Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  “I’m glad.”

  Kaufman said, “You don’t sound glad, Tom.”

  “It’s a result, Lyle, not a cause. The physics are just as obscure as ever.”

  Kaufman sat, uninvited, on the rock beside Capelo. ‘Tell me in simple terms what the physics problem is, please.”

  Capelo looked at him in frustration. Laymen were always asking for simple explanations of the complex, a vital part of which consisted of math they couldn’t follow. This was the same reason Capelo didn’t like teaching. Or half his colleagues.

  “I know I’m asking a lot,” Kaufman said, so humbly that Capelo was trapped.

  “All right,” he said. “We have four—no, five—sets of data. First, the patterns of excess radioactivity in the mountains, now known to be caused by the artifact. The thing alters the probability that certain nuclei will destabilize. All quantum events can be viewed as changes to topological surfaces created by the vibrating threads that make up the fabric of spacetime. The artifact affects the probability amplitudes, which are computed by summing over all possible topological surfaces.

  “In other words, our muddy ball drastically increases the chance that the emitted particle will be found in that part of its probability field outside the energy barrier of the nucleus.”

  Kaufman said, “So a ‘probability amplitude’ is just the area that a particle might be found, given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.”

  There was a lot more to it than that, but Capelo decided to let it go. “More or less. It’s clear from Syree Johnson’s report that the other artifact, the big one, did the same thing as our smaller one, except that it emitted its destabilizing effect in a spherical wave, not a directed beam. And when it blew, it destabilized a hell of a lot more than atoms above atomic number seventy-five. It blew up Johnson’s ship, the enemy’s ship, and a few unlucky flyers. And it sent out a destabilizing wave through this entire star system. A probability shockwave, you could call it, since it changed the probability of all sorts of nuclei destabilizing.”

  “I’m with you,” Kaufman said.

  “No, you’re not, because already I’m not even with me. Or with the physics we know. There’s no such thing as a probability shockwave, and nothing in our physics permits the possibility of controlling such a thing if it did exist.”

  “Well, the space tunnels aren’t in our physics, either.”

  “True enough,” Capelo said. “Anyway, the wave hit Nimitri and the next planet, and it did its job there. It rolled on toward World. And then … nothing. The wave caused absolutely no measurable effect on World. Nada.”

  Kaufman said, “Because World is so far away?”

  “No. Don’t play dumb, Lyle. You already know there was no weakening of the wave effect between Nimitri and the next planet.” What was that planet’s name? No matter. “World should have been fried. And it wasn’t.”

  “So your working hypothesis is that the artifact buried on World set up a planet-wide probability field of its own that neutralized the wave effect.”

  This was why he hated talking to laymen. Capelo tried to control his impatience. “That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing. What forces are involved? What happens at the level of vibrating threads? What is the mechanism and where is the math? What in hell happens? And how does whatever happened fit with the Faller beam-disrupter shield, which also appears to alter probability?”

  Kaufman said, “Tell me about that.”

  Jesus Christ, the man was obtuse. But what better did Capelo have to do? He certainly wasn’t getting anywhere with his so-called “work” on the problem.

  He said, “The Faller shield does something we also think of as impossible. We fire a beam of protons at a Faller ship. The beam is made of particles, but of course it’s also a wave. The ship has the shield. Syree Johnson thought that before the proton beam hits the ship, the shield somehow alters the wave function of the proton beam, making its phase complex just before it hits.”

  Kaufman echoed stupidly, “‘Makes its phase complex’?”

  “The proton beam is supposed to resolve itself into particles the second it hits the observer, which is the ship. As particles, the beam blows the ship to smithereens. But the shield somehow resolves the beam into a wave, according to Johnson. Plus it alters the wave phase to a complexity that doesn’t interact with ordinary matter. How does it do that, Lyle? Where does the beam go?”

  “I don’t know,” Kaufman said humbly.

  “Nor do I. Nor do I know how this same versatile handy-dandy artifact affected the probability amplitudes of neurotransmitter release in my brain this morning. If that’s what it did. Haven’t a clue.”

