Probability Sun (17 page)

It was? That was not according to plan. But Capelo was too tired for questions. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in days. Well, the plan was to get one tonight and then hoist the artifact out of its hole tomorrow morning. And he’d certainly sleep better if he didn’t have to worry about the girls. Still, it wasn’t like Kaufman, that supreme diplomat, to simply agree to requests without negotiating something in return.

“Thanks, Lyle. We’ll be there.”

Now all he had to do was stay awake long enough to walk the girls through the tunnel system to the shuttle. He shambled to the shallow cave which camping out had made their temporary home. Amanda sat at the cave mouth working on her schoolscreen, her shadow long from the lowering sun. Sudie, farther back with Jane Shaw, was playing some kind of game with glittery rocks. Capelo knew what those were. The girls’ possessions lay scattered all over the ground.

“C’mon, Mandy, we’re moving house. Pack up your old kit bag.”

Amanda looked up. “Moving? Where, Daddy?”

“Back to base camp.”

“Why?” Amanda said. Always the logical child. Capelo looked with exhausted love at her smooth fair braids. The older she grew, the more she looked like Karen.

“Back to base camp. And then on the shuttle up to the ship.”

Jane Shaw had heard. She looked inquiringly at Tom. “For safety?”

“Yes.”

Jane—what would he do without Jane?—immediately began gathering up clothing and toys. But Amanda said, “I don’t want to go up, Daddy. I want to see the artifact lifted out of the hole.”

“It’s too dangerous, honey. You’ll be safer aboard ship.”

“Safety is not the primary fact of a scientific life.”

It was something he had said to her. Pride fought with irritation. “You’re not a scientist.”

“I want to be one someday!”

“Well, you’re not one now. Pack up.”

Sudie started to cry. “I want to stay with Daddy!”

“Sudie … not now, for the love of God!”

“You don’t believe in God,” Amanda said primly.

“I want to stay with Daddy!” Sudie rushed forward and threw her arms around his knees, almost knocking him over.

Capelo glared down at the top of her head, which was dirty. Sudie had taken to camping out like the small savage she was. She’d exuded hectic, extravagant squalor. In the last light of the sun, her springy filthy hair stood out from her head, glinting like iron filings.

Amanda said, “I know! We could stay in the vug!”

“The vug! The vug!” Sudie cried. “I want to stay in the vug!”

“You can’t stay in the vug,” Capelo said firmly. The vug had already caused enough problems.

Gruber had discovered the vug on his first expedition. He offered to lead them to it, promising a fairly easy trip through ample tunnels and a spectacular surprise at the end. Capelo had agreed only because Amanda and Sudie had been so bored, confined to their camping cave in the upland valley. He hadn’t expected much.

Gruber had kept his powertorch trained unusually low until they were traversing a medium-sized cave. Then he abruptly stopped, turned the torch to maximum light, and swung it toward the ceiling. “Look!”

Capelo gasped. The children screamed with delight. Jewels sparkled on the cave ceiling, on the walls, in heaps on the floor. As his dazzled eyes adjusted to the bright light, he saw that the jewels were millions of gold crystals. Spattered among them were glowing flakes of pure gold as big as thumbnails. Gold nuggets glittered on the floor. Piles of white quartz sand glowed like spun glass.

“This is the vug,” Dieter said happily. “The biggest one I have ever heard of!”

“What … how…” Capelo sputtered.

“It is the inside of a geode. There must have been the caldera of a volcano right here, once. The gold precipitates out from circulating water heated by magma.”

Capelo touched a wall. Gold flaked over his fingers like shining rain.

“It’s incredible.”

“Is it not?” Gruber said, swinging his torch proprietarily around the walls.

Amanda and Sudie raced to the walls. Gruber was so pleased with the effect of his surprise that he let the girls stuff the pockets of their miniature s-suits with gold and jewels.

Capelo said, “How long has this been here? When did it form?”

“Hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

“And the natives haven’t ever found it and mined?”

“It is forbidden for them to enter the sacred mountains. Also, they would have learned centuries ago that the mountains gave them radiation sickness. A good example of religious taboo guarding health!” Gruber laughed.

“That’s enough, girls,” Capelo said. “Don’t be greedy.” But he had taken a sparkling diamond for himself. It would be valuable on Mars, but not as valuable as the glittery gems were right here on World. They kept Amanda and Sudie absorbed, inventing endless games that occupied them and saved Jane Shaw’s sanity.

