Probability Space

by Nancy Kress

  I am dizzy from four glasses of pel. Enough. I find an inn, the kind where no one asks questions, and sleep without the shared reality of dreams.

  It takes me a day, disguised as a street cleaner, to decide which of the men coming and going from the rich widow’s house is Pek Brifjis. Then I spend three days following him, in various guises. He goes a lot of places and talks to a lot of people, but none of them seem unusual for a rich healer with a personal pleasure in collecting antique water carafes. On the fourth day I look for a good opportunity to approach him, but this turns out to be unnecessary.

  “Pek,” a man says to me as I loiter, dressed as a vendor of sweet flatbreads, outside the baths on Elindel Street. I have stolen the sweets before dawn from the open kitchen of a bake shop. I know at once that the man approaching me is a bodyguard, and that he is very good. It’s in the way he walks, looks at me, places his hand on my arm. He is also very handsome, but that thought barely registers. Handsome men are never for such as me. They are for Ano.

  Were for Ano.

  “Come with me, please,” the bodyguard says, and I don’t argue. He leads me to the back of the baths, through a private entrance, to a small room apparently used for private grooming of some sort. The only furniture is two small stone tables. He checks me, expertly but gently, for weapons, looking even in my mouth. Satisfied, he indicates where I am to stand, and opens a second door.

  Maldon Pek Brifjis enters, wrapped in a bathing robe of rich imported cloth. He is younger than Carryl Walters, a vigorous man in a vigorous prime. His eyes are striking, a deep purple with long gold lines radiating from their centers. He says immediately, “Why have you been following me for three days?”

  “Someone told me to,” I say. I have nothing to lose by an honest shared reality, although I still don’t fully believe I have anything to gain.

  “Who? You may say anything in front of my guard.”

  “Carryl Pek Walters.”

  The purple eyes deepen even more. “Pek Walters is dead.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Perpetually. I was with him when he entered the second stage of death.”

  “And where was that?” He is testing me.

  “In Aulit Prison. His last words instructed me to find you. To…ask you something.”

  “What do you wish to ask me?”

  “Not what I thought I would ask,” I say, and realize that I have made the decision to tell him everything. Until I saw him up close, I wasn’t completely sure what I would do. I can no longer share reality with World, not even if I went to Frablit Pek Brimmidin with exactly the knowledge he wants about the scientific experiments on children. That would not atone for releasing Ano before the Section agreed. And Pek Brimmidin is only a messenger, anyway. No, less than a messenger: a tool, like a garden shovel, or a bicycle. He does not share the reality of his users. He only thinks he does.

  As I had thought I did.

  I say, “I want to know if I killed my sister. Pek Walters said I did not. He said ‘sick brain talks to itself,’ and that I had not killed Ano. And to ask you. Did I kill my sister?”

  Pek Brifjis sits down on one of the stone tables. “I don’t know,” he says, and I see his neck fur quiver. “Perhaps you did. Perhaps you did not.”

  “How can I discover which?”

  “You cannot.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.” And then, “I am sorry.”

  Dizziness takes me. The “low blood pressure.” The next thing I know, I lie on the floor of the small room, with Pek Brifjis’s fingers on my elbow pulse. I struggle to sit up.

  “No, wait,” he says. “Wait a moment. Have you eaten today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, wait a moment anyway. I need to think.”

  He does, the purple eyes turning inward, his fingers absently pressing the inside of my elbow. Finally he says, “You are an informer. That’s why you were released from Aulit Prison after Pek Walters died. You inform for the government.”

  I don’t answer. It no longer matters.

  “But you have left informing. Because of what Pek Walters told you. Because he told you that the skits-oh-free-nia experiments might have…No. It can’t be.”

  He too has used a word I don’t know. It sounds Terran. Again I struggle to sit up, to leave. There is no hope for me here. This healer can tell me nothing.