  “Which means you don’t have a clue how the artifact will react if we take it away from World entirely.”

  Capelo turned to gaze full at Kaufman’s face. “No. And that’s what concerns you, isn’t it? You already understood as much physics as I’ve explained to you. You’re too sharp not to have. You got me talking to focus me on your concern, which is using this damn thing as a war weapon.”

  Kaufman said quietly, “I thought that was your concern, too, Tom. For personal reasons of your own.”

  Capelo was horrified to feel his eyelids prickle. God, wouldn’t this grief over Karen ever lessen? That’s all he asked: lessening, not going away completely, which he understood to be impossible. He turned away so that Kaufman wouldn’t see him blinking hard.

  “Yes, that’s my concern, too. If this artifact will blow the Faller bastards out of the sky, I want it to do that. More than you can know. But I also want to know why it does that. For physics, but also for control. You can’t control your new weapon, Lyle, unless you understand it. You don’t know what the hell that thing will do in actual battle conditions. You don’t even know what will happen if you try to take it through a space tunnel.”

  “Neither do I know what will happen to the brains of a planet full of aliens if I remove the artifact that’s shaped their brains.”

  “I haven’t even considered that,” Capelo said.

  “I have,” Kaufman said.

  “Next to a war involving the future of our own race, I don’t think it matters,” Capelo said. “We’re talking about the future of humanity! This is a war—you’re supposed to be the soldier!”

  “I am,” Kaufman said, but Capelo didn’t, or couldn’t, hear the complexities in his voice.

  TWELVE

  BASE CAMP

  Kaufman arrived at base camp at the same time as Ann Sikorski, Enli, and four soldiers. He emerged from the tunnels under the mountains; the others approached across the grassy, fertile plain that remained untilled only because as yet World did not need the space. The soldiers were led by Captain Heller, looking even grimmer than usual.

  Although how would you tell? Even for a security chief, a notably suspicious lot, Heller was pessimistic. She had not wanted Ann to visit David Campbell Allen’s grave, a visit that the aliens apparently considered absolutely necessary. Kaufman had not disagreed; he wanted to do nothing that would hint to Voratur, or to the shadowy priest “Servants of the First Flower,” that humans were not completely of the same mind as Worlders. Shared reality.

  Captain Heller, on the other hand, had objected strenuously to permitting a key member of the project team to leave the immediate area of the base and venture into totally unscouted habitats. She did not, she had informed Kaufman, “give a three-handed fuck about shared reality.”

  After Kaufman had mildly forced her to accept that Ann was going, Heller had next wanted a dozen conspicuously armed soldiers to escort her. They had compromised on four soldiers, unobtrusively carrying laser pistols, tanglefoam, and nervewash. Kaufman failed to convince Heller that the natives were unarmed, unbellicose, and unsuspicious of humans now that humans were real again.

  “‘Unsuspicious?’” Heller had said, suspicious.

  “‘We see the universe not as it is, but as we are,’” Kaufm
an had quoted, but this had been lost on Captain Heller.

  Now she approached with an apparently unharmed Ann, who trudged along tiredly. Kaufman had vetoed the use of land mobiles as too alien to Worlders, and Heller had vetoed the use of bicycles as leaving her soldiers too vulnerable. Kaufman suspected that Heller did not know how to ride a bicycle, an antiquated artifact even on Earth. Heller had been born in the Belt.

  From the opposite direction, Voratur and his son sped along on what were clearly Terran bicycles from the last expedition. Both groups arrived together.

  “Pek Voratur!” Ann called. “May your blossoms flourish in sunlight!”

  “May your garden delight the First Flower,” Voratur answered. “And yours, Pek Kaufman!”

  “May your garden bloom,” Kaufman said, in his carefully memorized World. It seemed to him that Voratur looked nervous, although Kaufman wasn’t familiar enough with alien expressions to be sure.

  How was Marbet doing with the Faller’s expressions? All Kaufman had had from her since his visit were short, curt reports in routine language. He hadn’t had time to review the holorecordings of her sessions with the prisoner.

