Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  “Lyle!” called Dieter Gruber. “Come, we are ready to begin!”

  “—No signals received of any—”

  “Yes, thank you, dismissed,” Lyle said, and broke the link.

  At the edge of the meadow the scientists waited impatiently. Again the detection equipment had been set up, including the robot to depress setting prime two. Boulders and other objects, of various compositions, sat at various distances from the artifact. Sensors had been programmed in orbit. The difference was that setting prime one had produced a phenomenon predicted to a fairly high confidence level. No one had any idea what setting prime two would produce. Nor what would be required to shield against it, although they had done their best.

  Shields up, the small group waited tensely. When the orbitals were in the right position, Capelo said, “Now!”

  Nothing happened.

  “No changes in radiation level at any detection site,” Albemarle said, studying his displays, and one by one the rest of the detectors reported the same thing.

  “No change anywhere,” Gruber said. “Why not?”

  Rosalind Singh said, “I doubt they’d build in a setting with no effect.”

  “How do we know what they’d do?” Albemarle said. “Maybe the setting’s broken, somehow.”

  Gruber said, “Nothing has ever malfunctioned anywhere in any space tunnel. Their equipment does not seem to break.”

  “But there’s a first time for everything, Dieter.”

  Only Capelo said nothing. Kaufman watched him curiously. The physicist stood with his eyes closed and his arms crossed on his chest, the same posture Kaufman had surprised him in before. A black hole … everything about him seemed concentrated inward, cut off from communication with the outer world. Albemarle was watching Capelo carefully, and it seemed to Kaufman that Albemarle’s expression was a strange combination of curiosity, disdain, and wistfulness.

  The others resumed running programs that might find some change in something, somewhere, as a result of activating setting prime two. Capelo abruptly came out of his trance and walked rapidly away. Kaufman didn’t try to stop him.

  It was half an hour before he returned, dirty from climbing rocks. Without preamble he said, “Set up to test setting prime three.”

  Albemarle said, “Without knowing what prime two does? Why? To go to a greater strength because you can’t crack a lesser one is—”

  Kaufman said, “What are you thinking, Tom?”

  Capelo said, “I’m not sure yet. But we need to test setting prime three first.”

  “Why?” Rosalind Singh said.

  “I can’t tell. But I’ve been going through the situation … there’s a gap. No, not a gap, a … an unmade connection. It feels right to test prime three now.”

  “Oh,” Albemarle said, with a flash of the old jealousy, “if we’re going by feelings now … I thought we were doing science.”

  Kaufman studied Capelo. After a moment Kaufman said to the others, in the voice he reserved for situations requiring unarguable authority, “Do it. Set up to test setting prime three.”

  Rosalind Singh began giving orders to the techs. Kaufman waited until everyone else was similarly occupied to say quietly to Capelo, “Is it like chess, Tom?”

  With effort, Capelo focused on Kaufman. “Chess?”

  “I’m not a scientist,” Kaufman said, “but I play a fair game of chess, and I’ve read about the great players. They don’t logically reason out the possibilities as much as see them whole … no, not see, apprehend them in some inexplicable way, all the possible outcomes a few moves ahead. Do you do something like that with the physics of the artifact, with the equations?”

  “Something like that,” Capelo said. All at once he smiled, the kind of smile Kaufman had never seen from him. Not sardonic, not bitter, not amused. Happy. “We’ll get them yet, Lyle.” He walked off.

  “Them?” Kaufman wondered. The equations? The doubters like Albemarle? The builders of the artifact? There was no way to tell.

  Setting up for test three didn’t involve much work; the remote robot was repositioned and the calculations done to receive feedback from different orbital sensors. When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing.

  There was a two-hour wait for the orbitals to reach position. In the middle of it, Ann Sikorski and Marbet Grant, clad in s-suits, emerged from the tunnel into the meadow. Marbet walked over to Rosalind, and Ann made straight for Kaufman.