  He pushes me back down on the floor and says swiftly. “When did your sister die?” His eyes have changed once again; the long golden flecks are brighter, radiating from the center like glowing spokes. “Please, Pek, this is immensely important. To both of us.”

  “Two years ago, and 152 days.”

  “Where? In what city?”

  “Village. Our village. Gofkit Ilo.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes. Tell me everything you remember of her death. Everything.”

  This time I push him aside and sit up. Blood rushes from my head, but anger overcomes the dizziness. “I will tell you nothing. Who do you people think you are, ancestors? To tell me I killed Ano, then tell me I didn’t, then say you don’t know—to destroy the hope of atonement I had as an informer, then to tell me there is no other hope—no, there might be hope—no, there’s not—how can you live with yourself? How can you twist people’s brains away from shared reality and offer nothing to replace it!” I am screaming. The bodyguard glances at the door. I don’t care: I go on screaming.

  “You are doing experiments on children, wrecking their reality as you have wrecked mine! You are a murderer—” But I don’t get to scream all that. Maybe I don’t get to scream any of it. For a needle slides into my elbow, at the inner pulse where Maldon Brifjis has been holding it, and the room slides away as easily as Ano into her grave.

  A bed, soft and silky, beneath me. Rich wall hangings. The room is very warm. A scented breeze whispers across my bare stomach. Bare? I sit up and discover I am dressed in the gauzy skirt, skimpy bandeau, and flirting veil of a prostitute.

  At my first movement, Pek Brifjis crosses from the fireplace to my bed. “Pek. This room does not allow sound to escape. Do not resume screaming. Do you understand?”

  I nod. His bodyguard stands across the room. I pull the flirting veil from my face.

  “I am sorry about that,” Pek Brifjis says. “It was necessary to dress you in a way that accounts for a bodyguard carrying a drugged woman into a private home without raising questions.”

  A private home. I guess that this is the rich widow’s house by the sea. A room that does not allow sound to escape. A needle unlike ours: sharp and sure. Brain experiments. “Skits-oh-fren-ia.”

  I say, “You work with the Terrans.”

  “No,” he says. “I do not.”

  “But Pek Walters…” It doesn’t matter. “What are you going to do with me?”

  He says, “I am going to offer you a trade.”

  “What sort of trade?”

  “Information in return for your freedom.”

  And he says he does not work with Terrans. I say, “What use is freedom to me?” although of course I don’t expect him to understand that. I can never be free.

  “Not that kind of freedom,” he says. “I won’t just let you go from this room. I will let you rejoin your ancestors, and Ano.”

  I gape at him.

  “Yes, Pek. I will kill you and bury you myself, where your body can decay.”

  “You would violate shared reality like that? For me?”

  His purple eyes deepen again. For a moment, something in those eyes looks almost like Pek Walters’s blue ones. “Please understand. I think there is a strong chance you did not kill Ano. Your village was one where…subjects were used for experimentation. I think that is the true shared reality here.”

  I say nothing. A little of his assurance disappears. “Or so I believe. Will you agree to the trade?”

  “Perhaps,” I say. Will he actually do what he promises? I can’t be sure. But there is no other way for me. I cannot hide from the government all the
years until I die. I am too young. And when they find me, they will send me back to Aulit, and when I die there they will put me in a coffin of preservative chemicals…

  I would never see Ano again.

  The healer watches me closely. Again I see the Pek Walters look in his eyes: sadness and pity.

  “Perhaps I will agree to the trade,” I say, and wait for him to speak again about the night Ano died. But instead he says, “I want to show you something.”

  He nods at the bodyguard who leaves the room, returning a few moments later. By the hand he leads a child, a little girl, clean and well-dressed. One look makes my neck fur bristle. The girl’s eyes are flat and unseeing. She mutters to herself. I offer a quick appeal for protection to my ancestors. The girl is unreal, without the capacity to perceive shared reality, even though she is well over the age of reason. She is not human. She should have been destroyed.