  Hospitality flowers were exchanged: pajalib and allabenirib. Kaufman was learning the strange, all-important names. Then Ann led them all into the foamhut where her equipment for the Lagerfeld scans was already set up.

  Voratur said something, and Kaufman looked at Ann. She translated. “He says he remembers this metal hat from last time. He’s nervous but willing. Enli, don’t be afraid.”

  The female alien said nothing.

  Ann switched back to World, and Kaufman could not follow. Voratur sat on a low pillow with his back to the equipment. Carefully Ann lowered the helmet onto his head. It adjusted itself to fit snugly over his scalp, neck, and forehead, leaving his face clear. Ann began to ask Voratur questions in her low, soothing voice. At least it sounded soothing to Kaufman; he had no way of knowing how it sounded to the alien.

  Kaufman did know roughly how the Lagerfeld scan worked. Hundreds of minute electrodes were sliding into place on Voratur’s bald head and through his neckfur. Tiny needles carrying their own anesthetic would also sample blood, cerebrospinal fluid, even sweat. But the most useful data would come from the MOSS component of the Lagerfeld.

  MOSS—“Multi-layer Organ Structure Scan”—delivered almost neuron-by-neuron detail of the brain in action. Which cells were activated, which neurotransmitters were released, which neuronfiring patterns emerged. Receptor-cell docking, transmitter reuptake, enzyme cascades, substance breakdown and by-products … MOSS captured it all, analyzed the data in multiple ways and delivered equations and formulae to explain them. It did everything but synthesize pills and put labels on the bottle. The result was a virtual fingerprint of the workings of an individual brain in reaction to various stimuli.

  The stimuli were the questions Ann asked Voratur. Think about a beautiful garden, about a good meal, about falling off your bicycle and breaking your back … on and on. Ann had all the data from the earlier scan of Voratur’s brain for comparison.

  Soshaf Voratur and Enli chanted fervently, words meaningless to Kaufman. On the Lagerfeld display screen, graphs flickered, also meaningless. Sweat broke out on Voratur’s face. Evidently he found this very stressful, perhaps even dangerous. The alien was a brave man.

  Next Ann offered him concrete items to react to: food, tools, flowers. All trace of weariness had vanished from her face. After fifteen minutes she smiled brilliantly and removed the helmet from Voratur, who sprang up as if made of rubber.

  Enli took his place. For the first time, Kaufman wondered about Ann’s insistence on including a brainscan of Enli in their bargaining with Voratur. Ann had no base data for Enli. What was she looking for?

  Now it was Soshaf and Voratur who chanted, swaying on their pillows. Kaufman found his mind moving away from what Ann was saying now to what she was going to say later. It would not be pleasant. Kaufman hadn’t told her about the findings at the excavation site. She didn’t yet know that the buried artifact was most likely a directed-beam weapon. Or that it would probably be taken off-planet.

  What if she and Gruber were right, and it somehow created a secondary probability field that had shaped these aliens’ brains?

  Only a theory. No data.

  God, he sounded like Capelo.

  What was Marbet doing, aboard the Alan B. Shepard?

  “We’re finished,” Ann said in English. She removed the helmet. Unlike Voratur, Enli did not bounce joyfully off the floor pillow. She rose slowly, gravely, and the flesh between her eyes wrinkled. Her skull ridges creased. Now that Kaufman looked, he saw that Voratur’s smooth, oiled flesh wrinkled in the same way.

  Head pain. The Lagerfeld scans represented some sort of unshared reality, however minor, and that had given the two aliens—no, three, Soshaf also had creased forehead and skull ridges—massive headaches. They must have known it would. Bravery indeed.

  Or greed. Voratur said something to Ann, then put his hands to his head. Ann turned to Kaufman.

  “Give them the six comlinks, Lyle, so they can leave. This is very painful for all of them.”

  Despite his head pain, Voratur’s eyes gleamed as Kaufman handed him the small black boxes. He expected to show Voratur how they worked, but Voratur didn’t ask. He said something to Soshaf, who took one of the boxes and moved outside the hut. Expertly Voratur opened the link and spoke in World. Soshaf’s voice sounded back, and Voratur broke into a huge grin that needed no interpretation by anybody.

