by Nancy Kress
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Prologue
One. Cambridge, Massachusetts, United Atlantic Federation, Earth
Two. Walton Spaceport, United Atlantic Federation, Earth
Three. Lowell City, Mars
Four. Luna City
Five. En Route to Mars
Six. Space Tunnel #1
Seven. Lowell City, Mars
Eight. World
Nine. Gofkit Shamloe
Ten. Lowell City, Mars
Eleven. Lowell City
Twelve. Gofkit Shamloe
Thirteen. Gofkit Shamloe
Fourteen. Tharsis, Mars
Fifteen. World
Sixteen. At Space Tunnel #438
Seventeen. At Space Tunnel #438
Eighteen. Lowell City, Mars
Nineteen. Aboard the Murasaki
Twenty. Aboard the Murasaki
Twenty-One. Aboard the Murasaki
Twenty-Two. Aboard the Murasaki
Twenty-Three. Tharsis, Mars
Twenty-Four. Caligula Space
Twenty-Five. Tharsis, Mars
Twenty-Six. Artemis System
Twenty-Seven. In Q Space
Twenty-Eight. Aboard A Faller Station
Twenty-Nine. Q Space
Thirty. Tharsis, Mars
Thirty-One. Space Tunnel #1
Thirty-Two. Tharsis Plain, Mars
Thirty-Three. Space Tunnel #1
Thirty-Four. Thera Station, Mars Orbit
Bonus short-story. Flowers of Aulit Prison
By Nancy Kress
Praise for Probability Space
Copyright
For Jamie
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank both my editor at Tor, Jim Minz, and my husband, Charles Sheffield, for their many useful suggestions on revising this manuscript.
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state.
—ALEXANDER POPE, “AN ESSAY ON MAN”
PROLOGUE
MARS
July, 2168
Bellington Wace Arnold of Arnold Interplanetary, Inc., arrived late at his opulent office. Beyond the top-floor window and the piezoelectric dome of Lowell City, the sun was already well above the Martian horizon. Not much dust today. The sky was only faintly pink, and Arnold could see all the way to the hard clutter of the spaceport.
“System on. Messages.”
“Yes, Mr. Arnold. Five messages.” It meant five for-your-ears-only transmissions; Arnold’s staff would have handled everything else. The wall screen brightened to visual. As he listened, Arnold settled into his desk chair and scanned the printouts his secretary had deemed important enough for his personal perusal. The chair, big enough to encase his impressive size, was made of imported Earth leather from calves genetically altered to produce hides in his favorite blue-gray.
The first four messages did not need his entire attention, even though two of them involved billion-credit transactions. There was a lot of money to be made in wartime, if you knew how. The longer the war with the Fallers went on, the better for Arnold Interplanetary.
The fifth transmission made him look up. There was nothing to see; this message was voice-only.
“Cockpit recording, personal flyer registration number 14387, transmission date July 3, 2168.” Yesterday.
And then the voice of Arnold’s son, Laslo Damroscher: “Thass not ’sposed to be there.”
Slowly, pointlessly, Arnold rose from his expensive chair. Every line of his big body tightened.
The flyer had been a gift to Laslo on his eighteenth birthday. Arnold knew he did not love this son. Laslo, weak and whiny and easily led, was hard to love. A strange son for Bellington Wace Arnold to have, but then Laslo wasn’t his son only. It still took two people.
Arnold had other, better, legitimate sons. Still, he had always provided well for Laslo, even though the idea that Laslo might ever need money was laughable. He was his mother’s sole heir.
It had seemed a good idea to know where Laslo took his birthday-gift flyer, and what he did along the way. It might prevent danger, or embarrassment, or lawsuits. To that end, the flyer, unknown to Laslo, had been equipped with automatic continuous record-and-send equipment. A smart program flagged and relayed only those recordings that met certain parameters. None of the parameters meant anything good.
“Thass not ‘sposed to be there.” Laslo’s voice, very drunk.
