Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  “It applies to dangers such as climbing down cliffs after bird eggs.”

  Capelo lay back in his own chair and strapped himself in. Bird eggs. The artifact like a huge egg, ready to be lifted off a cliff, although of course these primitives didn’t know that. The artifact marked in primes, protuberances marked in primes, probability amplitudes that—

  He was asleep.

  Exhausted past any normal meaning of the word, Capelo slept through the alien chanting, the shuttle takeoff, its docking with the Alan B. Shepard, the transfer of passengers, and Amanda and Sudie’s light farewell kisses. He slept through the trip back down, awaking only when the shuttle screamed its way back into the atmosphere and landed beside base camp. By then it was morning, a bright cool morning of the day they would hoist the artifact, wrench it free from the secret dark place where it had lain for fifty thousand years.

  * * *

  Kaufman’s nerves had been fraying since Grafton’s comlink, an hour before shuttle departure. Kaufman knew they were fraying. He knew, from long practice, how to compensate. So there was no reason for him to have been so peremptory and antagonistic with Tom Capelo.

  Fortunately, the physicist was always so peremptory and antagonistic himself that he seemed not to have noticed.

  Grafton had not even offered any greeting. “Colonel Kaufman, I require your presence immediately aboard ship.”

  “Are we under attack?” A not-so-subtle reminder to Grafton that under any other circumstance, Kaufman was still running this show.

  “We are not. But your ‘researcher,’ Ms. Grant, has violated military orders. Since she is a civilian and I am not allowed to throw her in the brig for anything less than treason, I require you to come up and discipline her.”

  “What has she done?”

  “She has freed one hand of the prisoner Faller. Against, as I understand it, your express orders.”

  It took Kaufman’s breath away. He hadn’t expected it of Marbet, hadn’t seen it coming. “Is she physically unharmed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has anyone else been harmed?”

  “No.”

  “Has the Faller attempted to kill himself?”

  “No.”

  “What is the Faller’s current status?”

  “The hand has been retied. Despite Ms. Grant’s threatening to physically attack any tech who tried to resecure the prisoner. Which she tried to do, until restrained by MPs.”

  Oh, Lord. Kaufman said, “Thank you, Commander. Please leave the situation at status quo until I arrive. ETA available from Captain DeVolites.”

  “As you wish.” Grafton’s voice could have frozen glaciers. It hadn’t seemed the right time to tell him that the shuttle was bringing nine natives up to his ship.

  As soon as docking was completed, Kaufman was through the lock. Grafton was not on hand to meet him. Kaufman gave orders to the gaping OOD about housing the Worlders according to Ann Sikorski’s instructions. Then he went straight to the closed bay where the Faller was imprisoned, looking for Marbet Grant.

  FOURTEEN

  ABOARD THE ALAN B. SHEPARD

  They had left at dusk for the Terran camp, pumping away on the best bicycles Enli had ever seen, or ridden. Two moons were already up, Cut and Obri, and the sun set in a clear cool sky. Flowers lined the road. In Gofkit Jemloe they were garden flowers, lovingly planted: showy red jellitib, lacy trifalitib, the duster blossoms of orange allabenirib, the hospitality flower. Later, in the farmlands, came wildflowers, the ubiquitous mittib and, in the shade, vekifirib in all the colors of World. Enli saw how the others drank up the sight of the flowers. She knew what they were thinking: This might be the last time any of them ever saw flowers.

  She could have told them different.

  Terrans may or may not fully share reality (head pain: don’t think about it). They could lie, that difficult act for which there was no good word in World. They could die, or be killed, or kill. But their machines didn’t fail. If they said the metal flying boat would take them up in the sky and bring them back safely, then it would.

  Earlier that day, Pek Voratur had called together his entire household in the great central garden. A gardener, covered with good loam and smelling of rosib, asked Enli, “Do you know why he wants us?”

  “No.”

  “Have any more of those big Terrans come today? They look so strange, without even decent neckfur! And they smell odd. When they come, I try to plant in a different garden.”

