by Nancy Kress
Between them, they carried him back into the cave, made a bed of the blankets. Gruber set his powerful torch for heat and positioned it on the ground to bathe Bazargan’s shivering body. “I should have been watching for this,” Ann said in self-reproach. “There’s always a lag between exposure and onset of symptoms, and with everything else going on … Ahmed, you have to sweat, and you mustn’t get dehydrated. Drink this.” She brought him water, slightly muddy-tasting, from the valley stream. He drank what he could.
“I don’t have the equipment to lave you internally,” she said in frustration. “But I’m going to scrub what I can … Now, don’t go modest on me, Ahmed. You’re an anthropologist”
And anthropologists are better at being the observers than the subjects, Bazargan wanted to say, but couldn’t. His throat was closing up.
Gruber and Ann scrubbed him with water and small harsh stones. They cut his hair as close as possible, made him vomit again, gave him an enema. Bazargan endured each indignity, knowing they were right, hating his own weakness.
When they were done and he lay in the cave, wrapped in blankets, Ann and Gruber returned instantly to the topic of Gruber’s find. Bazargan listened as well as he could.
“The buried artifact measures as the exact center of the field, Ann. Of the toroidal distribution. I have kept careful track of the data, everywhere we’ve gone in these mountains since we first entered. Recorded it all, plus my data from the first visit. The thermal gradient whose rate increases as you go deeper, instead of decreasing … it should decrease because most radioactive rocks lie near the surface, generating heat that the rock traps for millions of years. But not here, because the source of radiation is that artifact. But not a normal source, and that’s why the thermal distribution and radioactive distribution are out of phase. Listen, Ahmed, you must hear this, too—it is the greatest discovery here. By far!”
More arm-waving. Gruber, usually sardonic, was now at a pitch of idealistic enthusiasm that Bazargan could only observe with weary wonder.
“Radiation strength normally decreases according to the inverse square law. The closer you are to the source, the more rads. But here, the radiation does not even exist right up close to the source. It comes into being weakly at about a quarter kilometer away, then increases rapidly, then drops away rapidly. I haven’t worked out the equations yet. We skirted the very top edge of it, I think, when Ahmed was without a suit and took the rads that make him sick now.”
“I follow you,” Ann said.
“Then follow this, it is key. The buried artifact does not emit radiation as such. It emits some sort of field that causes the substances around it to go radioactive, and also causes the thermal gradient. There is a lag, a rise time before the field takes effect, which accounts for the dead ‘eye’ we are in now. But the main effect-that’s exactly what Dr. Johnson said the moon that they’re moving, Tas, can do out in space!”
Ann let her hand rise, then fall again. She said, dazed, “Do you think this was another moon once, identical to Tas, whose orbit decayed?”
“Not identical, nein. Because Syree Johnson said the wave effect out in space was spherical. This one is a flattened toroid. But from my data, it seems that the generated field in turn generates, or strengthens, or somehow affects a much bigger field that envelops the entire planet. And this one is not radioactive. It’s not electromagnetic at all. And it is not thermal.”
“Dieter … while you were gone … Ahmed and I were speculating—”
“Let me finish first. This strange secondary field—although for all I know, it’s the primary field and the other is secondary! —but anyway, it, too, has the dead ‘eye’ that we are in now. A hole directly surrounding the source. So all I can do is speculate from my previous data. The second field blankets the surface of the planet, increasing abruptly as you climb up from the surface, then decreasing again. It—”
“How high up?” Ann demanded, stridently for her. She clutched Dieter’s arm. “How high up?”
He stared at her. “I’m not sure.”
“Estimate!”
“The field seems to be densest about a half kilometer up.”
“And where were we when we all blanked out, except Enli, in the tunnels? At what altitude?”
Bazargan, lying helplessly in his blankets, watched Dieter’s face change. “Mein Gott—yes! We were that high above sea level, the only time we were … the tunnels go up and down. We were in the densest part of the field when that blank stupid patch took us … but not Enli … Ann, what is it? What were you and Ahmed speculating? Ahmed, are you hearing this?”
