve-year-old Ahmed had felt come over him a kind of detachment, an uncoupling from felt grief like the uncoupling of DNA as it prepared to replicate and so preserve itself. In all the funerals in all the years afterward, that detachment had come, making him an observer and not a participant. The funeral of his mother, of his friends, of his colleagues. The detachment would even be there, Bazargan suspected, if someday he must attend the funeral of his wife, Batul, patiently awaiting his return to Earth. Detachment was what would get him through.

  But not here, at this funeral, in this alien land. Ahmed Bazargan had not even known the dead woman. But he felt his heart move for her, and searched for the reason why.

  It wasn’t the funeral procession itself, which from the point of view of a jaded anthropologist was pretty ordinary, except perhaps for the excess of flowers. The mourners walked first, moving slowly in lockstep toward the Gofkit Jemloe communal pyre. The color of mourning on World was black, but not for the Earthly reasons of night, the underworld, etc. Black was the only color flowers could not be; black buds absorbed too much heat to live. They died before they opened. So no gardener on World had bred black flowers, and the family members shuffling and chanting past Bazargan were each wrapped in a thin cloak of deep black.

  Behind them came the priests, led by the local representative of the order of the First Flower. Or so Bazargan thought of it, although he knew that Worlders thought differently. The servants of the First Flower were divided not into “orders” but into some structure more nebulous, something the Terran anthropologists had not yet unraveled, except that it was somehow connected with the Neury Mountains. The priests wore flowered robes adorned with tiny glass vases, each stocked with a living blossom in special water.

  Next came the entire village, also covered in black. As they drag-stepped past, the four Terrans joined the throng. World funerals were a shared event, and that meant everyone shared who possibly could. Bazargan saw an old man with a broken leg carried in a makeshift litter by four strapping young people. Children old enough to have had a flower ceremony walked solemnly beside their mothers.

  Finally, almost as an afterthought, came the deceased. The unwashed body rode on an ordinary two-wheeled farm cart, pulled by two kin. The corpse was hard to see, being almost buried under huge mounds of flowers, every type currently in bloom anywhere within miles.

  When everyone except the corpse reached the burning fire, they formed a huge circle around it, leaving only a narrow lane through which the cart was pulled. The pullers brought it to the very edge of the fire. A low ripple ran over the Worlders.

  Then came the part that Bazargan had seen before, at the funeral he had attended with Voratur, but which was new to , Dieter, and David. The cart was tipped forward. The wood had been highly waxed; the body slid effortlessly into the flame, mostly hidden by flowers. And everyone in the entire crowd, the grieving and the old and the halt and the lame, simultaneously threw off their thin black robes and shouted loud enough to wake the dead.

  It was a shout of pure joy. The dead woman was returning to her ancestors.

  The Worlders chanted and sang. Under their black capes they all wore brilliantly colored short robes sewn, festooned, entwined that morning with fresh flowers. Each bloom represented some facet of the wearer’s relationship with the soul now so jubilantly released to the spirit world, where every flower bloomed forever.

  “Mein Gott,”Dieter said, smiling. Bazargan could barely hear him above the incredible din. Ann looked stunned, but she also smiled. Only David looked as if he were fighting off a desire to jump up and lecture the deluded villagers on their worship of death and the priests who controlled it. Which he probably was.

  Bazargan turned away from the boy. The funeral still affected him. Not with grief, or with the joy the Worlders obviously shared, but with some other emotion he couldn’t quite pin down. What was it?

  The body was nearly burned by now; the fire must use fuels that reached enormous temperatures. Dieter would know. There was no smell of burning flesh. Probably the priests knew some oil, some plant compound, that either masked or eliminated the odor. Was Ann investigating this? Bazargan made a mental note to ask her.

  But no amount of intellectualizing masked his mild, agreeable, but very real emotion. And now, as the villagers began to dance to the thin high sweetness of pipes and strings, Bazargan knew what his emotion was. Admiration.

  This was the first funeral he had ever attended which had the
quality he admired most: balance. Between the grief of separation and the joy of eternity. Between secular and religious. Between, literally, life and death. It didn’t matter that the Worlders’ belief in a spirit existence with fulfilled ancestors was not Bazargan’s belief. What he admired was the dignity of those beliefs, and what moved him was the dignity in a death ceremony in which no women tore out their hair by its living roots, no relatives fought over the will, no politicians maneuvered for the power left behind by the dead—or assassinated—corpse. Death on World was, in a curious sense, pure. Stripped to its balanced essence: fire, ashes, flowers.

  Bazargan glanced at Ann, solemn in full dress uniform. No—not quite. None of them wore their swords. Bazargan remembered the tiny contretemps with Syree Johnson aboard the Zeus and smiled at Ann, wanting to share the memory. But she was looking at Dieter. Watching them both, Bazargan missed the beginning of the disruption of the dancing.

  Someone in the back of the circle was shouting, pushing forward. Then two people, five, a small group. At first Bazargan couldn’t distinguish the words. When he could, they didn’t at first make sense, because their content was so unexpected. It was like hearing soccer fans at a wedding.

  *Death on the unreal Terrans!”

  “The Terrans that killed Pek Aslor!”

  “Unreal! Unreal!”

  Bazargan heard, in a shocking moment of whimsy, Unclean, unclean! Philosophical lepers? Then his anthropological antennae took over.

  One of the protesters pushed through the huge dense circle to Bazargan’s right. It was a young man, neckfur glossy with youth, carrying what could only be a club. The young alien seemed surprised to have emerged from the thickly packed crowd so close to his quarry. He took a step backward, caught himself, and clutched his club more tightly.

  “Death on unreal Terrans!”