Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  Enli listened to the formal words. The head pain started between her eyes—so many things she knew that he did not—but it felt distant, unimportant next to this gift from the First Flower. Perhaps she had become too accustomed to moving between realities that other people could not even see. If so, then that was her reality. She could do that, mate with Calin, and keep to herself the unshared realities the Terrans had forced her to see. To keep Calin, she could do that. She could do anything.

  “Yes,” Enli said, and placed his two hands on her stomach. “We will unfold in the mating ceremony before the First Flower, and plant our gardens together. Our children will dance on the village green, and our petals will intertwine in the land of our ancestors.”

  They moved into each other and held on, until practical Calin said, “Now go carry out Pek Voratur’s instructions.”

  She couldn’t resist one more bit of information. “The trade goods you saw are one-sixteenth mine. Eight of us, including me, were traders in the bargain that Pek Voratur planted with the Terrans. You are mating with a rich woman, and the first thing I will do is buy you a bicycle.”

  Calin’s skull ridges flattened in surprise, and then his whooping laugh followed her as she left the room.

  * * *

  There was a glass vat of gently bubbling goo, which Pek Voratur said was a potion to cure the scabbing disease. There was a powerful device for seeing things at a very great distance, a telescope. There were nine more comlinks, one for each of them. There was a method, shown in careful drawings, for making a stronger blend of metals than existed now. Pek Voratur said that drawing was the most valuable of the Terran trade goods, but it didn’t seem that way to the eight others who had ridden on the small metal flying boat up to the larger metal flying boat. To all but Voratur and Enli, the greater value lay in the flowers, amazing flowers with exotic petals and glorious colors, Terran “made” flowers that every great household and every village green on World would want to plant in their gardens.

  The nine voyagers sat in Pek Voratur’s personal room and listened to him explain how their shared trade goods would be marketed, how the profits would be calculated, what each of them could hope to receive and when. Looking around, Enli saw that few of them actually listened. The woman who was a trade agent for Voratur listened, certainly, and so did the woman who had shrieked on her pallet aboard the flying boat. But the head gardener was more interested in examining the Terran flower he had been given, roots and blossom. The stonemason played with her comlink. The apprentice weaver merely stared around him. And the girl, Essa Pek Criltifor, who had run and laughed and hidden with the Terran child Sudie, seemed more intent on the ugliness of the square-cornered Terran boxes than in the future riches that Pek Voratur described.

  And then Enli, who had not been listening because her thoughts brimmed with Calin, saw Ann Pek Sikorski standing in the open archway to the room.

  The Terran looked smaller, more tired, more the color of bleached road dust than usual. She stared at the Terran goods being passed around the room. No one noticed her except Enli, who slipped quietly out. A Terran bicycle lay on the ground; Pek Sikorski must have ridden it straight through the household gardens, a breach of manners Enli would never have expected from her. Enli led the Terran to a bench under the shade of a magnificent saj tree.

  “Pek Sikorski?” And then, when there was no answer, “Ann?”

  “They’ve gone, Enli. Or some of them have, including Pek Kaufman. The rest will go over the next few days. All of them.”

  “All the Terrans? Gone where?”

  “Back to the ship. And from there, back to Terra.”

  “Even Pek Gruber? Your mate?”

  “Even Pek Gruber,” Pek Sikorski said, and her voice throbbed with a sudden anger that Enli didn’t understand.

  She said, “They left you here? Alone? Why?”

  “I chose to stay here. Listen, Enli, I have something very important to tell you.”

  The scent of the saj blossoms, waxy pink and heavily fragrant, drifted to Enli on the warm air. She had the sudden thought that she would remember that scent the rest of her life as belonging to whatever Pek Sikorski was going to tell her now. The saj perfume, redolent and sweet, spoiled for her forever.

  Pek Sikorski said, “Do you remember when Terrans took Tas away from World? Of course you do. There were seven moons, and then there were six.”

  Enli gestured yes.

