Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  Gordon shifted in his chair. “‘Invading’ is a pretty strong word, Major.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And why wouldn’t this Capelo be everybody’s obvious choice? What’s the other shoe here?”

  Kaufman said, “He’s not military, sir. Harvard University, United Atlantic Federation. And he’s reputed to be … eccentric. Not everybody likes working with him.” Kaufman paused, considered, decided on honesty. “In fact, hardly anybody likes working with him. He’s sarcastic, and he’s always convinced he’s perfectly right.”

  “And is he?”

  “Usually, sir.”

  “I see. Major, you’ve handed me a stinker.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. Let’s hold our noses while you explain this science to me. Do it slowly, do it clearly, and show me why you think it might lead to some counter-device to the Faller shields. And don’t overstate your case, Major. I probably won’t be able to detect if you’re doing so now, but I’ll find out eventually.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kaufman said, and had to hold still a moment before he began again. His head felt light. The science wouldn’t be easy to explain, but that wasn’t the problem. Nor was obtaining Gordon’s consent. Kaufman knew that he, like Gordon, was a good judge of men. Gordon had already decided to chance the expedition. No, Kaufman’s light-headedness wasn’t because he was nervous about Gordon’s refusal. He was nervous about Gordon’s acceptance.

  And of what train of events he, Lyle Kaufman, had just, finally, got out of the station and into motion.

  TWO

  THARSIS PROVINCE, MARS

  When the comlink shrilled in his brother-in-law’s comfortable living room, Tom Capelo said, “If that’s for me, I’m not here.”

  “Incoming message in real-time from Earth, United Atlantic Federation, for Dr. Capelo, priority one,” the house system said.

  “I’m not here. In fact, I’m not anywhere. I’ve vanished from timespace.”

  “Tom,” Martin Blumberg said with weary patience.

  “System, tell them I’m caught in a space tunnel.”

  “It won’t do that,” Martin said. “Only your system will do that. This is a normal system. House, put the call on screen.”

  Capelo’s younger daughter said, “Daddy, you’re not really in a space tunnel.” After a moment she added, “Are you?”

  “Caught with all my molecules dissassembled.”

  “Oh, he’s just acting stupid again,” the older daughter told her sister, with enormous disgust. “You’re such a baby.”

  “I am not! I’m five!”

  “So what? I’m ten, and that’s twice as old.”

  “Transferring message,” the house system said. A section of the living room wall, which had previously shown the Martian sunset outside the room, darkened briefly, then brightened into an image of a sharp-featured man in a darkened bare room. The image said formally, “This is Dr. Raymond Pellier at Harvard University, UAF, calling for Dr. Thomas Capelo. Please activate two-way visual and audio. There will be a six-minute delay between transmission points. Acknowledge immediately.”

  “Asshole,” Capelo said, into the six-minute delay.

  “Daddy said a bad word,” said Sudie, the five-year-old.

  “Frozen star,” Capelo said in a heavily fake Russian accent.

  “Stop acting so fizzy, Daddy,” ordered Amanda. “You always embarrass us.”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” Sudie said stoutly. “What’s embarrassed mean?”

  Martin stood. “Girls, your father is receiving an important message from his department chair, and I think he needs to do it in private. Let’s go find Aunt Kristen.”

  The two children, unmoving, looked at their father. Capelo said, “You might as well go. I’m only going to tell the frozen star that I’m disassembled.”

  “Daddy—”

  “All right, all right, I’m not disassembled. You two never let me be anything fun. House, activate two-way visual and audio. Ray, you’re acknowledged. ‘Give sorrow words.’”