  “Ann, I—”

  “You can’t do it, Lyle.”

  “Do what?” he said, although he already knew. He’d watched Ann’s recordings, and Ann had obviously talked to Marbet.

  “You can’t remove that artifact from World. Not to test it in space, even. It generates the shared reality mechanism. Without it, Worlders can’t share reality. Their entire society will fall apart. On ship—”

  “Slow down a minute, Ann. Just listen a minute. You found out that something on World generates some sort of mechanism that enables shared reality. You don’t know that something is the artifact.”

  “Come on, Lyle! What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know. But you don’t, either. You’re proceeding on assumptions, not facts.”

  “Marbet told me you’d discovered a prime setting already permanently activated! That’s a fact!”

  Kaufman had obviously told Marbet too damn much, without specifying that she keep the information from Ann. Which, since Ann was a member of the team, wouldn’t have occurred to Marbet. Anyway, Ann would only have learned the same thing from Dieter.

  Ann said, “You’re planning on experimenting with these people’s brains, Lyle. They evolved in this probability field. You don’t know what will happen to them physically if they lose the field permanently, or even for longer than the nine Worlders spent aboard ship. You’re experimenting with a whole planetful of people’s brains!”

  “I don’t have any choice.”

  “Of course you do! You have total discretion on this project!”

  “I have military objectives.”

  She stared at him. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you? Take the thing first into space, and then if it’s useful enough, out of the star system entirely?”

  “Yes. If I can.”

  She gazed at him a moment longer, then turned and walked away. Kaufman hadn’t thought her gentle face could look like that.

  He didn’t want to talk to Marbet, now inspecting the artifact up close with Rosalind. He said abruptly to a tech, “Sergeant, clear the field immediately of nonessential personnel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When the orbital sensors registered proper position, Capelo said, “Now!” The command was unnecessary; everything of course was preprogrammed. But Kaufman saw that Capelo couldn’t help himself.

  This time the displays registered all kinds of results. When Kaufman could sort out the technical discussion among the scientists, he said, “It’s the same effect that Syree Johnson got when she activated setting prime one on the bigger artifact, isn’t it? A spherical wave destabilizing everything above atomic number seventy-five, and obeying the inverse square law.”

  “That’s what it is,” Gruber said happily. “Two down, five to go!”

  Capelo had not gone into his black-hole thinking mode. Kaufman said to him, “You expected this for setting prime three.”

  “Not expected. But when we didn’t get this for setting two, I hoped we’d get it for three.”

  “So what is two?”

  The others, alerted by some shift in the experimental weather, stopped talking to listen.

  “I don’t know what two is,” Capelo said, with all his old irritability. “I just have a theory. I think it’s a shield. Against setting one, and maybe against other things, too.”

  “A shield!” Gruber said.

  Albemarle snapped, “With what evidence?”

  “Non
e, Hal. None whatsoever.”

  “Then pardon me for not being impressed. We activated setting prime two and nothing happened. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.”

  “You’ve never bought artwork, have you?”

  Albemarle looked peevishly puzzled, but Kaufman couldn’t help smiling. Original oil painting versus forged copies so good that the difference was undetectable. Until the right expert came along, anyway.

  Capelo explained the problem. “We need to fire a destabilizing beam from setting prime one, reflect it back to the artifact, and see if setting prime two is automatically activated. It would have to be automatic—there’s no use in having a defense that can’t intercept an unexpected attack at light speed. But there are two problems. First, the beam goes through everything, so what are we going to reflect it back off of? And since the beam fades out over such short range, how far away does the reflector have to be to still be outside the shield range?”

  “If there is a shield range,” Albemarle muttered.

  Rosalind said, “What are you implying about the dispersion relationship?”

  The three physicists fell into argument that Kaufman couldn’t follow. S-matrices, modes of resonance, J constant, infinite malleability. Finally he grasped that Capelo was arguing that the destabilizing beam manipulated probability by exchanging virtual particles with other Calabi-Yau dimensions in the spacetime curvature. Rosalind had an objection to this that Kaufman couldn’t follow, and Albemarle objected to it from, it seemed, instinctive opposition to Capelo.

