Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  This was different from attacking Kaufman and Grafton. You didn’t have to be trained to hit a man from behind with a blunt instrument. For a nanosecond shame flooded Capelo—if Amanda saw this!—before he shoved it away. He wasn’t going to kill the kid. Karen had suffered worse.

  The soldier staggered, tried to recover. By that time Capelo had the taser out of the MP’s belt. He pressed it. Nothing happened.

  “Shit!” Capelo yelled, and hit him again with the data cube. God, he didn’t want to kill this guy! The soldier still moved on the floor.

  “Use the tanglefoam. It’s not keyed to individual thumbprints,” a voice said behind him. Capelo whirled. Marbet Grant stood in the doorway. When Capelo hesitated, unsure if her presence would trip an alarm, she pushed past him, unbuckled something from the MP’s belt, and sprayed him as he lay on the floor.

  Pink goo formed itself into tight shoulder-to-knees bonds, the same sort of tanglefoam that had bound Capelo for eight hours. Unthinking, he said, “What’s the chemistry of it?” and immediately felt like a fool.

  Marbet glanced at him, amused. The MP began to sputter. Capelo thought, Thank God he’s not dead.

  “We’ll have to gag him,” Marbet said. She looked around the anteroom, didn’t see anything usable, and took off her socks. She wasn’t wearing shoes. To Capelo she explained, “The bedsheets aren’t tearable. So that prisoners can’t strangle themselves.”

  She stuffed her socks into the MP’s mouth. He glared at her with hatred.

  “I’m sorry, Gary,” she said softly. “It’s only for a little while. And it’s not your fault.”

  Capelo had somehow lost control of the situation. He grabbed her arm. “You’re coming with me.”

  “I know, Tom,” she said. “I’m going to show you the way to see the Faller. There’s no other reason in the universe you’d be doing what you’re doing now. I’m willing.”

  He took the tanglefoam cylinder from her. She didn’t resist. He grasped her firmly by the hand and opened the door to the corridor.

  * * *

  This time, escape was harder. Marbet Grant wore the green coveralls of a prisoner, and there was no other clothing for her in the brig. Her quarters were at the opposite end of the ship. But the Faller’s prison, it turned out, was on the same level as the brig, and not far away. Which made sense, once Capelo thought about it.

  She led him silently along, stopping at the end of a T-junction to whisper, “It’s just around the corridor. But there will be two MPs outside the outer door, and it’s possible there could be observers inside. The xenobiologist, the doctor, the intelligence people, even Lyle. I don’t know.”

  Capelo weighed the cost of waiting to see who went out or in, versus the cost of someone’s discovering that Capelo was missing, Marbet was missing, or an MP was immobilized in tanglefoam with two nasty lumps on his skull. Waiting lost. “Come on.”

  “Wait. Let me have the tanglefoam.”

  Capelo looked at her.

  “Tom, I want the same thing you do—to get more information out of the Faller. But I’m more experienced at tanglefoam. You’ve never used it, have you?”

  “No.” She didn’t know he was going to kill the son-of-a-bitch. Or did she, and was this a ploy? “I’ll keep the foam. I saw you use it, and it’s not exactly a particle accelerator.”

  She shrugged. “Just make the first sweep over both of them at once, at weapon-belt level, and fast. Then do each more carefully. You don’t have to avoid the face; the nanos won’t go there.”

  Why? He wondered, but there was no time for science now. He dashed around the corner, already spraying.

  It seemed to work. Both MPs went down. Capelo sprayed with a manic glee that should have scared him. What did scare him was his realization that only one MP stayed down. The other was instantly on his feet and charging.

  “Antidote-coated!” he heard Marbet cry, and then the soldier hit him full in the stomach. It was the same as before his arrest: astonishing pain and the deep biological panic that he couldn’t breathe, wouldn’t ever be able to breathe, he was suffocating to death …

  When enough breath had returned for him to see, it was just in time to glimpse the second MP toppling forward, his face frozen in surprise. Taser, Capelo knew. How …

  One MP’s body slipped away from Capelo’s blurred vision. Someone was dragging it through the door … Marbet? He couldn’t see her. He struggled to sit.