  “No more Terrans came today,” Enli said.

  “Good. But they do grow lovely flowers, I will say that for them—look at those rosib they traded Pek Voratur!” He gazed admiringly at the red, pink, and white blooms on their long thorny stems, which he himself had probably nurtured.

  “People of the household of Voratur,” Pek Voratur said when everyone was present. His large bulk balanced, Soshaf beside him, on an upended vegetable crate. Alu Pek Voratur was still in childbed. “I bring you here to share reality of a trade with the Terrans.”

  People glanced at their neighbors; traders did not inform every servant in the household of their trading bargains.

  “The Terran head of their household, Lyle Pek Kaufman, has called me on my comlink,” Voratur said importantly. “He offers to plant a trade with me. He would like ten people today to travel in their metal flying boat up into the sky to a larger boat, stay two days, and come back home.”

  Loud exclamations broke out in the crowd: “To the sky!” “By the First Flower—what will those people do next!” “I’m not going!” “Ten people! Why?”

  Voratur flapped his arms for quiet. “One of the ten will be me. Another place is already claimed. Soshaf Pek Voratur will stay here.” In case I die, he didn’t say, but everyone heard it anyway. “The others must choose to go.”

  “What will they trade us for going?” someone called.

  Voratur smiled. “Ah, that is the best part. I have told them I will not plant a bargain with them until I see what trading goods they have in the larger flying boat. We will bargain then. But whatever bargain I plant, there will be profit for all who go. One-half for the household of Voratur, the other half to be divided equally among those who make the journey.”

  The crowd buzzed. Half the profits to be divided equally among the travelers! Voratur was the best trader on World; one eighteenth of whatever bargain he planted might be more than anyone had owned before, or his mother before him. But to go into the sky …

  “I will go,” a woman called out from the back of the crowd.

  “And I,” said Telif Pek Forbin, Voratur’s head gardener. The undergardener standing beside Enli stared incredulously.

  “Let me go!” cried a child, to nervous laughter.

  In the end, there were seven volunteers, not eight. The Terrans would have to make do with that. Enli waited quietly for Pek Voratur to turn to her. When the others had been sent to the bicycle shed, he did.

  “Enli … the last place on the flying boat … Pek Kaufman said it must be yours, as translator.”

  “I know,” Enli said, and Pek Voratur nodded. There was no need to discuss the decision; it was shared reality. That satisfied Voratur. Only Enli wondered how long reality would continue to be shared with the Terrans.

  Head pain.

  She went to choose a bicycle for the trip to the Terran camp.

  * * *

  “All right,” Ann Pek Sikorski said in World, “come with me, please.”

  The nine Worlders huddled together, singing the request for the protection of the First Flower. The beautiful chant quieted Enli a little. She had never seen the flying boat so close up. It was not as big as the family wing of the Voratur compound. A ramp, like those used to help farmcarts up slippery slopes, led to a shadowy inside.

  A short distance away, Lyle Pek Kaufman stood being shouted at by a Terran whom Enli had not seen before. The man was shorter than Pek Kaufman, very dirty, and very angry. With him stood a woman and two female Terran children,
eagerly watching the Worlders. Enli stopped singing long enough to risk smiling at them. The older one smiled back.

  Pek Kaufman finished arguing and walked up to Ann. “All right, take them aboard.”

  “What did he say?” Pek Voratur demanded of Enli.

  “We go into the flying boat now.”

  The singing grew louder. Holding hands, skull ridges creased and neckfur bristling, the nine Worlders stumbled into an alien machine. Enli felt her stomach clench.

  The inside of the flying boat was much smaller; evidently most of the space lay behind doors. The flying boat was lit inside, although Enli saw no lamps. Seats were arranged in straight ugly rows. In the center seat of the first row sat a man with utensils and moving pictures in front of him like those on the Lagerfeld machine; he must steer the boat. But how? There were no oars, no wings, nothing to navigate the currents of the wind. Which the flying boat was far too heavy to sail on anyway.