Neither of them waited for Bazargan’s answer. Ann said, “It is just speculation, Dieter. But here it is. Your planetwide field isn’t electromagnetic. It isn’t radioactive—even from the Zeus we could pick up that radioactive activity is concentrated in the Neury Mountains, not evenly distributed over World.”
“Yes. From the neutrino flow. Go on.”
“The field is not biochemical: pheromones or anything like that. I’m convinced of it. Yet it affects the brain. Ours when we entered a section of its greatest density. Enli’s ever since we’ve been in your ‘dead eye’—I don’t know if you noticed, but she’s had no unshared-reality headaches while we’ve been in the eye. Possibly David’s brain, too, in that his instability is much worse the last five days, although to be fair, that could be mostly from trauma plus withdrawal from the Discipline.”
“So you—”
“Wait. There’s one more piece. The lifegivers—you know, the insectlike pollinators—never land on a Worlder or human head outside these mountains. Never. But here in the valley, in your dead eye of the field, they do.”
“They do? So?”
“So I think they’re sensitive to your secondary unknown field, too. And I think the field acts specifically on certain kinds of living tissue. Because that tissue evolved interacting with the field. It acts on neural tissue in the brain.”
Gruber shifted on the ground and frowned,. “No, it cannot be. The brain is biochemical and electromagnetic. And I have just spent much time telling you this is neither.”
“The brain is biochemical and electromagnetic, yes. Consciousness is a pattern of neural firings, a synchrony in the gamma oscillation. But there are new discoveries in biochemistry that haven’t been popularized yet. Support evidence for a theory once considered radical, but less so each year, as we learn more. Do you know what a paracrystalline vesicular grid is, Dieter?”
“No,” said Gruber, the geologist.
“I explained it to you once before, when we all discussed Voratur’s Lagerfeld scan, remember? Never mind. Basically, you have billions of vesicular grids in your brain. They’re found at the ends of nerve synapses. They control how much neurotransmitter is released with each nerve impulse, which in turn affects everything you think and feel. Paracrystalline vesicular grids are very small. They operate according to the laws of quantum physics, Dieter, not classical physics. They can cause quantum events outside their energy barrier, because part of their quantum probability field lies there. More and more, it looks like that’s how consciousness affects the brain. Through altering its probability field. There’s no other way for a purely mental event, such as deciding to get up from your chair, to produce an effect in the material world without violating the law of conservation of energy.”
“Wait, wait,” Dieter said. “I have not slept last night, I am very tired. Are you saying that the brain operates through a probability field?”
“Only partly. Electromagnetic nerve firings and biochemical events are also there, of course. But neurotransmitter release, caused by quantum events—and their associated probability field—is the basis for electric and chemical brain happenings.”
“A probability field,” Gruber said wonderingly. “In all brains? Yours, mine, Worlders’?”
“If the theory is right.”
“And the buried artifact generates its own probability field. That affects everyo
ne’s brain on World. Steadily outside the Neury Mountains, erratically inside, depending on where in the toroidal distribution you walk through it. Our brains reacted differently from Enli’s because her race evolved here and ours didn’t … Ann! The probability field would have begun affecting World when the artifact hit the ocean on prehistoric World! It could account for the differing evolution of human and World brains, and solve your difficulty about why shared reality prevailed here when the equations say it’s not a winning genetic strategy!”
“Yeeeesssss,” Ann said. She sounded dazed. “Dieter, I need to think about all this. I need to—”
“More!” Dieter shouted. “If you bring in quantum mechanics, you bring in the possibility of quantum entanglement!”
“Of what?” Ann said.