“What isn’t supposed to be where?” Another young man, sounding marginally less drunk. “Just an asteroid.”
“Isn’t ‘sposed to be there. Hand me ‘nother fizzie.”
“They’re gone. You drunk the last one, you pig.”
“No fizzies? Might as well go home.”
“Just an asteroid. No … two asteroids.”
“Two!” Laslo said, with pointless jubilation.
“Where’d they come from? Isn’t supposed to be there. Not on computer.”
“N-body problem. Gravity. Messes things up. Jupiter.”
“Let’s shoot ’em!”
“Yeah!” Laslo cried, and hiccuped.
“What kinda guns you got on this thing? No guns, prob’ly. Fucking rich-boy pleasure craft.”
“Got … got guns put on it. Daddy-dad doesn’t know. Illegals.”
“You’re a bonus, Laslo.”
“Goddamn true. Mummy doesn’t know either. ‘Bout the guns.”
“You sure ‘bout that? Isn’t much your famous mother don’t know. Or do. God, that body, I saw her in a old—”
“Shut up, Conner,” Laslo said savagely. “Computer, activate … can’t remember the word…”
“Activate weapons. Jesus, Laslo. YOU gotta say it. Voice cued.”
“Activate weapons!”
“Hey, a message from th’asteroid! People! Maybe there’s girls.”
“You are approaching a highly restricted area,” a mechanical voice said. “Leave this area immediately.”
“It don’t want us,” Conner said. “Shoot it!”
“Wait … maybe…”
“You are approaching a highly restricted area. Leave this area immediately.”
“Fucking snakes,” Conner said. “Shoot it!”
“I…”
“Fucking coward!”
“THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING! YOU HAVE INVADED A HIGHLY RESTRICTED AND HIGH-DANGER AREA. LEAVE IMMEDIATELY OR YOUR CRAFT WILL BE FIRED ON!”
And then a fourth voice, speaking rapidly, “Unknown craft … SOS … Help! I’m being held prisoner here—this is Tom Capelo—”
A very brief, high-pitched whine.
“End flagged recording,” said Arnold’s system. “Transmission complete.”
Arnold stood in the middle of his silent office. He tried to think factually, methodically, without haste.
The electromagnetic impulse carrying the flyer’s last conversation would have sped at c toward the nearest far-orbit data satellite, of which Mars had thousands. There the information had been encrypted and rel
ayed through closer satellites toward Mars. It had taken only a few minutes to arrive last night, when Arnold had been asleep. The transmission would have traveled ahead of the shock wave. The brief whine at the end of the transmission had been a proton vaporizer.
Laslo Damroscher was dead.
Arnold couldn’t blame whoever had shot Laslo down. Laslo had been where he shouldn’t have, had been adequately warned, had been old enough to understand that warning, had defied it anyway. Laslo, “Conner,” and that boy in the other craft, “Tom,” playing at war games when there was a real war on, pretending to be somebody famous to boost his own pathetic ego … irresponsible. All three of the boys. A corporation or a government had the right to protect its property. That was just reality. Most likely the restricted area had been government-controlled armaments, and in that case, Laslo’s death would not even rate a trial. Not in wartime.
The irresponsible behavior that had gotten Laslo killed had not come from Arnold’s genes. Arnold had made only one mistake in his entire life, and that mistake had produced Laslo. Whatever else Laslo’s death might be, it was not Bellington Wace Arnold’s fault. The responsibility lay elsewhere.
But …
To his own surprise, Arnold couldn’t maintain his factual objectivity. Sudden memories flooded him: Laslo’s birth, the beautiful baby in the arms of his preternaturally beautiful mother. Laslo toddling across the floor of this same office, holding out his small arms to be picked up. Laslo riding a toy red car, laughing and laughing. Laslo proudly printing his name for the first time, even though it was not his, LASLO D. ARNOLD …
Unexpected tears scalded Arnold’s eyes. He stumbled back to his chair. It seemed he had loved his lost son, after all. Although never as much as the mother who had cosseted Laslo and spoiled him and ruined him.