  “All right,” Capelo finally said, “we’ll try it.”

  “Try what?” Kaufman said.

  Rosalind said in her clear, precise voice, “If setting prime two is a shield against the destabilizing beam, we would need to test it by firing a destabilizing beam at it. But we have no idea how to create such a thing, or even any idea of the principles behind it. But Tom thinks setting prime two might also be a more generalized shield, against a variety of weapons.”

  Kaufman got it. “You think that’s what the Fallers are using for their beam-disrupter shield. That they’ve cracked the same principle employed by the artifact. That they’re using it to deflect our proton beams.”

  “We can’t know that yet,” Albemarle said. “But Dr. Capelo here wants to test it anyway.”

  Kaufman stood very still. The principle behind the beam-disrupter shield. An artifact that duplicated the Faller shield. If he could bring that back to Mars … And then the thought, clear and hard, Ann just lost any chance at all of leaving the artifact on World.

  “Start with a simple laser gun,” Rosalind suggested. “You’ll want Carlington sensors,” and the three were off again, discussing ideas Kaufman could not follow. At least now Gruber, too, looked left out. The geologist’s knowledge of physics did not extend to whatever rarefied heights the others trod.

  An artifact that duplicated the Faller shield. Right in front of them, here, now.

  Rosalind and Capelo were giving orders to techs, who then started attaching sensors to the artifact, near the artifact, at various distances from the artifact. Kaufman’s comlink rang. It was DeVolites. “Major, are you authorizing the shuttle return to the Shepard?”

  Kaufman stopped himself from saying, what return? He waited.

  DeVolites finally said uneasily, “Ms. Grant has requested being taken back up. She said it was all right with you.”

  “Yes, it is,” Kaufman said, broke link, and pushed down his anger at Marbet. She took enormous liberties. A civilian project specialist did not give orders to a military shuttle pilot. He punched at his comlink to tell her so, but stopped himself before the link was completed.

  She would only say that of course Kaufman would have authorized her return on the shuttle. Her work was on board ship with the Faller. And she would be right.

  Kaufman canceled the comlink. He told himself that her work was too important to interrupt with procedural complaints. But he realized, with dismayed honesty, that he also didn’t want to tangle with Marbet just now. She was too disconcerting, reading his intentions from his voice or body language or minute facial movements or whatever the hell she read. He was too transparent to her. He didn’t like it.

  Even though, under other circumstances, he had welcomed it.

  * * *

  When everything was ready, a tech fired a laser handgun directly at the artifact from various distances. No one had expected this to affect the artifact, which had once survived a high-speed collision with the planet, and it didn’t. But it did affect the scientists.

  “Amazing,” Rosalind Singh said, and from her it was the most profound awe. “Nothing. No reflection, no scattering, no residual heat, no atmospheric resonance, nothing. The laser beam has just disappeared.”

  “Try it again, at a different angle,” Albemarle suggested. Once again, curiosity seemed to have overcome his dislike of Capelo. Albemarle was a scientist at his core.

  Capelo said nothing. To Kaufman, the physicist seemed different now. His biting sarcasm had all but disappeared, as if burned off in the furnace of scientific intensity. Kaufman saw that Capelo was thinking, and that this thinking was different not only in degree but in kind from what the rest of them did when thinking.

  For the rest of the day they hit the artifact with beams of electromagnetic energies in various wavelengths. None of them affected the artifact. All of them seemed to vanish with no trace whatsoever, except for macro-scale material missiles. Those simply ricocheted.

  Finally Capelo said, “I want a beam of proton particles. Bring the ship around.”

  “You’ll blow apart the mountain,” Kaufman said. “Proton beams are a major offensive weapon, Tom.”

  “I want it. We’ll dig the artifact out of the rabble afterward.”