“Entanglement! If two electrons are entangled, doing something to one will instantaneously affect the other, even if it’s at the far end of the universe. Space and time separations don’t matter. Scientists think it might be the theory behind the space tunnels, although we have no clue about the engineering. But if the buried artifact and Tas are somehow entangled … if both use probability fields …”
Ann seemed to have forgotten that she’d refused any more speculation. “And the brain uses probability, too. Human neurotransmitter release is probabilistic, so it’s logical that Worlder brains work the same way. But if this probability field of yours exerted some sort of effect on neurotransmitter release, selectively favoring some grids over others, and it did so over a long period of time, an evolutionary span of time … that could be what shaped the shared-reality mechanism, Dieter. It could explain why the biology shows no difference between human and World brains, and yet the difference exists. It’s in the frequency of probabilistic events. No wonder it didn’t show up on a Lagerfeld.”
“Mein Gott, it all ties together!”
“We need someone who knows more physics, though. Someone like Syree Johnson.” Ann’s voice changed. “Dieter, if we die here, no one will ever know all this.”
He put his arm around her. “We won’t die here, Liebchen.”
“You can’t know that.”
He didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep, sitting slumped on the ground, a filthy exhausted elated lump.
Ann eased him onto his back. She checked on Bazargan, also asleep. Then she took Dieter’s handheld, activated it, and began to make notes as rapidly as she could speak. Outside the cave the sky grew darker with thick clouds, and after a while it began to rain.
TWENTY-FOUR
GOFKIT RABLOE
Enli let Pek Allen pull her to her feet. She still gasped from their wild trip through caves and tunnels. But over the pain in her lungs and the unshared-reality pain in her head, an angry thought formed.
They had not died in the hidden spaces of the Neury Mountains after all.
And because they had not, the twisted blooms of Pek Allen’s crazed mind would drag them to find Worlders, so he could “save” them. The Worlders would of course kill both Pek Allen and Enli. The priests would imprison their bodies in chemicals and glass, to prevent their returning to their ancestors and polluting the world of spirits. Enli and Tabor would remain unreal forever.
She tried to pull her hand free from Pek Allen’s grasp, but he was too strong. Bloody, bruised, one arm limp by his side, fresh from the special sickness of the Neury Mountains (even her Terran suit had shrieked as much!), Pek Allen was still strong. The strength of a terrible unreality.
“Look, Enli. A village.”
They stood at the edge of a tunnel leading out of the mountains. A steep incline of broken rock led to a ledge below, then another incline, less rocky and with some scrubby bushes. Beyond that lay fields and, in the distance, the smoking chimneys of houses, their roofs glistening in the rain.
“Pek Alien—”
“Don’t falter now, Enli. The time to act is here. And who knows how much longer that bitch Syree Johnson will give us until she blows up her weapon and irradiates World?”
He spoke in World, but two of the words were Terran: bitch and irradiates. Enli was beyond caring what they meant. Her head ached with his unreality. Her belly mourned herself and Tabor. Even so, some small part of her desolate brain noted that Pek Allen had stopped raving. He spoke calmly, rationally, as if he could actually do what he said.
“Come on, Enli. Not much longer now. First, take off that s-suit. Do it! All right, now come with me.”
They stumbled forward through the steady rain. The lush fields were food crops, but beyond them, around the houses, lay flower beds. Enli looked her last, hungrily, at the flowers. Pajalib, jelitib, blue trifalitib in a lacy cloud. Bright small mittib. Fragrant ralibib, vekifirib in the shade. Sajib, of the waxy pink blossoms big as her hand. All the flowers that were the glory of World.
The village was largely deserted, its breakfast cookfires in the square banked under their neat metal protectors, its houses closed. Everyone must be off harvesting zeli fruit. This was the season for it, even in the rain; the fruit would not wait. In such a small rural settlement, even the priest would help harvest. Still, there would be a few people left behind the wet doors. The very old watching the smallest young, the ill, the people with flower sickness for cariltef blooms, which always were planted near zeli fruit.
Pek Allen stopped in the middle of the village green, surrounded by its ring of cookfire hearths. “Hello! People of World! I come with an important message from the First Flower!”
Enli closed her eyes, then opened them. Moments, perhaps, left to live. Oh, Tabor …
“People of World! I come with an important message from the First Flower!”