  “Verify identity with retinal scan,” the door said. And a moment later, “Marbet Caroline Grant, Special Project civilian personnel. Identity verified.” Apparently no one had taken her off the access list. Well, thought Capelo through his blurred pain, that made sense. She was incarcerated and no threat. Although—

  But by the time he had this second thought, he was sitting up. Nobody was left in the corridor, although he could hear voices beyond the door, now partially ajar. He staggered to his feet and through the door … and for the second time in nine hours tanglefoam hit him. He crashed back to the floor, rolled over, and saw Lyle Kaufman holding a tanglefoam canister.

  “I knew you’d bring her here, Tom,” Kaufman said. “Thank you.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  ABOARD THE ALAN B. SHEPARD

  One of those annoying aphorisms that the Academy fed its cadets surfaced in Kaufman’s mind: There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. For the first time in his adult life, he was doing none of them. He was doing this his way. His stomach twisted.

  He grabbed Capelo by his armpits, dragged him through the door, and closed it. Three bodies lay in front of him on the deck. One tasered, one gasping in tanglefoam, one tasered and in tanglefoam. The tanglefoam was what had let Kaufman drag Capelo, unverified by retina scan, through the door: the door “read” tanglefoam as no threat. The MPs, of course, carried automatic pass-throughs for any door aboard ship. Kaufman turned to face Marbet.

  “Do I have to restrain you, too?”

  “You know you don’t. You know you can’t.”

  She was right, of course; he needed her free to work. She added, “Let Tom go, Lyle.”

  “I can’t. He’s not cleared to be in here. The room would send code one alarms.”

  She studied him. “You wouldn’t free him anyway.”

  “No. He’s here to kill the Faller, if he possibly can.”

  He watched her green eyes widen, her body swing to face Capelo. So she had believed that Capelo wanted the physics from the Faller. Even Sensitives could make mistakes about people. The knowledge, obscurely, cheered Kaufman.

  Marbet said, “Is that true, Tom? Were you going to try to kill the Faller?”

  Capelo tried to speak, failed, tried again. It came out as a wheezing whine: “Yeeeesssss!” The MP must have hit him pretty hard.

  Marbet closed her eyes. Visualizing what might have happened, Kaufman guessed. When she opened her eyes again, she said simply to Kaufman, “I’m sorry.” Capelo she ignored.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” Kaufman said. “We don’t have much time, Marbet. You need to get to work.”

  “Yes. What do you want to know?”

  “Anything he can tell us about settings prime seven, prime eleven, prime thirteen. Or about whatever you think he wasn’t saying before: Most of all, try to pick up the location of the artifact the Fallers possess. Is it back in their home system as protection, or on its way to destroy the solar system?”

  “Why should he tell us anything?” She was slipping unselfconsciously out of her coveralls, out of her underwear. Kaufman looked away.

  “Probably he won’t. But anything you can deduce from his behavior … can you guess how much he actually knows, Marbet? Is he the equivalent of a front-line grunt who doesn’t know anything about weapons or battle plans, or is he their equivalent of a staff specialist, or what?”

  “I don’t know. Probably something in between. Maybe not. Their military structure is completely opaque to me.” She was nude now. Swiftly she moved to a side door, letting it
verify her retina print and keying the nonvocal code. The door swung open. “Stay here, Lyle.”

  “Leave the door open. In case.” In case she freed the Faller’s hand again and the Faller did his best to kill her. In case Kaufman had to rush through the door with tanglefoam and every second counted. In case.

  “All right. But stay out of his line of sight. Watch on the viewscreen.”

  She hadn’t needed to tell Kaufman that. He watched her put on a helmet with air supply, disappear through the side door, and emerge moments later from the tech airlock behind the invisible barrier that separated human and Faller atmospheres. She carried a flat package.

  The Faller didn’t seem to change expression, but Kaufman knew he wouldn’t be able to tell if the enemy had. His flat eyes fixed on Marbet. She released the soft manacle on his far right limb. Then she did something Kaufman hadn’t expected. Swiftly she unfolded the package, which became a flat marker board on a thin-legged easel. She pushed this close to the Faller, angled to be visible both to him and the viewscreen. Into the Faller’s hand she put a frictionless marker before vanishing again through the tech door.