  “No,” Kaufman said, for the first time, and prepared for Capelo’s explosion. It didn’t come.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Capelo muttered. “It wouldn’t work. I’m not thinking about this right. There’s something missing. Something I’m not seeing … but I need the proton beam. We’ll have to move the artifact out into space.”

  Everyone looked at Kaufman. It was almost dark; they had worked straight through the day without food, or thinking of food. The photosensors had activated the lights that turned the alien meadow into a human outpost, filled with human equipment. Only the smells were still alien. That, and the four small moons among the strange constellations in the sky. Kaufman thought, irrelevantly, of Hadjil Voratur, eating his evening meal amid his flowery gardens and his shared reality.

  “Lyle?” Rosalind said. “Tom wants to move the artifact off-planet in the morning.”

  “Yes,” Kaufman said, and opened the link to the Alan B. Shepard.

  * * *

  Sometime much later, when Kaufman had finally drifted toward sleep, his comlink rang. It was Marbet. As soon as he heard the tone in her voice, something in Kaufman’s chest kicked him awake.

  “Lyle. Come up right away. I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “I got the Faller to respond. Large scale. And what he’s telling me could change everything.”

  EIGHTEEN

  ABOARD THE ALAN B. SHEPARD

  It was ridiculously easy to steal a piece of a planet.

  Kaufman had studied Syree Johnson’s accounts of moving the first artifact from World to Space Tunnel #438. But that artifact had been in orbit, an artificial moon that the natives called Tas. It had been four kilometers in diameter and had massed nine hundred thousand tons. Colonel Johnson had moved it one point two billion kilometers, accelerating it most of the way by pushing it with the starship Zeus on full power. The effort had taken over five days, and by the end the Zeus was being fired on by a Faller warship, until both ships and the artifact were annihilated in the desperate effort of trying to force nine hundred thousand tons through a space tunnel that, Johnson had known, could handle no more than a hundred thousand tons.

  In contr
ast, Kaufman’s artifact was only twenty-five meters in diameter and massed less than a hundred tons. Kaufman merely had to lift it forty-eight thousand clicks to orbit. No one was shooting at them. The entire operation took one morning, with the artifact secured in its monofilament-cable net and carried up on the same trip that returned the scientists to the Alan B. Shepard.

  All except for Ann, who had refused to go.

  “I could order you aboard,” Kaufman said. They faced each other a little after dawn at base camp. Around them, crew loaded equipment and baggage onto the shuttle for the first trip up. People snapped into comlinks and shouted to each other. The foamcast huts, soon to be abandoned shells, shone with reflected light from the rising sun. Ann’s long, pale face looked gaunt.

  Ann said, “It won’t make any difference if you order me. I’m staying. I’m not military, remember.”

  “You’re still under my command.”

  “If you take that artifact off this planet, you’re not fit for command.”

  She couldn’t enrage him the way Marbet could. He said gently, “I understand your viewpoint, Ann. But I can’t share it, and I don’t think you can expect me to. All right, you can stay even after the last shuttle departs. But you realize that you don’t know how long you’ll be here. World isn’t going to be of interest to Mars anymore, and there may not be another expedition for years. Or ever.”

  “There’ll be another expedition. You think so narrowly, Lyle—as if military expeditions are the only possible kind. Anthropologists and biologists are intensely interested in Worlders. Maybe even more so after you wreck their society. And you will, you know.”

  Kaufman was silent.

  “Look at what happened when the nine Worlders went aboard ship. In only thirty-six hours away from the artifact and shared reality, all the accustomed restraints on rebellion and greed started to fray. What do you think will happen on World itself, with nothing in place to substitute for the traditional social restraints?”

  Kaufman said only, “Is Dieter staying, too?”

  “No,” she said, so bleakly that Kaufman saw that husband and wife had seriously disagreed. Gruber had sided with military necessity over anthropological compassion, and Ann could not forgive him. Or Kaufman, for causing the break.