Probability Sun (31 page)

Everything had changed.

*   *   *

Enli watched Pek Sikorski and Pek Gruber walk into the darkness of the zeli field, led by Pek Gruber’s powertorch. She knew what they were doing, since they did the same thing every night. Pek Sikorski spoke for a long time into her comlink, describing everything she saw happening on World. Her words, she’d told Enli, went to the large metal flying boat far away in the sky. It took the words longer each night to fly there because they had to catch up with the flying boat, which was speeding away as fast as it could. Sending these words chasing after the flying boat seemed very important to Pek Sikorski, although Enli could not see why.

“Does Pek Kaufman answer you?” she had asked.

“Yes,” Pek Sikorski said bitterly, “but not with anything I want to hear.”

Enli had asked no more questions. The reality of the Terrans was even stranger than the one that had come to World. Pek Sikorski had agreed to share the true reality in the sunflasher messages, but Enli knew it was not the whole true reality. Pek Sikorski had not spoken a piece of reality: that when the manufactured object rose into the sky, it had been because the Terrans had taken it. And Enli had not said that piece of reality to the old woman, either. Was it a
lie
if what you said was shared reality, but not all of shared reality?

She sat thinking about this, slumped on the rough wooden bench outside the farm shed. Within, the grandmother’s mother, Ivi Pek Harrilin, and the baby all slept. Essa and Serlit talked softly; Enli could hear their murmurs through the shed wall. Probably they were holding hands.

Calin …

She sat sorrowing over Calin, over unshared reality, over what might have happened to Ano and the children, and so didn’t hear the people approach until they were upon her.

“Hit her out!” the woman cried, drunk with pel. Enli could smell it on the man just before he swung his thick stick. She had started to stand and the blow caught her on the chest instead of the head. The pain was astonishing. Enli fell, unable to breathe, against the wooden bench. It scraped along her upper arm but she scarcely felt that pain through the burning agony of her chest.

Essa. Serlit. Ivi and the baby.

“Go in!” the same female voice shrieked. Two large bodies stepped over Enli, kicking in the shed door. Someone screamed. Something fell heavily against the wall beside Enli’s head. Still she couldn’t breathe. She heard herself make noise trying:
eueueueu.
The baby began to wail.

“Nothing here but another bicycle,” a man’s voice snarled out the open door. “Another good one.”

“Then take that!” the drunken woman called and laughed, a high horrible sound.

“You, you would try, you’re nothing but a
boy—
” Another sickening thud against the inside wall.

Air was returning to Enli’s chest. She tried to raise herself on her arms. Essa, she must help Essa, Serlit, and the baby … She was a hand’s span up from the ground. Someone wheeled a bicycle over her body.

“
Lieber Gott
!”

The bicycle crashed on top of Enli, followed by three more crashes. The drunken woman began to shout incoherently. Enli felt Pek Gruber’s massive arms pull her upright.

“Enli! Are you all right?”

She didn’t have enough breath to answer. Pek Sikorski pushed past her into the shed. Pek Gruber laid Enli on the bench and rushed after his mate. Everything went dark, but only for a moment. She could hear the others moving round in the shed—how many, O First Flower, how many?—and over all, the high terrified wail of Ivi’s baby.

Enli struggled to sit. Essa exploded from the shed, rubbing her shoulder. She stopped short and stared at the ground, so that Enli looked, too.

In the light from four moons lay three people, each wrapped from shoulders to knees in pink mud. No, not mud—some sort of sticky thick stuff, like sap from dobwood trees. They wriggled on the ground like helpless infants. The two men looked terrified, their skull ridges so deeply wrinkled that it drew their eyes higher than Enli thought eyes could go. The woman had stopped shouting and lay completely still.

“Is she dead?” Essa whispered. “What is it?”

“I … don’t know,” Enli wheezed. Her chest still burned, but she could breathe again. Her arm was scraped raw where it had hit the bench. The pink sap must be one of Pek Gruber’s
weapons.

Pek Gruber and Pek Sikorski came out of the shed, leading Serlit and Ivi. Ivi, carrying the yelling baby, seemed unhurt. Serlit’s tunic was torn at one shoulder and his arm hung limply. A great bruise covered one side of his face.

“Your arm is broken!” Pek Sikorski said. She ran to her bicycle to get her healer’s bag. Essa forgot the wriggling strangers in the pink sap and hovered around Serlit.