At the thought of Magdalena, Arnold’s tears vanished. He would have to call her, tell her. Send her the recording. For years Arnold had avoided any contact with the bitch. Well, it was going to be only minimal contact now: a prerecorded message. Her reaction to Laslo’s death would undoubtedly be violent, irrational, vengeful. Dangerous.
He could at least spare himself Magdalena.
ONE
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED ATLANTIC FEDERATION, EARTH
Three months earlier
Sometimes it seemed to Amanda Capelo that she had the best life of any of her friends at Sauler Academy. Her father loved her and her sister a lot more than her friends’ fathers did. Everybody saw that. Plus, her father was famous. And her stepmother Carol was a nice person—she might have gotten somebody awful, like Thekla Carter had when Thekla’s father remarried. But Carol was great. Plus, Amanda’s grades were good, and her friends were the best, and even at fourteen she knew she was pretty and might even have a chance at being beautiful someday. She would go to college and become a scientist, like her father, although not a physicist because she didn’t have the math sense. A biologist, maybe. Meanwhile she had a nice home and the right clothes and a vacation every year on Mars visiting Aunt Kristen and Uncle Martin. A good position on the spacetime continuum, Daddy said, and Amanda agreed.
Other times it seemed to her she had been afraid her whole life, ever since her mother died. Afraid that the war with the Fallers would come to the Solar System. Afraid that something would happen to Daddy or Sudie or her aunt and uncle. Afraid that somehow Daddy would lose his money and they’d have to live in the terrible parts of cities that she saw on TV. But then Amanda discovered that, until the night the men took her father way, she hadn’t known what fear was at all. Not at all.
The evening had started badly, with another fight with her father. Before she turned thirteen, they’d never fought, but for the last year and a half it seemed they couldn’t stop. She loved him more than anybody on Earth, but why couldn’t he stop virusing her program? Other fathers weren’t like him. Thekla’s father let her go alone to the holos, and Juliana’s father let her free-fell, and Yaeko’s father would talk with her about absolutely anything that Yaeko wanted. There were so many things Tom Capelo would never talk about.
Amanda pondered all these things as she crept into her father’s bedroom. She wasn’t supposed to be there. But he was downstairs in his study doing physics, and when he did that he grew oblivious to everything else. Including her, Amanda thought with sudden resentment. No, that wasn’t true. Her father loved her. But he either smothered her or ignored her. Why couldn’t he just be normal?
Quietly she closed the bedroom door, and just as quietly pulled the box from under her father’s bed. A meter square and fifteen centimeters high, it was made of a strong opaque plastic intended for long-term storage under adverse conditions. It had an e-lock, to which Amanda had figured out the code. It hadn’t been hard; the code was the digits of her mother’s birthday. You’d think a world-famous mathematician would have more imagination.
Or maybe not.
Amanda’s throat tightened, the way it always did when she opened the box. Pushing several data cubes and two smaller boxes to the side, she lifted out the dress. Her heart started a slow thumping dance. This time, she wasn’t going to just look at the dress. She was going to put it on.
On Coronus, brides marry in yellow, the color of the sun. Her father had told her that years ago, the one time he’d shown her the dress. Amanda suspected he’d been drunk, very unusual for him. Later she learned it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. He never mentioned any of her mother’s possessions again. Yet he had kept them, even after he married Carol.
Pushing the box back under the bed, Amanda stripped off her shoes, tunic, and shorts. She slipped the dress over her head and studied herself in Carol’s full-length mirror.
During the last year, her body had bloomed into curves that still startled her, although secretly she was pleased by them, Yaeko still didn’t have hardly any breasts at all, and Thekla’s waist was getting too thick. Amanda wished she had Thekkie’s eyes, though. Still, she looked nice in the dress and, thanks to being so tall, older than she really was. The yellow fabric that dung on top and flowed into a swirly skirt wasn’t too big for her. Karen Capelo had been a small woman, like her husband and younger daughter Sudie. Amanda took after her aunt Kristen. Although with her long straight fair hair and gray eyes, she looked a lot like Mommy, too. Unlike Sudie, Amanda remembered her mother. She’d been almost eight when Karen Capelo was killed in an enemy raid on a peaceful planet.
