by Nancy Kress
“Ahmed, anything worthwhile cannot be free of risks that—”
Ann said, “If you get killed going back there now, Dieter, there will be no one left who can explain to the Trans-Planetary University Funding Committee that digging out this artifact will be worth the expense and cultural disruption. Ahmed and I don’t have the physics. You do, just barely. Without you, the buried artifact may well stay underground in the Neury Mountains for good.”
She didn’t look at Gruber as she said it; she stared across the tiny sunlit valley, her face carefully blank. But Bazargan saw the telltale twitch in the soft hollow of Ann’s neck. She was gambling, to keep Gruber from yet another dangerous stunt. Bazargan smiled inwardly at the duplicity of women in love, and the secret smile seemed to him the first good thing that had happened in days. It gave him a peculiar and unexpected strength. Even as entire worlds were endangered, human connections endured.
He said soberly, “I’m afraid Ann is right, Dieter. If you die trying for a second look at the buried artifact, it will probably remain buried.”
Gruber uttered what sounded like a blistering oath in German. He set off toward the stream, calling back over his shoulder, “I will wash now.”
Bazargan weighed the cost of calling him back against the cost that the space artifact would blow in the brief time Gruber was immersed, exposed to the sky, in the very cold mountain water. He decided to let the geologist go. Perhaps it would help him cool his hot head.
“Come back inside, Ahmed,” Ann said.
“Yes. But the comlink has to stay out here to keep possible contact with the Zeus. And I can’t go too far inside, either, or I can’t hear it.” Assuming there was anything to hear.
Bazargan and Ann moved a few feet into the cave. Ann brought the blankets and arranged a makeshift couch. When Gruber rejoined them, he had put his s-suit back on. It, and he, looked marginally cleaner, a smeared gray instead of filthy and caked gray. Gruber’s natural cheerfulness had returned. He set up various instruments from his pack both inside and outside the cave, then presented Ann with a gaudy red flower picked in the valley. “For you, meine Blume.”
Ann smiled. Bazargan did not. He felt weak again, although not nauseated. “Sit down, Dieter. Sit down and tell me again what you think might happen to this buried ‘probability field’ if Tas blows.”
“I have not the most blurry idea,” Gruber said. “None. Really, Ahmed—until yesterday I did not know such a thing as a planetwide probability field could exist. Now you want me to say what it will do if a second artifact, a billion kilometers away, that may or may not be connected to the field, does or does not go through a space tunnel?”
“No speculations, even?”
“Sure, speculations. Why not? Tas will collapse into a black hole, its counterpart buried here will be forced by quantum mechanics to take the reverse state, and you and I and Ann will be inflated into gods. Able to control all probabilities. Walk through walls, align atoms, make love nonstop for days and days. Why not?”
Ann looked at Gruber with the mixture of exasperation and amusement with which mothers regard giddy small boys. Bazargan reminded himself that Gruber, too, had been under great strain.
“All right, Dieter. All right. We’ll just wait.”
“What else?” Gruber said, quiet now. “I know nothing about this situation, Ahmed. No one does. We all just sit and wait.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
GOFKIT RABLOE
You can’t wait,” David Pek Allen said to the priest bending over the farm cart. “Not even a minute.”
How he hated talking to a priest! Enli thought. But talk he did, rasping out words around his swollen throat, looking as if he no longer knew what he said. Probably he did not. “Slimy, perverse, repulsive creature … you’re only interested in using anything you can to get and keep power, aren’t you? Even this situation! I wish I could kill you, rip you apart, you garbage … you exploitive shit …”
The priest gazed back at him, a mild, almost-middle-aged woman dressed in the rough clothes of a harvesting, bits of twigs and zeli fruit stuck to her tunic. She was heavily pregnant. Her bewildered brown eyes moved from the stricken human to Enli, the unreal Worlder. Enli saw the headpain that the sight of them cost her, that the whole situation cost her.
“The words have no meaning … ?”
“They are Terran words,” Enli said. “I will say the World meaning for Pek Allen.”
“Yes.”