  “This is Nick Pek DeVolites,” Ann said in her accented World. What strange names Terrans had! Pek DeVolites held out a yellow hospitality flower. He did it more awkwardly than anyone Enli had ever seen. Pek Voratur presented his gift flowers, his fleshy oiled hands visibly shaking.

  “Sit here,” Ann said, “and here … and here … that’s good. Are you comfortable? I must lock these straps onto you, for safety…”

  The head gardener, Pek Forbin, said, trying to mask fear, “Will the currents of the wind be rough sailing?”

  “We hope not,” Ann said. “There … are you comfortable? Enli?”

  “My soil is good,” Enli answered.

  When everyone was tied in, the shouting man came into the boat with the older woman and the two little girls. Up close, the man looked even dirtier and wearier. The little girls looked as if they wanted to talk but had been told not to. The younger was very small, and almost as dirty as the man. The older girl had smooth fair hair like Pek Sikorski—her niece, perhaps? Ann did not introduce any of them, bad manners that Enli had never seen from her before. The older woman tied the children down, and then herself. That made the Worlders feel better; the tying must be all right if the Terrans did it to their own children.

  Ann and Pek Kaufman took the seats on either side of Pek DeVolites, who said, “We’re away.” The door closed, there was a noise like a hundred bicycle wheels grinding, and the boat began to move, faster and faster, until it rose into the air.

  All the Worlders fell silent, too frightened even to chant.

  Beyond the window in front of Pek DeVolites was sky. Then clouds. The metal boat screamed—surely it was coming apart! Then the boat flew through the clouds—to be above the clouds!—and Enli closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the black sky was full of stars, and the moons Cut and Obri glowed larger and brighter than she had ever imagined. Obri, first home of the First Flower, who had unfolded her petals to create World. Reverence swept over Enli. She began to chant the creation song, most sacred of the holy chants.

  Pek Voratur began to sing a sky-watching song.

  The gardener resumed chanting the First Flower protection tune.

  Asto Pek Valifin, a cook’s assistant, started a work song.

  Everyone fell silent. They twisted in their straps to look at each other, eyes wide. Neckfur bristled. This was not possible. Songs always began together, or just a few notes after each other, the same songs, the song right for the occasion. The song that, once heard, felt right. Shared reality.

  Pek Valifin sang another few faltering notes. No one followed. She stopped.

  There was no head pain.

  Enli saw Ann watching closely. Was this, then, why the Terrans had brought the Worlders here, far into the sky? To break shared reality? The Terrans had always been fascinated by shared reality, especially Pek Sikorski. But of the nine Worlders aboard, only Enli knew that, and the unshared reality should have been giving her terrible head pain.

  There was no pain at all.

  She grappled with this, saw the others doing the same thing, saw the fear on their faces. This could not be. No one spoke.

  Finally a high clear voice said, “Hi. I’m Sudie Capelo. I’m five.”

  “Sudie, Daddy said—”

  “Daddy and Jane are asleep,” the child said, and all the Worlders turned to look at her desperately, the smiling dirty child, bouncing a little in her straps, the most solid thing in a world suddenly as insubstantial as empty air.

  * * *

  “We are dead,” the head gardener said. “And this is the world of our ancestors.”

  “No,” Ann Sikorski said gently, “you are not dead. Truly.”

  “Where is shared reality? I am unreal!” He began to wail. No one joined in, which only made their numb terror worse.

  The flying boat had stopped. It was now joined to a larger flying boat, one as huge as a village, but only Enli had noticed this. The others were too terrified.

  Ann said, “You are not unreal. None of you are unreal. When we go back to World, shared reality will return to you. I promise this.”

  Voratur said, “Reality cannot ‘return’! It does not come and go! It always is, or it is not reality.” Sweat beaded on his oiled forehead. “Why do I feel no head pain at this unreality here?”

  Ann said, still in that same kind voice, “Shared reality, complete with head pain, will return to you on World. I promise this. Nick,” she added in Terran, “switch the viewscreen direction to show the planet”

  Pek DeVolites did something to the window, and it suddenly faced in a different direction. Another impossibility.