  “This is Ori,” Pek Brifjis says. The girl suddenly laughs, a wild demented laugh, and peers at something only she can see.

  “Why is it here?” I listen to the harshness in my own voice.

  “Ori was born real. She was made this way by the scientific brain experiments of the government.”

  “Of the government! That is a lie!”

  “Is it? Do you still, Pek, have such trust in your government?”

  “No, but…” To make me continue to earn Ano’s freedom, even after I had met their terms…to lie to Pek Brimmidin…those offenses against shared reality are one thing. The destruction of a real person’s physical body, as I had done with Ano’s (had I?) is another, far far worse. To destroy a mind, the instrument of perceiving shared reality…Pek Brifjis lies.

  He says, “Pek, tell me about the night Ano died.”

  “Tell me about this…thing!”

  “All right.” He sits down in a chair beside my luxurious bed. The thing wanders around the room, muttering. It seems unable to stay still.

  “She was born Ori Malfisit, in a small village in the far north—”

  “What village?” I need desperately to see if he falters on details.

  He does not. “Gofkit Ramloe. Of real parents, simple people, an old and established family. At six years old, Ori was playing in the forest with some other children when she disappeared. The other children said they heard something thrashing toward the marshes. The family decided she had been carried off by a wild kilfreit—there are still some left, you know, that far north—and held a procession in honor of Ori’s joining their ancestors.

  “But that’s not what happened to Ori. She was stolen by two men, unreal prisoners promised atonement and restoration to full reality, just as you were. Ori was carried off to Rafkit Sarloe, with eight other children from all over World. There they were given to the Terrans, who were told that they were orphans who could be used for experiment. The experiments were ones that would not hurt or damage the children in any way.”

  I look at Ori, now tearing a table scarf into shreds and muttering. Her empty eyes turn to mine, and I have to look away.

  “This part is difficult,” Pek Brifjis says. “Listen hard, Pek. The Terrans truly did not hurt the children. They put ee-lek-trodes on their heads…you don’t know what that means. They found ways to see which parts of their brains worked the same as Terran brains and which did not. They used a number of tests and machines and drugs. None of it hurt the children, who lived at the Terran scientific compound and were cared for by World childwatchers. At first the children missed their parents, but they were young, and after a while they were happy.”

  I glance again at Ori. The unreal, not sharing in common reality, are isolated and therefore dangerous. A person with no world in common with others will violate those others as easily as cutting flowers. Under such conditions, pleasure is possible, but not happiness.

  Pek Brifjis runs his hand through his neck fur. “The Terrans worked with World healers, of course, teaching them. It was the usual trade, only this time we received the information and they the physical reality: children and watchers. There was no other way World could permit Terrans to handle our children. Our healers were there every moment.”

  He looks at me. I say, “Yes,” just because something must be said.

  “Do you know, Pek, what it is like to realize you have lived your whole life according to beliefs that are not true?”

  “No!” I say, so loudly that Ori looks up with her mad, unreal gaze. She smiles. I don’t know why I spoke so loud. What Pek Brifjis said has nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.

  “Well, Pek Walters knew. He realized that the experiments he participated in, harmless to the subjects and in aid of biological understanding of species differences, were being used for something else. The roots of skits-oh-free-nia, misfiring brain sir-kits—” He is off on a long explanation that means nothing to me. Too many Terran words, too much strangeness. Pek Brifjis is no longer talking to me. He is talking to himself, in some sort of pain I don’t understand.

  Suddenly the purple eyes snap back to mine. “What all that means, Pek, is that a few of the healers—our own healers, from World—found out how to manipulate the Terran science. They took it and used it to put into minds memories that did not happen.”

  “Not possible!”

  “It is possible. The brain is made very excited, with Terran devices, while the false memory is recited over and over. Then different parts of the brain are made to…to recirculate memories and emotions over and over. Like water recirculated through mill races. The water gets all scrambled together…No. Think of it this way: different parts of the brain send signals to each other. The signals are forced to loop together, and every loop makes the unreal memories stronger. It is apparently in common use on Terra, although tightly controlled.”