  Martin took his nieces by the hands and led them away, closing the door behind him. Capelo waited the twelve minutes for his message to be received on Earth and responded to. While he waited, he paced restlessly around the room, touching objects. Bookshelves with actual books, a vase of genemod flowers from the garden at the far side of the dome, a severe metal table topped with a severe slab of red Martian stone—why did all of Kristen’s furniture look so austere? His sister used to have a healthy sense of excess, back when they were kids. But now look: books lined up neatly, flowers sedate in a severe vase. Somehow excess had vanished when she’d married Martin, that most sensible of men. Patient Martin, putting up with his crazy brother-in-law. Although probably it was for the sake of the girls. Give them a sense of family, Kristen probably said to Martin, poor things. Well, that was all right, Capelo himself would put up with anything for Amanda and Sudie, even Kristen’s ugly furniture. Even Mars, with its too-close horizon and grossly inadequate gravity. Even Raymond Pellier. Even—

  “Dr. Capelo,” the image of his department chair said, “I have just received a message from the Solar Alliance Defense Council. A representative is currently on her way to see you in person, and will probably arrive shortly after this message does. I’m calling you first to let you know this representative is on her way so you may prepare yourself. Also, to tell you that I’m arranging indefinite leave of absence for you from the university so you can accept the mission the council is sending you on.”

  “What?” Capelo said, although of course the image wouldn’t hear him for six minutes. “Mission? What mission, Ray? I’m not a fucking soldier!”

  “I know you’re always interested in your graduate seminar, so I want to reassure you that Dr. Gerdes will be covering both that and your thesis advisees.”

  “Gerdes? Gerdes? He can’t advise the way across campus!”

  “Let me just add, Dr. Capelo, the department and the university’s congratulations on your being tapped for an assignment vital to the war effort. Transmission finished.”

  “House, turn off the system,” Capelo said.

  He poured himself another drink. “Assignment vital to the war effort.” What crap. The council had probably concocted another of those exploratory committees of scientists they were always putting together to forecast what the Fallers would do next and what protocols should be designed to meet it … as if anyone knew what the bastards would do next. But undoubtedly the council had requested “a top Harvard physicist,” good window dressing for PR purposes, see if you can dig up a Nobel winner or at least a short-list candidate, and just look, citizens of the Solar System, at the efforts we’re making to protect you! And Ray, that pompous bureaucrat, had jumped at the chance to unload difficult touchy Capelo somewhere beyond a distant space tunnel so the physics department could have some peace.

  Well, forget it. Capelo wasn’t going. Let someone else enact the farce that there was any way to protect citizens from Fallers. If anybody had reason to know better, he did.

  The door opened and Martin stuck his head in. “Tom … you have a visitor, from the Solar Alliance Defense Council. Do you want to see her in here or—”

  “I don’t want to see her at all.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not a choice, Dr. Capelo,” another voice said, and a woman pushed past Martin into the living room. Tall, outwardly sixty-ish (always hard to tell with genemods), with short gray hair, she wore a crisp Alliance Army uniform. “Thank you, Mr. Blumberg. Please leave us.”

  And Martin meekly went, ordered out of his own living room, quietly closing the door behind him.

  Capelo said, “Hello, and good-bye. You’re here to request my inclusion on a scientific war committee; my department chair just called to tell me. But I’m not interested. Sorry.”

  “Yes, you are interested,” the woman said. “I’m Colonel Byars, Dr. Capelo. I’m here on the direct authority of General Stefanak.”


  “Very impressive,” Capelo said. “And so are you, Colonel. You positively exude authority, your own and the general’s. Unfortunately, I’m not intrigued by authority. And the last time I looked, the military was not drafting civilians for its exploratory committees. I’m flattered as hell by your wanting me and all that, but no thanks.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “If you insist.”

  “Will you sit down, too?”

  “Certainly. I can say no just as well sitting down as standing up. It’s an inherited family ability, passed along for generations.”

  They sat. Colonel Byars pulled her chair uncomfortably close to Capelo’s and said calmly, “This assignment is not an exploratory committee, Dr. Capelo. And you are not just any civilian—you’re a scientist with irreplaceable and non-duplicatable skills needed for this project, which is priority one, Special Compartmented Information clearance carrying ‘most vital to war effort’ status. You can be recruited for a project with that status, and you are being so recruited. Now.”

  Capelo said, “You’re wearing a portable communications shield. With a Faraday field big enough to encase these chairs.”