  Back in the anteroom, she didn’t even glance at Kaufman. She threw off her helmet and assumed the weird posture she used with the prisoner: half crouching, limbs held at unnatural angles, gait strange, face distorted. Kaufman watched her become alien, neither human nor Faller, and pushed down his distaste.

  Waddling/crouching, she moved toward the expressionless alien. When she reached the barrier, she went through a series of grotesque motions and grimaces that Kaufman didn’t understand.

  No response.

  Marbet picked up her marker board. The holodeck had been removed, undoubtedly to deprogram it. But blank marker boards offended no one.

  Kaufman heard a dragging sound behind him. Without taking his eyes off Marbet, he said to Capelo, “Stop there. If you go into that room, or if you say anything at all, I’ll taser you until next week.” The dragging noise stopped.

  With her marker Marbet sketched swiftly on the board. Kaufman couldn’t see her sketch until she turned it toward the Faller and the viewscreen. He changed his corneas to zoom.

  Marbet had drawn the artifact: a circle crudely shaded to suggest a sphere, with seven equidistant protuberances around its perimeter.

  The Faller began to draw on his board. He copied her sketch exactly, except that beside one of the protuberances he drew a small glyph. Marbet moved her hands, and the Faller moved his one free hand in response. Two strings to her bow: the drawings and the hand signals she had taught him.

  A disengaged, analytic part of Kaufman’s mind saw the irony of thinking of it like that: two strings to her bow. Medieval metaphors in alien weapon scenarios.

  What was the flurry of hand signals now? And why was the Faller “talking” to her at all?

  That one was easy. He wanted to know how much humans knew. It was possible that the intelligence she might or might not be obtaining consisted of disinformation, lies designed to mislead. With a human subject, a Sensitive could easily discern that. But with a Faller?

  Marbet was drawing again. On his side of the barrier, the Faller drew in response; more hand signals. None of it meant anything to Kaufman. Marbet’s reflection in the mirrors on the cell wall told him nothing, either. She was too distorted, too alien herself.

  Yet more drawings, more hand talk. How much time before someone sounded the alarm? Work fast, Marbet, he willed, and his disengaged and ironic mind jeered.

  Something happened.

  Kaufman could see it immediately. The Faller’s whole body jerked. His mouth opened and let out the first sound anyone had ever heard a Faller make: a deep-noted rising roar, not loud but expressive … of what? Whatever emotion it was, the Faller felt it deeply. For the first time, his face bore something Kaufman would have called an expression, although he didn’t know what expression. It lasted only a moment. The Faller sketched rapidly.

  Marbet’s expression changed: suddenly she was again human. Her wide mouth opened in a wider, red-tongued O. Her brows rose and her eyes grew enormous. Kaufman didn’t have to be a Sensitive to read her surprise.

  The Faller ignored Marbet’s transformation back to human. His whole strange body seemed agitated, although without obvious fidgeting. He drew more lines, more hand signals, and Marbet sat stunned.

  Kaufman could stand it no longer. He stayed out of sight but called out into the room, “What is it? What does he say?”

  Marbet half-turned, recollected herself, and turned back to the Faller, but without resuming her Faller body. “He says the entire galaxy will be destroyed. Slowly.” She pointed to the alien’s last sketch. Kaufman recognized the familiar spiral-armed disk, and over it a huge glyph he did not recognize. Above it were two of Marbet’s circle-with-protuberances artifact sketches.

  “Does he say why it would be destroyed? How?”

  “No. We don’t have the communication for that. In fact, I can’t be sure whether he’s saying it will be destroyed or is being destroyed now. I don’t even know how they express temporalities, if they do.”

  “But you’re sure about the galactic destruction.”

  “Yes.”

  “It could be a trick,” he said to Marbet.

  “No. He wasn’t surprised—shocked—that we knew setting prime thirteen might destroy a star system. But he was profoundly shocked that we might bring the two artifacts together. I think that’s what the drawing means—both artifacts activated at the highest settings in the same star system. This is real, Lyle, he’s not faking. I know it!”