“He says the First Flower sent him and me as … as a message. That I have been in the Neury Mountains and am not dying, is a sign the message is indeed from the First Flower. That Pek Allen is dying, in order to deliver the message that will save World, is a sign that he is real.”
The priest nodded, her skull furrowed. She struggled, Enli saw, to understand. Not to accept—shared reality here was clear. Why else would a Terran die to save others, except that he shared the greater reality? There was no stronger proof. But nothing like this had ever happened in the quiet village of Gofkit Rabloe, nor anything like Pek Allen ever been seen.
He lay in obvious pain. Red dots had appeared on his face, his arms, his torso in its rock-torn rags. His swollen tongue was turning black, and bloody sputum flew from his peeling lips as he railed against the servant of the First Flower in a language she did not understand.
“You think I don’t know what you are?” Pek Allen rasped. “Or who else is in on your little conspiracy? Bazargan, Voratur, that bitch Syree Johnson—” He tried to sit up on the cart, brandishing a clenched fist, but could not and sank back down on the zeli fruit.
Around the red dots, a slow burn flushed his skin, more than fever or rage. It looked, Enli thought, as if Pek Allen were being cooked alive, from the inside … Was that what the Neury Mountains did to people? But not to her, in the Terran s-suit he had given up to save Enli.
“You’re all monsters, conspirators, vermin … evil. Keeping the power to oppress others—”
“He says,” Enli told the priest in World, “to send word everywhere on World, immediately. To tell the nearest sunflasher it is a great emergency. A terrible … sickness is coming from the sky. People must go into their root cellars and stay until told otherwise. Or they will die.”
“Yes, die!” Pek Allen shrieked, in World this time. “All you conspirators should die! But you will not, because I will save you all, that’s my burden, that’s the reality …” He had subsided to muttering, and at some point had also subsided into Terran. Enli could no longer be sure of the difference. Nor could she be sure what, or how much, this simple rural priest, with her swollen belly and mild shocked brown eyes, actually understood.
More villagers crowded around the farm cart, drawn back from the harvest by the shared news. Each glanced at Pek Allen, recoiled in horror, and was hastily told by neighbors of the shift in reality. Each person then returned to the cart, skull furrowed in headpain, to stare at the Terran reality who was a gift from the First Flower.
Pek Allen found the strength to raise his right arm. He made a curious sign in the air, moving his hand down and then across. “Bless …” His eyes closed.
Not dead, Enli saw. But still cooking from inside.
The priest said in her soft mountain slur, “Pek Harit, Pek Villatir, and you, Unu … run to Gofkit Beslo. Pek Tarbif—”
Enli turned swiftly. “No, wait. There’s more reality to share. The sickness will make certain objects dangerous. Turn them as deadly as the Neury Mountains themselves. No one must take any of these things with them into the root cellars. No one. The things are …Pek Allen?”
He had fainted, or fallen asleep, or gone into shock. His swollen lips cracked even as Enli watched, and began to bleed. She turned away, trying frantically to remember everything Pek Gruber had said.
“No one must bring any jewelry”—or had Pek Gruber said only gold jewelry? Enli couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter—“no jewelry at all. No cooking pots. No flower honors, definitely no flower remembrances
…” That’s mercury running around inside that ornamental glass, Pek Gruber had said in Terran about the flower remembrances, which conveyed no meaning to Enli, but never mind that now. “ … and … and no rocks that shine or sparkle in the dark. This is very important!”
“May your flowers bloom forever, Pek Brimmidin,” the priest said.
“May your blossoms rejoice your soul,” Enli answered, and the tired, middle-aged priest suddenly blurred in Enli’s vision.
“All right,” the woman said, still in that same tentative mild voice, but no one argued. This was shared reality. “You heard the items that must not go into the root cellars. Pek Harit, Pek Villatir, and you, Unu … run to Gofkit Besloe. Pek Tarbif, you have that fast new bicycle … go south on the main road as far as Pek Rafnil’s, she’ll get word to the sunflasher in Gofkit Amloe. You, Unja, bicycle to the Cannihifs’ …”
Within a few minutes, she had her runners off. Within hours, Enli knew, the shifted reality of the sickness from the sky would be known all over World. Runners to tell runners, each one sending off many more, without question.