A wooden door opened. A very old woman, bent with the seasons, peered out. When she glimpsed Enli and the huge bloody Terran, her face melted into horror and she slammed the door.
“People of World! I come with an important message from the First Flower!”
Another door opened. A man strode out, young and strong. Undoubtedly excused from the harvest for flower sickness; his neckfur was braided in atonement. He carried a long knife.
The young man wasted no words. He rushed toward them and thrust the knife at Pek Allen’s chest.
Pek Allen grabbed the man with his good arm. To Enli the movement looked easy, almost inevitable, as if Pek Allen’s rock-battered body had lived its whole life for this moment. He took the knife away from the man, threw him to the ground, and stood over him with a small metal machine, oddly shaped. It was, she realized suddenly from remembered Terran conversation, Pek Gruber’s gun. Rain dripped off the end of it. Pek Allen did something and the gun made a shrill noise. Yet when her ears stopped hurting, the thing had not exploded, but lay still in his hand, and a wooden bowl left carelessly on the green had been sliced into useless pieces.
“Listen, Pek,” he said in World, “I am David Pek Allen, Terran. You know that. Reality and Atonement has declared me unreal. But I come to warn you of something terrible that will happen to World soon, perhaps today. A shift in shared reality. You must listen to me.
“You know that Tas has gone. The other Terrans stole it. You know this. What you do not know is that the unreal Terrans will send a sickness from the Neury Mountains, like the sickness that is already there, but much stronger. It will sicken people a little. But it will sicken things—cooking pots, jewelry, flower remembrances—very much. These things will become as dangerous as the Neury Mountains themselves. You must warn people of this shift in shared reality.”
The young man pinned on the ground turned his head away from the sliced wooden bowl and spat on Pek Allen’s feet.
“Enli,” Pek Allen said, “go into the house there, where the old woman slammed the door. Bring me the child that’s in there.”
Enli started. But, yes, of course there would be a child in the house … the old woman wasn’t infirm enough to have missed the harvest otherwise. She would have ridden on the back of a farm cart, helped prepare the noon meal, been a part of the shared fun.
“Enli! Go now!”
Enli didn’t move.
Pek Allen’s eyes slid in her direction, back toward the man on the ground. “If you don’t go, Enli, I will have to kill this man. There is a whole world at stake here. Don’t make me do that.”
The flowers of his brain were that twisted! She hadn’t known.
Enli walked to the house. The door was barred from the inside. Enli broke the glass in the window and called through the hole. “Open up, Pek, or this crazed brain out here will explode the house. With you and the child in it. I am sorry, but it is so.”
The pain in her head almost blinded her. Was she really doing this? She, Enli Pek Brimmidin, at the bidding of an unreal madman?
The door opened. Enli walked in—how normal! to walk into a house through an open door, to share that simple reality—and spoke quietly to the old woman. “Go out the back door. Tell the child not to make any noise. Go down that little hill, keeping the house between you and the Terran, and hide in the vegetable garden.”
The old woman simply stared at her. Not because Enli was unreal, but because the woman was terrified into stupidity. In the corner a cupboard door moved slightly. At least the hidden child was old enough to stay quiet.
“Go now!” Enli said, trying to sound like Pek Bazargan when he gave orders to her. Even so, she was faintly surprised when the woman obeyed.
Enli turned and walked back outside. “There is no child, Pek Allen. I looked.”
He glanced briefly at her face. “You lie.” The word was Terran; but the meaning obvious: to not share reality, but something else. Now he would kill her with the gun. It might as well be now. Enli closed her eyes.
Someone screamed.
But she still lived. Still stood in the rain. And when she opened her eyes, even though there had been no shrill deafening noise, the young man on the ground lay writhing and moaning and clutching his leg.
“It is only hurt a little,” Pek Allen said, in that same strong voice. “So you don’t hurt me before I give my message. You will recover fine, Pek. Enli, come.”