  She didn’t know it that positively, he thought. She couldn’t. And even if she were right, military intelligence would not see it that way. They would consider that it might be a trick, and then decide it was.

  The Faller fumbled at his crowded marker board. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he turned it over to its blank side. He started drawing again, more carefully than before, although his face had returned to impassivity. This sketch filled the entire board. It looked urgent even to Kaufman, although he had no idea what it was supposed to be:

  Marbet made a hand sign. The Faller pushed the incomprehensible picture toward her. It shuddered on its easel, fell off, and hit the invisible barrier, ending face-up on the floor.

  Kaufman said from the anteroom, “The bottom part is the Solar System.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are those flowers in that circle?”

  “I don’t know,” Marbet said helplessly.

  “Could he mean flowers because flowers are so important on World, where we took the artifact from?”

  “How does he even know we’re orbiting World?” Marbet asked, and Kaufman felt stupid. She was right, of course. He wasn’t thinking clearly. Although the Fallers in the aggregate did know that humans had taken the first artifact, Syree Johnson’s artifact, from World.

  Kaufman looked again at the drawing. It meant nothing to him, except for the Solar System covered by the thick jagged line.

  “Signal to him—can you do this?—that we need more information.” If the Faller would give it.

  Before Marbet could respond, the alien raised his face to the ceiling and gave the same sound as before, the deep-noted rising roar. Abruptly, he snapped his head downward to stare at the drawing on the floor.

  Behind Kaufman a voice said, “Oh my God.”

  Kaufman whirled. Capelo had dragged himself into the doorway, either moving noiselessly or else making noise that Kaufman, in his intense focus on Marbet and the Faller, hadn’t even heard. Capelo had somehow inched himself up against the doorjamb so that he rested half-upright, a wrapped pink caterpillar helpless as a baby, grotesque as the Faller itself. From that angle, he could see the Faller’s drawing lying face-up across the cell.

  Kaufman whirled to grab Capelo. The fuck-up, the fool, if his interruption broke off the dialogue between Marbet and the Faller, Kaufman would kill Capelo himself—

  “No!” Marbet cried. “Lyle, sto
p! Free him from the tanglefoam!”

  Free him? Kaufman hesitated. Even if she was right, tanglefoam antidote was nano-based; once you sprayed it on, it dissolved all the tanglefoam. You couldn’t free just arms and leave legs tied, and there was no time for Kaufman to fetch something that would do that, or even to secure Capelo with manacles. Which Kaufman didn’t have; he wasn’t an MP. More importantly, Capelo wasn’t cleared for the secure area.

  “Do it!” Marbet said.

  “I can’t. It’ll set off the alarm.”

  “Do it anyway!” she cried, and Kaufman took the canister from his belt and sprayed Capelo with the dissolvant.

  Once free, Capelo raced across the cell and drew something on Marbet’s board. He turned it toward the Faller, who did nothing. Meaningless to the alien, Kaufman guessed; the symbols were too different.

  “Marbet, give him his fucking board back!” Capelo barked.

  She darted into the anteroom and through the tech door, not even stopping to don a helmet. Kaufman saw her holding her breath as she erupted through the airlock. She grabbed the Faller’s board, erased both sides, set it back on its easel, and hurried out.

  No MPs yet.

  The Faller scribbled something, a single glyph.

  “That’s useless, I don’t know what that is,” Capelo spat.

  The Faller resumed drawing. This time he drew, more carefully, the same drawing that had set Capelo off before. Capelo stared at it, and Kaufman saw his face change, acquire the look of deep thought. Kaufman held his breath.

  A long time seemed to pass, although it was probably no longer than thirty seconds. Still no MPs … what was Grafton up to? Marbet cried, “Tom…” and Kaufman quickly shushed her. Capelo stared again at the drawing. More time. Too long, too long … hurry it up, soldier, move it, move it …

  Basic training had been a long time ago, and yesterday.

  Finally Capelo’s face changed again. Kaufman watched it, and knew what he was looking at. He had never expected to see it for himself, not in this lifetime, not at this height.