Nor did Enli question that all would obey. It was a message from the First Flower. It was shared reality.
The rain, which had never really stopped, suddenly fell harder. The little priest took Enli’s arm. Enli saw that they were the only two left beside the cart. “I am Azi Pek Laridor, servant of the First Flower. Come with me, Pek Brimmidin. We will draw the cart to my house, and you and the … the Terran Pek can eat before we go to the root cellar. There is soup left from breakfast, I think, and the grandmother made bread yesterday. Come.”
Enli followed her, stumbling along the muddy road toward rest and warmth.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SPACE TUNNEL #438
Fourteen thirty-one hours. The Zeus and the Faller warship closed in on each other from nine million clicks apart. The Zeus had once more turned on her main drive. Moving at the speed imparted by her long acceleration, she could have easily escaped the Faller warship, but that course was farthest from Peres’s mind. This was war. He had swung the Zeus in a wide arc that would shortly bring the two ships within firing range of each other.
Fifty seconds left until the first flyer darted through Space Tunnel #438 from Caligula system.
Talk had resumed on the bridge of the Zeus, calm and impersonal talk. It was, Syree thought, as if each of them were a separate data terminal, efficiently connected, but with operating programs that did not touch.
The Faller skeeter orbited the tunnel at high velocity, less than thirty clicks from the nebulous panels that made up the tunnel’s visible machinery.
Forty seconds.
Syree picked up her handheld. Once it was in her fingers, however, there was nothing to tell it. All the data about the artifact—everything they knew—was already stored in both the handheld and ship’s library. Much of that data had also gone with the Hermes to Caligula command. So had every scrap of information about the Faller wave-phase alterer, about Space Tunnel #438, and even about the irrelevant anthropological expedition on the inhabited planet. There was no new information to add. But there was speculation.
Consider, for instance, the neutrino stream from the Neury Mountains, planetside. They had always disregarded that. It was probably some anomaly of radioactive rock distribution or planet formation … Syree was neither geologist nor cosmologist. And the neutrino stream was well within normal limits for radioactive rocks on a planet of this mass. Only its intense concentration in the Neury Mountains was peculiar. But since the radioactive field was purely local on the planet, having no effect whatsoever on the artifact or any other orbital object, Syree had left its exploration to the grinning, loutish-looking geologist on the landing team. Dr. Gruduer or Gruler, something like that. Radioactive rocks were not part of Syree’s mission.
Thirty seconds.
But Orbital Object #7 emitted its wave effect by altering the binding energy of nuclei, which was of course the definition of radioactivity. Why hadn’t someone made that connection before? Why hadn’t Syree made it? She’d been too focused on the artifact itself, and on the time constraints in penetrating it before the enemy arrived. The constraints of war. They hampered thinking as well as action.
Two factors affected the stability of nuclei. The strong force attracted all protons and neutrons toward each other, while the electromagnetic force operated only between the protons in the nucleus and repelled them from each other. Since the strong force decreased more rapidly with separation distance than the electromagnetic force, for nuclei greater than a certain size, the strong force always “lost.” Those nuclei did not have enough binding energy to hold them together, and were unstable. That much was so basic she seldom ever thought about it. It was just there, a given. Reality.
Twenty seconds.
But sometimes radiation was emitted from molecules despite the constraints of binding energy. Quantum events outside the energy barrier occurred all the time, although they could not of course be predicted or controlled. That was the nature of quantum theory, whose reality depended not on certainty but on probability. Part of a given nucleus’s probability field always lay outside the expected range, so that, say, the emission of an alpha particle occurred despite the attractive strong force in the nucleus. The nucleus temporarily destabilized. In fact, one way to look at the wave effect of Orbital Object #7 was to say that it affected the theoretical probability fields of everything in its range. So normally stable atoms—or relatively stable, anyway—destabilized. That was what had killed Daniel Austen. An abnormal concentration of destabilized atoms …
Such as the neutrino detectors had identified in the Neury Mountains.