  “Look, Pek Voratur,” Ann said. “Look at your World.”

  It lay as if just beyond the window, filling it, indescribably beautiful. Clouds, seas, the dull purple of land … the sweetest blossom of the First Flower, as no Worlder had ever seen it before. Even the hysterical gardener stood still, his mouth open.

  “Why did they all stop talking?” the younger child said.

  The older one answered, “Because they never saw their planet from space before.”

  “It’s just a planet,” the child said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Shut up, Sudie.”

  “Don’t say shut up to me! Daddy, Amanda said shut up to me!”

  The Worlders went on gazing at their home, where shared reality still lived, while the Terrans did incomprehensible things to the flying boats.

  Eventually the Worlders were led through a little metal hallway into the larger boat, then to a big room with no windows and nine pallets on the floor. Not really pallets, just piles of Terran blankets, but they would do. Ann stayed with them, talking softly in World, soothing fear. The other Terrans disappeared. Food was brought, good familiar food from World, Enli saw with relief. People ate, and then most escaped from the terrible strangeness into sleep. It was very late at night, except that night was down below, in the lost reality.

  Enli could not sleep. She lay on her blankets in the faint light—there was still no telling where it came from, everywhere and nowhere, like her thoughts. This was truth, then. Shared reality was only one reality. The Terrans had a different one. She had known that before—she, and only she of all World had known that—but not in the stone-solid way she perceived it now.

  Suddenly Enli knew why she and Pek Voratur were going to each have another brain picture tomorrow. That was part of the bargain. Pek Sikorski wanted pictures of their brains away from World. She wanted to see if the pictures were different from the ones made in shared reality.

  And the Terrans—Pek Sikorski and Pek Kaufman and the dirty man and his children—moved in and out of realities, as if realities were bicycle sheds. “It’s only a planet,” the grubby little girl had said, in the Terran only Enli had understood. Many, many realities, and this was the first time Enli had ever been able to think about that without head pain.

  She was afraid. Not of the many, many realities—although that she was not afraid was probably proof that she was crazy. No, she was afraid of something else. A feelin
g that, she recognized, had been a long time coming. A feeling she could not have if she hadn’t known the Terrans before, and journeyed with them, and learned their speech. Certainly a feeling she never could have on World, with the head pain of World.

  The feeling was curiosity. It was interesting to think about many, many realities. To wonder what they were like. Terrifying, but also interesting. And that was the strangest reality of all.

  She lay awake a long time, in the alien ship flying through the sky among stars.

  * * *

  Kaufman confronted Marbet in her quarters. She opened the door heavy-eyed with sleep, draped in a white nightdress, her auburn curls tumbled. He would not be distracted. He pushed past her into the tiny cabin and closed the door behind him.

  “Lyle! What are you doing on ship?”

  “What are you doing is a better question. Grafton tells me you untied the prisoner’s hand. Against my specific orders.”

  The sleepiness left her eyes. “Don’t get huffy, Lyle.”

  “I am not huffy. I am extremely angry.”

  “You don’t have the right to be angry. You told me to get this job done and I’m doing that.”

  “I do have the right to be angry. I told you to do the job within specific parameters, and you’ve violated those. If you were military, I would have you court-martialed. As it is, you’ve imperiled yourself, the med techs, and the project.”

  Her eyes widened. “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “Why not?”

  “I got so caught up in the progress I … oh, Lyle, I didn’t mean to imperil the project. Or your career. I’m sorry.”

  She spread her hands, palms up, in appeal. Her shoulders drooped. Lyle felt his anger lessen. “At least no one was hurt.”

  “Yes. I’m glad of that. But I really didn’t think about your career. You have a lot riding on this.”

  Her distress erased the last of his anger. She was a civilian, after all. He said, “All right, no real harm done. I’ll square it with Grafton.”

  “Thank you.” She looked at him so gratefully that he said, “Maybe he can be convinced, since nothing negative resulted, to try the experiment again, under more controlled conditions. Tell me, what progress have you made? What did you learn?”