  “I told you then that Tas was not a real moon. It was a manufactured item, made long ago by people no one now remembers. Well, there was another such manufactured item buried in the Neury Mountains. Smaller than Tas—much, much smaller—but made of the same material, by the same long-ago people. And now Pek Kaufman and the others have dug up this buried object, and taken it away from World up to the flying boat. They will take it back to Terra.”

  “Why?” Enli asked. Clearly the Terrans should not take things away from World without planting a bargain for them. And nothing at all should be taken away from the Neury Mountains, home of the First Flower. But Enli didn’t see why these actions made Pek Sikorski look as she did, so … so defeated.

  “They’ll take it back to Terra because they think they have a use for it there. But there’s more. Enli, do you remember what happened when you and Pek Voratur went with me up to the flying boat? Do you?”

  She said slowly, “Shared reality went away. Many different realities, one for each person, came instead.” She didn’t like to think about that. One more thing Calin had not shared.

  “Yes. And that is going to happen again. Enli, the buried object causes shared reality. When the object goes off World in the small flying boat, shared reality will stop again, like it did aboard ship. Only this time it will stop forever.”

  Enli touched Pek Sikorski’s head, below the place where the strange headfur began. No, Pek Sikorski was not feverish, even though she looked sick. Nor was she unreal; Enli was too experienced now to believe that. And you could be sick without having a fever.

  “It’s true, Enli! And it will happen soon!”

  “You should lie down. Come with me to my personal room.” Too late, she remembered that Calin waited there.

  “I have to talk to Pek Voratur,” Pek Sikorski said wearily, “and he has to summon a sunflasher. People must be told what’s going to happen. There’s not much time left.”

  Enli said gently, “Pek Voratur will not share this reality.”

  “Yes, he will. Didn’t you see him aboard ship? Without shared reality, he was ready to cheat you all. He’ll understand.”

  “Cheat” was a Terran word. Enli didn’t know what it meant.

  Pek Sikorski’s comlink rang. She punched at it, and Pek Kaufman’s voice said, “Ann, I just wanted you to know. We’re lifting off now.”

  “Good-bye, Lyle,” Pek Sikorski said. “Don’t give us another thought.” She punched the comlink again and looked at Enli. Her long strange Terran face sagged.

  “Too late,” she said.

  * * *

  At first, it seemed Pek Sikorski must have been wrong. Nothing happened.

  Enli led her to the court she had occupied on her last visit, near the compound wall, with the cool flowerbeds of shade-loving ollinib in bloom beneath the window. Pek Sikorski protested that she couldn’t sleep, this was too important, it didn’t matter that she hadn’t rested in two days. Within three heartbeats she was asleep.

  Enli went back to her own room, and to Calin. He wasn’t there. She found him in a servants’ court, squatting on the ground with two men and a boy, playing dent. The smooth polished stones for the game had been fished out of the pool in the middle of the court. Bright flowers grew around the pool, and a cool breeze blew from it. Watching the laughing group, Enli felt her breath swell in her chest.

  Hers. He was hers.

  Oh, Tabor …

  But that thought she pushed away. Tabor was joyous among their ancestors, and he came to Enli not even in dreams. It was time for her, too,
to know joy.

  She whistled softly, the whistle from a child’s game back in Gofkit Shamloe, and Calin looked up. He smiled and beckoned her over. “Look, Enli—I am winning. Already I have won enough to buy us a good evening at a pel house.”

  One of the men, old Bafil Pek Honimor the jik herder, laughed. The other man, whom Enli didn’t know, bristled his neckfur. He took the three dark stones and cast them among the light ones.

  “Lil!” the boy called; evidently they were playing the “moons” variation of the game. Despite herself, Enli thought briefly of Tas, the moon that was no more. Did that affect the game?

  The surly man cast again. “Obri!” the boy called. “You lose to Calin again, Justafar!”