  In thirty more seconds, with only minimum flower exchanging, the three aliens bicycled away.

  “Well,” Kaufman said, “speedy diplomacy, at least.”

  Ann said stubbornly, “They should not have those comlinks.”

  “Then you would not have your Lagerfeld data. And the comlinks won’t affect their overall society very much. Really. If they take the comlinks apart, they won’t discover anything useful to them—these people are centuries from microchips.” He considered this, wondered if it were true, and changed the subject. “Tell me what you learned at David Allen’s grave.”

  Ann was clearly impatient to get to her data. But she sat down on the pillow Enli had vacated. “What do you know about David Allen, Lyle?”

  “That he was the graduate student with the previous expedition. That he got the position only because his very influential father pulled strings. That when all of you were hiding in the Neury Mountains because the Worlders had declared you unreal, David Allen took Gruber’s gun and kidnapped Enli, and neither of them was ever heard from again. A few days later a flyer picked up you others and lifted you off-planet.”

  “Yes. And so we still believed humans were thought to be unreal,” Ann said. “But it turns out we were real again to Worlders. Because of what David did.”

  “What did he do?”

  She pushed back a few strands of the long fair hair that had come loose from her topknot. Not really pretty—her face was long and her features too small—Ann Sikorski nonetheless had one of the most attractive faces Kaufman had ever seen. For its kindness, for the steady integrity in her pale eyes. Precisely the qualities he was going to have to outrage a few minutes from now.

  She said, “When David took Enli and left us in the middle of the night, we all knew that Tas—the artifact Syree Johnson had moved out of orbit—might blow if Johnson tried to take it through the space tunnel. The mass was too great. Gruber worked it out for us, because Johnson was giving out minimum information to us anthropologists on the planet. Like most military.”

  Kaufman didn’t reply to the dig, but he noted it. It wasn’t like Ann. She was really upset about the comlinks.

  “David was … in an excitable state,” Ann continued. Again Kaufman said nothing. The planetside team leader, Dr. Bazargan, had said in his report that Allen had developed a full-blown grandiose paranoia.

  “He took Enli to the closest village and together they told the villagers that
a ‘sky sickness’ was coming. That’s how he described the wave effect. He said he’d been told about the sky sickness by the First Flower while he was in the Neury Mountains.”

  “Why did they believe him?”

  Ann smiled wanly. In that smile Kaufman saw that she had liked David Allen, no matter what he had been. She said, “It’s a paradox. They believed him because Enli had also been in the Neury Mountains and yet wasn’t sick, which was clearly a miracle from the First Flower. And also because David was sick, sick enough from radiation poisoning that he died, and so clearly he gave his life to warn everyone else. Anyone who dies for another is real. And so, by extension, are the rest of us humans.”

  “I see.”

  “The Worlders listened to him. They sent word around the entire planet, using their sunflasher network, and by twenty-four hours later they were all holed up underground. Eventually they came out, found themselves unharmed, and made Enli real again and David a hero. I saw the flower altar they erected to him.”

  It made sense, given the Worlder beliefs. They wouldn’t know about the s-suit that had protected Enli from radiation in the mountains, or about David’s mental state, or about the wave effect’s mysteriously not having any effect whatsoever on World, aboveground or below.

  He said, “The outcome was fortunate for this expedition, anyway. Worlders have let us come in peace.”

  “Yes,” Ann said, “and in return you’re going to destroy their entire civilization.”

  So here it was. Kaufman had hoped to postpone this discussion, but he realized now how stupid that hope had been. “You talked by comlink to Dieter.”

  “Of course I talked to Dieter. He’s jubilant that the mapping of the radioactivity patterns match the simulated seismic shifts of the artifact’s protuberances. It’s a directed-beam destabilizer, isn’t it? Or can be used as one?”

  “Yes,” Kaufman said.

  “And so you’re going to take it to a war zone.”

  “Probably.”

  “At the very least,” Ann said, “you’re going to remove it into space to test it, aren’t you?”