The problem was that ever since that trip, the girls had begged constantly to return to the vug. Kaufman, mildly tight-lipped, had vetoed this. “Tom, Dieter never should have taken you three there in the first place. We’re trying to physically disturb World as little as possible. Certainly not to thieve from it.”

“We’ve strip-mined their so-called sacred mountains!”

“I know,” Kaufman said wearily. “Unavoidable necessity. Carrying off native wealth is not. Your daughters can keep their gems, but no more trips to the vug. I’ve told Dieter so.”

Sanctimonious hypocrite. Capelo had been half tempted to take Amanda and Sudie back anyway, by himself. But he’d been too busy, and he wasn’t sure of the tunnels, and the faithful Jane had been the one to take the brunt of Sudie’s wheedling and begging.

Now Jane said briskly, “We’re going on the shuttle, girls, just as your father said. Sudie, are you forgetting that Marbet’s aboard the ship? She’s been there all this time. I wonder what she’s been doing?”

Sudie instantly unclasped Capelo’s knees. “Marbet?”

“Do you think she’s programmed that halo lion she promised you?”

“I want to see,” Sudie said, and began picking up her things and stuffing them in her bag, a model of obedience.

“I’ll go,” Amanda said, “but I don’t like it.”

“Understood,” Capelo said, somewhere between gratitude and exasperation.

The trip through the mountain tunnels was uneventful. By now the route between valley and base camp had been used so much that it had developed litter and graffiti, both against orders. Capelo passed a scrawl that said
PHYSICS AIN’T PHYSICAL ENOUGH FOR ME
. He grinned; no wonder he liked crew better than officers. The crudely scratched grumble cheered him up.

The cheer faded when they emerged from the last tunnel, walked to the shuttle area, and found Ann Sikorski and Lyle Kaufman inexplicably standing beside the shuttle with nine aliens.

With nine aliens.

“Wait here,” he snapped at Jane. “Kaufman! Wait!”

The colonel turned, spotted Capelo, and hastily walked toward him and away from the aliens.

“What the hell’s going on here!”

Kaufman said, “These natives are going up to the
Shepard
as part of Dr. Sikorski’s research.”

“Boarding a Navy ship? What kind of research is that?”

“Dr. Sikorski’s. Tom, stop shouting.”

“My kids are going on that ship!”

“And so are the aliens, and Ann, and me, and a security team, and you, if you want to. The shuttle will return in plenty of time for tomorrow’s hoist.”

“I don’t want my daughters traveling with a bunch of aliens nobody knows anything about.”

“Then leave your daughters here,” Kaufman said. “And as it happens, we know a great deal about Worlders, including the fact that they’re peaceful. Aboard the shuttle they will be strapped in. On ship they will be segregated from everyone but Ann and her security team. And if you don’t like it, Tom, either stay here or stay quiet. I have enough to contend with without flack from you. And the natives are nervous enough already.”

Rage filled Capelo. He struggled to hold it in check, to speak calmly. “But why are they going up?”

“To see how they behave away from the buried artifact. Out of its field.”

“Oh, God, not this again. Not the undetectable-field-affects-all-Worlders’-brains theory again.”

Kaufman said nothing. Capelo said, “Then how do you know the absence of this hypothetical field won’t drive them all berserk? God, I can’t believe I’m even discussing this lunacy.”

“Then don’t discuss it. I didn’t come several hundred light years to argue with you.”

“I did. Arguing was my sole purpose in coming to this rat’s ass end of the galaxy. Okay, Kaufman, you win. But let me know that the aliens are all strapped in before I bring Amanda and Sudie aboard.” These same aliens had once slit the throats of two human kids.

“Of course,” Kaufman said. A gracious winner. Damn him.

Capelo walked back to the girls. “There are going to be aliens—natives—going up to the ship with you.”

“Really?” Amanda said. “Great! Can I talk to them?”

“They don’t speak English.” Was that true? Of all of them?

“Come on, Daddy, let’s hurry up!”

He held them back, with Jane’s help, until Kaufman signaled from the shuttle ramp. The aliens filled the passenger chairs, grimacing horribly, wrinkling their bald skulls, and
singing.
No, chanting. Capelo kept a firm grip on Sudie, who wanted to rush over and make friends. Amanda studied the aliens carefully. Capelo let Jane do all the work of strapping the kids in. He was so tired.

“They’re chanting a ritual song requesting strength in undertaking some dangerous task,” Ann Sikorski explained.

“I thought there was no danger among the ever-peaceful Worlders,” Capelo retorted.

“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

T
hey 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.”