  Justafar’s skull ridges creased sharply. He reached for the pile of coins to one side of the stones. The old man laughed; Justafar must be well-known as a poor loser. Good-naturedly Calin put his own big hand over the coins, still smiling. Justafar swung his fist and hit Calin in the neck.

  Then the shocking thing happened. Nothing.

  Justafar’s blow should have set up such crippling head pain in himself that he would drop to the ground without hitting out again. Shared reality meant that you could not strike another without such a consequence: a blow broke the sharing. One person wanted to strike, but the other not to be struck. The three men, the boy, and Enli should all have been clutching their heads, the fight over, until reality was once more shared among them.

  Instead, they stared at each other, dazed by not feeling any head pain. The boy cried out in anguish, “I’m not real!” Calin turned to look in bewilderment at Enli. And Justafar struck him again.

  The two men fought clumsily; neither had ever done such a thing before. Justafar hit out over and over again because he was enraged, because he was frightened, because the world should not work this way. At first Calin mostly defended himself, but when it was obvious that Justafar was trying to do genuine damage, Calin too fought in earnest. He was bigger and younger. Eventually his fist connected with Justafar’s temple, and the other man dropped to the ground and lay still. And Enli saw that no one, not she nor Calin nor old Pek Honimor nor the boy nor the people who had come running from the buildings around the courtyard, felt any head pain.

  “Shared reality will stop again, like it did aboard ship, only this time it will stop forever.”

  “Aiiieeeeee!” a man cried. All her life Enli had heard people make that sound, when the jik stopped giving milk or a child fell ill or a bush failed to flower. But not like this. It seemed to her suddenly that the man’s cry sounded strangely Terran, alone and uncertain and desperate. And that the cry would go on forever.

  TWENTY

  ABOARD THE ALAN B. SHEPARD

  Tom Capelo had agreed with that ceaseless inquisitor, Lyle Kaufman, that thinking about physics was like thinking about chess: non-verbal, patterned, branching. It wasn’t true. Kaufman’s statement described a physical world, and a way of thinking about it, that was neat and well organized and repeatable. Perhaps some physicists thought that way. If so, Capelo didn’t see how they could be any good.

  The physical world wasn’t neat, wasn’t well organized, wasn’t always repeatable. It hadn’t been for roughly two hundred fifty years, not since a wave became a particle and a particle became unmeasurable in all its particulars at once. And in the last century the physical world had only gotten more complex: more thread vibrations like the graviton, more dimensions in the Calabi-Yau spaces, more tiny but long-range force fields to further complicate the roiling quantum frenzy. Every time physicists got together and agreed that some phenomenon was impossible, some maverick did an experiment or came up with an equation that proved it was not. “We shall never understand anything until we have found some contradictions,” said the legendary Bohr. Contradictions were the lifeblood of discoveries: experiments that contradicted theory, math that contradicted theory, theory that contradicted theory. Contradictions and intuitions.

  Capelo’s colleagues complained that he couldn’t explain how he got his results, and that he insisted on the truth of his results before he had the equations to go with them. Fools, most of them. The point was not to create tidy strings of reasoning—engineers could do that—but to glimpse nature whole for one glorious moment. To catch a fleeting sight beyond the prison of conventional thought, a glimpse out of a briefly illuminated window. And then work like hell to follow that glimpse wherever it led. It wasn’t like chess; it was like falling in love. And like love, physics involved obsession, sacrifice, blind spots, enormous anguish. Gazing in delight at some aspects of the beloved and averting your eyes from others, knowing they could not stay averted forever.

  That was how he worked, but how could you explain that to a bureaucrat like Kaufman? You couldn’t. And Kaufman couldn’t understand, although he tried. He was, despite the uniform and authority, a science groupie, and Capelo thought there was nothing more pathetic. Always on the outside, longing to be inside, incapable of doing what he so admired. There were times it was painful for Capelo to be around Kaufman.