Ivi said to Enli, “What … what did the Terran do?”

“I don’t know,” Enli said. It was getting easier to talk. “The Terrans have many devices. Pek Gruber … tied them.”

“Tied them? With what?”

“I don’t know.”

Pek Sikorski returned, and Ivi thrust the baby at Essa so that Ivi could tend her son. Essa, looking startled, took the wailing bundle. Somewhere she had learned to tend infants; she walked up and down, patting the child on its back.

Enli suddenly felt her insides lurch. She staggered behind the shed and emptied her stomach. Leaning against the wooden wall, she took deep breaths of the cool night air until her belly calmed. When she returned, Pek-Gruber had dragged the three wriggling and terrified people in pink sap away from the circle of light of his powertorch.

Pek Sikorski looked up from putting salve on Serlit. She said sharply to Pek Gruber, “Did you—”

“No, no,” he said in Terran, “I will just leave them in the tanglefoam for the night. Let them think what they do and wonder what I will do.”

Pek Sikorski nodded and returned to Serlit. The baby had stopped crying.

“Ann,” Pek Gruber said. “No … Pek Harrilin, Serlit…”

“What?” Ivi said. “What is it?”

“In the shed,” Pek Gruber said in his awkward World. “I’m sorry. Your grandmother … she is dead.”

Ivi said, “She has gone to join our ancestors?”

“Yes. They didn’t hurt her. The body is almost cold. I think she just died in her sleep.”

“She has gone to join our ancestors,” Ivi said, and there was so much joy in her voice and in her face that Enli scarcely recognized her.

*   *   *

They held a farewell burning the next morning. There was no priest, but Essa and Ivi and even Serlit with his broken arm rose at dawn to gather hard woods, plus masses of flowers to burn with the body. Pek Gruber put something from his pack on the fire and it got very hot, consuming the body quickly. They all danced and sang flower songs. Ivi looked radiant. Her beloved grandmother had at last gone to their ancestors, happy and sound and safe.

Afterwards, tired from dragging logs and dancing, they sat in front of the farm shed, eating zeli mush. Ivi looked into her bowl and said to Pek Sikorski, whom she found less strange than Pek Gruber, “Why?”

Pek Sikorski said gently, “Why what, Pek Harrilin?”

“Why did those people come to hurt us—Pek Gruber, what have you done with them? I forgot them completely!”

“They are gone,” Pek Gruber said. “I freed them from the … the pink ropes and made them run away.” The wording was odd; was that Pek Gruber’s imperfect World or was he, too, trying to share only part of reality? Enli didn’t ask. Ivi appeared not to notice.

Pek Sikorski repeated, “Why what, Pek Harrilin?”

“Why did those people come to hurt us?”

Serlit said, “Because they were drunk, my mother.”

“No,” Enli surprised herself by saying. “Not because they were drunk.”

Everyone looked at her. Enli realized she had been thinking about this for a long time. She said, “They came to hurt and steal because now they can. Without shared reality, they
can
. Just as Essa liked going in the flying boat. And Pek Voratur kept more profits for himself than he agreed to. And Serlit wants to go with Pek Sikorski and Pek Gruber and Essa to Rafkit Seloe. All of them, because they can, without shared reality. People do things just because the things are possible now. Because they can.”

Pek Sikorski was looking at her with sadness and love. It made Enli feel strange inside. “Yes,” Pek Sikorski said softly.

But Ivi had been caught by a different piece of Enli’s words. “Serlit? You want to go to Rafkit Seloe with … with these Terrans?”

“Yes,” he said shyly, looking at Essa.

“But I want you to go to the next sunflasher with me!”

“I’ll come back, Mother. But I want to go. I’m old enough, you know I am.”

Ivi looked helplessly at Pek Sikorski. Her mouth moved, stopped, moved again. “How … how do you … when reality isn’t shared, how do you…”

“You learn how, mostly,” Pek Sikorski said. The love and sadness that had been in her face were now in her voice. “Over time. It’s practice, partly. You will learn.”

Ivi looked at her son and bowed her head.

“Mother?” Serlit said.

“You can go,” Ivi said, very low, and to Enli the words sounded almost like a flower blessing, as if Ivi were not only a farm woman but had, somehow, become also a high priest of the First Flower.