  “Affirmative. Your SCI clearances are already in process, and until they come through, I can’t give you all the specifics on the project. I can say that it’s one worthy of your prodigious talents, as they’ve been described to me. Of course, we can’t forcibly carry you off and make you do physics for us, but if you absolutely refuse to serve the Alliance, we can find you a willful obstruction to the war effort.”

  “And send me to prison,” Capelo said. “My God.”

  “And send you to prison,” Byars agreed. “But we don’t expect that to happen. First, there’s nothing in your record that indicates you oppose the war, and at least one personal reason to think you have an interest in defeating the Fallers who—”

  “Stop,” Capelo said. “Stop right now.”

  “As you wish. Second, the project is one with genuine and major scientific interest, one that we think will hold authentic fascination for you. Real physics, at the experimental and theoretical edge.”

  “You’re not a physicist,” Capelo said. “Not even a minor one. You wouldn’t know the theoretical edge if it sliced you in half.”

  “No. I’m proceeding on the words of people who are physicists.”

  “And you’d really send me to prison if I say no.”

  “We would indeed. We don’t like doing it this way, Dr. Capelo. A reluctant scientist on a military mission is nobody’s conception of ideal. Especially not mine. If this were up to me, I’d choose somebody else.”

  “Points for honesty, Colonel. But not many. I don’t like being pushed around.”

  “I don’t like doing it. But apparently you, and only you, are needed for this.”

  “And from the way you’re studying me, you can’t imagine why.”

  She didn’t answer. Capelo got up and strode around his sister’s sensibly decorated room, fighting the impulse to throw something. The bastards. The fucking imperial bastards. High-handed, dictatorial … Abruptly he flung himself back into the chair that stood too close to Byars’s.

  “I’m going to astonish you, Colonel. I’m going to accept.”

  “I’m pleased.”

  “No, you’re not. You wanted me to say no, that’s why you presented this as autocratically as possible. Your starched little military soul really does want somebody else. But somewhere above you there’s a military physicist who knows better, and I think I can guess who. He’s worth listening to. So I’ll accept, with two conditions:”

  Byars said levelly, “The Solar Alliance Defense Council doesn’t accede to conditions, Dr. Capelo.”

  “You will this time. This little recruiting session is being recorded, isn’t it? Of course it is. I already called you on your overall approach. Don’t add to it unreasonable obstruction of a war effort on your part.”

  Byars was good. She didn’t retort, didn’t move even a facial muscle. But Capelo saw the anger in her eyes.

  He said, “First condition: You confirm for me that the military physicist who wants me is Vladimir Cherkov. Confirming that surely doesn’t violate security.”

  “Affirmative. It is Dr. Cherkov, responding to a request for recommendation from non-scientist officers.”

  “The opinions of non-scientists don’t count. Second, no matter where this project is, anywhere in the galaxy, my two daughters and their nanny go with me.”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “Then I’ll go to jail.”

  For the first time, Byars’s expression changed. “You’d take two children into a war zone?”

  Capelo threw back his head and laughed.

  The laughter—sharp, bitter—finally seemed to disconcert Colonel Byars. But she said nothing until Capelo turned on her.

  “Take two kids into danger, you mean? Where the enemy is? Let me finish what I wouldn’t let you finish before, Colonel. You said I have at least one personal reason for wanting to see the Fallers defeated. You meant the death of my wife in the Faller raid on New London. Were you there, Colonel? No, you probably weren’t. New London is a peaceful colony—was a peaceful colony—with no military presence whatsoever, on a peaceful planet beyond Space Tunnel #264, where my wife was surveying alien fishes. She was a xenobiologist, as your briefing undoubtedly told you. The Fallers attacked and she died, just as they’ve attacked numerous other human settlements, military and civilian. With no apparent obstruction of their war effort by the Solar Alliance.”