  But he’d give Kaufman one thing: He didn’t try to dictate to Capelo what had to be done. When Capelo said, “We’re going to have to put the artifact back,” Kaufman had arranged to do it.

  Of course, that was only the smallest piece of it. The biggest piece was that glimpse of the whole, that one insight that justified pursuing a line of thought. So far, Capelo hadn’t had it. The window was closed as tightly as ever.

  “All right,” Kaufman said to the assemblage on the observation deck, “Grafton has agreed. We’re putting the artifact back on the ring in the meadow.”

  “I’d love to have heard that conversation,” Albemarle said.

  Kaufman ignored him. “The techs will retrieve and redirect the artifact. Anyone going planetside should report to shuttle bay in three hours. Tom?”

  “Staying here for the test,” he said curtly.

  “Hal?”

  Albemarle hesitated. “Staying here.”

  Gruber said eagerly, “Then I’ll go down.” He began to ask technical questions. Capelo didn’t listen.

  The problem with quantum phenomena was—had always been—that a system goes along one way, particle and wave, for a while. Then it goes along another way, one or the other, after being observed. Why should that be? Why did an observer make so much difference—and why did it have to be an observer who was either sentient or created by sentience? Why should the whole system require an observer, an outside component, at all?

  There was another way to think about it, of course. The wave collapses not because of any observer, but because the means of measurement, whatever it is, has somehow forced the curvature of spacetime to exceed some critical, very small value. But what value? Why? How?

  The space tunnels transported huge masses—but not more huge than one hundred thousand tons—across great distances, instantaneously. The accepted buzzword for that was “macro-level entanglement,” a term which meant exactly nothing. How did anything larger than an electron move from classic laws of motion into the quantum world of entanglement? If the artifact was entangled with something, what was it? Where was it? How did the entanglement work?

  A third window to try to catch a glimpse through: probability. Physics itself was probable; it had been clear since the twentieth century that all models of the universe were provisional, and most were partial. Anything that explained anything never explained everything.

  On a smaller and more specific level, it was easily seen that certain events were probabilistic: They may or may not occur. In many cases the probability was documentable: We know there is a 17 percent chance that event x will occur under these specified conditions. There is a 53 percent chance that event y will occur under different conditions. Or whatever. What nobody could say yet was why event x occurs 17 percent of the time. There were no identified causals for varying probability levels, even when the levels themselves were known. There were no equations.

  Yet
what the artifact represented was manipulatable probability fields. Had to be. The directed-beam destabilizer: It manipulated the strong force, so that all atoms above atomic number seventy-five emitted alpha particles. Or did it manipulate not the strong force directly, but the probability that a nucleus would emit a more-than-probable number of alpha particles?

  How the hell did you manipulate probability? No one could even explain probability, let alone direct it. That contradicted every known theory. In fact, Capelo now had reams of experimental data, his own and Syree Johnson’s, that clearly contradicted theory. So for, that hadn’t led to any progress in his understanding. No glimpses through the window.

  “Tom?” Kaufman said, evidently for more than the first time. “Did you hear me?”

  “No.”

  “I said, do you want anything to eat?”

  “No.” He left the observation deck to find Amanda and Sudie.

  They were in their quarters with Jane Shaw. To Capelo’s surprise, Jane looked upset. This was serious. Jane never looked upset; she was the bedrock all of them rested on.

  “Daddy!” Sudie cried, hurtled herself at him, and burst into tears.

  Capelo picked her up and cuddled her. Over Sudie’s shoulder he looked inquiringly at Jane. She said, “She’s been having nightmares. For a few days now. She’s hardly had two hours’ unbroken sleep.”

  “What kind of nightmares?”

  “She won’t say,” Jane said. Sudie’s howling rose demonically, making further conversation impossible. Capelo sat in a deep chair and rocked her, crooning wordlessly, patting her back and her springy dark curls. Amanda came to stand beside the chair, and Capelo patted her, too. So grave, so quiet, her pale face way too sad for a ten-year-old.