TWENTY-FIVE

ABOARD THE
ALAN B. SHEPARD

T
he flyer that had informed McChesney and Grafton of the Viridian massacre had also beamed more routine data to the
Alan B. Shepard
, including the mailbag. The major newsgrams showed holos taken from space of what was left of the colonized planet and its colonized moon. Kaufman looked at the ones with quarter-meter resolution and felt his stomach turn. Human presence had been firmly established on the planet, which, like World, had been fertile and welcoming, so people spent much time outdoors. The holos were horrifying.

Around the ship small knots of crewmen spoke in low voices. Those few with relatives or friends in the Viridian system were excused from duty by their section officers. The chaplain announced an all-faith memorial service in the chapel, and had to hold more than one service because so many off-duty personnel wanted to attend. Kaufman had known the chapel, in this secular age, to be totally empty for weeks at a time.

There was little he could do but wait. He knew what would happen, but not how soon it would happen. He couldn’t go to Marbet, or Grafton, or Capelo, not without affecting the outcome. Maybe this, he thought without humor, was a human equivalent to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Any attempt to measure the outcome would change its spin or direction.

He told Hal Albemarle and Rosalind Singh only that Tom Capelo had been arrested for attacking two MPs. Albemarle’s lip curled knowingly. Rosalind looked grave. “Lyle, we need Tom to finish this project. No one else has a clue about a model for these phenomena.”

“Neither does Tom,” Albemarle said. Couldn’t resist, Kaufman thought with contempt, and then forgot him. Albemarle wasn’t important.

Kaufman said to Rosalind, “I don’t think he’ll be confined to quarters long. After all, he’s a civilian. It isn’t as if a soldier had assaulted a superior officer. Once Grafton is satisfied that Tom has calmed down and is no longer prejudicial to good order, Grafton will pretty much have to release him.”

Rosalind, troubled, said, “He’ll be accompanied by MPs, though, won’t he? To make sure he doesn’t have another go at you or Commander Grafton. Or even try to get to the Faller prisoner.”

“Yes, probably.”

“Tom’s working method … you’ve seen him, Lyle. He roves around. He goes into a sort of other-worldly trance and paces restlessly about. It’s counterproductive to restrict him, or have guards constantly hemming him in. He needs to work.
We
need him to work.”

“I know,” Kaufman said.

“I don’t like this, Lyle.”

“None of us likes it.”

She nodded gravely. Albemarle tried to look as if he were not still sneering. Kaufman left them both and went to his quarters.

To wait.

*   *   *

He had lost it. His own fucking fault. The red rage had grabbed him and he’d lost it. No excuse.

Lying helpless on his bunk, wrapped from the shoulders down in tanglefoam, Capelo cursed himself. The red rage was from the time of Karen’s death, when it had gripped him every few weeks. Afterward, he wouldn’t have been able to remember what he’d done, except that the results lay around him. Broken furniture. A smashed computer. Once, his wedding ring pounded into a flat blob. That scared him, as nothing else had. After that, he worked as hard to keep the red rage in check when he was alone as he did when he was with Amanda and Sudie. And he had succeeded, until now.

One of the motherfuckers that had killed Karen was alive on this ship.

Capelo forced himself to breathe deeply and steadily. It took ten minutes to feel that his breathing was back in his control. Then he started on his mind. Ever since he’d been in graduate school, a favorite relaxer had been to work on the Riemann Conjecture, that piece of unsolved math left over from three centuries ago. He examined various pieces, played with extending the known results, let himself be absorbed by the challenge. Known infinite number on
X
=½ … extend to non-denumerable infinity … how? He let the Riemann Conjecture massage his brain, and that further massaged his body until his muscles unclenched.

He needed to unclench. The doctor would come soon, and the doctor was strictly military. Grafton’s by-the-book military, not Kaufman’s slippery PR military. Capelo wasn’t sure which was worse. The doctor wasn’t going to authorize dissolving the tanglefoam until Capelo showed acceptable skin moisture and temperature, acceptable breathing, acceptable neural-firing patterns.

He thought some more about an infinity of zeros.

*   *   *

They made him wait eight hours, through two separate doctor visits, before the MPs sprayed the tanglefoam with the nano-eaters and it dissolved from around Capelo as if it had never been. He sat up on his bunk and rubbed his arms.