Was she prettier than her mother? No, not really. Her mother’s face had been really lovely. Amanda’s nose was too long, and her forehead was sort of squinchy, and there was something wrong with her chin … If only her parents hadn’t been such dinosaurs about having her and Sudie engineered! Not everybody was so archaic. Thekla had the most gorgeous green-blue eyes engineered for color and size and—
Her father was coming up the stairs!
Amanda’s stomach clenched. She wasn’t even supposed to be home. She was supposed to be at swimming, but she’d skipped it and taken the bus home alone, which was forbidden. Her plan had been to avoid her father until the time when Yaeko’s bodyguard was supposed to drop Amanda off at home, and then act like she’d just arrived. Her father would be furious. Swiftly she kicked the crumpled pile of her discarded clothes under the bed, opened the closet door, and slipped inside. She didn’t dare click the door closed, her father was already coming into the bedroom, but she pulled it so that only a tiny crack remained.
It wasn’t her father. For a frozen moment Amanda thought the man in her father’s bedroom was Dieter Gruber: huge and blond and genemod. But Dieter had been left behind on World, at the other end of the galaxy, over two years ago, and anyway Dieter was always clumping and noisy. This man moved quietly as a cat.
He looked around the bedroom, closed the door again, and went down the hall.
Amanda squeezed her eyes shut tight. Who was he? What was happening? What should she do?
Softly she opened the closet, slid out, and pulled back one corner o
f the bedroom curtain. Another man stood outside beside a car. The rest of the street was quiet and dark in the April night, behind the lacy bare trees that were her father’s reason for choosing this neighborhood in a quiet suburb three miles from Cambridge. “I may have to work with those dolts at Harvard,” he’d said, “but I don’t have to live with them.”
Her father came out of the house with a third man. To Amanda’s eyes, Daddy wasn’t walking right. Too quiet, too calm, nothing jiggling or twitching. He never walked like that. She watched him get into the car with the two men, and then the man who’d been upstairs came out and got in, too. The car drove away.
Maybe it was a college meeting. Maybe her father left a note. Amanda tore downstairs to see. But even before she reached the kitchen table, where he always left her notes, she knew it hadn’t been a college meeting. That big blond man had come upstairs in her house, and her father had walked like someone had done something to him. Drugs, maybe.
She should call the police.
“Bumbling incompetents with the intelligence of chairs, seventy percent of them,” her father always said about cops, “and of the other thirty percent, half are in league with the criminals.” What if she called the police and got one in league with whoever took her father? Or even one of the chair ones, who wouldn’t know what to do? Her father would say that fifteen percent was a low probability of success.
Amanda stood very still. “Think,” her father always said. “Reason it out. That’s what you have a brain for.” All right, she would reason what to do.
She couldn’t call the police. They might be part of this thing. Even at school some girls talked in whispers about how the government was breaking down and an uncle or a cousin had disappeared. Of course, they were talking about the big government on Mars, not the little ones on Earth. On Mars everything about the war was worse than on Earth. But even so … government people couldn’t be trusted. Who could?
Aunt Kristen, of course, in Lowell City. But if she called Mars, the men who took her father would know. Calls could be traced, especially ones to the capital of Mars, and even if the calls were encrypted, tracers could still tell if a call had been made, even if they didn’t know what was said. Everybody knew that, from holo shows. Also, House would have recorded everything that happened by the front door and the first-story windows. The bad people would certainly pierce House’s firewalls (Amanda herself could pierce them) and destroy the evidence of their kidnapping. When they did, they’d know that Amanda had come home early, had been in the house. Then they might come to get her, too.