Ten seconds.
Syree sat frozen, for too long. Two seconds, three. No, it wasn’t possible. Worse, you couldn’t show if it was possible or not. The math didn’t exist. The theory didn’t exist. No one had ever identified, let alone created, a manipulatible probability field. But wasn’t that what the new Faller wave-phase alterer came down to, in its essence? It manipulated the particle beam from the Zeus to keep it a wave whose path was never the one observed. In other words, the wave-phase alterer manipulated probability. But within a given field only, a field wrapped tightly around the skeeter, or else the fabric of space-time itself might have been affected, including the node of it occupied by the Zeus. That hadn’t happened.
Were the changes in probability caused by the radioactive “effect” emitted by Orbital Object #7 somehow linked to the improbable concentration of neutrinos coming from the Neury Mountains? If so, how? Was one or the other causal? Or were the artifact and the planetside neutrino source somehow “quan-tumly entangled,” in whatever unknown way the two sides of a space tunnel were entangled to eliminate any spatial dimension between two points?
And if the artifact—once a planetary “moon”!—and the Neury Mountains were macro-level entangled, how far did the field stretch? Orbital Object #7 had been moved over a billion clicks away from the Neury Mountains. Was it possible that anything done to one might still affect the other? Quantum entanglement was independent of distance.
“Flyer number one emerging from the space tunnel,” Lee said crisply. “Commander—Oh, God …”
The flyer had emerged exactly on schedule, popping into existence as if newly created at that second. The next moment a beam shot out from the orbiting skeeter. The flyer disintegrated. The skeeter disappeared into the tunnel.
“Flyer destroyed,” Lee said, and his voice faltered on the last syllable.
“Fire on the warship!” Peres said.
“Firing … a hit, sir. Range plus-five.”
A plus-five hit would have inflicted barely minimal damage. The warship was barely in range, and Peres knew it. His order to fire, Syree thought, had been pure retaliatory instinct. A flyer pilot had just died. In his place she would have done the same thing.
Three minutes forty-one seconds until the second flyer appeared.
Peres stared
at the artifact, racing toward the space tunnel circled by the waiting skeeter, which had darted back through. “Detonate,” Peres said to Lee. “Now.”
“No, wait!” Syree cried. She needed to think, to calculate—if the artifact was a probability field generator that could be manipulated, it had to be saved somehow, used somehow, it was too valuable to lose to the enemy—
“Detonating,” Lee said, and Syree saw him key in the manual fail-safe commands.
Nothing happened.
The artifact continued to race at 4,860 clicks per second toward the space tunnel, now less than four minutes away.
“Damn it, I said detonate!” Peres said.
“I did! Repeating … repeating … it doesn’t blow, commander. No, it does blow, the instruments say the explosives fired, but they didn’t affect the artifact. And the residual radiation waves aren’t there … aren’t there at all. It’s like the explosion happened and didn’t happen at the same time … or the waves just went somewhere else!”
Outside the energy barrier, Syree thought. Into a different probability configuration. Another reality. The perfect defense.
Lee said, “One hundred fifty seconds until the second flyer emerges from the tunnel. Two hundred ten seconds until artifact reaches the tunnel … one hundred forty-five seconds …”
“Course change!” Peres said. “Dead on toward the tunnel, five gees acceleration, prepare to fire.”
“Changing course. Accelerating …”
The frantic acceleration slammed Syree against her chair. A last effort on Peres’s part to protect the second flyer. He could return later to attack the Faller warship, now actually closer to the tunnel than was the Zeus, thanks to the Zeus’s steep arcing. Now Peres’s duty, as he saw it, was to fire on the skeeter, since he couldn’t use the artifact to detonate it. Oh, Syree knew exactly how Peres was thinking. Maybe this skeeter, unlike that earlier one, wasn’t equipped with the wave-phase alterer. Maybe Peres could take out the skeeter, saving the pilot’s life and propelling the artifact into Caligula space. Peres was playing the wild card, hoping desperately to ride the long odds, the loophole, the unexpected probability.