  “Their beam-disrupter shield—”

  “Is impenetrable, I know. We all know. And if I can do anything real to crack the science of that bugger, I will. Because that’s what this project is connected with, isn’t it? Has to be. I’ll do it. Just don’t sit there and try to tell me that there’s anywhere I could go that’s more dangerous than anywhere else for my girls. Because I know better. Where I go, they go. They’ve already lost one parent—they’re not going to lose the other. I’ll go to prison first, and make sure they’re housed right outside the walls. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Byars said. She stood. “I’ll report your answer.”

  “And hope it disqualifies me, right? It won’t. Not if Vladimir Cherkov wants me. Make reservations for four, Colonel. Table near the war.”

  “I’m turning off the communications shield now.”

  “Fine by me. Have a good trip back. Stay in touch.”

  She walked out of the room, back stiff with disapproval. Or with military uprightness. Or with something—who the hell cared?

  A moment later, Amanda and Sudie burst into the room. “Your company’s gone! Can we make a fort?”

  “Sure you can. Upend the furniture. Puncture the dome. But first come give your daddy two kisses. Oh, hell, you taste of crabbiness! You’ve been swimming in the underground Martian sea again!”

  Sudie giggled. Amanda said with disgust, “You’re being fizzy again, Daddy.”

  “Always.”

  “Why can’t we have a normal daddy, like other kids?”

  “You were born lucky. I knew it the minute I saw all those angels singing in the sky.”

  Kristen entered, looking vaguely worried. “Tom? What was it?”

  “Nothing, sis. But we may have to cut our visit short a bit.” Howls of protest from the girls. “Yes, we may. The university is sending us all on a nice paid vacation.”

  THREE

  LUNA CITY, LUNA

  Major Kaufman walked in his spacesuit from the shuttle to the clear piezoelectric plastic dome on Luna. These days he spent all his time under the hazy red-dust sky of Mars; he had almost forgotten how a sky looked without an atmosphere. Black, cold, pricked with diamond-bright and diamond-sharp stars. Beautiful.

  He wasn’t here to admire stars. He was here in his professional military capacity, to recruit a civilian. It was to be, had to be, recruitment through persuasion only. Dr. Thomas Capelo, Kaufman had heard, h
ad not been persuaded so much as bullied. However, bullying was out of the question here, even if he’d been good at it, which he wasn’t. But he was pretty good at persuasion, especially for a soldier. To recruit Marbet Grant, he’d have to be.

  Lyle Kaufman had never wanted to be a soldier. This was not something that a major in the Solar Alliance Defense Army, attached to High Command of the Solar Alliance Defense Council, could admit to anyone. Kaufman never had.

  His family was military, all of them, UAF Army. When the time came for seventeen-year-old Lyle to choose a college, no one had ever asked him if he wanted to go to West Point. It was assumed he was going, even if West Point wasn’t what it had been, was in fact only the heavy-gravity training arm of the SADA Military Academy on Mars. Lyle Kaufman, intelligent and hard-working but with minimal genetic enhancements, could not aspire to the Martian Academy. Even acceptance at West Point was not assured, although only Lyle seemed to realize this. His parents, uncle, sisters, and brother never questioned his going, and Lyle never discussed it with them.

  He knew, somewhere in the recesses of his orderly and conventional mind, that the reason he was going to West Point was that he had no particular desire to go anywhere else, study anything else, become anything else. He also knew that wasn’t a good reason for becoming an Army officer. But he ignored the knowledge. He was seventeen, amiable and calm by temperament, and he had not been brought up to think very much or very deeply. Certainly not about choices in life. A good soldier did what was expected.

  By the time Lyle Kaufman did get around to thinking about his choices, he was a captain. To his faint surprise, advancement came from doing what he was told to do as well as he could do it, without either opposition or self-interest. This held true in combat as well as out of it. At some level, that didn’t seem right. Surely he should feel more involved with the decisions he made, decisions which affected other men’s lives as well as his own? But he didn’t. He proceeded with whatever task was at hand to the best of his ability. Other officers, he saw, seemed to respect this, although Lyle could not shake the feeling that he was on autopilot, not all that different from a very sophisticated computer. After his tour of combat duty, he was promoted to major.