  Sick brain talks to itself.

  “But—”

  “There are no objections possible, Pek. It is real. It happened. It happened to Ori. The World scientists made her brain remember things that had not happened. Small things, at first. That worked. When they tried larger memories, something went wrong. It left her like this. They were still learning; that was five years ago. They got better, much better. Good enough to experiment on adult subjects who could then be returned to shared reality.”

  “One can’t plant memories like flowers, or uproot them like weeds!”

  “These people could. And did.”

  “But—why?”

  “Because the World healers who did this—and they were only a few—saw a different reality.”

  “I don’t—”

  “They saw the Terrans able to do everything. Make better machines than we can, from windmills to bicycles. Fly to the stars. Cure disease. Control nature. Many World people are afraid of Terrans, Pek. And of Fallers and Huhuhubs. Because their reality is superior to ours.”

  “There is only one common reality,” I said. “The Terrans just know more about it than we do!”

  “Perhaps. But Terran knowledge makes people uneasy. And afraid. And jealous.”

  Jealous. Ano saying to me in the kitchen, with Bata and Cap bright at the window, “I will too go out tonight to see him! You can’t stop me! You’re just jealous, a jealous ugly shriveled thing that not even your lover wants, so you don’t wish me to have any—” And the red flood swamping my brain, the kitchen knife, the blood—

  “Pek?” the healer says. “Pek?”

  “I’m…all right. The jealous healers, they hurt their own people, World people, for revenge on the Terrans—that makes no sense!”

  “The healers acted with great sorrow. They knew what they were doing to people. But they needed to perfect the technique of inducing controlled skits-oh-free-nia…they needed to do it. To make people angry at Terrans. Angry enough to forget the attractive trade goods and rise up against the aliens. To cause war. The healers are mistaken, Pek. We have not had a war on World in a thousand years; our people cannot understand how hard the Terrans would strike back. But you must understand: the outlaw scientis
ts thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were creating anger in order to save World.

  “And another thing—with the help of the government, they were careful not to make any World man or woman permanently unreal. The adults manipulated into murder were all offered atonement as informers. The children are all cared for. The mistakes, like Ori, will be allowed to decay someday, to return to her ancestors. I will see to that myself.”

  Ori tears the last of the scarf into pieces, smiling horribly, her flat eyes empty. What unreal memories fill her head?

  I say bitterly, “Doing the right thing…letting me believe I killed my sister!”

  “When you rejoin your ancestors, you will find it isn’t so. And the means of rejoining them was made available to you: the completion of your informing atonement.”

  But now that atonement never will be completed. I stole Ano and buried her without Section consent. Maldon Brifjis, of course, does not know this.

  Through my pain and anger I blurt, “And what of you, Pek Brifjis? You work with these criminal healers, aiding them in emptying children like Ori of reality—”

  “I don’t work with them. I thought you smarter, Pek. I work against them. And so did Carryl Walters, which is why he died in Aulit Prison.”

  “Against them?”

  “Many of us do. Carryl Walters among them. He was an informer. And my friend.”

  Neither of us says anything. Pek Brifjis stares into the fire. I stare at Ori, who has begun to grimace horribly. She squats on an intricately woven curved rug which looks very old. A reek suddenly fills the room. Ori does not share with the rest of us the reality of piss closets. She throws back her head and laughs, a horrible sound like splintering metal.

  “Take her away,” Pek Brifjis says wearily to the guard, who looks unhappy. “I’ll clean up here.” To me he adds, “We can’t allow any servants in here with you.”

  The guard leads away the grimacing child. Pek Brifjis kneels and scrubs at the rug with chimney rags dipped in water from my carafe. I remember that he collects antique water carafes. What a long way that must seem from scrubbing shit, from Ori, from Carryl Walters coughing out his lungs in Aulit Prison, among aliens.